LINUX Unplugged - Episode 139: Virtual Bondage | LUP 139

Episode Date: April 6, 2016

We look at the state of Virtual Reality under Linux. Richard Brown from openSUSE joins us to discuss making the Plasma Desktop even better & our quick review of Apricity OS “a modern, intuitive operating system for the cloud generation”.Plus a bunch of project updates & much more!

Hey look, there's a picture of Popey! Oh. Oh, he looks so happy. That was a surprise. I bet he smells good there too. I like the comment as well. What the hell are you using as a laptop? Is that your phone, Popey, that you have hooked up to a keyboard ten times the size of your phone?

What is that? That was for him because he wanted a photo of a phone doing Convergency stuff. The one on the other side is a ThinkPad. That is it. Oh, I see. I like the image text where the desktop was the phone is now, says Adam, stroking the rich mahogany Louis

XVSK. Yeah, really. Stroking the rich mahogany Louis XVSK. Now what kind of... That is a heck of a keyboard. Is there a lot of battery in that thing? What's going on with that? Why is it so big? The Logitech one.

It's so you could sit a tablet in it. But it's only got a AA and it lasts forever. Like it lasts a year. I've got one. It's brilliant. Oh, I love – I have a – oh, so it's not that thick. So I have a Logitech that's – because that looks really thick in the picture. And the Logitech I have is –

It's quite thick. Oh, okay. But it's quite sturdy. It's quite – I think it's not that thick. So I have a Logitech that's – because that looks really thick in the picture. And the Logitech I have is – It's quite thick. Oh, okay. But it's quite sturdy. It's quite – I think it's more like metal. It's about a centimeter and a half thick, Chris, which is about four furlongs or something. Yeah, some of the students in the school are working. It's got something like that for the iPhones as well. Well, there you go.

Either way, you can tell that's a man who smells good. That's all I know. Look at that USB cable too there. Look at that. That's a nice flat USB cable. I like that, Pope. Look at that USB cable, too, there. Look at that. That's a nice, flat USB cable. I like that, Popey. Is that an internet phone there on the table, too? You got an iPhone 4 or something there?

What is that? There's no iPhones there. That's a BQ phone. Oh. Duh. Okay, okay. Well, they all kind of look alike these days. There's Ubuntu phones.

Yeah. Yeah, I moved all of the non-Ubuntu phones out of the way. Yeah, right. He's done this thing before. Smart man. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 139 for April 5th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's celebrating Wes's upcoming birthday with a little birthday beer that he brought himself. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hey, Wes. Happy early birthday to you. Well, thank you, sir. And thanks for bringing your birthday beer in today. Anytime. Every time. Well, coming up on today's episode of the Unplugged program, we're going to do some updates on our favorite open source projects like we always do and hear some of those directly from the horse's mouth.

Then in the second half of the show, if you will, we're going to try out a brand new distribution that promises to be beautiful, elegant, up-to-date, fast, ultra-customized, and arch-based. And it's not a district you've probably heard of before. Yes, kids, we're going to look at this guy and tell you if it truly is something you want to take out on a rig like yours. Maybe Wes has sacrificed his own rig for you to find out. Stand by. We'll tell you about that in a little bit. After that, I've got to admit it,

I've been bit a little bit by the hype bug. I want to play with virtual reality, Wes, but in Linux land, there's not much going on. Or is there? Is there a virtual reality desktop environment? Are there projects available for Linux users right now? If you have virtual reality hardware, we're going to take a look at the state of virtual reality under Linux and some of the things you can play on right now.

And some of the interesting things that Wes and I discovered when we were digging around about the state of VR under Linux 2, which is just kind of interesting tidbits that we're going to share. Plus, we got a whole bunch of other things in today's show. But to top it all off, I did mention we were drinking birthday beers. Wes brought in something fun, and I think the Mumble Room is going to give us a hard time about this one. So maybe we'll bring them in first before we really read this one. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Okay, now, you've got to forgive me. Time-appropriate greetings. Thank you. Okay, so you've got to forgive me because I'm just going to read it the way I see it. Crikey IPA, an American Indian pale ale.

Crikey IPA, there you go. It's got an 89 beer score, 90 from the community. It's an American IPA with a 6.8 alcohol by volume from Ruben's Brews in – can you guess where, Wes? Do you know where it's brewed? Yes, I do. Go ahead. Seattle, Washington.

That's right. It's a local brew, ladies and gentlemen. So that's what we're drinking on today's episode. I thought that R was sexy. Yeah? Yeah, you're right. That is it. It reminds me of Rainier a little bit. That's what they It's a local brew, ladies and gentlemen. So that's what we're drinking on today's episode. I just thought that R was sexy. Yeah? Yeah, you're right. That is it. It reminds me of Rainier a little bit.

That's what they're going for there. So we have much to talk about today. And there's a topic that we haven't floated before. Oh, did we actually talk about this on the show? Did this ever come up on the show or is it only something we've talked about behind the scenes? I'm not sure. I don't know either because it's a big deal. It's very scary.

Something we've talked about behind the scenes. I'm not sure. I don't know either because it's a big deal. It's very scary. Developers have warned us over and over again about uncorrectable issues and freedom problems. Yes. Not my freedom. No.

No, I'm talking freedom problems. It's negative in the freedom dimension. X86 is just getting a bad rap these days. dimension. X86 is just getting a bad rap these days. Another developer, a long developer involved in Coreboot, Libreboot, is trying to call attention to the uncorrectable freedom and security issues on the X86 platform in a newly

freshened attempt to get everybody to realize that post-2009 Intel systems and post- 2013 AMD systems have massive flaws. Mainly, he argues in the fact that you have these management platforms, the Intel management engine and the AMD security processor, which require these binary-only blobs that have

major vulnerabilities in them. And he also has issues with UEFI secure boot. And he wants the community, he is calling upon the community to make a move to ARM, Power, MIPS, or even RISC-V processors. He does then provide a summary that is not very exciting about making that move. Yeah. But it is a good summary of the state of the available. Now, this is a topic I think that has particularly tickled your interest for a little while. What is it about the whole concept?

Because you've been tracking this story since a couple of other reports recently that have said, you know, we have to abandon x86 immediately. We must move to another platform if security is at all important to you. What is it about this x86 story that keeps grabbing your attention? I just think it's not brought up that much. I mean it comes up occasionally. That's why it piques my interest when it does. And you just don't hear very much about it. Some of these features are really useful, a lot of, you know, especially enterprise management. But in particular, like I haven't heard very much about the AMD, you know, the platform. That's not talked very much.

And obviously, we're not going to all drop x86. But as we see ARM coming up, which again, has some problems in some implementations, but I don't know. So Daredevil in the mumble room, I know you have some thoughts on this one. Share it with us, sir. So I'd start with, first of all, it's interesting that now there is a competitor that is trying to get into that realm, that there is more research about the actual security of this, who should be financing this research. I mean, not saying that the research is biased, I'm saying that there is financing towards researching the issue. Nothing says that there isn't the similar issues on the other platforms or their architectures.

So we need, you know, it took us years until we realized those things. And having that said, the secure boot scenario is all about, you start by opting for devices that actually allow you to control the keys you have in the device, moving towards the ability to then replace the thing when we have a free software implementation of it. Since there's interest in the public,

developments are happening. Something about the idea seems fantastical to me, like that we would all make a huge migration, like a migration west. Like we all get in our low-powered, under-resourced ARM machines and we just all double down on ARM or something like that.

I'm not saying it'd be ARM. But the idea of one day all of us just sort of mass migrating away from x86 right now seems ludicrous. But it could start to happen. I think it will start to happen at least for once, and maybe it is already there. ARM beats out the chips from 2009 and 2013. If you are concerned about security, right,

there's people who buy the older laptops, so you can still get core boot on them. Oh, boy, that's not a good solution at all. Right, so at some point, that will cross with where ARM is going in terms of capabilities. Huh, huh. So that's a start, but obviously that won't be the mass market. But to be fair, your primary computing device almost certainly is an ARM device right now.

My phone? Yeah. I don't know if I classify it yet as my primary, but it's definitely damn close. Maybe not you. Maybe not you. Maybe not you. But I think you as in the average person who is considering this a ludicrous proposal might actually then pull out – they're probably even reading that article on our arm device. You're probably right. I have been shocked at how many people I now know that their primary computing device is a phone. I already shared this story on Coder Radio, so I'll just make it super brief.

But the community I live in, a lot of people there are just using their phones as their primary computer. And we have like community events. We had a Thanksgiving event. We had an Easter event and a Christmas event. It's adorable. Thanksgiving event. We had an Easter event and a Christmas event. It's adorable. And when we get together, it is interesting how technically they are very aware that they could – it's not like they don't have a computer because they are scared of them. They have them at work. But in their estimation, they can do everything they need on their phone, including like they were doing the

healthcare.gov stuff, like they're getting healthcare exchange coverage on their phone. And then when they need a computer, they just do it at work. And so I think you're right, Popey. I think for a lot of people – and that's kind of where I was going where I could see this is what if a vendor like Dell or Apple came out with a really successful ARM-based laptop? That would also peel off a whole bunch of people. I don't know about for me, though. Let's stay focused on the issue, though. The issue is non-free firmware,

non-free code. You're right. It's running at a higher privilege level, and almost every ARM device has that. A proprietary blob that runs in the trust zone. If you buy anything from Qualcomm, you have to run their trust zone. There's no way for you to know what's actually inside that. It's really no better than Intel's management engine.

Yeah, that's your primary issue, right. Go ahead, Wimpy. And that trust zone has been riddled with security issues for a long, long time. Well, isn't this just depressing? Yeah, it is. Come on, guys. You're supposed to make me feel better.

It seems like the best bet. You know what? Actually, you know what I've heard people talking about? Not RISC, but what is the CPU design that was originally from Spark, right? Isn't Spark open source? Aren't Spark chips like the entire Spark design completely open source? The chip is open source, and I think Fujitsu still produces some, but all the new ones made by Oracle are completely locked down.

They don't release any of the specs for those. I think the old ones, all the Verilog is out there, isn't it? Okay, okay. North Ranger, there is at least IBM's power. So if you look at the TALIS workstation, at least all of the code that's running on that is open, even if the chip design is not. Sure, right, sure. North Ranger, did you get a chance to jump in with what you wanted to mention? Yeah, I think, you know, it's already been alluded to a little bit, but, you know, even

if you swap out the platform, you know, with a CPU that can be booted in an open manner, we're still going to be stuck with peripherals that have binary blobs. Even if they're not binary blobs that have to be loaded by the OS, your hard drive has basically an OS running on it to manage all the flash chips. But none of that, though, is as critical as your CPU. Like if the CPU is the core source of either, if we're just concerned about blobs, or really security issues, then that's a fundamental problem. If a peripheral is, that's not as egregious.

It's still egregious. Well, in the case of a hard drive, it could be pretty egregious. Yeah, it could. It doesn't control what data you're accessing. And so it could put in whatever data it wants. Okay. Well. I've seen examples of that.

Oh, Wimpy's got something for the show notes I will add to. Yes, OpenSpark. Right. Exactly. Very good. Yep. Well, there you have it. It doesn't sound like we – even though we've had – and it's interesting you've been following this story for a little while, Wes.

It's interesting you've been following this push, and yet we don't really have a super clear alternative that doesn't also have its set of downsides. I just like to bring myself down. And not to mention that we've now got decades of R&D into x86 and software built around and all of that. Speaking of decades, speaking of decades, that whole SCO versus Linux, don't believe what you read. It's actually still around. Yeah, the SCO versus IBM is alive 13 years later and continuing. Now, you know what? You might not even have been alive if you're listening to this show when this lawsuit first started.

even have been alive if you're listening to this show when this lawsuit first started. So at its core, the Skogrup, which was then named Caldera Systems, filed a lawsuit against IBM in March of 2003 for allegedly contributing sections of the commercial Unix code from the Unix system in it to

from Skogrup to the Linux kernel code base. Skogrup claimed that they alleged presence of its proprietary code in the open source code named Linux devalued its proprietary code's value, and so therefore they were suing IBM for that. Along the way, Skoll filed for bankruptcy, and the group claimed that anyone who used Linux

owed them money. All the while, Novell successfully claimed ownership of the allegedly infringing code, and then said, okay, everybody's going to be indemnified from it if you run on Linux. But all of that has not stopped the SkO group from continuing its battle with IBM. The group on Wednesday, which is last Wednesday, did not actually reveal the nature of their appeal, only as solely as a notice to the appeals court that they would be lodging an appeal soon.

So it's not SCO versus IBM, which is one of the oldest stories I've been following. It's still not done. It's still not done. It's unbelievable. One of the first stories tracked for Linux Action Show. Really incredible. All right. I don't want to go into all the April Fools this week, this past week.

There was a lot of April Fools shenanigans. But one I thought was particularly good because, you know, like what ThinkGeek does is ThinkGeek has these products sometimes as April Fool's and then people want it so much that ThinkGeek actually ends up making it. I think that's what's going to happen to the KDE project. The KDE project, I think, ended up with an April Fool's that they're going to have to make. On April 1st, they posted Plasma 5.7 will let you log in through an online account. KDE is going to provide an own cloud installation to let Plasma and KDE PIM users sync their data. You can already use own cloud with Cardav and CalDAV to get your calendars and things like that synced. And now you will be able to use own cloud to sync Plasma configurations and manage them.

When your work is completed, you'll be able to load a Plasma session by specifying your username and password in an own cloud provider. That's right. And then you can log into your KDE desktop and have your settings synced via own cloud in Plasma 5.7. A massive feature, Wes. A massive feature. Now I kind of want it. I know, right? So did everybody else. So, ha-ha, April Fools.

That was a super funny April Fool's, everybody. Super funny April Fool's. Reminds me of Ubuntu 1. What was the Ubuntu 1? I don't remember that. It wasn't Ubuntu 1, the thing of the cloud that you could also put your backups in there. A service that was discontinued at some point. Yes, yes.

Dropbox-like. Yes. Yeah. No. But it got enough people's attention they say they're actually, it happened that they were already going to be meeting at the at their VDG you know, the developers group meeting that they

have. And so they're like, people are really excited about this April Fool's. And so they looked at it and they're like, God, you know, there might actually be ways we could actually accomplish some of this. Now, not the login stuff, but integrating more syncing stuff, better place to store stuff in own cloud. It looks like they actually looked at some of the ideas from the April Fools and went. I'm not trying to be negative.

This just seems like a huge expense for very little benefit. Well, not the login part, not the login part, but some of the other file syncing stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wimby, you were mentioning Google's April Fools. That didn't go over so well. I heard some people got really upset about that. Did you go? Where'd you go, Wimpy?

Where'd you go? Oh. Hello. Hi. I think the people at Google need to remember they've been employed to be kick-ass engineers and various other roles, and none of them are employed to be full-time comedians. Yeah. And they should just knock this on the head. It's very tiresome.

And, you know, their April Fools this year, a couple of them went bad and none of them were very good. What happened to the halcyon days of the Google April Fools, like Google Glass and Nexus Q? I mean, those were cracking. There you go. I agree. And, you know, those are hilarious. I saw some people that were tweeting, like, they were writing, like, condolences emails to people who had, to family members who had had somebody passed away, and it inserted that mic drop thing. And anyways, people were upset. So it might be some fun thing. Anyways, people were upset. So it might be some fun stuff coming out of Plasma soon. And also, KDE has come up with a vision for the future that, well, I'll read it to you.

The KDE statement for their vision is a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy. The more expanded it goes on, but in greater detail, their vision has no geographical barriers. KDE should be able to be available to everyone. KDE wants to put their users in the driver's seat. And KDE wants people to control all aspects of their digital lives. Okay. Hard to object to. That is the KDE vision.

And you can find out more at.kde.org. And this is kind of an interesting thing. I wonder – so the group that put this together, I wonder how much connection this actually has to people that are actually writing code. That's always something I kind of wonder. When I watch the KDE project from afar, I get kind of confused about what is actually directly connected to the project and what is just sort of like people who are associated with the project that do in the project's name. are associated with the project that do in the project's name. And I've been running the Plasma 5.6 desktop since about five days, since before Plasma 5.6 or maybe seven days before Plasma 5.6 was released to final.

And now I've been running it since then. So I guess I'm coming on like I must be on almost a month now. And just recently I'm starting to have issues on this Intel Skylake machine. But I have really profoundly changed my position on the Plasma desktop. And it no longer, with each release of the Plasma desktop, I have felt like there's just a couple of things that were really fundamentally broken that didn't work for me. For a while, it was sound was really bad. Then being able to go in there and understanding, at one point, I think it was like in 5.4 or 5.5, when they updated the sound or the multimedia system control panel where you could go and disable hardware devices.

So it was a process of elimination. I could make the right sound card work. That was a huge game changer for me. When the stability got so that way I didn't just – when the session was idle, I would sometimes just have the plasma shell crash. When those things stopped happening, that was another game changer for me. And so 5.6 has been really a great, great release. But at the same time, as much as I see improvement, I see a lot of room for continued improvement still. And last week we covered a mailing post that Mr. Brown, who is in our mumble room right now,

who hails us from the SUSE project, wrote up. And he sent it in to the KDE mailing list. And if you guys recall, he talked about how there's multiple text editors and multiple start menus. And there's so much going on in there that it might need a little refinement. And I don't want to actually make it too clumsy. So, Mr. Brown, if you wanted to maybe just really recap really briefly for our audience who didn't catch the episode last week, kind of what your message was in this mailing list post because I thought it nailed my thoughts.

I thought you were actually really able to verbalize some of the things that I've been thinking in a really clear, cognizant way that wasn't hostile, that came from a place of I love what you're doing. I love everything we've accomplished, but we still have room to go. And so would you mind summarizing your post really quick for the audience? Yeah, I don't mind at all. I mean, it comes from a lot of the discussions we're having with the KDE project at the moment about their relationships with distributions, some pain points with our packages and stuff like that. And the conversation kind of ended up talking a little bit broader

about sort of just distribution positioning and stuff generally and yeah the the key message that i wanted to kind of get across is yeah there's parts of the kde stack which are absolutely phenomenal and of good quality and great but if you look at kind of kd as a whole it's hard to get a handle on what the project is trying to do. And if you ask three different KDE developers, you generally get three different answers on pretty much everything. And you made a point that that clearly translates to what that happens is the KDE project

on the Plasma desktop is not messaging to the distros what's awesome about the Plasma desktop, so then they can't turn around and relay that to their users. There's like a disconnect there. And so that's sort of the big problem. So what you just said, the end result is KDE actually has to – KDE doesn't just market to end users. It also has to market to distro makers themselves too.

And there's like little snippets and like little glimmers of what I think is a wonderful – well, I don't want to use the word vision because they're using it now. of what I think is a wonderful, I don't want to use the word vision because they're using it now, mission, goal, whatever, of like some of their plasma maintainers of like just thinking of plasma as a workspace and thinking of the applications as something different.

And if you think of it as something different, which is clearly a mindset that some of the KDE project have, a lot of these problems and pain points go away because all of these duplicate applications are suddenly available to not be included. You know, if you stop thinking of KDE as a huge stack, but as a pick and mix selection of technologies you might want to put in your distribution, things get really exciting again. Sure.

The whole project isn't angled in that direction yet. The messaging's not there. Well, you know, when you think of, as an end user, when you think of the Plasma desktop, don't you – aren't you – isn't one of the things you think about is how well all the applications integrate and how they all play off each other and how it's a whole suite? I mean, when I think of the KDE desktop, I think of Plasma 5.6. I think of all of the text editors. I even maybe consider KOffice included in that. I mean, I think of the entire suite when I think of all of the text editors. I even maybe consider KOffice included in that. I mean I think of the entire suite when I think of the Plasma desktop. You think that way, but the KDE project is no longer working in that way.

So is that a smart thing to have those expectations so far divorced from each other? If you haven't got maintainers on the KDE side maintaining all of that stuff to the same level as the Plasma guys and the KWin guys, aren't you just setting yourself up for disappointment and failure at some point? Right, yeah. That's actually a great point. But how does a project like KDE, which has been labeled in the past as a bit

chaotic, how does a project like that come together and say, we're going to unite around a single editor, we're going to unite around a single this or that. Or is that the job of a distribution? And if that's the job of the distribution, why has it never happened? Yeah, that's a tough answer. I mean, I think there is room in KDE for some kind of leadership in that area, like just

people stepping up and saying, OK, we we're gonna make some of these tough choices it won't make those people friends just like some of the changes no made didn't make necessarily make certain people friends but in the long run it's proven to be a pretty good thing i think that might be part of it the other part of the distributions is the other stuff that we were talking about before we got onto this conversation of of like these um i was going to say 100 paper cuts but at the moment it feels a bit more like a thousand of like just living with the KDE stack, packaging the KDE stack, handling

you know, new dependencies, new changes and we're having a bit of a hard time getting like the communication from them as the developers of like, what are they expecting from us? What dependencies do they need? What versions of X, Y, and Z? We just get these big old tables and them as the developers of like what are they expecting from us what where what dependencies do they need what versions of x y and z we just get these big old tables and expected to get it

out there and they you know use his hands as fast as possible and that can be really tough sometimes yeah absolutely now you also really effectively broke down the rather dominant position that GTK-based desktops are in versus QT-based desktops. And I find that to be not shocking and not a huge surprise. But if you walk into a room of Linux nerds and you ask people to raise their hands on what they prefer, QT or GTK, a lot of people are going to raise their hands for Qt in terms of application development. A lot of people would say Qt is superior or cute. Yet, you did the math.

I'm raising my hand, but I use GNOME. Right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of in the same. I'm using Plasma right now, but I'm kind of in the same boat. So what's going on here? Why has GNOME or GTK desktops essentially dominated

the top positions on DistroWatch and the larger distros when Plasma desktop has been around for a long time? The QT technology is pretty advanced. You have folks like Canonical who are investing a ton of resources into it. What are your thoughts there? I think it's a case of just just hitting that sweet spot of the implementation. If you think of many of the core audiences of Linux these days, we're talking about tablets and stuff earlier and mobile devices. If you think about who is using a Linux desktop these days, you typically have developers, techies, sysadminies, guys

who generally fall into one or two camps either sort of the lightweight guys who just want the most simple window manager or whatever that can you know just does the thing that it's meant to do and you know probably some old school stuff that no one's seen for 10 years or seen an upgrade for for 10 years and then you have another lot who just want something that keeps out of their way and I think most of the GTK ones generally do that in a very elegant way KDE appeals to

these control freaks who want all these options and all these buttons and everything but does that necessarily overlap with most of the core Linux users these days I'm not so sure and I actually want to give a chance for Daredevil overlap with most of the core of the users these days. I'm not so sure. And I actually want to give a chance for Daredevil to jump in here, because Daredevil,

you say too, maybe it's the money. There's more money behind GTK. What do you mean there? I mean that there is just as much money being poured. Like, Qt has the support of the corporation, DJ, right? And GTK has just supported Red Hat. That's not a small feat. That's not a small feat.

That's not a small amount of engineering in there. And when you look at that money being poured into, hey, this, if you're going to make an application that is going to work in your company and you're already using those Red Hats or this Fedora, you know, it's just that they document in a way. And there's also the cycles. Of course.

In the end, you should just remember that there's also still the very first reason why GTK was created is there was the doubts about the licensing. Now there's no longer many doubts about licensing, but there is still an attempt to show a different path to a different license on Qt,

which is not necessarily the GTK count. Yeah, that's a good point. And also, it's not just Red Hat that have money behind GTK. Susan Linux Enterprise also standardized on GNOME with the last release. Well, that is a perfect segue to my next question, Richard. So this is semi-awkward here now all of a sudden because everybody kind of thinks of OpenSUSE as primarily as focusing on the KDE Plasma desktop. But your enterprise distribution is focused on the GNOME desktop.

You kind of talked about this a little bit. Is this requiring OpenSUSE to pivot more towards user demand or do you play the role as a desktop advocate here and try to get more people to try the Plasma desktop? What decision does OpenSUSE make in light of the reality of GTK's market predominance and apparent user preference in some cases? Well, first, I guess it's clear to say, like, SUSE's business decision regarding the enterprise distribution is, like separate from open Sousa. Like in, in the sense of like Sousa made this decision about gnome as a default quite

a while ago, they did it for 11 as well. And at the same time, the open Sousa community had a discussion, made that decision, went and stuck with KDE. And, and you know,

we're open Sousa is always free to go its own road. Do you know, make its own decisions, and we have an absolutely awesome KDE team. I mean, to be blunt, the best KDE team out there doing a wonderful job of packaging all of this stuff despite the stuff that I've been complaining about. Yeah, and, you know, if you want a KDE experience, it's the best one.

Where that comes to, like, what does OpenSUSE do in the future, at times coming that we'll probably end up having a discussion about this soon. And I think there's some really interesting options to put on the table. Like in the case of Tumbleweed, because one of the things with the community with OpenSUSE, we're not the perception that we are KDE first has always been wrong. We've always treated every desktop equally. So do we put KDE on there? Do we put no desktop as a default in Tumbleweed, for example?

In the case of Tumbleweed, we might be able to get away with that. It might make sense. It reflects the community as we are. But for Leap, probably not. Hmm. What makes the difference there? for leap they're probably not hmm what makes the difference there just the target audience of leap of you know being a an easier not rolling less techy user-friendly distribution i see i mean we could maybe put no default there but that's another thing that i kind of stumbled on when i

was writing all this stuff to katie like there's a lot of distros out there that don't have a default um you know we thought we were crazy thinking about it. Maybe it's an idea to go for that. Yeah, I guess so. I think the idea of the default desktop, I mean, doesn't it feel like that idea comes from, we are going to put all of our focus on this. We're going to do our theming, our customization, all of our effort goes into this, which is really kind of a commercial company way of thinking because it's really a we only have 10 developers to do this, so we must put all of our energy into this desktop. In reality, though, in open source, you may have multiple contributors that want to work on multiple desktops, and so you can ship multiple desktops. Is that true or is there an advantage to just focusing on one desktop, which I think is where that kind of mentality comes from?

I think if you ask kind of mentality comes from? I think if you ask other projects, you'll say focus is the way to go. In the case of OpenSUSE, we've been doing this now for 10 years of the traditional every developer. As long as we have contributors, we will do it, and we'll find a way to do it. And if we have two sets of contributors pulling in two different directions, we find a way of doing it together. And that's one of the things that we're exceptionally good at doing these days.

So for us, that's fine. But then you do have to think about the user experience of like, okay, some guy puts in your DVD, boots it up. Do you really want to shove a desktop selection window right in front of them when they have no idea what all those options mean? So this sort of moving on from this, I guess I kind of wanted to ask you just as a follow-up to last week's, I think it was 138 we talked about this. What do you think would be the major breakthrough to make the floodgates open for people to

move, say, from the Ubuntu desktop or the Fedora desktop or whatever and say, you know what? This time I install this machine, I'm doing OpenSUSE. And I – last week, I think I made it into the show. I'm not sure if I made it into the final version. I proposed that the thing that might finally break those floodgates open is universal application installs across Linux. Because if all of a sudden software availability was sort of the same across all of the major distributions, then you could start picking your distro on other things like technical merits. And you might see a lot more people picking OpenSUSE. It seems like right now one of the barriers is software availability despite all of the nice tricks and means you guys –

It got a long way, but still. Despite that, it seems like that might still be the thing that holds up a lot of people. But I don't know, Richard, what your thoughts are as far as if there could be a big shift that would all of a sudden make it much easier, less friction for people to start jumping to SUSE. Yeah, I think that's part of it. I mean we've been thinking about the software availability thing from sort of the other direction of tidying up some of the rough edges around like software.openSUSE.org and the OBS and bits and pieces like that. The universal application stuff is interesting. I'm perennially worried about the baggage it might bring, you know, libraries that need patching and maintaining and all that other stuff.

I think we've got some expertise in that area because we've been playing around with like Docker. We have Zippers, the only package manager that can patch inside a Docker container,

for example. Wow. Kind of fun. So, you know, maybe we end up, you know, patching inside application containers too

and having fun with that. But, so yeah, I think it's, it's part of the story, but I think in the case of OpenSUSE, the main part has actually been sort of actually having a consistent story. The same thing that I've been criticizing KDE about.

I know that's been a weakness for OpenSUSE in the past, and I think we're finding our feet with that, getting that message out. It's just a case of taking time, listening to feedback, iterating, tuning. One last question, and then I'll toss it to it to Daredevil and then I think we're anything you want to bring up. The last week, the thing that really got my head spinning was Microsoft's announcement of Bash on Windows. And to Mr. Popey's delight,

they specifically said you can run Ubuntu apps on Windows. In fact, I think when you run the user land now, in the command prompt when you type Bash, up in the little window it says Ub Ubuntu as if the application you're running is Ubuntu. And Ubuntu is now an application in your taskbar, Ubuntu, with a little Ubuntu logo and on Windows. And I'm wondering, when you heard this announcement, did you think to yourself, oh, shit, I wish they would have just said the Linux command line. Why did it have to be Ubuntu? Actually,

I heard the announcement, logged onto this mobile channel, and asked Popey a few questions about the technical stuff, because I reckon we can possibly dump OpenSUSE on top of that instead. Yeah, I would love to hear people try this, because they call the subsystem the Linux subsystem. They don't call it the Ubuntu subsystem. The user land is

Ubuntu. But, Popey, now, last week in the show, we were covering the rumors that there might be bash on Windows. Did you know at that time what was coming? I didn't. I knew, like, about an hour before they went on stage and said it, and that was it. Uh-huh. See? We got to get a line to Dustin. We got to get somebody giving him beer to give us the inside scoop.

Derek Devon, before we move on from Mr. Brown, I wanted to get your question in. So, no, I was just saying, the Universal Labs, don't you guys think that it will change what they mean or what it means when you now have to consider Windows platform? I mean, isn't that the appeal? You mean that particular compatibility layer now? Yeah, I mean, seriously. You make an application for Ubuntu, and now it just works on Solaris, BSD, Linux,

your regular distro, and it will work on Windows. I guess Windows can just run CLI apps. They can't run graphical apps yet. No, but you know someone's going to get X working on that thing. You know somebody's going to get it. Well, Xming is already a thing. Oh, well. I hope so.

I wonder if somebody will merge Sigwin with this somehow and make just some sort of Frankenstein setup. An unholy Linux monster. Right. You know exactly what I'm thinking about. Richard, was there anything else you wanted to touch on before we move along? No, that's all fine. All right, sir.

Well, thank you for joining us. And I thought that was a great post, well written. And it was really well stated, too. And I hope the KDE project takes up some of your suggestions. And we will just have to wait and see. I will mention DigitalOcean, sponsor right here of the Linux Unplugged program. Hey, Wes, do you have any DigitalOcean droplets? Oh, you know I do.

Yeah, I do. You know, I have own cloud running up on DigitalOcean right now. I got the version 9 running. You know, the version 9. They got a one-click deployment now of own cloud 9. One click. That's fast. Boom, boom.

That's easy. I tell you what, DigitalOcean is great. It's a great way for you to get your own Linux rig up in the cloud. They call it the cloud. But really what they mean. It's this magical place. It could be magical. But really what they – you know what it is?

It's DigitalOcean's magical servers. They have data centers all over the world totally specced out. They have them in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Germany. They have a new one in India. 40 gigabit E connections to the hypervisors. What? All SSDs. Super fast CPUs. Linux on the entire infrastructure.

KVM for the virtualizer. And then all sitting on top of it is this incredible web app. And it is so well designed, but yet extremely powerful. And then, to top it all off, like sprinkles on top of a cupcake for Wes's birthday, an API

that is straightforward and easy to use. It is so easy. With lots of great open source code already written, taken advantage of Dat API. I love their interface and I love this. If you use our promo code DLUnplugged, you get a $10 credit. $10 credit over at DigitalOcean to save yourself when you're trying it out. I have DigitalOcean also running an EMR application.

Well, I think it's called OpenEMR, actually. Like, the name is not all that creative. But my lady runs a medical practice, and Noah set up one for her a while back. And she tried it out for a little while, and he did the same thing. He spun up a DigitalOcean droplet. That's the first thing you do. She wasn't really ready to try it then. He was being a little pushy. You know how Noah can be. You know how. I mean, I'm just saying.

Noah's a good guy. But he can be intense. So she's like, I'm not quite ready. That's how he's going to win this challenge. I hope so. I hope so. I said, I'm not quite ready, she thought. But now, now she's ready to jump in. It just takes seconds. I'm a busy guy, Wes. And the fact that I can manage my DigitalOcean droplets, it melts my freaking face.

It is so great. And when you use our promo code DLNPLUG, you can try it out. Their pricing is very straightforward. You can even just do hourly pricing. You can go get a big rig. Here's a fun one. I would totally suggest you use DigitalOcean to set up a Mumble server. If you have not played with Mumble for yourself, it is a great open source voice chat program.

Invite your friends. Just chat. Or your own virtual lug. It's what we do for our virtual lug. Our virtual lug uses Mumble running on a DigitalOcean droplet, and it works great. People connect from all over the world to that DigitalOcean droplet, and it runs all the time. DigitalOcean.com. Use their HTML5 console to manage your box,

their API, or their fantastic interface. They got Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, CoreOS, and even that free BSD. They already have tutorials popping up on their site, too, for 16.04. They're on top of it. DigitalOcean.com. Just use that promo code, DO, unplugged, one word, lowercase, and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. And many, many of our friends out there in the open source world

are also taking advantage of DigitalOcean, either as like DigitalOcean sponsoring them by providing the server hosting, or they're just already choosing to run off them. In fact, I recall, I think Wimpy uses DigitalOcean for some Ubuntu Mate stuff. And speaking of Ubuntu Mate, it is a new month. And so we look back at the month of March and we see that the Ubuntu Mate project has had yet, once again, another good month. And Wimpy has outlined how he'll be spending the monies, or how the monies were spent, I guess, better put.

And I wanted to just let him jump in. Is there anything from the update you wanted to share with the audience, Wimpy? Well, those people that are following the blog, they can see all of that stuff in there, see where the money's going. We've put some aside because we we've got the uh 1604 a couple of weeks away and we'll be releasing the raspberry pi images for that we anticipate a spike in downloads and that gets expensive so we're uh we put some money aside to cater for those downloads you know i think i i've been thinking about what it is about these updates that I like.

I mean I like knowing, but it's not just that. What I like is – I assume it's true. But whether it's true or not, you give the impression of a financially stable and financially sustainable distribution. And as somebody who's been watching distributions come and go for a long time, it makes me feel good about that distribution, that you have a sustainable path here. But I wanted to kind of – I actually wanted to push you a little bit on two of the line items you have here because I don't know what these mean and they sound really interesting. So Luke got some cash for working on Ubuntu Mate Welcome. That's very generic, Wimpy, because Ubuntu Mate Welcome has been a project you've been working on for a long time. What did you want to share? Any specifics? Because I was curious. I would like to know, what did he do? Well, he's effectively the principal developer for Ubuntu Mate Welcome and the software boutique now.

Oh, OK. It's really Luke falls into the category of people that really isn't interested in the money, doesn't want the money. And this is just a way of me saying thank you for the hours and hours of effort that he's put into the project. And also he's the forum administrator in the community. So he's taken on a lot of responsibility. And it's just nice to say thank you for all the time and effort he's he's taken on a lot of responsibility and it's just nice to say thank you for all the time and effort well he's invested into the project i would say luke you have helped create one of the best software centers or deployment tools for linux that i have ever used absolutely i think it's fair to say that he hasn't helped this is luke's imagining so i

hasn't helped this is luke's imagining so i started the ball rolling in 1510 and luke's involvement's kind of interesting because very very early on when welcome was really really fresh and new early in the 1510 cycle he posted a mock-up in the forum of the rolling in logo animation that you see in the 1510 Ubuntu Marte welcome and I said oh that would be so great if you implement that and the next day there was a pull request and he'd implemented it all and the rest of it and that kind of sparked his involvement and then I didn't hear much from him and then as the 1604 cycle started, I got this colossal pull request. and and he was very clear you know he he he got what welcome was all about he totally understood why it was important and he really wanted to go for it so um i kind of stepped back a little bit from active development i've had a

hand in it but he has really driven abunz Welcome and the Software Boutique in 16.04 with the help of Robin Thompson as well, who I approached to help us with the translation work that we've been working on the last six weeks or so. So also, I noticed that it looks like there's been some continued effort to porting Mate Desktop to GTK3. Yeah, yeah. I noticed that it looks like there's been some continued effort to porting Mate desktop to GTK3. Yeah, yeah. So the upstream guys, Wolfgang and Vlad, and another guy called Luke, who I don't have any active contact with.

But Luke from DC, I think you go by on GitHub. You really need to get in touch with me. I need to reach out and say thank you to you for all of your hard work as well um but yeah the the three of them have been working tirelessly for months and months to really refine the gtk3 implementation and i think the target at the moment more or less is that marta desktop 1.14 will be released in about a week's time, and it should be the first one that has a stable GTK3 implementation for those people that want to build against GTK3. Hmm. That is exciting. That's impressive.

So GTK 3.20 is the version that they've targeted, and they've worked really, really hard on that. So do you want to chat a little bit about some Raspberry Pi stuff? version that they're targeted. So they've worked really, really hard on that. So do you want to chat a little bit about some Raspberry Pi stuff? I know that you've been working on several different things in that regard. I don't know how much you want to talk about, what you want to share, but there's several things that would be pretty interesting to the audience. Yeah, yeah. That's my sort of favorite pet project.

I like tinkering with the Raspberry Pi. I have lots of friends with Raspberry Pi. We I like tinkering with the Raspberry Pi. I have lots of friends with Raspberry Pi. We like you tinkering with the Raspberry Pi. Yeah, it's lots of fun. So, yeah, I alluded to the fact there will be a Raspberry Pi release for 16.04 for Ubuntu Mate. And I will also build the same versions that we've had before so I've made versions of the Ubuntu you know traditional Ubuntu server and also Ubuntu and Ubuntu images for those people that want to play with those and I think a couple of months ago we

were talking about this stuff and i alluded to the fact that you know there was some experimental work going on from the raspberry pi foundation with um accelerated drivers for the video core for chip and that you know if that went well then we could potentially start seeing some of the composited desktops running on the raspberry pi 3 right so i've spent a couple of evenings playing with that and having some fun with that yeah and how has that gone would be well i've got to the point where so at the moment i i can boot and run in air quotes, Ubuntu Unity, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 on the Raspberry Pi 3. Wow! That's awesome.

Oh boy, the Raspberry Pi 3 is getting awfully appealing all of a sudden. You can do a lot with one of those. Now, it's progress, because in 15 1510 that just wasn't possible and the video core 4 drivers are still very experimental so none of those desktops are what you would call usable okay they're kind of interesting uh you know little moose boosh. And I'm sure it will improve. So over the course of the year. Have you seen my Plasma desktop?

It literally is glitching out all over the place right now. Well, so actually the Kubuntu thing, I don't really, I'm not really familiar with it. The issue there, and this isn't a kde issue it's you know it's the uh video call for drivers you know that there is some rough edges there right so some of the rendering's not right so some of the icons and some of the fonts are a bit um you can't make them out but when i can get it to do stuff the animations are just silky smooth, just perfect. You can't complain. On Ubuntu Unity, that generally works.

Although when I tried to take a screenshot of the desktop, that locked something up. So that's why I had to take a photograph of that one running rather than a screenshot. But, you know know that broadly works um kubuntu works but i can't make it out where ubuntu uh has better you know it doesn't have the rendering glitches um it has some other issues and then ubuntu gnome looks perfect it absolutely looks perfect there is no rendering issues whatsoever but as soon as you launch any application the whole thing dies on its ass and it only works only works in classic mode oh okay so you know these these drivers are evolving so they'll get there in in in due course but it kind of whet my appetite. So I've now started experimenting with some of the other acceleration facilities that are available on the Raspberry Pi 2. Well, in fact, all the Raspberry Pis, but obviously I'm targeting the 2 and the 3 because of the Ubuntu base supporting that architecture.

And so I'm now working on video playback acceleration. And that's a much happier story. Now, this could be huge because a lot of people that I've heard in the audience that have tried the Pi for a media center said it is great. It is great when you're watching SD content or 720p content, but you get up to around 1080p and it starts to be a different story. And it has made the Pi sort of unattractive to me as a Kodi box. And to be honest with you, even as a production box because if I can't get 1080p playback, then I can't capture 1080 and that's no good because that's what we capture out here locally. And so it's sort of eliminated as a possibility as even something I could have as an extra studio computer. Yeah, and the other issue is that if you have a dedicated media center application such as Kodi running on something like OpenELEC, it works very well. well um and i agree on the older models of the raspberry pi um you could comfortably do 720p and depending on the bit rate it would do 1080p yeah i've never tried on the three though

yeah yeah so this is this is what i've been playing with just recently and uh it's looking really good so there's a guy in the Ubuntu Marte community called Arawan who posted a load of tips and tricks on how to compile various things with acceleration for the Raspberry Pi 3 so I've been going

through his stuff and sort of piecing it together and filling in the blanks and what I've got going at the moment is I have VLC fully accelerated for the Raspberry Pi 2 and the Raspberry Pi 3. Yes. And that's properly great. So that's using the OpenMax API, which is the same API that things like Kodi on the Raspberry Pi use

and the OMX Player use. So although you've got the user interface for VLC, you launch the, you know, pick your media player and set it playing, and it immediately goes full screen, and you just use the keyboard bindings to then control the playback. But it is absolutely super slick and it's super smooth and it works perfectly. Man, that's going to have big, that could have a big impact for people that are using the Raspberry Pi in a battery situation, which I could see a lot of people doing.

Yeah. I mean, I've got one of these Atrix laptops and running on that, it's like a portable media player now. It looks fantastic. It's got an HDMI screen hdmi audio can run it off a battery it's got a built-in battery that can power the pi it runs for about 10 hours it's just fantastic producer q5 sis has one of those atrix docks and i borrowed it for like ever from him i think i think i gave it back to him now and it is ideal it is ideal for the raspberry pi if you could have just a way to attach it. And I could, you know, for me, something I could easily connect to like different TVs in the home or in the office that would then have fully accelerated playback. That is a big deal. Now, is it just in VLC, Wimpy, or is it other applications as well?

Yes, I've started to branch out into other stuff. So the thing about VLC is that in VLC, Wimpy, or is it other applications as well? Yes, I've started to branch out into other stuff. So the thing about VLC is that in the past, we've only been able to offer OMX Player, which is a command line utility. So there's a barrier to entry there. So now having VLC, you can right-click on things, launch in VLC, and it will just start playing, or you can do it through the VLC UI. through the VLC UI. But this evening, I've got a build of FFmpeg,

which is fully accelerated for the Raspberry Pi. There we go. Yeah, yeah. No. No. This is neat. And that uses a different API. This uses the ML, which is the multimedia abstraction layer for the video core chip and uh so you can

use ff play for example to for a command line to launch your content and that's windowed so you can do it in full screen or you can have it in windowed and that all is fully accelerated and i will confirm i've even seen a screenshot that actually confirms it is actually real which is yeah yeah yeah yeah screenshots or it didn't happen yeah right so the next step is uh i should be able to compile mpv and link it against that version of ffmpeg to give a fully accelerated mpv now would you ship that in 1604 i don't know if i'll install these things by default ffmpeg will be included by default definitely vlc will mpv will be so uh the way that the build works is that there's a ppa stacked on top so uh if you installed mpv on one of those ubuntu flavors built

with the ubuntu by flavor maker you would get the accelerated version of MPV. And I'm fairly confident I can get MPV working. And then the final step is to then build an accelerated version of Kodi. Oh, nice. Which, of course, loads of distributions have as you know a a dedicated you know kodi box my idea is just to build kodi in the desktop you know version so you can run it window well maybe windowed maybe full screen i'm not quite sure which which api to use yet but the idea is to have kodi as an install option that's fully accelerated. That would be splendid. Because everyone wants that.

That's a tall order, so I'll see how I go. If you get this, if you pull this off, and I know everything is subject to change, but if you pull this off, what you are going to do is you are going to apply bacon grease to the already incredible momentum that Ubuntu Mate has for the Raspberry Pi platform.

If I knew that there was a distro out there that I just downloaded and FFmpeg was already patched to be hardware accelerated on the Raspberry Pi, that would always be the distribution I download. You seal the deal right there. It becomes the premier. The Mate desktop, which is obvious on a Raspberry Pi 3, that's obvious, combined with

hardware accelerated FFmpeg or maybe even VLC and heavens be, perhaps Kodi. This would be an obvious premier distribution for the Raspberry Pi. And it turns out there's a lot of Raspberry Pis out there.

Is this your goal or are you just – I mean this seems like almost like evil mastermind level planning. No, this is answering what the community has asked for so uh the first goal was to make ubuntu mate um as useful to the makers as raspbian is so i've got lots of friends who make stuff with the raspberry pi and you know they've got this is all alien to me they've got breadboards and they've got widgets and wires and things and they glue it all together, and they make stuff work. One of my friends, Albert, made a mind-controlled game with the Raspberry Pi. Imagine that. So a headband you put on your head, and you think, like flappy birds, you think up, down, and it responds to your thoughts to play the game.

Okay. So, you know, epic levels of maker. Combine that with VR, and you got my attention. So when I ask Albert, you know, does this work? I've got to the point where Albert is satisfied that all of the stuff he needs to do and Isaac as well. All of these guys are from the Pi podcast. They're the presenters on the Pi podcast. They're like the unofficial official Ubuntu Mate test team.

So when they tell me stuff works i'm fairly confident it works so i've kind of got all of that gpio maker level stuff working really well now and the next thing that everyone is asking for is they want kodi they want vlc they want it accelerated so that's what we're trying to do. Definitely we've got VLC done. That's in the bag. We've definitely got FFmpeg. That's in the bag. And FFmpeg is there because we use that with the YouTube downloader,

which has got the GUI built in. And next is to try and ace Kodi. And I make no promises about that because I have tried several times in the past and flat out failed. So we'll see how we go. Hey, at least you're trying, I guess. Well, that is quite the update. That is really great. Boy, I'm excited about that.

You know, I am – so I've been for weeks now, I've been using Plasma Desktop on Ubuntu. And for the last two, I've been using it on 16.04. And now I'm switching over to Unity. I'm going to be running on Unity until final comes out. Oh, snap. But I wouldn't be surprised if the one I end up on is the Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on the Apollo. Well, that just makes sense.

And then when I run it on my Raspberry Pi 3, same exact setup. I love it, Wimpy. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Thank you. So, yeah, thank you to everyone who contributed to the project in the last month. It was really great.

So we shifted 55 terabytes of downloads of Raspberry Pi images in March. What are you using to distribute 55... What did you say? 55 terabytes just for the Raspberry Pi. What are you using to do thatabytes just for the Raspberry Pi. What are you using to do that? Just for the Raspberry Pi. We've got three servers and two of them are responsible for shifting that data.

Holy smokes. One in Canada and one in France. You should maybe talk to Alan because you need to move some data. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Holy smokes. Yeah, holy smokes. As somebody who moves many terabytes of data a month, too, there are not many independent shops that are able to move that much data. I am extremely impressed. I thought I was one of the only that got my day job. I can do that all day long, accelerating video playback and plugging things into GPIO ports. Not so hot at that.

That takes a bit more time. But you're doing it. Yeah, exactly. Slowly, baby steps. Oh, shoot. I was just trying to look. It's no longer... It doesn't seem that Alan no longer, he doesn't put it in

there anymore. Alan used to put the total terabyte of transfer in the invoice, but I don't see it. But yeah, it's a pretty significant amount of terabytes per month. And so that's impressive, Wimpy, just for the Raspberry Pi too. That's, yikes. All right. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to take a minute and tell you about my mobile service provider. You know, I'm going on a road trip, Wes. Road trip. Road trip. Everybody go to linux.ting.com real quick, won you what. I'm going to take a minute and tell you about my mobile service provider. Ting, you know, I'm going on a road trip, Wes. Road trip. Road trip. Everybody go to linux.ting.com real quick, won't you?

I'm going on a road trip. You know what I'm going to do before I go on my road trip? You know what I do? This is legit. I log into my Ting dashboard, and I go turn on my MiFi line. Boop. And then I have a MiFi. Yeah.

It's easy. Wow. And then when I'm back from the road trip, you know what I do? I log into the Ting dashboard. I turn off my MyFi. Boop. Your boop was better than my boop. Oh, thank you.

That was a really good – is that your first boop? I think so. That was solid. Linux.ting.com. Go there and save $25 off your first device. Now, why Ting? Well, that is easy. No contract, no early termination fee, and ladies and gentlemen gentlemen you only pay for what you use

$6 for the line so when I activate do your boop boop no oh come on that was boop when I activate the MiFi

that's $6 a month and then my usage on top of that and then when I deactivate the MiFi boop no no wow

you peaked dude you boop peaked I sure did. When I deactivate the Wi-Fi, then I don't pay for it at all. This is really nice. So I generally have about three active devices. So I'm paying $6 a month for each line. And then my usage on top of that, minutes, messages, and megabytes.

Well, guess what? We've got Wi-Fi right here at the Jupiter Broadcasting Studios. And guess what? I've got Wi-Fi at home. And I've got Wi-Fi when I go to Angela's house. I've got Wi-Fi when I go see my dentist even. My dentist has Wi-Fi, dude. Dude, my dentist.

There is a grocery store up in the city that I live in that has Wi-Fi. The La Conner grocery store has Wi-Fi. Wow. Yeah. You have Wi-Fi everywhere. Well, no. No, I don't. And that's why I have Ting because when I'm not on Wi-Fi, I can choose between GSM or CDMA networks.

Yeah, I look at my cellular data sort of like my backup data when I need it. And I primarily – and that – because of that and Rikai, he's – Rikai, he's like – the beard is like a ninja, dude. It like soaks up Wi-Fi signals. It's like a booster. beard is like a ninja, dude. It like soaks up Wi-Fi signals. It's like a booster. So between us with three lines, we're doing like 37 bucks this month for our Ting line. It's ridiculous. And then you combine it with that dashboard. Ting is an unbelievable deal and great customer service. They got like these fanatical customer support reps that are going to talk to you, they're going to work with you. They'll stay on the line. They'll talk to you until it's completely resolved.

My first road trip I went on, I had like a little SIM, SMID mix-up or whatever. I don't even remember anymore because it was a while ago. But when I was going over to Noah's house for the tour of his house with all the tech he had in there, my first day on the road or a couple days into it, I had to like troubleshoot some sort of SIM issue. I don't even remember what it was now. There was legitimately a.45 minutes into the call where I thought they were going to be like,

well, Mr. Fisher, thank you for... There's nothing we can do. I was like, look, you've done everything you can. I've done everything I can. I understand at some point in time you've got to move on. This is totally cool. Dude, I kid you not, they stuck with me for another 25 minutes, and they went above and beyond. And they really – the problem got resolved, and I was back online, good to go.

I mean, it was like – and I think at one point they had to call someone, and they put me on hold, and then let me listen in on their call to them. And I could hear them telling them what was up. In a way. Yeah. They were really cool. And then later on they in on their call to them and I could hear them like telling them what was up. In a way. Yeah. They were really cool. And then later on they sent me a postcard. A postcard. A postcard.

That was pretty cool. And they do that – I guess they do that from time to time. Go check them out. Go over there. Look at all the great devices they have. They also on their blog just recently put up a post. I love long reviews. A long review is the best kind of review.

Not these reviews where they get them five days before the device is out for the public. But these reviews. My month with the Moto X Pure Edition. That just went up on the Ting blog. Go check them out. Linux.Ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux.Ting.com.

Thanks to you guys for going there and supporting the show by checking them out. So, Mr. Wes, I am surprised. Almost every week, it seems, at least for the last few weeks, we have found a reason for you to have to format your hard drive and try out yet another off-the-wall Linux distribution. Long-serving hard drive. Yeah, and this week is no different. We're going to call it, I think, Apricity. Apricity OS.

Apricity OS. Apricity OS. And it is Arch-based and a GNOME-based desktop. Or Cinnamon. Thank you. And it uses the power – oh, geez, it's going so fast I can't even read it. The Powerline shell. It's a modern intuitive operating system with the cloud integration designed for the cloud generation. And by that, they mean it ships with a lot of interesting defaults,

one of them being Pushbullet, so your Android notifications are synced between you and your device. Hey, that's handy. That is kind of handy. There's other actually kind of rather nice things, like they ship it with Play on Linux included by default. In fact, it's rather stacked all together. It ships with TLP for battery management installed by default. In fact, it's rather stacked all together. All things, it ships with a TLP for battery management installed by default.

Sync thing is installed by default. I've got it. I'm already syncing with my droplet. Google Chrome is installed by default, not Chromium. It also has, well, a rather design-heavy desktop. I have it running here in a virtual machine. Wes has it there running on a desktop. So if you're watching the video version, I'm going to pull it up here so you guys can just kind of see here.

Let me log in with my super secure. I have like a demo review password that I use. It's funny. So I'll zoom out a little bit. I apologize. You know what? I will remote in, and I'll turn off the lower third just for a second so you guys can see the whole – you can see the whole desktop there. So there you can see I have it running in boxes under my KDE desktop.

Here, I'll go full screen. Why not? What could go wrong? And it kind of reminds me almost immediately of elementary OS because it has a dock along the bottom. It has the transparent top. Pretty clean. Yeah. But what do you think, Wes? So as somebody who doesn't – your daily driver doesn't run Arch, but you've probably ran Arch on many occasions.

Everything else in my life mostly does. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's nice. I'm enjoying it. I've kind of already got everything replaced. I'm doing the show from it. I've got IRC back up. It was very easy to get installed and going.

it was very easy to get installed and going. And since it's Arch, you can just one-tick enable the AOR in there, a little add or remove software, or I can have Pac-Man on the command line like I'm always used to. Now, you and I both thought the installer was pretty nice, pretty clean. Did you recognize that as an installer from anything else? No. I didn't either. I didn't recognize it.

It felt so well done that it must have – it felt like it must be a fork of – and the only reason I'm saying this is because it usually takes a couple of years for an installer to be pretty well flushed out. It seemed to be one of those areas, yeah. Yeah. And this seemed like a pretty spot on good installer and it handled my partitioning just fine. The only thing it didn't do that I've come to expect from a modern-day installer is it didn't appropriately detect my time zone. Oh, yeah. It didn't for me either. But it let me set it.

I mean, that part was fine. Yeah, exactly. Super easy. It's not a big deal. But, I mean, that's just like one – The grub screen was really nice. Yeah. Polished.

It found my other install. Now, because I'm running a VM, I might not be getting the same experience as you did. But for mine, my grub screen kind of – in fact, I could reboot right now and just show the audience. My grub screen kind of looks like the GNOME 3 login screen. Like it's that same color and that great texture. All right. Yeah. So right there.

So it kind of – and then when it boots up, that's the same color and the same general look you're going to get your login screen. Now, I don't get – I just get a text boot here. Do you get any kind of graphical like Plymouth type boot? And the same general look, you're going to get your login screen. Now, I don't get – I just get a text boot here. Do you get any kind of graphical like Plymouth type boot? You know, I'm not sure. You haven't rebooted yet? Well, I did once, but yeah, nonsense then. Yeah, okay. That's fine.

I'll have to check on that. Yeah, so it's Apricity, I guess. It's kind of a new distro based on Arch. It does have its own repos. I haven't really dug into that too much. I probably should because that's always kind of the Achilles heel of these kinds of things. But this is an interesting trend where you have these super design distributions. And I think that was kind of what I found to be interesting about this.

So you got Solus, right? You got Elementary OS. Those are kind of two that jumped to mind. But there's many others that are very design heavy. Elementary OS. Those are kind of two that jump to mind, but there's many others that are very design heavy. And XMetal says that it reminds him of a mix between Elementary and Antigros, which I could see that too because it's similar to the Arc theme, which reminds me a bit of the Bungie desktop. And it's similar to Antigros because it's Arch-based.

Yeah, and they're using – yeah, it looks like they're using – Wes, do you remember the name of the shell that they have here? They have – Powerline. Yeah, okay. So they have Powerline installed by default, which is interesting because that's kind of a jazzed-up bash shell there. And it makes it – I don't know if you're watching the video version, but it makes it look a little nicer than normal. And if I go into downloads here. Oh, look at that. That's cute.

You see how my path is in the. Yeah. Isn't that. It's kind of neat. It's very clean. It's very easy to read. And yeah. That's just something.

There's a lot of little things like this that they've done by default to make it a very. I mean, actually make it a very attractive desktop. They have like Telegram right in their own repo as a binary. So we got that. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't know what else they have already. Now, I guess I can just get that from the AUR though. You can.

Yeah. They also have a graphical package manager that is actually kind of palatable. So search Telegram there. You'll see it. I think you'll see them both. Oh, okay. Okay. Telegram.

Let's take a look. Oh, Telegram with an E now. Did you know they spell with an E now? I don't see it in here. No, you're a big, you take a look. Oh, Telegram with an E now. Did you know they spell it with an E now? I don't see it in here. No, you're a liar. Oh, okay. Well, maybe you might have to enable AUR. Well, check this out.

Check this out. They're using this GTK3 front end to libALPM, which essentially gives you a graphical package manager for Pac-Man. And it even gives you the ability to install local ALPM packages, which is really kind of an interesting thing for an Arch user. So this is a GTK3 interface to the package manager that they ship here. They've got Caffeine just by default up there. Yeah, yeah.

I bet they have a, you know what, if we launch GNOME Tweak, which they also have in the dock by default, I bet you we have quite a bit of extensions in here. Wow. Yeah, always zoom workspaces, caffeine dash to dock, flip or remove clock, media player indicator, place of status indicator. Yeah, there's a bunch in here, Wes.

But you know what? To be honest with you, these are actually all of these. In fact, there's even a couple I would add. These are all good. Sure, sure. These are actually all great. In fact, I know some of the people that make some of these and they're all really dedicated people. So these are all really high-quality extensions.

And then again, these are really good defaults. It's kind of interesting. And one of the other things that they're doing that I find to be interesting is this is a Patreon. Yeah, they've got a Patreon. This is a Patreon fund, and they've only got a few backers right now because it's early. And I imagine this concept too is kind of odd for a lot of people. But I don't know. I find it to be really neat.

I kind of – if I wasn't in the midst of my like 1604 mega deep dive, I would be – I guess to put it another way, when I go back on my ArchBinge, I might be tempted to go this route. The only thing I'm going to have to spend time is I got to look into what always – maybe you could check for me if you don't mind. Yeah, sure. Are those GNOME extensions coming from their repository? And are those GNOME extensions coming from their repository? What all is coming from their repository? Because when GNOME 3.22 comes out, that crap is going to break. And that is always what sort of dooms those Arch-based GNOME desktops in the long term is when they pull too much from their own private repository.

But, yeah, so they have that fancy bash terminal installed, which is really nice. They also have prebuilt several packages like Telegram in their user repository. PlayOn is installed. Steam is preinstalled. Obviously then Wine, because you have PlayOn, is preinstalled. It's an interesting Arch-based distribution. Has anyone in the Mumble room played with this one? I doubt it.

It's pretty new. Apricity, I think is how you say it, Apricity OS. They have a Cinnamon edition available as well, which neither one of us gave a shot. Okay. I mean, I'm not seeing too much. Here's a list of everything in Apricity Core I've got installed. Okay. Give it to me.

They've got like a bunch of themes, other icons, some Broadcom Ath 10K drivers, BT Sync, Cower, Gnome Terminal, Google Chrome, Google Talk plugin, that kind of stuff. Pack AOR. So just kind of their own modifications. But it's not very much and it's none of the GnOME stuff. Bitten mentions in the chat in real time follow-up that that GDK3 GUI for the package managers that I was loving there, that Pac-Man front end, is what Manjaro uses. Oh. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'm not sensing a huge interest in this, even though I actually think this is kind of a fascinating distribution. I will just wrap with this. They're focusing on web apps

in a way that I've actually recently become a little more hip to myself. I've been using Google Chrome's create it. What does Google Chrome call it? When you go in here, you can say, you know, there's a way to – isn't there a way to – yeah, like a way to make this a save page as or add to desktop or something like that. Add to desktop and it makes it a desktop application? Right. Okay, Add to Desktop makes it a desktop.

Yeah, so they are shipping something called ICE. It lets you put your favorite web app on the desktop, a simple SSB, a site-specific browser manager. These specialized browsers minimize the number of steps between you and wanting to use your favorite web app, they say. It embodies our vision here at Apricity. We want to help make your workspace and your play space more productive and elegant. Now, as someone who has fallen into using an online markdown editor a lot, not always,

an online document program, Google Docs, an online chat program, IRC Cloud from time to time, or Mattermost or Slack, it starts to make a lot of sense to have these be separate processes that show up as separate icons in my task manager. See, what I'm seeing is this seems like a great, it's such an easy thing to slot into. You've got SyncThing, right? So bam, you're syncing with yourself. You've got your key pass. You've got whatever you need. Now you're signed into Chrome.

You're signed into your accounts. You make web apps for Slack, for Telegram, and you've got your full desktop experience in like 10 minutes on a fresh install. They also say a fresh install usually idles after everything's up and running around 500 megabytes of usage, which really isn't too bad. They focus on battery usage with TLP installed by default. Pushbullet for integration with your Android device to get notifications, texts, and phone calls across all your devices. Sync thing like Wes just managed. Also, SB Backup, which is kind of a nice

backup program that allows you to do both compressed and uncompressed backups and split uncompressed backups into multiple parts if you want to do it across thumb drives or something. You can do scheduled backups and manual backups with it, and also backups to remote destinations, and they've built it in right there installed

by default. And then like I earlier mentioned, the Powerline shell, which is the pretty nice terminal prompt. It looks really classy. They've gone throughout and made sure that things are well rendered under high DPI. And I like their defaults. You know, they're using GNOME photos for your photos, GNOME music for your music, GNOME calendar for your calendar. They got Steam installed by default.

They got LibreOffice installed by default. And, like, you know, other things like we mentioned. So it seems like a really cool project that's really thinking about this stuff. And, you know, Arch-based, which kind of gets my attention down the road, I think. So Apricity, we'll have a link in the show notes, apricityos.com, if you guys want to check it out. Derek Delvin, you had a mention about Chromium Embedded Framework. Go ahead. I don't hear you, Derek Delvin.

I guess he did have a comment. Yeah, he did. It's fine. It's fine. I think these web apps' inclusion into the desktop are a natural evolution of the Chromium embedded framework. I mean, Google did this simplify you development. I mean, if you think Atom, Bracket, those editors are using that principle.

But I guess it's time that we, before we start just jumping on board on this, start making the question, aren't our browsers already doing quite a lot? And do we really want to be in this completely remote so the application can run somewhere else and you just get that face? No, no, no, no. But in some cases, yes. Yeah. In some cases, especially for stuff I don't care a lot about, the stuff that's not super

important. Yeah, I think so. Right. Yeah. But yeah, that's a good question. Patreon.com slash Apricity. They have four patrons right now. They're making $30 a month.

I doubt that's covering much. Yeah, I doubt. I doubt so. But it's an interesting try. And so I'm glad you installed it, Wes. Yeah, we'll see. I might just be using it next week as well. I'm not seeing – I mean I can mount my other one if I need it.

I'm not seeing a lot of reason to go back. Do you like the performance on the physical hardware? Performance is okay on the Sputnik there? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I suspended it all the way here. Things are working great. Yeah, yeah. You know, Wes, I think we should take a moment and we should thank Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

Now, all of us know that if you really want to get a great job, you're probably going to have to have a few certifications under your belt. Also, it's kind of nice as personal challenges and it also helps at review time. Linux Academy has had a ton of success in the last few months. I mean they have had success for a lot longer than that. But they've been publishing it on their blogs in the last few months and really sort of demonstrating what a difference people can see when they go to Linux Academy, especially when they're looking to learn something around Linux or AWS. Other learning sites, they don't quite get it right. They don't quite have the passion and the drive to actually care enough to understand the difference between Red Hat, Enterprise Linux, and Fedora or Debian and Ubuntu. There are differences.

You know there are, but they can barely even understand what they are. That's not Linux Academy. Linux Academy is a platform designed by people that are extremely passionate about Linux and wanted to sort of promote it in a way that would get wider adoption for Linux. They came together with educators and professionals and developers and created the Linux Academy platform, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, support this show, form, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, support this show, and give yourself a discount. You know, I think also one of the things you might take for granted about Linux Academy because it's a website.

You probably think it's only useful when you have an internet connection. But if you're going to be offline like I'm about to be for several days, they have downloadable comprehensive study guides. They have PDFs for reading. They have audio and video, stuff that you can get while you're offline as well. Listener Seth listens in the shower. He's not bringing his laptop in there. He's got it playing through his speaker system while he's in the shower.

That's awesome. Yeah, I know. It is kind of awesome. And that's a really nice functionality. They also have, of course, yeah, okay. So on the other end, they also have live events and you can ask instructors questions and they have instructor mentoring and all of that. And they have an active forums. It's packed full of Jupyter Broadcasting members.

They have great courseware on Red Hat. I mean, Noah is all about the Red Hat Enterprise certified like administrator and engineer. He's always – yeah. Well, and the clients love it, man. I mean, I don't know how much Noah is into it. I mean, I think he respects Red Hat as a company, but it's the clients that really want it. And it's the same when you're trying to get a job.

And so that's why he pursues it. And he's done a lot of different avenues. And Red Hat is a seriously respected certification. And their courseware at Linux Academy is top notch. Also on the AWS stuff, on the front of AWS. Just when I started getting into like S3 and storing my web assets and like the complicated system that they have for it. And I was like, okay, I've got this.

I don't need any courseware on this. I mastered this on my own. Okay. So then I went further and a client needed a Windows 2003 server. You know what? I'm an AWS expert now. I'll go set this up for you. Yeah, I had

a couple of weeks of going back and forth with the client and deciding how we were going to do what and what was going to run where. All in the meanwhile, this brand new server I set up for them was running on AWS. And I didn't quite grok the fact that that was costing me. As the CPU runs, it costs me money.

Per cycle, it costs money. Unbelievable, right? Unbelievable. They're charging me per CPU cycle? Unbelievable. Who even tracks that is what I was thinking. So I got this bill and I'm like yeah, you know that server that we haven't even

deployed to production yet? We're already paying for it. Sorry. And I was using that time to learn the system too. Kind of, you know, at the same time. That's a podcaster, folks. Yeah. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.

When you go there and you're going through one of their courses or they have a scenario or a live lab, they'll spin up the AWS instance for you and manage all of that so you don't get stuck with that. Fine. They also have Android development courses, PHP, Python, Ruby, the whole DevOps category. Their Chef tutorials are very helpful. Dude, their Linux basics and all of that. And they have like nuggets on IP tables and net tables and fire and tables, whatever it's called now, and filter. Firewall, all the things.

All the things, SSH, all the things. Really, they have great nuggets too if you just have a little bit of time and you want to just do a deep dive. So go check them out. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and avoid that huge bill that I got one day. Okay, so there was a thread over on RLinux that kind of got me wondering. It said, you know, what's the state of VR for the Linux desktop? What do we have, I3 on multiple monitors, those kind of things? And there was a couple of different answers that came out of the thread,

but one of them, Wes, was kind of intriguing. And there was a couple of different answers that came out of the thread, but one of them, Wes, was kind of intriguing. It was a Qt 5 or Qt 5-based 3D Wayland compositor. Oh, snap. Yeah. So now this is totally early days, but what they have designed is sort of a Wolfenstein-style layout of a map. And in each room is a different virtual desktop. So when you go between rooms, you're going between virtual desktops and

you have different windows and then you can, you know, you'd have perhaps like a bot in there, Wes. You know about bots, Wes? I have. Yeah, well you could have a bot in there and things like that. Oh, look at that. So that's one representation of it. But there's not a lot of progress.

There's not a lot of progress for the Linux desktop. No HoloLens SDK? Hackaday.io has a great one that they posted back in 2015 where they had like a couple of different examples that looked pretty exciting. You put the headset on and now you're doing window management. And again, another room concept. I've seen a bunch of different concepts. IBX is one that runs on Windows and Linux. But maybe I'm just smoking the hype too much.

Wimpy, do you think there will never be a real use case for VR on Linux? I'm a skeptic. Yeah. But I'm not much of a gamer either. But I don't know. Wearing a great big heavy thing on your head. People weren't prepared to wear glasses to watch 3D films. But what about just the fact that it would be the world's largest monitor?

Okay. Think about that. Think about, you be the world's largest monitor? Okay, think about that. Think about, you know, 27-inch monitor, 30. No, the entire room is your screen. But strapped to your head. And also, until they're completely wireless, you know, you're just tethered. You're just, you know, like a pony. A pony?

A pony? Okay. Okay. Okay. All right, Mr. Skeptic. But okay. Okay. Okay. All right, Mr. Skeptic. Okay. Okay. You're probably right, actually.

I'm fairly skeptical myself. I'm only playing devil's advocate. But what about something like a mumble room? Ask Popey. He's got a counter argument, I'm sure. Popey, do you think we could have a VR desktop on Linux in the future? Come on, Popey. Maybe you could slap your Ubuntu phone

into a Google Cardboard headset and now you are in VR unity. And you know they built in support for Mirror, too. They've built support into Mirror for VR in the future. Oh, Popey doesn't answer. Now, I guess he doesn't have an opinion. Sorry. Go ahead.

I just left the room to make a cup of tea for my wife, and all I heard when I got back to the microphone was, Popey isn't answering. So, Popey, that is, you are such a romantic, you are a gentleman. The question was, is, you know, Wimpy is sort of an on-the-record VR skeptic, you could say.

And I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm sort of a VR hopeful but trending skeptic. What do you think? We were just talking about. I'm sort of a VR hopeful but trending skeptic. What do you think? We were just talking about sort of the lack of a VR desktop. But there are a couple different projects. They're mostly school projects that create a virtual Linux desktop in VR. What about, Popey, I'm just going to throw this out in your face.

Ubuntu Touch in a Google Cardboard headset, Ubuntu VR Unity desktop. Your thoughts? Can we get our existing desktop working first? Great answer. That's a good answer. But, okay, we're going to go 10, 20 years. No, we're going to go five years in the future. Do you think there could be a VR desktop?

I really feel like Linux is missing out on VR, but maybe I'm just sort of getting excited by, I don't know, the tweets of some people that are working on VR. I mean, I'm just getting hyped. I don't know. I see this as being a bit like the Tesla. It's something, you know, quite desirable, and it might be useful for a small set of people on the planet, but for the vast majority of people, they will almost never see this and therefore it won't be useful for them therefore we shouldn't devote 99 of our development sure sure that's it okay and it seems like it'll start where a lot of things start where like first entertainment and then in like particular power applications like mod cad modeling or you know whatever where they really take advantage of a certainD. There are certain very specific 3D use cases for it.

But then, like, if I'm looking at a document, I can't, you know, call me an old fart or lack of imagination, but I can't see how a LibreOffice document can be improved by the adding of an extra dimension. I agree with you there. I've already got that plane in a third dimension if I just look at my laptop. But I could agree with you there, but there could be use cases.

I mean I think of it as just more screen real estate to be honest with you. Right. And being able to look behind things and look around things is novel. And we've seen demos of this for years and years. Wii moats to his head and did a nice demo of being able to move your head from side to side and look around things and get a real parallax kind of view of things on your desktop. It looked interesting, but that was years and years ago, and nobody ever did anything with it, partly because it's kind of impractical. Which would be coolistic.

Go ahead, Daredevil. So I think the use case for documents is when we have the natural voice commands working. So you're not necessarily writing the document. So LibreOffice, the application, definitely is not an application to benefit from it. But let's say you are searching your computer and you're seeing the results in a graph window. And then you're seeing the other graph available to you and whatever else. And maybe you are actually projecting this to what is your reality. So it's more of an augmented reality than just virtual reality.

And now at that point that you're talking with your computer and you're getting the results and they're coming to you, I guess now you can have different ways of manipulating this data rather than think of the normal conventional applications that we are talking about. I think the benefits will be in there. So, you know, you're looking at stock or you're looking at the company or you're doing your search and suddenly you are with the data that you wanted for stocks, for example, for that application.

And then you can do the math next to it and you can get the result. Right. Producer Q5Sys says that he thinks that perhaps there could be an interesting use case in terms of interface for managing VMs. You're running a VM on a virtual computer in your VR world, so it's like you're really sitting at that virtual machine. Yeah. And it's a cinema killer as well.

Yeah, it could be. I agree. Now, when I tried it on the most low-end implementation of VR I've tried is on the Samsung Galaxy VR. And to me, it just seemed like a glorified way to watch great movies. But it was a great way to watch movies. Janus VR, J-N-U-S-V-R, is something that already works on Linux today. And it's – what they say, it combines the power of the internet with the potential of virtual reality. Websites become immersive spaces linked by portals where users can explore, collaborate,

and create content on a platform that builds upon the open internet. And it's so retro in so many ways. It's like how we actually would have visualized the internet to work in the 80s when we did the movies. Yeah, right. Where you go through portals to go to different rooms and there's avatars and people have keys and it is so neat in its intricacy, but it is so impractical in its actual usability that I find it to be a fascinating experiment.

And it's using browser technology. Now, the hardware thing, Wes, you and I noticed when we were looking around, it's like it looks like nobody is taking the plunge on the Linux side and just like trying to see what works under Linux. Now, the Vive is just starting to ship, but everybody online right now is asking, does the HTC Vive work? That's the official Steam-backed SteamVR headset. Does it work with Linux? And everybody is asking the question, but nobody has really got an answer right now. And you've got Google Cardboard, but that doesn't really work with Linux desktop. And Oculus, you know, they could go suck an egg for all I care.

Oculus. Yeah, go ahead. And there is a big reason for why in Linux there hasn't been much development. We have usually huge issues with graphics drivers. So, to that effect, you really can't do anything graphical. You know, all I want is just the game. I just want there to be a standard. I want there to be a VR standard, and games just need to support that standard.

And then if I have the hardware that understands that standard plugged into my machine, that's all it needs to be. I just want to get to that level. And that's when it's going to be. That's when it's really going to be something. You know, I have a little bitterness with the Oculus, it's true. The way they dropped, you know, I backed it

because they had Linux support. And then when they dropped it, you know, and I the reason why I'm not a full-on skeptic like Wimpy is – and I was until I got the Oculus DK2. And when I got the DK2 and – I know I've shared this story. But when I got the DK2 and I went on this little raft that's floating out on the ocean and I just sat there. I had a chair here in the studio. So it was like I was sitting on the raft and I had the Oculus here in the studio. And the studio is sound insulated and I had headphones on.

So it was like there was no – and it's dark in here. There's no outside influence. It was very much perceptually like I was on this raft. And because I was on a swiveling chair, I could turn my whole body to turn with the VR environment. And so it was like I was turning around and looking at the ocean. And I kind of got like that feeling you get when you're just chilling on the beach. Wow. and I kind of got like that feeling you get when you're just chilling on the beach. And when I started to feel like I was chilling on the beach,

when I'm sitting in my studio in my chair, I realized there's something here. I don't know exactly what it is, but that just gave me a totally new experience. That was really something. And so that's why I'm hopeful we figure it out. But right now, the hardware requirements are ridiculous. And the Linux support is weak. And the most economical implementation is going to be

the cheap stuff built into the phones, which have the weakest graphics and the most disappointing applications. So, yeah. Wimpy asks, you were asking how much the Oculus is? uh-huh i think it was about 300 bucks but i can't i can't it might have been it might have been it was a you know it was one of those like second round fundings so i don't recall how how many times have you been out on the raft

virtually only a few because i've been i've lent it out i've lent out the oculus since then when they dropped their Linux support. I'm just thinking you could probably have rented a boat and experienced bobbing up and down on the ocean for real for about the same money. Fair enough. And then you get smell. Yeah, that's true. Virtual reality needs to offer something other than a poor simulation of reality to be compelling, I think. You're probably right. You're probably right.

Kitson, you had a thought, though. Go ahead. Yeah, one more serious thought on this is I just think the VM is just overkill for most gaming applications, and just computer applications especially in general. Most of the best games that I've played had really simple graphics and they were able to place me in a world where i was more convinced of things true than a lot of these games that try to force graphics and cinematics on you and it's just yeah yeah that's true you are talking to the guy that just got mario uh working his television at home. A funny side effect of that is that because of the power required for VR, the current VR games are less graphically intensive, just like you described. Yeah, that's why it feels like it's going to be a real catch-22 for them to ever actually take off.

I will say that EVE Valkyrie demo did seem pretty neat. What was that one? The EVE Valkyrie? It was at E3 in 2015. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's an older one, right? It is, yeah. That just always stuck with me. There's not a lot standing between Linux and having

broader VR support, because a lot of the engines, like the Unreal Engine, for example, if you make a VR game, okay, here's what it is. I've just got to be... This is going to be Linux Unplugged Confession Edition. I want to walk around the Starship Enterprise. Yes.

And there is an Oculus VR-compatible Starship Enterprise project that is unbelievably detailed. And the man has recreated areas of the Enterprise that you've never seen in order to connect it all together so you can walk the entire thing. Including areas of the shuttle bay that are absolutely stunning and order to connect it all together so you can walk the entire thing. Including areas of the shuttle bay that are absolutely stunning and compelling. I mean, it is... It is transcending. And now you've just described something that actually makes it

compelling because you can't experience that in the real world. So he took the blueprints to the Starship Enterprise and made them into a virtual world. Yeah, it is. If you're watching the video version, I'll show you a little bit. It's pre-alpha footage here, and he's been working on it for a long time.

He has a Patreon for it. But what he did is he took the blueprints to make the most accurate representations of it could from like it's about season six or seven from what I can tell by watching it. And I am that much of a nerd that I can tell it's about season five, six or seven. But I would guess six. And it is it is remarkably accurate. It starts with a it starts with a tour of the shuttle bay in a way it shows you how

the how the cargo bays and the shuttle bays are connected in a way that is brilliant, but yet never demonstrated in the actual show. And he goes on to show you areas that you are very familiar with. Oh, here's another. He spends a lot of time on the shuttle bay because he's very proud of it. And this is all based on the Unreal Engine. So it looks really good. And it's all Oculus compatible.

So this is 10 Forward Lounge that he's showing here. And I'll go forward, because you know what we all want to see, though, is what we really want to see is the meeting room here and things like that. So this will probably get us pulled down from YouTube, but of course it does also have sounds. Oh, man. Look at that.

He's in the conference room. And this is why I say it's like season 4, 5, 6, 7 on it. It's later on in TNG. And then he had to make up this hallway, and he took the the conference room, and this is why I say it's like season 4, 5, 6, 7 on it. It's later on in TNG. And then he had to make up this hallway, and he took the old conference room gold chips from the conference room and put them in the hallway connecting to the bridge, which is just brilliant, because those were destroyed because they used the set in Star Trek VI. Now he's on the bridge. And it is immaculately done.

And it is immaculately done. Now, you would......genre of Picard, Federation Starship Enterprise. So I would pretty much... I would die to have this under Linux. ...transfer to bridge. The detail... Sayo Dito. Photon torpedoes armed and targeted.

And he walks around, you know, the whole thing. He's got just about every... Oh, he even did the bathroom. Look, he even finally did the bathroom. Now, this is based on schematics. There's three shells, which is a nod to a Stallone movie. And he's got three shells in the bathroom, which is just hilarious. You can sit in the captain's chair.

I don't think I'm cut out to be captain. You can sit in the captain's chair. Protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise. I don't think I'm cut out to be captain. First officer, maybe. Then go check out the ready room. It really is remarkable. It's so well done. And so there's also, there's other, one of the things that the Gear VR was really good at was photographic tours of Paris, which I thought was – I've never been to Paris. So I took a photo tour of Paris and it's not like Google Street View. It's way cooler than Google Street View.

And of course you can do 360 degree. You can look around. That tearing is not in the video, by the way. That's just on my – I'm having some problems with K-Win today. But the tearing isn't there. And the engine is just, you can see the graphics are... Yeah, that, I can't wait.

I don't know what VR solution is going to provide me this, but... I'll pay for it, that, I can't wait. I don't know what VR solution is going to provide me this, but... I'll pay for it, that's for sure. Yeah, I love it. I love it. So that's what I... I want that, but I don't want to have to run Windows. Yeah, exactly. Like, that's a real conflict for me. I want that in my life, but at the same time, I don't want to have to run Windows.

And so we've got to get this figured out under Linux. So if anybody out there has tried or gets their hands on the HTC Vive, you've got to let us know. Yeah, you've got to let us know how it goes. X Metal just comments, YouTube is going to hate this. Yeah. I've already got one of my shows pulled down this week. So why not have another show pulled down? It's only Tuesday.

So might as well get two shows pulled down. One a week. One show a week. Why not, everybody? So yeah, I agree with you, Wimpy. If you make it compelling enough, I could get interested. I think I also agree with the rest of you. I'm not looking to do a VR desktop anytime soon.

I'd give it a go, but no. Just for a desktop would be too much hassle. Yeah. Let's just get the main desktops working. Let's get Wayland out there. Let's get Mirror working. Let's get Unity finished up. Then we could worry about the virtual reality and the whatnots, right? Don't you think?

I actually might reconsider if I get to use the Nintendo Power Glove. Bring that all in. Bring it all together. Why not? Let. Bring it all together. Why not? Let's do it. It's so bad.

That actually seems like a pretty good idea. I think you should capitalize on that. You might have something there. That will bring us to the end of this week's episode of the Unplugged program. Thank you to everybody who joined us in the Mumba Room. You guys were great. I'm preparing to go out on spring break. First spring break trip with the kids.

What? Going to take Lady Joops out on the road. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm pretty to go out on spring break. First spring break trip with the kids. What? Going to take Lady Joops out on the road. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. I've got our Kodi installation packed up with media so we can watch TV offline to save bandwidth. Clever you. Yeah, watching full resolution. Open source. If you'd like to join us live, we'd love to have you here.

Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com to find out when this show is live. You can catch it live at jblive.tv. The calendar page will convert to your local time zone, and you can submit content by going to linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Why don't you join us for 140 Live next week? If you don't, we've got feeds you can always download.

Get it automatically. Thanks for joining us. See you right back here next Tuesday. That was a lot of fun. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Thank you. We had a lot all come together, and I think it made for a nice medley of the Unplugged program. I think so. Thank you very much. What was that?

Do that Plasma Kill shortcut. Oh, yeah. What was that Plasma Kill shortcut? That might do it. But that probably doesn't restart KWIN, does it? I don't know. What was that Plasma Kill shortcut? It wasn't on this computer that probably doesn't restart KWIN, does it? I don't know. What was that plasma kill shortcut? It wasn't on this computer, so I don't have it in my recent history.

Oh, that was nice. Wow, look at that. It's so bad. Look at my, look at KRunner. Oh, that's unusable. That is not even, that is like, yikes. Holy smokes. Look at that.

That is getting in the seizure territory, right? Yeah. I think Kai records this for a bug report. I got to tell you. We saw that on OpenQA once. It's flashing as fuck. Yeah. Which channel and X and Messer and stuff are you running?

You know, I have no idea. It'd be whatever the default. I could go bring up. You know, one thing I did play with is like the KWin rendering settings, but I don't even know. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Whoa.

Whoa. Oh, my gosh. All my icons just did, like, this little blurry thing for a second. A little, like, holy smokes. This is getting crazy. I wonder if it's going to make it the show. Now it's going to be, like, a race against the, uh. So where do you go?

Okay, so I still can never figure out KDE settings. There's so many freaking. Where's the over and under for Chris's build? So where do you go? Okay, so I still can never figure out KDE settings. There's so many freaking... Where's the over and under for Chris's build? So where do I... I guess I'm reloading this machine. Where do I go to find where you configure... God, there's so many options in here. Desktop behavior.

Is this on the Panobo, by the way? No, this is on the Apollo. Where do you go to manage KWIN now? Where the hell is that at? Up there in search, type in window manager. That is such a cop-out. Window management. None of that's coming up.

What if I just type for KWIN? KWIN, here we go. Oh, there. Can you see my icons? Do you see that? Look at that. Look at the window management icon. Do you see what I'm talking about?

Come on there. It's back now. Yeah. It's listed under one of those categories, but it doesn't say KWIN explicitly. All right. Okay. So let's see here. KWIN rules, KWIN scripts, task switcher.

Nope. None of this is what I want. I'm looking for the thing where you change what your renderer is in KWin rules, KWin scripts, task switcher, nope. None of this is what I want. I'm looking for the thing where you change what your renderer is in KWin. Desktop behavior. This is the problem, really. This is really the thing. Okay, compositor, here we go. OpenGL is what I currently have.

I'm going to try 3.1 and see what happens. What could go worse than what's happening now? Nothing. It stopped. It happens. I mean, what could go worse than what's happening now? Nothing. It stopped. It stopped. You see that? Let's see if I can aggravate it. It's not doing it with boxes.

It's not doing it with Spotify. I think switching K-Win from... Wait a minute. Nope. It's doing it again. Damn it. Oh, it's happening again. Although, look, it's not happening on the second screen yet. That's interesting. Oh, now it is.

Now it's happening on the second screen. Well, that lasted a good few seconds. That's too bad. Got your hopes up, though. I did. I did. What if I do X render? Okay, it stopped. I did X render. It stopped. I don't know if I go aggravated a little bit. This is definitely a KWIN issue, though.

There's no way about that. This is definitely. So now I'm not using OpenGL as my render. I'm using X render, which I would imagine means it's CPU-based, right? Seems to be working really good, though. All right. Now I'm not having a problem. Awesome.

So we'll go with X-Render for the show. Yay. Perfect. Yeah, perfect. My definition of perfect, exactly.