LINUX Unplugged - Episode 161: A Real Pain in the Flash | LUP 161
Episode Date: September 7, 2016Wayland by default may finally be nigh & we share what we’re looking forward to the most about a Wayland powered desktop.The ext4 bug that bit Wimpy, Adobe Flash comes crawling back to Linux & our q...uick review of a well put together Plasma Desktop distro.
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How much of your Bitcoin stash have you still got left, Chris, or have you exhausted it yet?
I haven't exhausted it yet, but I am starting to get more picky about how I spend it.
Yeah, I've depleted mine by about eight and change Bitcoin this last week.
Oh, what did you? Oh, really?
And I've been watching the price.
In fact, at this very moment, it's at $612.81 US.
Not that I'm following.
Not that you have multiple tickers on your desktop.
But why would you want to share the class what the transaction was?
Because that sounds like a big chunk of Bitcoin.
I mean, I've got to look that up.
But let's see.
Eight Bitcoin.
Can Google do this?
Eight Bitcoin in USD?
Is that something?
It's about grand. Yeah. It doesn't 8 Bitcoin in USD? 5 grand.
It doesn't do it when you type it in, but
I wonder if I could ask Google.
8BTC is USD. Basically 5 grand.
Yeah. Just about.
Wow.
Hmm.
That's some buying power right there.
That is.
I have been tempted to cash mine in for a very large
laptop recently. I've been thinking more about mine in for a very large laptop recently.
I've been thinking more about doing production on the road.
Oh, that'd be cool.
Yeah.
How much is that, Acer 21?
Just curious.
I don't know what the price is.
I don't know if they even have a price yet.
It's probably not out yet.
They probably don't have an announced MSRP.
So was it a laptop, Wimpy?
Two laptops.
Oh.
Wow, you were all of a sudden in the hardware. in the hardware yeah yeah so i uh i haven't had much hardware for a long time and then this year um has been a blowout year for
for new hardware yeah sort of a restocking year i've been selling stuff as i've been going along
oh good yeah uh yeah i've got the um i haven't got it yet which it should arrive tomorrow hopefully um the uh
the top of the line dell xps 15 oh that sounds nice yeah and also the dell xps 13 developer
edition are those both sky lake or both sky lake yeah that'll be interesting. Are these going to be development machines?
Yes, yes. One for mobile stuff and one for around the house sort of dev work
and to and from family and stuff like that.
But I really wanted something with 4K screens and touch to uh to experiment with so
so yeah so and thunderbolt accessories as well so that'll be interesting were you able to take
advantage of dell direct using bitcoin um no i went through um some local companies that are part
of the dell outletlook program. Interesting.
That'll be really cool. It'd be great to hear your thoughts on them.
I know for me, one of the reasons I pulled the trigger
on the XPS 13 was that high
DPI display because that was a game changer
for how I do my reviews.
I was like, wow, I think I waited
too long even.
Maybe, I don't know, it kind of depends. Linux
is also kind of dragging its feet
so you you got yours last year is that right yeah yeah okay i couldn't remember if it was last year
all the years blend into one now um and you got a windowsy version that you adapted with the
adapted as a polite word yeah i pulled out the wireless and i put an intel card in and then i installed linux yeah it's it's interesting actually reading reading because um um there's been lots of
firmware updates for these devices which you sort of have to apply and some of them you can only
apply through windows so bust out the trial versions of windows 10 in order to update all
the drivers that's obnoxious and
firmware yeah i know um the bios you can do but it's like the thunderbolt firmware and touchscreen
firmware you can't do outside of windows um but it's interesting how many people that are running
windows actually say swap out the broadcom for an intel adapter because it works better yeah that
was much simpler when i did that yeah yeah, but it's not for compatibility with drivers.
It's just the Intel stuff works better than the Broadcom stuff,
or at least it did then when it was sort of new.
I think it's all been resolved now,
but it's interesting to see some of the parallels
between the two communities.
Yeah, it's funny because I really, really like my XPS 13 as far as size and portability goes.
But, man, now having worked on some desktops, some newer refreshed desktops again, I really feel like there is some serious advantage to a large machine.
I could maybe have a much more portable workload where I could do more work.
You're usually less limited by things.
You don't have to think about it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You're a man who likes to have a much more portable workload where I could do more work. You're usually less limited by things. You don't have to think about it.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
You're a man who likes to have a lot going on at once.
Yeah, and so to buy that laptop in Bitcoin, did you have to convert it first or were you able – how did that –
So I'm wondering if you were able to avoid like Brexit-induced economic depression-like type conditions.
Oh, good question i i can't tell
you how how valueless our currency is and that's why bitcoin could look even more attractive at
this moment yeah so um for both transactions i was able to keep it purely through bitcoin which
was a key part in actually being able to do it yeah yeah i wonder um for anyone for anyone listening in
this part of the world specifically in the uk and you're interested in bitcoin and you need
an exchange that is reliable and works uh there is an exchange called coin corner and uh you can
move your money in and out of a bitcoin wallet no problem whatsoever and cash out no issues paying it's
really really simple works very well so they're uh semi-offshore they're in the isle of man which
is sort of a tax haven uh and independently governed so a good place to put your bitcoin
this is linux unplugged episode 161 for September 6th, 2016.
Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's not all that interested
in tomorrow's Apple event.
My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
Hello, Wes.
I'm glad you're here today because apparently Linux doesn't take Labor Day off.
Nope.
We have a lot to cover.
In fact, the show this week is packed full of updates from some of our favorite open source projects all over the net,
including a little suspense, including a little distro review.
Oh, and even some Wayland love.
It is a classic episode of the Unplugged program.
So super excited to be here.
We're back from Labor Day.
You didn't miss a beat, Wes.
You were on top of it with tons of links this week.
So we're going to go through all of those.
So brace yourselves mentally, and let's bring in that mumble room.
Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug.
Hey, dudes.
Hey, dudes.
Hello.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hey-o.
Hello, guys.
So Wes is over here rapidly tap, tap, typing away on his computer, where he has once again
trying out another distro for us to discuss here on the Unplugged Show.
So that'll be coming up in a little bit.
I'll give you a hint.
It might be the best KDE desktop ever.
It just might.
But you have to stay tuned.
Yeah, it might not.
It might not.
You never really know.
But why don't we start out, since I just hinted with a little KDE news, or a little KDE review,
how about we start with a little KDE news.
Speaking of Wayland, speaking of KDE, I just threw them all together in a sandwich, and that is
our first update this
week. The KDE Neon developers
are switching to
Wayland by default.
Ooh. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, get ready for this. Now, you
guys remember Neon. That's the more cutting-edge
version of the KDE desktop that sits
atop of Ubuntu.
Now they're going to start moving
forward for their developer unstable packages to use Wayland by default.
Now, there's going to be some conditions here.
There still has to be some work done on X, X Wayland.
Plasma 5.8 is required.
There's some other upstream updates that have to be made.
And also, if you're on NVIDIA, you're still going to be using X.
It's going to default you back to X.
But the Wayland is getting nice.
So we have this story here from KDE Neon Project.
And then here's another story.
Fedora 25's technical advisory board for Fedora has given the thumbs up for Fedora 25 to ship Wayland by default if they want.
Wow.
Now, the developers could still choose not to just like they did for 24 because they got the same approval for Fedora 24, and they decided to punt it.
But it's been given the go by the FSEO, as we all like to call it around here, which
stands for Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee, I guess.
Well, of course.
Yeah, obviously.
So they gave it the green light.
They say they agree to go with Wayland by default, and they'll make it clear how to
switch back to X11 in the release notes if needed.
That was part of their requirements by the technical board.
Fedora 25 will be using GNOME 3.22 by default, and it's currently scheduled to ship on November 8th, assuming there were no delays.
There will be no delays.
There's never delays.
Never delays.
So let's take a moment, Wes, and envision a future where Fedora 25 actually ships with Wayland.
Let's just pretend like this actually happens.
All of the major, major, major issues are fixed.
What's the first benefit you're looking forward to?
When you can boot up one day and Wayland is by default turned on, ready to go,
you're no longer using X, what that day changes?
I'm going to be able to show a YouTube video to one of my coworkers
without being embarrassed by the screen tearing.
Yes.
That's it for me.
Yeah, in fact, one of Wayland's taglines has always been,
every frame is perfect.
Right.
That would be huge.
Yeah, the frame tearing thing.
If I'm using MPV or something else
where it knows what it's doing,
I don't really have that big day-to-day
watching problems, but there's just always those videos
or it's coming from an old Flash client or something.
It's just, my computer's powerful
enough. I have the GPU for it. It just looks like crap.
Yeah, that was going to be my pick, too. Does anybody else
in the Mumble room have a big, like,
this is why I'm waiting for Weyland?
Because you've got to ask yourself, what's
all the excitement about? It's going to be a huge change.
Things are going to undoubtedly break.
Is there something
on the other end of this transition that you're looking forward
to? For me, it's definitely the screen tearing thing.
I wonder if anybody else in the mumble has any. Go ahead
and jump in. I was just reading there's a
thread on the Fedora
subreddit that talks about it. They also,
you know, this is a good one too. Multiple
monitors with different DPI, so you
can have a high DPI monitor and a low DPI
monitor and have a multi-monitor setup.
That'd be slick. It's kind of
embarrassing actually on Linux. If you have
a high DPI laptop with
an internal screen that's high DPI and you hook up
an external monitor, the external monitor
is at a much lower resolution than you would like.
It's really kind of a –
You know what's even more embarrassing?
What?
Microsoft Office failed to do high DPI on a single monitor on Windows.
That's embarrassing.
Well, yeah.
I mean, yeah, the Windows platform is not –
There's no excuse for that on Microsoft's part.
Office should work perfectly on Windows with high DPI.
Yeah, that is.
But yeah.
All right.
Besides OS X, everyone has their problems there, I think.
Guys, I got to crack one open before we get into this next story because this is not the headline I expected to ever read on this show.
Adobe is updating the Flash player using the Netscape plug-in API.
What?
For Linux.
New version of Flash is coming, everybody.
Why?
Well, and I was trying to think about this.
Why?
Why would they do this?
William, do you have any guesses why Adobe would do this?
I mean, besides Firefox support, I don't know.
Does Firefox have any workaround for
dealing with that if they didn't do NPAPI?
Well, I guess Firefox
could probably adopt
the PPAPI if they wanted to.
And what about
Chrome and Chromium?
Well, Chrome and Chromium are using the PPAPI already.
So is Opera.
So here's a couple other things
that are just noteworthy. This is a really odd, like, understated – they don't make a big deal about the fact that they're totally reversing the position that they made in 2012.
This is really odd.
But one of the things they do mention is because this change is primarily a security initiative, some features like GPU 3D acceleration and premium video DRM
will not be fully implemented.
Hmm.
I wonder what their angle
is. What's the pressure for this?
There has to be some sort
of contract or some sort of
agreement. I mean, so one of the things that Adobe had done
is they said they were going to stop updating
in 2017
for security purposes.
Maybe this is just an easier way to do security updates possibly because that's what they're focusing on.
But I almost wonder if there was some sort of vendor product that shipped using Linux
and there was a contract in place.
Oh, maybe.
And Adobe's like, well, if we have to do this work anyways, might as well ship it.
Because I don't think Mozilla has any interest in keeping it around.
It's got to be someone else using it.
This is what grinds my gears, though.
If these bastards at Adobe were going to spend all of this time and all of this back and forth
and all of this rigmarole on getting Flash on Linux and supporting an old Netscape plugin API
and backporting features from their Windows and Mac version into the Linux version to make it stable and secure again, which can't be a small task.
Why is this what they choose to spend their time and resources on?
Why aren't they doing Photoshop or Premiere ports or After Effects?
Like, spend your time and energy there, you jerks.
Not on the Flash thing.
Let Flash die.
Maybe it was easy enough.
It was just, oh, all right, we'll kick the cron back on,
and they'll build that for them and upload it to their web server.
So, yeah, that was a story that caught my attention this week,
and I was just, you know, facepalm.
Well, I'm glad in some respects.
I'm glad we're getting security updates for Flash.
I mean, it is better to have them to have not.
I just hope it doesn't, like, grant some legitimacy to people still using Flash
or not without a migration plan.
Oh, I think it does, yeah.
I think it does. And. I think it does.
And I think part of that is because the industry hasn't fully replaced the functionality that
Flash offers.
Still feels like one or two years away.
Mm-hmm.
That's just crazy.
You know what else is an interesting little read that I think you caught?
This is from somebody named Carl, and he's a software engineer, and he likes to be considered
an aspiring artist.
Oh.
And he ran into a little extended for bug that I thought I'd just share with the class because it's particularly interesting.
He said, after buying and setting up a shiny new 4 terabyte hard drive, I began filling
it slowly with files from various old hard drives I have.
We've all done this.
Yep.
Been there.
I have, he says, and so I went through it.
I found like an old website I had when I worked in high school and decided, why the heck not?
Why with so much space should I not just keep track of all of this?
It's going to be easy.
So I started copying the files over, and I started getting the strange no space left
on device there.
He says, hmm, this is odd.
I have this huge hard drive, and I'm just trying to move over an 18 gigabyte website
directory.
He says, as it turns out, I ran into a bug with extended four that causes it to fail
if there are more than 32,000 files in a directory.
extended for that causes it to fail if there are more than 32,000 files in a directory.
So he goes on to say, by the way, really what you should probably do is do a little bit better file management and not have so many files in the root of a directory.
But I guess that, you know, I toss that in there mostly as a PSA because it's probably
not something most of us think about.
But I think the real lesson here was do better file organization.
Plan to have your files stored in a hierarchy from the get-go.
Don't have flat folders with file explorers that just, when you open it up, they just
totally die because they can't read all the files.
William, do you have a sense of what this particular bug is?
Oh, it's kind of a built-in limit.
I don't think it's really a bug he just hit a fundamental limit
of ext4 no it just has a limit of storing 32 000 entries in the inode wimpy you had experience
with this it's it's not a limit it's a bug so really yeah so i i got hit by precisely this
issue about four or six weeks ago at work and we figured out the problem
and fixed it so very quickly in the transition from x3 to x4 yeah a new um hashing algorithm
was added to hash all of the files in a directory in order to accelerate the lookups. And theoretically, that hash should be good
for a massive number of files in a directory.
But in reality, there's a limitation in the implementation.
It is a bug that means you start to get hash collisions
after about 50,000 files,
or you can start to get hash collisions after about 50,000 files, or you can start to get hash collisions after
about 50,000 files. And we were backing up a large directory, a single directory that was full
of files, millions of files. And the issue was, is that the actual server was running X3,
the backup server was running X4, and our backups were failing because we were running into this hash collision.
And if you look into the kernel messages,
it says DIR index out of range or full or something like that.
So our solution was to change the backup server from X4 to XFS
and all of our problems went away.
Look at that
one of the favorite file systems here on the show everybody thinks that we're on the zfs payroll
i've been accused of uh yeah being but if anything it'd be the xfs camp which who even who even is
the main it was sgi back in the day right wasn't it thought so yeah so. I think it still is SGI engineers.
It still is SGI, yeah.
Well, thank you for that.
Red Hat ships this by default, right?
Yeah, I think so.
What, extended for?
I have the full, you know, I will put the full link to the post in the show notes.
Between a rock and a crazy place it says wimpy while we have uh your ear um i wanted to do a follow-up from our discussion last week about installing ubuntu touch on the
meizu pro 5 because you came across like a pretty solid piece of um instruction like it's a pdf that
kind of has everything you need yeah a couple of guys in the ubuntu community have basically
pulled together all of the information that I sort of read.
They've pulled it together into one PDF document with links to all of the files and utilities that you need.
So you can start at step one and work your way through.
And at the end of it, you have Ubuntu running on a Meizu Pro 5.
So it's a PDF and I've got it linked in the show notes.
How has your experience been going now another week into it?
Yep, very good.
Still works, no issues discovered.
Still finding my way with, you know, the touch experience
and updating some of my own apps
and still finding new apps along the way.
So all good.
And working out what I'm going to do to sort of help improve things.
Oh, cool.
So how is the podcast playback situation?
Is podcast player Bluetooth audio, is that still rough?
Yeah.
I could use a headphone jack.
I'm not an animal.
I'm sure every Ubuntu Touch device will have headphone jacks for a long time.
Yeah, so if you use a headphone jack that's just fine and i've updated my so i say i've updated my
uh there's a guy who is maintaining a pocket casts web app i've published my own pocket casts
web app which is a little bit more updated and we'll keep, we'll not interrupt the playback of the podcasts, for example,
and things like that.
So I'm using that for local playback because I can just, you know,
resume it.
It's got, you know,
staked between all of my other Pocket Cast setups.
But I desperately need to actually write up a number of sort of feature
requests and enhancement ideas for Podbird.
Because what I'd like to do is actually move to the native Podbird player, which can play podcasts just fine.
It's if you've if you listen to a lot of podcasts, you know what the rough edges are in terms of the user interface and and and using it navigating around
and that's sort of stopping me from adopting it that and the fact that bluetooth in the car
doesn't work at all at the moment yeah disappointing but that'll come i think and uh yeah there's there's
bugs for it and i've i've added my information to the to the bug tracker on that one so there
are people that are aware of it it It seems to have a high priority.
It sounds like there's a couple of different options
for playback of podcasts.
So that's nice.
I was pretty close to trying it out on my Nexus 5.
I got the process started,
but I didn't have time to let the Ubuntu Flash tool finish going.
Oh, that would have been really cool.
So it's going to happen again
when I have a little more time dedicated to it.
That would have been really cool.
I was trying to get the multi-boot image to work,
but no luck has it yet. Ooh, that's the way to do it, too.
So that way, if you really had to, you could still go back
to Android, right? Right. See, that's like
dual booting with Windows, though.
That is risky.
I think you've used
this analogy before. It's like a recovering
alcoholic. You know, if you leave
a bottle
of beer out on the on the desk somewhere
and you can see it you'll be tempted to drink it right the first time things get really hard
i'm just rebooting for netflix that's fine yeah exactly what i was good yeah it starts with the
netflix it always does so uh yeah remove all of those temptations i've i've factory reset my
my android phone,
which is still doing pocket casts,
but it's just all it's got is pocket casts.
I haven't set up any of the other services on it.
Oh, nice. That's a good way to do it.
I kind of mean, and I've also, you know,
moved all of the two-factor authentication stuff onto the Ubuntu phone, you know,
because that's kind of, when you do that,
there's no going back.
It's like, right, this is my device now.
This is the one I'm using.
Interesting.
I'm following Wimpy.
I'm following this because, you know, I'm looking at the Nexus 6.
I'm thinking, one of these days, Android, one of these days.
Right.
Speaking of mobile, let's stop for a second and mention our sponsor this week, and that would be the folks over at Ting.
What a fitting moment to
talk about Ting, because that's exactly where I'll be taking my
Ubuntu Touch device. I do know folks that have
run Ubuntu Touch devices on Ting
for like, I think
it was a two-week period
around Ubuntu Touch, but then I actually
ended up on the Nexus 5 finding Sailfish
OS to work a little better for me.
Ting does not mind any of that.
Ting is really great. It's super simple wireless.
They have CDMA and GSM service,
which is wonderful because you can pick whichever works
better in your area. And
you can get a great discount if you go to
linux.ting.com. You support
the show. You get a discount off your
first device. Or if you have a compatible device that
works on their GSM or CDMA networks,
then you'll get $25 in service
credit. Ting just charges for what you use.
It's $6 for the line and then your usage on top of that.
They got real human beings that actually help.
They're geeks themselves and they actually help, which is sort of an amazing thing to
be able to say about a company.
They have a whole range of devices from exceptionally well-priced phones up to the really crazy
high-end expensive ones, the ones that we all drool over.
They've got great tools to manage your account.
One of the things I really like about Ting is they don't really have any agenda other than just offering you a simple wireless service.
So the way they've set it up here is you can use Ting as only a phone provider.
You could use Ting as only data.
You could never text if you use something like Telegram and never pay for text messages. Or just only
text. Maybe you love texting. Well, and
I do know a couple of people who
I've mentioned before that have the SIM cards
in little devices that are connected to their
alarm systems. Oh, yeah. And they text
them when there's movement or things like that.
And it can just be the simplest thing
and that's all they use it for. And they get, what, five
text messages a month? That is cheap.
Yeah, it's so cool.
Go to linux.ting.com to check them out.
Also, you don't even have to be a Ting customer to take advantage of some of the cool stuff on their blog.
They've been doing unboxing giveaways.
Usually it's like a matter of leave a comment on Facebook,
subscribe to the YouTube channel and leave a comment,
and you're entered to join to get a potentially free phone, which is really cool.
But they've also been covering all the different types of cord cutter problems that you might run into.
So if you're a cord cutter and you want to get sports or you want to get news or you want to get the CW shows, they've been doing a series of blog posts on that.
And that's not really specific to being a teen customer.
They're just geeks and this is the kind of stuff they're into.
And you might just want to go there to check them out and just learn more about – like in a piece down here where they talk about football,
they do a little mini review of the Sling TV service which I use to watch Food Network
and History Channel and Live News at home where we don't have any TV service.
It's pretty cool and they do a review in there and it's really applicable to anybody
that might want something like that.
So it's kind of nice to go there.
You can learn more, and before you hit their blog,
you can support the show by going to linux.ting.com
and then jump around and learn more about Ting,
try out their savings calculator, read their blog,
see how cool those people are.
linux.ting.com, and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
That's linux.ting.com to support the show.
Well, Mr. Wes, I can't believe that Adobe story.
Like that's still like rattling around in the back of my head.
I thought we were beyond this as a community.
And you know what else I thought we were beyond is this trying to get a government-approved backdoor into encryption.
And I think this is going to be a major problem if this goes forward for open source software.
This is something that we briefly touched on in the roundup in TechSnap last week.
The FBI director, James Comey, is positioning for a reopening, quote unquote, of the, quote,
encryption debate because right now it's dipped below public consciousness, he says.
And he thinks in next year
he's going to wait to
2017 because next year we
can have a quote, adult conversation
in this country about it.
He wants to install backdoor encryption
and that would, it would
be a regulatory
thing. So that would
mean if you're shipping software that uses a type of encryption in the US, in order for it to be legal here, you would have to follow these rules potentially.
And that seems like it could have huge consequences.
Go ahead.
And this has got a bit of conspiracy bake in here.
But why is Comey wanting to wait wait why not do this debate right now is there something
else that's more important than that well i think he i think he gives away his motivation when he
says next year we can have an adult conversation in other words once we're past the election year
because everything in an election year gets crazy let's have a let's have a conversation right now about it you know well i think that's what i'd be saying i think i think
the technology community is simply of the opinion this is just a bad idea for all kinds of reasons
we've been there's no such thing as just a government backdoor there's backdoors they
can be taken advantage of and it's just so frustrating because it feels like they're not listening on the other side.
You're like, well, OK.
We can have this conversation.
Have you answered our other big point that we kind of have been asking you about?
Well, I guess what I'm worried about is what we're not talking about is the impact this will have on the legality of open source software,
is the impact this will have on the legality of open source software,
the impact this will have on the adoption of open source software in companies that have government contracts
or government agencies themselves and divisions.
If all of a sudden things like Tor and, I don't know,
name a LibVault or LibreVault or a sync thing,
all of these things all of a sudden have to have back doors built into them,
well, there's going to be a huge portion of these software developers
who are going to say, no, I won't do that.
Plus, now the technical aspect of how that gets implemented,
is that going to be GPL code?
Like, how does that exactly work?
It can't be like some sort of proprietary thing that gets bolted onto these GPL projects.
So how the hell does open source exist if this ever becomes a reality?
And here's why I worry about it is because they do not let up.
Every single terrorist attack, oh, yeah, it's encryption.
Going dark, Chris.
They're using that evil telegram.
They're creating their own encrypted applications for communications, cyber caliphate, blah, blah, blah. And then there's – and then anytime there's an attack, the encryption is once again the conversations brought up.
And it does kind of worry me.
And the other thing is, is that it's not just Commie.
In fact, I think one of the reasons why James Commie is having so much luck with pushing this conversation amongst legislators and whatnot in the US is our our counterparts over the European Union have expressed similar initiatives.
Last month, the French and German interior ministers called on the EU to implement measures
forcing encrypted app manufacturers to develop backdoors for use by law enforcement officials
who would effectively make end-to-end encryption where only the sender and the recipient have
access to transmitted data illegal in Europe.
Yeah, isn't that – that seems wild.
It's happening on both ends of the pond right now.
Are they coming for my full disk encryption too?
Yeah, yes, absolutely.
That's terrifying.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
And I don't-
It does feel like open source isn't hardly considered
because it's like, yeah, well,
the government can strong arm the companies.
You can get your Microsofts and your Apples
and your Googles to do this.
But how are you going to get the LibreVault developer
who lives in Russia to do it?
Yeah, exactly.
And you can't.
I mean are you just going to have more laws that we just pretend and look the other way when you acknowledge that you're not really going to be able to stop your citizens from using it and then you just turn them into criminals?
Is open source software that doesn't have these mandated back doors become illegal?
Does it become a crime to use types of software like that for communication?
I don't know.
Where does this end?
And that's why it's kind of got me worried.
Because in particular, we are having the conversation and people like Bruce Schneier and other loud voices in this debate are coming out strongly against this concept.
But there's nobody advocating it from the open source perspective of how this could – and if you at this point damaged open source to this degree, it would probably have a negative impact on the economy.
Seems pretty crazy.
Maybe we can be those advocates in that or at least the starting forces.
I think you give us too much credit.
But damn it, we can try.
Let's go back to something that's more in our realm because, yeah, there's only so much shouting in the wind we can do on that particular issue.
But the issue has been raised.
I thought this was pretty cool.
KDE software is coming.
Oh, that's right.
It's going to be a store soon to offer downloads in snaps, flat packs, and app image formats.
Wow.
Yeah.
Dubbed the KDE Store, the new software store is exactly that. A store where application
developers can publish their own open source
projects and share them with the world.
Also known as the KDE Software Store.
The migration from the OpenDesktop.org
services to the new KDE Software Store has happened
in the background. It's been going on for a while now.
And a KDE developer blogged about the
new software store on his personal blog, revealing
the fact that users might be able to soon download
their favorite open source applications
in the new Snap and Flatpak
app image binary formats.
Which is pretty damn cool and
it's nice because we've seen the GNOME Software
Center sort of get pretty wide
adoption on the GTK side of things.
There's
not a great
answer for the KDE Plasma
desktop side of things. There's some different solutions like the Muon Software Center and things like that.
But one like KDE, quote-unquote, official store is great.
And I remember talking to Aaron years ago about some of the backend ideas I had for this,
which were pretty bright.
So I think it could be a good move.
Stuff's been in the works, and hopefully this is a good push through and people can use it.
Anybody in the Mumba room have any thoughts about the new KDE software store?
And again, when they say store, I bet you almost everything in there is going to be free.
It's a weird model for open source.
Why say store?
Is that just because of what they think people will understand that analogy better?
Repo is a scary word, maybe?
They couldn't think of a better word like boutique.
There's only so many good words better word like boutique. Ooh.
There's only so many good words today.
Boutique was taken.
Software center, yeah, it's taken too.
I still think boutique or something would be weird compared to store because you're used to, like, the Google Play Store, the App Store,
those kinds of things.
Right.
That's where I think it comes from.
Something, something, big marketing, big different.
Katie, big list of software you can use.
Yeah, go ahead.
If I might offer, I think the software store,
given that people are looking for app stores, et cetera,
and there is such a thing on the GNOME side.
I'm not a KDE user myself,
but I widely would accept a software store even if it's not monetizable.
And if it is, that's great.
More app developers can come in.
And it leaves room for that later.
It leaves room later on for them to come along
and say, let's sell this.
And as long as they do a good job on the backend.
And you're going to go, hey, cool, a place to get stuff.
Yeah. Alright.
I'm excited.
Chris, Wes, here's another thought.
How long will it be until the other desktop environments get their own stores or boutiques or whatever you want to call it?
Like, for example, the XFCE shop or the Pantheon store.
No.
Hey.
There will be another.
It's not going to be called the Pantheon store, but you're barking up the right tree there.
Yeah.
Elementary are already doing that.
They've already got their app center, I think they call it.
Is that the right?
Yeah.
And they're developing that.
So that is, I think, good for KDE because kind of by my estimation, they were sort of – I was kind of looking like where is their official solution here?
So there we go, the KDE software store.
And downloads and snap too.
It's been weeks.
We really haven't heard really any big snaps, no big flat packs.
There hasn't been an announcement of some big project or anything.
There was buildup to it, but then we haven't really heard anything for a bit.
Maybe we're in an incubation period.
People are kind of trying them out, making more of them, maybe even using them.
Maybe.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of distribution for those three.
Will they have mostly one kind, mostly snaps?
I don't know.
Yeah, which ones will be the most popular?
All those?
Yeah, maybe we get stats on that.
All right. Well, which ones will be the most popular? All those? Yeah, maybe we get stats on that. All right.
Well, let's move along.
Moving on because something caught my eye over at elementary.io.
Speaking of the elementary OS desktop, there's a countdown going.
Two days, 19 hours, 22 minutes, and 7 seconds as we record this year's show.
A countdown, Wes.
Let me guess.
Edit.
Let me guess.
Right now, just like last time, it's going to be for a new release.
Why would you get...
I don't know, Sweet Lou.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Probably likely.
I don't know.
We'll find out in two days and 19 hours.
I remember.
I broke the news in the chat room the last time they did it.
Sweet Lou breaking the news for us.
Maybe they're just merging with Apple,
and Apple have some big news for us on their release, too.
Ooh, that's a good one.
That's a good conspiracy, that they're merging with Apple.
Yeah, I like that.
I'm going to guess it's probably not that.
Yeah, well.
I'm going to say that if that were the case,
they probably wouldn't be the ones making the announcement.
Yeah, of course, they're smart.
They're smart because if you were –
You wouldn't suspect a thing.
If it was going to be merging with Apple, it would be announced tomorrow.
Yeah, true.
Right?
Their countdown is just wrong.
Apple is keeping them in the dark.
You know.
Yeah, maybe so.
We'll find out.
Stay tuned and find out.
I'm sure we'll do a little update next week.
But I do kind of like the hype.
I got to admit, it's fun.
It makes it feel a little more like
it's not just posted on the
mailing list. And maybe that's more your style, but it's
like there's a whole involvement to it. It feels like
a production. So let's see.
Zeni452 says that they're merging with
Twit, Elementary OS
and Twit.
I got a theory for you.
How about this one?
System 76 is buying them.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
The new official distribution for System76 hardware.
Wouldn't that be good?
Wouldn't that be something?
Because, you know, they've got, System76 has got a really great range of machines right
now, and they have one of the developers works there at System76.
They both share attention to detail and wanting to craft a complete system.
And, you know, because somebody who works with the project works there at System76, they have a kind of a direct line for this kind of stuff.
And some of their rigs would look particularly good running elementary OS.
They really would, yeah.
Like they have the Sable Complete all-in-one, right?
That's like obvious.
That would be, I mean I mean that legitimately would make – and also elementary OS has really kind of gone out of their way to make sure everybody –
they're clear like they don't feel that their competition is Ubuntu or Ubuntu Mate because they want to –
they say they're mainly going after users that are already running proprietary OSs.
They don't – that's who they're going after.
You could argue that's still competing with other distros.
But I think it's an interesting approach.
And if you look at their distribution in that context, their primary market is people who
aren't running Linux yet.
I think their attention to detail is pretty interesting.
So System76 picking them up.
Well, now I just want that to happen, Chris.
I know.
I know.
It would be pretty big.
I wouldn't want the general distribution to go away because I've been running on Dylan's laptop and that's a Dell.
I think it's almost like that same exact model that you've got right there.
Oh, nice.
And it's been flawless for well over a year now.
So I wouldn't want them to go away as a general distribution.
No, I wouldn't either.
But you do have to wonder.
I'm sure if something like that were to happen, there would be some little birdies going around tweeting about it to me.
Yeah, probably.
All right.
Before we go any further into the show, I'm excited to get to the review that Wes is reviewing.
Wait, what?
The review that Wes is reviewing?
No, the distro that Wes is reviewing.
Speaking of really well put together distributions that pay a lot of attention to the fine details.
I'm really curious.
But before we get there,
I'm going to mention DigitalOcean.
DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O-U-N-P-L-U-G-D,
all one word lowercase,
and you'll get a $10 credit at DigitalOcean.
This is a great cloud hosting provider.
Why is it great?
Well, when you're using the cloud,
you're using other people's computers.
And so you want to make sure they're good.
You want to make sure they've got great infrastructure, running on Linux, using the KVM virtualizer,
SSDs for all the disk IO, 40 gigabit e-connections right into the hypervisors, some of the best data centers in the world in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Toronto,
Germany, even India.
I know, I know.
They have the best interface in the business.
Never seen anybody come close to this.
Desktop or a web app.
HTML5 console.
You get access to your rig from post all the way to login.
They have incredible, nicely formatted tutorials and guides to help you set things up.
They have entire application stacks you can deploy.
Boom, ready to go.
Everything's good to go.
Or you can deploy a base rig.
I love both of those options.
They've got a bunch of good distributions you can choose from. And you combine that with the great
UI, the simple ability to spin up multiple machines at once, the crazy straightforward
pricing. Get this, $5 a month is the base rig. So if you use our promo code D1plugged, you get
the $10 credit, but you can also do digital lotion at an hourly rate. Now, girl, I am telling you,
D1plugged is going to get you the extra mile if you're using the hourly rate because you can get a fantastic rig at like $0.03 an hour.
I think that's the most popular one.
I mean it's just nuts.
And now they have block storage, up to 16 terabytes of storage you can allocate to your rig.
That stuff is awesome.
All SSD-based.
That's pretty nice.
That is pretty nice.
based.
That's pretty nice. That is pretty nice.
Also, check out the DigitalOcean community page, where they've got
all of their tutorials posted right there, including
some good ones working with ZFS,
working with OwnCloud.
A lot of stuff is now getting updated for Ubuntu
16.04 and CentOS 7 and all that
stuff. And then also they're highlighting
their projects that use their
super nice, straightforward API.
Just use our promo code DOUnplugged, and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring
the Linux Unplugged program.
And yeah, they got FreeBSD, too.
Yeah, they got FreeBSD.
In fact, mentioning FreeBSD just really quick before we move on, FreeBSD just announced
a CentOS 7 binary compatibility.
They've been working on it for a while.
Anybody get that Linux layer in there?
Yep.
You mean like Windows does?
Yeah.
As of yesterday, Linux base C7 landed in ports for installing the CentOS base packages.
This will allow running newer Linux binaries built for modern CentOS Red Hat Enterprise 7 era systems on FreeBSD, which is very handy, it turns out.
Previously, CentOS 6 was the default.
It's feeling a bit dated now.
It is, isn't it?
So there you go.
So now you get the CentOS 7,
which doesn't feel like a spring chicken either,
but a nice step up.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was kind of wondering to see this
after Windows made their announcement
if FreeBSD was going to have any more incentive
to keep this current.
I wonder what kind of games, not games, but I do wonder if games are going to be more.
I was wondering just what kind of class of applications this opens up for BSD that wasn't available before.
And I've seen some people hacking to get Steam working on free BSD, and there's been scripts that do it.
I guess it wasn't this.
Yeah, this could make it easier.
Yeah, maybe.
I wonder if they'll ever target not sent to us as well.
I've asked about that, and I basically got a what's the point.
Yeah.
Why would we do that?
Like, because I think, and I don't mean to disparage,
but I think to the BSD people, Linux is already really silly,
and so if you're going to support any kind of compatibility,
why wouldn't you do it with the most adult Linux?
I think it's how they look at it.
And if they're targeting a lot of server workloads,
CentOS may be the thing
that is most like
what their boxes
will end up being used for.
I don't...
I would be way more enthusiastic
about being able to install
like a Debian user land
set of tools and stuff.
And then I'd be like,
all right, okay,
let's go look at this true OS
with the rolling free BSD
and a Debian user land
I can install.
I mean, I...
Yeah, I would do that.
What's that?
That Mac OS 10.
Don't, uh, there is a, there is a, there is like a, there is like a user land set of tools
you can install that has like apt, like functionality.
I'm blanking on it.
I don't even know if it's around homebrew.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Homebrew.
That's what it is.
Yeah.
Homebrew.
Yeah.
Homebrew.
That they can, it's something kind of like that.
Yeah.
That'd be nice.
Give me all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, I, I, you know, I think that's probably going to hook some people up.
So, Mr. Wes, you are trying out the distribution that Jack Wallen at Linux.com says brings serious relevance back to KDE.
Oh, strong words.
Yeah.
So it's called Chaos, K-A-O-S.
We have talked about it before.
They've just recently gotten a new update.
Chaos, K-A-O-S.
We have talked about it before.
They've just recently gotten a new update, and it is a very refined approach to the Plasma 5 desktop.
Sort of a gray color scheme, very uniformed.
What are your thoughts on it so far?
You know, I haven't run a KDE distro for a while, so that was a little bit different. That was one of the reasons I was thinking it would be a fun one to throw at you.
Yeah.
I like it.
KDE takes a little bit to get used to.
Honestly, there's a lot of little things that I'm kind of surprised by.
And I'm like, oh, right.
I really like this.
And so there's a lot of little things.
I'm enjoying having the taskbar kind of thing right on the bottom.
I'm enjoying just the responsiveness.
And there's a lot of effects, but there's not too many effects.
And it's kind of just refreshing.
It feels light.
It feels pretty responsive.
And I've been really impressed when I was just going in to tinker with it.
And they have their own limited repository.
And they're using Pac-Man as the tool.
So it felt right at home.
And they've got nice colors.
It feels just like it's been well cared for, well touched.
I haven't used it long term, so I don't know how well their software availability will meet my needs, especially since I'm used to the larger Arch repos.
And one of the things they advertise is a limited repo.
And they're very focused on KDE and Qt.
Isn't it Arch-based, though?
Yes, and I believe it would be pretty easy to get other Arch packages installed if I wanted to.
I've not tried that yet.
Yeah, I think when I messed around with it, you could.
But I think that's one of their things is they really want you to just use their limited selection.
But it does feel like a very modern, like if you're someone who really likes KDE and wants something that, like, you can just kind of set up, go with, it'll be a nice configured default.
You can customize it if you want from there, but you have, like, new packages.
You have, like, the core stuff.
You're kind of already using the, you know, KOffice or whatever,
then I think you'll be really happy with it.
So they have a Qt designer included,
Corita, Cupzilla, Cfile, Dolphin, K3B, Kate,
Sue Studio Image Writer.
Jack says the only real glaring hole in Chaos' list of software
would be an email client.
For that, you have to go to the package manager.
Now, did you get a chance to try out their GUI package manager?
Did you get a chance to look at this thing? Yeah, aren't they using
Octopi? Yes. Yeah.
Yes, I installed Firefox from there
and a couple other things, and it wasn't
too bad. I went back to the shell, which I was
also very pleased with, and it looks like they've
applied some formatted options, like they've got the fun
little Pac-Man style on the Pac-Man
set, and they've got some really nice spacing
set up, so it very clearly shows you some, like,
this is your packages, here's the new ones,
here's how much you're downloading
in kind of a non-standard way, which I appreciated.
So they break it out into three repositories.
So they've got Core, that contains the basic software
necessary for the system to boot,
communicate with the BIOS, and set the basic shell options.
Then Main, which contains the necessary libraries,
drivers, and firmware to make the desktop function
and then they got apps and that contains all the user-facing apps spread out into those three
different categories the three repositories work seamlessly together to keep chaos or kaos
up to date and running smoothly jack concludes by saying if you've been looking for a distribution
to sway you back to the kde desktop and by k KDE desktop, he means Plasma desktop, look no further than Chaos.
It's a beautiful, it is beautiful, which runs with a snap of a much lighter desktop and
feels as reliable as any other option available for Linux.
I haven't been impressed with KDE for very, very long.
I have not been impressed with KDE in a very long time, but I am very impressed with this
one, and I am certain users would find themselves equally happy to return to a desktop that
has long needed a champion like Chaos. What are your thoughts on the speed? He talks about
the speed a lot in this review. Yeah, I mean, I was pretty, it didn't feel sluggish. I mean,
I haven't used a bunch of other KDE distros recently, so I don't really know. I can't
compare them that well from that perspective. But as someone who uses, you know, uses i3 or
awesome from time to time, who otherwise uses, you otherwise uses GNOME, but not that many plugins, kind of a lighter GNOME.
It really felt responsive.
It felt light.
The graphics looked nice, which they usually do, thanks to KWIN.
So I was very pleased.
It was like a very usable experience.
Well, that is probably, if you've been looking for a Plasma desktop to jump into, this is probably one to play around with, if nothing else,
because you can get a sense of their design look
and their theme they're going for,
and you could replicate some of that if you wanted in your own.
Yeah, and I don't hate the way it looks.
I don't think it's necessarily the style that I would go for.
It's a little blue and boxy.
I mean, the gray is nice.
I don't think it feels quite as streamlined as what I'm used to in GNOME.
But, I mean, KDE is so flexible that I'm sure you can, you know,
if you want to change it to make it something that you like,
that wouldn't be a huge problem.
I'm waiting for the Plasma Mate desktop version that Wimpy will be shipping
in Ubuntu 17.04.
I will say it does come with some nice stuff like MPVs here included by default.
It's a pretty good showcase of a lot of different QT software as well.
That's good.
Yeah.
I'm seriously tempted to replace VLC with MPV at some point.
Yeah.
The new versions are very nice.
And, yeah, I'm waiting to see a VLC three drops with high
DPI support. I like GNOME
MPV a lot too, which is a nice front-end MPV.
I have not tried that. Exactly.
In fact, that new version
for GTK 320 is
really good.
It's my go-to player now
for video clips on the stream. Whenever I'm
playing videos on the show that aren't
on a webpage, I'm using GNOME MPV because
I've been also having decoding
issues with VLC and where it starts
dropping frames and things like that. It just gets to be
all kinds of a mess. Not something you can afford
as a broadcaster. I like Sweet Lou's idea
of looking at Chaos Desktop
and then taking some of those
ideas and transitioning them into an LXQT
sort of lightweight desktop. I don't
think LXQT has all of the theming and I guess unless you can use KWIN with LXQT sort of lightweight desktop. I don't think LXQT has all of the theming.
I guess, unless you can use KWIN
with LXQT, I'm not sure.
But I look at this and I think
they're doing some things that are right here.
And it's that same sort of, a little
extra attention to detail, and the Plasma
desktop doesn't often get it. So that's what also
kind of makes it special. Yeah, exactly.
And it feels like they're, you know, it's nice
to have the focus. It's not just a it feels like they're, you know, it's nice to have the focus.
It's not just a distribution that has,
oh, you can also get our KDE spin.
It's like, this is what we're doing.
It feels a little more polished.
It feels a little bit more like,
yeah, we've thought about it from beginning to end.
We've picked our entire software stack.
We've built our own repos just to do this project.
Wimpy, are you feeling the impending release date of the 16.10 version of the Ubuntu Mate desktop?
Does it start to build up?
Mm-hmm.
Is it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're in feature freeze now.
Yeah.
And, yeah, we've got lots of stuff to fix.
Now, I know there was one feature that ended up getting scrapped for 16.10, right?
Yeah.
I yanked the Marte hub HUD.
We introduced that in Alpha 2, and we had some great testing feedback, but the feedback was clear.
It was not ready.
And we don't have time to fix it up, so we've yanked that, and we'll revisit it in 1704.
Well, that is kind of a downer.
You should share with us something that's going well.
I mean, I respect the decision.
You've got to do what you've got to do.
But now pick me back up.
Get me excited about something.
What do we have to look forward to?
Well, it's a bit uninteresting, really, this release for Ubuntu Mate
because we haven't landed any groundbreaking new features
in terms of what the end user sees.
But it's a ground-up recreation, basically.
So although it doesn't look like it and it might not feel like it,
but we literally started from scratch and built it all from the
ground up all over again and it's really all about the transition to gtk3 and one of the reasons that
we don't have time to go back and fix the mate hud for example is we did the initial let's go was gtk 3 18 and then part way through the ubuntu cycle uh they've pulled in gtk
320 which is a massive upheaval um for anyone that's a theme designer you know that basically
all your themes stop working you have to redo all your theming oh man so we've redone all the themings for gtk 320 so we've actually done like
two significant toolkit toolkit transitions in in this cycle does that feel like you're burning a
lot of a lot of your time up um it does and it doesn't because i made this decision that this
release was going to be the we break everything we start over you know this is this is the new starting point
heading towards 1804 we have to do this and and the other thing that's happened which is perfect
timing it was um maybe late last week um it's been announced that gtk 322 will be the last gtk3
release from that point onwards it will only get fixes so after 3.2.2
then we go into this new gtk4 development cycle which is great so from the marty desktop team
this is ideal because now we can stop having to do catch up on gtk3 toolkit api changes and
actually just solidify hunk down fix up stuff against that
version and then the idea would be that 322 would be around for a year or more it will be well the
idea is is uh that um uh in about 18 months the stable version of gtk4 will come along in that there won't be any api changes at that point so we've
got like 18 months of sitting on that version of gtk with no api changes and then we have a
transition in about a year and a half to a new toolkit but we can now choose when we jump toolkit versions rather than us all having to keep pace with the cadence
of GTK. Yeah. That's nice. Have something really you can target and then do bug fix and that kind
of stuff. Yeah. So we might be a little bit rough around the edges for 16.10, but I'm really looking
forward to 17.04 because I know that we'll only have one GTK version to focus on.
And from now and probably all of the 17.04 release
will just be a refinement and fixes version.
Probably no significant new developments
will continue to improve the Ubuntu Mate Welcome
and the software boutique.
But in terms of all the other stuff,
we'll just focus on fixing up and making good
for a good long period
because we need to sort of develop that stability
and confidence that everything's working
as we intend it to.
It's amazing how much, you know,
how much backend work that takes
for sometimes very little actual show.
But when you really do get that, like,
no, you can trust it.
It just works.
It's really worth a lot.
Yeah, and it does sort of just work at the moment but i know where the bugs and the wrinkles are and some of the testers have sort of identified lots of little paper cuts and we need to start
addressing that stuff it sounds like it is it going to be an interesting it's an interesting
phase and i bet i bet you're still i bet there's still something as an end user I'd be excited about for the 16.10 release. And I think for somebody like me, I think every six months is pretty aggressive.
And I don't think there's any problem at all with using a couple of releases every now and then to just work on some of this stuff.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's what these intermediate releases are for.
You know, these are the releases where you do this stuff, you know, to build up to the LTS.
I mean, I suppose the thing that I'm most looking forward to, and this isn't a 1610 thing specifically, because it's I think it's landed in 1604.
If it hasn't, it's about to.
And that's some Firefox 49 being able to play Netflix.
I think that's huge.
It is.
That's such a big deal.
I think that's huge.
That's such a big deal.
So, you know, Amazon Prime and Netflix now working in Firefox is terrific.
So, you know, that's nothing to do with Tumate in particular, but that's a real good feature.
Yeah, absolutely it is.
Man, in fact, we should do just a quick Firefox update. We're blowing through a lot of our updates right now.
I think this is good.
But Wimpy brought it up. Why don't we do that? It's looking serious. I'll
tell you about it here in just a moment. In fact, let's reorient ourselves and talk about Linux
Academy really quick, and then we'll transition into Firefox. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.
That's where you go. You want to be happy like this lady up on the screen and do a little Linux
Academy dance? Go there and learn more. They got labs that'll spin up on demand with the distributions you've chosen and the courseware and the lab servers
match that choice. They have instructor mentoring when you need it. It is really a platform to teach
you everything about the core essentials around Linux and everything built on top of it. If you're
a client, if you have a client that has a new project for you, if you want to impress an
employer or you want to learn a new skill, you want to challenge yourself, or you want to get a certification, these are all great opportunities
to visit Linux Academy.
Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.
Check out how their dashboard totally maps out the courseware for you, gives you download
links for the comprehensive study guides and audio that you can take with you.
Instructor mentoring is integrated into the platform, too, so it's always available when
you need it.
They have a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, and they
have so much great courseware.
Plus, Linux Academy has been staffing out to
make sure all of their existing courseware stays relevant
and gets updates, and they can continue
and expand to make sure that your membership
stays extra, extra valuable.
LinuxAcademy.com slash
Unplugged. They've got iOS and Android apps
as well, so you can do it on the go.
Check them out.
LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.
And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.
So this is a big deal, I think.
Firefox could be getting up to a 700% improvement in responsiveness.
Yeah, I said 700%. Holy crap.
Chrome, take that.
This is really something.
Now, these are stats that are being reported by Mozilla themselves.
I'm guessing hopefully based on metrics they're getting back from early rollout of electrolysis.
The company is reporting a 400% improvement in responsiveness and a 700% improvement in web page load times.
This is also the responsiveness for loading large web pages.
Over the next week, multiprocess will begin coming to 10% of total Firefox users.
In the coming weeks, Mozilla will push multiprocessing to 100% of their initial user group.
The group represents 40% to 50% of the total users.
A lot of interesting numbers here.
Quite the gradual rollout.
Within the next six months,
the majority of users can expect
to have these capabilities. So here's
what you're going to get. In Firefox 49,
it's going to enable a set of add-ons
that work well with multi-processing.
So you'll have like a set.
In Firefox 50 and
51, somewhere, depending on how
development goes, sandboxing
and enabling of more add-ons turns on.
Then Firefox 52 or 53, multiple content processes will be introduced.
And they talk about some of the cool things they've done with their Memshrink project
to really nail this memory use thing with multiprocesses.
And they say, we've learned from the competition.
The way they implemented multi—of course, referring to Chrome, right? The way they implemented multi-process is RAM intensive.
It can get out of hand.
We're learning from them and building an architecture that doesn't eat all of your RAM.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah.
So up to 400% improvement on load times, less RAM usage, rust, electrolysis, Netflix support.
What is going on, Wes?
Is Firefox all of a sudden coming around?
Is it finally ready for Chris?
Is it coming out off the ropes and swinging, punching chrome right in the face?
I think it is clear at least that Mozilla, it's kind of,
you know,
they've really felt what users pain has been.
I mean,
especially like electrolysis has been a huge long rollout,
but it does feel like they've been making a lot of changes now to kind of
like,
okay,
we really need to catch up.
We really need to be,
be in the spots where Chrome has us beat.
Cause there's like,
you know,
there's like the 80% that they both do.
They're both totally fine.
You can do like that much of your web browsing.
It's just those like extra netflix support responsiveness not hanging
on your one crappy site like these are things that people who like use the web a lot really
expect out of a browser ww you've run into four gig memory limit issues what are you let's go what
what are you talking about you're talking per per tab, per process? What is this? For the entire process of Firefox, I've run into like two to three to four to five to six gigabytes or six.
No, six gigabytes of my eight gigs of RAM use just because I'm running multiple tabs or maybe I'm researching something or I'm reading across things. And, you know, so, yeah, Firefox definitely needs a memory shrink
because it's getting ridiculous.
Well, I think this new electrolysis overall is going to end up using more memory.
I mean, they're just being really smart about how they're doing it,
but I think it still uses more memory because you're running more processes.
So I don't know if that's actually going to help. about how they're doing it, but I think it still uses more memory because you're running more processes.
So I don't know if that's actually going to,
I don't know if that's going to help.
Yeah, Firefox doesn't have that sandboxing or like that Chrome thing
where it separates stuff
or tabs into separate processes right now.
So on the latest version for me,
it's still chewing up memory.
So the only thing it sandbox boxes would be the flash process,
I believe. So that's still separate.
So you'll eventually get a flash crash,
but you won't as often as it was before.
So it still needs, they'll do improvements.
And this is a good stuff.
And I've been waiting and waiting for electrolysis,
and I think Michael Tunnell, which isn't here,
has been using electrolysis a little bit more,
so he could probably talk more on that.
So for me right now, I'm still dealing with that,
and I still end up crashing Firefox daily
just because I need to reset my memory and I need to keep tabs and I have stuff enabled for that to keep those sessions.
It's a process and I'm willing to wait for it.
So, you know, we'll see what happens.
I'm getting hopeful, though.
And you should note that you can in about config under browser tabs.
Yes.
Remote.
Yes.
You can enable it for yourself if you have Firefox installed right now.
Oh, now you're talking my language.
So go try it out.
About config, right?
So you go in there and then it's where?
Let's see here.
You got the Fox there.
I got it right here.
Browser.tabs.remote.autostart.
Set that to true.
If you then look under about support, it should have a multiprocess Windows column,
and if it shows that you have those, then you're running it.
Cool.
I just enabled it right now.
It was really easy.
Cool.
Well, all right.
Now I kind of want to go try that.
Yeah, let's see if it's tolerable.
That's pretty neat.
And, you know, the thing is for me is I'm such an extension idiot.
Like I've just got like markdown extensions.
Be it GNOME, be it Chrome.
Yeah, really. I know. It's because markdown extensions. Be it GNOME, be it Chrome. Yeah, really.
I know.
It's because I find these tools useful to extend my workflow.
Like I can bang out some great show notes by using a bunch of different tools and stuff.
And you're in like – it's like a candy store, right?
You're like, oh, yes, I want that.
Expand the JSON.
Oh, come on.
Oh, come on.
Update things for me.
Yes.
I'm not that bad.
Block the ads.
I'm not that bad.
I'm not that bad.
I do that.
I got – okay, here's what I have right now.
I have two Markdown extensions.
Two?
Yeah, because one can create Markdown by selected HTML,
and one just creates a Markdown link to the page.
Okay, I see.
And then I've got LastPass because I'm back on the LastPass juice.
I got my highlighter bookmark, and I got Hang Hangouts and I got an imager.
Oh, and I got Google Quick Scroll, which is kind of cool.
Have you ever seen that?
Tell me more.
So like when you search for something on Google and you click the link, Quick Scroll comes up and it takes you right to the spot in the page that is relevant to your –
OK.
That's really nice.
Yeah.
It makes it fast.
And then I've got a subreddit style on it, which I don't even know what that's for.
I could probably just remove that.
So I'm not like crazy with the extension.
No, that's actually pretty good.
And Flash is probably in there somewhere, but Google does all that.
Yeah, Google handles that.
Thanks, Google.
You make me sound like I'm some sort of maniac.
No, that's actually very reasonable.
I'm excited to say that Wes and I will probably, if all goes as planned, be going to the Open
Daylight Summit, I think it was called.
I believe that's what it's called.
On September 27th in Seattle, it is a conference about software-defined networking and Linux, et cetera, et cetera,
put on by the Linux Foundation, which means we might be doing like a different recording
time in a week or so.
So we'll update the calendar and let you guys know.
But stay tuned.
Probably the 20th would be the day we would do something if we do like a double or a late
recording.
I don't know what our plans are there, but because the 27th, the day that the conference
starts, is a Tuesday.
Right.
And I don't really have any rigs here by myself that I think we could do a show live there
from at the moment.
I'm not sure.
It's a tricky endeavor.
Yeah, and I just don't think I'd...
I don't know.
Maybe I'd have time to put something together.
And it'd be such a bummer if like...
Oh, that would be.
If we tried that and then it didn't work and we just didn't have a show then.
Well, we could always just have the mumble room to the show.
Oh, yeah.
I think they've got it down now.
They might.
I bet if they really put their minds to it, they could.
I think they could.
They could probably do a better show.
With maybe Rikai Marshall on them into place.
I don't know.
I could see.
I don't know.
I think they could self-organize, actually.
I tell you what.
I tell you what.
I think Wimpy would probably get drafted.
Yeah.
But I think they could self-organize.
And then they'd do their own show.
Don't tell them.
They'll go off.
We'll come back to the network and JB1 will be taking over.
And then we'll go do the next show.
It's just you and me from then on.
Also, I guess before I run, if you want a little more show, I got to give a plug to our brand new show.
You can go to error.show.
And that will take you to the User Air program.
We've got two episodes out right now.
Episode 3 is officially in the can. I hear it's coming soon.
It'll be coming out soon and so you can subscribe
to the feed and just get it auto magically.
We do have an mp4 and mp3
feed at this time and
it's also getting posted to the YouTubes
and in the all shows feed so if you're already there
you've got it. But both episodes
so far really well reviewed so I invite you
to check it out if you want a little more Linux discussion.
In a very low-key, pleasant, fun manner.
It's great.
We try to have a very different feel for that show.
And so I think we're pulling it off.
Yeah.
I got to say, episode two was great.
Thank you.
I hope you enjoy it.
Very candid and just fun.
It's true.
It is.
And I hope you enjoy episode three as well, which will probably be out
Wednesday morning,
Tuesday night,
JB time.
So if you're watching the feeds.
What?
What?
I just like JB time.
That is true.
That's where we live.
Because it doesn't really matter
to anybody listening.
It's just,
because if I say it's specific,
well, who cares?
It could be East time,
but if it's not your time,
it doesn't matter.
It's just the time,
evening for where we're at.
Yeah. Re-catch time. The the time, evening for where we're at. Yeah, recap time.
The beard time.
I kind of like that, too. That's not a bad suggestion. Beard time.
I like it, Wes. Alright, so I think that'll probably
bring us to the end of this week's program. We do have a
couple of more things that we'll
pick up in the post show, so if you're sticking around.
You should be here live. Well, I might put some of it
in there, Wes. Don't disparage. People could
stick around and listen, but really, you're right.
The live experience is like...
Because we might get... I'm gonna
probably say, hey, Rika, put some of that in there.
You know, the cream of the crop, but there's some
choice bits. There's some real stinkers that are worth being
there live for. Over at jblive.tv
on a Tuesday, you can go to
jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar
to get it converted to your time.
You got the robots there to do that.
You can also go over to the contact page,
jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact,
send us in a comment,
and if you're a long-time YouTube watcher
for the Unplugged program,
give us a thumbs up.
Please do.
See you next week. Get it out of here.
I've never installed GNU slash Linux.
And the value of this is negative.
I'm going to say a cucumber sour is very refreshing.
It was actually very pleasant.
Yeah.
Not too sour, not super intense.
It would be a good summer beer too, like when it's really hot out.
Yes.
You can moan the law.
You go, oh, man, screw water.
You go, I want a beer, and you go grab one of these.
This Cucumber Sour would really do it for me.
Not hoppy at all.
Is this another local beer you brought, too?
Let's find out.
You are some kind of maniac.
From Bend, Oregon.
Oregon.
So not too far.
That's legit.
That's local.
That is local. All right, jbtitles.com. Let's go pick our title, everybody. Thank you, Oregon. Oregon. So not too far. That's legit. That's local. That is local.
Alright, jbtitles.com. Let's go pick our title, everybody. Thank you, Mumble Room.
Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
Now, we have to go vote
somebody off the island, and only one person
will survive at jbtitles.com.
Flashy extension idiot.
That's kind of funny. Welcome to nope um a real pain in the flash
that's also good so from everything i'm reading that we kind of linked me earlier apparently
by the end of this year um flash and silver light will be mostly in the NT API for Firefox,
and it will be the only thing there,
and they're moving everything else to web extensions.
You know, I do remember some talk about that web extension stuff in that vein.
Interesting.
The beard knows.
The beard knows.
So what do you know about software-defined networking, Wes?
Not as much as I would like to.
But it's an interesting topic, and I feel like it's something that Linux is poised to do well with.
It's too bad a lot of the hardware implementations are so proprietary.
Exactly.
You just don't really have much option in the way of hardware things.
Like switches, they're all very expensive for software-defined switches.
It'd be nice if there were cheaper devices
it'd be nice if like Ubiquity
got into software defined networking more
I'm waiting for like a white box switch
that you can download and buy and like actually run
cumulus on but they're all like
open compute theory will provide these things but they're still targeting
way higher end than what your average home user
is going to want like they're going like 100 gig now
right
I feel like there's, like, this huge software-defined culture
and community that's growing that is sort of, like, unknown.
Because there is so much happening here,
but yet I don't really have any eyes on it for some reason.
And I don't know if it's just, like, a lot of it's...
It's happening kind of behind closed doors in the enterprise, though.
I think that's why.
Okay.
I don't usually work on big switches or 40 gig plus or, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, that kind of makes sense.
So there is a Linux Foundation.
I'm looking it up right now.
Software-defined networking event in Seattle.
Oh.
The Open Daylight Summit. That's what they're calling it. The Open Daylight Summit.
That's what they're calling it. The Open Daylight Summit.
September 27th through the 29th.
And
I have gotten you and I pre-approved
press-wise to go in.
The foundation actually contacted us and said,
hey, do you guys want to attend? And I said,
can Wes go too? Well, thank you.
Oh, please talk to
King Linus.
Well, I don't think this isn't his.
This is actually not really his thing.
So this is developers and the software-defined networking community coming together to demonstrate some of the latest technology in open software-defined networking.
So I feel like this is an opportunity for maybe to go and learn what some of them are talking about and then see if we can translate that back to the audience to something that's interesting.
I don't know.
What were you going to say, William?
I was going to say it's open like open power is open to some extent.
The protocol and stuff is open, but most implementations are not necessarily open.
Like a lot of the ones you care about, say the hardware stuff,
while they're using OpenFlow as some kind of API that you can talk to,
you still don't have any of the software for the Switch.
Yeah.
And see, that's the kind of thing you want to...
You're linking against some Broadcom IP or something.
That's exactly the kind of thing I want to keep my eye out for.
That's exactly what I want to keep my eye out for.
And I mean, it's still cool.
You buy the Switch and it runs whatever software.
As long as you can control it with your open controller and stuff, it's mostly okay.
Yeah, it's still an improvement.
Right.
It's still an improvement, but it's not ideal.
So that's on the 27th, Wes.
Okay.
And that's a Tuesday.
And I don't know exactly what we should do.
There's a couple of options.
We could go in the morning and try to hustle back up here in time for Unplugged and do
a later Unplugged.
That's definitely a possibility.
We could pre-record on the 20th and we could do two unplugs
and then not worry about that Tuesday at all.
And I don't think I have the hardware for this,
but the real Hail Mary, of course, would be to do a show from down there.
Oh, right.
But I don't think I have.
I mean, maybe I could do it from the MacBook Pro,
but I haven't really put it in that
kind of workload yet. But otherwise,
I need a pretty powerful machine
to do all that. Not to mention,
I'd have to make sure I have all the analog equipment
to make that possible. So I think I can get permission
from them.
There's a good OpenFlow switch.
In terms of something a consumer could
afford, it's like $100.
It'd be a good learner device, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
The Zodiac here?
Oh, cool.
Yeah, the Zodiac.
The Zodiac.
This would be fun to play with.
Wow, look at that thing.
That's pretty interesting.
I don't know how performant this would be in terms of switching capabilities.
I don't even know if it's a learn-on.
Yeah, yeah.
So I guess I'm going to go in there with a pretty open mind if we can make it down there.
And you and I will probably just have to figure out what we want to do recording-wise.
Okay.
I'm open for whatever.
I would love to do the show from there, but I'm thinking that's probably not doable.
But if we hustled and we got a few interviews in the morning and then got up here, say, by like 2.33 and did like a late unplugged.
Maybe that might be.
I don't know.
So that's something to think about.
It's coming up on our radar on the 27th.
They're having it here in Seattle.
The Linux Foundation's behind it.
So that's kind of...
That's awesome.
Yeah, it's interesting too.
I like the idea of this at least.
It's the TuffPi case with 15 backers.
They have 22 days to go.
They're looking for 5,840 Australian funky money,
and they're at 2,400 right now.
The Tough Pie is an all-in-one breakout tough case for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 with an inbuilt 7-inch display.
Look at that thing.
Wow.
It looks like you're toting a bomb around.
You could be toting a bomb.
It could be high-end production equipment.
There's the inside view with 3D-printed mounting brackets and spaces. And look at all that stuff.
Looks like they're running Cody down there.
Look at that.
Yeah, they got one with Cody on it.
And, of course, I like that setup just for like, all right, I can watch my movies.
And RetroPie.
It's got a keyboard in there.
I mean, it's a huge laptop.
But this thing looks like you could toss it around on an airplane or drive over it with a tank and it would survive.
It's pretty cool.
And it's called the Tough Pie by Brett Swan.
You never know.
You never know.
22 days left to go.
It's a pretty reasonable goal to try to raise, too.
I'm going to send it over to Noah, though,
because he and I like the idea of modding up those types of Pelican-type cases
to do production stuff, too.
It's part of the cool, Wes.
I like it.
I'm interested.