LINUX Unplugged - Episode 166: Linux Winter Developments | LUP 166

Episode Date: October 12, 2016

Serendipity this week as a beautiful theme reveals itself throughout the episode. Plus we get updates from some of our favorite projects, discuss the historic shift happening in Linux desktop & wrap it all up with some macOS shade.

It's been a while since we've done a Kickstarter on the show here. Kick it! This is AI War 2. It has 696 backers. They're going for quite a bit of money. Yeah, they're only 10%. Yeah, they're going for like $300,000, and they've only got 29K. But they still have 29 days to go.

I wasn't so sure about this one, and then I watched the video, and I think I'm all in. Plus, also, day one Linux support, they claim, which I'm a big fan of. So check this out. Okay, when did you last feel proud of winning a game? AI War can be that game. Your fleets are surrounded deep in enemy territory. Come out of nowhere, strike, and then disappear back to your own planet. But do not get cocky.

Look, you're trying not to be noticed, and an easy target isn't always a smart target. The AI essentially plays a board game like Risk. You're playing a grand strategic RTS. I love it. If the AI ever decides you're a big enough threat, you're dead. So you basically lay low. You lay low. That is really cool.

The first AI war, well, you already know all that. So what's new? Well, there's better performance better networking better multi-threading we're adding modability the graphics are better and they're in 3d and they actually perform better we're cleaning up the ui and making sure that you can tweak or mod it we've even added technologies that let you customize your ships the sense of scale is much larger isolated planets well they've now become solar systems. Lonely units, well, they're now squads.

This thing is pretty neat. They just took everything up to 11. And something tells me that crowdfunding may be a bigger topic in today's episode of The Unplugged Show. So with that, let's get started. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 166 for October 11th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's feeling a little negative in the freedom dimension. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Wes. Hello. This is negative. We have a great show today. There's going to be a theme that you might notice that'll just sort of pop up as we run through. Look what we did. And of course, we've got our open source project update, some big news.

I'm really excited to talk to some of our old friends to cover a few big accomplishments. There is a Waylon story tucked in here that I'm excited about. But also, let's get real. Will you get real with me for a moment? Can we get real? I'll try. Let's do it. We're going to have to talk about Matej. Things are changing here. Things are going

big. Big league. Momentum. Huge. I think there's actually a legitimate transition not to just joke around about. Huge. I think there's actually a legitimate transition not to just joke around about it, but I think there's actually something massive happening here and I want to talk about it today. Also, later on in the show, we're going to run some interviews with an individual named Andy

and Andy will talk about how his company generates new leads by fixing bugs in open source. So they submit bug patches, they see their names on that bug patch, and, oh, I've got to work with that company, and they end up getting consulting business. It's a new way to make money

with open source that's a lot like the old way with a few tweaks. Using large scale projects, we'll talk about it in today's Unplugged. So there will be a lot to cover. But before we go any further, it is our duty to bring in that virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.

Happy Christmas. Hello. Happy Christmas. Yes, hello everybody. And some of them are joining us in a beer. And we are drinking today Vanilla Cream. Lights out. An extra stout. This is a hell of a beer, Wes.

It is a little bit extra. It is a little extra. A hefty 7.7%. And you know that Vanilla Cream of a beer, Wes. It is a little bit extra. It is a little extra. I have to eat 7.7%. And you know, that vanilla cream makes it nice and smooth. It's really a very drinkable beer. Mr. Pope, you'll be drinking a Christmas beer, and we'll be drinking a vanilla cream. Let me just have another one. From Bend, Oregon, too.

Just our neighbors in the South. You have yet to bring, you've only brought local beer so far. I think there was one exception that was in Wyoming. Oh, really? There was that Melvin. Oh, okay. Which was very good. I think there was one exception that was in Wyoming. Oh, really? There was that Melvin. Oh, okay. Which was very good. I like Wyoming, so we'll allow it.

We'll let that slide. We will allow it, yeah. There is much to cover today, and I want to start with one of the interesting updates. It really required a huge investment here on the Unplugged program. We had to put in a lot of extra wiring, additional conduit. It's a mess. And unfortunately, if everything works as planned, the next few moments of the show may be absolutely silent, but it's imperative that we get an update from a friend of the

show, so we're going to introduce a new feature, the Cone of Silence. The Cone of Silence. Come on, Mr. Ikey, step into the cone here. How do you do? Hello, sir. Welcome back to the show. It's been a little while. As indeed.

And I apologize in advance, but my voice is almost completely gone. It's kind of adorable. We'll forgive you. You're kind of adorable like that. So I constructed this cone of silence. I don't think any, it's just us. Nobody can hear us in here. And I wanted to get a little update on what you guys are doing over on the Soulless Project.

I noticed some back and forth on Twitter about the Patreon, and I noticed some back and forth about ISOs. What's going on over there, and what secrets do you want to just share between you and I? So this is what we agreed on Twitter earlier on, like nobody else can hear us, and this is not recorded. Did you not hear? I have the cone of silence. The cone of silence is a private, personal moment. It's completely confidential. There's three of us now. Okay. Oh, yeah. I snuck in have the cone of silence. It's the cone of silence. It's a private, personal moment. Just us three. It's completely confidential. There's three of us now. Okay.

Oh, yeah. I snuck in under the cone. I think Josh might have gotten a key, too. Right. I think so. Yeah. Okay. So, like, the room is getting bigger, but okay.

Otherwise, it's totally private. Recently, we've been building up to the 1.2.1 release, and I know for a lot of people by now, they're probably thinking 1.2.1 has got to be phantomware by now um but it is happening and now we've got into the last 10 and the last 10 is always the hardest uh that 90 before you know you race through that you're generating news all the time so the most recent news for us uh over the last few days uh mainly last night actually i finished up lvm2, an encryption support in the installer, which is something that people have been requesting for a long time.

So now in the Solus installer, we can do full disk encryption automatically for them. Oh, that's great. Yeah, which is like LVM2 on top of Lux. It's very, very simple. They can choose to use LVM2, and then they can choose to additionally encrypt it as well. So that literally landed just last night, they can choose to use LVM2, and then they can choose to additionally encrypt it as well.

That's awesome. So that literally landed just last night, and about 5 or 6 o'clock this morning, I actually finished the encryption support. So it was a bit of a late night. And while you're sick, nonetheless, too. Yeah, I mean, it was easier to do that than to deal with being sick, to be honest with you. Boy, isn't that the truth.

How are you feeling like the crowdfunding is going in Patreon? It's something we've been talking about here behind the scenes a lot. And I've been more and more worried that it might not be the right platform for a large project, even a project that wants to become large one day. What are your experiences so far? Well, I think I'm going to have to agree with you there. I mean, we've had Patreon for a long while. At the moment, I think it's hovering just over 550 bucks a month or something.

Now, that's been running up for a few months. So basically, I didn't take anything out for about five or six months now just to let it build up, you know, like a rainy day fund. And at the moment, there's like uh 2500 in there so you can kind of you can kind of see the picture that it does fluctuate quite a lot and you know it gets to the end of the month and then suddenly 15 20 pledges have gone um yeah so it's not a reliable source of income at all and uh 500 550 or whatever it is at the moment, it's not going to cut it, you know, yourself. So, I mean, it's been funded out in my own pocket now for a very

long time. So, that's servers, that's even my electric for, you know, I'm running like a big Xeon server under my desk here as well. We've got several servers, we've got the website's SSL certificates, and then there's the hardware as well. So, by no means does it cover it,

but it's kind of one of those ones with Solus. We never set out to be financially successful. It's just, well, there was a comment on Twitter earlier on because I was very surprised, but oh my God, Ubuntu actually put a post up asking about the future of the Linux desktop and was it Solus, which was a bit of a jaw-hit-the-floor moment. It's like, that's all I got to run to. But then someone said, they put it there very well,

they said Solus is now mainstream. It's like, you're kind of right. It's not like Solus was a year ago where nobody knew what it was. You know, everyone kind of knows what Solus is now. They've all heard about it. So it's one of the more mainstream Linux distributions. Everyone knows it's for the desktop. It sure has happened fast, though.

Yeah, I mean, a lot faster than we intended it to, to be honest with you. So that's why we have to add things now. Is there, I guess, do you want to just do a plug for the Patreon right here since we just mentioned it? Since we might as well if people are curious about the project. Where do they go? Yeah, I mean, if people go to patreon.com forward slash solace, then you can support one of us poor little devs. You know, like we get locked in the cage and we get abused thoroughly. So just a few dollars a month and you'll help us keep the lights on.

Yeah. All right. I relinquish the cone of silence. It's done. It's done here. Welcome back, Bumble Room. Wimpy, I kind of wanted to ask you too if you don't mind commenting on your thoughts. Patreon is a source for funding an open source project.

So I picture maybe the potential audience member being somebody who has a project they're working on that does have a set amount of users that does have a certain cost to run it and they want to keep it going and keep it sustainable. How's your experience been with Patreon? Yeah, Patreon has been a positive experience and certainly is responsible for about 50% of the money that gets invested into Ubuntu Mate. Oh, wow. the money that gets invested into Ubuntu Marte. Oh, wow. And then there's the PayPal supporters. There's between 300 and 400 people giving some money each month. And then we've got some corporate sponsorship on top of that as well.

Yeah, so it's part of a blend. But the Patreon is the the amount that you can actually rely on because you know month to month what's going to be coming in yeah and that has been essential in supporting the project when we went through a very popular period where we were paying for all of our hosting and bandwidth and that was expensive the patreon you know got us through that now we've got the sponsorship with bite mark all of that money can be pushed towards um funding uh development projects now and so that's the thing i'm most excited about now as we uh the this month is the last month we have any overhead from our previous hosting platform, and we can benefit fully from the ByteMark sponsorship.

So that would then mean that the full crowdfunding, or nearly the full crowdfunding, there's a few odds and ends that we have to pay for. But a lot of the crowdfunding can now go towards development. Yeah. I think that's an interesting way to look at it it as it's an important part of a blend overall. Right. And it's definitely like it's the number you can see that you're going to – you have a good estimation. I mean there's going to be some – there's going to be probably some declines. But you get a good estimation of what your baseline may be like a little bit.

Yeah, some fluctuation month to month. Yeah. You get an idea. Yeah. And like Heike said, keep some money in reserve for unexpected expenses. Like Heike said, keep some money in reserve for unexpected expenses. Well, let's remember this conversation when we get to the Mate update coming on a little bit later in the show. But before somebody freaks out in the chat room, we're going to do a gaming update because the chat room is losing their crap right now. Oh, my gosh, Wes.

They're having a panic attack in there. It's not our fault. Gabe's been pressuring us. Mad Max is actually shipping on Linux. Hey. The world. I believe it's called the – maybe it's just our fault. Gabe's been pressuring us, so. Mad Max is actually shipping on Linux. Hey. The world. I believe it's called the, maybe it's just Mad Max. I don't know if it has a sub name, but October 20th for Linux and the Mac.

What is that? I don't, I'm not familiar with that. That might be a version of. Is that like Windows 8? It's not suitable for gaming, that's for sure. No, you don't play. Oh, oh, oh, those are those, those, Oh, right, that company that used to sell computers. I thought it was called Next. I thought they make iPhones now.

It's the stuff that comes with cheese. So that's pretty cool. So there you go. There's your October 20th one-week-out heads-up about the outlandish, post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max. You can go get your hands on it. And, you know, have some fun, have some fun. I was just poking fun at the Mac.

In fact, we're going to – why don't we talk a little bit about the Mac here in a moment. But before we do that, I'm going to mention that I'm going to be at Meet BSD November 11th through the 12th. So basically 30 days, right, a month from now. That's great. Yeah. And if you're in the area, it's down by Berkeley. If you're down in that area and want to say hi, let me know. Hit me up on Twitter.

And if you're going to be at MeetBSD, you probably should go register. So you're going to bring like a Linux laptop? Oh, yeah, dude. I'm bringing Lady Jupes full of all Linux gear to the BSD conference. Hell yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm not going ashamed. I'm going as there's a problem.

What do you think about putting true OS on one of your laptops or something just to blend in? No. No. I like my backlighting and my keys to work, so I don't have any interest in that. You're interested in recent CPU graphics

support? Those kinds of things. The ability to run an Electron app would be nice. But I actually am really curious to see where their heads are at and how the BSD community does one of these things. Because I've gone to a lot of Linux events. I'm kind of curious to see what the differences are between a Linux community event and a BSD community event. And I think this is the one to go to.

It is. Just from what I've heard a bit coming up, it sounds like it's going to beSD community event. And I think this is the one to go to. Just from what I've heard a bit coming up, it sounds like it's going to be a wonderful event. And also, the format is one that I think is particularly appealing to me as somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience going to these conferences because this is a mixed, unconference format where there's scheduled talks and there's also just community-driven, like, this is what we care about events.

So from your perspective, it's kind of an outsider. It's a lot more accessible. There's a lot more to jump into. Technical talks and. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. So you can find out more at meetbsd.com if you're going to be down in the area.

It's at the Clark Kerr campus. I'm probably saying that wrong. It's Clark Kerr or something, which is not. I don't think it's on the actual main UC Berkeley campus. I should probably get that figured out. You should get that figured out. Yeah, you're going to have to get there. I don't know if you realize that.

I'm hoping that that's what Nav is for. No, I'll drive – I'm going to drive us to about 45 minutes away and then listener Ben is being nice enough to let me borrow his car. Oh, really? Well, thank you, listener Ben. That's awesome. Yeah. Ben, he's actually been in the borrow his car. Oh, really? Well, thank you, listener Ben. That's awesome. Ben, he's actually been in the Rover Log before. Oh, right. Yeah, he might get another appearance in the Rover Log again.

So that's sort of my plan. And then maybe meet up with folks. I'm just going to be down there for a few days. But if you're in the Berkeley area and want to hang out and say hi, that could be a lot of fun. So meetbsd.com if you want to hang out and chat. And let me know what you think about, you know, whatever's on your mind, particularly in the Linux world. Digitalocean.com, that's what's on my mind.

Go there and use our promo code to get a $10 credit. Go over to digitalocean.com. And remember, if you use our promo code, it's one word, all lowercase. You get yourself a $10 credit, DO unplugged. You apply that $10 credit to your account, and then you can try out their $5 rig two months for free or run one of their hourly machines and just run that balance until you're done with it. It's really kind of cool, and there's, like, no risk there to that. Right. You don't get overages.

You don't get, like, it's just they'll turn it off if you stop paying, but that's just fine. Yeah. And it's a great way to try out the DigitalOcean services to see if it works for you. And they have data centers in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Toronto, Germany, India. They have a really nice interface to manage all of this. It's very simple but yet very powerful. They have great powerful machines that will all use SSD storage. They have an interface that rocks, but they have an API that matches. And one of the semi-recent features that I think is really great and answered a lot of people's questions is this block storage.

You can attach block storage up to 16 terabytes, all of it, resizable, SSD-backed, super cool. Play with that. And also, you know, I had an MB server right up there for a long time. And this would be something, you know, I don't even have to have something massive, but just like the kids' movie collection so it's available when we're traveling. It would be wonderful. You know, I've really been enjoying it. It seems like they're picking and choosing, you know, something like AWS or Azure,

the bigger cloud platforms. They have 1,001 features. Very complicated. Lots of documentation. Digital Ocean seems to be taking, like, the best, like the floating IPs, like the block storage. They're kind of taking the best, like the floating IPs, like the block storage. They're kind of taking the best of the bunch. So you have the features you need, but in a simple interface, something you can understand and get going in 10 minutes.

I mean, way less than that. Probably a minute. I think that might be why I keep creating droplets is when I just want to try out something I found on GitHub even, and I don't want to bother putting that on my machine for security reasons, for simplicity reasons, or whatever. You just don't want to install some more things that you don't need. Yeah, and I can just spin it up in seconds on DigitalOcean, try it out, and then keep it or destroy it. And you get that public IP, right? You don't have to worry about firewalls.

You don't have to just like, boom. Super cool. And they make managing DNS, if you want to go that route, really easy too. And adding your SSH keys. All of it's great. All with different Linux droplets you can deploy and enjoy. DigitalOcean.com. Just use our promo code D-O-Unplugged.

That's one word, lowercase. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. D-O-Unplugged. So we were teasing macOS. And I do actually have something kind of newsworthy to talk about with macOS. But before we get there, before we talk about that, just an interesting diversion because I've seen this floating around for a couple of weeks now, and you've probably heard of it before, but if you haven't, I think you're going to enjoy this.

It's Zenix, and it was Microsoft's Unix back in the day. Microsoft, before they got all DOS happy, first experimented with creating a Unix-based operating system. first experimented with creating a Unix-based operating system. And they called it Xenix, and it was part of a messy breakup between AT&T and IBM, so it didn't really work out. But back in the late 1970s, Microsoft entered into an agreement with AT&T Corporation to license Unix from AT&T. While the company didn't sell the OS to anybody in public,

it licensed it to other OEMs like Intel, SCO, and Tandy. It's fun to hear that name. As Microsoft had to face legal trouble due to the use of the Unix name, the company renamed it and came up with its own Unix distribution. So AT&T licensed Unix, was passed around to other OEMs as Xenix. However, in the early 1980s, IBM was looking for an OS to power its x86 PC. As IBM didn't want to maintain any titles, I'm sorry, any ties with the recently split up AT&T, Xenix was automatically rejected.

To fulfill the tech giant's demand, Microsoft, they scrambled and they bought 86 DOS from a Seattle computer products company and managed to convince IBM to use it in their systems. Slowly, Microsoft began to lose interest in Zenix and then traded the full rights of Zenix to SCO later on because they were one of the partners. And that is how Microsoft started to create a Unix, was almost made at the base of their desktop operating system. And then they went all wrong. But because IBM didn't want to have any ties to AT&T. Boy, those Unix were sure were messy. They were dirty.

I mean, we live in such a simpler, more open... I'm very thankful for it. I don't think a lot of us have a perspective of how dirty they were. No, right? And I mean, like, you still had all the Unix goodness if you were lucky enough to be able to afford it and have a big enough system to run it on.

But those were different times. Mm-hmm. Back in my day. All right. So now speaking of a Unix desktop that doesn't make a very good Unix, macOS 10.12 has a broken pull. A broken

pull. The pull function, which actually breaks things like curl, so curl doesn't work on macOS anymore, which that actually does suck quite a bit. Wow. Yeah, that sucks. And I thought this first comment from ITP on Hacker News was pretty well put. He says, I can't say I'm

surprised. I used to be responsible for the port and upkeep of relatively low-level products on OS X. It was far and away the most troublesome platform. We would frequently run into bugs that had been reported on open radar for years without having been addressed. Offhand, I remember spending the better part of two days trying to understand a bug that was traced to a core routine issue.

OS X was just not saving a required register known and reported for five major versions of the OS. I remember discovering that unnamed semaphores don't work on OS X. Also, I'm not surprised that PULL would be broken, nor am I surprised that it was broken again because it's been broken in the past. The only thing that surprised me anymore is how many people continue to insist that Mac OS, or now just Mac OS, is a great Unix. It might be a nice desktop, but it is definitely not a great Unix. And I think that is the takeaway point. It might make a great desktop, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting a great Unix desktop power workstation or something. It's not that. I think at least part of that is like, you know, when they started building Mac OS X, and for a long time, they could compete with like what the Linux kernel, Linux user land was doing, right?

And you got this nice UI. You got Photoshop. You got all that on the platform as well as you could run Bash and Curl and all that thing in a shell. as well as you could run bash and curl and all that thing in a shell. But they haven't spent any time or energy or money on working on that user land on those kind of kernel features like pull or like any of that. And the BSDs, Linux, we're all moving on and doing more things. And so suddenly you're like, well. But what's weird about it is they're breaking stuff in their Unix land

that they just simply wouldn't touch, wouldn't be broken. But they're like they won't just leave it be. They're breaking it almost proactively, which is super frustrating. Now, this is a segue, but then you combine that with their shocking lack of hardware updates, you start to wonder, what is their long-term vision for the macOS platform and for their Intel machines? And so it's within that context that our next story comes up. Linus was talking about ARM.

He was at a fireside chat. He was talking with David Rusling, who is the chief technology officer of ARM tools. And so this guy... He knows ARM. This guy really knows ARM. And so he's asking Linus questions about ARM. And Linus is being very honest. He's like, you know, ARM doesn't really excite me. Which is interesting, too, just given

Linus' history with, you know, on Linux and to his history designing processor architecture. And he talked about not just because of the instruction set, he says it's more than that. It's the whole ecosystem. So I grabbed just a little bit of the interview so we could hear it here on the show. I'll just play a moment of it. And this is linked in the show notes, too, if you want to watch the entire thing. This is no bad thing.

Do you have a favorite architecture? That's a very obvious question. I mean, x86 is still the one I favor most. And the reason for that is the PC. Not because of the architecture. It's because of the infrastructure. It's because it's there and it's open. And it's open in a way that no other architecture is and it turns out

the instruction set and the core of the cpu is not very important and and it's one of those big differentiated differentiating factors that people kind of fixate on, but it really doesn't matter very much. I think that's interesting. What matters is all the infrastructure around that instruction set. And an x86 right now has all that infrastructure, and it has it at a lot of different levels. ARM obviously has it on the low end. There's no question that if you're in mobile,

you are pretty much ARM, and we can start forgetting about MIPS and everybody else. I've been personally, obviously, pretty disappointed in ARM. Not as an instruction set, although I've had my issues there too. But as a hardware platform, it's still not very pleasant to deal with. And it goes on. He says, of course, you guys know that. You guys are working with ARM all the time. So now we segue from this, talking about ARM, to talking about Wes's $9 computer, the chip, which he's brought into the studio here. So Wes bought the chip, which you might have heard us talk about before, getchip.com.

It's the world's first $9 computer. And you got it right here in your hot little hands, Wes. Tell me about it. I just showed up in the mail. It got sent to my old address. It's itty-bitty. It is itty-bitty. I also got the HDMI adapter.

I've really only plugged it in like a tiny amount. But they do kind of come with like, unlike say like the Pi, like they have a little plastic bottom already. So it's kind of a little more rough and ready to go. So it came with that plastic bottom? You didn't add that on? Nope. Oh, that's nice. Did you really pay $9 though?

Well, no. I paid like $21 I think with the HDMI output adapter. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it has a gigahertz processor, Wi-Fi BGN built in, four gigs of high-speed storage. Is that an SD card that came with it? Is that when they say high-speed storage, they mean an SD card on the USB bus? Is that high-speed storage? I'm not sure.

Chip comes with storage on board. Oh. There we go. Yeah. Well, there's no need to purchase. So it actually is high-speed storage. Yes, exactly. Bluetooth 4.0, and yeah, you got it with the hdmi port it comes with 512 megabytes of ram

anybody in the mom room got their hands on this thing yet this chip i will say um well i don't know what i'm going to quite do with it i bought it mostly to support it oh go on whoa whoa i think that was a hello i think that was a silent Hello? I think that was a Cylon. It might have been a Cylon. It might have been a Cylon. We're compromised. That might have been a chip. We're compromised. Yeah. Have you seen the Pocket Chip, though? Their little case around it? I was going to ask you if you were tempted to get that.

Yeah, you know, and I have a friend who has one, and it's pretty cool. He's still kind of learning Linux, but it's like a great little platform to have on the bus. You know, playing with Linux, you have a real shell. You can do stuff. It also seems like something that no one might be interested in, just knowing how much he wants to have a real Linux computer in his back pocket all of the time. That's true. It's not like a full laptop or anything,

but you could get a lot done. I could imagine doing some SSH and then doing real work or building things or bouncing some servers or whatever you need to do. Is it a QWERTY keyboard or is it... Well, it has a QWERTY keyboard, or is it... Well, it has a QWERTY layout. It's like a multifunction keyboard. So this would be an obvious thing to do with your chip computer, is the Pocket Chip. So I think that's a really smart move they did, where they're like,

well, we'll just sell a great accessory for it to give people something to do with it. And the Pocket Chip's $69. And I do still like the Onion Omega stuff that Alan was talking about. I think that's maybe a more interesting platform but but when this first coming out i it seems like an interesting kind of middle ground between you know like the arduino microcontroller layer and then something more like a raspberry pi this seems more um friendly for some reason like the the pitch of it is more fun, toy kind of thing. That's kind of neat.

And maybe that's the pocket chip that's kind of giving me that vibe because it makes it seem more like a game, more like a toy. So if you don't get the pocket chip, what's sort of your use case for something like this? For a $9, I mean, you've got a gigahertz and 512 megs of RAM. I mean, it's a gigahertz arm, but damn, that's amazing for even $20. Yeah. You know, I really don't have a use case yet. So if anyone in the audience has something that you want me to try, I'd be happy to. I'm going to try to find somewhere I can put it around the house.

It does have HDMI out, so I will test, like, what does that kind of look like? What can you play with that? But it also has the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi built in, so I could see it, you know, if you have any. It does have a USB port here, so like any kind of sensor or anything else that was integrated over USB that you wanted to put on your network or, you know, like we were talking about that USB IP kernel support with Linux.

God, that'd be great for that. You could plug that right in here, just set it right next to it. That would be really an interesting use case for it. Tiny remote sensors or remote IP USB could be game changchanger. But it's the nice thing where it's like you're not writing C++ code and compiling it to run on Arduino.

You're like, it's the Linux user land. That is really cool. Mr. Wiseass, you had a comment. Go ahead. Yeah, I am pinging to the outside and doing speed tests so it can tweet if my speed sinks below a certain level.

So you're kind of keeping an eye on your ISP and kind of getting a little bit of a heads up when they're not delivering what you're paying for. That's pretty clever. Yeah, I like that. Oh, maybe that's why I should do that too. You know, I'm at Lady Jupiter. And I would love suggestions on maybe the best tool

to do this or tools. But at Lady Jupiter, my internet connection slowly degrades over a period of few days. And it seems to be based on my usage

because what solves it every single time is I reboot the MiFi. I restart the MiFi. I, you know, pull the battery out, put it back in, let it boot up. Then I plug into the cradle point. I was going to say, is this some sort of traffic shaping?

But it doesn't seem like it. No. I don't know. I don't know if it is. And maybe when I reestablish a connection to the network, it clears. That could be a possibility. Or it is like the operating system on this little MiFi device could be completely falling apart. Right.

And maybe it's like running out of RAM or whatever. And, you know, it may be that Wi-Fi's aren't – or MiFi's or whatever aren't quite designed for the throughput that you put through them. Sure. Or there's memory leaks. You know, I have a – I'm going to do a video on all this stuff one day. I'm excited. But I'm still building it all out, but I have a WeBoost cellular booster that captures all LTE bands from all

carriers, brings them into Lady Jupiter, and then amplifies them by 60 dB. Yeah, it's awesome. So I can go from one bar to four bars. How big is that? Not big. Not big. The trickiest thing about it is the antenna that receives the wireless signals and the little thing in Lady Jupiter that's rebroadcasting the signals, the two can never meet.

And if the booster main antenna is even picking up the rebroadcaster, it totally shuts down. Yep. It does a feedback loop. Totally. Oh, God. loop and it totally and and in an rv that is a particular challenge because basically the rv is barely long as the minimum requirements are for these things to be apart so i have a booster coming into this mifi it's blasting it with a bunch of signal and so when everything's going great i'll get 23 megabits maybe on a on a and i'm that's not bad especially for parking in the

boonies yeah exactly i am exactly. I am on the coast. I am literally on – I am – I walk, I walk, I walk 10 minutes and I'm in the ocean. So I'm like far out in the boonies as it can be. Right. And to go from one bar to four is 20 megabits. I was like, oh, God, this makes this usable. This is like – I have the internet.

Yeah. And then a few days into it, I'm down to two megabits. So, of course, stupid Chris, first thing I'm thinking is, well, maybe my antenna fell down, so I'm climbing back up on my roof. I'm troubleshooting the connections. You're all the way at layer one. Yeah, I'm redoing all the connections and still two megabits, two megabits. I'm like, well, shit, this is just as bad as it was before I got the booster. Like, what the hell is going on here?

And then as a part of my troubleshooting, I left – I did every piece individually so I could determine what was the cause. And of course I made sure to troubleshoot the MiFi sort of separately. And sure enough, huge difference after a clean reboot. And it's better with the booster. But even without the booster, I could get six, seven megabits and it would go down to like two megabits. And now with the booster, after I reboot, I get like 22 megabits. But after about five days, I don't know what's on it.

I feel like that's one of the last things. It's older, I think. We have these weird proprietary little things that join us to the LTE networks. I wonder if like has Noah experienced any of that with his like ThinkPads built in? I don't know. But see, this is running 24-7 continuously for days.

It's your gateway. Yeah, and then I have stuff that's all on the LAN that, you know, I have stuff that determines what goes out over the internet. But the actual connection itself is open and running all the time. So I've been wondering if there would be a good open source tool to easily warn me when it's dropped below a certain threshold. So like if I could monitor, but I don't want the act of testing it to eat up the precious amount of bandwidth I do have because over the MiFi, it's not just the speed, but anything that introduces additional latency or traffic sort of degrades the connection for everybody.

It's not like 20 megabits on a cable connection. So I would love to be able to test that and map it and alert myself when it starts to say get down like the five megabit range or something without having to stress the connection all the time. That's a good question. You know, cause I've kind of wondered about that too. Like it would be nice to just have that something that makes it really easy to kind of see your graphs of like upstream bandwidth. So I was thinking a Raspberry Pi of types of sorts that would, so I don't know if anybody has a suggestion, tweet me at Chris Elias or something like that, that I could run on a Pi or run on, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, types, of sorts, that would, so I don't know.

If anybody has a suggestion, tweet me, at Chris Elias or something like that, that I could run on a Pi or run on, or I guess I could run it on the laptop for a few days. I mean, because there is always the worst case scenario where you run a cron job with a speed test CLI. Yeah, yeah. And it just emails you if the results are below this. But it would be cooler to have something that also graphs the output, thresholding, and you could always send it into something like Graphite or Grafana. Yeah, something that would give me sort of a

historical, like, this is where you're starting to get down. And then maybe you can kind of observe the trends and really figure out what's going on. Those guys over at the Ubuntu podcast have been getting suggestions from their audience on things to do with their pies. So, we'll just pick up from there. Yeah, if one comes your way that sounds like it would maybe solve my problem, Mr. Popey or Mr. Wimpy, pass it along to me,

because I'd be really curious to know if there's a set of tools out there or even like a ready-built distro for network monitoring. That seems like that should be a thing that would run with like a Raspberry Pi image or something. Well, we've had a bumper crop of feedback on the Raspberry Pi stuff for the next episode. It's been running and running for weeks since we asked for it. Yeah, and the projects are getting more and more interesting.

I will catch the next one if there's another batch. Not that I wasn't going to anyway. Before we go much further, while I'm talking about MiFis, why not mention my friends over at the Ting Network. Oh, you see how we just did that right there? Sneak it in there. Linux.ting.com. That's where you go to support the show and get the discount.

Linux.ting.com will take $25 off your first device or it'll give you $25 in service credit if you bring a device. What's nuts about Ting is their customer service. You know what? Have I ever played this video here on this here show, Wes? This video from the Ting customer service? This is what it's like.

We look at it a lot. This is what it's like. We look at it a lot. This is what it's like. No, this is the video right here. Thanks for calling Ting. This is Isabel speaking. How can I help you? Hello? Thanks for calling Ting.

This is Isabel speaking. How can I... Hey, this is Isabel at Ting. For service in English, press 1. Para el servicio en espanol, presione 2. To talk about phones, press 1. To talk about something else, press 2. To speak to an operator, press 0.

Please hold while we direct your call to the first available agent. Your time is important to us. Thank you for your patience. I assume they include this in all of their training videos. That's what the people want. Thanks for calling Ting. This is Isabel speaking. How can I help you? Oh, wow.

That was quick. That's really good. Linux.ting.com. So they have a really great customer service. They have a super good dashboard to manage all this. And I don't know if I mentioned it yet. They also have CDMA and GSM services. That is the most exciting part right there. And then no locked devices, no contracts, no early termination fee.

I think this is super nice because if you want to go like really high-end phones and it's one that after you use it for a bit, you want to be able to hand it down to somebody or give it to somebody else. This kind of structure makes the continued viability of a phone like that last way longer than these quote-unquote agreements you get in now with the carriers. Oh, man. And it's way easier to understand. Yes. And then on the other spectrum, it's really easy to do like the budget value phones. They just did a blog post for what they call five Ys, smartphone choices, for less than $200. And they have the list broken out here on their blog.

I feel like the Blue Life 1X probably doesn't get enough discussion. It's got a 5.2-inch 1080p IPS display with a 424 pixel density, which is actually pretty high-end. That is not bad. Yeah. It's got Gorilla Glass 3 scratch resistance too, which is not bad, and a decent camera on it, and it's got

full GSM 12-band compatibility. And it's $158. No contract, no determination. I almost kind of want that just as a backup phone in case I break my main. Yeah, it's $158 no contract no determination fee I almost kind of want that just as like a backup phone in case I break my it's $6 for the line yeah that's great and then just your usage

you just just pay for your usage check them out linux.ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the unplugged program you gotta go to linux.ting.com

to get the discount and to support the show and thank you everybody for doing that and thanks to Ting for sponsoring us holy moly

you know I did just uh i did just purchase myself a pixel oh you did it you know i think it'll be running on ting now did you so you did the play or did you what how did you did you do that yeah you did the bottom right from google really yep and one for the one oh man i can't whoa really yeah really she's going she's moving from ios wow so that'll be an interesting story that as it develops i'll be i really curious to hear your feedback on User Error 7, which will come out probably pretty soon. We talk about the Pixel in there. Wes putting his marriage on the line there. Yeah, right.

It was her idea. Really? Yes. What pushed her over? Well, I mean, her current iPhone has damaged screen kind of a little bit. It's not bad, but she was ready for a new phone. What version of iPhone is it? But she wasn't.

iPhone 6. Oh. I mean, it wasn't a bad phone at all. But she just didn't seem interested in the 7. And she looked at it and she was like, okay. Yeah, yeah. The first thing she said was like, this looks like an iPhone. So it's probably this.

Specifically an iPhone 6, actually. Exactly. With a really tacky two-tone back. But other than that. Other than that. Actually, I'm really curious to hear what you think about the shape. Because I think I'm really going to dig that wedge shape. I know.

I think I am too. It's kind of sexy. Yeah, and it's going to probably feel good on the table. So I'll be leaving vicariously through you. Mr. Wimpy, you don't happen to have, oh, I don't know, an Ubuntu touch device still, do you? I do, several. And now I've been negligent in checking in with you over the last few weeks. I think we've had like a three-week break. But how has, so far, your Ubuntu phone experience gone?

Popey switched his main driver over – or Popey, I'm sorry, Wimpy. I'm sure Popey has too, actually. I think that's why. Wimpy switched his main driver – You don't use it as your main phone? No. What? Okay.

Well, I want to hear about that too. But let me get back to Wimpy for a second. So Wimpy switched his main driver over to Ubuntu Touch. And one of the big areas I wanted to hear about from Wimpy was like how does it work with managing podcasts and doing your audio in the car? Because that's a big, big function for me in the phone. Agreed. So Wimpy, it's been a few weeks. I've been negligent.

I'm kind of curious why you are – I'm kind of curious how it's gone. and then I'll get to Popey and find out why he hasn't been using it. But how is your experience so far the last few weeks since we've chatted? So, in terms of all of the, you know, doing the social network stuff and email and looking up websites and all of that sort of thing, that's all just fine. Is that mostly native apps or is that web apps? A mixture. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it depends what or is that web apps um a mixture yeah okay yeah it may it depends what it is there's like a native app for reddit there's there's native apps for some things and wrapped web apps but what's happening now is that those wrapped web apps are starting to have um native elements embedded within them so it's still a web app but it's got more of the native

controls integrated with the web experience so that's that's noticeable in things like some of the new twitter apps and the google plus is that require that the well so google plus are they doing something specifically to enable that on their web app, or is this a new feature of the... Yeah, so the developers of these apps are embedding their own controls that exercise parts of Google Plus to make it feel more like a native application. That's nice to see. Yeah, it's pretty cool. The new Google Plus app I'm using is very good.

So it sounds like the ecosystem is really not doing badly at all it's kind of coming together right before your very eyes it is there you know it's slowly things are improving although uh to your earlier question if your use case is podcasting in the car i can't recommend it how come um the bluetooth is not reliable enough and the native podcasting app is not reliable enough at the moment so i'm still using my pocketcast web app to do my podcast listening and you're just wiring it in uh well i've had a change in circumstances so i don't need to work with the car anymore right i just need to uh get this i'm a bit old fashioned i plug headphones into my phone in order to listen to things um headphones i'm not familiar

with that is that a new thing yeah no it's an old thing that's you know going out of fashion fast apparently apparently haven't you heard about lightning already come on so how about the really boring stuff like uh long-term performance is it staying fairly consistent and battery life so battery life um it comfortably lasts me a day although my podcast um rapper for pocket casts has to force keep the screen on to ensure that the podcast keeps playing. So obviously you're going to take a battery hit if you do lots of that without charging in between. But if you're not doing that sort of thing,

I always have Bluetooth enabled. I have it paired with my two Pebble watches, and it's always connected to Wi-Fi and 4G, and it comfortably lasts the day, you know, more than comfortably lasts the day. That's wonderful. So no regrets overall? No regrets. I'm pleased I've done it. it um i'm so i've certainly seen sort of the rough edges but um i went into this knowing that i was going to encounter rough edges and i wanted to help to identify them and solve them so uh so you know that's what i'm doing yeah i have a question something that seems interesting like we've talked a lot about it as like a replacement platform rendering i'm just curious how much do you use

the fact that it's you you know, a little bit more like desktop Linux? Do you do things on the Ubuntu system that might require root on Android or might require weird workarounds on Android that are easier on the Ubuntu system? Not really. The only thing I do is on the tablet, I do have that connector. So I've got the wireless screen dongle for one of the screens upstairs and downstairs. And I do use the tablet to cast the screen to those. And on the phone, I do that occasionally, mostly for the fun factor. But the terminal experience is, you know, much more Linux than anything on the other devices. So I do use that from time to time.

That's really quite good. That's great. So the enthusiast in me kind of wishes I just had an extra phone to mess around with right now. That's kind of where I'm at with this. So thank you for letting me pick your brain on that. Don't go far because I want to talk about a few other things here in a second. But I cannot go any further right now without taking a moment and asking Poby. I secretly use Arch Linux.

Poby, out of anybody in the mobile room that I thought would be using Ubuntu on their phone as their daily driver, I just incorrectly assumed it would be you. I'm kind of curious maybe why you don't. And I hope the answer is not for competitive research because that feels like a cop-out. Don't say it. So I have on my desk a Pro 5 running up on to you. Sure. It's always right here on my desk and I do daily updates. And I use my Pro 5 for podcasting so i

use the native podcast app podbird um i don't i don't know if i just don't experience the same bugs as martin does but it seems to work okay for me for like just playing a show and like playing whatever most recent things i want um i don't use it as my daily driver mainly well for two two main reasons one i have banking apps and other things that they just aren't available i do have that problem too my bank yeah my bank has uh has an app and yeah i can make my own apps for that uh I have a bank. There's also an app for my kids' bank as well. So we have this whole pocket money thing where the kids can earn money, and it's managed through a phone app. And that's an Android app for me.

Yeah, how do we get on that list? Oh, man, I'm cracking the whip. I'll send you down the mine or clean the chimneys or something. So you probably don't want to do that. Oh, okay. I'll trade you some panels. chimneys or something so you probably don't want to do okay i'll trade you some panels and um and that's well the only other one is whatsapp for a couple of people but not many people i talk to whatsapp but yeah it really is just a few key apps that um i can't i can't use on

um i've been to phone really that's the that's the killer um It is always on. It's always sat here. I'm always carrying it with me, but it's not the one that's got my SIM in it. So if you phone me, it will be my Android phone that rings. It won't be this. So rumor has it you'll be traveling in November to a canonical event. Would that be something where you might maybe bring an Ubuntu touch phone with you for that thing, or do you still bring a different phone? I carry multiple phones everywhere I go. I used to be there.

Sometimes when we go, there's a UK Ubuntu group where we have, we meet up every year and go on a train where they sell, it's an old steam train where they sell beer on the train. All right, okay. We call it the beer train. It's called the real ale train, the rat. And we all go on there and drink beer. But there's a couple of games that we play on Android and on iOS,

which you need a wireless network. And I pull out my trusty BQE 4.5 and turn on Hotspot, and everyone connects to my Ubuntu phone and we're all playing with the Ubuntu phone being my wireless access point. So it has some uses that, you know, I just wouldn't, I wouldn't have another device with me that was battery powered, that was a wireless access point that I could just pull out my bag and turn that on and use it. So I use it for some weird niche things. It's just not necessarily the one that will ring if you phone me.

Interesting. Yeah, I've definitely done that for a while, too. I've had phones that are either for testing or when I had for a long time, I had a BlackBerry for work. Chris, that's insane. The other thing is the camera. The camera app isn't fantastic. It's missing some features. And, you know, I take a fair number of photos of my kids and my cats, course and you know other nonsense and i need a reliable camera app to do that i don't want to i don't want

to be that guy in five years time who doesn't have photos of his kids because he was religiously tied to one phone oh yeah that would be that would be hard yeah yeah that is that'd be a tough thing to live with. But, I mean, if you're the reason that Ubuntu Phone became the next big thing, maybe it's worth it. Maybe. Okay. This is a good pick. I can't see myself running it.

Not a price I'm willing to pay. So let's talk about the elephant that's been in the room. There is. It's a really pretty elephant. Yeah, there is a trend where I think a lot of times in open source, something gets forked. And we almost have a visceral immediate reaction to laugh it off. Now, every now and then there's exceptions. I don't know if that necessarily happened when NextCloud forked, for example. But most of the time, I think if you had heard that the GNOME project has moved on and declared that GNOME 2 is old and busted, and that in order to have a desktop of the future, it must be left behind, and a bunch of neckbeards came along and said, well, this will not stand.

We're going to fork this GNOME 2 GTK2 desktop, and we're going to keep it alive. I think a lot of people would have looked at that. I mean, if you remove everything that's happened in the last few years, and if you just looked at that concept in its just raw, naked form, I think a lot of people would say, that's ridiculous. Once again, open source is splitting its resources. Nobody's focusing on the right thing. People are going off to their different camps.

And it would be a laughable idea. Why would you take this old desktop paradigm that's old and busted, that obviously needs to be replaced, which is, again, a bunch of assumptions being made, and try to fork it? That's a waste of everybody's time. But yet, here we are, 2016, and I think the Mate desktop is one of the most relevant desktops in the Linux landscape. I think it's one of the most widely used Linux desktops. It's had, thanks to the Raspberry Pi, a huge surgence on lower-end hardware.

Massive deployment. It's made a lot of us, since its launch now, a lot of us go, why do people run XFCE again? I mean, it's literally taken that spot. And it's about, I believe, I believe it is currently transitioning into a totally different stage. And I think you're going to see a lot of it very soon. You could probably start beginning to play with a lot of it when Ubuntu 16.10 Mate edition ships. I'll let Wimpy talk about that. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think this will probably be a chance for you to get to see a lot of this. There are some big things that are coming, including what seems to be essentially a from-scratch reworking of Ubuntu Mate to go to GTK3.

I mean this is taking a desktop that was designed around a traditional desktop paradigm and technology and moving it to be completely technologically compatible with the latest Linux desktop, at least for GTK3. technologically compatible with the latest Linux desktop, at least for GTK3, while keeping an existing work paradigm that obviously tens of millions of users prefer. Isn't that a fascinating thing? You know, there's clearly there was a, when it was created, there's clearly this, you know, community of people that said like, well, wait, this is still working for us. So it's very interesting to watch it evolve. At first, it almost felt like a stick in the mud position. Yeah.

You know, like an anachronism almost, but functional. But clearly, they're very interested in taking on new technical things. It's just that there's also things they want to keep and refine. It is almost so obvious in retrospect that I think we've almost missed what an interesting transition this is. And so I think there's a couple of things happening here. There's work happening upstream with Matei itself that's impacting any distro that can run it. And then there's a lot of work specifically going into Ubuntu Matei. And so before I put too many of the wrong concepts out there,

I want to just make sure that I don't say anything more before I go to Wimpy and say, Wimpy, can you kind of enlighten us as what's going on with this gtk3 transition and why does it matter to end users and then could you eventually get to where we could end up seeing it okay it's a lot so yeah so marty was obviously forked from ganome 2 using the gtk2 toolkit and it's been that way for a long long time and behind the scenes gtk3 support has been added and we were getting very close and after the 1604 release i really wanted to shift to gtk3 because i felt we needed to make that jump. Otherwise, we'd procrastinate and sit on it for longer. And so I spoke with the Debian maintainer and the Fedora maintainer back in March, April time.

agreed a timeline that suited all three distributions to make the jump to a mate gtk3 implementation so that we could all roll together with that so ubuntu well in fact debian unstable is actually the first to benefit so debian unstable got the full mate 1.16 built against gtk3 uh at the weekend it landed in um ubuntu 1610 archives on monday and it's uh you know it's in fedora what will be fedora 25 so those are three major distributions that are doing that and then you you've also got the hot and sexy new independent distros like Solus, who when they go shopping for an alternative desktop environment, spot that Marte is now GTK3 and it's using modern technologies and it's underpinning. Why does that matter to me, Wimpy, as Fedora or as Solus? Why do I care if it's GTK3 versus GTK2?

Well, the main reason that you want GTK3 is because it's the gateway to even more newer technologies. So things like high DPI and eventually things like Wayland and MIR. And eventually things like Wayland and Mia. And isn't that sort of maybe the most important thing to note is high DPI and Wayland are not possible otherwise? I mean, how else can you accomplish it with GTK2? Is there any possibility? Not really. I mean, you can do font scaling and things.

Sure, yes. But generally speaking, no, it's not really there in GTK2. And there's a whole raft of other reasons. But it's not really there in gtk2 um and you know there's a whole whole raft of other reasons but it's not just gtk3 you know along the way it's all the other technologies that have since been phased out or are being phased out that mate has been adopting in order to keep it current and relevant so that it moves with the latest technologies. So, you know, Marte looks like GNOME 2 always did, even now with the GTK 3 implementation. In my opinion, it looks a little bit more polished because we've got some niceties from GTK 3

that weren't there in GTK 2, but it looks and works exactly like it did with GTK 2. And that's quite a nifty achievement, I think, because what people miss is that the Marte team are preserving our desktop cultural heritage by sticking with this project. It's not particularly glamorous to continually maintain a project that is effectively complete, you know,

because the, the objective of the project has been completed. We're just making sure it continues to work and it continues to. Okay. So that's interesting. So are you saying in a sense, sense they um by keeping by be keep by keeping mate relevant in terms of like the gtk my moving gtk3 supporting things like wayland and high dpi but keeping the basic workflow the same it's sort of the it's it sort of is the best way to to pay respect and tribute and keep that workflow and that paradigm alive it's not to enshrine it in like glass and never change it. It's a living document, right? Keep it going. Keep it living. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a living.

And the thing is, is that that paradigm that GNOME 2 used, it is built on good design principles that still stand today there are different ways that you can interact with computing devices and the way that that um user interaction works in gnome 2 and now mate is well tested um well thought and has years of work behind it so it doesn't mean that it should be thrown out just because it's an old idea what about after all we're using operating systems that are based on old ideas that people came up with in the 60s and 70s just because it's an old idea doesn't mean it's a bad idea i when i think the other thing i think of when i think of gnome 2 and mate is i think of low resources low memory footprint low cpu overhead low gpu requirements is there a way to is there a way to honor that and make it still appealing to like low-end devices

like raspberry pies um but still keep it modern with gtk3 and those things that's a little more challenging now there's some additional memory overhead with using GTK3 as opposed to GTK2. Certainly, targeting the Raspberry Pi 3 is still possible. That's not an issue. But in terms of Ubuntu Mate, which has got a lot of additional scaffolding around it

because it's got full accessibility stack and a whole load of other bits and pieces. In the 17.04 cycle, I'm going to put some thought into how we can retain the rich feature set but rein in some of that excess in memory consumption but without compromising the user experience. So that's going to be a goal for 17.04. Interesting.

And 16.10 is what? Next week, if everything goes? Two days. Two days from now. Two days? The 13th, yeah. Oh, okay. Wow.

I should get it installed and start kicking the tires and see how it goes. If you go to the CD image, are you familiar with cdimage.ubuntu.com? Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can get the daily live from there. If you get the Ubuntu Mate daily live, which is built today, that is our release candidate. And I'm really hoping that that won't change, that that is the version that will be the final version. I am downloading it right now.

Very cool. Yeah, I have been looking forward to trying out the 16.10 release because I usually jump in earlier, but this time I decided, since there wasn't a feature that I was just freaking out about, I would wait until the release candidate stage. So I'm ready to jump in. I will also toss a link in the show notes. So there we go.

Well, interesting, Wimpy. And so I guess kind of zooming out a few levels and kind of getting back to an overall theme that we've had this episode. This, to me, seems like we've recently had a huge burst, even more so in the last few years. But really just honestly, if you look at the last six to seven, eight months, it feels like there's been a massive burst in development in Matei, which is benefiting a lot of distros. You mentioned Fedora. But also I think it's obvious that it's going to benefit Ubuntu Matei as well. And so there's been work that's getting done. And I think part of it is probably thanks to a form of crowdfunding that you've been doing over at the Ubuntu Mate project, like you mentioned earlier, a blending of crowdfunding.

And I gather you're not take some of these funds you're raising and just hire somebody to sit there and work on this stuff full-time for you well you can you can do the you know do that you can hire people um and that is still a patreon goal for rentumate if we get to a specific funding level we'll have somebody work full-time on it that's an aspiration but in getting there i've actually found that you can get an awful lot of good momentum by breaking down uh small projects and handing off small projects to individuals and funding these discrete pockets of work and during the 1610 development cycle so that's been running from basically the beginning of may until the end of october the ubuntu mate crowdfunding has paid out about $6,200 to open source developers to work specifically on Marte

desktop and Ubuntu Marte projects. And that has made a massive difference to the project momentum because I was originally planning to complete this transition to GTK3 at the end of the 1704 cycle and 1704 at the end of 1704 which is in june next year so you're a little ahead of schedule we're six months ahead of schedule wow so we i planned that for the for a year we would just do that transition to gtk3 and all the other bits that we needed to port to gtk3 but all of that work has been done and all of it has been funded from the investment that the ubuntu mate project gets and also ikey notice i'm using the word investment i read what you wrote about that and i've changed all the language i use on the Ubuntu Mate website and what I say to say investment rather than donate, which is a little hat tip to Ike and some sensible thinking that he shared.

That is really smart. Yeah. Because it really is an investment. It is. And it's not technically a donation because it's not tax deductible. So that's a really good use of the word. And it hasn't been an investment, hasn't it? Because now, look, that's a huge leap ahead in the schedule there.

Yeah. So what we're going to focus on now for Ubuntu Mate specifically, in the 17.04 cycle, Ubuntu Mate is just going to be about bug fixes, refinement, and polish. Not going to concentrate on bringing in new features and expanding the scope of the project. Just make what we've achieved in this 1610 cycle moving to GTK3 more reliable, more robust, more stable, and true to the origins of the project. So that's what 1704 is going

to be so a bit of a yawner by comparison but i think important work that we've now afforded the time to do and um uh i've been setting up with uh some of the core marta developers we're going to do some uh bounty source type uh funding that's to expand the scope of this, you know, project sponsorship. And I'm hoping that we'll be able to invest even more money in independent developers and open source developers that are interested in working on Marte and Ubuntu Marte over the next six months. See, that puts you in a very cool place where it's like, you know, at least some of your funding comes from this community Patreon angle angle and then you kind of get to help shepherd it and then through bounty source or other things then go kind of give back to the community in a way

where you know the whole thing is self-supporting and and growing so and and when when i you know post our monthly summaries i explain who the developers are that have received money, how much they've received, what they worked on. And I also put their distro affiliation. And you'll notice in there that there are people from Debian, people from Fedora, people from OpenSUSE. And the most recent open, let's say, open content creator that has been rewarded through that program is Rotten, who's done some work for us just recently. Nice. That's great.

Also from Drupal Broadcasting. Yeah. And I'll give you an insight. What Rotten's been working on is retouching some image assets, which are our first baby steps to high DPI support. That's awesome. That is, oh man. Good man, Rodden. Good, or Mr. Tunnell.

Mr. Tunnell. I know, I'll call him. So that's, Wimpy, that's a huge amount of progress. And I say good on you for taking 17.04 release cycle and tightening it up because, let's be honest, the expectation with the Ubuntu Mate distribution isn't going to be rapid, crazy, revolutionary change every single release. There's going to be a certain point where people just want something that works

really well to be refined and refined and refined. And I look forward to the process and watching that. So I'm obviously going to have to try out 16.10, obviously. Before we get off of 16.10 completely, I know RMH, you had something I wanted to get to, but I think I'll take it in the post-show because we're running long. But I did want to put a feeler out there,

and I'm kind of hoping you guys can help set my expectation for Unity 8 on 16.10 because I know one of the headline features is Unity 8 will be available as an optional session and I'm kind of curious how I should set my expectations during the review process. I have a feeling

I should set them low, but I also don't want to just set them so low that anything's fine. Like, I don't know where this should be at, so I would love to hear both Popey and Wimpy's thoughts and anybody else's thoughts on it. Popey, can I start with you and say,

what do you know about this and have you tried it and what do you think I should set my expectations towards? I haven't tried it yet. So I'm only running 16.04 here. So for anyone who wants to try the Unity 8 session, it will be an option in 16.10 not the default now do i have to have intel hardware for it to work uh intel or the nouveau video driver oh okay video um i've not tried amd because i haven't touched amd for years

yeah same um it also works in kvm qemu oh nice vmware fusion i think i don't think it works in virtual box but it works in kvm it doesn't work in virtual box or with the nvidia proprietary drivers yet but i have seen that people are actively working on that uh right now right so so in terms of expectations and like apps too what do you think like include like the apps i might try uh so i think the default is just going to be this pretty much the same apps that are available on the phone the default app so the same the ubuntu web browser calendar clock calculator terminal those kind of like the basic apps no not that much oh really yeah it, it's the basic session is what you're going to get. So I'm testing at the moment the 1610 image behind me. And the pre-installed apps that you'll have are the settings, the browser, and the terminal.

And one other thing I can't remember without moving across the office and looking. I'm going to have a launcher, right? I'm going to have a launcher. And the launcher, so fairly minimal. But I'm expecting that you'll find that there'll be some documentation coming along fairly soon after the release that will explain how to install more of the Unity 8 apps and what have you. I'm wondering, should I... Can I expect my X App Store? Will Xmere be a thing that's functional?

Yeah, but you'll need to install some things. So there's a technology called Libertine. You'll need to install Libertine and Libertine Scope or Scope Libertine. I forget which way around the name of the packages. Once you've installed that through the Libertine manager, which will appear in the app launcher, you can create a container, and it does that for you.

You just give it a name. And once you've created your container, you can then install Debs into that container through a UI. So if you know that you want HexChat, you just type in when it says, what do you want to install? You just type HexChat in, hit enter. It installs that into the container and adds an icon to your desktop apps scope.

And you'll be able to launch HexChat and that will open. And for example, today I've installed Chromium just fine and HexChat and LibreOffice and all of those sorts of things. So the functions to do that stuff exist. And through Libertine, you can also enable third-party repositories and PPAs. So I haven't tested this yet, but I was going to have a go a bit later, is getting things like Google Chrome and Steam running to see if I can get those going up inside XMirror. But so far, everything I've tried works just fine.

And that's what I'm using to sort of get my traditional desktop application what is what exactly is libertine i mean specifically libertine itself is a container is it a cheroot is it it's an alex it creates lex d containers and then launches those applications and binds them to xmere sounds like a snap almost not quite right so you can create many you can create many containers so you could create one container for each application or you could create one container and install lots of different applications inside it oh okay so it's sort of like a you know a bottle in a sense like a yeah yeah and an interface there to help bind it to the whole

system yeah yeah and then of course you've got snap snaps as well because underneath it's just up and to 1610 so you can snap install bits and pieces so if there are snaps out there that are using MIR, then they will work. Interesting. And I think I'm going to kick the tires, but I suspect it probably won't be the main driver for me. No. This is the first steps. It's not by any means the full Unity 8 desktop experience. So that means that 16.10, though, is shipping with X and Mir.

So they're both in there, and they're both usable if you have an open-source driver. Yep. Hey, that's cool. Yeah. So, boy, isn't that interesting? Fedora's got Wayland and 25, and 16.10 has got Mir. And I don't...

It's not like the two were, like, competing with each other. It's just sort of how it worked out. It's just how it worked out, yeah. You will have to compare them side by side. Oh, Wes, I love that idea. We should totally try it out. Just see. Because we have a couple of Intel rigs around here with the open source driver.

And I think that Bonobo right there is in the sweet spot with the Nobu driver. Ooh. So that might be a way to go. Well, I'll report back and see how it goes. Right. We'll see. That'll be part of the review, but not the review, I suspect. Now, before we go any further, I do want to play the interview that we had for you.

And I want to mention Linux Academy for making the rest of the show possible. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to learn about a platform built by Linux enthusiasts, educators, and developers that came together and said, let's help spread Linux. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged is where you go to support this show. And now with a new seven-day free trial. Oh, woo!

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but now you can actually visually demonstrate in a public way what you've accomplished, which is great if you have a current employer that's helping you with your training. Yep. Or you need to prove that you've got the skills for that new promotion. This is brilliant. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged is where you go. And check out their video they have posted over there, too. Whether you're an experienced sysadmin or new to the world of Linux, Azure, and AWS, OpenStack, and DevOps, a sharp skill set is an absolute necessity to succeed.

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LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged now with a seven day free trial. And by the way, if you're going to be at Compute Midwest, go say hi to Linux Academy. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. And a big

unthank you to my neighbor for mowing the lawn right in the middle of an ad read. This is lup time. Everyone knows that. I mean, and what's crazy, too, is I think— You need, like, an—outside the studio, like an on-air light. Yeah, right? It wouldn't do anything, but it'd be very cool.

Now, answer me this. Are you not sitting inside a soundproofed, insulated room? Yes, I absolutely am. Is this the world's loudest lawnmower? This is an intense amount of sound proofing in here. There is an intense amount. All right. So that's neither here nor there.

We need to move on. I could do a whole podcast on why lawnmowers are the evil thing ever. But I wanted to talk about our friend Andy from InnoCybe. Wes and I had a chat to chance with Andy. And InnoCybe is a pure play open daylight partner. They're going all in on open daylight. They seem like one of the leaders. Yeah.

And their story is a fascinating one. And I have a couple of clips from the interview. I want to start with how by contributing upstream to open daylight, by closing bugs, by fixing little things here, by submitting patches, they ended up getting leads and they ended up getting contracts and making money. And I thought that was sort of a fascinating question or a fascinating answer to the question that we often ask, how do you make money with something that's free? How do you make money with open source? And so this is a little insight into that.

You know, people typically will find out, you know out about InnoCy because they see our names on the committers lists of the different projects. And then if they need help with an ODL project, then they typically call us. And so I would say that now people have definitely gone beyond the POC stage, the proof of concept stage, and they're deploying real things in production. And that's why we help them do that with our platform, get them to a commercial grade type of production deployment really quickly. So that's, boy, that's a really interesting thing there. So you're, you're picking up some customers because they're seeing the commits and they're seeing the names on the commits and they're saying, well, look at this work they're doing here. I want to,

I want to work with them. I want to pick their brains. And then that's one of the ways the business relationship gets established? That's exactly right. I mean, ODL is similar to other large open source projects in that it's very powerful and flexible, and there's a lot of things you can do with it. And then one of the negative things of that is it's really powerful and flexible, and there's a lot you can do with it. So you can get yourself in trouble pretty quickly, and so we help people get out, you know, stay out of trouble, right. And, and kind of stay between the guardrails of what works, what doesn't work,

what project is going to be useful for their specific use case. And we were sort of their, their lifeline into ODL. So he's, so they're able to sort of make money around this open platform from a contributing standpoint. And I wondered then once that transforms into a client, like what is really their main value? And you were kind of getting at this question too when we were there. You're like, how do you add value since Open Daylight is an open platform? The documentation is all out there. Anyone can use it. Anyone can use it. Why do you need to pay contractors, third-party companies?

Yeah, why am I hiring you? And this is probably true for all major open source projects, is the answer. I thought this was a good one. Great question. So I'd say one thing that's really common is because it's open source and it's sort of enticingly easy to get started, you can start down a wrong path and not necessarily wrong path but it's just that what you're creating might be great for a lab environment but to understand how to really scale yeah for scaling and and getting into production and making it make sure it's a very robust solution that is not going to fail in corner cases, that sort of thing, that requires a different approach, right?

And so when you're looking at things from a professional quality type of thing, then that's often where we see that if we can get involved sooner, it's better to shorten the path to production quality. It was nice of Andy to chat with us and get kind of an insight in how a company can make a decent living by supporting an open source project. Which then goes right back and supports that platform. The more people that are making money on it, right, the healthier future it will have. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So there's a lot of different ways. And somehow, there's a lot of different ways to crack this particular egg. And I just realized that they have eggs on there. Right. And then I just sort of realized why they have. Well, I was trying to, like, as I said, I was like, why do they have a cracked eggs on there. Right. And then I just sort of realized why they have, well, I was trying to, like, as I said, I was like, why do they have a cracked egg on there? Ah, because the omelet reference.

Yeah, there's a lot of ways to make an omelet between Patreon, direct funding, Bitcoin, and commercial contracts and sponsorships. And somehow, by the time we get to the end of this episode, we've covered them all. We had a theme. We ended up with a freaking theme on the Unplugged show that was totally unplanned, but

yet somehow magically worked out. Unplugged. Yes. Wow. That's actually, that could be like our slogan was. Yeah, right? Let's go with that. Well, so thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. Thank you to Andy for coming on. Thank you to Ike for letting us

chat in the cone of silence. Sorry that didn't make it into the rest of the show for everybody else. And of course, thank you to Mr. Wimpy for chatting with us and for Mr. Popey for letting us chat in the cone of silence. Sorry that didn't make it into the rest of the show for everybody else. And, of course, thank you to Mr. Wimpy for chatting with us and for Mr. Popey for letting me pick his brain today. I thought that was good to see him again. I hadn't been talking to him. And to the rest of our wonderful mumble room. Just one of those things. Love those guys so much in that mumble room.

All of them. Thank you, guys. All of them. Let's chat more, guys. Let's do it more. Come back maybe next week. We could even have a post show. Oh, that's a great idea. Let's try more, guys. Let's do it more. Come back maybe next week. We could even have a post-show. Oh, that's a great idea.

Let's try that. Okay, everybody. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Unplugged Program. See you next week. And don't forget to tune in liveibbititles.com. Jibbititles.com. jibbititles.com. All right, thank you, everybody. Thank you.

That was a lot of fun. Mamarum, I love you. You're fantastic. Now, I wanted to go to RMH, though, because he had something during the show that I wanted to punt to the post-show. So I forgot what your point was, sir, but the floor is yours.

Yeah, thanks. So basically what I was saying is that there are a lot of people in the service industry like Noah, and I'm getting started with my own enterprise. And we are all just using this open source software mainly because it's free for the customer, so no licensing stuff, and we get regular updates and things like that and in my business plan i actually have 10 of my income dedicated to giving back to the community whatever i'm using most or deploying most for that month, I try to give back what I earned.

And I think it's pretty important that we who use the software that gets created for free for us, for use, yeah, that we give back. Yeah, that's great. That is. Good on you.

We've been experimenting more and more here with giving back to open source. It's been a mixed bag for us. I mean, good, but people usually take the code we use and then they create something that competes with us. So that's when I was like, well, okay. But at the same time. That's part and parcel, right? Yeah, exactly. So Linux Winter Developments and Vintage GTK3 are all towards the top.

I like Linux Winter Developments. I think that's kind of – that must be a reference back to Popey's beer. How is that going, Popey? Oh, gone. Excellent work. I'm on my last vanilla cream right now. So there you go. Good on you, gentlemen, for both

of you for recording double episodes and then still making it. Thank you very much. Podcasting machines. I don't think we'll be around next week because we're both... Traveling. Y'all. Wow. Already? No, not traveling next week. What's next week? That's the sprint.

Oh, it is. I thought that was in... We're sprinting in the Netherlands. Oh, that is. Yep. Yep. We'll miss you. That's the sprint. Oh, it is. I thought that was in – We have a sprint in Netherlands. Oh, that is. Yep, yep, yep. Ah. Yeah. So – We'll miss you. Yeah, we will.

But I'd kind of love to know how that – Yeah. I'd kind of love to know how that goes. And aren't you guys having some press there this time or some bloggers or something? So there might actually be coverage during the event. Is that right? There's going to be some community people invited. And we encourage them to blog about their experience and talk about stuff.

Good. Great. There's someone from the elementary project with some kde people and uh yeah various people going excellent be sure to bring your uh your score on the 40 yard dash is that is that the first time you guys have done that no uh we have one in heidelberg a couple of months ago that was at the snap one july yeah and this is this is another snap one, Snappy Sprint. I mean, there's going to be a whole load of other people.

But specifically people that are in the press or like in blogs are going to be there? Like not just? No, I don't think we've got journalists, but we're encouraging those people who are there to share their experience. Oh, okay, good. Yeah. Yeah, I thought the stuff that came out of the Snap Sprint

was like the most information I'd ever seen out of an event like that. And it was a super good one for that to happen because it was a bunch of different projects coming together to work on Snap packages. So it seemed like – That's really an inflection point for the community there. And, you know, some companies are very clever. They intentionally bring like favored bloggers along to blog about it so that way they get great coverage and I kind of thought maybe you guys are going that direction but I also I kind of like

the idea of just saying no just the people that attend please do blog about it. Please share what you've done here because it does feel like to some people they probably don't even know that this isn't like the second time you've ever done this. I think some people don't know that you guys get together and do this from time to time at all i mean it's not the second you've ever done right it's they have no we do sprints all

the time exactly it's like i think there's five in a row in that one venue right um there's one right now and then we're joining next week and so on do you see why that is an important thing for the general linux user base base to know that even happens? Because it shows an output of Canonical's money and resources to further development of their platform. And it brings different people together. That seems like something that I would be bragging about a lot more. I realize it's to further your own goals and to, you know, work on stuff. But at the same time, it seems like a perfect opportunity to brag about some of the progress and work that's being done and the outreach that happens. So I don't understand why it doesn't get better coverage.

So, I mean, it can be quite intense. There's a whole load of sessions over the week. We schedule like tightly packed one hour to two hour sessions throughout the week. And it's, it's quite an intense amount of work that gets done. And then that gets decompressed at the end of the week. And some announcements come out of that. Maybe some press comes out of it,

but we rely on the people coming to blog about it because people have different perspectives and people join different sessions. So, you know, I might be in one session about, um, snap upstream related stuff, and then Martin will be in something related to desktop apps. And so if we both blogged about it, you'd get a different perspective from either of us, which is why we encourage everyone who goes to blog about it because we get multiple perspectives with each person coming from

their own project as well. I would, although I would argue, I mean, that's absolutely the way to do that, but I would argue that it's not enough because really the only time that gets any reasonable dissemination is if a larger outlet then picks up that developer's blog and covers it on their medium. Right, but it depends how interesting that content is. If it was like we sat in a room and right and figured out some api or something nobody gives a toss about that but you know unless you unless it's like inside baseball it's not it's

it's not interesting unless you know there's some big decision like maybe if there was an upstream there who said okay we're fully committing to this and we're going to deliver all of our apps yeah for sure although i kind of i kind of still disagree because you like – you look at the Open Daylight Summit. That was pretty much just what you described and we still got like three plus weeks of content out of it and they got quite a bit of exposure out of it because if – like for me, I wouldn't be the one going to the sprint event. But if I were going to the sprint event to cover the development, I would build a story around the people that are there and the work that's getting done, not the decisions that were made. So I think it just depends on the outlet. I mean, I know that's – but you've got work to do. I guess my point is it's just there's a lot of good damn work getting done and it's

not getting enough attention. And I just wish we could solve that problem. There's also not very many popular developers that have blogs in the sense of like you know a big-time developer who also keeps track of stuff they do on a blog and most of the time they maybe make one blog a year or something like that and so no one's paying attention to it so there's really no there's no traction so yeah they might blog about it but if the vast majority of people aren't looking then it doesn't really matter because if Canonical just did it where they just asked every blogger to do it and if they did submit like an email and then they just made an aggregate page,

like here's all the blogs about it, check them out. Like planet.ubuntu.com, for example, that's where you can find it. Most people don't even use that. Yeah, I mean your best bet is Softpedia picks it up or Chris notices it and things like that. I mean that's really kind of your best bet. And the only reason I think I get a little righteous, just like 5% righteous about it, is when I get a whiff of an injustice, I start here is the perfect lens to look at this is just the absolute talking points bullshit that came out after snap packages were announced. People couldn't get – first of all, people that weren't involved with it couldn't get the terminology right. They attacked Canonical for not working with the community.

They – just all of the typical talking points that roll out when a canonical initiative is announced. And I honestly feel like the work that gets done at some of these events would be a would be a would be a show. So it would be a it would be a it would be a visceral demonstration that goes against that narrative. Right. It's like even if you don't agree with it, it's like the people are doing real work and there's momentum and a community behind it. I'll speak to all PR people, Chris. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.

Oh, well, the lawnmower guy's here, so that means we're all done. We'll go with Linux winter developments, I guess.