LINUX Unplugged - Episode 130: The Six Rings of Ubuntu | LUP 130

Episode Date: February 3, 2016

Why Linux Mint’s X-Apps are a bigger shakeup then you might realize, bricking your laptop with a Linux command & Dell’s new Linux distro. Plus we celebrate 15 years of VLC, a quick look at Tails 2.0 & more!

I sent you a web-based IRC client. Oh, you did? I did. Where did you send that to me? Oh, on the Slack. Oh, okay. Speaking of Slack. Speaking of Slack.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.... I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm. I went full Gibson. With no warning. I know. I'm sorry. So what is this, Wes? What is this? Oh. A self-hosted web IRC client. Yeah, let it speak for itself, Chris.

Hmm. Yeah, so this is called Shout, a self-hosted web IRC client. That's pretty cool. Always connected. Shout never sleeps. Just sign in and pick up where you left off. The client works smoothly on every desktop, smartphone, and tablet. Shout is open source and licensed under MIT.

This is exactly, exactly what I was talking about, Wes. Let's say we got a demo right here. Let's try it out. Yeah. So let's call it. The name is going to be Chris Demo, okay? Guys, don't be a jerk, okay? Don't troll me, okay?

So, oh, they won't let me change the server. Oh, yes, they will. Will they? Nope. I can't change the server. Well, okay. We'll just go then. I let me change the server. Oh, yes they will. Will they? Nope, I can't change the server. Well, okay, we'll just go then. I was going to try to connect to GeekShed. You know, this is

pretty plain, but it's... It's quite plain, yeah. Is it configurable? Here we go. Change chat settings. Show joins, show parts. I like that. I like that you can turn that off. That's cool. Show quits. I don't need any of that. Enabled colored nicks. I like that. I like that you can turn that off. That's cool. Show quits. I don't need any of that.

Enabled colored nicks. I like that. Enable notifications. Do not want that. Okay. So it's got some configuration options, but the one thing it doesn't let you configure is the look of it apparently. It's pretty stark. Theming would be nice.

But it's almost doable. You know, I think I'm going to give it a try because I was looking at IRC Cloud, and this is, I'm liking this, so self-hosted web IRC client. Shout. Thanks, Wes. Good find. How did you find that? I think it is a good find. Found it somewhere laying on the internet. I don't know. Just laying around, huh? Yep. Laying around. That crazy internet.

I should be making use of that. I did something else with a web IRC thingy today, and I'm going to replace it with this. What web IRC thingy today, and I'm going to replace it with this. What web IRC thingy? Tell me, what was it? What was it? It's very awkward.

I can't say. Was it proprietary garbage? It was, wasn't it? It was. No, no, no. It's for another podcast. I've been giving another podcast's website a new look of paint. A facelift?

Whoa. Oh, you mean like when this isn't an IRC client you embed in the website? This is a web-based IRC client that's always connected that you bring up in your web browser. Yeah. No, that would be better than what I've done today. Very good. There you go. All right.

Well, I'll put a link in the show notes. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 130 for February 2nd, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show. It's jonesing for a new rig. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. I don't know, Wes. Maybe it's because before every show, Wimpy gives me a hard time about the fact that my

leader hasn't showed up. That has something to do with it. That might be stoking the flames, as they say. Well, coming up on today's episode of the Unplugged show, we're not talking about my drama. No, no. We actually have a great show coming up for today's episode of The Unplugged Show, we're not talking about my drama. No, no. We actually have a great show coming up for you on this week. Some really interesting updates.

We're going to spend a little more time than usual going through some big stories that have come up since the Linux Action Show was on the air. We have a lot to cover up on. And then we'll talk about this Linux command that's getting blamed for bricking laptops even when you're not running Linux. Oh, boy. Yeah. I love these controversies that we just seem to fall into. We'll do a quick review of Tails 2.0. They say it's Edward Snowden's almost of choice.

Wes has got it loaded right here. He's going to give us his take and some of the challenges he ran into. And then later on in the show, is Linux Mint drunk with power? What the heck is X apps? I know. We've got to talk about this. Maybe they are brilliant, or maybe they're going off into the weeds. Linux Mint is introducing its own suite of applications.

We'll talk about that in the show today. I just got to get your guys' take on that. I got to know. I got to know. And did you hear the news? Dell is making their own Linux. What? Dell is making their own Linux. What? Dell is making their own Linux.

And you're not going to believe the name. Do you have a guess what it is? Do you know what it is? No, I don't. You don't? I'm not telling anyone. No, no. If you have a guess, I would love to hear your guess as to what you think Dell is going to name their Linux.

We're going to talk about it later in the show, but I think we can give away the name now. Because it's so great. It's so great. No? I don't know. Should I not say? Should we wait? Okay, we'll wait.

Don't say, chat room. Don't say. Don't say. We'll make everybody wait until the end of the show. But you're not going to believe the name of Dazzling's. Don't say it. Don't say it, chat room. We have so much to get into.

But before we do that, Wes, you know what we've got to talk about? Because it's become a tradition now, just sort of accidentally on the show, is the beer we're drinking. Yes, it has. And I like you. So you heard me complaining and moaning on the last live show. As you do. As I do. I was beer desperate, and I went and I grabbed this coffee beer, which actually was delicious, by Stone IPA.

Or by Stone. This, however, is something completely different. This is a local Washington brew. So I doubt they'll be able to drink this. They'll just have to drink vicariously through us. How do you suppose you say that? Colesat? Colesan? I believe Colesan.

You're probably absolutely right. So this is their red ale. And it's actually surprisingly good. It's not amazing, but it's surprisingly good this week. It's easy drinking on the show. You know what?

It matches the weather. It's very nice out. It sure is. Kind of clean and crisp out. So there you go. It feels like it could almost be spring. Almost. It's teasing us.

So that is our beverage of choice today while we're getting started. Now let's get into the show. Let's bring in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumbleroom. Freedom. Freedom. Hello. Hello. Hey, howdy,. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Freedom. Hello. Hey, howdy, hi, and hello. Ooh, I like it.

I like it. Everybody's fired up today for a good show. Well, so let's get started with some updates. We have a little bit of a birthday party. I'd play the jingle, but it'll get us taken down on YouTube. 15 years of VLC, and I think actually specifically it's 15 years since VLC went GPO. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah.

Can you believe that? You know, VLC, everybody has a VLC trick, right? Like you have anything like you use VLC for that maybe is a little unconventional? Well, I mostly, I do stream it every which way when possible. My favorite is I take RTSP or RTMP streams. A lot of the television networks use these for their back-end streaming between each other. And if you can find them, you can use them to get the raw feed, and then you can record it, which is great for unfiltered. And so you can use VLC to write it right to an MKV file with X264, whatever your codec.

It could be Vorbis and Theora, whatever. And it is – I mean, that's what I use it for. I know a lot of people, oh, oh, we use it here in Studio to send, so you can see over there on that screen we have VLC that is playing reruns over there. Yep. And then we have OBS, that's on an Arch desktop. We have OBS that is taking that VLC window and recapturing it and sending it as an RTSP stream back over to this machine to run as reruns. And I can tune into that stream using VLC from any computer in the studio, and I can check on what's going on in the live stream just by doing that.

It's really cool. I did that over the holidays. I set up a repeating Star Wars stream for some of my friends before the movie came out with VLC up on a droplet and password protected with NGINX and you just had to sign in and point VLC there. That's awesome. That sounds like a segment. That is super cool. Yeah. So

congratulations to VLC. 15 freaking years. What would we do without you? Now, Wimpy, have you had a chance to try out them beautiful Blu-rays in VLC? Just recently I have. Yeah, I've beautiful Blu-rays in VLC? Just recently I have, yeah. I've got Blu-rays playing in VLC. How does the encryption work in that setup?

So you need a few bits and pieces. There's lib-aacs, which does the decryption stuff, and there's two ways of doing it. My old desktop workstation, Ied the firmware to in the blu-ray drive so now is there a specific blu-ray did you know you had to get this blu-ray player yeah i've had it for donkey's years oh okay so it's not something you can remember no no i've had this since blu-ray was new so it's very old and that's what i've been using to dump my blu-ray discs into plex for the longest time but it died about a week or so ago so i've got a new blu-ray usb3 blu-ray drive and i needed to dump the blu-rays you know with make mkv so i needed to do that

with the way where you get the keydb file and all those bits. And then I thought, well, I wonder if you can get them playing as well. So I've been working on that for Ubuntu Mate, and that's all going now. Yeah, MakeMKV, man, that's great too. So also, just sort of related, I also just want to give props to VLC. It has become such a badass on Android. Yeah, it has. And the VLC iOS app is actually pretty great. It's great, yeah.

And I can't believe this either, but VLC has an Apple TV app. And one of the things that the Apple TV app can do, I have not tried this, but one of the things the Apple TV app can do is it sets the Apple TV up as a media server so you can send any video stream to the Apple TV using VLC. I know that Chromecast support is coming. I mean it is. So the Android app is great. The Android TV app is great.

The Apple TV app sounds cool. I know the – really. So they've been able to sort of keep up. And they're 15 years old. This is really cool. So yeah, there you go. Five years before it was called VLC, it was called Network 2000.

It was called Network 2000. So it's never been the best with names. But that doesn't matter because it turns into a Christmas cone. That is one of my favorite things. Okay, I'm hoping somebody in the Mumble Room I saved this story just for Unplugged because I'm hoping somebody in the Mumble Room knows more than I do about the new Pac-Man that was released. Pac-Man version 5.0 came out, and I guess here's what I know that's new about it, but I don't know much. Pac-Man 5.0 is finally here after many months of development, during which maintainers managed to add a great number of new features, such as support for running hooks

before and after transactions, which sounds pretty cool. Yeah, that does sound nice. Pac-Man 5.0 also ships with support for handling symlinks to folders that have been replaced by a directory, support for recording the package, a variable in a local package database,

and the ability to print extra info for dependency errors, and support for comparing the internal versions of a package with the database one after downloading it. These all seem neat. Anybody in the mumble room have any more info about Pac-Man 5.0? I know it's kind of a big deal, but I don't really have...

I'll just start with using Pac-Man is always a pleasure. I don't know. It's just I'm very rarely unhappy with it. Yeah. It just works. I guess my systems, if it's out, I guess my systems are upgraded. I didn't really notice. But I guess it's working.

Okay. So nobody has any comments on that. That's fine. We can move on from there. Quickly moving then to something that I bet people do have some comments on. Edward Snowden's favorite distro, Tales 2.0 is out. That's where they get to market it now. And they really push that. So a couple of things new about Tales 2.0 is out. That's where they get to market it now. And they really push that.

So a couple of things new about Tales 2.0. Lots of changes to the Gnome Shell environment. Debian 8 base, which pretty much means all the software has been upgraded under the hood. You're using the Gnome Shell. It's in classic environment. And you're sitting here right now, Wes, with the new Tales 2.0 on. How's it going, Wes? It's actually working.

It's actually working, isn't it? It's working all right. So let's start there. It actually was a little bit challenging to get working. Well, admittedly, I was trying to install it in a very handy way with Grub2's loopback support. So you can just dump the ISO file on a hard drive. Actually, that works brilliantly. Totally supported.

Although their live CD disables root permissions by default, which probably does make sense. There's like an extra boot option you can check to have that happen. I have not been able to get that working. So I believe you'll probably need to install it or set it up to

boot just from the ISO to get all of the options. So I've not been able to set up the wireless. But the GNOME shell environment is nice. What was with the error message you got about it not being compatible with your hardware? I'm not sure. It is like a little Dell laptop here. So it doesn't have an Ethernet port.

It just has wireless. And you're not getting that error message now? Or are you still getting that error message? That's a good question. I'm not sure. So, I mean, that was really kind of strange. It was quite strange. When he booted up, he literally got an error message that said it's not compatible

with your hardware. Just trying to get to the network settings? Yeah, and it was like a GTK error message. Really, really strange. But they've got a lot of great built-in stuff. They've got a Tor browser. They've got an unsafe browser. Well, do they have a bunch of great built-in stuff?

LibreOffice, P2V, Lyfera? Yeah, I don't know about those things. Why the hell are these on my super secure distribution? Can you give me a single justification? Because you know what those sound like to me? Attack surfaces. They sound like software that can have flaws. They sound like software that can be exploited.

Sure, they're not a super critical software, but why is anything that's not necessary on my security distribution? See, I was going to say that, but they probably need LibreOffice because all those leaked NSA – PowerPoint slides, Chris. Yeah, right. Okay. No, I think what it is is they are setting themselves up as a full-time desktop distribution.

The switch to Gnome Shell, the upgrade of Libre Office, and P2V. I mean, give me a break. Also, the switch to system D. They're coming up now as a desktop distribution that you can use if you're security-minded. I don't believe the two things hold up. I think what makes Tails secure is that you only use it when you're in

stealth mode, when you need to be secure. You can spin it up and throw it away. Because it just seems to me reasonably so that the longer you use a desktop distribution, the longer you make it more insecure, the longer your passwords get cached on the hard drive, the longer your web history builds up, the longer you have a piece of software you don't update or that a zero-day vulnerability is available for for a stretch of time that you're not aware of. Like there's so much more exposure when you use a desktop full-time than when you just boot into it to do banking or buy your Bitcoins or whatever.

Right. It's useful to not have as a real desktop environment. ACO says that it's so that media creators can create with privacy. Yeah, but nobody is actually going to use P2P. So that's not really why. I mean I don't mean to be dismiss Yeah, but nobody's actually going to use P2V. So that's not really why. I mean, I don't mean to be dismissive, but I just – I don't – that sounds like a really niche possible use case that probably doesn't actually happen and what it actually does is exposing everybody.

It's for editing family trips but for witness relocation. It's so that ISIS can post their latest Jihadi John 2.0 videos. That doesn't make any sense. That's such an edge case that it's not worth making the rest of the distribution more vulnerable. I mean this is supposed to be a security distribution. Am I missing something, Mumble Room? I don't think so. Also, I don't think YouTube creators are going to use this to make their videos.

Yeah. Yeah. You will be happy to know. High DVI displays are better supported. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry, go on.

Is this a live CD you'd be willing to boot into during Black Hat, for example? Yeah, exactly. This is – yeah, it's that kind of thing. Or like I say, when you're doing your online Bitcoin or stocks or whatever that you – It does come with a Bitcoin wallet. Yeah, they do because that's something you can use it for or if you're going to communicate with a journalist for some purpose. Maybe – I mean let's be honest. Legitimately, you could be a savvy member of the US military, witness something that you think somebody in the journalism industry should know about and use Tails to communicate with them.

And it would be a mistake to continue to use Tails for other things. Yes, it would. I just don't. I mean, but good for them for the new release. I don't mean to crap on the new release. They also are shipping the Vivaldi browser with it, which is weird. And they got the Tor browser, of course. In no shell, it seems reasonable in classic mode.

It's pretty straightforward. It's hard to miss anything that you have there. Yeah, it's still a great distribution. Being based on Debian 8, I think, is... Just a little confused. Yeah, so what is your impression overall of just sort of... Does it feel like a Debian box to you? Does it feel like something different?

Yeah. Speed is good? Speed is fine. I might try installing it in a VM later and just play with it there. Yeah, that would be cool. Like a VM you could go into when you're doing certain things. You know, like your big Bitcoin exchange enterprise you got

going on the side, which is hosted on GitHub. Yes. Well, naturally. Naturally. Hopefully it doesn't go down. That's a lot of income I'm allowing. Get them Bitcoins! Mumble Room, any closing thoughts on Tails? Good, pro. It doesn't have to be related to them being a full-time distro.

Anybody in there tried it before? Or is this one of those distros we all talk about but nobody's using? I've used it before, but not for like a full desktop environment. I've used it just to do some things and then just boot out of it to the regular OS. That sounds about right. Yeah, that sounds about right. I would love to have somebody from the Tales Project come on the show. Yeah, that would be great. Wouldn't that?

We have an open Mumble room. Our virtual lug is open to all of you, even Windows users. Even Windows users. Just don't say anything. We won't ask. I mean. Probably. Sometimes we do.

Just say. When their audio seems to be working really well, then we get suspicious. I kid. I kid. Ouch, Chris. I'm just joking. Are you a bitter much? No, I'm just joking.

I've never installed GNU slash Linux. All right. So before we move on, there's something really big that has gotten a lot of headlines from snarky tech press about Linux brick and laptops. And the headlines have been – I actually did read this headline. Ubuntu can brick your laptop even if you run Windows. Isn't that a good one? Yeah, wow. Yeah.

I thought that was pretty great. And I'm like, OK. And it's right as Dell is about to announce a new developer edition of the XPS laptop, too. Come on, guys. So we'll tell you about what's going on there and actually how you can actually break the laptop. That is actually legitimately something you could do. But first, let me tell you about Ting. Go to linux.ting.com to support this show and get yourself a $25 discount.

Dot, dot, dot, dot, discount. Linux.ting.com. You can also get $25 in service credit if you have a compatible phone. And you might because they've got CDMA and GSM. Average monthly bill per device for Ting, $23. Isn't that something? Linux.ting.com. You just pay for what you use.

It's a flat $6 for the phone line and then your usage on top of that. I would suggest, too, go check a look at some of their devices so you can get an idea. So this one right here, the Samsung M400, $47. Kyocera Dura XT, this is the one that Noah's tried out for a bit, $47. He says the speaker on that thing is ridiculous and the battery life is ridiculous. I, myself, because I'm a classy lady, I would probably upgrade to the Ancetel OneTouch Fling. It's new. It's got a camera. It's got an, I think it's OLED on the front. It totally has a CPU in it.

It's a feature phone. And the more I look at the smartphone landscape, I think, geez, $63 for an unlocked phone. I own that outright. No contract. Only pay for what I use. That is ridiculous. You can also get things like the Motorola G or go all the way up to the really nice phones. In fact, like the Blue Studio 6 is a great deal for $181. You own these. Motorola G, third gen, $193 unlocked. It's yours. No contract.

You only pay for what you use. No early termination. Nothing like that. A really good dashboard, super fanatical customer support that rocks, and geeks. They're geeks, too. In fact, they have a blog post up. Watch the Super Bowl without cable. Hey, look at that.

This is like I am not a sports ball guy. Right. But I cannot avoid the Super Bowl hype. It's a good excuse for nothing else to have some great appetizers. Yeah, that's true. Have great appetizers, be judgy about the commercials, and drink some beer. So Super Bowl 50, yeah, you guys all know it's upon us. And they have a great breakdown about ways you can watch it, even if you're a cord cutter, which I think is pretty cool.

They also have some internet fiber services, depending on your location. Go check them out. I wish we had those. Could you imagine? I know. I know. Linux.ting.com. Visiting there supports this show.

Try out the savings calculator. See why I've been a customer for three years. Linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys are fantastic. And thanks for the MiFi on the way back from scale. Yeah, that's great. That's how I was able to listen to you and Noah do the Unplugged show.

Legitimately, though, I missed about 30 minutes of the show, not because Ting got disconnected, but because at that point in time I was in Oregon. And do you know about Oregon gas? I do know about Oregon gas. What's the deal about Oregon gas? I do know about Oregon gas. What's the deal about Oregon gas? What's the deal? Well, it's a hazardous liquid, Chris. Yeah.

And it smells bad. You need to be trained and certified to handle it. So it's so funny you say this because – so we get down to Oregon and we're going to fill up the Lady Jupiter. We're almost down to scale, right? I mean because we've got – Glory to Jupiter. California is the next – yeah, glory to Lady Jupiter.

California is the next, California is the next, yeah, glory to Lady Jupiter. California is the next state. And I'm like, I'm below half a tank. And if I need a boondock, I want to have enough fuel for my generator. So I'm figuring we'll fill up, pull off. The thing about Oregon is, like Wes was alluding to, you are not allowed to fill your own gas up. You can, it is state law that somebody pumps your gas for you or your petrol or whatever you want to call it. And so we get into a Flying J, which is designed for large vehicles and should have a high pump capacity. We get into a Flying J truck stop, a truck stop, because Lady Jupiter is big and we need a truck stop. I pull in there. I go over the ding-ding, and I spend five minutes lining this huge rig up with the pump, which wasn't big enough.

And I had to be pulled way into the parking lot. I'm pulled way into the parking lot, blocking the flow of traffic. And I sit there. Five minutes go by. Ten minutes go by. Oh, boy. Fifteen minutes go by. Twenty minutes go by.

I'm getting pissed at this point because I'm waiting 20 minutes. I'm like, I could go out there and pump this gas myself, right? And I'm sitting there. At least I'm listening to unplugged, so it's not all lost, right? 25 minutes go by. I start the rig back up. I put Lady Jupiter in reverse. I go over the cord again to make the thing ding.

I go back over the cord again. I go back up again. This huge motorhome. Back up over the cord. Ding, ding. Back up over the cord. Ding, ding. So that way they hear like four times I do this, right? And then I park it. I huge motorhome. Back up over the cord. Ding, ding. Back up over the cord. Ding, ding. So that way they hear like four times I do this, right? And then I park

it. I turn it off and I go outside and I wait for the guy. And he goes, oh, sorry. We've been real busy. Forgot. Sorry. Comes over there. It took, it's a 100 gallon tank. It took forever. It took 25 minutes to pump it. So not only did I have to wait 25 minutes but it took 25 minutes to fill it and I missed

that whole part of the show. So I made a declaration right there. No more fuel in Oregon. No more. Just skip it. Drive through the whole state. We drove through the rest. One did not stop again for fuel in Oregon.

I was not going to put up with that crap. And so while we were sitting there in the chair, we were like, okay, now we've got to know. Is this state law? What is the reason that it is 2016 and we are not allowed to pump our own gas in Oregon? What is the reason? And so then we found, like, the whole controversy. Like, there's a for it and against it. Oregon drama.

And against it, folks are like, gas stinks. It gets on you. It makes your clothes smell. And it's going to kill a bunch of jobs. And then the for it people are like, it takes too much time. It was, we fell into a whole controversy trying to get our damn gas. Do you guys agree or are you guys split on opinions? Oh, no, we wanted to pump our own gas, I'll tell you.

But anyways, moving on from there, it's just a story from the road that didn't get on camera because I was too grumpy. So let's talk about this command that can permanently brick some laptops. It is actually a thing. It is really a thing. And some people are actually dumb enough to do this. So we're going to have to cover it now because it's made controversy. And I want to arm you with the knowledge to combat the controversy.

Some FUD may develop, and we're going to be the anti-FUD solution. So as all things that are relevant and important to the internet, a user posted on the Arch Linux forums. Where all great things start. Back in January, which is still this month. I don't know why they wrote it like that. Wondering why their laptop wouldn't boot at all after running the simple rm, tack, rf, tack, no, dash, preserve, dash, root, slash. So, delete the entire freaking root directory.

It's a fairly stupid thing to run such a command, but usually not destructive in anything but the Linux installation itself. And I've done this to myself before. Sure, who hasn't spun up a VM just to see, well, how long will it keep kicking? Or a old install of like Red Hat 5. Really mad at your friend. And it was like the first thing you tried doing. Anyways, however, it turns out on some MSI laptops,

it is possible to completely wipe the EFI boot partition from within Linux. So this is what's happening. It completely wipes it. The directory that gets destroyed is at slash sys slash firmware slash EFI slash EFI vars. It stores information and scripts that the computer uses to boot using the modern EFI slash EFI VARs. It stores information and scripts that the computer uses to boot using the modern EFI standard, which, of course, once you wipe that out, it's like not having a BIOS on your machine, essentially.

And so because it's under slash C slash firmware slash EFI slash EFI VARs, when you delete everything under root, you are also deleting that. And then it no longer boots. you are also deleting that. Right. And then it no longer boots. A thread discussing the issue on the systemd repository on GitHub is full of discussions between developers arguing the directory

where the EFI boot data is stored should not be entirely writable. How about just don't mount it writable? Yeah, that's not bad. So far, the issue appears to only affect MSI laptops, but that's only because there are a handful of cases of it happening in the wild. Few people are wild or brave and have tried it on their own machines. That's a good point. It could affect other machines, but who wants to be the person to try it?

So have I told you my story? No. I was actually still in school. So this was a really, really long time ago now because I'm an old man. This was a really, really long time ago now because I'm an old man. And I sat down at a Red Hat machine that somebody had set up for me. And I don't know why RMRF was a thing I tried. Maybe somebody told me.

Maybe it was in the bash history. That might have been possible. I did RM-RF slash. Whose machine was this? It was one in the computer lab. So it was a school machine. And I was logged in as root because why not? Somebody must have sat me up looking back on it. I wish I remembered because it was such a pivotal moment in my young computer history

because I remember watching the system fall apart, completely degrade in front of me. And I remember thinking to myself, this is a badass OS. It let me do that. It just let me delete itself. And everything that's in RAM is still running. I can still, like, because it was some old desktop environment. And the windows that I still had open could still be used. And I remember thinking, this is something I want to learn.

Like, something that lets me delete itself and then continues to run until I restart. At least everything that was existing was like, this is freaking impressive. And that was really like, so then later on when Linux was suggested as an alternative to NT, I was like, let's give it a shot. That thing was cool. It was like a real pivotal moment for me. Wimpy, you had a story that I wanted to hear. Well, I used to work for a Unix vendor back in the day.

Well, I used to work for a Unix vendor back in the day. And when there were the conferences, you know, and everyone's got all of their workstations out on the stands and everything, we did used to go around and accidentally RM minus RF slash our competitors' workstations. Really? Accidentally? Really? Totally? Accidentally. I just fell on the keyboard. At lunchtime, you know, when they're having a break, just do that and reboot.

Something kind of equivalent from the technical side is when you're using Linux terminal servers and the clients lose connection back to the terminal server. They still have X11 and any applications that were loaded in RAM, but they've lost their root file system. It's kind of the same effect. And what's actually really damn impressive, and I haven't seen this for a couple of years, but I did see it a couple of years ago,

is when the internet connection or the network connection, the LAN connection or Wi-Fi connection, whatever it is, comes back online, the clients just resume, keep working. Like in just no big deal. Yeah, there's some errors, but it's no big deal. It was like, wow, this is a really cool operating system. This is really neat. And I remember some stuff was even GPU accelerated and it still worked.

So, yeah, there you go. That is the rumor that's spreading around. There's lots of news stories about it. And I guess it is technically possible. Just don't arms. It should be noted that a lot of this, the EFI standard lets you do this. It should work. It just may not be tested.

Go figure. It was an arch user. Right. And also some parts of the EFI system need to be mounted read-write in order for the stuff to work. And to change the variables that set your next boot, things like that. Yeah. Yeah, that is a thing. That's a bit of a problem.

And it's probably going to happen again. Okay, so I don't really have any action to take on this myself because I'm not on the right side of the pond. But if you are in London or in the area, you might be able to make an impact on the future of the Unity 8 desktop. you might be able to make an impact on the future of the Unity 8 desktop. Canonical is posting on their social media accounts that they – so on Twitter, G+, and Facebook so far – that they're conducting a research, and the research is a user experience research. The study is about Ubuntu applications developed by members of the Ubuntu Linux community for the next generation Unity 8 user interface.

The research study is being led by Ting-Rae Chang, a user experience researcher at Canonical, or maybe it's, yeah, I think it's Chang. And it's targeted mainly at Ubuntu or Fedora users. Ooh. Yeah, Fedora users. Probably because GNOME 3, I guess. Yeah. Swathpedia speculates.

They don't know why. But anyways, so they're going to do some research, and they'd love your help. They're looking for participants in a research study on a community-developed Unity 8 apps. In the survey, Canonical would like to know what email, terminal, calendar, diary, and music apps you use as well. So we'll have some links to this. There's a survey you can find out.

And if you're in the area, they're going to be doing a study at, they have the, it looks like it'll be about an hour- long study. And there may be a cash incentive. And you get to talk about Linux. So we'll have info about that. The Unity 8 desktop, Wes,

do you think they have to nail it when they first ship it as default? Or do you think there's going to be capacity to let them improve? Do you think people are at a point where your Premiere desktop can be a little undercooked? I mean, it does keep happening. So maybe.

I think it will go a long ways if they do nail it because people are already using it, installing it, and if it just comes with something that's really first rate, then all the better. I think they do have staying power that if it's improved pretty quickly, then it'll be fine. Micah68 says, I wish they could do the user study more openly than London. But at the same time, what other Linux distribution is doing actual real-world user studies that we know of? I don't know of any other ones. So at least they're actually doing some. That is extremely valuable.

Now is a great time to take a trip to London. New road trip. I hope. I hope. Wimpy, what do you think? I'm curious to pick your brain as somebody who probably is going to try it out. How much do they have to nail this right out of the gate? You're asking the wrong person, really, aren't you? But I'm very interested in participating in this. So yes, I shall enroll and try and go along to it. You're not going to try it when they ship it? Well, I'm already trying it. I'm already running the converged experience on my Nexus 4 and my Nexus 7,

and I'm trying out all the new stuff. Are you really using it? I'm experimenting with it it but starting next month i'm going to go for two months just using uh the ubuntu touch on a phone and a tablet and i'm going to actually turn off and set aside my android phone really are you going to do you're going to use the nexus 4 uh going to use the nexus 4 and Nexus 7. I've tried that before. And when the new – well, I did it last year and it didn't go so well. I did it for one month last year and it was hard work.

And I'm doing it again one year on to see – It kind of sounds like what your answer then is for a certain category of users, they're getting close to nailing it now. So it's just going to depend on who's using it. It's improved an awful lot over the last year. You know, I got a chance to play with it quite a bit at scale, and I wasn't super impressed,

but I was playing with it on a Nexus 4, and I guess a lot of the canonical folks there are using it on a OnePlus and getting much better performance. Were you using it as a phone, or were you using it as the converged? Just the phone. I was just experimenting with the phone.

There's a couple of great Jupyter Broadcasting apps and I was playing around with those and stuff like that. But I haven't tried it on anything as powerful as the Nexus 7 or up. Really, all my experience has either been on the Nexus 5 or 4. So I'm going to set out my criteria of what I'm going to attempt to get get it to do and work for me because there are a number of things that i need to do on a day-to-day basis

with it as a phone but i think really the convergence stuff is starting to become like the silver bullet because it's really compelling. It's quite amazing, actually, when you connect your Nexus 4 up and you realize this is a desktop and this is running off a phone. It really is very good. So if you haven't seen that, you're really missing out on the whole point. I think I could see it. I mean, I do see the point of it. I could see, you know, something I have at home, I bring it to work, I hook it up,

and I have all my stuff there, all my notes that I already had up on my text editor are still up on my screen. People are already moving to laptops that are, you know. But today, for example, they just got the full Chromium browser working. Oh, that's a big one. Often to touch in the converged mode. So, you know, sort of a full-blooded browser, which is, that's really, you know, important, I think. Important step forward.

It's a shame Popey's not here. I think he must be busy, but maybe another time you can pick his brains about all of this. He's much, much closer to it than I am. So how do you... I'm just an observer. Where do you square the user between...

So this is really interesting. I find it fascinating that you're following this so closely on the cutting edge and then you're also behind Ubuntu Mate edition, which is sort of like this distribution that epitomizes the traditional desktop environment that is kind of so far away from convergence and mobile that – so how do you slice that? Like what – is it the different workloads? Is it different use cases? Where do you see that sort of lighting up? Or do you think maybe eventually everybody who's seeking out a Mate type desktop would eventually go for a converged device? Well, so many questions. So obviously, I am close to all the new innovations and advancements in the Linux community.

Just because I work on Ubuntu Mate doesn't mean that I'm laser-focused on that paradigm. I want to experience everything from the Linux world and learn what I can from all the different projects. But you really are investing a lot of your time and energy and life into one particular paradigm. Yes, and that's mostly because, as I've said before, I've got family and friends that depend on having that computing platform. And so that's really where it comes from. And it's become popular in its own right, so I will continue to support it and back it. But, for example, there was a guy at the weekend who had Ubuntu Mate running on a Huddle tablet. You've probably not heard of those,

but that's the Tesco supermarket over here. Make a line of tablets, Android tablets. And he's put Ubuntu Mate on it, and I have to say it worked remarkably well. And I was thinking to myself, hmm, with just a few little user interface tweaks this could be you know really quite usable and another guy actually got um uh the mate desktop via an ubuntu ch root running under androids and another one has got it running under ubuntu touch as well so it's interesting that this convergence stuff you know canonical

are you know pioneering this on their platform with their user interface but already there are people in the community who are experimenting with other desktops and getting them to run under xmere and what have you um and i'm not not sure that i want to try and turn mate into a touch platform because that's a bit nuts isn't it but i'm certainly interested in experimenting with all of these touch devices and particularly ubuntu because um android has become very entrenched in my life and i use it because it was the best option five years ago. But I don't want it to be the thing that I'm wedded to. I very much feel that way too.

So I've put a lot of effort in the last six months getting to know Ubuntu Touch, and I've written a couple of apps for myself, and I'm starting more and more to get familiar with Snaps and MIR and that's something I'm definitely interested in in learning and doing more with in the coming year but that's not to say Ubuntu Marte is going to stop or go away that will continue on its merry way as well I find it to be exciting that it's actually getting – so we've talked about Unity and convergence and all this stuff for – it feels like three years now. Yep.

But being at scale, I find it to be really exciting to be at scale playing with these devices and seeing real community apps created for it like a Telegram app, like a Jupyter Broadcasting app. Nice. And I was talking to Ryan from the Mycroft project and he was there with his Ubuntu Touch device. And, you know, we were talking about the pros and cons of it. And, you know, for the most part, he likes it. But when using his device, I could definitely see the performance issues there. And that's something I'm pretty hypersensitive to because I just – I have a very high expectation. But if I, you know, if I could reconsider some of that stuff and if they could close the gap on some of that stuff, it might just be right.

Just right, Wes. And when there's a phone that runs it very well and you can get it. I liked the idea that was floated that someone should take an Android device that was this far into its lifecycle as the Ubuntu Touch phone is now and compare the two and see where the two are at. I was like, oh, if somebody could give me a good idea of what hardware to use, I would like to try that as a little review. So where was Android at this point in its development lifecycle versus where Ubuntu Touch is?

Well, it was sort of the gingerbread stage, wasn't it? Would you consider this gingerbread stage, wasn't it? Would you consider this gingerbread or is this still more like the Moto G or whatever? No, not Moto G. What was that first phone called? The one that had the little roller on it. I can't remember now. Since we've only gotten really one industry phone, it's like their first phone.

Well, if you're talking about device launches, then yes, it's closer to that htc dream referring to you know time of time yeah incubating and and being developed yeah i guess that that would be that you'd have to figure out those ground rules do you want to go by that rule or hardware yeah i think what you need to do is work out how many people android had working how many people google had worked yeah and. Yeah, I'm right. Because what you actually work out from that

is that actually Ubuntu are punching above their weight because they've got far, far, far fewer people who have made pretty much a fully-fledged mobile operating system with the Convergence story in three years. And I think that's pretty amazing. People are giving Ubuntu a hard time about it and saying it's not good enough yet and it's not quite ready.

But they've achieved such a lot. So it can only get better from here because the foundations are pretty solid now. I don't actually, I don't know that like that mocking attitude towards Ubuntu. I don't know if it actually exists in the real world at like,

beyond, I mean, know if it actually exists in the real world at like beyond – I mean beyond internet keyboard warriors. I just – I didn't get the sense of that. I don't – it's just to keep drawing – not to keep drawing on the scale thing. But Ubuntu came up a lot at scale because of what Ubicome was going on. And there was never any shame. There was never any, oh, eye-rolling. And there was never any shame. There was never any, oh, eye-rolling. And when, like, display servers,

which I heard several conversations about display servers, it would go X, Mir, and Weyland, or Mir, Weyland, X, or Weyland, Mir, X. You know, it was just like, whatever. Like, it was just, these are the things. It wasn't like this, oh, effing Mir. You know, it wasn't that. Yeah, I think there was sort of some, it was a community meme, wasn't it, sort of three years ago to just outright slander Ubuntu for everything they did. And I do think that those days are sort of generally behind us now.

Yeah, it seems like it was not even a thing, at least in person. And so then you still see some distro shame and things like that online. But I think the other part is that people are looking at what they're doing. They're like, okay, they actually got something they're really working on here. I think there's a lot of excitement for this upcoming LTS in April. Maybe so, Micah. Maybe that is true. I mean, yeah. I think it's still – it's people that are trying to be funny are still going to be able to take a shot at it.

But I think people that are getting work done recognize the fact that they're trying to get something interesting done and accomplished. I don't know. I walk away from scale. I didn't really get the opinion that people shamed Ubuntu. I thought that was a good thing. And there are just a lot of conversations too about CentOS and Debian. Really?

Yeah. That's great. Yeah. That really seemed to come up a lot. So I don't – it is interesting times, and I say good for Canonical for actually reaching out to actual human beings and getting them in London

and paying them for getting feedback on using these applications. Now, what would be really cool is if they published the information. Yeah, let other distros in on that. Yeah. All right, well, let me tell you about something else you can get on.

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Mumble on a droplet. Yeah, yeah. Lots of good stuff. It's a core part of the show infrastructure here. You'd think I would have thought of that. Well, you can try something out. Either little experience or lots of experience. You'd be surprised.

DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-U-M-P-L-U-G-D and a big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay, Wes. Get ready for this one. I hope I don't upset anybody, but I got to ask if Mint is just a little drunk with power. I mean, this seems like biting off way more than anybody would ever want to chew in 2016. You might have heard about it. We covered it in the Linux Action Show.

Linux Mint is getting its own application starting with the Linux 18 branch. We're going to call them XApps for Linux Mint distros, meant to work across multiple desktops. They'll be GTK3 applications with traditional interfaces, i.e. no, you know, CSD, what do they call them? Client-side decorations with the header bars.

Yeah. No client-side decoration header bars. And the idea would be that anybody could really take these on, but they're really going to be meant for the Cinnamon Mate and XFCE desktops. And this is part of the Mint's project of sticking to their guns and you might say eschewing new design trends. They say we've all witnessed the rise of the iPad and the iPhone. This is in the Mint blog.

And this has created a whole bunch of new trends, but we will not be swayed by those trends. And so X apps are going to be introduced. And, you know, I think it's – is it Clem that wrote this? Yeah, Clem that wrote this. Clem talks about some of the challenges he's run into with GNOME 3.18 and things that depend on that and moving that into Mint. It's just a big mess. And so the whole idea here is X apps,

X app, X apps. And my initial reaction was a little strong. I don't know. I wanted to kind of consult with the lug and see if maybe I was overreactive. Maybe there's a point I'm missing. I definitely want to pick Wimpy's brain. So let's start with you, Wimpy. What do you think about X apps and

what Linux Mint is doing here? I've got lots of thoughts about this. I've been very careful not to criticize or rag on other distributions and projects since Ubuntu Mate got started. So everything I'm about to say isn't intended as a bashing or a ragging on Linux Mint. It's my opinion. So if anyone thinks I'm trying to dog on them, that's really not what it's about. I want to say, too, I have a lot of respect for Clem.

He's worked really hard, and he's built a very good distro that I raved about the last version. Yeah. I do understand where this comes from. Yeah. I do understand where this comes from. So I understand technically why Clem probably feels this is necessary. And I'm active in my local community with small businesses and home users, and I can also see why they don't give a fig for these fancy new desktops.

If you look at what's happened with Windows, a lot of people are really disenfranchised with Windows now. These are home users and small business users that just need their computer to do stuff they don't care for all of these redesigns of the user interfaces they just want the look and feel that they're familiar with so they can carry on their merry way so there are an awful lot of people out there who who don't move in technical circles, who are quite happy to stay the course with traditional user environments. So I can understand why Clem would want to do this. And it's been a while now, but there was some discussion within the Marte and Linux Mint teams

and a couple of others from some of the other projects, although I think they may have moved on now, about one idea was potentially forking a toolkit. So looking at forking GTK2 and retrofitting. Modernizing where needed. Yeah, and the other idea was forking gtk3 so that we could establish a um i use the word stable to represent a a non-changing api rather than suggest that gtk3 is an unstable buggy platform because it isn't the issue with gtk3 that a lot of the projects that are

trying to write against it are encountering certainly you know for for full desktops is that it's uh it's a moving target and it's difficult you know with each new version of gtk3 there's new features that primarily target gnome 3 right and it requires an awful lot of work for the other projects to actually adapt to those changes. So with that as a backdrop, you can understand why forking these projects to create X apps is an idea. And we did discuss this idea of creating a common set of cross-desktop applications. And at the time, we were talking about looking at what Cinnamon required, what Mate required, what XFCE required, and what LXDE required. And the aspiration was that all of those desktop environments

could collaborate and work together on a common set of things. That sounds very nice. That sounds nice. Yeah, it does. I mean, it's a sensible suggestion. Rather than having four different file browsers and four different text editors and so on and so on, that you will coalesce around a common set of applications. But then, of course, there's nothing to differentiate them. And one of the reasons there's all these different desktop environments on Linux is because people have different wants and needs and they want to go their own way and do their different thing.

So there was never going to be sort of broad agreement from all of those desktop environments about which way to go and which of the file managers would be the chosen one and all the rest of it. So I imagine that's how Clem has got to the point he's got to now, which is to effectively go and cherry-pick different applications that are out there and bring those in under this banner of x apps to use in linux mint to sustain this you know traditional environment and i think you said at the weekend that you know um they weren't mint weren't keeping up they'd stuck their head in the sands and they weren't adopting header bars and client-side decorations. But by and large, most of the other desktops aren't either.

I mean, XFCE have started to, or rather, Zubuntu. Sometimes the lines are a bit blurred between XFCE and Zubuntu. But certainly within Zubuntu, some of the newer applications that have come along, some of the settings, bits and bobs that they've added recently, those use header bars and client-side decorations. I don't know if that's a trend that XFCE is going to follow or if it's just for a few bits and pieces that they've developed recently. It seems like that would be the real winner here for these X apps if Zubuntu and other distros started to also. Yeah. As far as I can remember, there was not enough

engagement, and obviously LXDE are going with Qt now, so they're kind of out of that discussion. Besides XFCE, it's kind of just Cinnamon and Mate who are the ones they're talking about here. Yeah, and I also acknowledge... No, there's two others.

There's two others, And there's elementary. True. That's true. Yes, that's a good one. They do seem to be adopting client-side decoration and header bars. I think that's their, you know, the direction they're headed in from what I've seen. I think that's where they're going. But here's an interesting one.

Unity is not a client-side decoration header bar right desktop environment yeah canonical have been actively patching out client-side decorations and header bars from those forked applications that unity is built upon and continue to do so you know i i still see this come up in the um you know the ubuntu desktop irc channel from time to time when a new version comes out and somebody has to go in there and refactor the patches to remove it. So in some respects, you know, GNOME is trailblazing this and it's not that the other desktop environments aren't keeping up. They're choosing not to do it. I wonder if this isn't the perfect timing for something like this. He's got to be looking ahead at the desktop for the next couple of years and going.

The demand for a really well-done, tightly controlled, Linux-based traditional desktop is only going to go up. Safe, easy to use, pretty predictable. I mean, Clem has been very shrewd in the way that he's put Mint together and he's clearly listened to his user community. And I should imagine this is what they want. But I think forking the applications is not the way to go. And this sounds a bit strange. As somebody involved in Marte, which is one of those big forking efforts,

in some respects, I think we've been justified in doing that because initially it was more about um sort of refuse nicks people didn't want to adopt the new thing but now it's more about preserving what was gnome 2 uh and and keeping that you know usable desktop paradigm available for you know the next generation of people to you know use um i think that just keep forking things and it's a lot of it's a lot of work and i think these x apps will only ever be available in Mint. I don't see that they will. They will get used much, if at all, outside of Mint's ecosystem. A couple of things strike me about this that make it seem like a challenging long-term strategy.

X apps and the avoidance of client-side decorations. So client-side decorations, like Tyler points out, doesn't look super great on non-Gnome desktops. I've actually not really had a problem with them, but then again, I'm kind of a fan. And I want to make a difference here. We need to be clear. Client-side decorations and the header bar in Gnome are two different things.

Client-side decorations is simply how the decoration is drawn on the client window. And the Gnome header bar is a certain implementation of a client-side decoration. So the reason why that's sort of important to understand going into this conversation is client-side decorations are going to become more critical when we move to Wayland. And because it'll no longer be up to the X server to draw the decoration because there won't be an X server. So the client will be responsible for

its own decorations, hence client-side decorations. It's not just for vanity, it's also to support Wayland better. So what Mint is also saying here with these X apps is they're saying Wayland is not in our future. Maybe.

Maybe that is what they're saying. And what I would add to that is what they're saying um and what i would what i would add to that is that um all of the energy almost all of the energy in the mate team at the moment is focused on gtk3 um and that we had a 1.10 release April-ish last year. That was the first experimental version of GTK3. We had a 1.12 release towards the end of last year, and that was a much improved GTK3 implementation, still considered experimental. We've got 1.13, which is just trickling out as testing tarballs at the moment. I think about three-quarters of the components are out with 1.13 which is uh just trickling out as um testing tar balls at the moment i think about

three quarters of the components are out with um 1.13 and with 1.14 to follow uh early this year and we're getting to the point now where we've only got a handful of sort of issues to overcome for where GTK3 is a really targetable platform. Unfortunately, GTK 3.20 has thrown a couple of spanners in the works. So we tried to adjust our release cadence to match GNOME and GTK3 because we hadn't had that many regressions to cope with in the last couple of cycles. But a lot of stuff's busted this time. So it's just difficult, just as we were about to go for it. Just as you get comfortable.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, Marte is supporting GTK3, and we do have support for client-side decorations. GTK3 and we do have support for client-side decorations. And some of the applications that I ship by default in Ubuntu Mate do use client-side decorations. They don't look horrible. They just look a bit different, but they work just fine. They do work. Yeah, that's a good point. See, this is what we're now... This is sort of – I see three tracks in the Ubuntu-based distro world, the heavy hitters. Of course, I do not mean to take away from Kubuntu or Zubuntu or Neon or whatever. But you have yourself in one corner the Unity default desktop, which is going to be undergoing radical changes like we've never seen, from a transition from GTK to QT and apps that are designed

for both mobile and desktop, and that powered by an entirely new display server called Mirror. That's in corner number one, the primary contender. In corner number two, you have Ubuntu Mate Edition, where you have a traditional desktop paradigm, but is integrating current technologies in a very logical, reasonable fashion. And keeping up. Right. And then, but that could mean in some circumstances your apps look a little different or things

are just a little different, like maybe system D sneaks in there, right? These kinds of horrible things, right? But, and then in corner number three, you now have Linux Mint 18, which as Clem promises in his blog post, will give you one button to make it look exactly like Linux Mint 17. So that way nothing looks any different. Nothing changes. It's going to be, again, based on a very long-term support. And these X apps are now going to be a thing.

And I'm two minds of this because it's like these are three very unique and very radical approaches in their own right in a belief of what the desktop should be. And so that's my first thought. And then my second thought is, man, as a reviewer, this is really going to be a treat because now these are three very unique and distinct beasts that, you know, fully deserve their own review. And in the case of Mint, you know, I'm going to be using different apps. I mean, yeah, they're maybe going to be very similar, but they're going to be their own review. And in the case of Mint, you know, I'm going to be using different apps. I mean, yeah, they're maybe going to be very similar,

but they're going to be their own set. I mean, it's really its own unique experience. And in some ways, it is sort of like this. I actually shouldn't leave out elementary OS. No, you shouldn't. It fits right in here. There's a fourth corner, Wes, with elementary OS. The ring is getting full.

There's a fifth corner as well, because LXQT is going to be a thing this year as well. Oh, a new contender enters with the sixth ring. The six rings of Ubuntu. And they all are extremely fascinating,

all based on one mother distro, if you will. I just find that to be really... Which are all based on Debian. I find it to be really interesting Which are all based on Debian. I find it to be really interesting the way it's all shaping out. I guess in that regard, more power to the Mint team.

I mean, Clem brought in more funding for his project than ever. I wonder how many of these there will be. And they might be good. I like Nemo, the file browser. It's not bad. If they fit in really well and they maybe somewhat limited feature set and they just perform well and are well integrated and easy to use, then maybe it'll work. Well, if you zoom out and take it to its ultimate conclusion, this is what's really happening here is these individual groups are taking Linux and they're truly building their

own platform and their own desktop vision on top of it. They are not necessarily trying to make a distro that plays with all other distros. They are trying to make a desktop experience or a mobile experience in some cases that is a unique platform all into their own. And Linux is the software that is making that possible, but it's not what's defining what it must be. No, it's kind of just at the bottom of the stack, hiding away. Yeah. Just like with Android. Exactly, or Chrome OS.

Yep. But just a little closer. That's an interesting time. All right. We should go to this Dell Linux distro. Right. We should go to this Dell Linux distro. Speaking of distributions that are – this one, I would argue, may actually – well, you know what? I'm just going to – you're not even going to believe it.

But first, let's talk about Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, please. Why don't you go there to support this show, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, and read more about a great education platform to learn not just about Linux, but all of the technology around it. I'm going to tell you more about that in a second. But first, for those of you who have heard about Linux Academy before, I should mention they have recently had some major updates. New courses, Ansible and AWS courses. Advanced AWS security. What's up, Docker and Elastic Beanstalk?

They have a new Cloud Cadet episode. It's a new series they're doing. And also, I love it, they now have a mobile app they're working on. But on top of all of that, I've mentioned they have group accounts before. Taking it up a notch. Now you've got big old enterprise accounts. Big old enterprise accounts, Wes, where you can have big groups and sub-teams. Linux Academy is really stepping up to the next level here. So if you've got an organization, I encourage you to go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. This is a great resource. Started by Linux enthusiasts who first thought, well, how do we spread the word?

I'm so excited about this technology. Let's go spread the word. Now they teamed up with friends that are developers and educators, and they created the Linux Academy platform. Now they've gotten some success, you might say. I think so. You might say. And as a result of that, they've been expanding their team,

bringing their content up, refreshing it, keeping it current. They have an incredible system where there are seven-plus Linux distributions you get to choose from, and you choose that distro. Man, that's so many. It automatically adjusts the courseware, which when we were trying to figure out how to Linux, we were running through ideas like this. And when I saw this, I was like, okay, that's cool.

And I remember I was talking to Anthony about it. He's like, yeah, but it doesn't just change the courseware. It also adjusts the virtual machines that we spin up on demand right as the courseware calls for it. You SSH into it. It's the same environment you chose earlier. It's really slick. They have over 2,200 self-paced courses. These are great courses.

You can go in there self-paced, so you do it at your own convenience at a speed that is comfortable to you. And you can also set up timelines and reminders. They have scenario-based labs that put you in the middle of tasks common to everyday environments. Instructor help is available when you need it. They have graded server exercises so you can get immediate feedback. They have AWS training, so when you need to do something on AWS, they spin so you can get immediate feedback. They have AWS training so when you need to do something on AWS, they spin up those instances.

You don't got to worry about Amazon charging you a whole bunch of monies. They have a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, live events where you can ask the instructors questions or get news directly from Linux Academy folks.

It's a really great way to run an academy. It's a great resource for our audience and it's a super cool way to support our show. So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, and a big thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. I'm telling you, that instructor help is so valuable for a topic like this. Yeah, no kidding.

All right, so Dell is, well, you know what? Maybe they've been looking at Ubuntu Snappy, and they're thinking to themselves, hey, this might not be such a bad idea. So Dell is launching its own Linux distribution. Get hyped, everybody. Get hyped. All right. I'll tell you the name.

You've all been patient. It's not Super Dell OS? They're calling it OS X. Wait. Isn't there an operating system called that already? I think so. Yeah. Only this one isn't with an X.

It's with a 1 and a 0. OS X. Well, that's a little more clear, actually. This is unbelievable. This is their Linux distro called OS X, and they plan to make it a strategic operating system offering, expanding Dell switches and their storage products. OS X is based on a native, and I like that they're promoting this.

As somebody who's worked in the enterprise west, have you ever heard this term before? A customized, hardened Linux kernel? Yeah, right? Here's a new spin. This is a 2016 spin on this. An unmodified Linux kernel. Is that stock, Chris?

That's their marketing. An unmodified Linux kernel that can support a broad range of applications and services from the Linux ecosystem, Dell officials say. That can support a broad range of applications and services from the Linux ecosystem, Dell officials say. Dell claims this differentiates from Kumulus' network, Kumulus Linux, and HP's OpenSwitch because this one's meant for open network systems because of open. Yep. OS X is – I can't believe I'm saying that. It's comprised of a base module and various operational application modules separated to offer choice control and programmability. I'm going to get me some of those application modules later. Yeah, because you get control.

This is an alternative where things are bundled tightly. Essentially, what Dell has done here, tell me if this reminds you of something. Separation of the OS X application modules from the base modules allows customers to tailor IT operations for different use cases and operational processes. Dell didn't comment if they're just forking Ubuntu Snappy or if they just- I think it's FreeBSD. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

So they've got, they're basically doing the Ubuntu Snappy thing or the FreeBSD thing where you have your base OS and the applications are separated out. And the base OS is a read-write or read-only image. And they're calling it OS 10. OS 10. Maybe it's in binary. Is it? 1-0.

I just don't understand what's wrong with Dell. Because at one hand, Dell's watching the Linux scene and totally into it, releasing drivers and stuff. Dell's like watching the Linux scene and totally into it, releasing drivers and stuff. Like it was this week it's announced that Dell's about to ship a new XPS developer edition based with Skylake processors, which means they're taking like $100 off the Broadwell ones right now if you want them, which are probably better. I have the Broadwell XPS. I think mine's Broadwell. I don't know.

And I think it's a pretty good machine. And I would not get it with high DPI, and you get a bunch more battery life and better video performance. Yeah. Better application support. So you have one hand – on one hand, Dell keeps revving a pretty damn nice machine. On the other hand, they're launching their own custom Linux called OS X. What is – That said, it would be kind of nice to be running a nice Dell switch in production and be like, hey,

it's Linux and I know how it works. I don't know how you'll see it, though. Wimpy caught your binary joke and you have an observation. Go ahead, Wimpy. So, the first is they've missed a trick because I wonder if they're trolling Apple here and they're just expecting

to smack down. And this is just, you know, to they're trolling Apple here and they're just expecting to get the smack down. I know, right? And this is just, you know, to get it out in the press and they'll rename it after the dust settles. But why isn't it, you know, Dell OS, it goes to 11? You know, call back to Spinal Tap. And if it's binary, then it's OS 2. So neither of them work particularly well. Yeah, right.

Exactly. We've had both of those. It's like the worst possible name. Yeah, yeah. So either way, they're new or wrong. Well, Xapps is worse, but... Yeah, Xapps is worse. Jacob in the chat room is asking

if I'll update my XPS 13 to OS 10. Yeah, sure. I'll run OS 10 on my XPS 13. Just ask me... Yeah, it's just... This is just a train wreck, though. Instead of the PIX, it'll be the top application module. I know run OS X on my XPS 13. Just ask me. Yeah, it's just a train wreck, though. Instead of the PIX, it'll be the top application module. It's almost a joke.

It is almost a joke, but it is actually true. And I don't know. Maybe somebody out there will have experience with it. Was there a Dell OS 9? Yeah, they went straight to 10. No, that's what I'm wondering. No, that's what I'm wondering. Is it just something built for data centers that I wasn't aware of that just had its 10th release?

Or is this a completely new thing? No, in fact, I've had clients that have had Dell switches, and they did not call it that. They didn't call it OS. No, that is funny. Wow. Well, there you go. There's Marketing 101. We're watching it right here.

Just go straight to 10. The next show we announce, we just got to call it 10. Start with episode 10. Call it 10. That's ridiculous. Well, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. You'll find a feedback thread for 130 stories, community, like spotlights or callouts, anything like that. Application modules.

Yeah, sure, sure. Application modules separated from your base OS. Those are welcome at linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Also, I'd love to get your help supporting the entire network at patreon.com. Today we have a lot of big things in the works, and we want to do it from community funding instead of commercial funding. And if you'd ship in, Chris posts a lot of fun updates on that page. Just for the patrons, that's true. Yeah, right, just for the patrons.

Patreon.com. Today it supports all of our shows. Don't forget to join us live. Oh, updates on that page. Just for the patrons. Yeah, right? Just for the patrons. Patreon.com slash today. It supports all of our shows. Don't forget to join us live. Oh, hey there, Wes. Hey there, Chris. Hey there, Wes. Join us live next Tuesday.

We do this show Tuesdays live. Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for that. We invite you to join us at jblive.tv. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Athletics Unplugged. Now that I'm done smacking microphones I'm gonna get the hell out of here see you next week see ya All right, jbtitles.com, let's vote.

Oh, Wimpy, I love that. Tell me about your New Year's resolution. Yeah, so I've obviously been consuming independent content for some time now. You don't say. Yeah, it's true. It's really true. And I was thinking about, you know, New Year's resolutions and what have you, like everyone does at the end of the last year. And I, you know, wrote up the usual list of New Year's resolutions, you know, go to the gym more often, eat healthily, have my alcohol intake to 60 units

a week all that sort of thing and um after i did that i thought no i'm i never keep these resolutions so let's try and think of one i'm actually going to keep so i i decided right i'm going to support all of these independent uh content creators and then i thought well how do i how do i do that how much am I gonna spend on this so you might be familiar with the fact that in the UK we pay for a TV license yeah and yet that supports the BBC so I looked at how much that cost a year and I took the exact same amount and I have spread that amount of money across all of the content creators that I consume content for. So I'm effectively paying the same amount as I pay for my UK TV license for all of the

independent content creators that I listen to and watch. I like that too. That's really cool. Yeah, I'm working on something kind of similar. I was looking at the price of satellite TV where I'm at. And I think I'm going to figure out how much that is. And then first, I'm going to contribute that to independent media. And then once – if I'm comfortable doing that, then maybe I'll let myself.

Then maybe you'll get the – And I actually feel like that's actually – since I've done that, I'm more comfortable at Patreon, signing up on Patreon. It's like it's all really like set-top boxes now, it's easier on the go to get online content a million times over than it is to get traditional. Yeah, right. Especially for someone like you who's roving all over the place. Quite literally. Yeah, good point, Wimpy. All right.

While I finish up, I'm going to ask you, Wes. Uh-oh. And then you – I mean somebody in the moment room, anybody in the mobile room is willing and can answer. But, Wes, what would you do? What would happen? How screwed would you be if GitHub shut down tomorrow? Hmm. If GitHub went away off the internet, totally offline.

I would be mildly inconvenienced. Too. Quite frustrated after about a day or so. How would I update YouTube to yell? See, this is the thing, is I think the way it would impact me is all of the open source stuff I use that's on GitHub that would be like offline, like AUR things would break. Updates would get rough. Mumberum, anybody in there have any thought, how screwed would you be if GitHub went offline tomorrow? I think it will...

Sorry, Fritzl, go ahead. I think the primary thing for the Linux community would be that, like, for example, AUR, a lot of AUR packages pull sources directly from GitHub a lot of people who use Go applications would be screwed because Go resolves dependencies by downloading stuff directly from GitHub I have

for the reasons that there is a chance of GitHub going down, I do have a private Git instance running on the server that has a lot of stuff that I need, but it would be massive inconvenience. I would have access to my own stuff and all the dependencies that I need for my own stuff,

but if I want to install something completely new, yeah, it would be horrible. Yeah, that's kind of my take on it. Like, it would be, you know, because if I want to install something completely new, yeah, it would be horrible. Yeah, that's kind of my take on it. Hey, you know, because if you had a... Because Git, it writes Git, so your own code you theoretically... Yeah, you have on your own machine. It's all the other stuff you depend on that probably doesn't have...

Everything's a mirror. You don't have local... Now, Freesaw, do you have a way to bring that mic closer to your mouth? Because we're getting a lot of room echo and background noise on you. Go ahead, Wimpy. Well, I was just going to say that, yes, for all of those other dependent services, a lot of things would stop working. or an individual that puts stuff in, something like GitHub or Trello or Bitbucket even, there are tools out there to back up your stuff so that if GitHub or Bitbucket or any of those go away,

you actually have your own copy of your data. And a lot of people think that simply having a checkout of githubs enough but if you're an organization with lots of developers with with code checked out that's not actually a recovery position so you know if you're using those services you should be routinely mirroring your repositories to your own instances inside your organization so if if it goes away, you can just repoint your origins and carry on. Very well said. Well, here's why I can feel that I'm slipping, because I am coming up with more and more ideas to use Slack for,

and now I'm realizing, okay, this is starting to speed up to a pace where if I don't watch out, this is going to become irreplaceable. And I have learned that lesson. I have learned that lesson. So now I'm putting a plea, a call out to anybody who could help me get a Mattermost install. Ideally, I'd like to put one on a DigitalOcean droplet because that's where I manage all my stuff. I would like to do it there. If anybody has – anybody wants to help me with that, I would love to chat with you because it's happening fast. And not only that, but I have ideas that I want to take public and it would just make

sense to have people, if I'm going to work with people in the public, it would make sense to do it on Mattermost and not require people to sign up for Slack and things like that. Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah. So I'm putting a call out there if anybody does have any experience with Mattermost or a Slack alternative. I know like there's Trello and things like that, but I want something ideally that would be on my own droplet

that I can take snapshots of and things like that. So Wimpy, you say you're about to play with it? No, not about to play with it. No, it's on the very long list of things to do. Yeah, I could see how there's a lot of... I guess I didn't... I guess I didn't take Slack seriously first, and like it's IRC,

and I have Telegram. I have IRC and I have Telegram. Why do I need Slack? But the really nice thing about... One really nice thing about Slack... I don't even know if Mattermost supports this. Well, first of all, it has a good phone app, which is really nice, because if I have an idea on the go, I can just quickly open up Slack and throw something in there. And it can include a picture or audio.

That's super nice. But the other thing that Slack really nails, and I don't have any experience with Mattermost, is switching teams. So I can be a member. I'm like a member of three Slacks right now. Right. Yeah. I have two. a member. I'm like a member of three slacks right now. Right, yeah. I have two. That is, that is.

So that way, because for me, it's all about divisioning off things because I work on things as, you know, I have time for them. And being able to slice things up like that is really nice. And you can just ignore one for a while. Yes.

If you need it, just don't look at it. And I have no idea if Mattermost has anything like that. Right. So having heard of Slack, but never used it, and having used IRC and Telegram, how does Slack differ from Telegram and IRC? Well, so a few things that are nice about Slack is it's persistent chat for everybody. So regardless of anybody's client setup, they're always getting all of the chat history,

even if it's stuff that they weren't present for. It has bot integration, which is actually kind of handy. And, of course, any major service it has integrations for. So, for example, we have a bot that monitors the Google Calendar. And whenever there's a calendar change, it sends those changes to a specific channel. And it also does a daily check of the calendar and posts the recording schedule to the channel. And this has helped us. I mean, it sounds like a really dumb, simple thing,

but it has helped us keep the calendar accurate. It's like the thing that's helped us make the calendar accurate now is because there's a thread where we're seeing we have to look at the calendar every day. Every show that we do has a next thread, so the next episode of that show. So that way we can, we have a spot to communicate with the people who are involved in each of those episodes, what we need to have in place for the next episode. And what's really nice about that is if you like, if you link a YouTube video, it will preview the YouTube video right there in Slack

or you can get the link. It doesn't do a bunch of crazy redirector URLs. You can just get nice, clean links. It has support for a lot of – you can just plus one a comment instead of having to say I agree. That's kind of nice. It has support for some offline functionality, and it has limited markdown support. It has like code snippet support and things like that that are also nicer than you get with any typical IRC client. And really the thing about it is there's a ton of good IRC clients and Telegram and things like that, but what you get with Slack is every single person is on the same playing field as far as functionality and capabilities go.

And then the other nice thing that comes with that is a lot of people know Slack already. Just like one of the great things about using Skype is a lot of people use Skype. One of the nice things about using Google Docs is a lot of people have a Google account and use Google Docs. And it's the same thing now with Slack

is when I invited Wes to the Linux Unplugged Slack, he already had a Slack account. He was already set up. Easy peasy. Yeah. So there's that too. Okay. So it is a sort of – it's taking IRC and abstracting away some of those bits that you

would have to have an admin set up for you. Yeah, and then making it super easy to integrate things like Dropbox and Google Docs. And, you know, so like if I post a link to a Google – like I'll say, okay, the doc is up for this week's episode of Unplugged. And when I post that link in there, it gives it a big Google Doc button. It's obvious that it's Google Docs. Like it's sort of intelligent about that kind of stuff. It's all – and I guess – and then, of course, you get all of that and it takes you a grand total of 30 seconds to set up a Team Slack, which is also very nice. Right.

And like anyone can do it or set it up. Well, that's the other thing is it's pretty much free until you want like fancy stuff like maybe private channels or – Archiving of messages. Yeah. But even then, like you still get an incredible history. Like it's still ridiculous. Like 10,000 messages. Yeah, but even then, like, you still get an incredible history. Like, it's still ridiculous. Like, it's like 10,000 messages or something. So, and then it's $8 per user, basically, after that.

And it costs you your freedom, of course. Yeah, and if you really want some of the fancy integrations, you have to have, like, a Heroku account, and you have to host some of the apps on there, which means you're using another closed platform. But then you can really start doing some serious shit that is, you know, people are really integrating, like, with their business workflows and stuff.

And there's a lot of support for people who do development work and get integration and things like that that I don't ever use. I've made a few Slack integrations. They're pretty easy. Yeah, like, what kind of things? Like, we have an alert console at work for things that happen.

And so we just made it so, so like if you're away from that and you want it to ping you on Slack, it'll just send all the new alerts, new emails for things we like share inboxes right to Slack. See this is the problem is there is a community now out there that knows how to do this and if I go to something like Mattermost, I'm

forfeiting that. We gotta start making some Mattermost plugins I guess. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that could be the goal is to get enough traction publicly that. We got to start making some Mattermost plugins, I guess. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that could be the goal is to get enough traction publicly that people get interested to build that stuff. I'll help set up a Mattermost server. Have you done it? Or you're just willing to take that challenge on? I would like to play with one.

No, I'll take the challenge to set one up. Well, you know what, Ham? If you do it, build it on a DO droplet because then if it works,, you could transfer it to me, and then I could just start paying for it. Okay, sure. I've got some instructions on how to build, do it on a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Yeah, so just use one of our promo codes, right?

So you'll get two, you can try it out two months for free. Actually, build it on a nicer rig. So do like one with one gig of RAM, just that way, because I like to do one gig of RAM now. So do a 1 gig of RAM rig. Chris is going premium up in here. And then I'll get you one month to build it, and then you transfer it to me, and I'll just start paying for it.

I've already used your promo code, so they won't let me use them again. All of them? All of them? What's the latest one? Good man. No, it's just, you have, okay, you could use Coder Digital or Last Digital, right? Or, let's see. We got here, you got SnapOcean, DO, you could use Coder Digital or Last Digital, right? Or let's see. We got here.

You got SnapOcean, DO Unplugged. Use DO Unplugged. Support this show. SnapOcean, Coder Digital, or Last Digital. I've been pushing that DO Unplugged, man. Good man. Good man. That's right.

Anyways, I'm just saying. Yeah, probably only one promo code per. I don't know exactly how it works. But either way. Or, you know what? For God's sakes, Ham, I'll send you the $10, whatever it takes. But I would love if... I got a big...

I got something I want to do. I want to go big. All right, boy. That's a sign I'm done. Woo! I might just walk out of the studio.