LINUX Unplugged - Episode 120: Budgie Jumping | LUP 120

Episode Date: November 25, 2015

A member of the Vivaldi browser project joins to discuss their new release. The man behind Solus comes on to follow up on our review, discuss the big plans for the future, creating a custom distribution & the problem with derivatives.GIMP turns 20 this week and we ask if it’s just time to accept that some OSS projects will never topple their commercial competitor & why that’s just fine by us. We’re still thankful for the GIMP.

So, Wes, you caught this one. Maybe we could talk about this on the pre-show here. Cheepoo, is that how you say it? Yeah, I have no idea how to say it, actually. Take a shot at that one. Chapow? Chapow? Chapow.

Ooh, let's go with Chapow. That's the most fun way, I think. So, Chapow 23. Anyone want to correct us? Chapow 23 Beta 2 is out, and Chapow is another remake of the Fedora project. And I normally don't cover all these derivatives, but I've— How did they—oh, the 23 comes from Fedora. How did they get to version 23 without me

having ever heard of it or known how to pronounce it? Magic. No, yeah, because they're just basing on Fedora 23. Here's why I think this is noteworthy. Because remember how before a couple of releases ago nobody was basing stuff off Fedora anymore? Yeah. And now we've got a few of them.

And so these guys, they have themselves one of them good-looking desktops. They've gone ahead and made things actually look usable. And like most respins of Fedora, you get your third-party content like your codecs and your Adobe Flashes and your DVD and Blu-rays. You also got the curation. And they say it's gaming ready. What do you think, Wes? What did you think when you first found this? Gaming ready. you know uh i was just surprised i hadn't heard of it before but you're right i do like to see more things based on fedora because i don't know i

think to some users still they're just just installing fedora there's kind of a lot you have to do still to make it if you're used to something you know like mint or something where you have everything installed it's ready to go you can kind of get whatever you want fedora takes a little more work so if this is like a really nice polished, starts up fast. You know who this would be good for? You know who this would be really good for in like three, four, five years? Maybe just a couple of years even is like Noah's kid. Yeah, right.

Because Noah loves that Fedora. And so BXNT in the chat room says that it's chapeau. Chapeau. How do you say it? Chapeau. Chapeau. Which is hat in French. Yeah, it's French for hat.

Yeah, there you go. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 120 for November 24th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that encourages you to... Come on now. Encourages you to brine that turkey. Wes, my name is Chris. My name is Wes. I know that.

You know that. Yes. I'm sitting right here. You've seen me before. Listen, Wes, we have a huge show. It's a holiday week. And we thought what we would do is get ourselves a little eggnog, pour ourselves a drink, and have one of the biggest shows of the year.

That's what we thought we would do for this episode. Stuff ourselves, you know? Everyone else will be doing it later this week. Yeah. Getting started early. We did have a little bit of bird tirade on the pre-show, so for those of you that are joining us live, I hope you enjoyed the warm-up session where apparently I went on a complete rant against having birds. But that is not going to make it into the show.

I won't, no. This is a Linux show, believe it or not. Yeah, we're going to going to make it into the show. I won't. This is a Linux show. We're not. Yeah, we're gonna talk about Linux and open source things. And to that end, one of the gentlemen from the Vivaldi project is joining us a new browser out for the Linux desktop. After that, we're going to talk about Solus. We're going to have the developer of the Solus project on here and talk about his desktops inspired by a bird's name.

Hence the rant earlier in the show. And then later in the show today. Listen, I love Linux. I love open source, we've all been here a long time. GIMP just hit 20 years old. LibreOffice just got a thousand developers. Big milestone. Hit a thousand developers. But let's be honest, these projects are still not good enough. GIMP still isn't there yet. Doesn't have CMYK support, doesn't have non-destructive editing, it are still not good enough. GIMP still isn't there yet. It doesn't have CMYK support. It doesn't have non-destructive editing. It's still not competitive with Photoshop. After 20 years, is it time to just admit that sometimes open source projects are never going to get there?

LibreOffice, 1,000 developers, getting better all the time, but still maybe not competitive with Microsoft Office. How many developers, how many years does it take until open source software can actually compete with the commercial alternative? Or have I got it all wrong? We'll talk about that coming up at the end of today's episode of Linux Unplugged. So no word talk. None of that, Wes. Except for I do highly encourage you to brine your turkey. Well, of course.

Yeah, that makes it delicious. Go look up Alton Brown's recipe. It's really good. Hey, we've got a great mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, virtual dog. Hello. Hello. Konnichiwa.

Hi. Heyo. Okay, I got to know. Poppy, how do you always manage to be the first? Like what do you do exactly? I'm in your head. Okay. I mean that's what I thought.

That's exactly what I thought. All right. Well, we have a couple of stories I wanted to follow up on that are kind of big news that have broken since the Linux Action Show was on the air. And let's start with the first one here. AMD's got something for your face, an open source driver. It's been released and supports the latest AMD GPUs. The announcement has been made on the X.Org announcing mailing list from, you know, obviously the X.Org Foundation.

And according to, I'm going to call him Mr. Dan. According to Mr. Dan, the brand new XF86 video AMD GPU driver, version 1.00 driver, has been forked from the open source project. And it has been, if you have Linux kernel 4.2, which has the new AMD GPU kernel driver, then, Wes, a good batch, and I think they're in the Softpedia article they mentioned, a good batch of the current Radeon cards are now supported by this totally open source driver. Did you see the list there? Here you go. It's this paragraph right there.

What's that say there? Oh, yeah. Okay. XF86 Video AMD GPU 1.0. Yeah. Currently supports AMD GPUs from the Fiji, Carrizo, Tonga, Stony, and Iceland. There it is. There it is.

Yeah. So if you've got an AMD GPU in that range of cards. You should be able to use this now. You've got Linux kernel 4.2. This is some pretty exciting stuff. This is some stuff that really NVIDIA hasn't even gotten to yet. And it's stuff that we've been covering in the news on the Linux Action Show for like a year now. And I think we're all kind of wondering like, okay, they've talked about doing it.

But when are we going to see the code shipping? So here's another piece of that. And, Ike, you're mentioning that 4.3 of the Linux kernel also has some more AMD GPU stuff. What's that about? Yeah, so I was recently updating the kernel inside of Solus. There's a lot more changes made for basically more devices than the 4.3 kernel. It's going to be replacing the old ancient defunct drive, which I'm just trying to find out exactly how old it is.

One second. The ancient one, huh? What do you think, Wes? Well, yeah, my understanding is that at least part of what this article is talking about is the X-specific component of the driver. You know, where there's also a kernel part and then the MESA part as well. And so we need all of those components to come together so that we can have a functioning AMD open source graphics. So this really could take the process of getting a semi-recent AMD GPU from one of the more challenging processes to get full 3D support to potentially works right out of the box. I wonder if we'll see more support.

I mean, I think a lot of people, the people interested in gaming on Linux kind of tend to skew to NVIDIA these days, you know, maybe pretty strongly. I wonder if this can shake that up. Yeah, yeah. And also, could there be some other work cases? You know, because I can very clearly see NVIDIA's reason. NVIDIA's got their proprietary driver. They have a lot of certain types of work cases that offload the different types of processing to the GPU that the Linux desktop is great for different institutions.

I don't... AMD has those same capabilities, but I don't know if things like the... I mean, it seems everything's focused on CUDA these days, and I think AMD GPUs are more open CL, which is great, but I don't really... I don't know what the big work case scenario is in the

enterprise for AMD GPUs. Maybe it's editing. I'm not sure. Ike, did you find the info you were looking for? So I had an update in 2014, another release today. So that was once a year. So you can see really there wasn't a lot of effort going on in there. Yeah, no kidding.

To be fair, it's better than the Nova driver. I mean, that's ancient. Everyone's having to use Git build. So fair play to AMD for actually maintaining something. Yeah. Yeah. And while we're talking about the display stack, kind of a fork from that topic, Fedora is seeking for some testers on Wayland. You know, they're getting serious about shipping Wayland and Fedora 24 workstation.

It's become the default option already in Rawhide, the rolling development version of Fedora. It's become the default option already in Rahai, the rolling development version of Fedora. But the plans are not yet carved in stone for Fedora 24 to actually ship with Wayland, despite what's been reported by a lot of places online. And really, it kind of comes down to us. Before GNOME on Wayland becomes a default in Fedora, we need to ensure the transition is smooth, says the Fedora magazine site. And the users won't recognize a difference. Now, that's a high bar to set. That's a high bar, yeah.

I'm sure it's probably the same exact bar Canonical must have set. So we need reports on deficiencies that occur on Wayland but not X11. And I have it linked in the show notes too. They have a guide, really. The Fedora QA team has written up a comprehensive guide on how to debug Wayland-related problems. So if you want to see this happen, this is a real way you as an end user could actually participate in the adoption of Wayland. You could go follow these links in the show notes. You could read their QA guide.

And I'm willing to bet this comprehensive guide is probably just good reading in general. Yeah, probably. Especially if you're interested in Fedora. I got it linked right here. Let me go see if I can find it. I'm kind of curious to see what they actually say because this could be one of those things that could really apply to a lot of things. And it's really kind of nice that they did this. So this is over on the Fedora Project wiki.

How to debug Wayland problems. Hmm. Here you go. They say Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X11. It changes the design of Linux desktop architecture. That's good background information for you. Yeah, exactly. And so they have tips in here for reporting issues and looking for similar reports, how to file a bug,

information to include in your bug report, debugging the GNOME shell. See, okay, well, all those first few things are going to be good for anything, right? Debugging mutter, known issues, frequent complaints, and fundamental changes. It's also really good so you're not creating dupes and things like that. It's like a really good reference just for people transitioning or looking to transition to Wayland. Yeah, I think this is nice. And this is what's really cool about what, you know, when Microsoft dumps their new Windows 10 in your face and tells you it's the best thing ever and Apple tells you the next thing is magical. I thought it was the best thing ever.

Well, well. That's why we're using it here, right? Well, maybe eventually they can get it there. But in the meantime, this is something we as end users could actually go participate in today. I like that quite a bit. And regardless of what distro you run, I would assume some of the work done here

is going to also help other distributions. So it's a nice place to go. And we'll have links for that information in the show notes if you guys want to get involved on that. I just like that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's nice to see. And Fedora's doing a great job of trying to push things like that. Wes, you found a kick-ass

guy that looks really nice, even has some stuff in here for the Mac users, but this is the art of the command line. You know, like the meta overview, the basics, everyday use, processing files and data, system debugging, one-liners, obscure but useful commands, and then crap just for the Mac users, resources

and all kinds of stuff. The art of the command line. And I started reading some of this and this is a really nice guide. You know, it's pretty in-depth. It looks like it's been well worked over, you know kind of only the things that need to be there are there, but there's a lot of stuff for I think any level of user. I also like seeing

you know, like one of the things they have, the HTTP IE program, which is like a curl alternative that's a little easier for interactive. Maybe you're doing like a RESTful JSON API kind of stuff. They have a lot of these modern tools worked in with the classic Unix examples, which is really nice. Yeah, that is cool

and it's, you know, it's a nice resource that I was looking at the edits. It's getting updated fairly frequently, which is nice. So you can check it out. We'll have a link to that. The Art of the Command Line. You could probably also Google and find it. It is posted up on GitHub.

And it is all formatted in? Markdown. That's right, sir. That's right. Very good. Very good. So, Wes, you're a trooper this week. You have in here – what is this?

Is this actually a Sputnik or do you know? It looks like it's one of the Sputnik series. You know, it might be. I am actually not actually a sputnik or you know it looks like it's one of the sputnik series you know it might be i'm i'm actually not sure i didn't ask it looks just like it but it does it was actually yes i think it must be because uh on dell's website they have it listed with the two yep so he's got one of these uh one of these uh dell laptops here like the the sputnik line uh and uh for this week you've installed what on there? Velt OS? Velt OS. Velt.io is their website?

Yes, sir, and we're going to talk to Ike about that in a little bit to see what he thinks about this. But Wes has been trying out a bunch of different things, and I love it because a lot of times you'll come in here and you've been trying out a different distribution, and I'm curious to know your thoughts on Antigros. So check this out. Their latest ISO is laying the groundwork for a ZFS,

oh, I said it, ZFS kernel module in preparation for ZFS support in their future installer. Hey, that's great. Yeah, so ZFS installation right there in the Antigros installer so you get a rolling Arch-based distribution with minimal modifications from upstream Arch with ZFS support in a GUI installer. Your thoughts?

I love it. Honestly, I don't usually install Antigos, but it is my go-to live CD. I think it's a great environment. It's polished. It's pretty. It's got that nice Numix theme. And also it's Arch.

So I know you have all the AUR as support. You have all the latest packages. And if I want to install Arch Linux, it already has all the installation tools. So if I can do that and have easier ZFS support, I mean, what's not to like there? I thought on the Linux Action Show subreddit, XOO's take was the best. Hey, Alan, your troubles are over, Alan. Oh, that's just baiting.

Look at that. But this is not news. Like, Ubuntu announced they were going to do it first. Yeah. And then everybody's like, oh, well, if it's okay for them to do it, then everybody can do it. It appears to be the case. My concern is how differently it's going to be done in a bunch of different Linuxes. Yeah.

Because it seems like suddenly, when you're setting it up in the installer, as someone who's written the installer for ZFS and required multiple iterations to get it right, are they going to do boot environments? Because if not, they're kind of wasting their time. Yeah, I certainly hope so. I imagine. I don't know yet. Because if they're going to use DKMS to make it work, then I

don't want my boot environment using it. I mean, DKMS seems to work, but... Right. So, yeah, there's a bunch of questions. There's having ZFS and there's booting from ZFS. And then it comes down to, out you know at some point Grub would have to do a release which they haven't

done in a couple of years in order to actually get all the features we've pushed back into Grub actually in a version that people might use although random distros might just pull from their head their master branch or whatever you want to call it in Git but it seems like that's a bad way to run a

software project what's the objection with having boot on something else and everything else like all your main storage on zfs yeah i don't see a downside really objection to that it's just you lose boot environment so on freebsd with boot environments you can boot off an older a clone of a snapshot so like before you do kernel upgrade, you can just roll back. But you can roll back everything. Before you run apt upgrade or whatever the equivalent is, you would take a snapshot

and you can roll back so that if the latest package update installed a version of GNOME that likes to crash, you can just be like, give me the one I had 10 minutes ago. Oh look, it works. I don't see how having a separate boot removes your ability to do that. I'm not a ZFS expert, though. I should be faced with that.

Well, because if the separate boot is not ZFS, then it wouldn't be included in the snapshot. Other file systems do snapshots, though. The idea would be one set of tools, though, to manage all of it, right? So, I mean, there is a disadvantage to managing ButterFS to get your boot environment working again and then managing ZFS or ZFS to get your data environment and your OS environment working. That's not ideal. It's not optimal, right?

Yeah, the entire point is to keep them in sync, right? Or I actually have online two separate environments that's, hey, this is FreeBSD 10 with FreeBSD 10 packages and this is FreeBSD 10 with FreeBSD 10 packages and this is FreeBSD 11 with 11 packages. The thing is, I do go back, though, rebuilding your boot environment is a pretty... In terms of recovering your server and getting it back online, rebuilding slash boot is... I mean, there's worse things that could happen.

That's not what I mean by boot environment. Boot environment is what we call the different snapshots. So that would be what? Kernel version and everything? Or what exactly is a boot environment. Boot environment is what we call the different snapshots. So that would be what? Kernel version and everything? Or what exactly is a boot environment? The boot environment is a complete snapshot of everything in the system except for directories you exclude, like your home directory and var log. Okay.

It is the perfectly working kernel and packages and your entire environment that's not volatile data, basically. Sort of like Undentidentified is pointing out, sort of like SUSE is doing right now with Snapper and Butterfest, but it's... Yeah, they're copying the CFS version. But it's Butterfest. Yeah. It's something Solaris came up with like 10 years ago, right?

And that's where all new technology comes from. We live in the frickin' Star Wars universe where we don't invent anything new. We just steal older stuff and pretend like it's new. Oh, God. Human progress. Why can't we live in the Star Trek universe where we actually invent new things? Well, I actually – boy, that's a whole other – boy, we could do a whole episode on that. Holy smokes.

So I'm not quite sure how Anagross is actually – Rodden, have you had a chance to look at this at all? Do you have any insights on how Anagross is actually... Rodan, have you had a chance to look at this at all? Do you have any insights on how Anagross is actually rolling this out? Not the technical aspects of what you're talking about, like the boot environment stuff. They haven't really given a full detail of that. Even just usable ZFSS storage would be very nice to see. I think as a first cut, that's almost certainly what will happen.

Those advanced restore and recovery stuff, I i think would be further down the line but for a first given this is our going to be our first release with it in i suspect it will be mostly focused on storage and you will have to you know do your own thing for how you recover the things that are not zfs or the things that are not being snapshot right that makes sense and that makes sense. And that makes sense. And, you know, that's how FreeBSD did it for a long time. And even when it supported root on ZFS, many people were like, I don't trust it enough, including myself.

Yeah, it would probably, yeah. I still have my very first ZFS server, which is still running perfectly fine, but it still boots off UFS because I didn't trust ZFS back then. Now, I actually trust UFS less. What the Chrisney says here, something about Butterfest boot support

isn't in mainline Grub. Is that accurate? It is. Yeah, that does sound right. It actually depends on what kind of features you've enabled in Butterfest and, of course, as well in ZFS. I was going to say,

because I use subvolumes to boot from in Grub. And most distros are actually rolling a Git version of Grub anyway. There you go. Most of them have kind of taken their own snapshots over time. If you look at it, it's almost certainly a Git version of Grub. Yeah, it's almost certainly. Well, like I said, Grub really needs to do a release. Hey, man, I'm still sticking with Lilo.

So what's up? Lilo for life. Lilo for life. That's worse than birds. Hey, man, I'm still sticking with Lilo. So what's up? Lilo for life. Lilo for life. That's worse than birds. Hey, that's a title right there. It's worse than birds. You're right about that. You know, speaking about living in the Star Trek universe,

I'll tell you what feels like living in the Star Trek universe. Ting. Go to right now. Linux.ting.com. But don't get a phone. This is the worst time ever to get a Ting device. You shouldn't get a phone. Do not get anything from Ting right now.

Okay. Don't do it. You told me not to. Yeah, no. I'm telling you right here, on Linux Unplugged on November 24th, don't buy anything. It's the worst time ever to buy something from Ting. Because on Black Friday, they are having a crazy sale. And if you can wait just a couple of days, I would definitely go that route.

a crazy sale. And if you can wait just a couple of days, I would definitely go that route. Like 30% off some of their top devices, like free shipping starting about 8 a.m. Eastern time. The virtual doors open and you can go cray. They got great deals on smartphones. They have really like the best chance to get like the Ting Sims. If you have a couple of devices.

Maybe I'll pick up a couple of those. Nice. $5 Sims. Exactly. And of course, free shipping on everything. So you can, I mean, they really, $5. Maybe I'll pick up a couple of those. $5 SIMs. $5 SIMs. Exactly. And, of course, free shipping on everything. So you can, I mean, they really are $5 SIMs, which is awesome. So go to linux.ting.com. Then you can combine that with savings for our show. And you support our show when you go to linux.ting.com.

Why go to Ting? Well, they have a CDMA and GSM network that you get to choose from. So you get to be a boss. But also, it's pay for what you use mobile. No contracts, no determination fees. You only pay for what you use. It's a flat $6 for the line. So go to linux.ting.com to support this show. Check them out. Try out their savings calculator and go back on Black Friday. Go get yourself an unlocked device. Get updates from the Googs or whatever. I mean, if you get a Googs phone, you get the updates directly from the Googs

on a network that you only pay for what you use with no contract, and you get to choose between CDMA and GSM. That's ridiculous. Linux.ting.com. Go check them out and go get their Black Friday sale. I'm tempted to see. I'm hoping there's a couple of different Android devices that are on my wish list that go on sale. That would be really exciting. I'm still – where is my phone, Wes?

How cracked is my screen? I mean, that thing is just – it's all, Wes, look. That is ugly. It is all jacked up. It is all, look, you see those chips right there? Yes, I do. That is a jacked up phone, Wes. It kind of looks like, does it hurt to touch?

It actually hurts to put up to my ear. Yeah, it actually does. So I have, but I have been. I think it's the representative of this podcast and the whole network. Thank you. You just can't, you can't have a device like that. I have been holding fast and waiting for the Black Friday sale. Not only do I love putting

a whole bunch of turkey in my mouth, but I love good sales. So go to linux.ting.com. Go get a great deal. $25 off a Ting device, $25 in service credit, and you support this show. And you can read more about their Black Friday sale on their blog, linux.ting.com. And thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux on Plug Show.

You guys are awesome. I'm really glad you're doing such a big sale. That's really cool. All right, Wes. So I'm really happy to recommend to welcome a representative from the Vivaldi project, a new web browser, really that's designed for their friends, they say. They have a Linux version out. You've been checking it out for a little bit.

Yeah, we're running it here today. Yeah, I've run different builds of it all along. They have the brand new beta out, so I installed it last night on my rig just to give it a try. And Rory joins us from Vivaldi to tell us a little bit about their new release. Rory, welcome to Linux Unplugged, and congratulations on the new beta. Thanks very much. We appreciate it. So you're trying to get the word out about this desktop browser which is sort of entering maybe the most competitive browser market we've seen in the

last few years with chrome from google firefox is really doubling down on features microsoft's got their new microsoft yeah and microsoft yeah and so uh are you guys crazy or do you actually have something here now you'd think so but actually I think it's a perfect time to do it because all of those browsers, the ones that you mentioned, they're all going in a similar direction in terms of offering something very simple for what they believe is the common user. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to make something for everyone else, right? The common user, but also just people who want something extra and a bit different.

And so rather than remove features, which you probably saw the other day, Firefox are dropping their tab grouping solution, they're dropping their themes. We're adding those things. So this is a browser for everyone else, if you like. So are you basically saying it's a browser that appeals to power users,

but at the same time isn't too hard to use because i'm looking at it and honestly you know i have to say using it it doesn't feel like a complicated browser so how are you how are you delivering something that isn't reducing features but not being complicated because everybody else tells me that's completely impossible yeah i think there are a few things there. I mean, we've got a very good design team, so I think it looks nice and clean in its default layout. But on top of that, what really works is the technologies we're using. There's been a lot of talk of making a browser with HTML, JavaScript, CSS technologies, and we're one of the first to really do it. And I think that ramps up how fast we can add things. And we've been trying to look at those ways of doing things. Really? Yeah.

I've been, I mean, I guess I knew that, but, you know, actually in using the browser in practice, I have to say it, to me, feels like it has the fastest UI elements. It's very snappy. I mean, very few glitches. In your impression and my impression, Wes, like when you, like, say you bring out the bookmarks bar,

I mean, it is immediately, it immediately snaps out or the downloads immediately snap out. And it's animated but it's not exaggerated animation, right? Like it's like enough animation. Yeah. Yeah. Or what I really like is the way that the tabs will assume the color of the site you're on and then now the tab coloring is based on the site you're on but it all happens very nice, very quickly.

So I guess, what kind of black magic is making this feel so fast? And my primary experience has been on the Linux desktop, but we're now today, also we tried it on the Windows desktop. It also feels very fast. It feels like maybe it has the best scrolling out of any of the browsers on the desktop here. The UI elements are exceedingly snappy. What is being done there to make all of that happen?

I think it's just a question of where we are with the web today. And HTML, JavaScript in particular, has had massive performance increases. And you can just do those kind of things now. A few years ago, that would have been a pipe dream. But now we're really there. And so it's just we were one of the first to kind of try it, and it seems to work well. I think actually I'm really glad that you found it so snappy, but I think there's even further we could go with that because for our part, we know there are things we can improve, and we're definitely working on them. ask you about the underlying technology because it seems like the hard problem you're going to have with technical users that are listening to our show is they're going to look at this and go,

well, this is based on Chrome. This is a reskinning of Chromium. This is Blink or WebKit. And if I really just wanted to use this, I could just use Chrome. I don't need something that just lays down a UI on top of it and has a bunch of stuff just built in that I would rather use as extensions. But that is not actually what's happening here. What is sort of the go-to rebuttal for that? I think the thing with extensions, I mean, they're great. I used to work at Opera before, and I had 20-plus extensions. They're good, but they often get in the way. Or there's an upgrade and something's slightly out of sync, and this extension doesn't work anymore. So it's about giving a whole package and making it very simple. You know, you go into settings, you switch something on, you switch something off. You don't

have to go and find the extensions. You install the browser somewhere else. It's just tweaking a few settings and you're back to where you were. So I think it's just that simplicity, that ease of being exactly how you want it straight away without having to configure 20 extensions or worry about, will the next upgrade, will this break my extensions? It feels to me like it's a guarantee of some features. Like, well, these are important enough that they're in our core feature set. These

will always work and they will work in a really well, really good way. And like, you know, one of the good examples of that, and it's one that I wonder if people have really explored much, is the taking notes and things like that just built right in. But, you know, Rory, I wonder, it feels like today, the biggest thing that I miss when I switch from, say, Chrome to another browser is now today when I install Google Chrome, one of the first things that happens is Google says, hey, why don't you log into your Google account? And at the moment that I do that, it pulls down everything, all of my extensions, all

my themes, all my bookmarks. And not only that, but it logs me into all the Google properties, which is a major convenience. And so when I look at switching to a new browser, like I did last night when I switched to Vivaldi, I had to go through the process of importing bookmarks and all these things. And I wonder, do you feel like perhaps this is the biggest area of competition where the browser maker, like Firefox as well, now has this sync service? And essentially, it's this backend infrastructure I rely on for some of these browsers that's the most appealing aspect to them.

And how does Valdi sort of draw me away from that and give me something else that's maybe also competitive? Well, I think something you should bear in mind is we're not anti-sync at all. I mean, it's something we've put a lot of man hours into, but we're not quite there yet. But we fully intend to have sync. So those kind of things will appear in Vivaldi in the future. But, you know, we're coming up to our first version. We've just had one beta, so we're not quite there yet. But, yeah, sync is something we want as well.

And sync is something that we intend to deliver in the long run. So they'll essentially be sort of the same kind of implementation that I will be able to sync those things across. And one of the kind of nice power user features I noticed is right out of the box, you can check a box, you have a dark theme. Love that. Also something

else that's very cool is there is a quick commands, like you hit f2 and it's a keyboard based um command system for the browser uh yeah i really like that a lot what other kind of power user features are in vivalli that maybe i'm not familiar with uh you mentioned that you mentioned the panels on the side and and things that you saw that like notes but we also have uh panels for each of our different properties and we also have a thing where you can add a panel if you click on the plus you can add a url and it will add that as a page it actually sends a phone user agent so it usually gets a very nice phone so it has the right size and then it's a way of like adding an app or checking on something you can add a page which

has maybe nice rss feed or some news items Or maybe you want to stick Twitter in there, and then you can keep track on Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is you're interested in. You just add that in the side, and then you can carry on watching. I love that, actually. That's really cool. Yeah, that's a great idea. Picture in picture.

And you mentioned the quick commands. The quick commands, I don't know how much you play with them, but when you're typing, you can type addresses in there. It will search your address book. It will give you the option to search, but it also will narrow down your list of tabs, so it's a way to switch tabs. It also will allow you to type actual commands.

So when it's called quick commands, it really means that. So, for example, if I type new, you'll see in the list below the search engine, it says new window, new tab, new. And so they're commands that you can just hit enter on, arrow down and hit enter, and it does that action. Yeah, like a new private window, for example. Yeah. Very cool. It's very nice. As someone who's used a lot of like, you know, like VI type extensions for other browsers, having those kind of quick commands just from the keyboard is really nice. Yeah. Yeah, I think having it built in and making sure it works is what helps i mean we have other uh we have other things as well we have a keyboard navigation if

you go to a page and you hold shift you could use arrow keys to go around on links and so on and then you can hit enter to go on the links i like that we also have um tab stacking so again you can drag one tab over another they will combine they're a stack. You might keep maybe a stack. Say you're doing shopping or you search for various things on Google. That is really cool. Yeah, I'm seeing that. And when you're done, you just delete the whole stack. You can also, things that are in a stack, you can right-click on the stack,

and you can choose to tile it so you can see two sites side by side. Oh, I got to try that. All right. I got to try that. I got to try that. So I will open up a couple of tabs here, and I will drag a couple of episodes of Jupyter Broadcasting on top of stuff. Oh, it's kind of hard to drag it on top

of stuff, but I see. I'm bound and determined, Wes. I'm bound and determined to do it. I think once you just get over it a little bit, like when the back one fades, then you can do it. Yeah, okay, there you go. Okay, so then how do I stack them? What do I do now? Okay, there's a couple different ways you can do it. There you go. Okay, so then how do I stack them? What do I do now? Okay, there's a couple different ways you can do it.

There's down near the bottom of the UI. Oh, I see. Oh, my gosh. You've got title. Oh, my gosh, that is so cool. That is so cool. I'm glad you like it. Yeah, that is really kind of something, isn't it? I can see people, though, who keep track of a lot of different things, you know?

You're kind of trying to get an overview, and you have to monitor certain things. Social media feeds, RSS feeds. Yeah. Monitoring for uptimes and Nagios-type stuff. That could be super cool. Huh. Now, Producer Rottenkorps, you had

something you wanted to jump in here with the web panels and extensions and quick options and things like that. Go ahead. Yeah, one of the things I found out that I really liked about it was there was an extension I added to test the tab group concept that Firefox has

since they're getting rid of it. I was wondering if there was something you could do with Baldy or something. Yeah, I mean the tab stack... I actually found a cool extension, and you can take the extension controls and turn it into a web panel so that you always have that extension just quick shortcut. Okay. You can have just the options and the controls for a particular extension can also be it, so it doesn't have to be a website. So this is a pretty competitive market, Rory.

Do you suppose that the market for the Vivaldi browser is the user who wants something a little more capable than just the sort of watered-down mainstream browser, or is it somebody that is doing research? When you look at the core demo for the Vivaldi browser, who is it and why is the Linux desktop part of that story? I think it is for those types of users, but I don't think it's only them.

I mean, a lot of people used to joke back when we worked at Opera about Opera having no users, but I was there when we had 60 million users back for Opera 12 and so on. And there are a large number of people, more than you would think, who like to have, maybe even it's just one feature. They just appreciate one thing. They appreciate having notes and they don't use any other power user features or they just appreciate having web panels. So I think it's bigger than that. But yeah, sure. I mean, that's our core demographic right now. That's who we focused on.

The browser is, we call it a browser for our friends. And really, Jan von Teschner, who's the founder of both Opera and now Vivaldi, I mean, that is really what he meant by it. He's making it for the kind of people who are real fans of the old Opera, for people like him, for people who want those power user features first and foremost. We expect others will come as well. And then I wonder, Rory, if there's anything you could comment. Legitimately, if I'm going to switch to this as my main browser,

one of the first questions that comes to mind is what steps is Vivaldi taking to ensure my privacy when you're looking at upstream Chromium code and you're making a browser based off that? Is there things being removed that Google includes? Is there any kind of tracking? What's the privacy situation with the Vivaldi browser versus, say, the Upstream project? Yeah, if you open the settings, just Alt-P and go to privacy, you'll see that there's a bunch of stuff that you can tick off. So if you don't like the Google phishing and malware protections, for example, you switch that off. You switch off

diagnostics. Whatever you don't feel comfortable with, you can just switch that off. We also looked at some of the options. Like, for instance, some people are worried about the amount of data that, say, Google collects. And so when we came to do our, like, HTML5 notifications, when we came to look at things like tracking, you know, so when you're on Google Maps and you click to find your location, a lot of people use a Google service for that. We actually use one provided by the guys at Mozilla just to give something different. So we do look at those kind of issues. And if people raise them, if they say, you know what, I don't like the way you do this,

or I feel like this is some form of tracking, we're very open to adding options for those kind of things. Yon has like a catchphrase, which is basically, when in doubt, we'll add an option. And we really do do that, which is why a browser which hasn't even been released has so many options already. I have to appreciate that. As somebody who's been using the web browser for more than six months, it turns out it's really nice to actually have some configuration control over some of these things. So I really do appreciate that.

Roy, is there anything else you want to touch on before we wrap up on the Vivaldi stuff? This has been really cool. The only thing I'd like to say is that the Linux community have been great with us. And at the moment, we have two package types. We have RPMs and DEBs. We do really support the browser

in as many distros as possible though. The only reason we don't do more packaging types is simply because we think that the distros do it better. So I think it'll happen more when we get to final. Distros may consider putting us in one repository or another, which is appropriate. But we would like to work with package maintainers to get native packages because we think that's the best experience for users. Our packages are okay, but people who do packaging all the time do a much better job. Yeah, I was very thankful. It was really easy to install from the Arch user repository.

They have the beta in there, they have the Git build, and I just installed that real quick, and I was able to use it for the evening. Actually, the one bit of feedback I would have is I wasn't able to watch Netflix. I wanted to watch the new Jessica Jones series, and I couldn't watch it in the evening. You know, actually, the one bit of feedback I would have is I wasn't able to watch Netflix. I wanted to watch the new Jessica Jones series, and I couldn't watch it in the Vivaldi browser. Okay.

Yeah, we're looking at the Widevine support now. That's a proprietary component. Sure, I bet. Yeah. We do do a little trick right now because we have to test these things internally. If you got it from Arch, there's a package there in the recommends that they suggest,

which gives you H.264 support. Yes. If you install that, we'll also gives you H.264 support. Yes. You can install that. We'll also do another trick. If Chrome happens to be installed, like as a test while we're seeing how this works, we'll use their Widevine installation if it's there. So you should be able to use it if Chrome's installed. And, of course, we don't want to encourage you to install Chrome.

Right. I follow you. Yeah. All right. And, Rory, if you wouldn't mind, Heaven's Revenge has a couple of questions that he wants to ask. Go ahead, Heavens. And I would be curious to hear what you think. Because, you know, I've been using it.

I've been pretty impressed. So fire away. Hello. Well, I used to be a very massive Opera 15 or 12 fan back in the day. But this is basically a reborn version of the old opera a nice customizable power user version of opera what prevents another company from just buying vivaldi out and changing the new wicked vivaldi into the new opera that doesn't have all the power user options and just destroys the old user power user base that we used to

it was beautiful the old op and it's just saddening and i would hate for the same thing to happen to vivaldi now i think there's an interesting story there if you look at uh i don't know how much if you're an old fan you probably remember on tech now one of our two founders of opera and he's the guy who runs for baldy and it got to a situation where obviously there were more and more shareholders involved, and they're able to do things outside of maybe the way he would have liked it to go. I think what we have at Vivaldi is what Jon would have wanted Opera to be. Our company is wholly owned by him really at the moment. I mean, the employees have small

amounts of share, but I don't think this is intended to be floated anytime soon. have small amounts of share, but I don't think this is intended to be floated anytime soon. This is a reaction to the fact that opera isn't the way people like Jan wanted it to be. And so there's kind of a protection there, in a way. He's not going to sell this out anytime soon. And those of us

who have small shareholdings in it, neither are we. I don't think this is going to be floated anytime soon. So he's more of the embodiment of the old, loved opera that we all used to very much so. I mean, Jan is very much that kind of a guy. I mean, a lot of us joined purely because

it was him and we know his thoughts on the matter. I mean, I myself was working at opera. I had a job there. There was not long ago, I don't know how much you follow the news, a bunch of people were fired from the Oslo office. I was not, but I quit because I specifically wanted to work with Jan because't know how much you follow the news. A bunch of people were fired from the Oslo office. I was not, but I quit because I specifically wanted to work with John because I know how he feels about these things. So what – this is a horrible question to ask really because nobody likes to talk about this.

But also I kind of wonder. I totally grok why Google makes a browser. It makes sense. I even grok why Apple and Microsoft make their crappy browsers. I understand why Mozilla does it. What is the long-term sort of revenue model? What's the path to success for Vivaldi? Obviously, you're probably not going to charge for the browser itself.

And it may not be in stone yet. But is there sort of, as somebody who might become really passionate about this, I like to know you guys are going to be around here for, say, 5, 10, 15 years. What's going to make that happen? I mean, the revenue model is actually the same as we had at Opera. It's the same way that Firefox makes their money. I mean, there are a few things that you can do to make money from the users, which also benefit the users.

One of them is doing search partnerships, and that's where most of the browsers nowadays make most of their money. So like a fraction of a fraction of a penny for every X number of searches we get paid on. And so we add some search engines there, and we do deals with them. We do other small deals as well, but the idea that we always had at Opera, and I think we did quite well,

is to add things that are both benefits to the user and benefits to us. I mean, people want those search engines anyway, right? Sure, yeah. You try to walk that line. Yeah, exactly. Try to walk that line. And it was feasible to do at Opera. You need some millions of users to make it work, but I think that we can get to those millions of users and it should be self-sufficient. As it happens now, to show you the level of commitment that Jon has, I mean, he's bankrolling pretty much this until we get to that level. So when I said he's making

this for his friends, he's doing it, he's putting himself on the line and he's going to make it happen. So, you know, I think you can feel comfortable because it's different from the old operand that he has much more control here. And so, of course, we are on Linux Unplugged and one of the questions can probably be very nicely summed up by Heaven's Revenge.

I think, Heaven's Revenge, you've been asking what's sort of the open source story here. We know it's built on top of some open source technologies, but some of the things that the Vivaldi is offering are closed source. And, Heavens, I don't mean to cut off your question, but is that essentially what you're asking? Yes, considering they were touting how fast and fluid their user interface is. And it is. Because it is JavaScript and CSS based. And since the old, or at least Chromium project is what they're based upon, will they go down the old path of Opera, which is a closed project and a proprietary one, which prevents a default installation on a lot of live disks and a lot of distributions?

Yeah. That is what prevented Opera from being so widely used on a lot of distributions. Being legally allowed to, yeah, like so could a distribution legally redistribute the browser. And honestly there's a lot of people out there that are looking at this thinking, if I'm going to switch to something

I want to be able to trust it. It's a little more trustworthy if it's open source. Opera, or at least Firefox and Chromium just because they're open source. So Ubuntu won't even give Chrome, because of its close nature, Chromium or Firefox as their default options. Unfortunately, to that end, too, yeah.

So, what do we get? So, okay, so there are a couple things there. Firstly, all the stuff on Chromium, all of the C++ code and everything that makes up Chromium, the changes that we make there are essentially to run our UI, which is written in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and so on. And all of those changes we make, some of it we'd have to anyway, but not everything

because there are different licenses in Chromium and Blink and so on. We put up a source code. If you go to vivaldi.com slash source, you can download the source code package, and that is basically the Chromium version we're currently based off plus all of our changes. And any change that we made will either match the license. Say, for example, if we'd adjusted FFmpeg, we haven't, but it's LGPL,

it would inherit the LGPL license. In any other case, we give it under a BSD license. The details are explained in the readme and the license file and so on. So it's only our UI, which is proprietary. That is, however, auditable because you can just get that from the package, the regular package. I mean, it's just, as I said, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. It is minified, but you can go through it and see what it's doing. And people have tweaked it.

We have talked internally about possibilities for other licenses, and it's definitely a door that's open to us. I think that there are people here who want that in the team and that the whole team works together so we can make that happen, maybe. But I'm not going to promise it, but it's definitely something we look at. And it is a box that is already being called Pandora because there's a distribution we're going to talk about later in the show today that's already shipping

with Vivaldi as the default browser. And you know what? We're fine with that. We're absolutely fine with that. I mean, in Opera, back in the old days, the Opera 12 days, we had a situation where the license for... it was quite a proprietary company in some ways, but we had a license for Linux, which was different from the other desktop browsers. And it allowed redistribution

and repackaging to fit the distro. At some point, we tweaked the license unintentionally. And basically, if you read it it literally it didn't look like you could redistribute and a bunch of distros actually dropped us and it was sad and it was a lot of effort to get us back in arch i did a lot of the community work there i maintain the package myself for a while um i got another guy to take over he's actually the guy who maintains the vivaldi package now um he's uh one of our volunteers we have a small volunteer team who help us as well. So, you know, we would bend over to kind of help people get it in the distro. We would really help them.

If they want to get something in the distro, we'll see if we can tweak the license if needs be. We just, we try to protect certain things. I get made up for the wrong word, but we are willing to work with distros to allow them to distribute it, if it also suits them lovely well uh i have john is an amazing guy oh hey chris no well go ahead john was a great man

but i don't want him to bring his mistakes of opera into the vault hopefully he learned from the potential mistake of being the browser closed and not make the same mistake with Vivaldi. I think that Jan is open to things. As I said, I don't want to promise stuff because I don't, you know, it's still discussions we have internally, but I think he's very much open to things. He likes people messing with the browser. Back in the old days in opera, we had a situation where there was a guy there who was just a fan, and he used to binary patch opera to tweak certain things.

Later on, because he was interesting in the community, we hired him. That part is great. Yeah, there you go. So we're not anti-people messing with it. And as I mentioned briefly, we have this volunteer community, a group of people who just help us out for free, who are like in the inner circle. They end up on our

Slack channel and so on. One of them is the package maintainer, and those guys have been tweaking and adjusting small things here and there. Okay, so to sort of summarize for those listening, if you are creating a Linux distribution today, the Vivaldi project, on the most part,

is okay with you including it in your distribution by default. Is that a correct statement? Yes, yeah, yeah, that is. And if they want to tweak the packaging slightly because not everyone's RPM on dev or they hate our RPM on devs, we're cool with that as well. Sure. All right, so we'll have links to download it in the show notes. It's also in a lot of distributions repositories already.

And I have to say, it's pretty exciting because it's fast, it is very feature feature rich. And if you need to take notes, if you do research and things like that, it has some of that stuff built in, which is nice because I have yet to find an extension that doesn't drive me fricking crazy that does that kind of functionality. So it's nice to just have it included in the browser and also feel like the UI makes my computer feel like a super machine. Like everything snaps open super fast. I'm like, oh yeah, it's 2015. So if you want a browser that feels like that, go check out Vivaldi. We have a link in the show notes. Rory, thank you for joining Linux Unplugged and telling us a little

bit about it and congratulations on the new release. Yeah, thanks a lot. Alright, so check it out. We'll have a link in the show notes and Wes, what do you think after using it for a bit? Your closing thoughts, sir. I haven't heard from you. I'm really happy to hear that it's, you know, built on standard technologies, HTML, CSS. I have mixed feelings about the closed source nature, but it does perform really well.

You know, and it is built a lot on our open source tools that we use anyway, Chromium, et cetera. This is what I like about it. What I like about it is it adds some competition to this landscape. Yeah, I think it brings a lot of, you know, it's well designed. Yeah. I think it brings a lot of features. And even if I don't end up sticking with it, I think it should probably help the ecosystem. And I feel like it's a pragmatic competitor in the sense that it acknowledges some of

the innovations that Google have done are legitimate, and they really have brought some new blood into the web browser market. But at the same time, it's sort of pulling away some of the black magic and allowing you access to some of those privacy things like being able to opt out of Google's content filter is actually a big deal because that means you're sending them a hell of a lot less data. And it's nice to see someone using the Chromium base that that's not Google, but that has a little more heft, you know, like this will exist for a while. Right. Also, and this is kind of my closing thought on it. I what I really like about it is you have a group that is just legitimately focused on a great browser. Yes, exactly.

At the end of the day, Google is focused on collecting data, selling advertising, and really moving their whole web agenda forward because the web is very important to Google as a company. Chrome is just a piece. Chrome is an important piece to that. One of the things about the Mozilla Foundation and obviously with Vivaldi and other projects like them, I really, really respect the fact that what they actually are focused on for the most part is just creating a great browser. Now, the Mozilla Foundation, that's not their only focus, but it's a huge part of their focus. And at the end of the day, as a user, I really like where their intentions begin.

And I think that's really awesome, too. So I'm glad to have another thought leader in that space. So check it out. We'll have links in the show notes. And in the meantime, I encourage you to spend your holiday weekend not consuming turkey, but checking out DigitalOcean. Head over to DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O-unplugged. D-O-unplugged, one word lowercase.

You know, it's way better for the waistline. Exactly. Don't eat that stuffing. Nope. Don'tO unplugged. One word lowercase. You know, it's way better for the waistline. Exactly. Don't eat that stuffing. Nope. Don't eat that crap cranberry from the can. Ignore your family. You should play around on digital ocean. Which is way better for your psychology.

Let's be honest. You know what, guys? Here's the thing. I am 33 going on 34. And let me tell you something. It doesn't get any better. It doesn't. The family is, it is. Let me tell you something. The doesn't get any better. It doesn't. The family is, it is, let me tell you something.

The family, you could just avoid that. I can tell you after 33 years, just avoid them. This is my personal recommendation. Stay home and play with DigitalOcean. And if you're not going to do that, like I tell you to, that's Chris's personal recommendation. Don't get mad at him, folks. Yeah. Hey, I warned you.

Just carve, if you'll excuse the pun, carve a little time aside to go play with DigitalOcean and use the promo code DL1PLUG. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to get your own Linux rig up on their super awesome SSD-based cloud with 40 gigabyte e-connectors. All run on KVM with Linux as the infrastructure because Linux is a boss. Right? So they got KVM, which is a super great virtualizer. It's awesome. It is. Did you know that we have a KVM rig here in the studio?

I did not know that. So before DigitalOcean was like a thing in Chris's world, they existed, but it wasn't in my world yet. That's right. I was out building KVM machines off of old rigs that are just monsters with ridiculous water cooling. I mean, yeah, it is a system, Wes, and you'd be pretty – I should show it to you before you leave.

You should, yes. And anyways, this was how I was going to like grow the Jupyter Broadcasting infrastructure. Thinking about scale here. Yeah, yeah. I was going to spin up machines on this rig in my garage. It's just so ridiculous. Now that I think about it, now because for $5 a month, I can get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer, right?

That's tier one bandwidth. That's the beginning. What tier do you have, Chris, here at home? Don't even. So for those of you, hopefully you don't even know, but we've actually had to stop recording and re-record parts of the show because we've had connectivity issues here at the studio, which as Wes can attest, made Chris a little grumpy. Yes, just a little bit.

I got a little grumpy because I started cussing. I started talking about how much I spend. And, you know, the thing is, $5 a month, that's less than a Big Mac. It's nothing. It is less than I spend on beverages for this show by quite a bit. You go to DigitalOcean, use the promo code D1PLUG, you get $10 credit. They've got data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, and a brand new one in Toronto.

And a super nice, kind of brand new, not as new as Toronto, but still, like, it still smells like it has that new data center smell in Germany. Oh. But it's that interface. Man, is it that interface. They have a great interface that really makes all of the kind of virtual

machine management really straightforward. Deploying applications, destroying your machines. You wanted to go deploy a FreeBSD rig, a CoreOS rig, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora 23. Yeah, they have Fedora 23. You can go deploy them right now. Use the promo code DUNPLUGGED. You get that credit. You get that credit.

You put it up in that little spot they got there. No credit required. They got a little credit spot there, Wes. They got a put it up in that little spot they got there. No credit required. They got a little credit spot there, Wes. They got a little credit spot. You know? That's what they call it. And, you know, the other thing I really like about DigitalOcean is, well, they got some really, really good tutorials. They have a brand new one up.

I recommend you go check out how to create a high availability setup with heartbeat and floating IPs on Ubuntu 14.04. This is a really, really nice write-up with some super great visuals, the basic understandings because what DigitalOcean has done is they've hired professional content editors to actually edit this stuff. It is good. It is good and it's all just included with DigitalOcean. Use the promo code DLNPLUG, get a $10 credit, go deploy an own cloud server, Minecraft server, SyncThing server.

My gosh, you guys, there's so many things you can do with it. Wes, do you have anything you want to... It's just, I mean, just the kind of level of stuff. You don't have to get, you know, you don't have to buy a really nice edge firewall that you have put on your network. You know, you can just get floating IPs. You can have these kinds of enterprise-style setups.

I know. But for your own peace of mind. Now, Wes, is there a way I could take my MB Fedora 23 droplet and combine floating IPs so that way I could have high availability MB. Can you think of... I'm just spitballing here, Wes. I'm spitballing with you.

I don't know if that's possible, but it's open source, so we can make it happen. Screw you, Plex. Go over to DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code D1PLUG, get a $10 credit, and try DigitalOcean. And say, sorry family, I got more important things this holiday season. That is

the holiday spirit here at Jupyter Broadcasting. Use the promo code D-O-N-Plugged and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Alright, so on this week's episode of the Linux Action Show, we talked about Solus OS, a really slick, built from scratch

operating system distribution, if you will, of Linux. GNU slash Linux, by the distribution, if you will, of Linux. GNU slash Linux, by the way. Don't get that S wrong. That is embarrassing. GNU slash Linux distribution. I've never installed GNU slash Linux. Yeah, there you go.

And we talked about it. We reviewed it. It has a really nice desktop called Budgie. Budgie, based off of a little bit of GNOME. And I could tell you all, I could go on and on about it all, but instead, Ike, who is the guy behind the distribution, who has joined us before on the show, has come back on Linux Unplugged to not only do a little bit of follow-up on the review, but, you know, correct pronunciations, tell me anything I've missed, and maybe, hopefully, tease the big release. Ike, welcome back to Linux Unplugged.

Thank you very much. So, what was the biggest thing I got wrong in my review, or Noah's review, our review? Let's blame Noah. Noah's review. Yeah, what was the biggest thing Noah got wrong on this week's episode of the Linux Action Show while we were talking about Solus? To be honest, it was mainly just the stuff about Solus. Yeah, sure, yeah, that would make sense. That would kind of be the range. Yeah, so anything pertaining to the actual review was probably wrong. So where do you want to start? Is there anything that really jumped out at you that was offensive?

No, not offensive as such. I think there was probably a misunderstanding about what the whole thing's about uh so we won't be doing a 1.0 until a date that i haven't got um because of murphy's law we well wait a minute now i saw i saw i saw specific gif animations that implied it may be coming to a stocking stuffer near me this is your source yeah really well GIFs? Really? Well, but they are GIFs on the Solus Projects website. Oh, okay. You didn't say that. Yeah. There you go.

Yeah. Busted. Yeah. So there's no specific date yet, just sometime before Santa turns up, which is not hard. You know, he's fat, so we should make it. Yeah, he's slow. Yeah. So sometime before Christmas.

But I mean, there is a lot to be done yet, to be honest with you. Budgie at the moment is going for a complete and utter rewrite we put GNOME 3.18 for recently which I noticed in the the words, I'm not good at them when you guys were showing it up on the screen last time it was showing GNOME 3.16

which kind of gave me an idea that that system was badly out of date we've upgraded kernel since then we've done a lot of security updates since then but in itself it's not such a bad thing that it is out of date because i may be completely and utterly broke budgie so the 3.18 update and i mean budgie's nearly two years old yeah so when i started out it was known 3.10 or something like that we started out with the code base.

And the stuff that we put in there to actually keep it all working, that's completely broken now. GTK and Motter are on less drugs than they used to be. So all the workarounds that we used to have in place now break it. So we've had to do a complete rewrite of the Budgie desktop. But it now looks nothing like the old Budgie if you want it to if that makes sense it sounds like you're heading towards a cleaner version though yeah get rid of the old hacks basically take out the trash to be honest with you um there's a lot of it's built up after the last two years so i mean last two years i

mean it's still two years of engineering experience put on top of that. So you're going to find a lot of stuff that makes you think, really, was that me? I'm ashamed. As in many projects. Yeah, that does happen. But, okay, so when we were looking at it, I guess it could have been out of date. I suppose that is possible. Although I think what it was is I was showing – so every now and then I kind of waffle on this issue almost every other review is a lot of times I get slammed for installing updates and customizing the distro. Actually, I'd be curious to hear your opinion.

And then other times I get slammed for not changing the distribution. So I kind of – when it's like a boutique distro that is trying to deliver an experience, I try to go all defaults. And when it is something that I feel like is your day-to-day workhorse, like an LTS or a Fedora release, I try to customize. And I'm curious, Aiki, so in your experience, if I was going to do a review of your distribution, say, down the road, would you prefer that I sort of live in it for a week and customize it? Or would you like me to go on air and tell people, you know, this is the experience right out of the box? Well, it's not up for me to tell you what to do with, you know, this is the experience right out of the box? It's not up for me to tell you what to do with your computer. We try and go over the same defaults by default.

You know, you want things to look nice by default, but by no means are we trying to stop people from customizing things. I know there are certain design-led projects out there which would rather you didn't ever post a screenshot without a wallpaper within a certain hue, shade, and battery level. But we're not along those lines. We're not really into the whole hipster culture. This is exactly how things should be. If you want to put a picture of a dead pigeon or a dead budgie on there, for all matter, you can do it.

Yeah. Really not bothered. Okay, good to know. Noted. So, all right. So i know we're going to retread some ground but i you know just in case people haven't heard old episodes uh i've got to ask this question um are you completely crazy for creating your own desktop and why don't you just tweak the gnome 3 desktop because i don't like gnome shell so i i like certain things about it

and when i first started out with budgie, I thought, well, logical step. Let's try and, you know, shove a few things in here, get rid of the overview. Let's try and put something down the bottom that looks like a panel. But at the end of the day, as nice as GNOME Shell is, it is monstrously heavy. Yes. So the computer I'm running on now is actually an Intel NUC, and it has 16 gigs of RAM. Now, that's more than most people have for any day-to-day stuff, and I probably shouldn't complain, you know, when I have enough RAM to do everything I want to do. However, on cold boot with Budgie, I'm using just under 200 megs of RAM, and that's obviously with Intel graphics. If it was NVIDIA graphics, you

know yourself, it's going to be slightly higher. They do tend to leak. But with Gnome Shell, I'm using something like 760 megs of RAM just to start. Another problem with Gnome Shell that I found myself, because everything is implemented as clutter, so they have their own toolkit, which is a fork of MX. Basically, everything that's on the screen is a frame buffer object, which is basically how clutter works. Now, when it comes to Budgie, the only framebuffer objects basically are the windows themselves.

And that's the things that we animate around and we push them around. When it comes to Gnome Shell, every last thing, whether it's the little popover menus or the panel at the top or your wallpaper, every single one of those is a framebuffer object, which is using more of your GPU, which obviously means more GPU wakeups. If you're using software rendering, that means a lot more CPU wake-ups. That means you're actually using more power than you could be. And it also means that if you have shared video memory,

you have less of that to go around for the applications or the games that you're using. All right. I mean, that's all fair. But essentially, at the end of the day, though, you are also sort of banking on some of the underlying technologies they're iterating on i mean obviously for example gtk 3.18 was important enough for you that it's you're willing to sort of bump some things around and rework on it so there's some underlying technologies there that you must seem must seem sound to you right yeah i mean that's the whole idea so the the gnome technology the gnome stack i absolutely love it and i have my problems and i do rant and bitch, but we all do.

It's stuff that we work with on a daily basis. The only thing I don't like is the GNOME shell itself. That's personally not for me. That's not how I want my desktop. That's very much, here's the experience you're getting. This is how we see it should be. But all the rest of the technology, like LibMotor, GLib, Valor, we use all those stuff and we use them quite proudly.

I mean, me, myself, I'm a member of the Gnome Foundation anyway and I'm quite happy to use Gnome technology and to see other people using it and improving, contribute to it myself. So I try to, when I'm talking to people, I try to get them to differentiate between Gnome and Gnome Shell because one is built on the other. It's exactly the same with Budgie. Budgie is built on Gnome, but Budgie couldn't differentiate between Gnome and Gnome Shell because one is built on the other. It's exactly the same with Budgie.

Budgie is built on Gnome, but Budgie couldn't exist without Gnome. It's very, very much dependent on it. And we're happy to integrate with all that because we don't have to go right in our own control centers or our own Satan's demons and all that crap. So to me, what it seems like the elephant in the room for distribution like this is sort of the big meta problem. And that is the community, the documentation, the packages, the how-tos, all of the tribal knowledge. And so it seems like you run the risk of basically the desktop becoming a feature of something else that's based on a more mainstream desktop. Or, I mean, a more mainstream distribution of Linux. So, when I'm looking at Solo OS, what do you feel is the compelling thing about the underlying operating system that is powering this pretty cool desktop

that would actually make me choose Solo OS itself over, say, Budgie on something that's derived from Arch? What is your thoughts there? yourself over say budgie on something that's derived from arch what is your thoughts there um well straight off the bat and i know everyone's gonna flame me for this and say how dare you say this this can't be true um solace boots fast at nudge um i know it's a controversial statement and i'm probably going to be shot in my sleep for it but it does um so before i did a reinstall of my nook arch at um i'm saying arch now solace boots in just over a second for me um the the highest i got it is 1.189 seconds i didn't bother optimizing anymore it did seem extremely fast to me as well yeah uh the point is solace is not a generic distribution while you can take a generic distribution and try and shoehorn it to your

needs uh the fact is that thing can run on everything from a toaster to a satellite whereas solace can you can't put it on a raspberry pi you can't put it on a server you're not putting on embedded hardware you don't have the potential to do any of that so there isn't any situation where we have to have 100 different package conflicts and we have to wonder worry about all these different groups and all these different architectures solace is built specifically for an x86-64 computer and only for the desktop. So there's only a desktop kernel, and it's a single kernel that we maintain. It's our configuration for a 64-bit desktop.

Focus. Yeah, and that's up and down the entire stack. Now, don't get me wrong. People say to me, well, why don't you take Debian, you know, strip it down, just do a kernel config there. It's still the same situation because you still have all those packages, right? I can't exactly go through rebuilding the whole distribution. Now, I've made that mistake before, and that was SolaceOS.

We all know what happened. I ended up closing down SolaceOS because in the early days when that was happening, at the end of 1.3 when we closed doors, I had over 7,000 packages that was maintained outside of Debian within Solus because the amount of problems I had trying to implement what I wanted to do. So it was actually easier for me to be a from-scratch distribution. So the main thing was it's being focused entirely on the desktop.

But unlike some of the projects that come out and say, yes, we are desktop-orientated, we are looking at mainstream desktop usage. That means can I use this for my work at the office? And for me, I need to do it for my job. So I'm a software engineer. I need to be able to do that. But at the end of the day, I still need to be able to go on and watch YouTube. I still need Netflix.

So, Ikey, is it your impression really that my question is maybe out of date and really the end user doesn't give a shit what the underlying distro is? And as long as it watches YouTube and reads Facebook and does Gmail and Google Docs and Office 365 and Chrome or Vivaldi, is it in your impression that that would be what all really matters? And if you create the own – I guess what I'm trying to ask you is do you you feel like when i look at your distribution i think to myself well geez there's all these packages not available but it sounds like to you that's not that's not even that's not even a concern at all no um i understand a lot of people are going to say it's like well you're building this from scratch you've got to you got to make all these packages and that's going to be very very difficult um so we've tackled quite a few problems with the whole packaging situation in Solus. It got to a point, it was probably about six months back, we say, right, all

this manual packaging is a complete and utter pain in the backside. So the simple answer was automate the shit out of it. So I'll give you a link there now on IRC so you can see it yourself. Okay. Because here's where I'm going with this is – I mean I guess, Ike, what I'm trying to get to is this may be coming down to a philosophical difference. A fundamental different expectation from who you're creating this distribution for and maybe who would normally consider themselves an advanced Linux user. And the reason why I bring this up is I want to introduce you, and of course I'm sure you're aware of it, to VELTOS, which is using your desktop environment but built on top of… Arch Linux. Arch Linux. Arch Linux. And it promises you everything Arch has with the rolling base, the AUR, but yet this new nice fantastic... The package manager that many people already know.

But with this nice new desktop. Oh, and of course, the Vivaldi browser as default. What are your thoughts about VELTOS? And this seems like a natural kind of open source thing to happen when you have a pretty compelling desktop, but a base that maybe is not appealing to the more advanced user. Your thoughts, sir? Sure. I mean, I say this to everyone. People

say to me, why didn't you use Pac-Man for Arch? And to sum it up in a statement, I don't care about package managers. The fact that people still care about them in this day and age is nothing short of disturbing for me when we're saying that Linux has no mainstream adoption yeah it must have the most advanced package manager of rollbacks it must have user repositories it must have exe compression

nobody should actually be caring about that in this day and age they want Linux to actually get somewhere on the desktop so in the case of I mean that's built on Arch Linux. That's great. I'm actually concentrating on building something that focuses on working from the ground up so the user never has to mess about with anything. At the same time, I don't want to make something that's completely condescending to the point that it's holding your hand the whole way through. So you were talking about philosophy.

Some part of it is philosophy, the fact that it will get out of your way. And the other part is that no distribution actually exists that is optimized for a desktop experience. Everything is shoehorned because you take a generic distribution and you try and apply it to the task at hand, which we've already shown doesn't work. Now, as for Veldt OS, yes, they're using Budgie Desktop at the moment.

They've claimed that they're starting their own new desktop. There was a bit of attention about this on Softpedia, as I'm sure you saw. desktop at the moment um they've claimed that they're starting their own new desktop there was a bit of attention on the about this on softpedia as i'm sure you saw and initially said that they was forking budgie desktop they later retracted the statement to say that they wasn't forking budgie desktop now i went along and looked inside their package repos i looked on github they renamed the package to vos budgie Desktop and made not a change to it. The mock-ups they've put up in their community, I mean, I'm not going to insult their mock-ups.

They're not quite my thing, right? They're not quite for me. I follow your lead. They've never at any stage ever approached us about getting changes made in Budgie. So they themselves are showing their own project immaturity by attempting to fork and then you know then going back and saying oh we're not forking now because they was made to look stupid to be quite honest um everyone was saying why are

you forking it well we're not forking it that's okay but had they just approached us upstream and said you know these are the changes we're going to put in, even the Budgie desktop in its current iteration supports applets and it can be built out of a tree. It has an API. You can develop your own plugins. You can develop your own applets. There's absolutely no need for a fork at all. So if it was another project, I would say, okay, maybe you've got something going. going but i don't quite see you you feel pretty soundly that uh the entire in order for the desktop experience that you're trying to create the entire thing needs to be a complete package

it's not abstractable you can't really remove the desktop from the underlying os because the underlying os is fundamentally built to sort of support what the desktop is trying to deliver am i following your basic logic? Well, I mean, if you really want to go and remove it, you can. That's not a problem. I mean, we've got normal shell and repos. We've got GDM, so you can switch to desktop if that's up your street. But, I mean, out of the box, nobody has to worry about a package manager.

That's kind of the idea we're getting. As an operating system, you run daily. It looks after itself. And this has kind of been my problem with distros and operating systems over the years we have all these workarounds that we put into place and we have these config files that we go in we have these packages we go adding because we know that they add the functionality we need or we have these these set fixes that we know always work yet the distribution of the operating themselves never does anything about it for you. Now, my argument should be it's an operating system, so it should operate. It should actually do what it knows how to do.

And I don't see any distribution like that. And that's my argument against any current desktop distribution. They don't look after themselves. You have to maintain the distribution. It doesn't maintain itself. What is sort of the – know, let's just say you managed to beat Santa and as an end user, something I might want

to install on my machine arrives. After it's installed for a bit, what does the update picture look like? A few months down the road, a year down the road, what can I expect as sort of a long-term maintenance of my Solus rig?

So in terms of support, what we decided to do, we figured it would be kind of an effort to have one release and then an LTS release. And to be honest, I'm going to lose count, and I'm not the best fellow with numbers. So what we decided to do is we do a release, we do that release each year, and then each release gets a two-year support, because ones and twos are very easy for me to add up so every two years you know your distribution as it was loses support but you've already had two releases since then do you know so if i release this sometime in december

next december there would be the new release which would be 2.0 but the one you're already using would already be supported for that next year as well, or you can upgrade. Very nice. That makes sense. Some options, yeah. Wes, any other follow-up questions before we wrap up here? What have you thought after using it for a bit? You looked at VELT OS 2.

Was there something that struck you between the differences? VELT did feel a little more bolted together. You know, it's also very new, where Solus has clearly had a lot of thought. One of the things Velg gets is sort of inheriting sort of all of that work there. But at the same time, I do, and I mentioned this in the

review on Linux Action Show, and if you guys haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, I wouldn't want to over-promote, but you might want to go check it out. You just might want to go check it out before you finish listening. You definitely should. And in there, one of the things is I really like the idea of something, and I don't know if I really touched on it very well, but what I really like is something that's just, I'm focused on the desktop.

I'm not worried about ARM and mobile and convergence. I'm not worried about the server and cloud. I'm not worried about any of that. I am worried about kick-ass desktops and kick-ass laptops. And there is something about starting at the very beginning with that intent and moving your project forward over a series of years with that intent. But not getting so, so, so, so far lost into it. No offense to the elementary OS folks because they still do great work. because they still do great work, but not getting so lost into it that it takes literally years for things to happen,

which is just not happening for any power Linux user. So what Solo S seems to be trying to strike the balance of is here's something that has a pretty fast development pace. It really is truly targeted for your high-end workstation an engineering station, a development station a sysadmin station, whatever you know, a great porn machine whatever you want to do, it's targeted well for that and you know what? Yeah, there's things called the Raspberry Pi yeah, there's things called the Nexus 4 that you can install images on, don't care about that

there is something about that intention that appeals to me quite a bit, what do you think? Well, I think we see that space, like just the number of developers who end up using MacBooks, they want that desktop environment that gets out of their way. They don't have to worry about package management. You're right. I haven't even made that

connection, but that is... If Solace can deliver on some of those things. At first, I was thinking, well, it's another package manager to learn. A lot of people like to use Ubuntu on the desktop because they use Ubuntu on the server, but there's lots of people already who use the Mac, use a different environment, or Windows. So if this can be the kind of desktop where you install it, you don't have to worry about

it. You've got your shell. You've got YouTube that works. And it's very pretty and usable. I could see that. There's something bold about a Linux distribution that's saying, yeah, we're for power users, but don't think about the package manager. There's something kind of bold about that. I don't know how that's going to shape out.

I mean, I think we'll see when 1.0 is out. But yeah, you can see how maybe it's time we start talking and going that direction. All right, Ike. Yeah, go ahead. Feel free to jump in and tell us how we're wrong. Well, so I mean, that is definitely one of the things that I really don't care about the package manager. Now, another thing to remember is Solace is about having a stable core and up-to-date applications. Which is a thing of mine. I love that.

Yep. So, I mean, we're using the example here of Arch, right? Arch Linux is a roll-in release. So, to give you an example which many Arch users have gone through themselves, you have to go into the blog because these binaries or these libraries are gone, so you have to now move these files across, which is unavoidable and it cannot be solved by their package management. So the package manager here doesn't

mean nothing. To put a nice label on a package, it's a tarball with a bit of information. It's just a glorified tarball. That's all a package is, right? So as much as somebody might derive from arch linux and they might have our desktop on it and it might make it very very very pretty at the end of the day they're going to run into these update problems because it is a roll and release something

like a lib png update which bricks the entire system now i can imagine there's a few arch linux users around who can remember that or the rename of the JPEG libraries, any one of those incidents. So rolling release already has a major disadvantage in a desktop which is aimed at not just Linux users, at people who just want to use their computer, right? Right, right. They're not going to be able to fix that. So, yeah, that's kind of our take on it. In terms of adding packages, we're one of the easiest,

if not the easiest, distribution going to package for. The average package meter information file that we have is probably about 30 lines, and most of that's auto-generated from a tarball. So, adding a package probably takes a couple of minutes in our

distribution. So, if somebody wants something, we'll add it. The thing is, we're not going to go around looking for the packages to add because at the end of the day, I don't know what people use. I don't really feel like you need to defend it. It almost seems like in a year or two, it's going to be obvious and you just might be a little bit ahead of the curve because

you have the XGG app stuff on the GNOME side and also the KD guy's been talking about containerized applications that are easily portable between distributions. You now have folks like Valve that are shipping Steam with the Steam runtime environment where you install Steam on Fedora and OpenSUSE and on Arch. And what are you actually getting? You're getting an Ubuntu runtime inside your Steam folder.

And they're making this possible now by saying target these libraries. We guarantee that if they have Steam installed, they'll have these libraries because we're putting them on the system. And I think when you have commercial vendors that are coming up with solutions like that, you have the open source guys that are looking at things like XDG app and containerized applications. It is being solved by multiple different sources and forces, and you don't have to really worry about that problem maybe in a year or so right and that's one of the things i've been trying to get across a while for people so i mean one of the things we have to accept as a project i mean we're coming up for a 1.0 right

most people are like who the hell is solace never heard of you don't really care so we have to acknowledge the fact that we will have a 1.0 come out. This is the distribution solace coming out and saying, hello, we exist now, you should probably get interested. Which is something you have to accept. I mean, you've got to put your foot in the door somehow. But when it comes to 2.0, I mean, one of the things we're working towards is making solace stateless. It's one of the things I've actually adopted from work,

which basically means there are no configuration files by default. There are no overrides. Everything is the same default. And it would quite literally mean your ETC tree being empty, which is something worth thinking about there, right? Another thing I want to do when we come up to Solus 2.0, which I can't do at the moment because we have to get the distro out there. We have to get people to know it.

They have to say, this is Solus. Look what we do. We're very pretty, aren't we, right? You have to do all to know it. They have to say, this is Solus. Look what we do. We're very pretty, aren't we, right? You have to do all that side of things. But for 2.0, I mean, you're going to be seeing a complete separation between the operating system and everything that you have. Because as far as I'm – the best example I can give, like the 3.18 update that I put in for GNOME.

Now, that was to put the new user land applications in because people want the new pretty knowledge. They love all that shiny stuff. Thank you, by the way. Oh, no, it's absolutely fine. Google Drive as well. Why not? But people want all that stuff, which is absolutely fine.

But at what cost? That should not brick the operating system. Now, in our case, Budgie would be considered part of the operating system. That's the stack and the shell that everybody gets, right? Now, that should not be broken. So when we go towards 2.0, you're going to see a separation between that. Applications will be out in the user's control, but you

won't be able to brick the operating system. So an update to an app won't brick the OS, and vice versa, the OS itself wouldn't brick the apps, which I think is something that really needs to start happening for something that wants to be mainstream and a desktop. Well, that's very ambitious, which I think is something that really needs to start happening for something that wants to be mainstream and a desktop.

Well, that's very ambitious. And I would love it if you would check back in with us from time to time and give us an update. I've also been following the blogs, like the weekly, like number 11 just got posted, I believe, which has kind of been giving some good insight. Regular updates, yeah. Exactly. So, Ikey, thank you very much for coming on and sharing with us.

And I'm going to keep checking it out. I now have it installed. And I don't know, maybe one day. Yeah, JB Community, do the same. We'll go out and try to break it. Could be the distro of choice one day. Check back in. Do make sure and break it.

And while you're at it, make sure you keep an eye out for Budgie Next which is the the replacement for budgie yeah which is very very very sexy by the way yeah as a notification center as well that is i mean that that is honestly looking like it's worth its its own episode to discuss because uh it the video that was posted was looked very nice yeah yeah it's definitely and we have links to all that in the show notes all right ikea you are welcome to stick around thank you for coming on the show today and telling us about that. Before we move on to the last topic, which I hope, I hope doesn't get me fired from the show. Hopefully the boss doesn't fire me. But before we get to that, I want to talk about our friends over at Linux Academy.

Now, Linux Academy is a platform built around educating you around all of the technologies that make Linux a really awesome platform. Of course, Linux itself is good, and there's tons of stuff you could learn just there. So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to get the Linux Unplugged discount. Linux Academy is not like, well, I don't even want to point you in the wrong direction, but let's just say, I don't know if you're familiar with this, Wes, but there are a lot of resources online for learning. Yes, there are. Yeah.

And a lot of them have what you might call features that they just kind of throw on there. It's more like a kitchen sink kind of thing. There you go, Wes. That's not the Linux Academy. It was created by people that are actually genuinely enthusiastic about Linux and open source. And then they have the idea, well, why don't we just pair up with our friends that are

educators and get some professors in here? And then, you know, we have these folks that we know that are developers. They could create this incredible platform platform and they've done it. And for me, one of the key features about Linux Academy is you log in and you can look at all of the courseware and all of these things that are sort of mythological technologies or, you know, skill sets that you've only dreamed of before are now all of a sudden quantified in hours and your commitment. And that is really a powerful situation. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

That's what I'm talking about. They've got almost 2,000 self-paced courses with instructor help available. Seven plus Linux distributions you get to choose from. The courseware automatically adjusts. And so do the virtual servers. I really like that aspect because they realize it's not just a Red Hat world or a Debian world. Or an Ubuntu world. Thank you, sir.

Yep. There's seven plus testers you get to choose from. They have scenario-based labs, which are really kick-ass. You get to go in there and do something that's like something you would do actually at work, which, what a concept, right? But they really have thought this out. Also, they recognize you're probably going to want to work on this stuff through like an SSH connection from your desktop. So you can just bring up your favorite terminal application.

You can SSH into a DNS name. You get access to these things. If you're doing like AWS training, they'll spin up the AWS rigs for you. It's really cool. And also, one of the things that I respect as somebody who gets super busy with three kids and my own business is they have an availability planner. You can log into the dashboard and tell Linux Academy, you know, basically, I'm going to follow the Jupyter Broadcasting calendar and make sure I watch every live show,

and every moment where Jupyter Broadcasting isn't live make me available. Or, you know, I've got a lot of work and Thanksgiving this week, so I'm not available on Thursday. I'm going to take Friday off. But you know what? I might dedicate four hours on Saturday

and an hour on Sunday evening after everybody goes to bed. You go into Linux Academy, just kind of give it your availability, and it will automatically generate courseware that matches that with quiz reminders and all of that kind of stuff. It is really cool. Also, they've done a whole new update on their CDN, so things are faster than ever. They're downloadable, comprehensive study guides, the audio stuff, and the video distributions you can watch. the audio stuff and the video distributions you can watch. I've heard from several people now that listen to the Linux Academy stuff in the shower.

Wow. Specifically. I mean, you might as well learn something while you're getting clean. I'm not making this up. Like at meetups, even when I was at Denver, he's like, I'm another guy that listens in the shower to Linux Academy. Like add me to the list. I don't know.

Maybe, you know what? Maybe. Have you ever heard of shower thoughts? Yes, I have. Yeah. What if, what if it's not just, like, really great ideas when you're in the shower? What if it's like your brain is in overdrive and you can crazy learn? What if that's what it is? Because I'm not kidding you.

A lot of people have told me they listen to Linux Academy in the shower, and I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. And now I'm realizing Shower Thoughts plus training. Oh my gosh, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go learn all of the fundamental technologies that make Linux kick ass. And when you don't have a lot of time, they also have dim nuggets. These are just like, you know, deep dives into a specific area. Like here's one on managing iSCSI, which you probably are a total expert on and don't need any help, I'm sure. But maybe if you wanted to be set up an HTTP secure proxy over SSH or do some SSH tunneling. And you do want to.

I mean, if you don't know how now, just go learn it right now. Again, these are nuggets. And look at this list. This list is cray. Everything from reverse tunnels to setting up Active Directory under Linux. I'm telling you, they've got it all. So go check them out at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

And I hope you guys go eat a whole bunch of turkey. I know some of you guys will be at least. Go put some turkey in your face. So Wes, kind of a big moment happened this week. I don't know if you noticed, you might have missed it, but GNOME turned 20 years old this week. 20 years old. That is impressive. Yeah, it is, man. It's been with us for a long time now. And it's brought many interesting fundamental technologies that we now use on Linux desktop today. So it's kind of a big

deal. And there's a lot still coming to GN him in 20 years. Also, another milestone this week, LibreOffice hit 1,000 contributors going from September 2010 to October 2015. 1,000 developers. And they have some interesting stats too. They pretty much added 16 new hackers a month since September 2010 as a result of a global mentoring effort by some of the project founders. And after five years and a thousand new developers, they are sitting in a pretty good position now. And they have wide distribution. They're really well known. Default install on many distributions. fault install on many distributions. And yet, both LibreOffice and the GIMP have really failed to unseat the industry professional products like, you know, Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office.

20 years of the GIMP. Is it time to just admit that sometimes open source will never be a completely competitive replacement? Wes? Well, I think there's something to that. I think you can also frame it in a couple different ways. And I think one way to look at it is that, yes, I mean, there are some reasons that we really should all talk about, you know, that maybe this is the case. But I think the other way to look at it is that maybe it's not as competitive. Maybe it doesn't meet the high-end business needs.

You know, maybe professionals aren't using it for their day-to-day workflows. But we do have a very successful, you know, free application that is kind of the right of any human to use, right? Like as part of a free society, I think we need, right. I think we need these essential tools.

You know, you get a free operating system. You can get this free image editor. And, you know, if you have a free society, I think we need these essential tools. You get a free operating system. You can get this free image editor. And if you have a business case, then you have to sell out for something more. Let's say after 20 years, GIMP manages to get to 80% of what Photoshop can do. Well, then essentially what you're saying is you flip that around, and that means that 80% of humanity now has access to a fairly competent photo editor. Yeah, right? I mean it doesn't matter what you make, how much resources you have.

If you have access to a computer, you can do these things. You can edit your photos. You can touch things up. I think that's a success. I do agree that we need more pressure to reach the higher-end features, and I think that we could unseat some of that market.

It's obviously not happening. Apparently I said no at some point instead of GIMP. I have no idea. Who can keep it straight? I was thinking, obviously, so much of GIMP and GTK are closely connected, but does anybody in the Mumble room have any thoughts on, here we are, 20 years of GIMP. I have no idea. Who can keep it straight? I was thinking, obviously, so much of GIMP and GTK are closely connected. But does anybody in the Mumble room have any thoughts on, here we are, 20 years of GIMP, and it's still really not quite there yet for pretty much any professional use. I've dreamed for the day that I could switch my

mom, a professional graphic artist, to GIMP. Yeah, I think we all have. And it's not there yet. So, Rod and Corp, you and I were chatting about this on the pre-show. What are your thoughts about it, looking at it sort of from a design standpoint? Well, yeah, I'm actually a professional designer, and I use Photoshop. Not in a shamed situation where I don't want to use Photoshop, but it's the best option, so that's why I use it. And it's not necessarily the fact that they haven't been pushing it enough. It's mostly the fact that GIMP's problem is that the people who control the future of GIMP don't care about community input. So there's been multiple forks that have created things like layer styles.

been one of the most important things that people wanted from Photoshop in GIMP for a decade that has actually existed since 2008 as a plugin. But GIMP refused to actually look into it at all to give it as a standard. And there's other things like that, like CMYK also exists as a plugin, but again, they refused to put it in the main system. And it took 10 years of people complaining to GIMP to get them to do a single window mode. And they don't even do it by default. So majority of people who use GIMP don't even know that there is a single window mode. So it's mostly the fact that they have a vision. If you don't agree with it, they don't care.

They have a vision. If you don't agree with it, they don't care. And that's what the biggest fundamental of that is the leaders of GIMP are not making it – they're not making progress. And they have such a huge market in the open source graphic world. There's not really any competitors against them because they just kind of take over. So I think it's mostly they don't really want to progress it as much as it could be, but also they've already taken so much market from away from the people who could do what the whole community wants that they kind of give up and the developers just go somewhere

else. Poby, I wanted to hear from you because I wonder – I hear what Rotten Corpse just said and I thought, OK. I think where a lot of us have been is you got to throw everything behind GIMP because so often in the open source community, it's fork, fork, fork, fork. Everybody has got a revolutionary idea and we constantly are rebuilding the foundation and never actually getting to that end user polish. And I'm curious what your take is, Poby. Here we are 20 years after gimp have we sort of all been betting on the wrong horse is it just something a matter of wait another 20 years what do you think poppy uh so this is a tricky one because i'm not a

designer i open gimp and i use like three features out of gimp and it works for you right right all i do is set the color levels on a picture of my cat and then unsharp mask and then export it out as a png great post by the way this morning that was a good one yeah thanks very much yeah uh he's very photogenic my cat uh so you know i'm not the best person but in a open source in general i think part of the problem is you know we just don't have enough people working on the thing you know i've mentioned before that hundreds of people at samsung who work on you know one particular component of their platform or the hundreds or thousands of people at microsoft who work on one particular component we've got people who are not necessarily working on this in full time,

but part time, they're doing a job, then when they get home, and, you know, put their kids to bed and have made food for the family, then they start hacking on free software, or after they finish doing their studies, they're hacking on free software, who are we to tell them that they're not doing a good enough job? And, Wimby, I wanted to give you a chance to sound in here, too. Do you feel like, really, in the big picture, GIMP's actually good enough? Well, again, I'm not a professional graphics designer, so you're asking the wrong person. No, actually, I think... A bit like Popey, I'm more of a super user because I use four features from GIMP.

This is sort of perfect, right? This is sort of Wes's premise, is that, really really if GIMP gets 80% of the way there, then that means it appeals to 80% of the users, which is kind of a big deal. So I'm kind of curious to hear your take as a non-professional designer. Yeah, no, it does a job for me. I always install it as the go-to graphics editor on my Linux workstations. And I think most of my difficulty with using GIMPs comes from the fact that I don't know how to drive graphics applications in the first place. It's not that GIMP is hard to use.

I just don't know how to do it. So I always have to go and google you know the more complicated things but you know and the other thing to think about gimp is if it wasn't for gimp we wouldn't have gtk thank you yeah yeah and that was sort of what i was implying earlier g and gtk is right is gimp yeah it's not gnome or gnu right yeah that was what i was getting to earlier sort of implying that. And Rodney, go ahead. As somebody who thinks about this probably a little more than most of us do since we're not superpower users in graphics, you have a chance to respond.

Go ahead. Yeah, well, I just wanted to say that while I think GIMP is atrocious for professionals, not in the sense that it's – when I say they're not professionals so they don't know, it's sense that it's, you know, when I say they're not professionals, so they don't know, it's not that it's bad. It's that it's fundamentally garbage. When we, when, when the methodologies that for normal proper technique of design are impossible to do in your application, it's fundamentally crap. But it'll never, you think it will never serve the role that the professional needs them? No, actually, I don't. I think the fact that it took 10 years to just get everything in one window means that the fact that I want non-destructive editing, and I want the ability to have CMYK, and I want layer styles and smart objects and all these different things for multiple composites,

styles and smart objects and all these different things for multiple composites that there is probably minimum 10 years more for one of those so are you going to pay a developer to do that then no i don't i have i have photoshop no but you say i want this i want that you can't just like knock on the door of the developers andP developers and then say, I want these things. You should do it because I want it. I want to create. I will happily put my money in where my mouth is for having a graphics program that was good. But GIMP is not going to be that because the people who are behind GIMP don't want to be that. And I have specifically said that they have no intention of ever actually competing with Photoshop, which is fine. It's their decision. That's fine. But people should

stop comparing them because they're not even remotely close. That is actually, just to pause you right there, an interesting point. You know, it's so funny what I get crap for on the Linux Action Show. You mean everything? Yeah. One of the things I got crap for this last week's episode is I got excited about PDV having a new release. Yes. And see, what people did is they assumed I was excited because it was GTK3 based and it had a nice toolbar. When in reality, what I was actually excited about was it was introducing a workflow that was actually somewhat representative of a modern video editor's workflow, but people chose to, you know, dog on me for the wrong thing. And it was what I took away from that was there are a great amount of tools on the Linux desktop right now that we constantly get stuck in the mode of comparing to the proprietary alternative,

stuck in the mode of comparing to the proprietary alternative like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere or in the case of GIMP, obviously Photoshop. And we constantly are doing, well, this is not as good as that. Photoshop is an incredible program with a massive legacy that appeals to a niche. That also owns its market. I mean that's the company for designers. They have all of the resources. Wes, what I've been reflecting on is, so on Sunday's episode of the Linux Action Show coming up,

because of the holiday, you know, we wanted to talk about some open source projects that we are genuinely thankful for that have improved our lives. Well, that's a good idea. Yeah, so we're going to do like a thanks to open source. We haven't done it for a few years. In fact, I'd love to hear the audience's ideas if you want to go to LinuxActionShow.reddit.com and submit

them. But one of the things I was reflecting on about all of this really is if GIMP never, ever is a serious alternative to Photoshop for those really high-end power users or designers, that is perfectly okay. When we're talking about something that is open source in GPL, we are literally talking about something that is available to humanity as long as we want to make it possible. Photoshop, even though it's going to be a market dominant thing for 30, 40 years, it may be around for 60 years, GIMP is literally available to humanity as long as we want it to be available and it can continue to get better.

And the thing about that is if it is appealing to 80% of humanity and it is available to 80% of humanity for as long as they want it for absolutely free, if they can just get to the internet, it fundamentally offers something that Photoshop can never offer and can never compete with. And when you think about it at that level, I'm pretty damn thankful about that. Yeah. I mean, I know I definitely needed something in a pinch. I don't have time to, if I was willing to even, you know, pirate or buy or any options that people commonly import, right?

Like I can just get GIMP. I know it'll work for what I use it for. I think you just nailed it. I think GIMP just has to continue to iterate. You know, honestly, as long as the project handles new leadership and brings in new blood, that is essential. Yes, they can get another 20 years. And if they can get another 20 years, then they can just slowly continue to iterate. And yeah, it does suck for those of us in 2015 that want it all right now. But it is something that's going to be available for a very long time,

and they can continue to make it better and better and better. And maybe one of the places they'll get to is instead of it becoming commonplace to pirate Photoshop, a proprietary crap application that locks your freedoms down, maybe you just decide to go get GIMP instead. And even if they just got, and I think they're damn well close to it, even if they just got the status of instead of stealing Photoshop, go download GIMP. Because if you're the kind of person that's stealing Photoshop, you probably don't actually need Photoshop to do your job. And so you could probably use GIMP. And as long as they can get that reputation, which I think they're damn close to already

with a common person, then it is actually a very serious thing. I think it's pretty cool. And you know what? Also, we were dogging on LibreOffice. I feel bad about that. If you don't like the way LibreOffice looks, which is kind of where I was going, I think LibreOffice. I feel bad about that. If you don't like the way LibreOffice looks, which is kind of where I was going. I think LibreOffice is an awesome project. I hope you guys

don't think I was dogging on it. I think it's very awesome. And I used to work in school districts. Trust me, I understand how revolutionary it is. We have a link in the show notes if you'd like to get involved in maybe sprucing up the look of LibreOffice. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's our project, right? It's everyone's. So if you want it to be something, go help. We got a link in the show notes to help out of LibreOffice. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's our project, right? It's everyone's.

So if you want it to be something, go help. We got a link in the show notes to help out the LibreOffice project to get another thousand developers. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll be back here on Tuesday.

Go to jblive.tv to watch us live, jubilabroadcasting.com slash calendar, linuxactionshow.reddit.com to contribute. See you next week. And shove some turkey in your face. Oh! Nom nom. Oh yeah, happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

See you next week. I will answer Wimpy's encoding questions if he will answer. I have a very, I'm going to be very ignorant here. I'm very ignorant. I don't understand why Canadians have Thanksgiving. Do people outside of the U.S. also have Thanksgiving? Is it just a North America thing? Just you. Okay, all right.

So what do you guys do on Thursdays? You're just super annoyed by all of us Americans? It's a normal day. Yeah. That sounds lame. Yeah, that does sound lame. Although all the retailers over here have started doing Black Friday, which is ridiculous. Yeah, yeah.

We're saying about that. It needs to stop. Yeah, I apologize. I bet it is extremely, extremely annoying. Okay, so. It is because there's never any offers. It's one of these things where everyone says there's these big bargains and you turn up and it's like, you know, a bunch of tennis balls and some drink or something.

You know what you ought to do? They're doing it in Germany now, too. It's wrong. You should just come to the US on Thanksgiving because here's two things. We really know how to eat and man do

we eat. And the other thing is it's like besides Christmas it's like the only other day of the year where everybody's nice. So if you ever want

to come to the US and actually want to have a good experience you come on Thanksgiving everybody's nice. Chris will have turkey for you.

Oh yeah that's true. Speaking of coming to the U.S., I've just booked my ticket to come to scale. So are you guys going to go to scale? You know, so, boy. We're actually thinking about not going to scale

because... Fine. I know. Because you're going to be there, Popey. The timing in January is real bad. It's real bad. And the thing is it's – because we do a big show at LinuxFest Northwest and I have limited funds. So I kind of have to pick and choose.

But the other thing is scale is a great show and it's a really good show to go to if you don't go to all the other shows. And if you go to all the other shows, scale is just a bigger version of all the other shows. But the thing about the other shows is they're a little more intimate, a little bit quieter and a little more focused. So from a term, from terms of content and actual access to the people, we get better results from some of the smaller shows than we do from scale so i'm still kind of like i'm like 90 decided but i'm still kind of on the fence about it scale's almost getting i don't know like overdone i don't know i don't know i don't know i think there's like so we're having an ubu con summit thing for a couple of days along with scale and i think there's like 20 or 30 of us

flying over there which like never normally happens but there's a whole truckload of canonical people coming over yeah you know i'm still considering i am it is not about the selling point just it would be nice you know i hadn't it would be nice to just say hi to people in person that would be a nice thing uh but so all these other events are really nice, and they're really genuine, connected, personal events. And so I don't know. If scale was after LinuxFest Northwest and then I knew how financially devastated I was from LinuxFest Northwest, then it would be easier to plan for scale because I could just plan accordingly. But because scale comes before LinuxFest Northwest, I can't sacrifice LinuxFest

Northwest in the name of going to scale. I don't know. It's a difficult situation. Isn't LinuxFest Northwest like on your doorstep? Can't you just rock up in your trailer? Right, but he has expectations there. Well, like last year... Lazy, lazy. No, no, no. See, last year we flew the whole crew in

and we did dinner and rooms and, you know. And demands for a live event, right? So it was a major expense for the network because, you know, mostly all these people are never actually here. So to actually bring everybody together in one place was actually a rather expensive investment. That was a—oh! Oh! Oh! So then, okay, so we're going to talk about Solus, which, am I saying Solus right?

Yep. Yeah. Solus. Solus. And how do I say the desktop? Is it budgie? That's what I... Budgie.

As in the bird with wings. Cute little budgie. Like a birdie? Birdie? Birdie? Yeah, birdie. Birdie? No, Cute little budgie. Like a birdie? Birdie? Birdie? Yeah, birdie. Birdie? No, the bird budgie.

I don't fucking know about a budgie bird. I know about crows and blue jays. I don't know anybody budgie bird. I know bungee software. I know bungee software. I know that pretty well. No, budgie. No.

Budgie. I don't know about a budgie. I don't know about a budgie. This is not a good list of approved birds. It's kind of like having a cage in your house. I don't know about a budgie. Okay, I accept it's a birds. I don't know about a budgie. Okay, I accept it's a thing, but I've never heard of it before.

Bless you, Chris, and your lack of knowledge of the world. I know, I know. But here is the thing. You know what I have heard of a billion times over? Budgie software! You bunch of kids. You know what? You're all a bunch of kids. That's what it is. Kids and their budgie birds.

I used to have a budgie. All right, somebody link me. I want to see what this damn bird looks like. You know what it is? I just don't give a crap about birds. I mean, the birds that fly around are great, but I always feel like the birds in the cage are just super annoying and loud and they poop a lot and they're not all that fun to look at.

What about penguins? No, I'm telling you, birds in the wild are great. That kind of bird I can get down with. But the birds that are just in a cage have never interested me at all. I don't want to expend... It's another name for the common pet. Yeah, okay. I've seen that ugly-ass bird that looks like a stupid bird that poops a lot.

Yeah, I've seen that bird. I don't know why you... I'm sorry. I don't know why you named your desktop after that. That bird looks like an asshole. Well, I made it. Of course course it's gonna be an asshole perfectly done perfectly done