LINUX Unplugged - Episode 119: What’s Up Docker? | LUP 119

Episode Date: November 18, 2015

Have we gone too far with Docker? We channel our inner curmudgeon & discuss the Heartbleed sized elephant hanging out in Docker’s room. Plus why all the bad press around SteamOS might be missing the mark & our virtual LUG shares their hands on experiences with openSUSE LEAP! Plus some important follow up, a few surprises & a dead UPS!

You know, I have been on a steady march to make things more hardware-based. And I just, for the first time, found a four-port HDMI switcher that does green screen and multiple cameras, multiple feeds with transition fader bars and everything. All hardware-based. A lot of the camera switching functionality that we use in Wirecast, all hardware-based for $1,000. Now, when I first started podcasting, the same unit with only two HD, they weren't even HDMI, the same unit with two HD inputs was $15,000. That sucker now at $1,000, that might happen next year.

I might eventually get that, and then that is going to be such a key piece to replacing the Wirecast machine. Not only that, but also to have something like that on the road would be amazing. Because, you know, I don't know if you guys probably all noticed if you watched the video version, but we used OBS this week, or OBS as they call it. We used OBS to do the live broadcast of Linux Action Show and the live event on an Ubuntu

14.04 System76 rig. And, you know, we got bit by lip sync issues that were kind of a bummer. And one of the things when you don't do video production that you don't realize is an issue until someone tells you, and you're like, oh, yeah, obviously that's an issue. But you don't think about it until you do video production. But if you've got a box, say a PC, right, and it's got three cameras coming into it. One is a 1080p or a 720p, it doesn't matter. Let's just say it's a 720p.

One is a 720p Logitech webcam coming in at 30 frames per second exactly, 3.0 FPS exact, right? Another camera coming into your rig is an HDMI capture card. That's 1080i, interlaced even, right? And it's coming in at 60 frames per second. Actually, not 60. It's coming in at 59.94 frames per second. frames per second. Actually, not 60. It's coming in at 59.94 frames per second. And then you've got a desktop shot that's coming from a PC that is a 1080p picture at exactly 29.97 frames per second. And then you've got a chatroom shot that is on the same machine as the Wirecast machine

that is exactly coming in at 30 frames per second at variable resolution, depending on how you size the window. And Wirecast, very intelligently, brings all of this together, plus an independent audio source, manages to try to figure out the timing on them the best possible, automatically mixes all of that together, and records it and sends it out. And it is truly black magic, because each camera and each device are all operating at different times, at different resolutions, at different frame rates. And then at the same time, it's bringing that all together with an audio interface, which is, you know, zero latency, right? So you've got USB, which has inherent latency because those web cameras have an H.264 encoder in them, which adds latency.

And then you have the bandwidth limitations of the USB bus, right? Then you're also, between that, switching to an HDMI camera, which is sitting on the PCI Express bus, coming in as fast as that HDMI port can blast the data into the PCI Express bus, which is way faster than that USB web camera. And then you have that coming in to a screen cap, which is going to be variable based on the CPU load of the machine that's doing the screen cap. And it brings it all together so seamlessly that we forget that you have to fight problems like lip sync and issues like that.

So when you sit down and use obes, you basically lose seven years of black magic. And you kind of have to manually punch those. So for 15 minutes before we started the live stream, 20 minutes or whatever it was, we're sitting there adjusting the millisecond delay. And then asking people and production, like Rikai back here at the studio, okay, what did you hear first, the clap or the sound? Did you hear the sound first or did you see the clap first? And then they tell us, and then we adjusted another 10 milliseconds. Can you imagine what an animal you feel like when you're doing that?

Versus Wirecast, where you just plug it all in and it just does it all. Wow. Yeah. So, I mean, there's still a huge gap. So, I'm looking at this hardware mixer that would handle these kinds of things, and $1,000, and I'm done with the Mac. Woo! I'm excited about that.

I think that's going to be a 2016 purchase for JB. That's really exciting. Yes, but would Stallman approve of the hardware mixer? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, you could always... So happy hacking. You could hack it, right? So that's cool.

I think Stallman just feels, in general... I think that we should all make those businesses fail. Now, I don't want to put words into his mouth, but I have a feeling he's probably said that before. Yeah, probably. Probably. I wanted to see – boy, it's too bad Wimpy's not here today. I know. He's probably busy doing Wimpy things.

Making those distributions. Yeah. Or maybe he's so busy responding to this ultimate new competition. I don't know if you heard about this. UU Mate is a re-spin of Ubuntu Mate 15.10.

Whoa! Only it aims to be better. Better? I think we'll let our audience be the judge of that. Yeah, so here's what it does. And actually, since UU Mate is not here,

I'm going to just say this. I kind of do like these additions, but I'm not sure. I mean, you could just do it to a regular Mate install, but the highlights of UU Mate include Google Chrome as the web browser. Right. Right.

Right. You've instantly got Chris right there. Yep. Yep. And not Chromium, I don't believe it, but it's actually the Chrome, which means you're going to be watching them Netflixes. KDN Live Video Editor. Now, here's the thing I thought was neat.

Peer Guardian, privacy-oriented firewall built in. Wow. That's not bad, right? Steam included. Now, Wimpy's got these things with one click away with the welcome screen, so it's not only. Yes, he does. Sync thing automatically set up.

Hey, I like that. TeamViewer remote control software installed and ready to go. Wine 1.7 Comp is turned on as well as numerous sound effects enabled by default. You know what? I'm not sure how I feel about that last one. You know what? If there's Star Trek sounds, I'll do it. Otherwise, I'm out.

Star Trek theme or nothing. Yes, there you go. That's why I hate the Windows sounds. It's not Star Trek sounds, I'll do it. Otherwise, I'm out. Star Trek theme or nothing. Yes, there you go. That's why I hate the Windows sounds. It's not Star Trek. Yeah, right. So the UU Mate competition is on. It is fierce. I don't know.

We'll see if maybe Wimpy shows up. We can get his take on it. I think it's going to be a battle royale. Yeah, with the users as the winners. That's right. That's West, man. That's freaking poetic. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 119 for November 17th, 2015.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, episode 119 of Jupyter Broadcasting's weekly Linux talk show. It's hoping that we don't get blown away by this crazy windstorm. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Now, Wes, it is ridiculous. I've been getting reports from all over the area. And right now, as we're sitting here recording this show, I would not be surprised, honestly, if the power goes out. No, I wouldn't either.

That's what I woke up to this morning. So it's really a luxury to have power now. Now, here's the great part, is the way that video codecs work is there's pretty much no chance we'll be able to save this file if the power goes out, we'll lose the recording. So it's just going to be the live people. Live stream, you're lucky today. Well, coming up on today's episode of Linux Unplugged, yes, I'm back from Colorado. I went to System76, and we have a great show planned for you today.

And we're going to start with something I've been mulling around for a little bit. Maybe, sure, true. Could be that Alan Jude. Chat room, ping Alan Jude right now. Tell him we're about to talk about Docker. See what he thinks about that. So Docker is obviously a phenomenon. In fact, DockerCon just happened.

And there's a lot of different people out there that are trying to solve a whole ass ton of issues that we have ran into now that Docker is a thing. And mostly, it's around security issues. There are rampant security problems with Docker containers. In fact, if you look at just Heartbleed, there's still a massive percentage of Docker containers that are vulnerable to Heartbleed. That's embarrassing. We created ourselves a huge mess. We're going to talk about that today on Linux Unplugged.

And then, SteamOS is getting off to a rocky start. A lot of bad reviews. Ars Technica has said it is the worst performer out there. Is SteamOS doomed or maybe have they gotten it a little wrong? And then last but not least, our Mumble Room is going to check in with their report on using OpenSUSE Leap for a few weeks.

We're going to get it straight from the horse's mouth. We got a whole flock of horses. Is that what you call them? Lovely, lovely flock of horses Is that what you call a bunch of horses? Oh, that's what we call them A flock? Yep Is that right?

Nope, I don't think so Not at all Okay, alright, we're going to talk about that in today's episode of Linux Unplugged So let's bring in that virtual lug Time-appropriate greetings, Mumbaroom Hello Hello Hello

Oh, jeez, holy crap Alright, everybody stop pinging Alan in the chat room. Okay, that's ridiculous. You guys did a great job. Maybe too good. That's too much. Alan, we're sorry. We're sorry, Alan.

I love you. I'm sorry. Double tech snap tomorrow. All right. So coming up now, we've got to talk about Docker because this is – I don't want to have one of these episodes where we kind of rant and rave too much, but it is getting ridiculous, you guys. I mean, my inner curmudgeon is screaming these days.

Guys. What? What? You like that? You like that my curmudgeon is screaming? That's what half the people are here for. Yeah, I know, right? They want to hear it.

And so let's start with a couple of big news items. The daddy of Debian is joining the unstoppable Docker crusade. Ian Murdoch has joined the Linux container shop Docker. He founded Debian in 1993. He led the project for three years during his birth, and he's taken up a position as a member of Docker's technical staff. Story number one. And I illustrate that story to just give you an idea of the hype surrounding this Docker thing.

The momentum that it has, really. Yeah. Thank you. And now, story number two, starting today from the CoreOS project, which we've talked about a lot on Linux Unplugged. They have launched Clare. Clare is an open source tool for monitoring container security. Now, you go, oh, that seems like a good idea, right?

Probably want to monitor your security. Yes, it does. Sure. I like monitoring security. Is my security secure? I don't know. You've got to have good security. I need Clare.

Exactly. You've got to have Cl security. I need Claire. Exactly. You've got to have Claire T. Ooh, yes. They should hire you on to do jingles. Yeah, they totally should. CoreOS says that over 8... Now, I'm not making this up. 80% of Docker images are still vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug.

Jeez. Hello. You can't even say it. That's how vulnerable you are. Heartbleed bug. Heartbleedblog. Bug. Jeez. Hello. You can't even say it. That's how vulnerable you are. Harbleedblog. Harbleed. And this, you know, I don't even have to say it, but honestly. This is egregious. It is disgusting. And I can see how this would happen.

Yep. As somebody who's a little lazy. You know never. I have a couple of Docker images laying around that I honestly haven't updated since the first day I deployed them. I think that happens a lot. A lot, a lot. And here we are deploying Docker like crazy. Just like we've deployed home routers and all of these other little Internet of Things devices that we don't actually have.

You don't know how they work and so you don't even think about it. Right. In fact, the whole appeal to Docker is, well, it's a static environment. You don't have to peek inside. It just works. They've configured it. Right. In fact, the whole appeal to Docker is, well, it's a static environment that doesn't break. You don't have to peek inside. It just works. They've configured it for you. I can update my host OS, but the static little container doesn't change. That's the whole appeal to Docker, right? Which is another way of

saying, this is this little area of my machine I'm never going to update. That's what you're saying. I'm not worried about it. It does what it does. And it becomes a deployment methodology. It becomes a way to manage risk. Right. You never hear about making Docker containers. You just hear about downloading them. Yes.

Or keeping them up to date. And I wonder, like, what's the plan here? What are we going to do here? And it feels like everybody is scrambling to come up with an answer to this problem. In fact, even Docker themselves, they are looking at this particular issue. Docker has added a hardware signing feature. You ready for this? Remember how you were saying about buying one of these? Yes, I was.

YubiKey. Hey. YubiKey, a device that we all are very familiar with here on the show, and this is their solution. Docker has already implemented the update framework, a method of confirming that a digital signature applied to a container image in a repository matches the signature of code arriving at the enterprise's Docker system. So they finally have signing. This is good.

This is good. Now, YubiKey, with YubiKey 4, this is where you could have two-factor authentication that requires the device to recognize the user's fingerprint before we'll issue the identification. I don't quite understand how they're going to work this in. But Docker, this happened at DockerCon, they announced a new layer in code and identify a confirming process developers and system administrators can use a keychain like a keychain fob like like the like the yubi key 4 it's got to be the yubi key 4 cannot be an earlier version plugged into the usb port on a laptop or a workstation to upload their unique identifier to the container and authenticate as the code moves

along its journey to a production system, the identifier continually ensures the recipient that only the identified hands have touched the code. So it verifies the entire chain and at the end with the YubiKey. Pretty fascinating stuff. So one of the demos from DockerCon was that the developer had a set of private keys that were generated from a root YubiKey in the developer's shop. The developer then decided in their wisdom

to commit those private keys to the public GitHub as a backup. Yeah, sure. That was the demo. So what they showed in the demo was that with the YubiKey, they were able to rotate the master keys and turn off those developers' private keys and therefore make it so that he wasn't able to push to the hub just by rotating those keys. So some really nice features. Also, they announced something called Project Nautilus. And that was, I think, the reason that CoreOS

have open-sourced Claire. Ah, you think there's a response to Nautilus? I reckon they knew about it and thought, right, we've wasted all this time, let's just make it open-source. I'm not a cynic, I promise. Can you describe a little bit about... Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, what Project Nautilus does is it gives you a very cool dashboard and it analyzes the layers and it does static binary analysis in each Docker container. Okay. So it'll look at the version of curl. You've got the version of OpenSSL.

Hmm. And it'll say against a vulnerability database that Docker maintain themselves. They were quite hazy on these details, which are obviously very important when it comes to security. But they maintain this database themselves of vulnerabilities. And what they were saying to me earlier was that if there's a vulnerability vulnerability in upstream for example and that's the container i've based off of what that will then happen as a child um container i will get a notification saying hey your container is now vulnerable because of this upstream vulnerability it's okay

we fixed it but you now need to um kick off a new build on your machine. Of course, right. Yeah, you would. So it's not going to automatically fix the 80% of images which are vulnerable. But it's a good start. So I'm just going to drop a link into the chat of the interface. Yeah. I'll put it in the IRC, too, if you're logged in, because that would be really handy.

What did you find there, Wes? What's that? You digging around on that? Oh, there you are. You're digging around on it right now. Yes, I am. Cool. Yeah, I'll put a link to this in the chat room, too.

That is actually really good to hear. And thank you. You know what? That is, it's really, it is really kismet on the timing there that he went to DockerCon and showed up. It really is perfect. And this is what I love about our virtual lug. If you go to a conference or an event like this, or even your lug, and want to come and and then showed up. It really is perfect. That's what I love about our virtual Lug. If you go to a conference

or an event like this, or even your Lug, and want to come and share with our Lug... We would love that. Yeah, we would. Yeah, we really would. I'm sat in my hotel room in Barcelona waiting for my flight tomorrow, and I had nothing better to do. Thank you. We really appreciate it. We really do, because it was in Spain this year,

and we were just talking a little bit ago. It's going to be in Seattle in 2016 on June 20th to the 21st, and I'm already kind of thinking, why do I do that, dude? I'm sorry. I take it as a compliment. After about a year, I'll get it. We'll get it right. Wes and I, I really think Wes and I are going to go to this.

If you can get it from work. Yes, absolutely. You think? I think whatever, six months is plenty of time to invest. June 20th or the 21st in Seattle, maybe you can come meet Wes and I, and we'll go down there and walk around and go to DockerCon. But this year it was in Spain,

so it was not very practical for us to go. I mean, I like Spain. Yeah, so thank you very much for going there and giving us kind of the report on that. That is pretty cool. And it is, yeah, I was thinking back on why I started using Scale Engine to host Jupiter Broadcasting. Oh, yeah. And so it started

as, I was just, the thing about a podcast is sometimes certain episodes are very popular. And so all of a sudden you have a huge spike in CPU and bandwidth and all of that, right? Transfer. At times that you probably can't really predict. Right.

And so I kept getting screwed. This is before DigitalOcean. I just kept getting so screwed. When you paid for a fixed amount a month. Yeah, and even paid for CPU usage. And so, you know, Alan came along, and I remember at the time thinking his pricing was unbelievable. Like, how could it be so low? Like, what is he like?

Can he really deliver? Is this over-served? And do you know how he did it? His jails. Because he could give you metal performance at really low cost to him. Right. He didn't have to spin up a virtual environment, an entire operating system. Wasn't paying for that overhead.

That emulates virtual hardware or tries to use a hypervisor that translates between physical and virtual hardware. Like, he just did a jail. And he just had a, you know. And honestly, it's the same exact thing that makes Docker so appealing to Linux users, is you can create a Docker container, and it is an isolated environment, right? And all of these things.

So you want to have a certain version of PHP? Have that at Haas. You can have your specific version. Yeah, exactly. So that, I have a certain version of PHP? Have at it, Haas. You can have your specific version. Doesn't conflict. Yeah, exactly. So that, I remember, now honestly though, FreeBSD had that years ago. Oh, they've had it. Yeah, it's been stable. And so what Docker did though

and this is, and I think, such an important thing for us to understand and I think it's, if you're curious about this at all what Docker did is they closed that 10%. And I like to say this on other shows. They closed the Uncanny Valley. In CG, they have the Uncanny Valley, unlike movies, where you can kind of tell it's CG, but it's really closed.

It's a little too. It makes you... It's just freaky. It's weird, right? It makes you uncomfortable. Yeah, it does. Totally. And that's the Uncanny Valley.

That is the difference between where Jails was and Docker is. Maybe Zones or Zones did that too. Yes, totally. Absolutely, it does. And so Docker closed that Uncanny Valley with that GitHub-like approach of publishing images, having a central... It very fits in today's deployment development culture. And that was all it took, right? Just like Apple

famously will... Oh my gosh, it's so revolutionary what Apple's doing. When in reality us nerds are like, dude, other people have been doing that for years, right? They just put the pieces together at the right time. And a lot of us nerds are like, well, I'll put the pieces together myself. It's no big deal. But they will close that gap. And that's what Docker did.

And so container technology was not totally new. I mean, even cheroot environments existed under Linux and LXC containers, but Docker came along and just put it all together into this nice package. And the problem with that is, is it also made it way more accessible and way more deployable. And so you got guys like me who go deploy SmokePing Docker containers.

Don't really know what they're doing. Yeah. What? This Linux thing doesn't... You know, I go deploy a SmokePing Docker container and then I don't touch it for a year. Right. And now it's sitting out there. Living there on the public facing. Yes.

And so that, I don't know where to take this. And I wonder, Wes, do you figure, is this one of these issues that just sort of sorts itself out over time? Or is this, are we, what I worry about is, will Linux become known as the platform that hosts a bunch of outdated shit? What do you think? I mean, in some senses, we are already. 80% of Docker containers

are vulnerable to Heartbleed that have OpenSSL. I think there's a lot of enterprises that are working on removing a lot of older Debian hosts in particular, older Ubuntu installations. And you get stuck on these things. Same true with Windows, though. Same as, yes, very much so. So it's not just. Same as the Windows 3.1 that brought down France last week. My work runs Oracle Linux 5, and they want to use Docker.

Wow. Oracle Linux 5 would be what? Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, I guess? Which would be three versions old now? Which would be almost seven years, I guess, which would be three versions old now, which would be almost seven years, I think. I don't know exactly. Wow. Wow.

That is really something. I do think, though, that there's been a lot of very good attention recently to both Linux community and in Docker, you know, that we need to have at least. You can't force what people do. It's definitely an issue they're taking seriously. Exactly. They devoted at least half their sessions today to security.

They're aware of it. They're on it. I think it'll take time. I think we also have community players like CoreOS in particular that really do take security very seriously. And they're pushing Docker. Right. They're pushing Docker.

They're pushing containerization. Yeah. But I think they're pushing Docker. Right. They're pushing Docker. They're pushing containerization. But I think they're doing it in a very open way and helping provide the community tools that they can use. Yeah. It's actually a great example of how you can have legitimate competition in the open source world, but yet every freaking body is benefiting. And I look at this and I think, man, I wish more people were current on this issue.

I wish more people knew all the nuances and were following this because this is such a brilliant example of how open source can be competitive yet cooperative at the same time. And in such an area that's so critical to the future cloud quote-unquote sphere. Right. I feel like right now we're kind of shaping what the next 10 years of deployed code

will look like. Yeah, I agree. Alright, so before we move on to some feedback, any other thoughts? Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, no, go ahead. Yeah, one other cool thing that came across was I saw a demo today of someone sharing the X11 socket

from inside a Linux OS to inside the container and with that they were able to run whichever desktop application they wanted in a Docker container. That's nice. And then where they took that was they then, they clicked a button and they launched

a whole Eclipse IDE environment in a browser. It sounds like maybe in the future we could have something like Cubes OS, but with like Docker or LXC instead of Zen. That is kind of like that. That is web computing. Alright, I just wanted to point out, before we move

in to the rest of the show, we went to System76 this week. That was a lot of fun, it looked like. I had a blast. I had challenges. I forgot the most important piece of equipment that we could have. I mean, there's not a more critical piece of equipment I forgot. That was awesome. I stayed in a hotel room that felt like a palace.

That was pretty cool. And I got to play with an augmented reality sandbox. That was awesome. So check out Roverlog. Check out the Roverlog episode 15 of my trip to System 76. It was a freaking blast. Colorado is – Sounds like you got some walking in too, Chris.

Wes, I'm not – So you're feeling healthier than ever now that you're back. Wes, I did not put this in the video. But there was a night where I legitimately went and laid down in bed, had to put a pillow under my knees, and all of my legs ached. And I thought to myself, 380 bucks a night and all I want right now is a freaking bathtub. In no bathtub? It was just so bad. It was so bad.

I hurt so bad because we walked around so much. Here, I'll play the first few seconds of the Roverlog. I want you to go check out Roverlog 15, though. It was a lot of fun. Oh, I don't hear it. Hold on. That's mostly Chris talking about how nice the hotel is. That's like 80%.

But it's worth it. It's great footage. It's definitely at least a solid 30%. I don't know about 80%, but yeah, check out the intro here. We're here in Denver, Colorado to go to System 76. It's their superfan contest, and we're going to go in there and see what they have to show us. Let's go.

So they had a whole steam room set up, which was super, super nice. I bet you were getting plenty fine performance in that room. Yeah, it was really cool. And they had a whiteboard paint up so you could draw and stuff on there. Oh, nice. Yeah, it was really cool. And they had a whiteboard paint up so you could draw and stuff on there. Oh, nice. Yeah. It was really cool. So Rover Log 15, it literally was down to the wire to get that episode of Linux Action Show. And you can find out more by watching episode 15 of the Rover Log.

Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com to find that. You know, you can also find a few other things over at Jupiter Broadcasting. But so that trip, it was so funny. We're sitting there just having a nice casual conversation. And I can't even remember how it came up. But it comes up that, you know, Noah switched a few people to Linux.

Right. Just a hobby, really. And Emma's sitting there. She's an employee of System76. And I love Emma. She's been a longtime friend of the show. And she says, I switch more people to Linux than you do. Bold.

And mind you, this is our first day there. And we're still kind of doing that phase where, like, I know you professionally. I followed everything you do. But you don't quite know where the, like, human boundaries are. How to connect on that level. Within 30 seconds of that conversation starting, there was four F-bombs dropped. It was odd. It's got human.

It did. These two, Emma and Noah, take switching people to Linux so seriously. Thank God those people are out there, though. And she threw down, I had mad respect. And so she came on the Linux Action Show, and we talked about that a little bit. And her and Noah are going to have a massive competition. I don't know how Noah's going to do this because he's also in the process of moving. He runs a business or something like that.

He runs his own business. He's got two kids. Right. Yeah, two kids. And they're moving houses right now. But he couldn't help himself. He throws down with this competition. And so what I love about it is over on the subreddit, there was a thread started by Rusin88, Noah versus Dr. Emma, switching people to Linux.

The competition rules. There's already 14 comments, and it's heated. It is passionate. It's so funny. So if you want to throw down on what your idea should be around this competition between – and both of these people, they legitimately switch people to Linux all the time. You don't know until you've been with Noah, but I went to a burger place with Noah. I went to go get a bacon cheeseburger and some fries. I feel like you're like the embarrassed wife in this situation.

Not right now. We're just trying to have dinner, please. I am an advocate for the Linux platform. We are standing in line at Five Guys getting a burger and fries, and Noah is switching this dude to Linux. And he's like, here, take this thumb drive. Go install this. And this guy's like, all right, I'm going to do it.

And before we order our burger, Noah has this guy switching to Linux. That's amazing. Yeah, it was so good. And to see those two go at it was so great. And if you haven't watched this week's episode of Linux Action Show, you've got to go watch it. It was a really funny throwdown. So we're going to have a competition coming up, and I really actually do legitimately want Rose because I have to play judge. Yes.

I've got to judge this thing, and I need to know— Arbitrator Chris. I've got to determine what the parameters are, so we have a link in the show notes if you guys— I think this might warrant a Teespring shirt or something. Oh, yeah. Noah the switcher. I don't know. And Emma the show notes if you guys. I think this might warrant like a Teespring shirt or something. Oh, yeah. Noah the switcher. I don't know. And Emma the closer.

Yeah, right. Exactly. That's good, Wes. Yeah. We should really make something out of this. And, you know, if we had more time, because we were just there for a couple of days. If we had more time, I would have just, we would have gone out down on the street, done a man on the street kind of thing and just have them start switching because both of

them. And think about like the, like the social norms you have to completely reject to do what they do. They literally walk up to strangers and start profiting to them. Have you considered changing your operating system? Can I tell you about your savior, Linux? Yeah, right. Exactly.

It's just ridiculous. And it is so much fun to watch. Switcher versus Closer. You guys got to go watch this week's episode of the Linux Action Show to see what I'm talking about. All right. So before we move on, because there's so much go watch this week's episode of the Linux Action Show to see what I'm talking about. All right. So before we move on, because there's so much to cover this week, I want to talk about DigitalOcean. I love DigitalOcean.

They always have come in at just the perfect moment. You can get started in less than 55 seconds to build your own Linux rig with one-click deployment or really fine-tuning it. And think about that. 55 seconds. I mean, you can't even get a live CD booted in 55 seconds. And pricing plans start at only $5 a month. You can't even get a burger for $5. And this is $5 a month.

A month for a Linux rig up in the cloud with a crazy fast connection. They'll get you 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. But what I love about DigitalOcean is their availability of locations. They got a brand new one in Toronto. That's called the FUNSA data center. But they also have a great one in Germany. They have ones in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and even London. But it's that interface.

It's that interface. It is so good. It is so intuitive. And it doesn't suck. Like is so good. It is so intuitive. And it doesn't suck. Like, it lets you do snapshots. It lets you destroy machines. It lets you transfer between virtual servers. It lets you one-click deploy applications in a Docker container.

It doesn't suck. And they have a straightforward API that makes it totally usable. And because that API rocks, there is a crap ton. I mean, like, a crap ton of really good open source code that makes you there is a crap ton I mean like a crap ton of really good open source code that makes you look like a pro you can go take advantage of right now. You can just go grab it right now. You can integrate it in with your smartphone, integrate it in with your

toolbar, get a GNOME extension up in that biz I don't care. There's tons of code. It's all about enabling you, right? Between that and all of the tutorials which cover like, I mean, they're so relevant, even if you aren't using digital ocean i mean that's the dirty secret that's the dirty secret right there it is so good because like you know you're just deploying standard linux distributions it's the new arch

it really is dude don't tell them that it is good because the thing they have you know kind of against you know like i don't mean to knock on the arch wiki because dude i go to it all the time but they pay the people. Right. Right? They pay you to write up tutorials. And then they have full-time editors on staff. And, you know, little side story here, and by the way, I haven't said this yet.

I probably should have, because this is the only way this show survives. D.O. Unplugged. Probably should have said that at the beginning, because if you don't. D.O. Unplugged. D.O. Unplugged, one word, lowercase. If you don't use that promo code, the show doesn't go on. So I probably should have said that at the beginning, but I get excited. So I look at this and I think, Wes, imagine what we've been talking about. We've been talking about Docker.

We've been talking about deploying things. There are ways to use Docker that are smart. And you and I, before the show, we were talking about a Python thing that you're working on to take an extra bit of work you've got and kind of parse it all up and put it in a spot for you that's easy to read. And it's using this Java intermediate. It's just like this long, complicated thing you're doing, right? And I look at that and I think, geez, once you've developed that, if you did all that

in a Docker container, it's like one, two, three clicks. Actually, they're not clicks. It would be, I'm looking at the command, four commands to have this deployed on a Docker container. And just boom. You have this up, then you create the DigitalOcean droplet, and then one command after that, and you have it running on a production. Everything's deployed.

Yeah. It's just going. So in four commands, you've got it containerized, you've got it ready to go, published up to the Docker hub, and then one command after that, you've got it deployed on your DigitalOcean droplet. That sounds really nice. I mean, that is a huge appeal. That is, it is really something. And it, or, you know, there's a bunch of other stuff you can take advantage of.

Just go try something like frickin' own cloud. Sync thing. Sync thing, yeah. Definitely sync thing. Definitely sync thing. Just go try something like that. Or Minecraft, go to your own Minecraft server. Mumble server. There are MB.

There are so many different ways I use Docker and DigitalOcean. And MB is running in a Docker container on a Fedora 23 DigitalOcean droplet right now. Wow. Yeah. It really can't get easier than that. Right? That's how I'm rolling these days. It's a good kind of easy where you know that it's stable.

Here's how I did it too. It's production grade. So in 55 seconds, I deployed a Fedora 23 DigitalOcean droplet. Then I installed Cockpit, which was one DNF command on the command line using the HTML5 console that DigitalOcean gives me. And then I logged into my Cockpit instance and in there, they have a whole container section, and I just deployed MB. So, I deploy Fedora 23 droplet,

install Docker, install cockpit, one-click deployment of MB. So, you could, like, give this job to interns, whoever. You can just get it done. So, there's things that happen. I'm like, you know what? I'll just log into my droplet, get this show on MB, and I'll just watch it on the Rover. It is amazing.

It is amazing. And you can use the promo code DOMPLUG to get started. Just go check it out and you support the show. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DOMPLUG. I mean, it is a Linux rig up in the cloud, crazy fast access, SSDs throughout. I mean, you can figure it out. Go do it.

DigitalOcean.com. Try it out and make something awesome because hashtag just saying. Just saying. Okay, so on November 10th, Steam Machines hit the internets, went out, and people started getting their really super

awesome, you know, design for gaming Steam Machines. And as always, people got to do their reviews. people got to do their reviews they got to do their benchmarks we're going here yeah you know what before we get into this i should do the official opening of our segment yeah there we go that's better and according to ours the, the takeaway here is that cross-platform 3D games face a 21 to 58% frame rate dip. Ouch. I don't like those numbers.

No. On the same exact hardware, you're dual booting between Windows and SteamOS. 58% drop. It is what you might call, Wes, I don't know, devastating. Devastating. And it's sort of confusing. You like that DF command in the background there? Yeah, that is nice. At least they're doing the Linux part right.

I appreciate that. Too bad it's like retrying crap like that. So to start their test, they dragged out a dual boot SteamOS Windows machine. This is on ours. They built two years ago, so it's a little old, but not that bad, and got all the OSs up to date on both sides. They ran two years ago, so it's a little old, but not that bad. And got all the OSs up to date on both sides. They ran a whole

bunch of tests. What was the... I know they had a lot of graphics cards, but... What was the specific graphics card that they used on this particular rig? Yeah, I'm just curious. Is that what you were asking me right now? That's exactly what I'm asking. Are you asking me that right now? Go on, go on. I'm sorry. No, no, no. That's a good

question, actually. I believe it was an NVIDIA card, but I don't actually think they listed it here. Okay, just because that's a... Oh, they did. I'm sorry. I'm a dummy. It was the GTX 660. Are you serious? With the NVIDIA driver 35891.

Now, are you S-ing me? That's a really good question. So here are you on the... I'm not sure. On the Bonobo... No, it's not current at all. On the Bonobo, let's it's not current at all. On the Bonobo, let's see here. I am on 355 because I haven't updated for like two weeks, but

I'm trying to figure out what is my, what's the video card in this Bonobo? Because it's a G4. So they basically tested it on a machine that is less powerful than my Bonobo and my Bonobo is three years old. It's still impressive that Windows was able to i have a 680m at the dude i have a 680m in my three-year-old bonobo and they're sitting here you know can i just take a second i mean we're happening folks we'll get into the rest of this as we go but i sure as shit would never come on air I would never in a million years come on air and dare to tell you the performance of games under Windows or Linux with such shit hardware. I wouldn't dare do it because I would be torn apart by my audience because they're smart. They're not a bunch of dumbasses.

I cannot believe ours published this just just on – okay, anyways. But that's not the takeaway because the numbers are what matter. But it is literally if you're going to be Ars Technica and you're going to make this huge-ass publishing, you're going to do this huge-ass article. If some podcaster wouldn't even bother doing this because his hardware is so out of date, you've got to think about that. Give that some thought. I mean, that is... Right? It's a little... Like,

install the latest driver. At least. If you're going to use that hardware, which... Are these the stats on the side here? That's the hardware. That's the hardware there, yeah. That they're using? Yeah, Windows 10. What is the CPU there? It's a Haswell. 3 GHz. Does that say Pentium?

G3... Will you look up the G3 220? It's the G3 220. But like R. Brown is... R. Brown, go ahead. You don't have to say it in the chat. You're in the Mumbler room. Go ahead, make your point. Yeah, the thing I was thinking, though, is if they're using hardware that's old,

I mean, surely all of the effort, all of the optimization for these Linux drivers are targeting newer hardware. I mean, I've definitely seen it with some of the older NVIDIA stuff. They just drop that support completely out of the Linux driver sooner or later. So if ours have gone back and used an ancient card, yeah, maybe it does suck compared to Windows, but I'd like it to see with like a relatively recent one yeah yeah i agree so what'd you find well i will say that the the

recommended customer price for the cpu box well for the tray which is the more expensive yeah 64 oh so it's definitely a bargain basement i mean and all of this it still remains the point like why is Windows performing better? Right. That is what— It's still totally relevant. That is the takeaway. It's just kind of surprising.

It is. I feel like I saw other reviews where they're like, oh, yeah, we bought the newest Skylake, and here we were trying, but— It feels like if Chris went and scrapped together a few spare parts in the JB1 studio and then did a SteamOS review. That would be bullshit, and my viewers would a i was an uneducated idiot and i got when i was reading it i just assumed that like okay they bought like the alienware or the like one of the commercial options and they installed windows i i was gonna say it was the reason why i went with this because the fact of the matter i was gonna say was it doesn't really what matters was how the difference performance delta was between the two os's and that is still the case but like

our brown is saying is it very well could be that the newer GPUs, so specifically, I mean, that's been three and a half years. And NVIDIA has changed its tune about Linux considerably in three and a half years. SteamOS was announced since then. Not that it's relevant to this review, but I'm sure the same thing would apply for AMD, you know, given their recent turn of events. Totally. Absolutely. But here is the devastating part. And honestly,

what really what is really disappointing, and it's really too bad, is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because Ars Technica is saying SteamOS is slower. So let me tell you what they're saying about SteamOS. That is actually the

takeaway. All that matters, unfortunately, in 2015 is somebody scrolled past that headline on their smartphone. And that is the reality of it. They were thinking about getting Linux. They were thinking about buying a Steam machine. And now they're like, well, no, I'll just build another Windows gaming rig. This did surprise me. Valve's own Source Engine games showed the same performance hit when compared to their Windows versions. Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 all took massive frame rate dips on SteamOS compared

to their Windows counterparts. Only Left 4 Dead 2 showed comparable performance between Windows and Linux. That's pretty devastating. There was no indication of the frame rate improvements that Valve cited a few years ago. That is a little bit of a bummer. Right now, it seems like choosing SteamOS, this is according to ours, this is their wrap of the frame rate improvements that Valve cited a few years ago. That is a little bit of a bummer. Right now, it seems like choosing SteamOS, this is according to Ars, this is their wrap-up,

choosing SteamOS over Windows Box means sacrificing a significant amount of performance on many, if not most, graphically intensive 3D games. That's a pretty big cost to bear, Ars says, considering that Alienware sells its Windows-powered console-style alpha boxes at prices that are only $50 more expensive than identically outfitted SteamOS machines. That's not to mention the fact that Steam on Windows currently has thousands of games that aren't even available on SteamOS, including most AAA recent releases. While SteamOS has similar exclusives to recommend over Windows,

hopefully Valve and other Linux developers continue to improve SteamOS performance to the point where high-end games will be expected to at least run as comparably between Linux and Windows. Ouch. Yeah. Ouch. That's not how you want your first launch to go. What do you think?

Is this a problem, or is this just... Is this sort of like how a early-generation thing goes and the consumer market understands? It's not great. I mean, I feel like we're still in the waiting phase to see how all of the Steam launch stuff plays out. Maybe after a quarter we'll see kind of what are the retail, how many were picked up, how many people did actually buy them, especially over the holiday period. especially over the holiday period. But it is disappointing that we can't come out the gate and say,

even especially on titles where Valve has ramped up support, that we can't say, look, you can play them on Linux and it's just as good. We can't even say that. And I want to add a little context to this conversation. Fedor developer, GNOME developer, I think he works on GStreamer, Christian Scaler, he writes, for us in the Linux community, these machines are more than that. They're an important part of helping us break into a broader market

by paving the way for even more games and more big-budget games coming to our platform. Playing computer games is not just a niche. It's a mainstream activity these days, and not having access to games on our platform has cost us quite a few users and potential contributors over the years.

I agree. I agree with that, yeah. I have, for instance, met a lot of computer science students who ended up not using Linux as the main OS during their studies simply due to the lack of games on the platform. I think this is a really accurate point. Instead, Linux got deregulated to that thing in a VM, and you only needed it when you had to have that assignment to complete. That does kind of ring true, doesn't it? I mean, I've met those people. Yeah. You know, I mean, and it's not against them.

It's like Windows is the operating system that works. You don't question it. Linux is your development thing. You know, so, you know, let's say you got $500 slosh a month. And you got to, you know, you save up a couple of months and you buy a $1000 laptop. Well now that laptop not only is the way you're getting your school work done but that's how you're getting your gaming done.

Maybe it has Optimus graphics. That is literally all that matters is that it took you two, three months just to afford this thing or to make the payments on this thing. It better be able to play games and if that's the difference between Windows and Linux you're going to go Windows. And it probably came with a Windows license.

I was talking to a student at System76, one of the super fans, and she said that she was running Linux because she was in computer engineering, but gaming wasn't a big issue for her. Right. And so it wasn't a barrier. On those cases, it's easy. Right. But she said, you know, other students,

that's the number one differentiator. That was just a couple of days ago somebody told me that. It's in school right now. So that actually really rings extremely true for me. He goes on to say, remember, he works on GStreamer. He's a developer. I gotta say, GStreamer's been doing some pretty impressive stuff. I don't know if you've seen that.

I have been following that. I'm very, very excited about that. This was on blogs.gnome.org. He says, Steam for Linux and SteamOS can be an important piece of breaking through this. SteamOS and Steam machines are also important

for the Linux community for another reason. They can help funnel more resources from hardware companies into Linux drivers and support. I know, for instance, that all three major GPU vendors have increased their Linux drivers

investments due to SteamOS. Also rings true. and support. I know, for instance, that all three major GPU vendors have increased their Linux drivers' investments due to SteamOS. Also rings true. This is why SteamOS is important. And the success of SteamOS is also kind of important. He says, by the way, side note, also working on a few features in Fedora Workstation

to make it better for Steam and Steam Games. This includes our work on the GL Dispatch and Optimus support, as covered in a previous blog, which we'll have linked in the show notes. And Lib, R-A-T bag? Lib rat bag, I believe. That's how I'm saying it anyway.

That is how you say it. Is a new library for handling gaming mice under Linux to make it even better. And finally, they're working on bug 64 to make it even better to host the Steam client related to the C++ ABI issues. I'm glad that they've gotten this sorted out because I don't want to deal with that. Do you think it's important, SteamOS, Steam Gaming? Really, honestly, do you think it's important? I think that the last point there about putting stress to develop more, I mean, like, we see it, you know, obviously, like, Pixar

and the really industry-specific things are doing it, but they have so much stuff that they end up replicating themselves or, you know, building stacks to do their high-end stuff on Linux. I think we need more of that consumer spectrum to be pushed and developed. Obviously, we have a lot of big changes coming with Wayland and Vulkan and all of that. Vulkan's a huge one. We'll see where that goes.

I think it's important even now to begin putting that stress on there and be like, Linux is perfect. We've seen it in other industries. If we can get more of that, maybe getting gaming companies to see that they can take Linux and shape it into what they want. Really what we have to do is we have

to bet that Windows continues to suck balls. Yes. And then that makes them want something else. And that the store threatens gaming industries. That kind of stuff. In fact, it'd be good for Linux in some ways in gaming if the Microsoft store did kind of well. Too bad it sucks so bad. Yes. And then you're right.

Because they could do this. They push on and they go, oh, man, this is why we need Vulkan. This is why we've got to support Vulkan. This is why we're getting behind Vulkan. Right. This could be really good in the long run. Because the thing about Linux is, like, you know, if you're focused on your product, you can take Linux and you can build it to just do that. You can make it excellent.

Yeah. Mumble Room, any thoughts on this particular topic on Steam Machines or Vul or gaming under linux or maybe why ours got it wrong the floor is open i'll give you a couple of seconds to jump in if anybody wants to yes i got one yeah so i was actually looking at these numbers here and i did mention in the chat room earlier any number over 60 frames per second is literally going to be imperceivable to the human eye. Any number over 30, you're going to have a hard time. I'm seeing here for most of these numbers here on the Ars Technical article, Linux still performs over 30 frames per second. So for most people, you're not going to have a perception problem there. Right.

That's a fair point. The other thing that ours should have done, and this is why I wanted to talk about this. I wanted to do a little debunking, is they should have benchmarked all of these at 1920x1080 because that's the highest resolution a SteamOS machine is running at. Right. And if you think about that, 1920x1080 is a really easy benchmark. Now, a 660 and a 680, they should be able to do that no problem. They should be able to do that at 30 frames per second, no problem. 1920 by 1080 is not a big deal.

And everything should have been baseline to that. They did a couple of different resolutions. One of them was 1792 by 1120. Not ideal for gaming. Yeah, that is a great point, right? Because the SteamOS machines only have to push at the max that your crappy HDTV can do that you bought on sale.

I will also say that the article, it touches on it and it does mention it, but I feel like there wasn't enough emphasis placed on what's the end user experience? Like, can you buy this or run this and have an enjoyable gaming experience for a large selection of the games that you can use? I mean, a Steam machine is about that living room, big picture experience.

And a Windows Steam machine is about that traditional Steam client experience, sitting at the desk, gaming. Right. And if you're the user that spends $2,000 and makes a custom gaming rig, that's a different marketplace than like, I spent $400 at the store and I want to be able to play last year to maybe this year's titles at reasonable settings. Yeahimpy you want to jump in on the vulcan point yeah so if you look at the um demonstrations that have been done demoing games using open gl and vulcan to show the performance increase on linux you typically see OpenGL performance sort of IO bound to a single thread on a single CPU call

and then when you see the same type switch Vulkan you see that workload spread across all the cores and the load come down and the frame rate go up significantly so while I don't want to appear an apologist for Linux's performance versus Windows in this case, I think we need to have one eye on the future, and that future is Vulkan. And that does perform very nicely with Steam. Yeah, I agree. I actually agree a lot. I wonder if we'll start to see Vulkan ship in 20... I don't know when we're going to actually start to see it as end users i'm so excited just for vulcan and wayland and yeah and both of those together is the future yeah yeah yeah uh yeah go ahead so when vulcan launches does this mean

we're gonna all have to get new hardware as well maybe although i i guess current hardware today what was that um i know something yeah go ahead i think today current hardware does support it go ahead i believe uh the gtx 550 uh 500 series and above will support it and then um the newer r series amd graphics may support it okay okay so some of it. How about the HD 4000 for Intel? Intel, I believe there are already drivers being built, but I don't know about Intel, unfortunately. Huh. I am imagining. Yeah.

I'd imagine they make that work. But it is funny. I don't feel like we have, specifically for this area, we have never really been at a point where we've been like, well, next year or in two years. Like there's a lot of times in Linux where we do say, well, soon it's going to be a lot better. Or GNOME is going to get this. Or the Linux kernel or system. You know, all this stuff we keep saying is going to be. But this legitimately is actually happening.

And there's a lot of interested parties. And it legitimately is going to change things. And I'm very excited about it. I am very excited about it. And this R-Technica article, what it really did is it underscores the need for Vulkan and why we want this. But what Wes

so very, very acutely pointed out that if even in the lowest conditions, you know, you're getting 61 frames per second, you're probably going to be okay on a console. Right. Hooked up to your HD television that may or may not even support 60 frames per second. And so,

that's really the market for SteamOS. I'd also like to say, it's pretty cool that here we are in a widely read publication that ours is. You know, they're talking about, like, here's the graphs. Here's, like, a widely deployed thing, and Linux is front and center. I mean, it's SteamOS, right?

Right. Linux is always rebranded. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is actually also something to kind of take away from this. Yeah, so Rikai, by the way, is touching in on the Intel thing. In the chat room, he says, Developed and showcased a Linux driver for Intel, which enabled Vulkan compatibility on the HD 4000 series integrated graphics.

So there you go. So you got back to the 500 series of the NVIDIA cards and the 4000 series of Intel graphics. That's pretty good ways. That is pretty damn good for Vulkan. That is really good. So when that actually starts to make more sense and it's something you might actually see on your machine, we're going to talk a lot more about it and why it's a big deal. But right now, I'm going to talk about Linux Academy

because that is a big deal and a sponsor of the Linux Unplugged show and a great opportunity for you. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to get our discount and to support the show. Keep us on the air. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. They got step-by-step video courses, comprehensive study guides. But what I think is really, really, really cool,

you can jump in, you know, you can start training yourself, you can use your own time, be your own boss, learn on your own schedule, and then if you get stuck, they got instructor help. And that is really nice, because these instructors are super bright. They are a bunch of Linux and open source enthusiasts, and they have decided, well, let's create a training platform. What a brilliant frickin' idea. What a brilliant frickin' idea. Genius!

Why didn't all the, like, look at, I shouldn't even say it, look at freaking Linda, right? What a joke! What a joke compared to Linux Academy. Their courseware is a joke! They are an embarrassment. Go to Linux Academy and see the difference

when you have people that are actually passionate about Linux. People that know what Vulkan is, and Docker is, and the difference between Linux, and a kernel, and a distribution. Like, maybe they know what the GNU tools are. That would be a great thing to know if you're going to start writing course material. So imagine people that are so crazy passionate about Linux

that they get the stupid idea to go create a website to train people how to use it. And that's where you start with Linux Academy. But instead of being dumb about it, they're like, well, alright, let's pair with educators. Let's pair with developers. Let's pair with industry professionals. Let's build something unique. Create a platform.

And you can tell they eat their own dog food, right? Like they use Linux every day. It's so tied into this. I frequently communicate with the guy that runs Linux Academy, and trust me, he is a diehard Linux user. And what is so brilliant about what they have done is they have taken something that is so often a checkbox, a feature on all of the other training platforms, and they have created an entire platform out of that. Virtual servers on demand, you have SSH access to, DNS makes it super easy to log into. They can choose from 7 plus distributions, so your virtual server matches that, your courseware matches that. You can be like listener Ryan and totally get all of your downloadable comprehensive

study guides and listen to them while you're in the shower, or Seth does in the shower. I mean, there are different ways. Or while you're driving, instructor help available on demand. They actually know what the hell they're talking about. They're watching the open source development, and they're saying, okay, this is something we need to start creating courseware from. They had courseware on Docker before you knew what Docker was. The Linux Academy is tuned in and passionate about this stuff.

That is that uncanny valley that I talk about. They closed that gap. I want you to go there and try them out because they're always getting better, adding new coursework, including new features. Man, in October, it was crazy with all the stuff they rolled out. They have some really good stuff, including real-time progress checking, some great professional development courses, better expanded nuggets, including – oh, man. The live events have been so great because you can just sit there. You can be stuck on something, ask them the questions, and then get the answers. And then if you get like a little bit of down, you know, we're not doing so good.

The community is stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting community members. Yeah, and we're the best. So, you know. I agree. Very encouraging. I really do. So, you know. I agree.

Very encouraging. I really do. And, you know, they also have all the stuff sort of attached to Linux. AWS and all of like, you know, Nginx and Python and Ruby and all that kind of stuff. I think that AWS one is really big too because that's one thing you see a lot. Enterprises love AWS, right? But it's kind of, the pricing structure is a little confusing, especially if you're like a small end person or just trying to learn it at home. Linux Academy completely controls that cost for you. They manage all of it for you.

It's amazing. It's just part of the subscription. You go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug. They just roll it right in there. The virtual machines they spin up, if they're on AWS, if they're on their own infrastructure, doesn't matter. They're honey badger. They just take care of it for you and you get whatever distro you chose at the beginning of your course. That's the

system you get. It makes a ton of sense. Even if you want to get into Android stuff. And then last but not least, if you're ready to go get those Red Hat certifications. You know, there are the few certifications after all of my years in the IT industry that I feel is the Cisco certs and the Red Hat certs that make people go, what? Oh, you actually got that? Oh. You know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Those are the certs, right? Right. Man, they have so many great courses on the Red Hat stuff. It is part of their bread and butter. And I get a lot of great emails from people that have gone there, taken the Red Hat stuff, and gotten the certification. It's kind of becoming the one go-to link. You know, people are like, how do I learn Linux?

I'm really interested, but what do I do? You're like, Linux Academy, man. Linux Academy. Just check it out. Check it out. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Get our awesome discount and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. All right, Wes, are you ready to, oh, and by the way, a special mention to the bad news about, for like, Bad news. The bad news about Steam Machines is spreading. Like, it does have some impact. VentureBeat has a story about Steam Machines is spreading. It does have some impact.

VentureBeat has a story about how Falcon PC is- It's close to home, too. I know. They've canceled their Steam Machine. They've canceled it. Falcon Northwest and an Oregon company. Yeah. It literally cuts. Right?

That does. It hurts, Wes. It hurts. So it is having some impact. The bad press is- We talk about it from like, oh, this isn't good. Well, it actually is making a bit of a difference at least. So yeah, we'll have links to all of that stuff, all that shenanigans in the show notes if you guys want to go read about that. But I want to shift gears for a moment and have a chance for our listeners in the Muppet Room to jump in.

Last week we said, well, let's kind of get an idea of how Tumbleweed is landing amongst the audience. So we put a call out there and said, if you've been running Tumbleweed and want to come on her show, give us your ideas. And so here we are, one week later, and we've got a good assembly here in our room. And we've even got a good thread going in the Linux Action Show subreddit, Electrical Magnition. Electrogician? I'm not

sure, but regardless, the feedback's great. You sound like an idiot. Electrogician. That's me. That's me. There you go. But there's no M in there. I know. No, you just got to emphasize the Electro... I don't know. I'm going to give up. No, what you do is you double down on that G. Alright, so you just checked in on the latest

episode of Linux Unplugged and was stoked to see a segment on my distro of choice. And we have 26 comments coming in on this thread. And I'm actually kind of excited to say I want to start with Mr. Brown, R. Brown, from the FASUSA project, kind of get an idea of how Leap has been received from the end users, and then jump in from the rest of the Mamba room there. So, Mr. Brown, tell me about, what are we, two weeks, three weeks in from the release? I can't remember now.

What's the reception been? Any gotchas? Any surprises? Any interesting tidbits to share with us? Yeah, it's been 14 days. It's been really good, actually. So, I mean, this is all a bit of an experiment for us, you know, treading new ground, mixing an enterprise distro with a community one.

And the feedback's been great. The community has been really receptive. Lots of people trying it. Lots of good feedback. Lots of good feedback from the press. I haven't read a bad review yet. Oh, good. And now I've said that, someone's going to write one.

Right, right. Yeah. So 14 days into it is not too long, but has anything sort of caught you by surprise? Or has anything already kind of been like, OK, we're going to have to address this? Any kind of like, we might have to shift strategy here? Real life adjustments. Yeah. It's been interesting with the feedback with our choice of versions for things like GNOME and KDE,

where there's some people who are really happy with kde 5.4 in there some would prefer to have kde 4 some are wondering like when are you going to have 5.5 there's that whole question of like how fast are we going to move that stuff yeah um and and i haven't got a straight answer for it i mean the it there's there's so many different moving parts of like how fast will the base system move how much does the community want to maintain it how much do we replace in the base system all that kind of fun stuff so that that's gonna be you know a good discussion point for 42.2 um same goes for for gnome i mean we had a lot of feedback of like why did you guys put 316 in there instead instead of 3.18? Yeah, yeah. I mean, everybody wants the latest and greatest GNOME.

Always. Always, yeah. Very good. So, Gabriel, I know I've been watching you in the subreddit for a while now. I know you've been a user of OpenSUSE and jumped on the leap since the beta milestone. So, what have been your impressions, Gabriel? Yes. So, my impression is very good i've started from beta

and i saw the review you made on the show a few few weeks ago it was yes it was uh very good i've tried both kd and gnome on kd just a couple of frees at the beginning, but after the first few updates, everything was very good. GNOME is good too. So I'm pretty happy. As you know, everybody knows, I'm a supporter of OpenSUSE, so I like it very much. I'm using it since one year ago.

Probably this is the reason why, for me, Leap is awesome. So, and what's the main thing about Leap that's awesome? The stability. the stability i like the idea of having a project that has a professional maintained core plus a community that is giving the let me say new things it's not as new as tumbleweed or archer but it is new. Yeah, and Tyler, you've also... Gabriel, I think you got an open mic there. Tyler, you've been using Leap for a past week and so. What are your thoughts on the KDE version?

So far, I've been really enjoying Plasma 5. I've had a couple issues I've run into. There are things about Plasma 5 that still feel a bit incomplete compared to 4. And I did actually have an issue where an update actually made the policy kit quite restrictive on the desktop. Oh, that's a little troubling. Tell me about that. Yeah. So after an update, I had an issue where the policy kit would not allow the applets to, let's say, go check for updates, or I couldn't just use the applet to change my network, I actually had to go and change the policy kit myself to allow myself to do that.

Hmm. Huh. That is probably... Those are the things you don't... Might be a bug. Might be a bug. Wimpy, you've been running Leap for the last week. Tell me about that.

Yeah, I installed Leap on my test machine, which is a fairly old thinkpad t61p and i found a lot about leap to like um i particularly like the way the default uh installer sets up the disk partitioning with the root file system using a rather complex structure of B3FS subvolumes. Oh, yeah. It's very impressive what they do by default. XFS. Yeah. I think that's a really smart move.

And I imagine is what is powering Snap. Is it Snapper? Yeah. Snapper? Yeah, Snapper. So as you do your package installs and package updates you get these snapshots before and after and you can hack and what have you. So I really

like those features. I think that's very elegantly integrated. Installed the KDE version. As I know traditionally KDE has sort of been the desktop the showcase desktop for OpenSUSE. And I haven't really run KDE much, and I really like the way that that's presented in OpenSUSE, because from my point of view, it's a very sane, usable KDE setup.

You know, it's instantly familiar, usable, and that. And I ran into a few sort of things that made me look at it, you know, sideways a couple of times, but nothing, you know, nothing awful or horrible. I was really very impressed. I thought it was quite elegant. Huh. Now, Heaven's asked a good question. I want to come back to this for a second.

But Barbara Wobble in the chat room says he's been using Leap on his home server with a few Docker containers, running W and Jesse in the container. And he's happy with it so far. He says that one of the nice things is the Ncurses interface to Yast makes it great for headless. Yes, I love that. Yes, I really do, too. Here's Heaven's question. And I'm wondering if anybody in the Mumble room has any thoughts on this.

And maybe, Wimpy, I can start with you. How would you say, Wimpy, how would you say Leap is for brand new users, like newest users to Linux? Do you think it's a suitable desktop OS? Once it's installed, it is. But if you've got to install it yourself, maybe not. Why do you say that?

Well, for somebody that's familiar with Linux installers, then you're not going to have any difficulty with this. It's going to be largely familiar. But, for example, when I started the install, I've got Intel Wireless something. I forget what model of chipset. But in the installer, the Intel firmware for the wireless chipsets not available so it sort of negs you that the firmware isn't available so i just sort of you know skip by that and ignore

it um but then that's strange on a four gig iso that the firmware is not available in the live session but then when you've installed the os the firmware is clearly there because the wi-fi works perfectly post install but some of some of the way you navigate through the installer isn't super intuitive you know if you've not done a linux install before i think you'd feel a bit out of your depth if you've done any sort of linux install i think i would agree with that. You'd be comfortable with it. I would say that even just, I was trying to download it earlier in the week,

and it took a good, like, three click-throughs to get to a page where I could actually download it easily off the SUSE website as well, which was a little like, if you're dedicated, if you want to do this, it's fine, but it's not like the one-click link. Yeah, yeah. We fixed that.

Oh, okay. It's now two clicks. That's perfect. Oh, good, thank you. Two clicks is much better. Yes, I know what you're saying. I can handle two. Yeah, yeah. We fixed that. Oh, okay. That's perfect. Well, good. Thank you. Two clicks is much better. I can handle two. Yeah. And I think... 33% less clicking. Right? Yeah, exactly.

That's the difference. 33% less matters. Yeah, I wonder if that actually stops some people from downloading. It might have, I suppose, in the past. Just because I'm used to Ubuntu, right? It's like right on the screen. You're oh click it downloads great so kitson you uh you kind of like the installer though don't you i like the installer i've always liked the open suse installer i've actually found the ubuntu installers and whatnot to be too simplistic

and some of their options i've noticed have. For instance, let's say you have an existing LVM encrypted setup on the disk and you don't want to wipe it. With Ubuntu, too bad. You're probably going to have that wiped. With OpenSUSE, I could set that up. I could give it the password. It'll mount it. I could say I want to wipe this partition in that partition but i want to leave everything else the same and i think that that's a big difference there

yeah you can do that on a one two you can there are manual partitioning options but if you if you just go next next next finish yeah you might have a bad time if you had something that you really wanted to keep yeah yeah uh yeah. I wonder, is it really? I feel like the OpenSUSE installer lets you go more out of the box if you want, but if you're willing to stay within certain parameters, all the installers are kind of a wash. Yes. Yeah.

Wimpy, you wanted to comment on YAST. Yeah, I mean, it's been such a long time since I've installed OpenSUSE and seriously taken a look at it that yast has actually changed considerably i think it's been rewritten so that probably gives you an idea how long it is since i last looked at it and i think where open zuzer shines is some of those yast modules for configuring things like a unis client or authenticating with a windows domain controller that that's where you see the sort of yes credentials coming through on the desk and there's lots of little things like that that you don't find in the other distributions as

readily um certainly not so much of out of the box install features so there's a lot of good stuff tucked away in yast it's a little bit of a mixed bag still you know there's some of the yast modules are a little bit confusing to look at and then other modules are just amazing the i forget which one what it's called but there's one that you can view your your discs and your partitions and your layouts in a in a whole load of different, but there's one that you can view your disks and your partitions and your layouts in a whole load of different ways. And there's one that maps the physical devices and the partitions to the volumes. And I just thought that was terrific. And that actually is very useful for a new user to actually get an easy to understand visual representation of how their

data is laid out on their disks. So I thought YAST was pretty cool. Yeah, I agree. That's a real area where you can underscore it too. Also setting up like Xen or KVM. Yep. Super easy. Yeah, that was really nice actually. And then the nice ButterFS support with the virtual Z.

Like those two go hand in hand. With Snapper built in so when you install a package you're getting snapshots. I mean it's real slick. It's real slick. Can I just add something about the BTFS support quickly? Yeah, absolutely. It was something that we kind of

forgot to talk about a lot with Leap's release. Someone mentioned it already with the different sub-volumes that were setting up by default. Part of that is to shield stuff from Snapper, so things like your home directory don't get eaten up into all those snapshots.

But we've also started using the non-copy-on-write attribute for certain key areas, so things like your database folders, libvirt folders, all that kind of junk, where they're going to have big files with lots of nasty I.O., you can still use that on BTFS. It won't do copy-on-writes. The performance is, you know, EXT4-like. Yeah, it really seems like

the benefits of OpenSUSE sort of embracing ButterFS before everybody else are paying off. I really appreciate that they are doing this, too. And they're showcasing how you can't...

There's some places where it's not ready. Yeah. But the places where it is. It is something I touched on specifically. I remember I spent some time talking about this on my review on the Linux Action Show, is that it is, I think, the most intelligent breakdown of sub-volumes.

Like it was mentioned in the chat room that Postgres is broken out, too. Another example where maybe copy-on-write doesn't make a lot of sense, or your virtual machines, copy-on-write doesn't make a lot of sense, and it is the number one thing that can hit your performance on a butterfs file system. And so the fact that SUSE has thought about that, I think very much shows that they've been trying this for a little while. And, Wimpy, in that kind of sense, I agree with you. It's not necessarily a new – I mean, it can be a new user's distro,

but it also can be a power user's distro too. Yeah, I think so. If you're an admin, more an admin than a developer, I would say, I think OpenSUSE is a nice distro. Yeah, it seems like a great place to host some deployments. Yeah, I wonder if we'll start seeing it take off in the VPS and cloud sphere as much. That would really be big. We already have some hosts already offering Leap as part of their hosting packages.

Yeah, Leap especially, it seems like. Yeah, exactly. You've kind of got the stable-ish. About once a year, I can handle a refresh, right? But maybe I don't need to micromanage it more than that. Right, exactly. But it still gets security stuff. Sweet spot.

Yeah. Dasani, you've been using Tumbleweed and Stable, and they are sharing the same home directory. Tell me about that. Has it blown up in your face yet? Nope, not yet. EXT4 in the home directory. Actually, what's the one you use?

Not EXT4, the robust one. XFS? Yes, that one. I use XFS in the home directory, and I share. So Tumbleweed can get however unstable. I know I can always roll it back, or if it gets corrupted, I can always kill it. But also I have BTRFS running the stable,

I guess Leap is what it's called now, and that has got all my games on it. So the kernel stays stable, the proprietary drivers, unfortunately, but yeah, they stay the same. And so I can play Borderlands 2 on stable, and it runs beautifully. And if I want to play with, like, Builder, it will run beautifully as well. And I don't have to wait until next year.

Yeah, that's a good point. And, Wimpy, you had a great question for R. Brown about rolling distros. I'd love to hear it. Yeah, I saw the Linux voice, voice of the masses, a question asking about, I think it was something to do with rolling releases. I can't remember, was it containerization? But I saw Richard comment on there that he had a feeling that rolling release was sort of vital to the future of Linux distribution at that point.

Yeah, that was from one of my slide decks. I have a lovely slide that I kind of throw in there to troll people, where it says, you know, rolling releases are the future of Linux. But I do honestly believe it. I mean, if you look at the pace of how upstream stuff is changing, the old distribution model just can't keep up. You know, kernel changes, base system changes, everything's just moving too fast.

And in many cases, like a lot of the, if you look at things like SystemD, GNOME, et cetera, you know, you need to move the base system in order to move the user space. So long-term, and in cases of, you know you you need to move the base system in order to move the user space so long term and i'm in in cases of you know enterprise maybe we're talking a decade from now in other cases maybe five years whatever but i really think rolling releases moving everything at a faster pace and then worrying about things like integration and testing and containerization and whatever is how we're going to see distros having to evolve because otherwise we

just can't keep up. We're out of date by the time we ship. Yeah, very much. I completely agree. Yeah, I do too, actually. Popey, do you want to expand on that? No. Yeah, I don't really need to either. I completely agree as well. We just heard from the beginning of this conversation why are you shipping

GNOME 3.16, not GNOME 3.18? I mean, even Microsoft is doing that with the new Windows 10, right? Yeah. I think the new expectation is, well, I've heard about this really awesome thing on that blog, and now I want it. Right. I want it. Why can't I get it?

I want it. I want it right now. And, yeah, that's, yeah, so. That's the Linux community in a nutshell. Well, you know, I mean, that's sort of put in the worst light. But the reality is there is really smart people making really awesome code that's available for free that makes your life better. And, yeah, you do want it because it makes crap easier and it makes crap better. And you don't want to have to deal with installing a whole bunch of stuff or dealing with conflicts.

You just want it. And, you know, you look at XGD app you look at Docker, and you look at all this different stuff that is talking about shipping applications and containers, and it seems like that's already a foregone conclusion as well, and that sort of isolates you from the touch and go of a rolling release. Right. So we're kind of coming upon this problem with two different solutions at the same time.

And I think that Tumbleweed is a very specific, unique approach to this particular problem, and it's one that I've kind of fantasized about for years, so it's really very specific, unique approach to this particular problem. And it's one that I've kind of fantasized about for years. So it's really cool to see it actually ship. So, yeah. Anybody else before we wrap up have any other comments on OpenSUSE Leap or things of this nature? Yeah. One thing that I really do like about OpenSUSE as well that I've noticed is that pretty much you can customize it from the get-go to be your own

distribution yeah with the way the software manager works and everything you can get the network installed uh you could click gnome for instance as your default desktop then you can click software at the summary and you can go in yeah and you could say i don't want this but i want this that and that yeah and then all that stuff gets uploaded there, and you're not wasting any bandwidth or anything like that. Yeah. And it's funny because that's how it used to be. Right. That's how you used to do it in distros.

You'd check, I want the KDE desktop environment. I want the web browsing packages and all of that stuff. I can imagine the old Debian menu right now. Right. And then Ubuntu came along, and it's like, well, we'll just pick all the best stuff for you by default. And that kind of became the trend for a while. And now there's like, oh, well, I kind of like being able to choose.

I mean, there's a middle ground there too. And I was going to say, I thought what you were going to mention was the build studio because that's really where you can customize. Yeah. If you guys out there are listening to episode 119 and want to share your thoughts on Leap, go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com or go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact. We really do check it. Please do.

We do. And it's been interesting to see. I specifically think they're doing something right here, them being the OpenSUSE project, because without question, without question, it has gotten more and more attention in our community over the last year. There was a point in time where we were not talking about it very much anymore, OpenSUSE. It's kind of the unmentioned third player. And I think this is re-gearing in a way that much more matches the expectations and desires of today's Linux user. I think it's fascinating. And I think it's also something that OpenSUSE was in the best position to deliver on.

Arch can't do it. They're too far into best position to deliver on. Arch can't do it. They're too far into the very rolling release. Ubuntu can't do it. They've got their system. Fedora can't do it. They're trying to reform it, but they can't quite do it. And really, you look back at it now, it almost seems like, well, yeah, of course it had to be OpenSUSE. But at the time before they made this leap, you couldn't see it.

And now you look back and go, oh, they're in the perfect position. They have the perfect tool set, and they're ready to go. I feel like it hits that sweet spot, too, where you have people, maybe they're in our community, they use Arch at home. But at work, they've got like CentOS or RHEL deployed and they're a little like, oh, this is so old. I keep having to deploy my own, configure things from source because it isn't in my repo. And they'll be like, when we refresh our server, what's the next thing we're using? Maybe it's OpenSUSE. Maybe.

Maybe. Maybe. You get that live kernel patching in there. You get that. Exactly, yeah. Up to, you know, I'm pumped. Woo-wee. Woo-wee.

I like that. I like that. All right. Well, okay. Last chance for any closing statements from the Mumba Room on OpenSUSE and Leap going once. Yeah, go ahead. Leap is now. Just.

Track. All right. Yeah. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Leap is now being, is now. All right. Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Leap is now tracking SUSE, which is the thing why they're calling it Leap now. So that's the thing.

You can now cleanly, at least is the ambition, transition from Leap to straight up SUSE if you want. Yeah. And I know there's one other person trying to jump in. I didn't catch who it was, but go ahead. So, yeah, Gabriel. So one of the good things I like in OpenSUSE Project is that we have both.

Right. Stable and rolling together. So in a few clicks, I can move from stable to rolling using ZipAdapt. Yeah. That's a few clicks I can move from stable to rolling using the zippered up. That's a very good point actually because it's the only distribution doing that.

And I don't want to give the impression that you're going to have zero problems when you make that transition like your NVIDIA driver might start complaining, but it is pretty damn neat. It is pretty cool and if that kind of stuff doesn't matter to you it is an incredible ability to make that switch. It is pretty cool. And if that kind of stuff doesn't matter to you, it is an incredible ability to be able to make that switch.

It is worth mentioning. Yeah, and I don't think anybody else is quite doing it like this with the complete picture. So it's pretty exciting to see it happen. And with the pedigree that they have. That too, right? That's also a really good point. And the brand.

Yeah, right. Yeah, yes. It's not some distro that Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, yes. It's not some distro that nobody's running. That won't be here in a year or two years, right? Yeah, very much so. Very much so. Yeah, R. Brown, you want to make a quick comment on the migration? Go ahead. I'm curious about that.

Yeah, just hopping from Leap to Tumbleweed, when you're doing it with just the official repositories, we test that as a standard OpenQA thing. Oh, great. So every time there's a Tumbleweed update, we see that you can get from Leap to there and back. And in fact, back we don't test that much, but we know Zipper does it with its eyes closed,

or you can just use Snapper. Nice. You can always hop over, try it, roll it back, and everything's wonderful and done. Easy peasy. Ooh, that's really cool. That is really cool. You almost take it for granted.

You almost do, right? And we've got a few things from the SLE guys of some of the stuff they're slipping in their new service packs, which I'm really keen to throw into 42.2 to make that even slicker. What would it take to make that actually happen? Is it just somebody saying, I'll do it, or what? Does somebody get assigned that job? How does that happen? That's just going to be figuring out a few differences between how our infrastructure

works and how the enterprise infrastructure works. Because there's things like repo metadata where they can say, okay, this release can upgrade to that release and that stuff. And we haven't got that stuff plumbed into our business yet. Does it feel like, to you, being a bit out on the edge saying, here's the distro. It's released. Now we have thousands of people using it, but we don't actually have that particular question answered yet? Which particular question? How exactly you might take something from SLES, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server, a great feature, and move it down to Leap. Like, it seems like that's going to be kind of a cornerstone feature of Leap, but maybe

not something that's totally been figured out yet, even though it's now out there for users. How does that, like, does that feel sort of like, well, we're just kind of going by the seat of our pants and we're just going to kind of figure it out as we go because we know that's the best way to do it? Or what is your impression sitting there in the project when, you know, there's real questions about how do you migrate something like that, like a piece of technology from Upstream or SLESS, and push it out to Leap? And you know you want to do it, and you've even kind of publicly committed to doing it, but there's not actually a process or a plan to do that thing.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, SUSE are doing that as part of the daily job anyway. So even when they're working on SLEE, engineering at SUSE work on Tumbleweed at the same time. If they're doing a new thing in SLE, in fact, I think it's still a policy in many cases where like their internal commit to SLE will get rejected if there isn't a matching one to Tumbleweed. Ah, wow. Okay. So, you know, upstream first is a, you know, a common policy.

In the case of Leap or stuff like this where it's kind of falling through the cracks because it's not a code thing but kind of an infrastructure thing, we'll figure it out. I mean it's just a case of timing, syncing, talking to each other. I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is an interesting time. Well, I'm glad that – thank you, everybody, who showed up to chat about this. Thank you, R. Brown and everybody who's been talking about this. It is really, really, really cool to see this kind of – see a lot more passion and interest pick up.

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Linux.ting.com. Thank you, Kyra. That's right. Linux.ting.com. Go there and try it and support Thanks for watching and see you soon. I haven't been able to make it work out yet. We'll hope. Linux.ting.com. Go check out Ting. It really is mobile that makes sense. You support this show, and you finally get out of that really crappy contract where they totally own you. Linux.ting.com. Wes, I am so effing hoping that in a couple of weeks I'll be sitting here giving you a review of my Libre or Libram. I don't even remember anymore. Libram.

Libram Prism 15. The Libram Prism 15. Purism. Purism. Thank you. Thank you. 15 will be shipping in phases. 10 pieces of light gray.

What is that? 10 pieces? Really? Only 10? Already shipping another 10? Either way, I should be getting my Librem or Purism or whatever it is I can't even remember because I bought it so long ago someday I should be getting my

ultimate Linux laptop soon to review this is exciting I actually am not that super excited anymore I was even as you don't even seem like you believe it's happening I don't because it's been it's been delayed twice now and I actually, I needed it,

like, the first time I got delayed, the first delay was, I desperately needed a new laptop because of a work thing we were doing, and I didn't, and I was just, and because... I like how you say work, like we don't know what it is you do for work.

You know, like a work thing, not this radio station. You know, podcasting. I know, right, yeah. Well, the thing about it was, because I've just been thinking about it. Like, my window of opportunity for needing this laptop has passed. Right.

And I kind of regret. I ain't getting an Oryx, so. Right. Actually, now I want an Oryx. Exactly. And I kind of regret funding this thing. I mean, I wanted to fund and I wanted to get behind something that was the ultimate Linux laptop. Nice.

A MacBook competitor that you can install a bunch of distros on. Had physical switch buttons for the webcam and things like that. You know what, though? It's going to be the end of the year soon. And I've moved on. And I'm really kind of bummed that I got caught up in this. I wanted to do this for a review. And so I'm hoping that once this thing shows up, my enthusiasm returns.

But at this point— At this point, it's a little— Yeah, it really will depend on what shows up at your doorstep and how you like it. Wimpy, I have not read the recent reviews. What have you seen? I'm not going to say. I'm going to let you read them for yourself. Oh, no.

View your own unit. Secret, secret. Uh-oh. It's not secret. If you search around, you'll find it. I just don't want to go down as a purism naysayer. Well, that says it. Despite the fact that I am.

All right. See, when you say that, I think I'm going to read the reviews and I'm going to be disappointed is what I'm taking away as an impression here. And I don't like that. Oh, man. All right. disappointed is what i is what i'm taking away as an impression here and i don't like that oh man all right and and and i i don't know like uh what should i have done right as the idealist linux user should i not have crowdfunded this it seems like this was a good like honest effort to try to fund i think i think you had a duty to fund it you know with the weight of the linux action show behind you this was a big initiative wasn't it it was a bold statement that purism made you had to back it you had to get the

equipment and you have to review it the thing is is that it was a year ago that we first yeah when it was you know first tabled and you can can't know a year ago how long this crowdfunding campaign is going to take to turn into a reality. But I think you've done the right thing in terms of you know, for the Linux Action Show, you've done the right thing. Whether or not it was

the right thing for you to do personally or not, you'll be able to tell us when you get the unit and review it. Yeah, that is exactly what it is. Either way, I think we're going to get a really good Chris Last rant. You know, it's just I've interviewed the founder, and I've met him in person. I know he even, like, knows which laptop is mine. Like, he knows which one is mine. And so, like, I'm like, okay, I feel like I should be excited here, but it was a year ago.

And to be honest with you, like W wimpy said i i just the enthusiasm personally has dwindled and professionally i'm still interested but yeah are you amazed i don't know if people can hear it in the background right here i'm gonna turn my microphone just for a second hold on hold on it sounds like a fan really almost yes the wind are you in a plane yeah it's it's it is, it is really windy here. I'm amazed that we haven't been knocked offline yet. No, it's weird. It's really windy here as well.

Yeah, I know. Really, really windy. Yeah, I think actually about the same speeds. It is, what was it, 110 km? Yeah. Yeah, it is really... We do miles an hour here. You don't have to convert it.

Oh, you do? Okay, all right. Very nice. I'm impressed. I think we're about 60, 65 miles per hour wind here. It is really... I was so proud of myself for having the conversion. I was. That was impressive.

You've been staring at your car dial, haven't you? No, I googled it. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll let you guys know if I get it, because they're supposed to be shipping Librem 15 units with dark gray coming with 4K screens. I believe mine is 1080p. You should just put this here where this Windows laptop is just for my sake, really. Right.

I know. Really. I'm amazed it hasn't been deactivated yet. Yeah. It still shows the watermark. Wow. I almost feel like I want to keep – I feel like Kramer right now. I want to keep going until the power knocks us offline.

I know, right? How long can we go? Right. Love marathon. We're running on fumes right now. It's a good idea. It's damn impressive. Yeah.

All right. Well, we'll wrap it up there so that way we can actually record the entire episode and not lose the file. That would probably be a good idea. That would probably be good because I have lost so many episodes in the past that I can't bear to lose another one. But I would love to have you join us live. Go over to jblive.tv on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. Pacific or go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash

calendar and you get this converted to your local time zone. That's amazing. Also, I'm going to give one more plug for Rover Log 15 for our trip to System 76. I say that because right now over on the reruns machine over there, I'm looking at 391. Hey, look at that. Live from System 76. It's well-timed. That was such a cool setup they had for us with the illuminated desk.

It's amazing. And the nice backing wallpaper. It looks like you're out in Hollywood. It's their booth setup and it was super cool. It was like all live events. It was down to the wire to get that work and it was a lot of fun. But a big

thank you to System76 for having us out there too. So anyways, I'll wrap it up by just saying our Mumble room is an open room. There's no secret password. There's no secret code you need to know. Just go over to jblive.tv. Do bang mumble. You'll get the mumble server info.

And then we just have mods who are awesome, and I love them, and I want to give them kisses. Thank you, guys. Because I yelled at them today. I'm like, what the hell, guys? But no, now I'm saying I love them. He loves you. He loves you. That was in private.

But in public, I say they're great. That's what I do. And you can talk to those mods, and they'll check your microphone and see if you can join our virtual lug, and then come in and share your opinion on stuff. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com for topics or feedback or check for the thread for 119 in there. And is there anything else we need to cover this week, Wes? I don't think so. I think we've hit it right on the head.

Momber Room, thank you guys for joining us. And, of course, if there's anything we're forgetting, we'll also have the post show, which we can chat in. Or please contribute to the subreddit. Yeah, that does really help quite a bit. We'll bring it right back up. Yeah, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. All right, so as we are recording right now, hopefully this isn't the only show you hear,

because the power just went out again, and the lights are flickering. Welcome, goodbye, hello, everything. I shouldn't have said anything. I apologize. Linux Unplugged 119 is coming to an end right now. Are we still on power? My God, I have no idea if we're going to make it.

The lights are flickering. We'll see if we're here next week. We don't know. I don't know, but thank you very much for tuning in. Go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get live events. jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for all that stuff. And contact slash contact for emails and slash live for the live stream. It's all slashes. Everything. Slash, slash, slash.

Wow. Well, hopefully this wasn't the only show we got. And thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode we really appreciate it come back next week no power outages if we don't get blown away we'll be here

see you then Yeah, we were unplugged. Linux unplugged. Even the Hughes lights got reset. Yeah. That's like, you know, it's bad. My connection to Quassel dropped. What is this? Now, before everybody writes in and says, get a UPS, listen.

Listen, they add line noise. Yeah. If you don't want in your podcast, you don't want Chris running everything on UPS. You can fit a few in there. Otherwise, we'll have to get conditioners and it's a whole thing. Now, I know our friends across the pond, they probably don't have this power issue we have here in Washington where all of our power lines are above ground. Yeah, who, I mean, bury things?

That's insane. That's nuts, right? Yeah. You can just string them up, you know, very loosely on the side of the road. Oh, wow. That was so funny. Like Wes and I are just sitting here looking at each other like, oh, wow, we just lost power. That sucks.

Sorry, guys. Did you all know in the mom room immediately what happened? You all must have. Sorry, guys. Did you all know in the MomBormic immediately what happened? You all must have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're gone. It was an awkward silence.

And they're gone. All right. Well, we should probably wrap up so we can get this file. But thank you guys very much. Great show. Absolutely. Sorry we have to kind of rush out of here, but I don't want to lose the file. Hopefully we have more than just this for the show release this week.

Yes. Oh, come on, Scale Engine. You have a backup. Your only hope. Chris, I've got a question for you. Yes, sir. Sir, yes, sir. In your time in the trenches, helping people move away from Windows and businesses.

Down in the trenches. What did you use? Did you have a deal with exchange compatibility? Oh, man. That's a good question. Exchange compatibility was, for myself, I'll tell you my personal story. Yes. Personally, it was the thing that held up my conversion to Linux the longest on my work desktop computer.

I can see that. Now, this goes back to why I have such a soft spot for Crossover Office. Because they made it possible to not just be connected, but actually use a legitimate Outlook. I started with Evolution and the Exchange Data Server and all of that. And it was okay. And it was my preferred way to go. But so many times, little things didn't work right. And so for Crossover Office to come along and give me actual Outlook, even though I hated Outlook.

Right. But to give me actual Outlook. A full-on Outlook. Yeah. Oh, man, that was such a game changer for me. And then, you know, it became less important after Exchange, I don't know, Exchange 2003 or whatever they called it, where they started to get the Outlook web access interface a little bit better.

Yeah. Right. And then it became, well, I could just use my web browser. You could just use the web browser. And then now today in 2015, it is not a weird concept at all to say, well, I'll just check my mail in a web browser. Right. You already have Gmail in one tab. Right.

But back in 2005, 2004, 2003, you were a maniac. Squirrel mail was like good web mail. Right. And that was like what you had. And I know I tried so many times. I tried using Thunderbird and LDAP and KMail and just so many different things I tried to use. And so for me, the slow but steady march of companies failing to very often upgrade their office installation, just the slow but steady pace they have there, meant that wine compatibility

was almost a guaranteed thing with the version of Outlook they were going to be using. So everywhere I went, there was almost always like, if they got to this, what I eventually did later on is I developed this scale. And on this scale, you could just use Outlook Web Access. And on the other end of the scale, you had Run Wine and Outlook, right? And usually in the middle was where Evolution sat, or even a little bit towards the Use Outlook webmail scale, Thunderbird sat. And so what I would normally do is I would suss up,

and I'm drawing Wes a diagram here. It's a beautiful diagram. I will attest to this. What I would normally do is I normally found that most users sat in the Thunderbird to Outlook range or between Evolution, and I would actually usually just avoid Evolution altogether because I found the stability to be unpredictable. I see, yeah.

Now, every now and then you had your high-ends, which had to go with your wines. Right. They needed everything. They used all those features. Yeah. And then now, I think if I was still doing it, I would probably just have them use Outlook Web Access. Yeah. And that would probably be fine.

Why do you ask? Oh, I was just playing with a tool I found that takes Exchange and translates it into IMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV, and LDAP. Do you have to run it on the Exchange server? Nope. You can either run it locally or set it up as a transparent... What's it called? What's it called? DAV mail.

Okay, yeah, so it makes it like a webDAV thing. It is Java, but I had no problem running it. They have a DEV and... So the DAV mail process goes out and connects to an exchange server over what? OWA, MAPI? It can use OWA and then it also uses Exchange Web Services. Okay.

So you're pretty much going to get even like address book lookup and stuff like that. You can do address book lookup, calendar. I haven't tested the full suite, but IMAP works really well. So your work uses Exchange? It does, yes. And yeah, OWA works fine, but there's some stuff where I want to set up some scripts that can check and do email-related actions.

What about things like out of office? Do you have to go to the webmail to set that still, or do you know? That's a good question. I'll have to experiment with that. Because that's always the thing that was totally... Those little details at the end, yes. Yeah, Exchange has gotten a lot easier in the era of smartphones and things like that. And I know Office 365 even has a JSON API now. So if you go that far, then it gets better.

It was really, though, like you said, back when I was in the trenches, it was really that thing. And I'm specifically reflecting on Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000, and Exchange 2003 and just watching that, watching how they had, Microsoft had such a brilliant lockdown. Oh, yeah, it's crazy. It's all just one big thing. It was really, and Active Directory solidified all of it, right?

And it worked well enough, I mean, for the things it did. It was actually, Active Directory was perfect because what it was was it was a significant, significant organizational improvement over NT4. Right. And that paradigm. And it was much more in line with NetWare's eDirectory and others. And it managed to not only make organizationing more streamlined, but it also could accommodate acquisitions and mergers that businesses face.

Sure. Right. That was something supported. supported. You understood how to do it. Yeah, exactly. You could actually figure out how to do acquisition mergers with other companies and integrate them into your Active Directory, which was, for the business world, that's a big deal. And then on top of that, they managed to, if you're going to go Active Directory, well, then you have to have a Windows DNS server. And if you're going to go Active Directory, you should probably do DHCP on a Windows server because that DHCP server will automatically dynamically update the DNS entries, which is important for Active Directory to function correctly. And if you're going to go Active Directory, you might as well go Exchange because that's

going to tie into all your user accounts, and that'll make single sign-on possible. And if you're going to go Active Directory, you might as well go IIS on your internet server because then you can use single sign-on possible. And if you're going to go Active Directory, you might as well go IIS on your internet server because then you can use single sign-on for your internet as well. And, yeah, we'd prefer to use Apache, but single sign-on is a big deal. We don't want users to have to enter passwords. So we'll go IIS. And it's such a brilliant way to lock you in.

But it's totally the old model, right? And it doesn't really apply anymore. And, yeah, Active Directory is still huge and all that kind of stuff. But, I mean, it was such a stroke of genius on Microsoft's part, right? And it doesn't really apply anymore. And yeah, Active Directory is still huge and all that kind of stuff. But, I mean, it just is such, it was such a stroke of genius on Microsoft's part, right? When Windows was going to be everywhere. Yes. Yeah, that was something. And now today,

Active Directory can just simply be a service on Azure. Yes. And, you know, the LDAP integration and that kind of stuff in Linux. So you've been playing with DHCP and dynamic updates? Oh, just there's a Windows component to our network and just playing with the living on Linux in that environment. You know, I remember when Bind actually – I don't remember if it was Bind 9. I can't remember when Bind got it, but I remember when dynamic DNS came to Bind.

Right. And I could deploy a Bind server again on my network and have it dynamically update the DNS on a Windows server. Yeah. And I didn't expect, I don't remember exactly the nature of the improvement, but I didn't expect an improvement, a noticeable improvement. What I expected was essentially no change at all from my point of view or the end user's point of view. I didn't really think moving to Bind would, I swear to God, Wes, there was an actual performance improvement in DNS resolution across all of the users. The way we worked is we had 110 terminal servers that I was responsible for sitting in one

room. And so all of your users across 40 plus branches come into one room and then they're hitting everything at once. When they log in across all, you know, you have 700 users that log in in one spot on one LAN all at once. It really hits it, right? Yeah, definitely. Especially back in the day when, you know, things were, you know, crappy processors and

stuff like that. And we didn't have SSDs and any of that kind of stuff. So if you're going to have any kind of disk IO, it's a massive scuzzy RAID array. And it's a monster to manage. Oh, geez. When Bind came along, just that small, I mean, Bind was around way longer than Windows DNS, but when Bind dynamic updates came along that interrupted with Active Directory, when that happened, you could actually witness, like you could

sit there and see desktop logins happen faster, name resolution happen faster. That's amazing. It was just like, wow, is everything better under Linux? Like everything? I was at DockerCon in Barcelona this week. Oh, really? Tell me about that. Tell us more.

Yeah, man, it was good. But the most surreal moment of the entire conference was listening to a Microsoft rep The most surreal moment of the entire conference was listening to a Microsoft rep giving a talk, stood there in a red hat hat about open source and how great Linux was on Azure. Whoa, that's weird. I don't know how I'd feel about that. What was the scene like at DockerCon? Does it feel like a lot of money was spent?

Does it feel like a new startup thing that's struggling to seem big? Or did it feel like it's arrived? Like what was your vibe? You walked away from DockerCon. Such a great community. The DevOps community has such a nice energy around it. It was a big conference, about 2000 people. And there was food everywhere you went.

And there was free beer, which obviously is great in Spain. And, yeah, it was a really great experience. I definitely recommend going if you can. And they've announced that the next DockerCon in June will be in your neck of the woods, Chris, in Seattle. No. Cool. Wes, we should go. We should definitely go.

Hmm. Well, you know what? I'm going to look into that. I'm going to – hmm, that's interesting. I've been thinking about scale this year. So I've been thinking about different conferences. Just toy in with it. I think we're not going to do scale this year, which is ridiculous because it's one of the largest Linux conventions. But, you know, Noah and I were talking about it on this trip to System76.

And we honestly – there's like a threshold where they start to get too big, and they get corporate. Right. Yeah, then it's more like an industry convention rather than like a user. And skills really walk in that line. I think Docker is going to head that way fast. Yeah, it feels like that. Ten years ago, you were mad if you ran a VM in production, right?

And now you're mad if you don't. And I suspect that Docker will go that way much faster because people will adopt note the trends faster and stuff like that. We're going to talk about it, but the economies of scale that Docker offers is just I mean, it is like

impossible for your CTOs to ignore. It's just too attractive. You mean we don't have to buy new hardware? Right. Keep that CapEx down. They showed a few cool demos, right? One of them was they managed their Docker containers in Minecraft. So your kid might like that, Chris.

No kidding. That's wild. Dylan. And another one they showed was a 1,000-node cluster on AWS deploying 50,000 containers in 52 minutes. Whoa. 50,000. Imagine the DDoS you could start up with. No kidding. And the only reason they stopped at 1,000 nodes was because that's all that EC2 would let Docker have.

Oh, really? That's great. That must have been quite the demo. Yeah, it got Apple-style applause.