LINUX Unplugged - Episode 136: There's a Snap for That | LUP 136

Episode Date: March 16, 2016

The future of Linux package management is here & there’s a lot of ideas on how to solve it. We discuss some of the more popular ones & how they might be impacting your Linux desktop much sooner than you expect.Plus that awkward moment when a traditional desktop environment adopts a controversial UI modern element, the new generation of “perfect” Linux laptops & more!

You know, Wes, we've got this wonderful Apollo laptop here. Beautiful. I got it from Entroware as an extended test here. They sent it over, and I've been using it now as the main show. And it's such a nice-looking laptop that I don't really want to put stickers on it because it feels like this laptop is going to outlive any one particular sticker. Totally. So then I thought, well, you know what I'll do is I'll get those vinyl sticker mats for the whole back of the screen.

It does have a nice, beautifully clean back. Yeah. So you just get one roughly the shape of a MacBook Pro or MacBook 13, whatever they're called. And I'll put the stickers on that. So I got a couple of different ones. And they take a little time to be made, so they're still getting delivered. The first one I got, I just wanted a canvas to put cool stickers from Fests on because when you go to these Fests, you just get –

Stickers abound. Yeah. So the first one I got is just a real nice – it's kind of hard to see. It looks a little blue because there's blue lighting in the studio. But it's just a wood grain vinyl sticker. You see that there, Wes? Very tasteful. Just a nice wood grain.

Oh, yeah. And I'll just – I thought because it's brown, white stickers would really pop on this. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So this is going to be one that I can take on and off. And these can be applied and removed and then reapplied. And then the other one I got, because I thought it would maybe match my outfit very often on the Linux Action Show, is a red plaid sticker.

You see that? I got a red plaid for the back of the Apollo. So I can be wearing red plaid, and the Apollo can be red plaid, and it can be double red plaid and last now. This is amazing. Yeah, I'm really happy about this one, too. So that'll be going on the back of the Apollo. That'll be the first one I'm rocking. I'm really excited for Red Cloud.

Very nice. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 136 for March 15th, 2016. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's getting in Lady Jupiter and going to pick up the ham radio. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. That's my plan, at least.

We'll see. The weekend before LinuxFest Northwest, I'm going to see if Noah wants to take a road trip in Lady Jupiter and go pick up ham radio to help assemble the LinuxFest crew. Guess what, Wes? Big show today. Yeah, big show. Big show. You know, there's a few things we need to talk about.

Some new Linux hardware that people are really excited about, and we're going to talk about some of the interesting things around that. Mozilla's got something new that I'm really looking forward to. I'm excited to share that. Later on in the show, we'll talk about our snappy future. And if these snap packages, snappy packages are really, you know, they are coming. Are they really advantageous? There actually seems to be a pretty good solid pro and cons list. And there's one potential thing that sort of reeks of issues of the past. We'll discuss that and a few of the security issues

around snappy packages. See what people think. See what they think, Wes. Absolutely. And then, I've been tracking a particular drama since about 2013. Gnome client-side decorations. Love them or hate them. Starting in Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu Mate will have, or Matei, will have support for client-side decorations, popover menus,

shadows around borders. So much fanciness. Yeah, Wimpy spent some time getting everything up to snuff, and we're going to talk about client-side decorations a little more. Not going to spend a lot of time on it, but we're just going to talk a little bit about why a traditional-style desktop like Ubuntu Mate might be doing something like this. So we got all that, plus we got the updates to do before we get into the show.

It's just too much stuff, Wes. It's too much stuff. Let's get started. Let's get started by bringing in that mumble room. Time for appropriate greetings, mumble room. Hello. Hello. Good evening.

Hello, everybody. So, guys, Wes brought something real special into the studio today. You know, as hosts of your virtual lug, we like to have a couple of brewskis because, really, I don't know if you've ever been to a meetup or a lug. I have. But the best ones that I've been to a meetup or a lug. I have. But the best ones that I've been to were at a restaurant where they were serving beer. Usually they're at schools or libraries. Something a little more tame.

Yeah. So that's what I – You can't really let your Linux flag fly. No, that's right. That's right. That's what I like about Linux Unplugged's virtual lug is you get to bring your own booze. And we like to just have a beer. We're not going crazy.

We're not getting stupid. We have a show to do. Actually, I mean we do sometimes get stupid. But that like to just have a beer. We're not going crazy. We're not getting stupid. We have a show to do. Actually, I mean, we do sometimes get stupid. But that's not related to the beer. No. So Wes brought two couple of unique beers in, both from the same brewery, but different types. Mine is the Ribstop Rye Pills from Base Camp Brewery out of Portland, Oregon, Wes.

They even put their GPS coordinates on the metal can. Easy to find. Yeah. So there you go. And then Wes is drinking the Intense IPL. Intense. Like a tent? Whoa.

Hey. Fun city over here. From Basecamp. You got a BA score of 85 on your brewskis, and I got a BA of 85 on mine. So both rated very good from the beer advocate community. And these bottles are beautiful. Very beautiful, and I'm really enjoying this beer. Yeah, right?

Yeah, it's really a good beer. So anyways, Base Camp at a Portland, Oregon. Great beer to go with your Linux. Wes, you know I spotted this story a couple of days ago, and I dropped it in our thread and said, we've got to talk about this thing. Here it is right here. I got this here. This one here is the Raspberry Pi 2.

Could you tell by looking at it? Can you tell? No. There's a couple of ways you can tell. If you look at the Raspberry Pi, there's a little- Field guide to the Raspberry Pi. This is your quick guide right here. If you want to know if it's a Raspberry 1, 2, or 3, you know it's a Raspberry Pi 3 if

there's a little Wi-Fi, a little white Wi-Fi antenna right there, and then nothing on the corresponding side. That's one quick way. Also, this HDMI port has this little color thing on there that's not there on the newer one. Anyways, so the Raspberry Pi 3, pretty nice device, but the first thing I thought when I saw this thing was, geez, I really now

want the ability to boot from USB storage. Yeah. I'm sick of the SD card thing. I want just a big disk. Turns out that was actually a feature they enabled in the Raspberry Pi 3. Really? And Western Digital didn't take any time. They're capitalizing on this. They got a $46, 314 gigabyte hard drive built just for the Raspberry Pi.

The Pi drive! It's based on a Western Digital Blue. And one of the things that's kind of unique about it is its interface. It's got a little USB interface there. It's a slim profile drive. Oh, that's cute. Yeah. They say it would normally cost about $45 a gigabyte.

No, I'm sorry, $45 for the drive. They're selling it right now at $34.42. Seven millimeter high drive. It's just based on the regular blue drives you'd see in a laptop. They're going to also include with a Barry bootloader to make it easier to run multiple OS's from the same drive hooked up to your Pi. That's funny.

I could see that getting included in some of those kits though. I was watching in my Google Plus feed, a lot of people are ordering this. So people are excited about this. Anybody seen this? Would you add a hard drive to your Raspberry Pi? You know, $46, you get 314 gigabytes. I definitely would if I had one just to be able to do what I want to do with it.

Is that a media center? Because that was one of my first thoughts. Yeah, media center pretty much. You know, just have something small or maybe I want to do media center and IRC local server, you know, could do two things with it easily. That's also enough for like if you kept this as your on-to-go media server, you could sync down from Plex or whatever. That's what I was just going to say. That's enough for a pretty reasonable moving library. I've been coming up with – I've been trying to come up with a solution for an offline storage for my library that makes it easy to work with.

And being able to hang something off a Raspberry Pi moves that Raspberry Pi up a notch in my list. Pretty cool. And the price, $46 for 314 gigabytes. My first hard drive was 20 megabytes. So, yeah. That's still in production? Is that what you're saying?

No, no, no, no. Wes, have you heard of Servo? Yes, I have. I'm actually legitimately excited about Servo because we finally got ourselves, well, a rough ship date of like June, was it, I think? June. June. Servo. That's very specific.

Well. June. Which could be like the very end of June. I don't even know if there's a – I mean I assume they mean this June, but I don't know if it's said. Could be. A June. Yeah, could be. It could be like June 2018.

A June. Yeah, it could be. It could be like June 2018. Servo is a modern – permanent – modern performant browser engine designed to be super fast. Everything is of multiprocess. But outside of that, it's built on Rust, which is interesting, which I think is maybe the most interesting thing about it. It's coming out of the Mozilla Research Division, and they're building it for Linux and what's that? The Mac and Android. You know, it's funny.

They don't list Windows on here. But they do say Linux, 64-bit Linux. 64-bit Linux. And Firefox OS. What are you looking forward to? Well, yeah, sure, sure. What are you looking forward to with Servo? I think it's just neat to see like a project of this scale being built in Rust.

I've enjoyed following Rust's development. I think it's a neat new systems language with a lot of interesting features. So it'll be neat. I don't know. And Gecko's cool, but everyone is, you know, it's WebKit these days or Blink or whatever. So it's kind of interesting to see Mozilla pursuing something new.

And maybe if they can bring some, you know, real improvements to that scene using Rust, that'd be awesome. I would love. I haven't tried it or anything, so I don't know. Go ahead, Rodden. What's cool about it is that Rust, the language, was actually developed because of Servo. Yeah, right.

Which shows you how long they've been working on it, too. Hopefully that means they're getting it right. Yeah. The benchmarking with Red Renderer looks awesome, though. This is the thing. I mean, you guys know if I could switch my workflow over to Firefox, I would. And this could be a huge step towards making people excited again about writing some of the extensions that I use on Chrome and some of that stuff. I find just totally arbitrary example that is not really any kind of real world test other than it happens to affect me directly.

When I use that web app called IRC Cloud, have you ever seen this? Yes, I have. When I use it in Firefox, if I leave the studio like on a computer and I leave it running and I come back the next day, Firefox will be seized up. But not only just that, my entire desktop session will be very, very, very laggy, very laggy. Same thing happens under GNOME Web. Same thing.

Same exact thing, which is a WebKit browser, right? Does not happen under Chrome. In fact, I can pin it to my browser in Chrome and accidentally forget to leave it there for days and days and days and notice zero performance difference. I know this is a silly benchmark, but for

me, it tells me something about the way these applications are architected. That the same exact web application in Chrome seems, yes, Chrome uses more memory up front and all of that, but at the same time it doesn't, after a day, crash my machine. Not a very common work scenario, not a big deal, but for me it makes a difference. Is there a possibility there's also some sort of effect here

with what we see in the Linux world with firmwares, where things are tested for Windows but not Linux? Are things these days kind of just being written for Chrome in mind? I don't know. Could be. Could be. Could be, yeah. So I'm looking forward to seeing them get people excited and fired up.

And Servo. Yeah, and Servo looks really cool. So we like to follow another project we like to follow is this is sort of what this portion of the start of the show has become on Unplugged, is open source projects that we think are interesting that we follow and want to give you updates on. Kitson, you want to jump in on Chrome and using more memory before we move on? Go ahead. Yeah.

I was thinking that might be why it is more performant is because it's keeping that memory fresh in the background rather than perhaps pushing it onto hard disk or swap. Yeah. That could very well much. Also, because even if one tab goes a little wonky, it very often does not affect the other tabs on Chrome. That could help too. So, yeah, good point.

All right. So we'd like to follow the Minecraft project, the future of open source artificial intelligence, intelligence, intelligence. We often hear from Ryan in their videos. They have a new keynote style video, which doesn't work as well for me as some of their other videos. But they do have something pretty cool to announce. You heard of that X Prize there, Wes? Minecraft's going cray. I'd like to introduce founder and CEO of Minecraft, Joshua Montgomery, to tell you about our new announcement.

Thank you, Ryan. Hello, Joshua. I'm Joshua Montgomery, the founder and CEO of Mycroft AI. Mycroft has partnered with Techstars, Vocality, Sprint, Ubuntu, and Lucid Labs in the pursuit of an artificial intelligence platform for the connected home. Today, I'm pleased to announce that Mycroft will be pursuing the IBM Watson AIX Prize. The IBM Watson AIX Prize is a $5 million prize being awarded for significant accomplishments in the field of artificial intelligence. Should we win the prize, the $5 million will be donated to open source projects based on the wishes of our developer community.

To win this prize, we've set a lofty goal. It's our goal to create an artificial intelligence platform that interacts with people so naturally that when you speak to it, you can't tell whether you're speaking to a machine or to a person. That's awesome. To seed this effort, we're providing $250,000 in resources and assigning machine learning expert Jonathan Dorlins to lead the effort. Our first milestone on the road towards this goal is the open source speech to text engine that takes speech and converts it into text both accurately and fast. We're looking for developers, students, and researchers interested in artificial intelligence and in

donating time and effort to the open source community. If you're interested in working with AI and you have a passion for open source, please visit us at openstt.org to find out more information. Together, we can win the IBM Watson AIX Prize. That's interesting. Thank you. There is so much going on in AI right now. It really is. Microsoft today is talking about their AIX initiative. Yeah. Which they're going to be training open. They're going to be some sort of,

oh, I got to look into it more. I said I was going to and I need to. But it looks very interesting. And just in our backyard. Of course, this week, Google's alpha go just go right it it just won a four to one four to one match i guess so the the human one once um it's a really interesting week for artificial intelligence and the minecraft project basically seems to have news almost every week it really does i'm and so far and far, I don't get a sense that they're failing to deliver.

It feels like they're on track and they're doing well. And I'm a little taken aback because not only is it rare these days, it seems like, for a Kickstarter that I've been interested or backed actually to do well. Where's the subtle disappointment? Right, right. But also, this is a really big deal for them not to F up for Linux and open source. And this is an area that's been so

corporate control. I mean, there's open elements to it, but all the big stuff is coming from... It's an area that has been so driven by the marketing strategies of Amazon and Google and Apple and Microsoft with Cortana. This is taking it so much further beyond that.

And so – None of them are extensible like in any way really. At one point I'm like, at what point is the Minecraft project going to crack? At what point does a little upstart new project like this that's doing something so ambitious reach their maximum capacity to handle all of these new partnerships and agreements. I mean I'm – Or when do they get bought and subtly corrupted? Well, they did just get into that accelerator, which should help.

But yeah, I mean it's just something that I worry about because they're so important. Yes. You don't really have a – they're it really. Yeah. But Joshua and Ryan seem to have pretty good heads on their shoulders. So yeah, it's pretty interesting to watch all of that and to see the broader market. So if you're interested, please do. Help them out.

I mean I think this is going to – if things keep going like they're going, this is going to be a big project. Yeah. I'm hoping – here's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping Mycroft test production unit, LinuxFest Northwest, hands-on. Yes. Hands-on, right? That would be the thing. And then, you know, we'd be one of the few places with cameras there.

Maybe we can ask it to play the live stream. Oh, my gosh. That could happen. If you could say MyCraft, MyCraft, play JB Live. You have to get its name right. MyCraft. No, I want to call it Jarvis. You should be able to call it whatever you want, right?

Computer. Wouldn't that be nice? Computer. Computer, play JB Live. And then it starts the stream. That would be so awesome. So I'm hoping we get our hands on it because we're going to have cameras there. We're going to have, you know, the whole crew there.

Everybody get to play with it. We'll all get our thoughts. We'll see. We shall see. And, you know, that back end, you know, because one of the nice things about Mycroft, you can deploy your own back end infrastructure. You can deploy that on a DigitalOcean droplet. Oh, that's right.

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Love it. And then when you get going, they have tutorials to take it even further. If you go to their community section, they've got write-ups on all those things you need to know. These are some of the best tutorials in the community. Like Let's Encrypt. You know, that's a hot topic right now. They've got Prometheus, Package Management Basics, How to Use Tink, How to Use Puppet, all of these things.

And DigitalOcean has got it. And it just makes your experience even better. So go to DigitalOcean.com. Go check out all of the good stuff. Look at the incredible pricing. And if you really want to feel like it's 2016, like if you've just been like, ho-hum, Back to the Future said it was going to be awesome, and you're not feeling like it's really 2016, I got something for you.

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Big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Wes, you got yourself here one of them early edition Sputniks, right? Yes, I do. The first one, if I don't make a mistake there. And that's what my son uses too. And it's a pretty great laptop. But this week, a new laptop entered the scene. What's making me jealous?

Yeah, the new Skylake-based Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu pre-installed is arriving in the U.S. It's a fifth-generation Intel, so that's not bad, with an i7, you know, it's a two-core. Up to 16 gigabytes of RAM and a nice fatty SSD. Loaded out of the gate with Ubuntu. Are you tempted, Wes? Oh, yeah. Are you? I mean, I've been looking at these new ones

with that tiny bezel for a long time now. Yeah, that is nice. Yeah. And I guess on these new ones, they're also offering a lot of these in their business precision line, but with the same form factor. So I think that would be the one I would be looking at.

Yeah. Their precision line workstation notebooks, the Precision 5510, 3510, and 7510, and 7710. 15 and 17-inch variants are also available, depending on which one. I believe they're more configurable, like they're less locked down. Yeah, yeah. Although the XPS 13 is a small, tiny laptop. It's really nice. and 17-inch variants are also available. I believe they're more configurable. They're less locked down.

Although the XPS 13 is a small, tiny laptop. It's really nice. Don't have any word yet on when they're going to support 16.04. They're shipping with 14.04 right now. I didn't install Arch anyway, so I don't know why you're wasting my time here, Chris. Hey-o! So up to 16 gigabytes of memory, 512 gigabytes of solid

state drive. I don't understand this. And this is. I don't understand this. And this is where I don't feel like Dell has yet matured to a true Linux vendor. 1404 is just not a good choice if you're shipping a high DPI display. This is a soapbox I've gone up on before. It's not a – I guess they must have used – yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because you can only go up to, what, GTK 3.10 in 14.04?

And that's only the very initial high DPI support in your GTK applications, and it's gotten so much better since then, and you're really missing out. And so when you ship a laptop with a 3200 by 1800 resolution, and you don't – We're so close to 16's release. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's why it'll be a really nice upgrade to 16.04. Hopefully it's not too long. You know, Project Spidemic's been going since 2012.

That's actually a pretty old laptop in computer terms you've got there. Yeah, it is. When they first did it, I was actually pretty skeptical. I didn't think this was a good idea. I also basically didn't think Dell was going to stick with it. No.

And all the time it's kind of just been this one little thing down on the side. I am encouraged that they're expanding to the precision line. I think that's a big story here. And they've had some in the past too. This isn't the first time they've done this, but they've expanded the program even more so. And I think what they've done here that was really super smart, that the other OEMs should take away from, like your HPs and your Lenovas, is they're targeting developers.

They're calling it the developer edition, right? They're targeting power users. And I think that has been key to its success because they're not saying, this is the laptop that will forever replace Windows. This is a laptop that's better than a MacBook. This is the MacBook killer. They're not saying this is the laptop that will forever replace Windows. This is a laptop that's better than a MacBook. This is the MacBook killer. They're not saying any of that. What they're saying is if you want a developer laptop and you're a technical user, we've got a computer for you.

Which is pretty neat because it makes it good like you're hired at your new job and they're like, oh, what do you need to work with? You could say MacBook Pro or whatever. But now you could say something like this and get nice hardware, nice screen. Very much so. Much more likely to have work or to probably order from Dell. Right. They already have a supplier there. Yeah, that is a big deal.

Now, not available outside the US yet. Good to know. But I think some of the precision machines are, which might be better rigs to go with anyways, depending on your needs. Probably more expensive. Okay. So let's ask the mumble room. Anybody in the mumble room tempted to pick up a laptop, maybe put funds aside. Let's put yourself

in the market for a laptop right now. You know, around $2,000. Chris Lass is buying. Around $15,000. Yeah. Let's spend Bitcoin while it's above $400, everybody. You know, something around $15,000 to $2,000. A nice high-end laptop. And you want it to run Linux.

Can somebody give me a reason why you wouldn't necessarily go with this laptop at this point? Hmm. That says it right there, I think. Look at Dell. I can't think of it. I mean, other than if you want a larger screen, but then you go to precision. So, you know, I'm hoping now that this really spurs on System76 to really step up.

They have some great machines. They do. Especially, like, in the higher end. Like, just on the pre-show, I was sort of wishing that I had my Bonobo hooked up right here. And on the Oryx Pro, like, right? But when it comes down to these super light, really thin, good battery life, high resolution screens, I know from my XPS 13, which is the last model, that screen is damn good. It's one of the best screens.

Yeah. You know, I still look at it. It's one of the best screens. Yeah. You know, I still look at it every now and then when I open it. I go, damn, I can't believe this is a Linux computer. I just can't even believe it. And that's you. Yeah. I mean, and Apollo is great. And Entraware has a great hardware setup.

I think I would – my preference would be to go with System76 or Entraware first. Yes, I agree. But if they weren't – but if I wanted something like this, I would consider it. I would. Oh, I guess they say we're in a different channel on the Mumbler Room. Is that true, Wes? That doesn't look true to me, Wes. That don't look true to me.

If we are, double-click on there. There you go. All right. So if anybody – sorry, if we were in a different channel, I don't know how that could have happened. But if you didn't get a chance to say something, your thoughts on the XPS 13 virtual log before we move on. No. It seems like a great laptop. And nobody had a reason why you wouldn't pick it up, right?

We didn't miss that. No, there's no major reason I could think of. Other than, I mean, what about the fact that it's Dell? They're all the same now. Isn't it even cheaper, though, than the Windows one now? I don't know if it is. It used to not be. Maybe it is now.

I thought I heard someone make a comment about that. Hmm. Yeah, but to say that it's just a Dell, I mean, Alienware is Dell, too, so. Well. You're just basically saying Alienware is awful now. And you'll put a Linux sticker over the little Dell symbol, right? I haven't yet on my other one. I guess I just, I don't really know what Dell's

future holds for them. But I'm glad they're doing it. But at the same time I look at the other vendors and go, so you're still planning to just do that Windows thing, huh? Still planning to ship Windows. That's working for you, huh? Okay. So, Muhahaha, you're a Dell fan, so defend them now that I have insulted that on us uh

yeah so i have two dell laptops and the first one holds a five gear and the stillest one the one i have now still going and it's about six year maybe seven so it's held up well is what you're saying yeah yeah that that, that counts for something, yeah. I have a laptop that its birthday was last week, and it's now 10 years old and still runs. That's a deal. The other nice part is they're pretty easy to get parts for and service generally. There's a lot of people who know how to fix Dell laptops. That's true.

That is all true. And if you're a developer and you just want to get your job done and you want a nice support contract. It's a pretty good choice. Yeah, I would shop around and you want a nice support contract. That's a pretty good choice. Yeah, I would shop around for it. Or those support contracts, that's right. Yeah. So you want to buy one? Let's just look. We're not going to actually buy one.

But I've got the XPS 13 laptop up here, the Dell configurator. So I figured before we got done here, let's just see. So it starts here with a couple of different. I wonder if I'm on the right one. It's kind of hard to find the Ubuntu edition. I don't feel like I'm on the right one because these ones have Windows stickers. So let's start by trying to find it. And let's just Google search for it, okay? We're going to get the full experience. Are you ready? Okay. We are Linux users who need a new laptop. So, yep. Let's say

we're going to search for Ubuntu Dell XPS, okay? That should be enough, don't you think? I would hope so. Okay. There we go. The Dell Developer XPS 13 Edition. First link on our Google search results. Easy peasy. All right. Didn't even have to bother with the Dell site. I'm feeling good already because that's usually where I go wrong. Oh, look.

It's Ubuntu right there. Yeah, Ubuntu right there. Now, look at this, Wes. We got two editions to choose from. One that starts at $899.99 and one that's $1049. I'm kind of inclined to say... What's the difference? Well, I think the huge difference here is a faster processor.

Well, you're going to need that. But otherwise, the specs look... Let's customize the $1,000. I have work to get done here. Yeah. I do like a fast rig. So you really get... So you can upgrade to 256 gigs solid state.

These all say fifth generation i7. Are these the last ones? Oh, it must be. No, though, because mine's an i7. So I can't change it to an i7 from here. But fifth generation. Shouldn't it be sixth? These are all, the new ones are Skylake.

Yeah, that's true. That is true. But you know what? They're marketing this. Yeah, maybe they're not available for – well, that's too bad. So why make the announcement? Double check on that for me, Wes. So it looked like it was around – that one was around $1,100, $1,400 depending on how you configure it.

Fifth generation is Skylake's sixth generation? Yes. Well, then those probably – so they're not actually available for sale yet. That's too bad. I was going to see how much it would be if we wanted to configure one right now.

I want it right now. Yeah, yeah. Would you consider upgrading yours? I mean, is that your personal machine or is that a work laptop? It is a work laptop.

It's an extra work laptop. Ah. Which is why it's good enough for now. Yeah, yeah. But I have been, I mean, I have been, one of these days I'm just going to snap and buy a new laptop.

Yeah, would this be on your list? It's very high on my list. You know what's confusing? It's hard because they all call it the new. Right. So they say the new XPS 13 developer edition. And it starts at $1,500. But then you, oh, oh, wait a minute. Look at this, Wes.

What changed? What? I don't know what changed. Now you're on the new, oh, wait a minute. Look at this, Wes. What changed? What? I don't know what changed. Now you're on the new, new, new developer edition. Yeah, and now it's sixth generation. What the hell just happened? What the? Holy crap.

Well, here on Linux Unplugged, we've unlocked the secret code necessary. I wonder if I just had to refresh the page. That might have been it. So here we go, Wes. It starts, holy smoke, starts at 1,500, but it goes all the way up to 2,300. You get a one terabyte hard drive. So let's go with the middle. So it really is in the MacBook Pro.

Yes. Let's go in the mid-range. Let's start with a 512. I can't go below 512 for my main work machine, right? I'm all right with 256, but let's go 512. In what world, Wes? In what world? Jeez Louise, Wes.

Jeez Louise, that's disgusting. 60 gigabytes of RAM, 512 gigabyte PCIe solid state. Oh, it's PCIe? Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. So that's funny.

So, by the way, don't Google search for like what we did because you might get that same result we did. I re-clicked on the logo of the XPS Developer Edition and it loaded this page. So be careful how you search because you might get to the wrong thing. So ours is going to be $1,949.99. Okay. Okay. Okay. I can see it.

Boy, it's barely worth that. I mean, at least based on mine. Unless they've improved the build quality a little bit. The case gives. It's a plastic case. It gives. And the other thing is where you rest your wrist right here. See, they're showing that right here.

Yeah, it's the same exact material. It shows stains like an SOB. And like, you know, when you're sitting there like we all do, when you're sitting there eating chicken wings and browsing Reddit. The truth comes out. You get wing grease on your laptop. Is this why you won't bring that to the studio? Are you embarrassed? It's just filthy? No, man. It smells delicious.

I want it at home when I get hungry. I just lick it off. Eat it up gently and it smells great. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, the build quality. So the build, I don't know, $2,000 for a Dell is, whew. Then you imagine what you can spend that money on a desktop. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Ooh, yeah, with a really nice. That's the other thing is the Intel graphics is not cutting it for me. And when you throw high DPI in there, it's even worse. So if you just get like a nice full HD, you know, like 1080p laptop, and then you can spend your money on your beautiful desktop. I was trying a little gaming here on the Apollo, which is the Skylake Iris.

Still not good enough. Still. So, boy, $2,000. I might be wrong. Let's go check. But I think when you get into a $2,000 Apple laptop, I think you get dedicated graphics. You get the Iris Plus. Right now, it's an AMD.

Is that how? Is that? Okay. So, let's go look. So would that be a MacBook Pro? And I guess this maybe isn't a fair benchmark, but it kind of seems like you have to at least consider that one of the better-selling competitors – ah, but they don't offer dedicated graphics in a 13-inch form factor. Oh, that is a difference. graphics in a 13-inch form factor.

So you do have to step up. That is a difference. You do have to step up to 13-inch, but yeah, when you, or I'm sorry, 15-inch, but once you step up to 15-inch, you get a legitimate quad-core processor on the MacBook instead of the dual-core i7. You get 256 gigabytes of PCIe storage, not as good as the Dell, and you get the Iris Pro video. I don't see dedicated graphics on this one, actually. Oh, okay. Well, then maybe you have to go a little more expensive. Yeah, you might. So Pro video. I don't see dedicated graphics on this one actually. Oh, okay.

Well, then maybe you have to go a little more expensive. Yeah, you might. So, okay. All right. I just – for $2,000, I want my damn dedicated graphics and I want my damn dedicated graphics real bad. Although even – unless you get something like the Oryx, a lot of the dedicated and the laptops are still – they're better but it's not what you pay for, you know? Yeah. better, but it's not what you pay for, you know?

I want something around $1,000. That's really... The CentroWare starts at a good price, the Apollo. So, yeah, it's closer. But, yeah. The marketing stunt by Dell. Look at our beards. We sell Linux as System T.

Mumbaroom, anybody else want to talk about the XPS? Either we're being unfair or maybe we're being too fair. Go ahead and share your thoughts. Going once, going twice. I think what it comes down to is that they might be trying to shift over from being just strictly a Windows OEM. And they're trying to get that Linux crowd bid. linux crowd but i'm looking at the seven system 76 oryx pro and even at a 15 inch or 17 inch it's still a better deal for under two thousand dollars wow so really yeah like the it's like

thirteen hundred dollars and you're getting a gtx 970 or a 980 mobile i know from nvidia boy and so it's like good try though but dude, but dude, System76 is killing it. Yeah. I mean, how much is the super thin, lightweight worth? And I guess it all comes down to your workflow. That's your main workstation. He said something there, Wes, that I wanted to – do you think this is Dell's hedge against Windows collapsing? And are they just doing it in a way that is hyper-focused and they're able to learn from?

Because obviously they're focusing, like we mentioned, at developers. Yep. And I think that – If you're Dell, you're Michael Dell, and you're like, you got to look at your money. You see where your money's spent. You see this group of like eight or ten guys and gals that are burning money on working for Linux. Why are you spending that money? Why is Michael Dell spending that money, Wes?

that are burning money on working for Linux. Why are you spending that money? Why is Michael Dell spending that money, Wes? You know, I think it might play also into the enterprise shift. They bought EMC. They were looking at kind of focusing on enterprise. And I think if you're going to still be selling workstation-level components, Linux is a good bet for that kind of power user.

Yeah, and maybe you're building web apps. Yeah. You know, your back end's kind of power user. Yeah, and maybe you're building web apps. Yeah. You know, your back end's on a Linux infrastructure. Yeah. The Red Pepper, you had a point to make about workstations. Go ahead. You can always order a Dell Precision 15-inch laptop with Ubuntu on it.

Yeah, the Precisions now, they've expanded with this announcement. They've expanded the Precision line with more customizability. And so, maybe one day we'll see Wes show up with a precision. I love, if I had unlimited money, if I could have all of the laptops in the world, I think I would like

to have the Apollo for my portability instead of an XPS. I actually think, my truly unbiased opinion, having the XPS 13, the last generation, and having the Apollo, the Apollo for my portability instead of an XPS. I actually think my truly unbiased opinion, having the XPS 13, the last generation, and having the Apollo, the Apollo is a better computer. And the trackpad's better on the Apollo. Wow. So for portability, I think the Apollo is better.

I really want to just slide that into my bag when I leave. I'm not going to lie. At the same time, I want some of the features and power of the Oryx, and I actually have had some limited production capabilities with the Apollo because it's not powerful enough. So part of me, if I had unlimited money, Wes, I would have the Apollo as my portable machine and the Oryx as my – I've got to do a whole bunch of work and I'm doing it between the studio and home all the time. And that would be my machine. And I would have two laptops because there's not a perfect laptop for me right now. There's not one that answers all the things like the –

the thing about the Apollo, lightweight, super easy to – Sturdy construction. Yeah, so it makes it very easy to move it around because it's really sturdy and a very small power adapter. The plus about the Oryx would be it has a great graphics card in it, a great desktop class CPU. It's huge through whatever you throw it at. Exactly, but it's huge, it's heavy, be it has a great graphics card in it, a great desktop class CPU. It's huge through whatever you throw it at. Exactly.

But it's huge, it's heavy, and it has a big power brick. And fans. Yeah. Yeah, that too. This thing has never once, once, the fans have never once spun up on air, which is a huge thing for me because then it makes it sound better. Stopping the show, complaining about the fans. It happens almost every other week until the Apollo. And the Apollo has better battery life than the O Orcs, I would guess, because it's all

Intel and no dedicated graphics. But either way, yeah, I don't feel like I could land on one single laptop right now. I guess the way to strike that distance would be to have – or to strike that balance would be to have a pretty well-built desktop PC that's within reason and then have a nice portable laptop. But still, I'm just trying to justify how you spend $2,000 on a computer that is limited to 16 gigs of RAM and doesn't have dedicated graphics. Maybe I'm just a PC master race guy. I mean, I don't even...

I'm not trying to be like, oh, you've got to have fast components, but $2,000 and you don't have dedicated graphics and you can only do 16 gigs of RAM? That sounds crazy to me. On the other side, I get frustrated that the RAM is always lock-stepped with the other components. Like maybe I don't need the 512 because I do a better job of keeping my file system organized than Chris does. Right. Or I don't need the super nice touch. I just want the full HD.

Yes, right. But you can never get the, like, 16 gigs and 32 gigs in that model. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, Muhahaha, tell me about this. You think it's, for $2,000, you say it's worth it if, as long as you get a good amount of use

out of it, like several years, maybe more? What do you think? Yeah, I think it's fine. You, how do you get five years of use out of a computer that doesn't have dedicated graphics and is locked to 16 gigs of ram seriously how do you get five years out of that debian stable and never change a thing so uh i think you okay i don't think you can do it if you are planning to game but if you're just planning to use it for development, yeah, just browsing. Okay, browsing, maybe that is kind of overpowered, but yeah.

I don't know, man. You know, I just read something, Wes, today. Didn't you link it to me? One of the features, and the reason why I didn't put it in the show is because I didn't understand it, so I didn't want to read it on air. But one of the features in kernel 4.5 is a bunch of work on the new open source AMD driver, right? Yes, I believe so. And I don't know if – can you pull up our thread on that computer and pull that up?

Because maybe I can. Because one of the things – and this is why I didn't include it in the show – is they talk about accelerating ButterFS file system calculations using the AMD GPU so if you're following me here that would mean your file system runs faster because it's using the GPU to crunch numbers that yeah okay let's see also by the way it has better

PS2 support Wes points out super important when you need that very accurate PS2 mouse here's the part that it says this is why I didn't read it on air so they say so points out. Super important. When you need that, very accurate PS2 mouse. Here's why, here's the part that it says, this is why I didn't read it on air. So they say, so what's exactly so promising

about Linux kernel 4.5? It includes an implementation of initial support for the AMD PowerPlay power management technology. And it also brings high performance to the AMD GPU

open source driver for Radeon GPUs. As a result, it will improve scalability in the free space handling of the ButterFS file system. And it will have better EPOL multi-threaded scalability. So this article is saying that the... This just got help. I'm just shoehorning this. But this thing is claiming that the improved GPU drivers will help with ButterFS free space calculations. No.

How can that be a thing? It's not a thing. Okay. It's not a thing. They're supposed to be separate things. They added the new free space map cache to ButterFS in version 4.5. Okay, good, good, good. Alright, so, because my point

was going to be, but I can't, that's why I was like, that can't be right. There's no way that's right, but where I was going with this is I see future workloads that are improved because your GPU takes some of the compute. It's already here today, but it's mostly here in production work.

So when you tell me that this XPS 13 is a five-year computer, I don't know. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's true. I think there's a certain class of people that can't have a five-year computer, and you might be one of them. Maybe on a desktop.

Maybe on a nice desktop that you don't game on. That's okay. That's okay. Well, so, there you go. There you go. Fine. Fine. That's just fine for Chris. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And there are some users that, you know, you can have an older ThinkPad

and use it for a long time and it works great. Yeah, that's true. That's a good point, Wes. That's a good point. Yeah, I guess where I was going with this is I guess what I was trying to say, and I'm not saying it very well, is I think there will be future work tasks and loads that are automatically offloaded to the GPU that you as an end

user don't even realize, like your web browser and its rendering, or how your menu pops up when you go to search for applications on your computer. Oh, yeah. Lots of interaction stuff is being GPU accelerated. Yeah. Today and in the future, more and more stuff will be GPU accelerated. And if you don't have a computer that has a good GPU, you're going to be left behind

a little bit. Your system's going to – that's all I'm saying. You see that software rendering pop up and you get sad and everything's slow. And for me, when I'm using my XPS 13, that just means, OK, this isn't a time I could play games. I just – I can't play games on this computer. And that's kind of a bummer sometimes. I mean, there's always race to slow.

That barely works. That barely works. Ouch, really? Well, part of the issue is 4K. And then part of the issue is so many games right now suck at changing their resolution. And so when you try to run it in windowed mode, it still gets really funky. So there's just a lot of rough spots still. I see.

And it makes gaming frustrating on the XPS. It's just not even worth it. Or you stream it from your – I don't know. Probably different games. Like a different – my kids can play Minecraft. That works pretty well. Right. So there you go.

Minecraft works. That works, Wes. But things like actual game games that are like – Things that aren't written in Java? Those don't play so well. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

All right, Mumbler. Any other thoughts on the Linux laptop topic before we move on? Going once, going twice. All right. So let's talk – let's take a break. Let's take a moment to reset before we get into something that is looking out into the future a bit. Let's talk about Ting. Everybody, I'll talk about something you can get right now.

You don't got to wait until the future. You don't have to wait until Captain Picard on the Enterprise comes by and has the solution for you. No, friends, get out there right now. Computer, what happened? And go to linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com, whiz! You go there right now, and you'll get a $25 discount off your first device. Or if you have a Ting-compatible device, and they got CDMA and GSM, guess what?

They'll put $25 towards your first month or whatever. Like your average Ting bill right now, $24 a line. So $25 in credit is going to pay for more than your first month. It's your minutes, your messages, your megabytes. They add them up, whatever bucket you fall into, that's all you pay. It's $6 for a line. So $25 in credit is going to pay for more than your first month. It's your minutes, your messages, your megabytes. They add them up. Whatever bucket you fall into, that's all you pay. It's $6 for the line. That is Ting. They got a bunch of great devices. They're unlocked. You can get them from Ting directly or you can

bring your own. They have no contract, no early termination fee, and they have a really good dashboard and fanatically good customer service. That's Ting right there. It sells itself. I don't need to sell it. It sells itself. But one thing that's kind of cool is they're geeks. And you can see this in some of their blog posts.

They did a blog post about cord cutters. They've been doing a whole series about cord cutters. They love cord cutters. Yeah, they do. They talk about how cord cutting not only saves you money, which is kind of obvious, but also saves you a whole bunch of time. The geeks over at Ting did the math, and it's unbelievable.

Not only do you learn a little bit about how commercials work in television, which is pretty insightful, but you also get a little idea of how much time you save when you stream shows without commercials versus watching shows or even DVRing through them. It's a pretty cool blog post. They got a whole bunch of good stuff. Start by going to linux.ting.com. That supports this show, gets you the discount, and lets them know you heard about it.

See, the best part? Right here. They let us put Linux is now a subdomain on their website. I know. Isn't that wonderful? Yes. That says it all that you need to know about shit right there. Yes, it does.

It is. Exactly. It is very, very cool. Go check them out. Go get a great device from GSM Card starting at $9. All the way up to feature phones. With Amazon Prime. Yes.

Get it just as soon as you possibly want. Yeah, put it in anything. And then they got, of course, feature phones and basic Android phones that are just nice, clean Android phones all the way up to the high-end luxury phones. I'm thinking of having like a, oh, no, the internet went out again. Yes. A little gateway, emergency gateway with Zing. $6 a month. I probably won't use it like nine months out of the year.

So here's the nice thing is if you had a way to activate it when your internet goes out, you could just turn the line on and off and then you're not even paying the $6. Exactly. And then just transparent internet. Don't tell Ting I told you that. But you could go get one of their MiFi devices or whichever one you want. Just grab a SIM. There's no contract.

And you just pay for $6. If you forget to turn it off, you'll, whichever one you want. Just grab a SIM. There's no contract. And you just pay for $6. If you forget to turn it off, you'll pay $6. And if you do end up – so you could – like if you say to yourself, you say, self, it's worth it to me to pay $6 a month to have internet always available. Honestly, it is. Yeah, it is. Then you could just pay $6 a month. But you could also turn it off and then use the Ting app on your phone to then turn the line back on when the internet goes out and then good to go. Because if the internet goes out, I know.

Yeah, you do. Right away. Oh, there's no missing out on that. I'm in a terrible mood. Where's all my stuff? Linux.ting.com. Go there. Support this show.

Check out Ting. Get yourself a discount. Big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. So check out Ting and get yourself a discount. Big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. I don't know what it is about these snappy packages, Wes, but I continue to feel like a dope. It's got a bee in your bonnet. Well, I struggle because it's a whole bunch of different type of technologies.

And you know what's funny about it? It's not even like the first attempt at this. It's maybe a different take on many attempts. We're going to get to that. But I do want to take a moment and talk about Snappy packages. So there's Snappy Personal. Their new approach to package management and updating is designed to be faster, more reliable, transactional, with

stronger security. Snappy for at least one of the desktop spins, and of course you've got Snappy Core, you've got the phone. They're all using Snap packages. There's also, on a future Ubuntu, still going to be Deb packages. A lot of the base OS will be using deb. Snap packages will be used to sort of unify the concept of package management against Internet of Things and desktops and all of this.

So developers could create these snap packages that are like a package build from the AUR. So it's a script file that tells you where to go get all the files, from the AUR, so it's a script file that tells you where to go get all the files, meets a container, meets PVIs, which are with, like, statically linked libraries and all that. Is this a good, rough description, do you think, Wes, from your understanding?

Seems to capture it. Basically. I mean, it's pretty rough. There's a little more, but that's the Snap package. And then there's a backend component to it that's run by Canonical that's sort of like the backend repo server, if you will, that is aware of where things are at and the keys and whatnot and things like that. So this is another component to it. It's not a distributed system necessarily.

It is a centralized system with a server. And this appears to be something that a lot of projects are trying to solve, this particular problem of distributing software. And there's different takes on how it should be done. A couple of them that are interesting is the GUIX SD. I don't know if you know about this one, Wes, but GNU has got an attempt at this one. Nix, I think, is what it's called. Yeah, they're kind of sister distributions. Yeah, yeah.

So you have Nix and you have GUIX and you have Limba, which is another project that's trying to do this. That's a new one to me. And you have, of course, XEG app, which is a big one from the GNOME folks. Kind of been waiting to see what's going to happen there. And XEG apps or sandbox apps, the whole goal here, they say, is allowing developers to distribute applications across Linux distributions. to distribute applications across Linux distributions, something we've talked about with Michael Dominick on Coder Radios many, many times, even in the last week's episode, because he'd been running Ubuntu for a while,

is if I wanted to create an app, let's just crazy pie in the sky, let's say, have you noticed how there is not really a great app store for Linux? Let's just say we could create an app store for all distributions, but how would you make applications you could distribute across all of those? You need something. You need something sandbox, something that takes into account all the different libraries and different versions of things.

Sandbox applications are the future for that type of distributed application. Not all of our apps that we install are going to be sandbox, but the ones where it's like one click and you download and you run, these are going to be sandbox applications. That's the way all of these different projects are going. And however they implement it, that's where there's differences. Snaps, Snap packages are an Ubuntu-specific thing. XGG apps are sort of a distribution agnostic kind of thing. Recently, we talked about AppImage.

Yeah, that was fun. Was that just last week we talked about AppImage? Two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, which is essentially another download, run anywhere thing. Download an application, mark it executable, and run it. No need to install. No system libraries or preferences altered. It has like a read-only kind of, you know your app doesn't change.

It's not getting overwritten. All the dependencies are bundled together. So a lot of different takes on this. Anybody in the Mumba room kind of maybe more familiar with snap packages and some of the technical details that maybe wants to fill in anything that I've missed here? You guys are welcome to jump in.

And of course, the chat room has pointed out updates are going to be an interesting thing with snap packages because you'll have your base system updates and then you'll have to update your snap packages as well, which might have their own libraries and their own containers. But those will just be delta updates, right? Supposedly, yeah. Supposedly.

Very much so. So we're going to get to a point in the future where there's going to be a lot of different technologies that are essentially solving the same problem. Well, we're already there. It's just none of them have any large acceptance. When Ubuntu rolls out snap packages... That's going to be a big push, yeah. Yeah. XEG apps though is Fedora, Red Hat, GNOME behind that one. So I wonder. Yes.

Kits and Kitty, you were asking about Apt? Yeah. So if I'm understanding this right, does this mean that Snap Packages will coexist on the same system as Apt-Git? Correct. Yeah. You'll have basically the base OS is still going to be based on Debian. Ubuntu, whatever it's going to be, is still Debian-based. The core OS packages are installed by apt. You can still

install packages from apt. Think of it, I do, in this term, I think of it as how the AUR has this user-created applications, and then Arch itself has repos, official repos. Well, I think the FreeBSD model is maybe a little better. Yeah, you're probably right, yeah.

Or, you know, in OSX land, it's slash applications. It's the same thing here. You just have a directory. But OSX doesn't have a base package manager, right? Well, no, you just get it all at once. It's the same thing. Yeah. In this case, you still have DEBs getting updated in the background.

Sure. You're now going to have your package managers going to need to update. You're going to need to. You're now going to have your package manager is going to need to update. You're going to need to do an app to get update and upgrade. And Snap package manager is going to need to do an upgrade. Right. I wonder if they'll wrap that in one or if it will be distinct. I would assume, right? Yeah.

I would think so. Yeah. So the two will coexist because, I mean, let's be honest. They can't repackage everything in Debian as a Snap. Without becoming another Debian. Yeah. Yeah. And there's no benefit

to that, really. So you have a couple of different technologies. The ones that I'm very interested in besides Snap packages are XEG apps. They use cgroups, just like Docker containers do, and namespaces.

They could leverage SELinux and KDBus in the future. And they're already writing it today with Wayland in mind, which I think is brilliant. See, that's nice. And I would, I mean, however we get to better sandboxed, better containerized or not applications, that would be a big win for Linux security.

Do you think actually it would be a big win for security? Because the big pushback... I mean, it depends on how well it's done. The big pushback that seems that everybody always talks about is don't bundle your dependencies. Don't statically link. Gen 2 has this wiki post here about why

you shouldn't do it. Everybody always says the problem with PBIs is they include all of their own libraries, which means if there's a security vulnerability in OpenSSL, you have to update libSSL on libOpenSSL on all of those applications instead of just updating it once on your system.

Is it better for security? See, that's a good point. I was more referring to the sandboxing parts of it, which I think Snappy has less as compared to maybe XTG, you know, where you're using C groups. Maybe you have a whole network namespace. I don't know. There is an issue, know with bundling dependencies

that's one thing that Linux users for a long time have kind of cited as like hey we don't do this I guess it depends on how widespread it is like I like if the base system and all that hardcore stuff I was going to say I think it depends on who's doing the bundling I think if it's upstream

the maintainers of the distro doing the bundling and they're actually keeping track of security updates and those sorts of things, it's fine. Like in the case of Snappy, if Canonical is doing the building of the snaps and they're actually being responsible

and updating it, then it's fine. It'll come right from the same source they're getting. If it's coming from the same source, you'll do updates regularly and all the bundling will be okay. Yeah, if it's coming from somebody else.

That's kind of the problem is then when you let it go to developers, sometimes they are not responsible about fixing their bundle dependencies. For example, you're getting Eclipse, and it's given the Eclipse project. Chances are they're just going to throw it all together into one great big snap, and it's just going to be like, well, what if that changes? It's like, well, they're probably just going to say, oh, it works.

Why don't you just don't use that? Yeah, that's one thing that I look at that and I go, there could be a possibility that you could have a couple of applications installed that have out-of-date libraries after a security issue. At the same time, that's a theoretical problem. I mean, it's a theoretical problem that's pretty easy to abstract from watching what could happen. But it is a theoretical problem. It also can go the other way, like subsonic's problem, right? pretty easy to abstract from watching what could happen. But it is a theoretical problem.

It also can go the other way, like subsonics problem, right? Like it wants newer libraries to install stuff. Oh, yes, very much. You're trying to install on 14.4. And which can wreck a system if you start messing around with that stuff. But you want your new app to have the shiny new, super patched. The other thing is actually what actually makes a system usually more secure is to avoid a monoculture and to have diversity and to have a lot of different obstacles in the way for an attacker. And so ironically, we've talked so much about having statically linked libraries could be a security issue.

It's possible. I'm just putting this out there. there, but it's possible that having a whole bunch of random different versions of things on one system, it makes it very hard for an attacker to be able to set expectations and know what to be able to rely on exploiting in order to take advantage of a system. In other words, because these applications will all be using different versions of libraries, there may not be a common threat for an attacker to take advantage of. So diversity may actually end up being a security advantage. Just saying, I'm not saying theoretically that sounds sound, but in the way things seem to

actually work out, one of the reasons why there's way less viruses for Linux, don't kid yourself, it's not because we have a small usage. Linux has a huge market share in servers. There's a ton of money in Linux malware. There's very few Linux malware, partially because we have a good security model, but also because we are fragmented as F, and it's very hard to write once and run anywhere on Linux right now. And that includes malware! That includes malware.

And so, if you continue to diversify in a weird way, you may be adding to security. I don't know. I could be wrong. But it might not be all. I'm going to package all my malware as snap packages thanks to you, Chris. Heyo. And also submit it to the AUR while you're at it. Kitson, I wanted to give you a chance to jump in though because you had a point that I wanted you to ask.

Yeah, I could actually see this being used to create a two-tiered system for package managing. Maybe you could have packages installed in your home directory somewhere. That way when you go to update your system and you want to do a full wipe on your system partition, you can keep those applications that you have installed

on your home partition. I don't know if that's technically possible, but that's an interesting idea. Yeah. Poby, I'm glad you joined us because I just gave like a rough explanation of Snap Packages. I don't know if you've been listening. But if you want to correct me in any way, if you know any better, you feel free to jump in. I haven't been listening.

I'm sorry. I was far too busy on the other podcast. Yeah, I know. The time zone thing. The time zone thing. Yeah. Look at you. You're back-to-back podcasting right now, aren't you?

I know, right? You're pro. You're back-to-back podcasting right now, aren't you? I know, right? You're pro. You're pro. Never stop. We were just actually talking about Snap packages, and this is actually something that I'm really glad you're here to answer because we talked about the dependencies and static link libraries. But one other thing, kind of a con I've heard about Snappy packages, Snap packages, is the back end can't be implemented on-premises. The back end is run and controlled by Canonical, and there's not really an equivalent of having a local repository on your LAN.

Is that, am I accurate there? I'm not sure that's the case. That might be the case today, because it isn't all finished yet. It's all, like like shifting sand underneath you. Sure, okay, yeah. But I don't doubt that that will be the case in the future because I know there are plenty of people who want to implement Snappy on-premises

and don't necessarily want to have their systems calling outside to the internet. Sure, I mean just look at providers like DigitalOcean who have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Ubuntu machines doing updates. Yeah, for them it makes a lot of sense. And then there's also the thing, one of the big selling points of Snappy is the secure side of it. And if you're a security conscious organization where you want to make sure that there's no possibility for outside ingress to your network, then you want to make sure that all updates are delivered from inside your network so i'm sure that's something that's on

the radar i've seen other people discuss it within canonical and uh and at trade shows i've seen it being discussed so i i don't think it's dismissed as not happening it's just not done yet sure sure that makes it right that makes sense so if i was betting man, Bobby, and I was asking for hints from you, when would I bet that I could install – when can I reliably expect to install snap packages? And am I using the right term? Is it a snap package? When I'm talking like instead of a deb, is it a snap? Well, we tend to call it a snap.

A snap. Oh, okay. So have you got a snap for that? Yeah. Yeah. Have you got a snap for that? That's good. So will there be a point where I'll be able to install them?

I just made that up. Wow, that's brilliant. I'm glad that came over. Get this man a raise. That is good. That is what people will say. And so is the goal to have, is it going to be possible to install them in 16.04? Like, I don't understand when that, really.

Oh. Yep. Well, you already get, I mean, there's pre-release images now. I'm running Snappy on my Raspberry Pi 2, which is on my desk in front of me. I've got the light blinking away at me as it's building stuff. But it's

under development. Like I say, it's shifting sand right now. It's really heavily under development. And so things can change. APIs can change. Terminology changes. And so on. But once things can change. APIs can change, terminology changes, and so on. But once 16.04 is out, sometime soon after that, I would expect it to all stabilize, and you would get an LTS-style snappy image for your device, whatever device that is, and be able to install snap packages, or indeed for the desktop as well.

And then the next, it seems like, not that that isn't enough of a challenge, but then the next really big milestone would be to get the developer community creating their own Snaps. I mean, am I following? Does that seem like the next step? And that seems like a massive task. And we're trying to, we're creating tools to make that easy. Like that is a target.

That is a definitive target is to get developers creating snaps. And one of the tools that we have is called Snapcraft. Oh, yeah. Snapcraft just takes a single plain text YAML file. So, for example, you can take a single plain text yaml file and bring together an application that is currently on github and you can bring like the tip of trunk on github and you can pull in whatever dependencies it needs maybe that maybe that application needs ffmpeg or avconv or something like that and so you can go and get the avconv from the debian

archive or the ubuntu archive or you can go and get if you need bleeding edge you can go and get the av conv from the debian archive or the ubuntu archive or you can go and get if you need bleeding edge you can go get that from github or bitbucket or wherever it comes from and pull all of these things together into an application and define all of that just in a single plain text yaml file right snapcraft right and boom it pushes out snap which you then upload to the store in fact you can upload to the store directly from snapcraft so you can just do snapcraft snap and it will create a snap and then snapcraft upload and boom you're in the store it's super easy i love it i i you know when i first started playing with snaps i was as skeptical as you and was fearful for change as you.

And recently I have been playing with it, and it is an amazingly good file. So the YAML file that describes the Snap, what is that called? Because I watched Shuttleworth up on stage write one of those in probably 25 seconds. He'd probably written it 100 times. Right, yeah. It's a plain text file, yeah. What do you call that file, though? It's the – yeah, it's a Snapcraft.yaml. call that file though it's the it's yeah it's a

snapcraft.yaml it's it's got a predefined name snapcraft.yaml okay and in your direction whatever yeah yaml so it's got a predefined format and it's very easy to read and yeah and in this file you could say it could say grab a file from github or grab a file from ftp or grab a file from apt colon slash like it the source can no okay where am i wrong there well yeah but no but you're right i mean the the syntax is different but yeah you say go and get this from go and get this from github go and get that from the archive but you might say uh like for example if you package up something simple like cow say right yep you you cow say is written in pearl i think so you'd need

a certain number of pearl modules you don't need all of pearl and you don't need every pearl module and in fact the way that debian and ubuntu package things they tend to bundle together a whole bunch of modules but you don't need all of them so why would you package all of that together right dependencies in your cow say application you would pull in cow say and then the one or two modules that you need so it's not just go and get this thing from github but go and get this thing from github go and get this debian package but only get these individual parts of that debian package you don't have to get the whole thing and go and get these individual parts of another debian package so you can smoosh together all the bits that you would normally find

inside, say, for example, a Windows executable or what you'd find inside a Mac DMG file. There'd be loads of individual parts, we call them parts in the Snappy world, and those are brought together and built together to form one atomic unit, which is a Snap. Has there been any talk about any other distributions letting this run? How easy would it be to port? Because I feel like that's where I really want to start. Dude, we barely have it running on Ubuntu, let alone someone else having it. But how standalone are they? I mean, maybe it can work on Debian.

If they're all self-referenced. It seems like it could probably work on Debian. Right, so they are SquashFS files. So a Snap is, technically so a snap is if like technically a snap is a squash fs file which is mounted um at a particular path in the file system okay that's kind of similar to what happened which was too right yeah and there's two parts to it there's the read-only part which gives you the security that you know those files haven't been modified right and then there's a writable part so every application needs a writable area you know those files haven't been modified. And then there's a writable part. So every application needs a writable area,

whether it's config or data or... Or state or whatever it is. Yeah, exactly. And so a snap gives you both of those. And potentially that, yeah, could be installed on other distributions. Obviously, that's not our focus. Right.

Right now, we're totally focused on... But I think what... I want to just, now we're totally focused on i think what i want to just if we can uh um well you know what i want to do the big takeaway that but before then i'll like i want kitson to jump in and then i'll jump in kitson go ahead so i'm with what you're describing and everything it does sound like really complex uh to actually install the application as far as like the behind the scenes stuff goes. So does this mean that the Snap packages, will they remove themselves cleanly from a system and clean up their own depths and not configs? Oh, my God, yes.

It's less complex. In fact, it's so one of the nice things about Snaps is when you upgrade them, if anything goes wrong, they automatically roll back. And the same goes for the kernel and the OS. So in the event that you have... Whoa, whoa, the kernel's going to be a snap? Yep, the kernel's a snap. Not a dev? The OS is a snap.

Well, where's the line drawn? Now, in terms of desktop, is that true? Or is that you're just talking on the... Oh, right, okay. No, on a snappy-based system. So think about the Raspberry Pi running. Sure, or the phone. Snappy, yeah, yeah, or is that you're just talking on the phone? Oh, right. Okay. No, on a snappy-based system. So think about the Raspberry Pi running. Sure. Or the phone.

Yeah, or the phone. Then the kernel is a snap, the OS is a snap. On the desktop, right now, for 16.04, it's slightly blurry because you have a mixed mode. You've got the Debian world where you can still install Debs, but you've also got the ability to install snaps as well. You've got these two dimensions as we call them. So in fact,

this is where it gets like, it fuzzes your brain a little bit. If you install on a Raspberry Pi, a snappy install, so it's snappy out of the box, then you can have the classic dimension, which lets you install Debs. And conversely, if you've installed a debian based distro like a desktop there is the snappy dimension so you're on on either side you

can install both but they're kind of kept separate so uh if this actually all gets pulled off and there are actual snaps available for things i care about, like, say, Sublime Text and Dropbox and Telegram and Chrome, which could take a year or so, but whatever. Like, let's just say it takes a while. This – what we are essentially now entering into the era of is an LTS that no longer holds you back from having modern applications. an LTS that no longer holds you back from having modern applications. So where 14.04 sort of you could say the difficulty with 14.04 was it was always sort of tied down to an older version of GTK, which at this point in time now feels a little limiting. Certain things you just can't install, et cetera.

But with 16.04, if snap packages actually take off and there's snaps, I could install an application like Corebird two years down the road now. So let's take a hypothetical example, like exactly what you're saying. Let's take 16.04 and 16.04 ships with, I don't know, LibreOffice 5.1 or whatever the latest version of LibreOffice is. Because it's an LTS, the support lasts for years. And then sometime during that support cycle, the Document Foundation release a new version of LibreOffice, which is like the kick-ass version of LibreOffice that has everything you ever wanted.

High DPI, integrated support, online collaborative editing. Oh, yeah, boom, go. All of that stuff. Yes. And more that you could not even think about like i want it now alpha go levels of uh levels of functionality so imagine they did that right typically we wouldn't put that in and back in the lts release because we we freeze the release and we only do bug release bug updates and and security updates imagine that there is a snappy package in the store,

which is LibreOffice 6 or 7 or 8 or whatever, which is bundled with whatever libraries are required to make that thing work on 16.04. Now, you could choose to stay on LibreOffice 5 or you could say, I'll take LibreOffice 6 or 7 because my business needs it or because I like the bleeding edge or, you know, I just want to try this stuff out and then undo it afterwards and roll it back after. And because it's a self-contained squash.fs file, when you uninstall it, it's all gone away, including all the dependencies.

That is going to be. And, of course, I know people listening are going to say, hey, there's a bunch of other people doing this. And I say, great. Totally. Which validates exactly what we're doing. If everyone's doing it, then clearly we're not doing the wrong thing. And it's like a very common, it's like, okay, great. Now ship and let's see what works really well.

I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. Wow. So maybe is it possible that there is something I can play around with for like my 1604 review to talk about the process? Is there something out there already? that there is something I can play around with for, like, my 16.04 review to talk about the process. Is there something out there already, or is it going to be, like, you know, a down-the-road 16.04 kind of thing? What, to install?

I would love to show the process. I would love to install a Snap package for the first time on the Linux Action Show during the 16.04 review. That would be awesome. Yeah, you probably could install it. There would probably be a limited set that you'd be able to install because it's early days uh but there would be a small set that you could probably install um fairly close to release if not like well soon before release i think it's and then many more after well another idea for the developers because one of the most a developer side, the most annoying thing about Linux distribution is to get it in the repo.

With the snap packages, it seems like you just write a YAML script file, or not script, but a YAML setup file, and then you just submit it, or you build a package, submit it, and you're done. And you're in control of that. So if you want to push a new version to the store every day like oh nine on cloud nine you want to push a new version like yeah a new version comes out twice a day and then there's a security update and then there's a bug fix because you were having a bad day and you did a typo and sure enough you can shove another one in the store and your users and if you and if you push an update that that actually balks on client systems and it doesn't start anymore never then the client systems will roll them back for you that's nice that is nice wow i am so uh the next

segment i'm gonna it's good this actually sort of just builds on everything we just talked about in terms of 1604 i i before we go too much further here i gotta just disclaimer sitting in front of me i do have an ubuntu mate 1510 machine. But that right there, that's Mint. Over there, that's Arch. Upstairs is Arch. I mean, I'm still a multi-distribution man. I love, I still love Arch. But I got to say, I have never been more excited about an Ubuntu release in, I mean, maybe since 1204?

I don't know. I don't, I, this is genuinely looking like an incredible release. And part of that is because, I mean, the snapback is just sounding awesome. But what's coming down the road, I just had a conversation last night with Wimpy about some of the work he's done on Ubuntu Mate that's going to ship in 16.04. to sort of bridge that gap between the traditional desktop environment and where the quote-unquote modern Linux desktop is going and how do you not fall behind and have to become your own island. And that stuff is landing in 16.04. So you take the snap packages.

You take the long-term support. You take the really great derivatives now. ZFS? And ZFS. So anyways, we're going to talk about the work that Wimpy did, but first, I want to talk about Linux Academy, our sponsor right here on the Unplugged program, linuxacademy.com

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It's a platform to learn the technologies built on top of Linux and, of course, the Linux fundamentals itself. Either that's in a nugget, a deep dive, two minutes to 60 minutes long, or it's through a comprehensive course with downloadable great study guides, audio, video, live streams, all of that, 2,300 and what? 32 courses. Look at that. Instructor help is available when you need it. That's really nice too. They have a great system. You can go in there and you can tell it how much time you have available in a week. I have time on a Tuesday. I have time on a Thursday. And then, of course, after the Linux Action Show, I'm going to do a little bit of studying, so I've got some time on Sunday. Well, guess what? You tell it that.

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They've just moved to new offices with new staff. They're expanding like crazy, and they're doubling down on the content. But what I think is really nice is they're hiring dedicated staff to make sure the back catalog of content. Huh. The back catalog. That's harder to say. Try saying that, Wes. The back catalog of content. Try that. I'm pretty sure you said bat catalog. Yeah. Try saying the back catalog of content. Go ahead. Try it. Back catalog of. See, it's hard. Try it. Back catalog of content.

You had to slow down. Try it. Say it fast, Wes. Say it fast. Back catalog of content. Say it one more time. Back catalog of content. Ah, yeah. That's really hard. Damn you, Wes. Say it fast. Back catalog of content. Say it one more time. Back catalog of content. That's really hard. Damn you, Chris. So they got dedicated personnel now.

Dedicated. Because they're dedicated, Wes. I don't know if you knew this. They're very dedicated. To that back cadillac of content over at Linux Academy, which I think is just a brilliant move. Great in-depth resources. Go check them out. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

It's a great fit for you guys. And they're a great sponsor. Thank you, Linux Academy, for sponsoring the Unplugged program. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. And keep that Cadillac shining, Linux Academy. Keep that Cadillac shining. So this is literally how the conversation goes.

I think it was last night. Because Wimpy knows that we've been following the client-side decoration thing on GNOME, and the whole debate between client-side and server-side decoration implementations and all of that. We've followed it since the beginning really. So we're talking back and forth and he says, well, tomorrow I'm going to write up this post about this work I did in Ubuntu Mate. And then about 30 minutes go by and he links me to the post that he'd written because he's so excited about it. He's had to get it out there, I think. So I don't even want to take it from you, Wimpy. I don't want to steal it. Could you give us an update about some of the work

that you did to implement client-side decorations and header bar applications in Ubuntu Mate, which will be shipping in 16.04? Could you tell us a little bit about some of that work you did and why? I can. So although I've done some things, I've not done anything particularly new. So there's a hat tip here to Wolfgang Albrecht, who is the Marte developer who maintains the Marte themes. And he worked out a lot of this stuff. and I borrowed from the work that he's done in order to do this but what this gives us is that the default themes in Ubuntu Mate now support client-side application client-side decorated applications and those applications with header bars. And although they have run in the past, they obviously execute, they didn't render correctly. So they didn't have the shadowing effects

and the popovers didn't render correctly and a whole raft of just little annoyances. And it's one of those things that when you're using the computer and I'm using it day after day and you want some of those newer applications that are using client-side decorations and header bar my favorite at the moment is corebird that's right hands down the best twitter client for desktop linux i agree but looked like complete ass and it wasn't wasn't you know ubuntu mate wasn't doing justice to this application okay how do i install right now could i install it in the repo right now

so i could show people because i'm on the older version i'll i'll tell you what oh is it not easy because of the okay if it's not easy it's okay if it's if it was it's if it was in the software boutique for example i would just go ahead and do Yeah, it's not easy because it's part of the artwork package, which also includes the Plymouth themes. And the structure of the Plymouth stuff has changed in 16.04 and isn't backwards compatible. What is the version of GTK in 16.04? I think it's 3.18, I think. Yeah, I think that sounds right. I think that's what I remember reading, too.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. So, Wimpy, one of the first things when you implemented this – and by the way, it genuinely looks good. One of the things I like about the screenshot is you mixed in traditional title bar applications and client-side decoration. It's very consistent. It took, I think, three or four comments before people are like, why would you do this? This is an atrocity. Client-side decoration should burn.

I looked back, Wimpy. We've had comments about this, Client-side decoration should burn. I looked back, Wimpy. We've had comments about this, about client-side decoration since 2013. The drama doesn't seem to be going away. Why would the bastion of the traditional desktop where I go to avoid the atrocity that is Unity, why would

that implement client-side decoration? Hang on. I was just channeling. I was just channeling. Go on, Piper. You've got something to say. I can tell. No, no, no. Carry on. I was just channeling. I was just channeling. Go on, Piper. You've got something to say. I can tell.

No, no, no. Carry on. No? Okay. So it's very, very simple. You can't hide from the fact that there are client-side decorated applications and applications using header bars. And there are not a huge number of them but those numbers are growing and certainly some of the new applications that are coming along from the gnome desktop are compelling and use this design paradigm and to simply cut yourself

off from being able to use those applications would be extremely short-sighted for an LTS release and thinking about how those applications are going to develop and probably become more prominent over the next five years so I wanted to get the support in so that people that are using Ubuntu Mate can have their traditional applications and and we like that stuff. That's good insight. That's great. But if there are one or two client-side decorated applications that are clearly best in class and hands down the best one that you want, you don't want it to look rubbish and you want it to work properly and blend with the rest of the desktop. Yeah, you don't want a penalty for choosing a different desktop environment.

No. Yeah, you don't want a penalty for choosing a different desktop environment. No. No. Yeah. I was, so Michael Dominick, co-host of Coder Radio, probably the second mentioned in this episode, he switched to Ubuntu recently when his MacBook died on him. And he's been running 14.04. And one of the applications he tried to install was Corbert. And it's not been going well for him.

So your insight about needing to have this well supported on an LTS I think is a good one because he's not willing to run anything but an LTS. So he's just sort of stuck in this limbo right now, and it looks really well done. Kitson, I wanted to give you a chance to jump in though because you had something you wanted to mention. Go ahead. I think Kitson went to get some popcorn. I think he's good. He good he's good well i did i did find it interesting that people were jumping on the bandwagon saying by you supporting client side decorations here you're gonna you're gonna help uh you're gonna help encourage more application

development like that which i well the the thing is is that GNOME is kind of this unstoppable force. So you can't just pretend that GNOME is not out there iterating on their desktop and their applications every six months and that this is the design direction that they're going in. That's simply crazy. Well, and I think also uh and and and i don't know it's not just that wimpy isn't it also mere and wayland well to some extent and you know i'll cross i'll cross that bridge in the future that's uh that's so i don't i guess i if i if my understanding is correct though the gOME's plan for supporting Wayland is essentially – their continued effort is behind client-side decorated apps. And that's sort of going to be the future direction for Wayland-supported GNOME applications.

In order for Mate desktop to even begin down the path of Wayland or MIR support, which your parent distribution is switching to, you have to go this route, don't you? Eventually? To some extent, yes. And even if it's eventually, even if it's in another two years for the next LTS, isn't it sensible just to do it now? Yeah, sure. And learn that. And, you know, this isn't stuff that other people haven't done before. I think that Ubuntu have got this to some extent as well

and some of the other desktop environments. But this was new to Ubuntu Mate, and I was very pleased with the results because I've had about a week of some spare time with my computer and we're we've got ahead of the schedule for the 1604 release so we've got an extended period of being able to do some bug fixing and refinements and there's been a few things about the themes and the look and feel that i've really never been happy with but there's always been something more important that needed dealing with so actually having the time to sit down and sort of smooth some of those rough edges. And then I look back at this, you know, several evenings work and I'd got one computer that was running that last week's image. And then this one I'd been working on, I thought, you know what, I really feel like we've nailed this. This is such an improvement. Because there's tweaks and improvements across the board.

And with the Qt 4 and Qt 5 integration that is activated by default. So those are facilities that exist within Qt 4 and Qt 5 that you have to hook into. But all of that is baked into a built-in party. Just to sort of break that down, what you're saying is you've enabled the support for Qt applications to sort of integrate and adopt the look of the GTK application, so they should look at place on the Mate desktop. Yeah. So those applications that don't define a very specific style will look like a GTK application.

So the Qt apps will look like GTK applications. Where that's not the case is something like the official Telegram desktop client. They've got a very specific style that they've kind of hard-coded into the application. They have linked to their own version of Qt and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. This is pretty cool. And I think this combined with the software boutique will also be in 16.04, right? Yeah.

And Coolbird is in the software boutique. Yeah. That software – literally, Wimpy, I'm not kidding. That software boutique is what kept me on the Apollo running 15.10. Because when you gave me the PPA for for that all of the extra stuff that i was wanting from the aur was in the fatigue and i just went through and installed it all in a few minutes and okay well now i'm good i don't need to go anywhere and and now now i'm actually considering uh switching my arch desktops over to mate for a little while yeah i know i'll see okay i know

so you'll have to do a lot of heavy lifting for yourself. I know. That is legitimately true, and that's why I'm hoping Snap Packages. That's why I'm hoping Snap Packages. I want snaps for everything, and then I'm back on Ubuntu, everybody. What's up? Oh, we'll see. I was actually – The whole circle.

I was targeting for Fedora as my next landing spot, but you take the stuff that Wimpy's doing here. I just love it. And then you combine that with Snap Packages. That's a hard, hard thing. You know what's going to drive me to... Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say, just to sort of close, I started by mentioning Wolfgang Albrecht,

and then I've reused his work. I've updated the default themes in Ubuntu Mate, so that's Ambient Mate and Radiant Mate, but all of the uh uh official mate themes also have all of this support built in so the full theme suite is all csd header bar enabled so it's not just one theme it's everything that comes it, the next couple of years are going to be really something. There is really a lot of, you know, and wouldn't it be great in this time

if Copper on Fedora got even better and the build service had more and more vendors that were just using the build service and Snap Packages had more and more people creating Snap Packages and the AUR continues to just be the best thing out there ever. Wouldn't that just – I mean, wow.

It's so funny. Depending on your perspective on where you sit, software is either the hardest thing to ever do on Linux and deploy and install, or it is about to be the coolest it has ever been ever. It just depends on your perspective at this point. And if you're a power user who might be buying that Dell Sputnik because you're a developer, then to you, this is awesome. And if you're a regular user, you just got to wait it out a little while and all this stuff will eventually get smoothed out. That is pretty freaking cool. Well, a mumble of anything else before we wrap up on today's episode because I'm ready to go get myself some 1604.

I'm ready to go install some Ubuntu Mate on my Arch. Get some snaps. It's going to be a mess up in this place. And you know what? Yeah, go ahead. I wanted to say earlier before my system decided to do what it did. When you went AFK, we need to away from Mike. You went AFM.

AFM. AFM, bro. Well, what happened was this push to talk stopped working on me temporarily, so I had to log out and log back in. I forgive you. Go ahead. But, yeah, I think supporting the client-side decorations in MATE is extremely important because it's part of the concept of just working. And if an application doesn't just work, then people aren't going to use it. And then the other part of that is if this is a new person coming to Linux, suddenly that desktop is a

desktop that doesn't work for them, and they're not going to recommend it to anybody else. So I think it is crucial that these kinds of standards are implemented and supported correctly in other desktops. Good point. And, you know, I just realized that if I switch away from GNOME 3 because I like Ubuntu Mate's implementation of the desktop, I'm literally stepping away from the beast that is GNOME and then becoming dependent on Wimpy's brand of implementation. That is a scary – that is a scary story.

They all have all the power. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Rotten, Cotton Rotten, you wanted to mention something. Go ahead. Oh, about extensions. Yeah. Yeah, I just wrote a solution for a problem that I had and a lot of people had.

In general, there's a preview for it. That's what it looks like without the extension. And this is what it looks like with it what well you tell describe it for the audio audience so it's a uh essentially what it does is take the gnome extensions website and provides download buttons for the actual extensions oh cool i see yeah so it's a little cut off on the live stream but uh and and then i guess that'd be well so that way when you reload, you can add them back really quickly, I guess? Yeah, you can add them back with the tweak tool, and you can also pick which version you want in case you don't have – like it's not detecting the right version, things like that. Nice. And it also supports Chromium and basically everything.

Oh, that's definitely nice. Yeah, because you've got to use a browser that has the Netscape plugin API in order to use that. Yeah, this bypasses it completely. I'm not sure it's the best way to go, but for you Arch users, oftentimes almost all those GNOME extensions are in the AUR too, and then the package manager updates them. While developing it, I talked to one of the GNOME developers, and he said that in 3.22, he's expecting to have GNOME software support for extensions.

As we wrap up, we should mention, too, that I think OMG Ubuntu has an article about Canonical looking for a hand on getting their implementation of GNOME software up to schnuff because icons and stuff are broken. So, you guys, if you are interested in that, you can go check that out. Hey, but you know what, Wes? That's a great sound effect. That brings us to the end of this week's episode of the Unplugged program. 136 in the bag, in the can. Man, LinuxFest is coming up so soon. I'm excited.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, at some point, we're going to have people in the studio. I mean, what are we going to do with them? I don't know. Just join us for the shenanigans over at jblive.tv. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Get it converted to your local time zone and submit content to the show by going to linuxactionshow.reddit.com

and go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact to send us an email. And we'll see you right back here next week. Thank you. We should give a total shout out to both Popey and Wimpy, pro broadcasters. If you ever watch a radio DJ live stream, you get kind of weirded out. At least I did. The first couple of times I watched Adam Carolla or our local DJs here on Cairo do radio, the music's playing.

And the music's right about to hit. And as the music's hitting the intro, they sit down and go, ah, welcome to blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, they were just outside in the room three seconds ago. And then they sat down and just started talking like they'd been there the whole time. That's what Popey and Wimpy did this week because of the time zone

change. They're recording the Ubuntu podcast and then they slip into the mumble room and some quick, a little quick maneuvering on our part. We bumped the client-side decorations at the end of the show when we realized daylight savings. You're giving away our secrets. I know, but it all

worked out pretty well in the end. So thank you guys for making that work. We appreciate it. That was good fun. You're welcome. I had no idea what the hell you said before we arrived about Snappy. You could have said it was just on the biggest pile of dog shit before I came in.

I think if you listen back to the whole... And then I come in and go, yeah, I completely agree. I think if you listen back to the whole episode, it all flows really well. It all sort of went together. So that was pretty funny. Firewatch is loading.

Here we go, Wes. I'm excited. Ooh, we get a little intro video. All right, bring it. Now the mouse cursor's in the video. Panic Incorporated. Hey, panic, sure. Okay, I know panic.

You old hat, you. Boulder, Colorado, 1975, Wes. Get ready. Julia. Uh, I don't see anything right now. All I see is this... Oh, okay. I'm supposed to do something. Here we go.

She's about your age. Late 20s. Laughing with well-dressed professors and grad students from a nearby CU Boulder. You, Henry, are out drinking with your pals you approach her bold move you are drunk so what what's your you know major you you're pretty which one do you want to go with that one i do too i like that one it's sincere are you guys playing leisure suit larry you're no we're playing firewatch. You're pretty, she says coolly. You are not.

You are a future hangover. Wow. What? You reply confused. Someone should buy you a cheeseburger, she says. She flakes down a waiter. And one week later, you are Julia's boyfriend. Nice move.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. All right. Now we're in an elevator. Sort of an emo elevator with a really low frame rate. So I can click on objects. I'm going to pick up this backpack. Hey, look at that. I got a backpack, Wes. Why are you so critical of this elevator?

Well, look at the frame rate. I mean, I know this thing's just Intel graphics and it's doing mirroring, but... Oh, what do we got here? Okay. Let's walk forward. Huh. The music is great. So I'm in a parking garage.

Do they sell just the music? Yes, they do, actually. Oh, wow. Great. Yeah, they do have that on Steam. Well, I'm going to buy both, I guess. It's pretty cool. All right, so this is a pretty hip little truck. Let's see if I can get in.

Oh, I happen to have the keys. It does seem to match your bag. Alright, I'm in the truck now. You date for over a year. She drives you absolutely nuts. It's great. Aw, cute. You move in.

You share an apartment near the school with a view of the mountains. You two drink beer out on the deck. Here, cheers, Wes. You drink beer just about anywhere. That's great. Life is good. Julia wants to get a dog. I'll do it.

Dogs are great. There's a scruffy, undersized beagle. Julia's in love. She wants to bring it home. She wants to bring it with Dogs are great. There's a scruffy, undersized beagle. Julia's in love. She wants to bring it home. She wants to bring it with her to class. She's also an intimidating but gentle. There's also an intimidating but gentle German shepherd. Nothing bad could happen to Julia while walking this dog.

It's badass. Let's go with the G. I don't know. What do you think? Well. I feel like if Julia got the dog that she can bring to class, it would be an expression of your love out in public. Yeah, true. So then she would be able to brag about you like, oh, yes, my boyfriend got me this dog.

As long as she's the one feeding the dog. And the thing is, beagles are barkers. They sure are. They're going to bark. So I'm going to say beagle. What do you say? All right, do it. We name him Bucket.

Bucket's a good dog. And a week week later you've totally forgotten about the other one. Julia loves him. You love him too. Does it feel like they're manipulating us? Yeah. 1979, you talk out on the deck. It's summer, 9.30 p.m., and the heat still radiates off the high desert. What do you think about kids, she asks.

Oh, boy, Wes. Getting serious. Kids? They're not very smart, or good at much. I'm saying if you and I had some, a couple of little idiots. I think we should just say yes. I mean, when this question comes up, she's been thinking about that for a long time.

You've got to be careful how you answer this one, Wes. Heads up. You're a man with experience. In that case, we should probably get married. Yeah, I would like that, you say. These kids are going to be screwed up enough. It's probably the best that their parents are hitched. You say she's absolutely right. This game moves fast.

Yeah, man. It's a modern game. Now you're getting in your super cool... Wait, no, we just got to have our super cool truck. Ooh, looks like we're out for a hike. Let's go take a little walk, sees. Thoroughfare Trial Head.

We're all here. Don't forget to check in! Warning, Thoroughfare Trail is not recommended for the inexperienced hikers. Don't bring fireworks. Huh. This is a pretty gorgeous game, even with the graphic settings turned down to work on the Intel graphics. Yeah.

How do you check in, Wes? Interesting. Boy, look at this. This is something I think I'm going to play later after the show. This is where I miss the bonobo right now. The bonobo would be able to chew on this. Yeah. This is probably cool.

I didn't check in, so if you see where I'm supposed to check in, you let me know. I sure will. Uh-oh, we got a little crossfade happening. Standby one. Oh, she is. 1980, it's Thursday night,

and Julia is four hours late. She doesn't call. You're worried and getting angrier by the minute. Whoa, we got a temper, don't we? She walks in after you've gone to bed. But not really. I'm up. She's not quite drunk, but she's clearly been having a fun time. You fight when she gets

between the sheets. You fight when she gets between the sheets. Do you get mad or do you ignore her? You want to press her? For convenience of time, I said we'd press her. Let's get mad. I mean, Pacific Northwest-wise, we should probably pick her. You call her an inconsiderate asshole. I don't think I would have done that.

No. She tells you to F off yourself and not to be such a baby. You call her selfish. She knows you mean it, and it hurts her feelings. Ouch. That was a wrong call. This is an emotional game. Did not mean to do that.

Julia still likes to draw. She draws plans from her research. She draws all the places you go. She draws you. You pose and flex like a He-Man. You frolic like Victoria's Secret Model.

Let's go with the Secret Model thing. Yeah, definitely. It would be funny. She was right. You are very pretty. Okay. Now we're hiking again.

It's like we're thinking of this while we're hiking It's red out, you see how Yeah No instruction on where I'm supposed to go No clues, no mini map No health bar No hit points No weapon Nothing

No indication of where I'm supposed to be going. I'm just a dude walking out in the forest right now. This kind of feels like up in the corner. That's all you've ever been, Chris. Although I have better frame rate in real life. Oh, what's this say? Two forks. Okay.

There we go. We got a lookout. Let's go. Can I jump? Space bar to climb over obstacles. Space bar. There we go. We got a lookout. Let's go. Can I jump? Space bar to climb over obstacles. Space bar. There we go. Perfect.

Wow, I did quite the jump there. Ooh, look at that sunshine, Wes. Look at that. Beautiful. 1982. During the summers, you and Julia enjoy walking bucket at night. Aw, bucket. There's a festival in town.

It brings folks from faraway places. One of them tries to mug you with a knife. Bucket gets kicked. Oh, that dog. Oh, that effing dog. Julia yells. She gets flustered and has trouble speaking when she gets stressed. You confront the attacker.

What do we do? Do we scare him away or beat him in? I think we're a gentleman. We scare him away. We scare him away. We scare him away. Okay. Reach into your pocket like you've got a gun and threaten to kill him. You manage to scare off all... You manage to scare all three of them. Wow.

Whoa! Oh, you scare all three of you and he runs away. This is moving fast. Julia asks to take a different path from that day forward. You say it's okay. You don't want to go that way either. From then on, you walk by the river. River's pretty anyway. 1984.

Plans to have kids have got waylaid by work. Julia gets offered a job at Yale. Yale is in Connecticut. It's 2,000 miles away. It's a great job. Associate department chair. She wants to Yale. Yale is in Connecticut. It's 2,000 miles away. It's a great job. Associate department chair. She wants to move.

You absolutely do not. Convince her not to take the job or agree if she commutes back and forth. Ouch. Neither of those are very good options. Yeah, yeah. Ooh, Chris, this is getting hard. I'm going to say agree if she commutes. I guess so.

Although if she's angry at us for that, she has every right to be. You ask if she'll commute back and forth. You don't want to move to Connecticut. She says that'll be hard, but she'll do it for you. Dang. You tell her not to pass it up if she wants. She agrees. She flies back to Boulder three times each semester.

1985. Julia sent home from Yale on paid leave after having an episode. She lost it on college for borrowing books that were on a colleague that were important to her research. She didn't remember she'd happily loaned them to him just two days prior. Jeez. She was found crying

in the stairwell. You say that maybe you guys should talk to someone about it. That's one option. You make macaroni and drink wine and try to forget about it. What do you think? I say talk to somebody. Yeah, let's do that.

Because I'm also worried about that time she came home late. Mm-hmm. Yeah. After seeing multiple doctors and having many tests, they are worried that Julia might be suffering

from early-onset dementia. She's 41. You decide to keep it a secret for now. For the both of you. Mm-hmm. She's 41. You decide to keep it a secret for now. For the both of you. Now we're camping again. There you go, Wes. Here's our journal.

Maybe we should leave it right here. And let the viewer at home fill in the rest. I'm interested, though. I'm hooked. Whoa! That's where we should leave it Right there Right there Perfect

Hot stuff journal