LINUX Unplugged - Episode 154: Pragmatic Idealism | LUP 154

Episode Date: July 20, 2016

Do you use desktop Linux for idealistic or practical reasons? We ask our virtual LUG & share our stories. Plus Chris’s new VPN solution & the hosted vs self hosted debate with a new twist.Plus Canonical’s smart move to push Snap packages forward, tons of updates from our favorite projects & the disturbing news about Chrome.

I do have one topic we could warm up with before we start. Did you see the Poculus chip? The Poculus chip. It's 3D. VR for everyone for only $49. That's my kind of price. I can't really. I can't really.

I can't. You know what? I can't. Don't you love this picture? Headset not included. Some 3D printing required. Yeah. So there's a picture of the pocket smacked up to this thing.

And there's even a video. Although. This combined emulator package so that we can get Virtual Boy running on Pocket Chip. So you're familiar with the Pocket Chip device, right? The thing's awesome. Yeah. And then they came up with a 3D printed VR headset that goes over the pocket chip screen. Oh, yeah.

This is awesome. Virtual Boy games in 3D. You have to see this. Look at that. It's actually kind of cool. It is kind of cool. I don't know that I'm about to buy one or make one, but it is cool. You know, if I had the pocket, I might.

If I had the pocket chip thing, that is actually so cool. Do you remember how red it was? Yeah, I know, right? Oh, man. Bring back the original VR. It's 3D! It actually is. It actually works! It's amazing! Yeah.

There's like 30 Virtual Boy games. That's Waterworld! Kevin Costner's Waterworld. Boy, I haven't thought about water world for ages this is linux unplugged episode 154 for july 19th 2016 Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's on the ground and reporting from the Linux trenches. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Hello, sir.

Big show today for 154. It's something we do just for all 154 editions of our podcast. Oh, it's very special. We just do big shows. That's what we do. That's a huge tradition. Coming up on this week's episode of the show, there's a big, big release

coming out for Linux. We'll give you the details on that. It was actually crowdfunded, which is pretty neat. We've got some follow-up on some stories we covered last week. There's some shenanigans going on that I think may just tip Snaps over the top. What? Yeah, we'll tell you about that. Why Snaps will

dominate. And then later on the show, I'm going to do a little follow-up on my VPN efforts, what I landed on, and then we'll get into a discussion about self-hosting. And it's actually kind of an interesting discussion because Wes has a little angle on there that we'll talk about as well. And then later on in the show, towards the end, I think this one will probably get the virtual lug going the most. Do you use the Linux desktop for idealistic or practical reasons? And what brought you here and what keeps you? We'll talk about that coming up towards the end of the show.

But before all of that stuff, we got a bunch of open source project updates to get into, like we do in every single Unplugged show. Lots of stuff from projects we're following every single week that we want to tell you about. News items, things that impact Linux users, things that our virtual lug could dig into. So why don't we start there? Speaking of that, let's bring in that lug. Time appropriate greetings, virtual lug.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

It is good to see you. So let's start with a story that's been grabbing attention all week long. I didn't cover it in LAS, but I thought, you know, by now everybody's seen it. It's the elephant in the room. Microsoft is blocking Linux installations on old hardware. So, Wes, if I'm grokking this story correctly, an update went out to the now essentially defunct Windows RT that closed essentially a backdoor that you could use to install alternative operating systems on the Windows RT tablet. Am I following the story? Yeah, that's what it sounds like.

So, like, on Microsoft's way out the door, they're like, all right, well, thanks for buying that hardware. Now that we're done with it, install this update. And then you install that update and you're hosed. Then you never have any fun again. And it was something Microsoft had known about the entire time. It was something they seemed to have intentionally left open. And then they're like, ah, see you. Right.

Thanks for all the fish. It seems just what's the benefit to that? I mean, I could see them have done it at the first, right? That's what they were going to do. They were going to be like, hey, lock it down. Not on our ARM platforms. No, it's secure boot all the way, no new keys, no anything. But when you're abandoning a platform, when you're like, sorry, you made the wrong choice. See ya.

That seems like the last thing you should do is make it basically unusable for anything useful after that. Yeah. I wonder if there was like enterprise pressure or some thing that's like they were actually using that platform. Yeah, that's a great question. Are they going to continue to support it so therefore they're trying to reduce the surface area of problems? Get it? Surface area of problems. Especially if this has like become more known or something where it's like, well, we really can't.

Maybe we're not meeting the contracts or like we said that this was a secure tablet or whatever. well, we really can't. Maybe we're not meeting the contracts or like we said that this was a secure tablet or whatever. But like WW is saying, you get the sense that this is sort of Microsoft of yesteryear, right, WW? Yeah, kind of like, hey, you know, thanks for all the money. Now you get no support or nothing on this. Or, you know, maybe we'll support Linux, you know. We got this Azure Or, you know, maybe we'll support Linux. You know, we've got this Azure thing, you know. Yeah, I think what WW is saying there

is why it got so much traction is, hey, what happened to hard in Linux? Yeah, exactly. What happened to emoji heart? What happened? Because really this just goes to block Linux. I mean, anything that's going to be used at scale would be Linux installations.

And the fact people talk about here that there is actually a couple of popular installations on RT tablets. So I guess if you want to install Linux on an RT tablet, don't install the latest update. Yeah. Which is sort of – I don't feel like this one story is a clear indicator of Microsoft as a whole's intention towards Linux. Right. And it's not important enough of a platform to really reflect their core values

probably. Right. You know what would really sell it for me? What's that? Is it called the Surface Book? That really crazy expensive? Yeah. And I know this would never happen. But man, you know what would shut me up immediately about Microsoft and

how much they support Linux? If they shipped a version of that with Ubuntu LTS. That would be crazy. Right? And maybe, and let's just, since it's Microsoft, we'll just give on a few things. The web browser's pre-configured to use Bing. Oh, naturally. You got Skype for Linux installed. I've heard you can use Etsy Scale for that, Chris.

Nice one, dude. Also, you have like Visual Studio Code pre-installed. So you have like the Microsoft Linux tool sets preloaded. Ready to dev.net right on your Ubuntu? Oh, man. Then I would be really like, okay, this clear indicator. I guess I'd like to hear from you, Manny.

What do you think? Do you think this is an indicator of microsoft's overall intention or perhaps this is just a bug fix gone wrong i mean you can't blame microsoft for fixing a bug a big step would be to open the wavy devices on these rt devices so anyone who wants to install Linux can install it. But just fix a bug is what Microsoft has to do. Oh, I kind

of like Landrash's theory, though. Landrash, go ahead. You have a theory that maybe this is sort of a competitive move. Well, it's good practice not to have competition against your own product. And if you disable the ability to install Linux, maybe people will be more encouraged to buy newer hardware

because they're not getting the same value. Wouldn't those just be pissed-off customers that just wouldn't buy another Surface? Well, you'll have a few pissed-off customers, but a lot of paying customers. Yeah, okay. I guess that's better than none, huh? It's just such weird timing.

Yeah. It's like if they'd done it around, I don't know, if they'd done it earlier, if they'd done it from the start, like they kind of said that they were going to. Yeah. You know, API in the chat room has pointed out, and we just did some coverage over the last couple episodes of TechSnap, there is a 20-year-old printer spooler bug in Windows that is exploitable remotely. And it's just, it's really something. And that is, so that's, we covered that in the last two weeks because it's a story that evolved in tech snap and then the week before that we talked about a group policy

disaster that that was an interesting story yeah it turned off group policy network wide and we just windows is yeah it's time to ship Ubuntu on that surface book so speaking of things that are shipping maybe this is why they are worried about Linux.

There is a game that you may have heard of. You may even have fond memories of System Shock, which is a game that came out damn near, I don't know, 23 years ago now. It's a AAA title. And after two decades, Night Dive Studios is rebooting and reimagining the original System Shock with a new game that they say is true to the classic experience. And I've read some reviews that say it is. And I hadn't talked about this before because it was a Kickstarter. And it wasn't – it was one of those where they sort of teased Linux support. Yeah.

And they didn't promise Linux support. We've been burned there before. Yeah. And so here's a little bit of the Kickstarter. I'll play a little bit of this for you so you kind of get a feel. They seem like a pretty fun bunch. Where it all began, it says. Stephen used to love to play outside with all the other children.

Until the incident. It was like night and day. After he started playing that classic cyberpunk horror video game System Shock, he simply lost touch with reality. game system shock, he simply lost touch with reality. So this is, it's a really fun parody video. And in it, they say, well, you know, they talk about reimagining this game and they say how they talk and they just talk and talk and talk about how much they love this old game.

And they promised a Linux version of that got to a certain amount of the Linux community said, great, prove it. We're not just going to maybe kick in and have you not reach your end goal. So today, the guys behind System Shock and Gals said, all right, well, we will prove it. We will ship a Linux demo to prove to you that we can hit the export button in Unity and make a Linux version. So they shipped that today. I downloaded it from GOG.com. It's free.

I think you can also get it on Steam. And it is freaking great, dude. So this is a video of the trailer here. This looks awesome. It is awesome. The comms are dead and they're responding. It has a very cool vibe to it. And I tell you what, the game is so damn great that I think I'm going to go back at the project after the show. So they're almost there now to get Linux support.

They've proved that they can hit the export button, so I think that's probably worth backing them. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, now here's what they say. They said due to popular demand, they put up the Linux demo. We're doing this before we hit the stretch goal as a gesture of good faith, but understand that the Linux demo

does not guarantee a Linux version of the final game unless we hit the stretch goal. It took quite a bit of time to get it all working on Linux, as well as a bit of internal testing. I like that. Ooh, internal. A bit of internal testing. Sounds like more than a bit of time to get it all working on Linux, as well as a bit of internal testing. I like that. Ooh. Ooh, internal.

A bit, huh? A bit of internal testing. Sounds like more than a bit. Launching on other platforms takes time to adequately support and deploy, which is why we have a stretch goal, and it is vital. Okay. How far away are we from that stretch goal right now? They talk also, by the way, they talk about how you have to install libSDL2 for the audio to work correctly. I see. Let's see.

If I recall something, it's like they're like 15,000 away from it right now or 16,000 away from it. But they don't just come right out and say in the post how much money they need. They have like this graphic here you have to follow. A tech tree. Yeah, from the breakdown. In fact, I think Liam has over on GamingOnLinux.com. He even breaks it down too. He says, yeah, it needs to get around 63,000 to hit the stretch goal. And right now it is at – oh.

Oh, it needs another 63,000. That's what it is. It needs another 63,000. So there you go. Well, Linux gamers out there, see what we can do. Yeah. Actually, I think they're going to make it. I think they hit a million. So I think they're going to make it now.

So I think that's going to be awesome. I look forward to it. And the great thing about the demo is if you just want to play around, it's free, and it's hosted right up on GOG.com for direct download. Wow. Yeah. That is a very good faith effort. And it's nice after being burned by – look at that. Look at that screenshot there, Wes, with the planetary rings out the window.

Holy smokes. That looks cool. My heart is a flutter. Yeah, and it's nice to have to get burned by Kickstarter a few times. I know. Yeah, to see that. So anyways, the System Shock demo is out. I downloaded it on my machine upstairs.

I did have a little audio problems, a little audio glitch. I heard sounds, but there was still like this tick, tick, tick, tick. Yeah. So not quite there. No, not quite there yet. Not quite there. Their first stretch goal was 1.1 million. Okay, and they're at 1 million right now.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. They don't make it super obvious because it's all like in that graphic. And I think I'll probably back them after the show just because I would probably buy that game on Steam anyways after it comes out. And if they're so damn close, I wouldn't mind pushing them over. Yeah, okay. So CyberSeal in the chatroom says it is available on Steam as well for free.

Oh, nice. So you can get that. Speaking of something else you could try out for free, that'd be DigitalOcean. In fact, if you use our promo code DOUnplugged, all one word, and that's lowercase, you can get a $10 credit over at DigitalOcean.com. A simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your own rig on their super badass infrastructure. SSDs top to bottom, 40 gigabit e-connection to the hypervisor. The hypervisor is KVM running on top of Linux. Did you say 40 gigabit?

Oh, son! Yeah, you can tell, too. Like, when you're downloading software, one of the other things they do that I just love is they have a private networking option that goes over their own internal networking, doesn't count against your transfer. It's a great way to proxy connections to the machines behind you, or if you need to set up something to do, like, file storage. It's a great way to proxy connections to the machines behind you, or if you need to set up something to do like file storage, it's awesome. They have snapshots and backups that make taking point-in-time snapshots of your machine before you go cray-cray

super easy. The straightforward API makes that all super automatable, but let me tell you something, girl, that interface. Oh, that interface is nice. The way that they've been able to evolve it to and not add unnecessary complexity or buttons, it's really something the KDE project should look at. Go over, use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. You'll get a $10 credit, and in less than 55 seconds, you can get your own DigitalOcean rig spun up. They have Ubuntu LTSs, of course. In fact, even when it's a non-LTS release, they have the most current version in there.

They got FreeBSD, Fedora, Debian, CoreOS, and CentOS. CoreOS is a pretty awesome concept. Have you played around with it? I know you're a container guy. It is pretty cool, yeah. But you're just a straight-up LTS with LXDE. You don't need no CoreOS, right? I do think it's a pretty cool project, though.

It is super cool. It's very interesting. And I appreciate how much diversity and other tooling and kind of a different take they've brought to the Docker ecosystem. And, yeah, with Rocket. Yeah. And plus they're super, super sound voices in that space. Yeah, they have a lot of good engineers. Bringing a lot of like –

etcd is really cool. Yes. Like a lot of really good software for distributed configurations. Exactly. And DigitalOcean, which is really cool, is they work right upstream with CoreOS. So that way they're in one of the release channels. They get official updates from CoreOS. And by the way, they just launched their new block storage where you can attach up to 16 terabytes of SSD storage.

Whoa. Whoa. DO Unplugged when you check out. Or actually, what you do, it's not when you check out. It's in the account. You go when you're doing your payment area. You just apply it and you get a $10 credit. And you can run a rig for

a while. DL Unplugged and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. I want to do a little bit of follow-up because I realize not everyone watches Linux Action Show that watches this show and I've been getting a lot of tweets about this still. Not tweets, emails. I wish I was getting tweets. Jeez Louise.

At ChrisLAS telling you if you don't hear from me in email, you ping me on Twitter, you might get me. But just don't tweet me, ask me to read your email. That never makes sense. So this bug has bit me, and I talked a little bit about it last week. The update to 4.64. It drove you off of what was otherwise a pretty good operating system. Yeah, it turns out there was a microcode bug in that package. And because of that, the kernel update fails.

After you do the update, the microcode package fails to update and it doesn't boot. Major bummer. And it's been hitting people with Skylake machines. So I just want to do a quick follow-up. Right here I have linked to the show notes the Fedora bug where they're tracking it. There is a kind of a workaround you could do if this particular issue has hit you. I've heard from a few people where they have. And

I said this on the show, Wes, and I just want to sort of double down on the statement here, but Skylake has been a major disappointment for me. It really has been. You know, especially since we've talked about it, you hear a lot about just how good Intel is at working with the kernel. Supposedly, right. Right. But it seems to have been a major pain point,

especially since it was kind of like, it seemed like an architecture they were kind of excited for as a company. And we've heard a lot about new Skylake laptops. Yep, yep. And I remember when 16.04 came out, they had that graphics flashing issue and it bit Michael Dominick

and he ended up bailing. He ended up bailing from it. Oh, wow. Yeah, and that was sort of like, it was a moment where I was like, OK, so there's one user lost. But all right, all right. OK, sorry. Sorry, Michael.

Really, I promise it's better next time you try it. I want to talk about something really quickly that I thought was an interesting development. And it really kind of came to my attention when I saw a tweet this week that – see, do I have the tweet up here? Yeah, here it is. In other news, your Chrome browsing data will soon be used for ad tailoring. Time to act surprised, I guess. And this is something that you don't even really know about until you go in to review your Google account settings. And I noticed Google was prompting me to review my account settings recently. I was like, why is it? And I went in there. I didn't see anything.

It's not obvious. I didn't read the fine print. Right. But if you read the fine print, it says, When you use Google services like Search and YouTube, you generate data, things like what you've searched for and videos you've watched. You can find and control that data in my account under the web and app activity setting. With this change, this setting may also include browsing data from Chrome

and activity from sites and apps that partner with Google, including those that show ads from Google, which is just that whole apps that partner with Google. That's probably apps that use the Google sign-in and apps that use advertising. Holy sheesh. It makes me wonder about when will this this present like a conflict of interest for like extension developers or like a big enterprise where suddenly – I mean we already knew like everything you – you type in that little bar. It's getting sent to their servers. But I use Chrome at work and I can consider security policies that would be less than happy about that.

Right, yeah. That's a good point. I was sniffing around trying to get a sense of what it is that Chrome is sending back to Google that they will use for advertising. This is probably not a complete list, but here's some of the things, and I put these in the show notes that I came across. People who sign into Chrome, then you are opted into this. People who use opt-out services, like use a web service to help resolve navigation errors, use prediction service to help complete searches, you know, that search thing that gets you. that search thing that gets you. Using a prediction service to load pages more quickly, automatically reporting details of possible insecure pages to Google, protecting your site and devices from dangerous sites.

When you get that pop-up, it says the site might be dangerous. Automatically sending uses and crash reports to Google, opting into all of those things, they will use that data for advertising. And this is so obvious. I mean, yeah. I mean, I can't even vain that I'm surprised. I can't. But it's so disappointing.

It's so freaking disappointing. And what it shows you is this was the end goal all along. This is why they launched a web browser to have a say in web standards and to do this thing. This is why an advertising company creates a web browser. Yep. And I kind of had a sense of what was going on because I noticed things that I had typed in Chrome were showing up in my Google Now cards. So I had a sense that they were parsing that. And sometimes it's nice.

I'll say Google Now has shown me some stories I wanted to see. Oh, for sure. Yeah. But they're just not so public about it. But with that news combined with this neat script that came out this week, I'm thinking about making a change. It's not a dramatic

change, but one of the things that's prevented me from trying out Vivaldi. We've talked to the developers on this show. I've done a quick take on it before. But at the end of the day, Wes, I'm not going to lie. I do like to be able to watch Netflix sometimes. You have Star Trek to watch, you know? You nailed it. And so that's why I'm super excited about this new script that enables playback in Vivaldi and other Chromium-based web browsers, including Chromium itself.

So this is super nice. A Vivaldi project guy has managed to create a handy script that'll allow you to do this. And I've linked it in the show notes. I've tried it out. It does work. It's just a, it's a gist that you download. It's also in the AUR. And one of the neat things about the AUR version is they have a Vivaldi specific one, and then they have a Chromium specific one that works for Vivaldi and all of them. And the Vivaldi specific one has less dependencies. specific one that works for Vivaldi and all of them. And the Vivaldi specific one has less dependencies. The Chromium based one downloads like 150

megabytes of packages, which took forever on my MiFi connection. But I'll tell you what, at the end of it, I was able to watch Netflix in Vivaldi and I can install some of the same Chrome extensions that I kind of need to do the show notes. And you know what else?

In my limited use, it felt like it loads faster. The other thing I like about it is it has better display of page loading. Like I have – it tells you your transfer rate of how fast the web page is downloading, sort of like old web browsers used to. And each tab has progress indicators. It feels a little faster. It does. And I did enjoy using it. I had it on my laptop for a while when we first talked about it.

And it's definitely not a bad browser. And they've recently introduced something that I know you have bolted onto Chrome in their latest version of Evaldi, if I'm saying that right, is tab hibernation. Yeah, definitely. And I don't use it myself, but my understanding of tab hibernation is that it has an ability to sense how long a tab has been inactive. And once it reaches that threshold, it essentially pauses anything on that. Like it doesn't render that page anymore.

Am I getting it right? Yeah. You know, I don't know the exact implementations of the Vivaldi version, but the great suspender is the extension I use in Chrome. And, yeah, it'll just basically changes the URL to the URL of the extension plus the page you were on and then you click like so the extension basically takes over the tab using much less memory than you know a full rendered dom page and all that and then you just give it a click and then it the extension then just reloads the page that was there so if there's any animation of any kind or anything that all pauses you know it doesn't preserve state uh it just preserves like where you, what page it was. And that's good, I suppose, if you had

a lot of tabs? Yes. Yeah, exactly. Or like, you know, like you're doing some research for the show, perhaps, and there's a lot of times where it's like, well, I have a whole stack of tabs, and maybe I need 10 of them right now, but I'm going to need the next one 30 minutes later, especially if you're on a laptop on the go. So you're releasing probably way more than half the RAM each one of those tabs

takes at that point. Yeah, exactly. I mean, did you know, so when it does that, does it also unload all of the extensions? Because, you know, each instance of the extension. That's a good question. I guess, I don't know. Anyways, that's interesting. And they've built it into Vivaldi, which is kind of compelling from a laptop battery saving standpoint. So I think over the next week, I'm going to transition to that browser and see how it works for me.

I have it loaded upstairs on my machine already. Oh, awesome. Next week I'm going to transition to that browser and see how it works for me. I have it loaded upstairs on my machine already. Oh, awesome. And I did the Chromium script that allowed me to install Netflix for all Chromium-based browsers. It looks like a pretty reasonable script here too. I mean it's only 100 lines long.

You can easily parse it yourself. It's not crazy. It's not crazy. And it was made by one of the team members to just enable it because this was a total thing that they needed fixed on their browser. And it seems like a pretty good – you know, they didn't just bake it into theirs and not share it with the community. It's like – That's kind of a nice guy thing. Yeah, that's great. So, you know, what they do is they take Chromium and they rebase off of Chromium.

And in some cases, they've done – they've walked this line of – it feels like they look at the Chrome extension market and they go, well, those four things are a really good idea. Let's bake that in. And I don't know exactly if they re-implemented or if they work with those authors or what. But they've managed to do it in such a way that the UI still seems very responsive. The browser seems really responsive. And it's – for me, it's easier to navigate than Chrome itself in terms of settings. And it's – for me, it's easier to navigate than Chrome itself in terms of settings. So you click on the Vivaldi menu and you just have a traditional file, edit, view, tools menu instead of a hamburger.

And when you click on settings, you can change this. It can be a tab. But a separate dialog with hierarchical settings comes up that is much easier to navigate than Chrome's huge long list of settings. And you always have to click advanced to get the things you really want anyways. So that stuff, they've managed to simplify those experiences in Chrome. It appears to use less resources while giving me more information and automatically including some of the extensions I want. And now also I can play Netflix. And for me, because Firefox just hasn't worked in the past, I'm thinking this could be a good potential.

It is nice to at least – I mean even if it's not crazy different, a broader market is not a bad thing. Here's the other thing I like, Wes. You're right. Because – did you hear that Opera just got bought out? Yeah, I know. I was about to say. Here's the other thing I like, Wes, though, is they have done a good job of outreach to the Linux community. They've exchanged emails with this show. They have gone out of their way to notify Linux news publications of things that are applicable to Linux users.

So they seem to want the Linux user base too, which is, I think, a good sign. Yeah, we don't get that from a lot of people. Oh, and Nogogo also points out something that's kind of neat is it can interpret theme color, the meta tag. And so depending on the page you're on the window chrome can change to match sort of like chrome does on the android on the android the android version of chrome does when you're on a web page like if you're on a green page the title bar turns green it all kind of matches

or whatever Vivaldi does that as well Vivaldi also has a dark theme right out of the box which I like a lot it starts with a light theme but has a dark theme so my quick take on it is impressed from like the two hours i played with it again this morning after it's been you know months and uh i think i'm gonna put it on all my machines for a while i just don't i don't know what the sync situation is

on that but i'll figure it out i'll play with it and let you know so i want to shift gears for a moment you guys know i gotta i got to soapbox on the show and i i almost have to avoid you have the show i literally i i swear guys i promise you's why you have the show. I literally, I swear, guys, I promise you, I try not to make this a topic every single week, but it is such an epidemic in the Linux ecosystem that sometimes I just can't help myself.

This Sunday, I kind of got on, or no, it was last time plugged. I kind of got on SJVN's case for saying that Linux Mint was the best desktop ever. You remember me? I got into the best desktop ever. I said, come on. Is that true?

Is that really true? You got into the whole thing about what does best even mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that a phrase that you can stand behind? Right. And he said in 25 years, the best Linux I ever used. And then I took a look at it and I said, well, what about these issues? And I laid them out on Sunday's show and I would argue those issues I raised do not make it the best

Linux ever. It may be the best for certain work cases or certain scenarios, or a very good option would be a reasonable way to put that. So this next one really got my attention. It was published today by SJVN. It's the best Linux laptop, everybody. Oh, yeah, that's right. The XPS 13 is the best Linux laptop ever. Make no mistake about it. The 2016 Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop is wonderful. It's fast. The display is gorgeous.

And it's less than three pounds. But, oh, that price tag. It's the best laptop ever, Wes. And then, you know, as somebody. What do I got? Hey, Wes. Hey, Wes. What is this somebody – what do I got? Hey, Wes. Hey, Wes. What is this right here?

What is this? What is this right here? Why, that looks like an XPS 13. Yeah, this right here in my hands is the Dell XPS 13. That's the best Linux laptop right there? Let me tell you, Wes. Let me tell you. Wow.

I don't even need to be the one to tell you about a – I think it's a fine laptop and I don't discourage anyone from picking one up. I think about it all the time. I'll admit that right now. Here's the things that Stephen Jay himself says are an issue, but then still says it's the best Linux laptop ever. So the display is great. I love it. But it's only 13 inches, and it is legitimately kind of small and cramped when you get a 4K version.

It's almost unreadable. And there's an oddity that really makes it stand out. They stick the webcam down in the bottom left corner of the display. And he goes on to say it doesn't really matter that much. It is awful. I've seen a lot of other people complain a fair bit about it. I don't ever use it. I never use it.

It looks so bad. Also, he admits here, it's limited to only 16 gigs of RAM. Now, that might be fine absolutely for like a VI workflow or an Emacs workflow. If you're a Java dev or virtualization, you know, you need to run different instances to test stuff. You need more than 16 gigs of RAM. Especially if you're getting that from work or something who's

willing to pay for it and you're just like, well, that's the max. Doesn't disqualify it, but I think it raises the question, does it make it the best? Especially when you think of like, you see those ThinkPads that Noah's buying or other things where it's like it might not be as pretty, but it has performance. Here's the other thing. Does the absolute best Linux laptop for 2016 ship with an OS that launched in 2014? Because it ships with Ubuntu 14.04.

Now, later on, Dell plans to update it. But does 2016's best Linux laptop ship with a 2014 OS? I don't think it does. Nope. I don't think so. If you went and got an Entroware or you went and got a System76, it would ship with the absolute latest version. Also, he mentions that it ships with Thunderbolt 3 and DisplayPort and no HDMI or Ethernet. But he fails to mention the fact that the DisplayPort basically doesn't work.

Really? And the Thunderbolt basically doesn't work either. Yeah, it's horrible. All of my time with it, the DisplayPort has never worked correctly. Here's the other problem. Here's the true problem, too, is the main display is 4K, but

when you hook it up to an external display, X does not handle that well. You can't have one screen be high DPI, 4 and one screen be 19 by 1080. Unless you've got the nice 4K monitors at home. And in 14.04 specifically, in Ubuntu 14.04 specifically, in some cases, the display port doesn't work at all. It doesn't work at all. So the version it ships with, you have to be running the absolute latest hardware-enabled entitlement kernel of Ubuntu 14.4 to make this work, which Dell does ship.

But it literally— And then you're in another situation where it's like if you want to rebuild that— Yeah, right? Exactly. That's the problem. And then he goes on to say the touchpad sucks. Then he says the touchpad sucks. Then, to top it all off, he mentions that the Windows 10 Home version starts at $799,

and this version starts at $1,099. So it's even more expensive for the similarly equipped Windows version, but yet this is the best Linux laptop of 2016? And last week he declared that Linux Mint was the best Linux desktop of 2016. How can the best laptop not run the best OS? That doesn't make sense. Mint's got security issues. This is a legitimate problem.

Here's what I'm talking about because here's a better example of a headline that was also published today at opensource.com who I've given a hard time in the past. A Red Hat employee, Anderson, over there, did his review, surprisingly just posted it today, I'm sure a total coincidence, of his Dell XPS 13. And here's the title he went with.

Get ready for this one. Hands-on with the Linux-ready Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. How about that? That's way more reasonable. That's way more reasonable. That's way more. Like, there's no, like, there's just, there's nine-day difference between, and he goes through and he does such a better review. He talks about, he compares it to the ThinkPads.

He compares it to, yeah. Seems like a must-read for anyone. He talks about trying to install Fedora 24 on there. I mean, way better. And he does say it's a good, well-built machine and that it runs Fedora and Ubuntu virtually perfectly, which is – it's a good – he says if you're a system administrator or something like this, this is a great machine for you. And I echo that. If you – and I put Mint 18 with Cinnamon and I turned on high DPI mode. I'm leaving it on there.

It's so nice. I should show it to you. It's really good. I really liked it. So anyways, I really am getting sick of this. I don't have a particular point. I don't want to make a whole thing out of this. It's just this is an ongoing problem that I feel like Linux journalism suffers from.

Yes. And it's just it makes it feel very bottom of the barrel. And I know we don't have like the biggest journalism community out there, but it makes it also very hard to find reasonable things. So it's like that second article, that's a great deep dive, a real analysis from the headline. You can't just walk away with a TLDR point. You know what I mean? Like you have to you have to read it to understand it. And two years from now, it would still be worthwhile.

Whereas the first article, it's kind of nothing. And there's just so many like, oh, it's the best of this year. Maybe kind of except for this. But I'm still going to call it the best for your clicks. Yeah, and of course what they're really aiming for is those Google juice search results. Oh, this is beautiful. Doesn't Cinnamon look really good on the XPS there? Yes. I know.

I mean, I would think this was 1080p except on a super, super high-res screen, right? Yeah, everything fits. The fonts and text look super great. So you've got to give Clem credit. I mean, that really is one of the best out-of-the-box high DPI. Once I check a box, it's one of the best. So when is someone going to make a Linux Mint spin that just enables the kernel updates, and that's the only change?

Well, you can still do it. Oh, yeah. Well, totally. But, yeah. So anyways, I'm going to keep that on there for a while because I think it really works well on the XPS. I'm excited to see what you think. All right.

Moving on. You may have noticed a certain lack of Popey or Wimpy this week. I secretly use Archimedes. Oh, there he is. Actually, I happen to know where they both are right now. And this is the reason why I think Snap Packages are going to be the dominant universal installer. This, you don't even know it, but this week is the week that Snap Package has won. And I know that PDV just shipped in a flat pack.

I know that just happened. But what Canonical is doing right now is going to push it over the edge. So let's break this down. Let's get into what's happening as we record this very show. Canonical is holding a snappy sprint event in Germany to ship up Universal Snaps. Canonical announced, Softpedia and others, about an upcoming event that aims to bring different developers together and contributors from various well-known projects to work together on shaping up Universal Snaps. Okay, interesting.

But what does that mean? Well, I happen to know what it means in practical sense is that Mark Shuttleworth and others made direct invites to members of the community from all over to bring them out. And here's Popey on G+, talking about hitting the air and going out to the big event. But what's really been interesting is following Wimpy's posts on Google+. on Google+. So Wimpy posted at 1 a.m., just finished the first cross-distro session on day two of the Snappy Sprint. Sitting in the room are representatives

from Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Elementary, and Ubuntu, all working together to make sure Snappy is well-integrated into various distro CI systems and provides consistent experience everywhere. Which, look at that fruit plate right there. That looks really good. Then another post from Wimpy.

Now this is the snappy Sprint community team dinner. These are the people in the room that are not from Ubuntu, have been invited to represent their distro or project. Around this table is AppStream folks, Arch, Linux, Debian, Elementary, Fedora, OpenWrt, OpenSUSE, KDE, and of course him from Matei behind the camera.

He got an invite from Mark to come to make sure. And the reason everybody is there is what they really want is they want a consistent experience. And they want just everybody kind of on the same page. So they brought people out to this to meet in person, which is exactly when this happened. The Flatpak folks were like, this isn't how you do it. You have to meet in person and talk. Right. Well, look at this.

And this is why I think this is a way in which app images don't have the means or resources to compete. Flatpaks don't have the organization or corporate backing to compete like this. And Canonical does. And look how fast they've moved on this. It does. And look how fast they've moved on this. They've moved from announcing it to then making it all distro agnostic to now flying out key contributors and stakeholders to this event. And Wimpy was talking about another post how he's sitting next to Daniel from Elementary OS and they're checking out each other's betas of the latest OS, sharing stories and whatnot. It's pretty cool to have a forum like this where people can – this is going to push it over the edge.

Yeah. to have a forum like this where people can... This is going to push it over the edge. Yeah. I mean, I really think because you have these gatekeepers of their particular communities or software at this event all collaborating together and talking about how to deliver software, how could Flatpaks compete with this? Well, and I think it also kind of highlights

where snaps really seem like they're going to be playing. Like, Flatpaks seems like they've spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of the underlying issues, more related to how package management works today. There's a lot of thought about when you're building up a distro and you want to use this, where Snaps, it really seems like they're focused on whatever you're running, you're running Linux,

and you want this application, we are the thing to go for. And if they bring in all this, not all, but if they bring in a fair number of stakeholders, I think there are still some issues like the CLA, that kind of stuff, right? But if they're at least – if it's good terms, people are invited and it's like you don't have to support this, but let's all make it so that everyone wants to use it. Well, and if there ends up being free re-implementations of the backend, which appears to be super straightforward, the CLA may be less of an issue there too. I guess – so it's the same reason why I think Steam and Valve could have only worked with Ubuntu. They're in a unique position where they're flexible and nimble enough to act extremely fast and they – apparently, Mark says let's do this and then they just do it.

This came together very quickly. They announced it on July 5th. And now here we are on – it's been going for two or three days as we record this. That is a quick turnaround. Yeah. So they're really – they're moving fast. And meanwhile, the Flatpak folks just got a name. Yep.

And it is interesting too because, I mean, as we've seen for the past few years, Ubuntu have been kind of the people where it's like as much as we have a linux platform they're it right so it's nice to at least see them kind of fulfilling that role or trying to even if not everyone wants them to be that role not everyone wants them to be what it is right but when people when you have an app that's packaged for linux eight out of ten times it's it's packaged for a bunch you so if that becomes packaged for snaps and it runs everywhere just already when you said that you know what else it made me think of is thank God they're actually doing something. Like they announced Ubuntu for Android and Ubuntu TV and nothing happened. And they didn't do anything with it.

And, you know, there wasn't a position where they had a lot of leverage. Now when you see them in a position where they have some leverage, they really do act. And they're acting quickly. And, you know, who cares if you don't want to use it, you don't have to. But it's super nice that they're actually working with, they're acting quickly and who cares if it does – if you don't want to use it, you don't have to. But it's super nice that they're actually working with – they're outreaching. They're working with OpenSUSE and Arch and others. They're trying to do the right thing.

They also just recently announced Snappy Playpen, a place to test, learn and create snaps and share best practices and with a big focus on desktop applications, including in here is MPV, Shotwell, SMP Player, Ubuntu Clock App, YouTube DL, VLC. VLC developers are also at the – there's several other ones. Hopefully when the guys get back the next week, they'll share a certain – We'd love to talk to them about that. I would really like to know how it went, who they got to talk to, and if they have a sense of where adoption is at. I know. I'm really curious to see how the representatives from the other distributions, what they're feeling. Yeah.

Yeah. And also, do the people who go, say, from SUSE, do they become sort of outliers in their local community when they come back? Are they traitors? Are they at different times? Do they have to come back and become an advocate, an advocate to the other SUSE people that this is a technology that's worth adopting even though it's from the evil, evil, horrible canonical. Boy, that seems like an interesting position to be in. And I don't really see anybody here. OK.

One last thing. We'll move off of this. Nice run. The other thing we'll move right off this is nobody's reporting on this. Softpedia had the announcement about the event taking place. But here is an example of Canonical, in my estimation, coming up with an idea, outreaching directly to community members, flipping the bill to fly them out, have a venue, organize all of this. Mark Shuttleworth himself is, at least in the case of one of these that I know of, calling them up directly and saying, hey, I would like you to be there. This, to me, feels very much like a company that works with the community. And yet this kind of stuff, we are literally the only outlet reporting on it.

I will say people might have been happier if they had done this before they had that announcement. Right, right. So maybe this is kind of a – But would the interest be there if they had done it like this? That's a very good point. Yeah. I mean, as they say, no press is bad press. Well, and people, now that this conference, when you get there, a huge part of the conversation has already been happened.

And you can already run it on these things. How can they be used? What are examples of software that could be packaged up as snaps? All of that's already been answered by the time they all get to the sprint. So you could argue the execution. You might be right, though. I think the Fedora folks would say so for sure. Because now you could have that press release and be like, yeah, look, they did it.

It's on the up and up. Yeah. I wonder. I wonder possibly. I think Landrash also agrees with you it looks like. So, yeah. Either way, I think it's really great they're doing it, and I think it's also interesting that it's the kind of thing that doesn't get reporting.

And I think in part that might have been because Canonical didn't really outreach to much press. Yeah, right. They didn't tell us, and they told Softpedia that it was happening, but they didn't invite any press to be there at the event to cover it, to relay what happened. And I think that's maybe a shame because one of the things – Maybe it's just like one of those work sprints where they're trying to get stuff done and they don't want to do the press yet. I know. I think that's exactly what it is. Yeah, I know.

I know. But see, what the problem is is then that's a – we just threw it over the wall and now here it is instead of covering it in the – when they're actually doing the nitty-gritty community aspect of it. Especially that like you might not even have to focus on the outcomes. Just kind of focusing on the like cross-distribution, hand-reaching, that kind of stuff would be really interesting. That's the story. Yeah, exactly. That's the story.

We'll see what happens. I mean you can already run it on a lot of these anyway. It may go nowhere. Yeah, totally. You know, the flat packs or app images may win out in the end or nothing or just tar files with hard link libraries. That is the future. But the real story is that this company is calling up these stakeholders of these different distributions and bringing them out. That's the story that's not getting reported on, I think.

And it goes – it would play directly against the narrative that not invented here narrative that is constantly thrown in canonical space. I just don't think they're quite savvy enough because they're so busy actually trying to do it. They're not thinking about the PR spinner as politics would say, the optics of how it all goes down. But good for them for doing it either way. Absolutely. Good for them. All right. I want to mention Ting real quick before we go much further into the show. That's my mobile service provider, and it's mobile that makes sense because you only pay for what you use, and there's no contract or no early termination fee.

Go to linux.ting.com to get our special promo. You get $25 off a device, hey-oh, or $25 in credit if you bring a Ting device, which you might because they've got two networks, GSM and CDMA, which means there's a lot to choose from. There are a huge number of devices. And really, who doesn't have a device now that you can pop a SIM card into? They just had a great sale on those SIM cards too, but now you can pick them up for $9. And again, there's no contract. You activate it and you just use what you need. They have a really good dashboard to manage all of this and you get to talk to a real

human being whenever you need to. They also have one of the best deals on like just straight – like if you need something for like notifications and messaging, like if you want like an alarm system or like a – I was actually thinking before I mentioned this, like a hardware temperature monitoring device in like your data center. We have one we're thinking about building out for the garage here at the studio. This is one of the best deals because it's only $6 for the line. this is one of the best deals because it's only $6 for the line you cannot beat this so it's only $6 for the line and then you just pay for the text messages that you use

and it's really easy to manage all of it you could even put caps and say alright well if it goes above a thousand text messages cut it off and you can use it you can do that in their web or their app so they just just really consider that too for automated systems they just really have one of the best deals out there for that.

They have a savings calculator where you can plug all of that in there. Check out their devices page for some of their great devices. I love the Nexus devices on there. And they're also constantly posting tips up on their site. Check them out. Go to linux.ting.com. A series that I've been kind of following, too, is the different cable cutting. It's so cool how interested they are.

You can tell that a lot of Ting people are cord cutters. They're living the online life. And they also have a post on here about learning what customer service lessons they've learned since they launched Fiber Internet, which is kind of interesting. That is very interesting. Fiber Internet, man. Woo, Ting. Ting, I need you to bring it here. Here's what you got to do.

Go to Linux.Ting.com. Try out that, man. Woo, Ting. Ting, I need you to bring it here. Here's what you got to do. Go to linux.ting.com. Try out that savings calculator. What would you save? That's what it says, right? Click that. Click that. Put your deets in there. Boop-a-doop-a-doops.

See what you would save. That's your litmus test. If you pass, like me, I save like $2,000 a year. I mean every two years. I save about $1,000 a year. That's nice. Hey, that's a brand new best Linux laptop right there. Yeah, it a year. That's nice. Hey, that's a brand new best Linux laptop right there. Yeah, it sure is.

Also, businesses, like if you've got 10 to like 20 employees, something like that. Yeah. Especially for those like you want someone to have a phone. They don't really need it, but you want them to be there. It's great for certain family members too. Yeah. Yeah, I really like it. Also, another reason I love Ting is I have an old, old LG tablet that

has a SIM slot in it. Oh, nice. And every now and then, it's nice just to have another machine with a data connection. And so I have a Ting SIM in there, and I can turn it on and off right there in the drop-down menu for my notifications, and I activate it, and I get a different data connection. And $6, you just don't feel bad about $6. It's a sandwich.

You know, it's great. It's really great. Ting's a great service, a great company, backed by two cows as well. Check them out. Linux.ting.com. That's where you got to go to support this show and get the discount. A big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. So last week I talked about my desperate

need for a VPN to avoid an upstream proxy that not only was spying on all of my HTTP and HTTPS traffic, but also just adding unacceptable amounts of latency to my web browsing session. You're an impatient man. You need those, you know? Sure.

Give me my DNS now. Nothing is more frustrating, honestly, where it hits me the worst is when I'm in Google Maps and I'm in satellite mode and I'm like moving around in the tiles and it's so slow to load each title and they load in like an old, like when you used to look at porn back in the 90s on the internet, and you had to wait for the JPEGs to download, right? Just like that. Horrible. So I had to find a VPN to just essentially route around this,

not even just for the privacy, although that was an element of it, but to basically get around this proxy server and see if it actually made a difference in my web speed. So we talked about this last week. And if you guys want to know more about it, check it out by listening to episode 153 of the Unplugged program. So I think I'm not going to claim this is my final solution, but this, damn, this is working well for me. This is working so damn well. The performance, way better.

The ease of setup, mind-blowingly simple. And I got a couple of recommendations. So I'm going to talk about AirVPN today. I may end up, and we'll talk more about this in a moment, doing a OpenVPN solution on my own server, but I'll talk about that in a moment. First, I want to talk about AirVPN. And it's a VPN based on OpenVPN, and it's operated by activists and hacktivists in defense

of net neutrality, privacy, and against censorship. Okay, that sort of piques my interest. A couple of other things I like about it. Not only did I get a lot of good recommendations from the audience, I got people who emailed and said I've been using AirVPN for a while I really think you should check them out I got people who tweeted me and said AirVPN is great they seem to really support Linux

they also apparently accept Bitcoin for payment which is kind of neat when you're setting up for a VPN provider and you want to really stay more anonymous they also allow you to log into their service anonymously which is really nice. And they support just every damn near device out there.

And of course, like I said, OpenVPN, they have unlimited and free transfer for what I have. I have no maximum speed limit. And I really like it. So here's one of the other things that really I thought was super slick. And again, I haven't shopped a lot for VPN services, so maybe this is kind of common. But I thought this was pretty neat here. They have an open VPN configuration generator.

Oh, nice. So you tell them what OS you want. So you choose your operating system. And I choose Linux here. And then they tell you to pick your server. And they break it down at first by region, which includes a lot of the servers in that region. And they give you the capacity of the regions right here.

What's even nicer for me is because I'm specifically trying to find the fastest route around my proxy. I'm not really trying to hide my traffic. I'm not trying to pretend like I'm in Europe. You can actually break it down by individual servers, individual countries.

So here's Canada, of course Switzerland, France, United Kingdom right here. And then as I scroll down the list, you find the United States and all the different servers in the United States. And of course for me, it was just a matter of now either picking a couple of these, which I could. So I could pick this one in Miami, this one in Georgia if I wanted to, and this one in Los Angeles. And it will include all of those in my OpenVPN script it's about to generate for me. I have a couple other options. I accept the terms of service, and then I simply generate it. It downloads the script for me. And then you just go into GNOME. You have to have OpenVPN GNOME Network Manager installed.

But you just go in there and import the script, say OK. You connect using Network Manager and your VPN. That is great. I was connected within 10 seconds. Wow. And there's other sites out there that help generate OpenVPN configs for you. But the way they bundled this in there was really nice. The way they tie in the server status so you can pick and choose and see what the current

transfer rate is for the whole server, how many users are connected. I think all of that stuff is really nice, geeky stuff. Then they also give you ways to do speed testing on those. I was about to ask about that. Speed testing is nice, especially if you can rig up something where you're like, well, especially, you know, you've got

the, you're roving around all over the place. Once you get connected, you come back to the AirVPN sites, airvpn.org slash speedtest, and then you can speedtest your connection, which is just great. So not only am I able to try out a whole bunch of different servers to figure out what region is best for me, but I actually be able to test them. And the AirVPN guys, or NGALs, seem like they're really straightforward folks that make it easy to be anonymous if you want to and have full-fledged Linux support. And I like that they promote the fact that it's OpenVPN too. They don't try to hide it as some sort of black magic. They're proud that they're using OpenVPN. And that appealed to me as well, because they're transparent with that. So that was sort of my temporary solution to see if this actually solved my problem. Before I went in and built a server that I was going to manage

and be responsible for and read a tutorial and all that stuff, I wanted to see if this actually would solve my problem. It absolutely did. The performance is better. The Netalyzer results come back and no longer complain about proxy issues. That's awesome. Yeah. So now the next question is,

am I going to implement this at a network level, and am I going to host my own? So the first question, the network level one, I'm not so sure about. The cradle point that I have, and I got tweeted saying, hey, which model cradle point do you have? I can't remember at the moment. But I dug through the settings. I don't see built-in VPN support. So I'd probably have to set up a Linux box somewhere on the edge or just here.

Which in the RV is not a super great option right now, but I might eventually go there anyway, so it's a possibility. But what I'm really struggling with is is this the type of thing that is valuable enough

and fragile enough that I should probably be hosting it myself? And this is the age-old problem that I constantly keep running into is do I take advantage of an easy solution that allows me a lot of flexibility? I can try testing all different locations.

It gives me tools. They give me scripts. Do I go with that solution? They have their own staff, right? They have support if you need it. Or is it time to go spin up a droplet, install Ubuntu or something like that, CentOS, whatever, FreeBSD, of course. That's probably even a one-click OpenVPN thing. Maybe so. Maybe so. us whatever freebsd of course and then probably even a one click open vbn thing maybe so maybe so

and i know this is not a new new question but it's one that i'm now once again facing i'm just sitting here going oh crap now now that i know this does fix it what do i do next and i know you kind of had a same similar thing this week you've been messing around with command line accounting software for a while yes i have and that's sort of progressing into well now what do i do do i self-host this? Where are you at with that? Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. You know, it's like I have less time,

but at the same time, I do have the ability, right? Like I know how to run a server. I know how to set up a Linux machine. So I do have the ability. And it's one of those, you know, where do the trade-offs lie? And so like a lot of people have used Mint

or other things. You Need a Budget is a popular one, right? And, you know, you want to be able to understand your money. You need cash. Yeah, but there's a lot of people have used Mint or other things. You Need a Budget is a popular one, right? And, you know, you want to be able to understand your money. You need cash. Yeah. But there's a lot of tools out there where it's like it really depends on – it seems like it depends on how much flexibility you need and how much you trust. Because like I've enjoyed Mint, but now I'm in a little more of a complicated situation where, you know, I've got some business accounts. I've got – my wife and I, we don't share a last name, so it's a little bit different.

We have different accounts that aren't even shared. And I'd like to manage all of that through one, but I might have some, like, custom stuff. I'd also like access to some more of the data. Like, what if I want to kind of compute some of my own metrics on there? Mint doesn't make it that easy to export data or, you know. So it really, I struggle with that, too, because it's like, well, I'm also very busy. I have a job doing similar things already, right? So it's like, I don't have a ton of time every night to do

administration to get good deployment practices. After all, after you do this all day long, is that what you want to do when you get home? Yeah. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is. And sometimes it's like, it's totally worth it. And I mean, I love playing with, I love playing with digital ocean. I love setting things up. I love that feeling of like, yes, I made it work and it's mine. And there are some times where you like you set it up and it just works and you forget about it.

And you have the sense, I, you know, I can trust this. That's super nice, especially when it's your accounting data. Yes, right. And so it may depend on, you know, how personal is it? How private is it?

And how much, you know, there are some things and, you know, I've done both in the VPN case. I do pay for a VPN service provider, but I also do sometimes throw up sometimes use a DigitalOcean one. So maybe there's room for both. Now, should we not gloss over the fact that you have opted to do command line accounting?

Yeah, maybe not. So tell me about this, Wes, because I thought about this in two ways. First, I thought, thought well that's just freaking crazy that's just because you know like i'm thinking about like how you really like when you're trying to reconcile or something like that that just sounds crazy but then i thought back to the to the uh late 90s early 2000s when i was migrating users off of dos and i was moving them over to Windows and about a year into it, the bank that I was moving them at, they decided that it would be better

and faster for the end users that if they just kept using the old DOS program, the old mainframe interface that they were using inside a window in Windows NT instead of using the GUI version and this is a bank because the entering of transactions and all of that was faster in the command line version for the staff than the GUI was. And so I guess it's not totally crazy because I watched a whole user base switch to a GUI and then switch back to a text-based solution. But what do you like about it?

I guess I like that it's a little more – we use this phrase all the time. But like a little more Unix philosophy where, you know, I understand text. I work with text all the time. Text is what a universal interface is what they say. And there is a certain amount of tedium to it, right? Like Mint lets you roll a lot of this, like it'll just do it and it just filters it. But like in particular, like one of the ones I use here is Ledger, right? And, you know, a lot of people will talk about how

tedious it is, and it can be. And it kind of depends on what you want to do. Mint does a pretty good job of classifying things. Ledger can do that too. It has some built-in, a little bit of learning to try to classify things. Will it import from your bank? So there's actually a really cool Python project called Ledger Autosync, which does. I've got it working with several different banks. It pulls it in. You can set like how far back you want to pull it in. And I've actually got it down to like what I think is a pretty reasonable workflow.

And it depends on what you want to do. I think at the base level, I just really appreciate like one, you know, I have a math background, but not an accounting background. So it's been kind of fun to learn a little bit more about double-entry accounting and understanding how this works, especially as someone who wants to – I want to make sure I do my finances right. I want to be up and up on that. So it's kind of helpful to be able to play with that a little bit in a safe environment

where I'm not – there's not so much going on. Especially like you were talking about GNU Cache, some of these other environments, or if you've used QuickBooks or stuff, some of these software, they're very complicated. There's a lot you can do. And, you know, I do have a small business, but it's like, I don't, I'm not an enterprise. I don't have a ton of needs. But what I really want to do is understand where my money comes from and where it goes. And I don't even, you know, you might not even need a huge breakdown of that, but just being able to easily see like, for different time periods, what's my, how am I balanced? What's my cash flow

you know so is the process for you now when you need to do that do you ssh into a remote box that you've set up and that's actually that's the next part in mind i've been running it locally um i just will it's like a just a database you back up a file is it file based how does it work yes it's file based it's just it's a flat text file. And you can kind of configure which files it uses. Oh, I really like that. Right? So it's really easy to back up. You can throw in a tar snap.

I can worry about encryption for the file. But to have my important data in text, you know, I always envision that bunker scenario where the entire infrastructure has come down. And I'm tunneling in with my flashlight and my shovel. And I'm going to rescue the data off that hard drive through a cheroot and a boot. And if I can just read that data and not have to reinstall a program to get access to the data, that's a huge win for me.

So I've really enjoyed this auto-sync because it will do the job of just grabbing each little transaction and then I can just go in and kind of correct it. And I have it set up in a way where you will, where you can have like, you have your main file of your transactions or you can even split it up like this is this month, or this is this year, and then you make a new file and you can kind of consolidate that to like,

what was the net for that, you know, that year at the end of it. And then a lot of it's just like, it provides a nice like once a weekend, or you can do whatever frequency you want, obviously. But you know, I just go through, I grab, it grabs like the last week of transactions from my bank accounts, credit cards, etc. I can, it provides a great opportunity for me to just go look through that, make sure there's not any anomalous charges. Most of the time, it gets a lot of it right, and then I can kind of just go through and be like, oh, yeah, well, this store I know, that's grocery. It takes a half hour maybe, 45 minutes. And at the end, everything's accounted for. You can run lots of commands.

It's very flexible in terms of reporting. And then one that I've been – I'm playing with switching is HLedger, which is a Haskell re-implantation of Ledger. Yeah, that's great. And it comes with, like it has a CLI interface. It has more of like a Curses style interface. It has a web interface that has some graphs.

A web interface, huh? Yeah. And so one of the other things I liked is like, we at work, we use a lot of Graphite or Grafana and other graphing solutions. And so I really liked the idea. Like a huge thing for me is just understanding like this month, do I have more money coming in than going out? And what does that look like? What is the slope of that graph? How does it change week by week? And so the fact

that I can just take this, I can set up a cron job that just runs one ledger command that outputs my balance or my, you know, like my net transfers for the month, spits that into Grafana or whatever tool you want, and then you can graph it however you need it. Or you can throw it into a Google Drive document or whatever. You're able to use some of the same flexibility and tools you use for work to manage your finances, which is really kind of great. So HLedger, a simple, precise, plain text accounting. And that's sort of the perfect do-it-yourself hosted solution.

And I don't know where I'm at. So that seems like an obvious line. Okay, that's something I'm going to self-host. A VPN because I think here's where I'm leaning with my decision. If I were using the VPN solely for the purposes of hiding what I'm doing online and keeping what I want to do private or even possibly getting into another country to get access to content that's restricted. In that scenario too because I don't want to violate terms of service. I think I would self-host.

I think it unquestionably would be obvious I should self-host. But in this scenario, my priorities, I'd say my top three are find the fastest route around a proxy server. I think – and the second one would probably be flexibility to choose different locations based on where I'm at in the RV. flexibility to choose different locations based on where I'm at in the RV. So if I travel to a different state, I might need a different VPN endpoint. And then I think my third one would be ease of use. I was trying to decide if that's number two, but I think the third one is ease of use. And it seems like AirVPN is the better tool for those top three requirements because they have tons of servers for me to choose from. And DO is great because they have a lot of things or similar companies but not the same number of devices.

If I'm going to build my own DigitalOcean droplet and run VPN, I'm probably only going to build it on one droplet. Now, you were talking about a way I could potentially bounce it around to different droplets like the entire setup. Do you remember what that was? bounce it around to different droplets, like the entire setup. Do you remember what that was? I mean, there's lots of neat scripts, but I think that's kind of the power of DO is if you were going to do it, it might be nice to use the API to have like a template. Yes. Right?

I think that's what it was, like a template thing, and I would ping the API and say, spin this template up on the New York data center server because I'm closer to that server now. Exactly. And then when I'm back on the West Coast, I'd ping the API. But see, to me, that seems like the downside to that is what I would lose out on is any kind of small modifications I'd made between that time and the last time I'd done the template. And with AirVPN, I just go in there, choose my server, download the new config, and load it.

There are people that manage that. And here's the other thing, And I've already done this. I have different regions now. I have a folder just called AirVPN in my home directory with each different region's servers that I can just connect to really quick and try. And it doesn't require I do any other setup. I just have the file sitting there, and I have

them all. I have three of them imported right now. And I really like that. So I feel like that might be a better solution, and I feel like they're a pretty solid company. I do wonder. Yeah, it does seem that. And there's like that might be a better solution, and I feel like they're a pretty solid company. I do wonder. Yeah, it does seem that. And there's a lot to be said about exporting the support, all that stuff. Do they have other – do they have non-OpenVPN?

Obviously, OpenVPN is a great VPN. That's a great question. I didn't even look. Yeah, you're right. Some people want that native IPsec support. iOS has it. Android can do it. There's some SSH tunnel-based ones that are really slick.

I think they're only OpenVPN-based. Yeah. As far as I can tell, but I might be wrong because I only – I wanted OpenVPN. Right. I mean OpenVPN is great. There's apps for whatever platform. So it's not like it's a huge problem. The other thing that's really nice is I was able to set up apps on other devices and whatnot.

Look at this. They have top 10 users on here, top 10 speed and all that. So I really like how transparent they are with all of this because I can look at this and go, all right, well, I'll connect to this server that has half the users. Exactly. That's nice. That's really transparent.

Of course, then again, if I rolled my own, I'd be the only user. Yeah. So there's that too. Anybody in the mumble room have thoughts on VPN solutions or my particular particularment or Wes's accounting stuff before we move on? Or even like how do you – as someone who might be skilled, like you can run it yourself. How do you decide if the tradeoffs, the effort is worth not impinging your freedom or whatever? That's a lot of questions.

But anybody has thoughts because you guys haven't had a chance to jump in. Yeah, because you guys haven't had a chance to jump in. Altair says, how do you describe something that runs by activists as a company? I don't know. Maybe they're not a company. They take my money and provide a service, and they seem to be good at doing that, put it that way. Yeah, that's a good point. So is Airbnb a company or do you donate?

It's not a donation. No, it's not a donation. No, it's not a donation. And I think they have a VAT ID. So they must be... I'm clicking on it. Oh, that takes me nowhere. But they do have a VAT ID and they're including taxes in there. So you tell me. You tell me. I could go there.

Because here's the other thing. Is I thought about attempting to go the whole route and totally anonymous because they allow anonymous login and they allow Bitcoin payments that I can send through a Tumblr. That's nice. I thought about it just to really test that. But the thing is, if I'm being completely honest with you, security is not high on my list in this use case because my alternative is to send everything I'm doing through a proxy server that's literally interrupting my, that's manning mentally my HTTPS connections. So, and then adding a super cookie to all my traffic. So like the upgrade in security for me is pretty, yeah.

So another question that might be relevant here is like, what about, do they have, do they let you have forwarded ports? Yeah, there's a couple of options in there where you can do that. There's not a lot of options, but you can also – again – You get a private IP too. That obviously – I didn't check that. You're less anonymous in that regard.

You're not sharing a server. Yeah. But that's one thing I know some people look for. Yeah, yeah. I didn't check to see if they let you do that. But one of the things in the setup is the port for it. So I was just reading here. They say it's operated exclusively by activists, privacy data protection, and security issue-aware persons,

a little bit, activists, privacy data protection, and security issue aware persons, law experts with the help of same lawyers and counts more than 80 servers with high bandwidth lines and good top hardware in 15 data centers across 16 countries in three continents. I'm picking up. English is not the main language. They have a great infrastructure. They say customer service has not and never been outsourced in order to provide high quality of support. There you go.

I'll keep playing around with it. I'll tell you what. It came from some people I respect in our community too, and that made me feel really good too. Definitely. It was recommended to me by some people that know their stuff. But I'll keep playing around with it, and then eventually I might break down and just roll my own.

I'll tell you what the tipping point would be is probably if I'm combining with another solution, like a network-wide persistent VPN. And when I'm ready to step up to like a persistent VPN, they don't fire up when I need it. That might be when I go self hosted on Dio. Right now, I have a very unique setup because I can't just replace my router with a PFSense box like the chat rooms like, right, just do PFSense. It's easy. The issue there is, well, unless anybody – if anybody has experience with the AirCard line of MiFi devices and hooking that over USB with PFSense, that works. Shit, let me know. That would be awesome.

Maybe I'll just replace the cradle point with that. But then if I go with a persistent one, I think that's where I would draw the line. Mamoru, any other thoughts before we move on? We do have one more thing we're actually going to get to today, but you guys have the last word. Yeah, I wanted to clarify. So you have one server, and you can download certificates, and then you can jump countries according to your needs

because you can be connected to one server only at a time. Right, yes. Essentially, you could have multiple setups too. So you could have like your US server config file and your other country config file, and then you would just have two different VPN entries in Network Manager, and you would just choose whichever one you wanted for that. That sounds really cool. Really cool.

It is nice. Yeah, I thought they – I mean, who knows? Maybe it's an MI6 operation for all I know. But I thought I liked the way they set it up and I thought it was worth checking out. But, you know, I think really one of the things that I always consider whenever I'm thinking about self-hosting versus going with somebody who's obviously an expert and passionate about it is how well do I know the subject? How prepared am I to maintain a box? It's infrastructure. It's security.

All of that. All of the responsibilities that come with that. And I think that's something that probably Linux Academy could help with. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go learn the essentials and the advanced topics around Linux. So that way, when you implement systems like this, you do it correctly. And it's funny, too, because it's really the small, small stuff. It's the little things that add up. And really really the key to good security is having as many of your I's dotted and your T's crossed and really understanding what you're working with, understanding the best practices. See, that's it right there. Like you really can't – like as two people who have like taught themselves a lot of things, like you can learn how to do things, right? But it's hard to trade that experience with someone who's like I do this day in, day out, every day, and I need systems to be secure. And they can just

show you the little mistakes that you're making, the things you haven't thought of. Honestly, I had a very private humble pie moment in my career because I got so far into my career being self-taught. And then I started playing the corporate game of wanting to get good reviews and promotions and started going to get training. And, of course, there was training budgets and we're using this training budget. We make this training budget available. OK, I'll go spend your money. And so I went to school and I went and took a course by a man named Grant Williams at Edmonds Community College.

Shout out to Grant who sometimes listens. And learned that there was lots of little tiny things that I never really – I just blew right past. I just – you know. You haven't touched it. There's so much. Yeah. It's not that I was dumb. It's not that I couldn't figure it out or look it up.

It's that I never really was presented with a particular need. And so therefore, I never quite got that aspect of it. And so going through and doing the things that you had to do in a class really sort of opened up my eyes and showed me that, okay, there was a couple of things I've missed by being self-taught, and now I can add these tools to my tool set. That was extremely valuable. And it's genuinely like that for just about every damn topic, if you think about it. And Linux Academy covers them all, from AWS to the entire Linux stack, OpenStack, even Azure and DevOps, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go check them out, get our discount, and support the show by visiting that URL, interact with a community Stack, even Azure and DevOps, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go check them out. Get our discount and support the show by visiting that URL.

Interact with a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members and take advantage of instructor mentoring whenever you need it. And why not go browse that brand new website? Even if you're not ready to sign up, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go visit that and check out the new site. Thanks, Linux Academy. All right. So I don't want to go too far in this without bringing in the mumble room, because this is sort of the segment I wanted to give them a chance to shine.

However, I've got to ask you. I don't think I actually know the answer to this question, either. I was just trying to think if I knew what you were going to say. Do you today use the Linux desktop for idealistic reasons or for purely pragmatic practical reasons.

Today, it is that different than when you first tried Linux. I think I've kind of come full circle. You know, I grew up kind of playing with Windows. I remember trying to change the, like, Windows boot screen and breaking the family computer for a while, that kind of thing. And you quickly figure out, like, what you can and what you cannot change with Windows. And so Linux started out as just this, like, wonderful playground. And, like, I knew what open source was. I thought it was cool because I kind of, like, started trying to program.

But it didn't mean a lot. I couldn't really use it to do any, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, I could do a lot. And I loved all this software. But it was like, this is just fun. and let me like really deep dive and i think somewhere in the middle there i really stuck around because i mean at some point i started going to school and like well i mean linux was very important for that you know you can write a paper on just about any operating system so i think it really the the idle ideology it really

did it really did sink in. And it made me want to try more distributions. It made me want to try to, you know, you can play with FreeBSD or something else, look at a little different ideology. But I think today, I don't think there's another platform where I could get what I need to get done. Like, there's definitely both parts. Like, both parts are very important. I think the ideology is, it's important. I parts are very important. I think the ideology is important. I think freedom is important.

I think open source is important. But it's also just I need an operating system that is malleable and where I can change things. And the ideology definitely informs that. But someday, as long as it is free, I think I can make it work. Okay. All right. So let's bounce to the mumble room and then I'll give you my thoughts. So BC, I'll let you go first.

Do you use it today for idealistic or practical reasons? And is that how you started using Linux? Yeah. The first time I installed Linux, it was like 15 years ago. Yes. Coming directly from Windows, I started. Just wanted to

check out what exactly it is. Right now, as I use Linux full-time, I'm just much more productive with it. However, it's not just productive because I try to use as little closed software as possible. So in reality, both. See, it is an interesting thing there, too, because you can kind of reach a limit where you're like,

well, I want to be free, and then sometimes you hit that area where you're like, well, my operating system is free, but this application is proprietary and I need it. Yeah, I use Windows for some things. For example, game development, I use KVM GPU pass-through, unfortunately. Yeah, okay, All right. Good. And it sounds kind of like sort of a similar situation. Uber Panda, I want to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, so I started using Linux because of battery life reasons. My laptop on Windows lasted like one hour, and I just started using Arch Linux, and it lasted for two and a half hours. So I used that. And then I understood what was free software, that kind of thing, so it became an ideology, and now I think free software is good,

and Windows is also a terrible operating system, so I use Linux for both reasons. Yeah, interesting. I love it. I think that actually makes a lot of sense. Now, okay, Mr. Heaven, so it sounds like you've been around the block a couple of times, including over in the FreeBSD camp, and then ended up back on Linux. So is that for

idealism, or is that because it just made more sense, practically speaking? Well, the reason why I went, or at least, let's say during my first bit of open source adventures, of course I like the technical things. So I went on to a, you know, adventure in benchmarking a whole bunch of file systems. I found XFS while I was on Linux, and I loved it. Thing is, my philosophy is closer to the BSD philosophy versus the Linux one. So I actually

went over to DesktopBSD and whatever that other one was, and FreeBSD, and I went there for a while. The thing is, their XFS port wasn't up to date enough. So even though I love FreeSB's philosophy of true freedom, it allows you to keep secrets if you want. Linux pretty much prevents you from keeping secrets regardless if you want to or not, other than the LGPL. So I went back to Linux because of XFS, because all of my storage was XFS. FreeBSD didn't actually provide what I needed. So that's a practical reason there. Yeah, that is actually a practical reason, even though it's slightly philosophical as well.

Oh, man, that's so interesting. All right, MiniMC, your practical or idealism for your initial adoption of Linux and where you're at today? So I wanted to know something new. I started with Linux 6.1. I just wanted to know something new i started with linux 6.1 i just wanted to see something new and all missing stuff was really hard to replace and then from time to time it became a feature so now linux changed my whole workflow so it stripped me down to the basics and i'm much faster much clearer in my workflow than I was before, I guess. Interesting. Yeah, I know.

What's been interesting for me just on the workflow part is I've had the opportunity now of moving a couple of different types of workflows onto Linux. It started just moving like desktop, Microsoft workflow, like Office and Outlook, getting that running on Linux

and doing interacting with Windows file shares. And that workflow was a major workflow. And it took me a while. I mean it took me a while to make that more efficient under Linux to be able to justify running Microsoft applications under Linux. But I got there. I eventually got there. And then I moved – I went as a consultant. I had to move that workflow onto Linux when I did IT consulting for a while.

And then just here at Jupyter Broadcasting, there have been so many workflows that are sort of – they start with the Mac and then I was like, I have to move this to Linux. And definitely one of the biggest ones for me was my unfilter clip editing and workflow. Oh, really? Because that just – it started out as such a Mac-centric couple of tools that I just hated using and it just was a mess. And moving that over to Linux and finding that to be – and being able to then use all of my traditional Linux skills on the command line and being able to take advantage of things like Guake and being able to take advantage of things like AvidMux and being

able to install codecs by just a command away. It made it very practical in that case to move that workflow over there. So that workflow element and just because I have a better workflow sometimes is enough of a reason. And more options in how you make that workflow, right? So, Rotten, I wanted to hear your practical or idealism. practical or idealism? Well, I started as a practicality thing because I was a beta tester for Windows 7 for about a year before it was released.

And when it came to the point where they were about to release it, they said all beta testers now had to pay for it. And it wasn't like you had a certain amount of time to pay for it. They stopped your Windows 7 from working. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah yeah that's

right yeah so it was completely like just stripped away from me and they gave me i think like a week ahead of time you're going to lose the access to to run the system that you've been working for free to fix bugs and and you know find problems that we've we've obviously have not finished fixing yet wow and uh then it to the point where i was just like you know what out problems that we've obviously have not finished fixing yet. Wow. And then to the point where I was just like, you know what? Out of spite, screw it. And I was already dual booting at the time, but then I just kind of like just wiped it and went to the Linux way and been there the whole time.

And now it's become both. I didn't really know what the ideology was at the time. Exactly. Right, yeah. It's hard to pick up on it first. So now it's more like the ideology made me stay and the practicality made me come over. That's a good way to put it. Landrash, I wanted to hear your ideology versus practicality, where you started and where you ended up.

Probably started in school with – well, using it when I needed to for courses and stuff. Going over to Practicality when I got used to it and basically getting the only way I could do things was with Linux because I needed the tools. I had the tools I needed there. I'm going to Windows for like shooting myself in the foot and doing it 10 times slower. I think we've all been there. He's finding that school's pretty cool. Okay, Mr. Ranger, how about yourself? I'm another one that I started out practical because back in the late 90s, early 2000s,

worked at a computer shop where we needed easy internet sharing and IP chains was where it was at. Similar to your banking story, we had a point of sale system that was crashy and the networking on it was horrible. And oddly enough, the perfect solution was to run it in DOSBox. Wow. And even to this day, just a few months ago, was an officiant at my sister's wedding and I needed some random government form. And I was trying to figure out how to modify this the way that I needed, and Scribus was one command line install away. So I'd say practically Linux is so easy to get software for and so easy to find software that does whatever task you need that day.

So for me, way practical. Cool. I think that's an interesting thread, like in what Swift 110 here is commenting. It's interesting how, I mean, practical is so different. There's a lot of enterprise cases or if you're a creative type where it's less practical because the tools you need are proprietary and expensive. But there's a lot of other cases where the ideology of freely available makes for these, if you're underprivileged, if you're out of budget for the quarter

and you really have a problem that you want to get solved, free software is there for you. Yeah, yeah, it really is. I'm going to touch on that one. I'll share mine here at the end, but I'm glad W.W. wants to share his. So go ahead, W.W., what's yours? So I started back in Red Hat 5.1 in 96, 97.

Yeah. We didn't have, I didn't have LUNX back then. I lived in the desert, so I was lucky enough to have friends that were into Linux and into ham radios. And you can walk into a software, et cetera, and buy mandrake linux or whatever or if you were lucky enough you can have an independent isp and order linux online and get it and so i think i should have been on it longer i should have been on it before since windows 3.1 because i always like to get dig into the system and figure out how it's running and what it's doing and how to change it or how to move it around. So for me, practically, it's been something that I've

been striving to be more on, even though I've been someone that dual boots and still uses Windows for what I really need to do. It's ultimately where I hope I end up is more on Linux. And I'm not sure about the ideological side. I like to be more pragmatic. So for me, it's more of a practical reason to be on Linux. And that makes more sense in the long term than being stuck on a closed system that you will never be able to open and openly use a way you believe it should be used.

So long term for me, I think it's going to be practical, but maybe once I get a chance to read more into the ideological stuff, it will be both. But for me right now, it's more of a practical reason. You know, I think what I'm really picking up, and it echoes mine, is sometimes you come at it from what feels like a very practical reason, and then you get there and you discover the philosophy. So I'll tell you, you know, mine really started as a need to solve a limitation of Windows. Windows just simply, at the time, Windows NT44 was not good enough for the job I needed it to do. And so I had to find another solution. It started very practical. I think particularly for

me, if you watch the back catalog of the Linux Action Show with this in mind, you can see where I switch from a pragmatist to more of an idealist. And now I'm on Linux simply because I can't stand to use any other platform. I couldn't imagine having to use Windows as my daily driver. I don't know what I would do. So you could claim that's practical, but I think really I'm here now for the idealism. And I'll tell you, for me, it took a while for it to sink in, mostly because there were so many problems I needed to solve, and it didn't really hit me until I started thinking about it in the way that

affected my own bottom line. And then it clicked. And it was really in the sense of my clients kept getting screwed over by companies like Microsoft and many other proprietary companies that would just extort them for support contracts that were unbelievable and that would change and drop features at a moment's notice and completely leave them off on this old version that was no longer supported for a decade because the next version up completely uplifted their workflow. And what I discovered over time, both in a sense of software and hardware and in contracts, is that vendor lock-in can be paralyzing for a company sometimes. And so that was in which the lens that I first looked at the advantages that a core open source infrastructure gives you.

The kind of visibility into the long-term viability or even the emergency eject lever of forking and maintaining it by hiring your own developer. It's a really interesting business case. You get a lot of freedom there. It's huge because I can tell you, you can deploy your infrastructure on this. And worst case scenario, if they stop making this thing, you can go hire a developer and that developer can continue the thing because all of the code is completely free and open source.

And for an enterprise, that's not a crazy proposition. They already have developers or they can hire one. Yes, and if it's a core piece of their business that makes them money, they like having that flexibility. And so it's with that perspective that looking at open source, the way that it would solve that problem that I realized, oh, shit, this is the killer feature. It's not the great package management. It's not the stability. It's not the security.

It's not the transparency. It's not all of the incredible minds and diverse opinions that are contributing to this. It's this fundamental open license, this GPL that is the actual killer feature of this platform. this GPL that is the actual killer feature of this platform. And it took me a while to get there, but now it is based upon that, which I look at everything else.

You can't have a practical Linux desktop experience without that GPL, without that idealism that led to the GPL and the GNU stack. You can't have the full practical Linux desktop, which is a sensible reason that we're all using it. It wouldn't exist without that. And so once I sort of made that sort of transition, that revelation, I realized, oh, I'm actually

an idealist. And when I make decisions based on that, in the long run, those always tend to be the ones that pay out. And when I make a decision that's not oriented towards that, it tends to screw me eventually. And that has bared out in my personal life through stuff I just use myself. And it's bared out in my professional life with my clients and whatnot. And I'm very, very, very, very, very proud of the fact that I can go back to almost any of my clients and any of the Linux and open source solutions that I implemented are still

maintainable and supportable today. That's awesome. And I cannot – Priority solutions don't work that way. Cannot do that. It's literally not possible because aging them out is part of the process and locking you into their support path because that's where they make all of their money in the enterprise is part of the process. And so it took that kind of – that particular doorway in which I saw it. Then it really sort of lit up for me.

But it was very pragmatic. It's funny how linked these two are. I feel like a lot of people – that pragmatism, especially if you're – I feel like networking is a huge part. We're like, I want my internet gateway. And I feel like it actually – that's a more solid foundation because if you're just in it for the idealism, then the idealism is going to last you as long until you want to watch something on Netflix or you're going to watch a TV show. I mean where do you draw the line at that point? Do you abandon all proprietary lockdown media all together? Because that's kind of pretty hard.

And maybe you do. And maybe that works for you. But to me, it seems like that eventually, after a certain amount of time, unless you're freaking Richard Stallman himself, you're going to give. That dam eventually is going to break. And then what do you have if all you have is the idealism? If there's not the pragmatic thing you're also grounded with, I feel like it's not quite as strong as a grip. If you can't get anything done, then what's the point?

Yeah. So it's a fascinating topic and it popped up a couple of times on Reddit in the last couple of days. And so we thought we'd ask it here in the show. And I'd like to hear your stories too, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Oh, please go. That's a great forum. Yeah and episode 154 will have a feedback thread in there or you can always join us and chat with us

in our mumble room. Just go over to jblive.tv and once you get in the embedded chat room or irc.geekshed.net do bang mumble I know I'm all speaking mumbo jumbo to some of you. Do bang mumble and then you'll get the server information. If you don't know what that means, then just ask in the friendly IRC.

Yeah, if you don't know what that means, well, keep watching this show. Yes, that's true. You still have some homework to do. Also, thank you to our patrons over at patreon.com slash today. Not only do you help us stay independent and support the whole network, but you're also getting exclusive live posts of the shows, the whole live stream, absolutely everything, even the stuff that didn't make it into the unplugged release. I know. I know. So watch out, Wes. Watch out.

Patreon.com slash today. Thanks, everybody who supports us there. Jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar is where you go to find out when this show is going to be live. Get it converted to your local time zone. We do have that virtual lug you can hang out in and join us. And jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact is where you go to give us emails. Send them in through there. We have robots that deliver them to the correct inbox.

Or even better, tweet us. I'm at ChrisLAS. What about you? I'm at Wes Payne. Oh, check that out. How about that? All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Unplugged program.

And we'll see you right back here next week. Thank you. Well, there we go. Now, that was a lot of show. But we've been having some long ones recently. Some long ones. I know. What's going on with your screen over there? Oh, there's just a smudge on it. Oh, I thought maybe you spilled some beer during the show.

Because we've been haunted by that before. JebbyTitles.com. Thank you, Mamoru. You guys are great. We had such good participation in that last segment. Thank you, guys. That was awesome. I had to write the names down so I could keep note of who had pinged me in the chat room with Mom. I just wrote them all down and went through them one by one.

So thank you, guys. We need some sort of software for that. We do. Jebby titles. Just a note. You can call me Mini Mac, like Mexico. Mini Mac. Oh, or like a mini.

So mini Mac, like the Mac mini? No, not like the Mac mini. Like mini Mac. It's French, like little guy. Like a Mac? Like a Mac warrior? Like a Mac. It's French, like little guy. Like a Mac? Like a Mac warrior? Like a Mac warrior or Mexico, like mini Mac. Or a McDonald's sandwich, mini Mac.

Okay, I got it. I don't like McDonald's. Surprise, surprise. So yes, like McDonald's. Idealistic Linux desktop, practical VPN package, sharing Ideas and Practices Linux Pragmatic Idealism. That's interesting. Jaby Titles. Jaby Titles.

Now you all got to go both. Bang suggest. Or else you'll be eliminated. What? I didn't. Nothing. No. Did you say?

Just have the pill. Don't worry about the color of the pill. Just enjoy it. It's just a sugar pill. Trust me. We bought it for you. Yes, I know it burns. Just swallow.

All right. Man, Unfiltered is going to be so packed tomorrow. It's I know it burns. Just swallow. Alright. Man, Unfiltered's gonna be so packed tomorrow. It's gonna be crazy. Yeah, it really is. It really is. Matt and I have been working on it every single day. So,

I'm not kidding you. Not exaggerating. I got off the air. I didn't even finish putting the show tags in. We didn't pump the episode. I didn't even finish putting the show tags in. We didn't the episode wasn't even finished editing and I was already collecting clips for the next episode. I don't think I was off air for 15 minutes

from last week's Unfilter before I started working on tomorrow's Unfilter. This show is out of control. It's nuts. It's nuts. I'm going to have to just go big picture on something. It's just so much to cover that it would be a three-hour show.

I don't know. Right. At some point, you're going to have to pick and choose. You do. And then that's sort of dark in some ways because some of the stuff I have to choose not to talk about, I don't know. Right. And you're not saying it's not important. Yeah.

J.B. Tuttles. J.B. Tuttles. J.B. Tuttles. The king. There we go. Boot. So here's what's floating up. Linux pragmatic idealism. Oh, snap. Where's Wimpy and Poby? That's clever. So here's what's floating up.

Linux pragmatic idealism. Oh, snap. Where's Wimpy and Poby? That's clever. Idealistic Linux desktop. Rotten's rotten past. Practical VPN package. Sharing ideas and practices.

I do like Linux pragmatic idealism. Whoa, that was a good one. I'm surprised that's my first one. I know. This has been super buzzy. It's so bubbly. Bubbly beer. I'm really surprised. The VPN of things.

That's cute, WW. But you know what I'm talking about when I say, like, I think this is what's going to push Snap packages over the edge is app image and flat packs and what's the other one? The other one, like app image. There's orbitals. Then what's the other one? There's one more. Oh, yeah.

I'm blanking. Yeah, Ben, that Jon Stewart skit on Stephen Colbert skit, have you seen that? Mm-hmm. That was crazy. That was... Amazing. That was so funny.

I literally was laughing. I don't do that at the TV. I was cackling laughing out loud at the spit tank stuff like that. And what's so great is what amazes me that it managed to be funny when there was like a 30 second built like you know it's coming. You know it's coming. And it still happens.

And you still laugh. And it's those two together are just they have the timing. They've inherently mapped each other's timing so well. It's just wow man. I feel like one weird person. timing so well. It's just, wow, man. You're like one weird person. JB titles, JB titles, JB titles. So should we go with Linux pragmatic idealism?

Should we do that? I mean, people seem to like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I'm looking forward to Sunday's. Should it be Linux? Should it be possessive? No?

Linux is pragmatic idealism. Hmm. There's also just pragmatic idealism somewhere down there. Well, that's not bad. Yeah, I took in that one, but WWNSX beat me to it. But yeah, Linux Unplugged is already Linux in the title. Right. Yeah.

Linux Unplugged. So you could just go with pragmatic idealism. I like the way you guys think. Linux community snaps together. Oh boy. Long but cute. More simplified. So where's the shorter one?

Where's that at? It's North Ranger. Pragmatic Idealism by North Ranger. Yep. All right. So yeah, it's already got five boats by the time I got to it. Yeah. Stephen Colbert coming out as Colbert.

Right. You knew they were going to have to eventually do that. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just too good. Yeah. It's great. It's great. They even have an opening dance number and stuff into the show.

It was insane. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good for him. He technically gave up on the pronunciation of his name because originally it was colbert versus colbert right character in himself right he's like nah screw it it's colbert everywhere yeah that's fine i think it's been interesting to watch him sort of ease into just let like when he first started doing the the night the tonight show what's it

called it's not called the anyways the late show When he first started doing The Late Show, I think he was very awkwardly trying to totally not be that character. And now, as he's been doing it for a while and the elections are here, he's letting more of that old character in. And it does seem to be playing well to the audience. Because I think there's like – you can have a little of that and still be a different show. Yeah. Yeah. And plus, it's – when you're on CBS versus Comedy Central, it's a totally different...

I mean, I think you could reuse a lot of that stuff. And it's such a huge newer audience that I wouldn't blame them. All right. So we're going to go with... So I'm going to refresh the bolts here. Let's see. Pragmatic idealism is almost number one now. So I think that's rocking way up there. So we'll go with that. We'll go with, so I'm going to refresh the bolts here. Let's see. Pragmatic idealism is almost number one now. So I think that's rocking way up there.

So we'll go with that. We'll go with it. All right. Thank you, Mr. Ranger. Thank you. And WW. Yeah. Yeah.

Tip my hat to him. All right, gentlemen. Really, thank you, everyone. Oh, you guys. You know what else? Thanks to the audience. Oh, my. That audience.

Thanks, audience. Oh, my gosh. All right. Let's get out of here before we start.