LINUX Unplugged - Episode 172: It's Not X, It's Wayland | LUP 172

Episode Date: November 23, 2016

Fedora 25 is out & project leader Matthew Miller joins us to chat about what’s new. Plus Wimpy & Popey are back from UbuCon and share their experience, Ryan shares some tweaks Sytstem76 made to jump to 4k & Solus OS founder Ikey Doherty joins us to discuss benchmarking the “feel” of the Linux desktop.Plus community updates & more!

no ike he's laughing at well why are you laughing like you why are you laughing why am i laughing yeah you're laughing at us about conflict yeah upgrade complex package conflicts yeah yeah why is that funny the whole pc master race peasant laugh now because i don't have package conflict so for me this is hilarious this is all the reasons why it's all it exists how can solace never have a package conflict? How is that possible? How can you never have a package? Because nothing is allowed to conflict with another package in the Solus. You have a single provider of a thing that does a thing. You don't have 15 different JPEG turbos or alternate versions of them.

You pick one and you build to use that. So to me, I find this hilarious. These are the problems that Sol has set out to solve. You bastard. So how dare you? How dare you? I'm enjoying this, Sol. The audacity right there.

All right. So you're telling me that I know – how can that be? How can you have a diverse package? How can you have all the kinds of applications I want and never run into conflict? Simply the reason, it just seems simply because at a certain point at scale, you have so many different software developers that are targeting so many different libraries or certain dependencies that it's just unavoidable. We don't let them in. Like, you know how for RPM packages you have like package config build dependencies. We have that in solos as well we only allow a single provider of a package config name in the

repos like when we set out this has been since day one you may only have a single provider of a given soul name a given provider of a package config name it does not enter the repo if your file conflicts or any any one of those issues it's just not allowed to do it for when we're renaming packages on an update which we've done before we have a mechanism called obsoletes so the first thing that happens when you update is the obsolete package is automatically removed if there's one that replaces it that's set to replace it and it's allowed to path conflict during that update it's already configured to handle that. So during that, it knows the other package is being removed.

It knows this one is coming in. So it automatically ignores certain files while it's letting that happen because only one package is allowed to provide those set of files and it's set to replace it. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 172 for November 22nd, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that might be slightly inebriated from some pre-recordings that were happening earlier today. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Wes, I cannot confirm nor deny these baseless claims by the chatroom.

Baseless. Come on, guys. No faith in us? Either way, we are here. Or they know us too well. We've got a great episode lined up for you. Coming up on this week's episode of the show are fresh impressions of Fedora 25 and the man steering that project, Mr. Matt, will join us to discuss the new release. And later on in the show, we'll get an update from Ubicon.

We'll talk about a new potential Linux appliance that could save the day. Then later on, not only will we get the inside dope on how System76 got the Ubuntu desktop tweaked to support 4K, but let's discuss the modification. I'm using that. Strong i'm calling i'm coining that but let's talk about the world where we have surface books surface studios macbook touch bars mobile tablets the hardware the software the platform it's all created by one vendor and it's getting harder and harder to get Linux on these systems. What is the solution here?

And is there a long-term problem? As general x86 vendors become less and less incentivized to participate in the PC business, is there going to be less and less hardware that Linux can run on out of the box? We'll discuss that and what some of the potential solutions could be for that. And then towards the end of the show, I want to talk about benchmarking the feel of it. I'm talking about that feel when you drag the window across the screen, that feel when you're accessing files on your hard drive and loading programs and you're still using your system and opening menus the way it feels when a program launches and snaps up. How do you benchmark that feel? Well, Ike is joining us from the Solus Project, and I get a good sense that you think about the way things feel a lot.

I get that feeling too. And so we'll get a little input from him and the rest of our virtual lug on how you benchmark the feel of something. Because I'll tell you what, Wes. In the back of my mind, I'm working on a project. I'm working on a long-term project. You always are. So before we go any further, we got to do our duty. We got to bring in that mumble room.

Time appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Hello, guys. Hello. Hello. Hello. I love that. Whoa. Jeez, that was a lot.

Hello, guys. Jeez, I get back, and that, it is good. It was good to be. I think they missed you, too. It's good to be back, because when I was listening on the road, I wanted to constantly jump in. I was like, let me, I got to, oh, wait, no, I can't. And I actually, I apologize. I did try to remote in, only I was double natted.

And I did what I never want people to do. And I connected in over a double nat and it sounded like crap. So I apologize to everybody for that. But you tried. I did want to give my input so badly. It was painful, but it was also fun to listen to, even though Noah sounded like death warmed over. It was pretty bad.

But we have so much to get into, and I'm going to give a little plugsy. I did I was just telling Wes before the show started that I went down to meet BSD because I've gone to a lot of just, I don't know, all of the big Linux events that I kind of ever wanted to go to except— You've been there, seen that?

Except for the ones that are outside the U.S. That's still on my bucket list. But the ones inside the U.S., I've pretty much checked off all of those boxes. And I've really gotten a feel for what it's like for community-run events and big commercial events and everything in between. So I wanted to see what it was like when the BSD cousins got together. What is the other side like? And so during last

week, I was off in Berkeley, California, the home of BSD. I figured like, if this was ever the time, go back to where BSD lives. See where BSD was born. See how the other side lives. Get experience in that. And I thought I'd go down there and I thought I'd create two videos. I thought I'd come back and in 172 you and I would be listening to a couple of BSD keynotes

and we'd be discussing the things that the speaker said. Just a couple clips. Yeah. So I got down there and I thought, wow, turns out I've got four videos. And then I got back and I said, wow, it turns out I've got four videos. And then I got back, and I said, wow, it turns out I have got six videos. I think on Sunday even on the Linux Action Show, I said six videos are going to be released, one a day next, starting the week after Thanksgiving.

And then now I'm sitting here on Tuesday. So just two days later, I'm like, actually, I've got eight videos, eight videos that I'll be releasing on my personal channel because they're not all technical in nature. Sure. They're more like behind the scenes, Jupiter Broadcasting stuff, the experience. Yeah. YouTube.com slash C slash Chris Fisher. That's my name.

And starting next Monday, I'll release one a day for so far eight days. I think I'm – I don't know. I'm going to see how far I can get. See when it stops. I got a lot more stuff shot because Noah was here in town and we were doing a bunch of stuff. So I just kept the cameras rolling when I got back. We'll see how far I get before

I just get totally overwhelmed with all the other work. But that'll start coming out next week. YouTube.com slash C slash Chris Fisher. That's my name. If you want to see the videos from that. So it was a good experience. It was a lot of fun. But let's talk about Linux. You want to talk about Linux from that. So it was a good experience. It was a lot of fun. But let's talk about Linux.

You want to talk about Linux, Wes? Yeah, always. Do you like talking about Linux? Because I thought maybe we could talk about Linux, Wes. Let's do it. This is CNN Breaking News. As we record today's episode of the Unplugged program, Fedora 25 has been released. The latest and greatest from the Fedora project.

And the guy that runs that Fedora project is joining us. Matt, welcome back to Linux Unplugged. It's great to have you here. Thanks. It's great to be back. So first of all, before we go any further, congratulations on the new release. Always awesome to see a new Fedora released.

And I know when I think of Fedora 25, what I think of is Wayland by default. Is that really what I should be thinking of? And what else are you thinking of when you think of specifically like the workstation release and some of the other versions? Yeah, so I think Wayland by default

is definitely the big story on the workstation release. That's something that the graphics and desktop team has been working to for a long time. So it's very cool to finally have that. You know, GNOME 3.22 is a nice release as well. And I think there's kind of an understated story there as well,

because in the beginning of GNOME 3, each update was kind of rough as sort of the initial ideas of GNOME got, you know, GNOME 3 got kind of polished and they hit the real world and it kind of polished and they hit the real world and um you kind of responded to feedback um but it's kind of it's kind of gotten to where it's really gotten into its groove and so one of the things whether that we you kind of identified as a feature here is that your shell extensions are probably expected to just keep working now if you have anything that like puts the top icons up on the bar or whatever. Because basically it's the shell is not expected to change so much that it's likely to break

those things. Great. I'm excited about that as well. Yeah. And I feel like that has been getting better over the last few releases. So as a project, you know, I noticed that immediately now there is a post by Justin on upgrading from Fedora 24 to Fedora 25. How official is this as a process, as a project, upgrading from one release to another now?

Oh, yeah, absolutely official. So it's definitely especially it's been something I've been working on for over the last couple releases. So actually, I noticed somebody in your channel asking for fedora lts and i've heard other people talking about a rolling release and sometimes it's the same person that says fedora should either be an lts or a rolling release which is weird because those are very different in you know what what you get from that. And so when I ask, 90% of the time, what people mean is upgrades suck. They're painful and things break and it takes a long time. I have to basically give up three days to upgrade. And so I can't run Fedora because I can't afford to block out

three days every six months. And as much as we tell people, really, you've got 13 months, just once a year, it still doesn't resonate very well. So we really worked on making the upgrades go more smoothly. So first we had FedUp, which is a name that I really love, you know, Fedora upgrade, FedUp. Yeah, that's great. And you can actually still run the new DNF system upgrade as fed up, which I do myself because it's the best. But yeah, so this new DNF-based system upgrade uses basically the same

systemd-based offline updates that the GNOME software updates do. And so the nice thing about it, it's really fast. I was shocked. I upgraded my system in under half an hour when I went to do the upgrade. So, and, and some of that was just like waiting for it to download while I could still do things. So really like click the button, go out for coffee, come back and you have the new release. So are you delaying or doing some sort of rollout for the notification for those that are going to use the gnome software, or is it just when their distro checks in on the repo? to use the GNOME software, or is it just when their distro checks in on the repo? It's when it checks in, and I think someone on Reddit, we figured out that it does that daily.

I wasn't actually quite sure what the thing was, so it should basically hit all at once. We've got a pretty extensive mirror network, so I think that should be okay. So I'm looking forward to it. I've got it in, well, actually, I attempted to install it. I was going to throw down a challenge to Wes. Are you Wes? Are you ready for a challenge? Boom, boom, boom, boom. Oh, there we go. Much better. So contained on this red 16 gigabyte Toshiba USB 3.0 flash drive is Fedora 25 workstation.

I was going to say no, but since it's USB 3, yes. Okay, those are fair terms, Chris. Those are fair terms. I'll do it. Wes, behind you is the Entraware Apollo. Oh. A fine rig if ever there was one. It was just recently running Ubuntu Mate 16.10 perfectly. So why not replace that with Fedora 25? Yeah.

However, I attempted to install earlier today in preparation of this very show, Wes. I take it it did not go well. After reboot, nothing happened. Dead. Now you are clear and free to wipe all hard drives. Okay, okay. Re-do all the loads. Purge all the mistakes Chris has made here.

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is before the end of the show, have a working Fedora 25 installation on the Apollo Entryware behind you, plugged in, currently. Do you accept the challenge, sir? Yes, I do. Oh, all right. Then here you go. I issue you your thumb drive.

Last drive accepted. Awesome. Good luck. All right. That's going to be my review machine right there am i gonna work it because it's got the it's got the intel graphics so i so i should be able to do it should be great gnome 3 and wayland out of the box right yeah absolutely i'm looking forward to that so that'll be my that'll be my my test machine one of my test machines at least so the other big thing i wanted to talk about um we changed. So we've had this Fedora Next

thing for the last couple of years, which is basically like thinking about what we're doing on purpose rather than just continuing to keep doing what we've always done just because we do it. Well said. And one of the things we cited as part of that is to have these basically separate additions to address different use cases. So we've got the workstation, which is basically a technical user desktop with the caveat that technical users are people too, and so we wanted to be easy to use. And then a server as well. And then the third thing we had was Fedora Cloud, which was kind of envisioned to be a platform for doing scale-out cloud computing things. And I was hoping we would do SCL software collections on top of that.

And for various reasons, that didn't pan out very well. But meanwhile, containers came along, and we had this ongoing revolution in how operating systems are put together. And so with Fedora 25, we've replaced Fedora Cloud with Fedora Atomic as one of our top-level editions. And so Fedora Atomic is – Ah, OK. So I thought I was just getting confused. That makes a lot of sense. See, I thought I was just being silly.

So now Fedora Atomic is one of the – is it an edition or a flavor? What's the right vernacular? Yeah, edition is our official term. You know, flavors is more broad, so I include the additions and the spins and everything in the flavors. So is Fedora Atomic, is that... When I think of a Project Atomic

transactional update, so what is Fedora Atomic? Yeah, so Fedora Atomic is an implementation of Project Atomic, basically. So Project Atomic is kind of the theoretical umbrella, so there's RHEL Atomic and CentOS Atomic and Fed Project Atomic is kind of the theoretical umbrella. So there's RHEL Atomic and CentOS Atomic and Fedora Atomic. And so this is just like Fedora in general, a fast moving upstream version of Atomic. A two week release cycle?

Absolutely. So it's based on the Fedora 25 base, but then there are updates every two weeks with new package sets and everything. Wow. base, but then there are updates every two weeks with new package sets and everything. And unlike most of Fedora, like you were talking about, you know, the 13-month life cycle. Sorry, I'm getting so excited I can't talk. Basically, we're only supporting the latest version of Atomic. So if there's a problem, it's update to the latest two-week thing. And now that Fedora 25 is out, we're not supporting the Fedora 24 Atomic at all. And just so I'm clear, the deal with Atomic is if I do an update and something borks, I can transactionally roll back, right?

So it's lower risk in a sense. Right. Absolutely, yeah. So basically it's kind of like Git for your operating system in a lot of the concepts. Kind of like Git for your operating system in a lot of the concepts. So basically you can check out a certain point, and then that's what you have as your operating system. Slick. I like that.

And then what do you mean when you say that Fedora will also offer a Docker-formatted base image? Is this – Yes. So we have – that basically means there's a Fedora Docker image. That I can start with to create some. Ah, okay. It's what you get when you say, you know, Docker run Fedora. That's what you'll get. Neat.

That sounds kind of fun to play with. And so we're actually also working on, and should be in production like literally any moment now, a thing where Fedora contributors can, using basically the same workflow that we use to create RPMs, create Docker images that are layered on top of that base using RPMs in the Fedora distro. Wow, Matt, that is some super great stuff. And it's interesting because it's sort of treating the Docker hub and all of that as just another distribution platform for Fedora. Yeah, basically. And then, of course, users can build on top of that to build their own applications and things they need.

So that will be because with Atomic, you can, using basically a debug mode, install different RPMs directly onto your system. basically a debug mode, install different RPMs directly onto your system. But basically, part of the tradeoff you get for having the atomic updates is you get a system that is like the same image everywhere, which is also good for QA, but hard for like, how do I get my application onto here and actually do things? And the answer is you do that in containers. Like the idea is the base should be small and minimal and not a bunch of custom stuff on it, and everything you do that in containers. Like the idea is the base should be small and minimal and not a bunch of custom stuff on it and everything you do goes in a container.

So the next step obviously is where do my containers come from? So that's the – That is exactly where it seems to be that the puck is going. was gone last week, I met the gentleman that is in charge of all of the network storage for LinkedIn and also for one of the gentlemen that's in charge of all of the network infrastructure and services for Groupon, as well as one of the network engineers at Intel and one of the guys that works at Level 3. And all of them, all of them, we're talking about using containers to host services that they use. Now,

all of them, even there, even the ones that were there to talk about BSD and talk about, they were talking about using jails. And when they weren't talking about their BSD systems, they're using containers on Linux. Not all of them are necessarily using Docker. Interesting.

Yeah. But there's, it is, that is definitely where definitely where they're going so uh i i i often i often think about well it seems like canonical has a super strong presence here with ubuntu they've they you know they've really been benefiting well here i don't know how well susa is is doing here but it sounds like fedora has with 25 especially has a really solid answer here uh we like to think so, yeah.

And I think as we're going forward, I talked about Atomic and Workstation, but not very much about Server in this release. I think Fedora Server, this is kind of an incremental release here for Fedora Server. You know, new versions of stuff, et cetera, et cetera. Some of the things highlighted in the release notes. But next release, we're actually going to put together a version of server that is hopefully composed of different containers running a lot of the base services as an experimental version of it. So more of the stuff in containers. I think it's definitely the future of the operating system.

Wow. Well, so Noah and I will be reviewing the Fedora 25 Workstation edition this Sunday. And Wes will get it installed here on the Apollo, I'm sure. And I'm going to load it on a couple other machines. I'm really looking forward to trying it, especially because a few of my machines, I think, are Intel graphics. So the Wayland, just getting to try that out and just – even if it's not perfect, it's going to be exciting. And we know you want that smooth desktop. I do, I do. We'll talk about that more.

But Wimpy, you know, I was looking at the different features of Fedora 25 and one of the features that jumped out at me is in Fedora 25, Mate 1.16 is available, which is the switch to GTK 3. What do you think about that?

And what are your thoughts about how awesome it is right now that a current version of Fedora is able to ship Mate 1.16 and it's based on GTK3? This seems like a big step forward just for the Mate platform in general. Do you agree? Yeah. So Wolfgang Ulbricht is the Fedora maintainer for Mate, and he has done that work.

And it was he and I and Mike Gabriel who got together earlier this year. So Mike Gabriel's a Debian developer, and the three of us got together and agreed we would land the GTK3 version, solely the GTK3 version, in those three distros for the 1.16 release. So, yeah, there's been several distros working towards that um and uh yeah it's only because the fedora release schedule uh was offset slightly from the ubuntu release schedule that ubuntu got there first but you know we we actually arrived with mate 1.6 or gtk3 at the time, and then it was just as the releases landed. So when Debian 9 lands next year,

that will be 1.16 as well, GTK3 only. That is so awesome for Mate, because it's going to... Everything, once Debian 9 ships, everything major being on that release version, GTK3 being available for all of them is big for things because it's like it's like gtk3.20 too right so that means flat pack supports in there and but also like high dpi supports in there and all these other things right yep and um now the the job at hand is to sort of polish that 1.16 release um so we've got um debbie and coming up with their um their release and uh it will be

an intensive bogs bog bug squishing uh season now as as that approaches to try and really uh shine it up do you have a cold wimpy no i've uh i have an empty bottle of wine in front of me much better i was actually hoping you were going to say yes because i mean not that i want you to I have an empty bottle of wine in front of me. Much better. I was actually hoping you were going to say yes because – I mean not that I want you to be sick at all. But that was going to be my super smooth transition to Ubicon. And Poby, I thought you weren't going to be here this week. Both you and Wimpy are here. I thought for sure – I thought you were traveling.

I've been watching your Twitter feed this week. And I thought you were at Ubicon, which apparently I had totally missed the date on. So, guys, I'm glad you're able to make it. Pobi, let's start with you. Welcome back. Did you manage to get the con crud or did you avoid any of the con crud meeting with all your fellow Ubuntuers? Yeah, it was great. It was really nice to meet up with friends and watch a bunch of talks and have beer in the evening and cool conversations in corridors and meet new people and record interviews for our podcast and all kinds of good stuff. It's really nice.

Like, because we're all distributed around the world, we don't often bump into each other. I mean, I see Martin fairly often, but I don't get to see many of the other people I work with and certainly not many of the community people from around the world so it's really good like just with every other distro it's nice to get together and see the people who help make your distro rock where was it poppy uh it was in a town called essen in germany and uh the community guys in germany organized the whole thing we gave them help and there was some community funding from Ubuntu users who've donated money to the project. We used some of that money to help fund the project, and they also had some sponsors.

And, yeah, it was in a place called Unperfect House, which is a bizarre building, which is excellent. Lots of little tiny rooms and a couple of big rooms and loads of art spaces and creative types. It's just – and a bar, a couple of bars. I would imagine if this is a community-driven event, it's not like policy is being – policy is not being set. Future project directions aren't being set. So what is, is it a get-together just of people where they trade stories or is there any kind of community action

that develops here? What happens here? So the structure is there's a bunch of talks, one-hour slot talks, and anyone could submit a talk and there's Jane Silber, our CEO, did a keynote. Oh, cool.

And one of the guys from the IoT team gave a talk about Ubuntu IoT. There was someone from Microsoft there talking about Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. Oh, really? There were people talking about how to contribute in the community, talking about how to improve the desktop. It was all kinds of stuff, like a diverse range of subject, you know, you pick a subject and you submit it as a talk. And it got on the track, we had like two or three tracks. And so sometimes there were clashes,

and you couldn't go to everything. And other times, there was only one talk on. So, you know, you get a good attendance at those kind of talks. So it was really like a pure community, a bunch of talks but then there was also corridor communication corridor conversations like you get at any kind of event and conversations over beer in the evening and you know why don't we do this and you know kind of brainstorming ideas of how we can improve things and then towards the end there were discussions of what the next do become would be where that might be in the world, and which part of the community is going to organize that. And yeah, it was really great.

I massively enjoyed it. It far exceeded my expectations for a community event. So Wimpy, I wanted to ask you what it was like to go, because you have, I would imagine an interesting and now newer fresher perspective but is this your is this the first kind of event like this you've gone to wimpy or have you gone to a few of these this is the first ubu con europe that was that's ever taken place and it's the but there have been other regional ubu cons but this is the first one that i've attended does it feel different going now as a canonical employee uh somebody who now is kind of more well known in the community well not really so um obviously it was good that i knew there was

probably over the course of the weekend about six or eight canonical people who were you know employees who were at the event and it was good that i knew who all of those people were because i've now i've now met them at a couple of events you know earlier in the year but by and large the people in the community who knew me or knew of me knew me because of ubuntu mate not because of the fact that i'm a canonical employee i thought for sure you were going to say linux unplugged well actually no uh i did i did when i sat down for dinner on saturday night and they heard your I thought for sure you were going to say Linux Unplugged. Well, actually, no. When I sat down for dinner on Saturday night, I joined a table. And they heard your voice. Yeah, exactly.

I joined a table of people I didn't know and joined in the conversation. And then somebody said, I know your voice. And it was from Linux Unplugged. So I quickly pointed them at Ubuntu Podcast to set them in the right direction. Good man. Yeah, isn't that funny? It's funny how many people I meet once they hear me speak. And then they realize, oh, I know that voice.

And it is very – so, yeah, that's always how it goes down. So what did you think? What did you take away from Uber gone uh wimpy and uh what did you take away not only as an employee of canonical but as somebody who might be looking at what users want and and how you could tweak your project so um it was one of the best sort of floss open source conferences i've ever attended um as as poppy said the quality of the talks was high. It was extremely well organized. The venue was excellent. And the social events that happened on the Friday and Saturday were also really good fun. So there was a lot to like about it. Made loads of new

friends, people who I've had sort of passing online acquaintances with over, you know, several years, actually getting to meet those people in person and shake their hand. And in some cases, I tried to buy people beer, but I had more beers bought for me than I got to buy for other people. That's tricky sometimes. You know, so, you know, it was a very friendly, that was the other thing, it was a very friendly group of people. It was really good fun. There was no awkwardness at all. It was terrific and

we put we recorded a mashup podcast whilst we were there from a few of the European Ubuntu podcasts got together and did a mashup recording so I thoroughly enjoyed it and one of the guys there even made a took a bottle of club mate and adapted it into the official Ubuntu Mate beverage, which was very good of him. So there was all sorts of silliness and good fun. Very good. Very good. First of all, I feel like we should do some mashup podcasting, but you guys got to make the long trek over here. So I know it's like asking a lot.

Or you could come over here because there's one of you and there's several events you see i know so one of the one of the conversations that's kicked off immediately after that ubercon was uh the next ubercon at scale next year oh yeah that could happen oh see i'm still on the fence about scale and now you're making me want to go i mean that would be a thing if i knew for sure you guys if i knew for sure you were going to be there then maybe that that might be a game changer i'll try and bring my nice smell i happen to know why is popey smell so good at these conventions because when he arrives at the airport um before he boards the aircraft he goes into the uh into the uh the um he goes into the men's smellies department and gets himself all new nice smelling things.

It's the freebies, dude. It's all the freebies you get in there. Wimpy, you'll be happy to know that I was literally crawling all over MeetBSD. I should send you this photo. Maybe I will later after the show. I was – I crawled up onto a speaker that was set up for, you know, like to rebroadcast what the person in the booth was saying. And I mounted my camera to the top of the speaker

because I wanted a shot of the person giving the presentation. And I'm like – I'm stretched all the way out, reaching to the speaker, and right there, in front of the entire BSD crowd, is me wearing my Ubuntu Mate jacket. Oh, that's nice. Nicely done. Nicely done. So I was repping while I was down there,

and it was, yeah, it was fun. So I did some brand promotion whilst I was there as well. So when I arrived on the Friday, I had all of my Ubuntu Mate stuff on. And then on the Saturday, I wore the SystemAU podcast shirt that I won recently from a competition on their podcast. Yeah, don't rub it in. Oh, well, that sounds like a good time. Now I've got to think seriously about – Wes, what do you think about scale? How would that work?

Could you get like the work – Yeah, sure. Could they? I mean if – well, I don't know. I'd have to ask. But I could investigate. Well, you could totally – But I might even just go if it's –

You could totally. If you wanted to, you could ride down in Lady Jupes with us. Oh. If I go. Right. See, this sounds like a lot of fun. See, I got really lucky on this last trip because I got to camp in the campus parking lot. That's slick.

So that made it much more doable. I don't know if I could be that lucky with scale, but that was – so you could ride down with us if you go. Well, then we got to start thinking about this. I assume you're planning on doing LinuxFest Northwest next year as well. Yeah, of course. Are you? Yeah, okay. Well, I was hoping to make it this year, but events escalated,

so that didn't happen. But, yeah, I would like to come out. I think it's May. I was looking at the dates the other day. Yeah, they just changed it, actually. I mean, they changed it from what it has been previously. Yeah, so LinuxFast Northwest 2017 is going to be May 6th and the 7th.

And, you know, I think this thing gets nearly now 2,200 participants. Isn't that awesome? That's a serious scale. I mean, that is... That's quite something, isn't it? That's a real... Old wordplay.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And it's a serious event. So I do think it is worth more and more time for people that maybe haven't gone in the past is it's getting yeah so yeah i'm i'm considering going to linux fest northwest and you know that main c mod you know um fly all that way to go to a weekend event from europe but there were there were people at ubu con europe from the u.s who traveled out so uh elizabeth joseph So Elizabeth Joseph was there for the weekend and Nathan Haynes, one of the

community contributors, was there as well. But there's another guy in the community called Jose. He lives in Lima in Peru and he traveled all the way from Peru to Germany for the weekend and was flying back to get back to university in time for class

on the Tuesday. It's just like mental. So there's some really committed fans out there. If you're able to make it out here for Linux Fast Northwest, schedule an extra day, and I'll take you to just a couple of spots in the Pacific Northwest. I will promise you are some of the most beautiful sights you will see in the world as long as the weather's

cooperating. I mean, they are truly gorgeous. If you have an extra day, I'll take you on a personal tour. Lovely. I'll see what I can do. So let's talk about really quickly before we move on, because there's so much stuff to talk about this week. We should probably pick it up. I want to talk about GM Vault, both a tool that Wes and I found this week that allows you to back up and restore your Gmail account. Yeah, your Gmail account. It's a tool for backing up your Gmail account and never lose any email correspondence. What a nice thing to have, a little peace of mind when you're using Gmail.

And just as Wes likes it, just as Mr. Richard Stallman likes it. I've never installed GNU slash Linux. It is GNU AGPL 3.0 license. You can find it at gmvault.org. And it's super easy to set up. And it backs up your entire freaking Google account. So what were you thinking when you found this one? Well, I just got myself a Pixel.

So I'm more involved than ever in the Google ecosystem. And, you know, I heard about them. I think they reversed that decision. But there are some issues with people pre-ordering pixels and you know what let's talk about it let's talk about that and I do you have your pixel here I do hold it hold it don't let me see it yet oh my god

I have been looking forward to trying a pixel I cannot wait this is going to be my first hands on with the pixel and Wes how long have you had it Wes I got it last Wednesday oh we're gonna basically you've had it for six days. We're going to hear your thoughts about it and all of it. So we'll have a link to GM Vault.

But let's take a moment and let's thank Ting because, geez, this is pretty time appropriate, right? It sure is. Linux.ting.com, Linux.ting.com, Linux.ting.com is where you go to get $25 off your first device or $25 in service credit if you bring a device. Yeah, they got CDMA and GSM networks. So check their BYOD page and you just might be able to bring a device. Ting is mobile that makes sense. They take your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. They add them all up and whatever you use, that's what you pay.

It's $6 just for the line itself. Think about that for a second. One line is $6 a month, then your usage. Two lines is another $6. Three lines, another $6. If you're a small business like me, that is so economical. Plus, if you've got Wi-Fi at your office, that means if you're doing Ting for your business

and you have Wi-Fi at your office, when your staff are at the office, they're not using Ting because they're on Wi-Fi. Just use a messenger, use some VoIP, and you're done. And you're not paying for anything but the line except for when they're on the road because when they got home, they got Wi-Fi too. So if you're – also, obviously, if you're an individual, this works for you as well. I love this. They got all these great devices you can choose from, from the bare SIM to feature phones all the way up to the latest and greatest. So check them out at

linux.ting.com and a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. linux.ting.com Okay, I'm going to have to, you know what? Hold on really quick. Oracle bought DYN. That Okay. I'm going to have to. You know what? Hold on really quick. Oracle bought DYN. That's what we were going to talk about.

Instead, let's talk about. Can I see it? Yeah, sure. Can I see it? All right. I'm going to turn the camera on because this is super special. This is very important to Chris. So if you're watching the video version, this is Chris's first.

Don't ignore all the Jupiter Broadcasting presence right there. That's for another thing I'm recording at another time. Just ignore it. Oh, let me see it. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. That's nice.

Yeah, it has a very pleasant hand feel. It's much lighter than I expected. It's much lighter than I expected. I definitely think that weird two-tone, that's weird. It even feels weird, the two differences there. Oh, yeah, like the glass and then the metal. On the backside, it has that weird angle. All right, all right.

It's kind of wedge-shaped in general, if you notice. This is nice, though. Yeah, I like it. I like it. It feels good on the table, like I expected. One thing I noticed is the power button has, like, a ribbing crosshatch on it, which is helpful when you're pressing it. Yeah, kind of like the 6P had that. Yeah.

The 6P had that, too. Yeah, these buttons feel very much like the 6P, only this feels in the hand a lot like the 6P, but half the size, width-wise. Yeah, right. It feels exactly like the 6P with those buttons there. And I got the Pixel, not the XL, just to be clear, audience. Good size. Yeah, that's good size.

I love it. It's perfect. So how's the camera? How are you liking all that kind of stuff? I haven't taken too many pictures yet, but it's fast. It's way faster than any other Android camera that I've seen. I mean, the app still takes like a second to start up, but here, if you want to play with it. Oh, you unlock it for me.

There you go. Have at it, sir. The new launcher looks exactly like the old launcher, but except for the search thing smaller. Is there anything else? The search thing smaller. You can like swipe up to get all of your apps. It has Google's Assistant down at the bottom if you'd like to play with it. Have you used that much for the search thing smaller. The search thing smaller you can like swipe up to get all of your apps. It has Google's assistant down at the bottom if you'd like to play.

Have you used that much the assistant? A few things like I mean I've had it set alarms or tell me the hours of a restaurant. Feels fast. Yeah no it does feel fast. It's probably the fastest Android phone I've had or used personally for very long. So I'm pretty pleased with the performance so far.

So yeah gosh the screen looks far. So, yeah. Gosh, the screen looks great, man. I know. The camera feels very fast. I would say it feels as fast as the iPhone. Yeah, you know, I haven't used the iPhone that much, but my wife switched to this phone as well from an iPhone 6.

Oh, really? And so far, I think she likes it a lot. I'll have to get more reviews. How's the battery? Battery life has been great. I'm charging it like once a day-ish, but kind of randomly whenever, and it does charge as fast as advertised, so I don't really worry about

charging anymore, which has been very pleasant. I don't yet have a lot of the USB gadgets in my life, but I do have some coworkers with USB phones, so it's nice knowing, too, like we can charge each other's phones. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. USB-C does seem like the way of the future. And I've already fallen in love with not having to, you know, find which way my damn USB cord is oriented.

Yeah. That's just worth it all by itself. It looks like you get about 12, 13 hours looking at your battery stats. It looks like you get 12, 13 hours of battery life, which is pretty solid. How's the audio quality? Like listening to podcasts on the speakers built in, how's that? Pretty good, actually, and loud, surprisingly loud. For a while, I was having a Bluetooth issue, which is no longer the case.

So I was just listening to the speaker. With your 5X, you mean? Or what do you mean when you were having a Bluetooth issue? No, when I first installed this one, before I updated it or anything, it was more just like it wasn't connecting to my Bose wireless speaker. Oh, I love the Bose wireless speaker. That's a great speaker. So for a little bit, just for that day, while it was like,

that was the first day I had it, I was just listening to the speaker. And it was like I could shower and listen to a podcast from the phone. So it was pretty loud. So have you used like the voice dictation – like the – I don't want to say it. But like the – where you can say, OK, Googs. Have you been using that? Yeah, a little bit. I mean it works pretty well.

Have you tried it like across the room? Have you tried it? No, I have not. Okay, let's do it right now. Let's do it. Okay, so I've just turned off your screen. I've turned off your screen. Now you attempt to invoke it. Okay, Google.

Oh, yeah, let up. You got it. You got it. You got it. Okay, now let me try it. It knows me. Let me try it. Okay.

Okay, Google. It didn't do it. Now let's mumble try. Mumble try. No, it can't hear. Okay, now let's try it. Okay. Okay, Google. It didn't do it. Now let's mumble try. Mumble try. No, it can't hear. Okay, now let's try it on the iPhone. Okay. Oh, yeah.

There you go. So I'll unmute it just for this. Hey, Siri. Okay, so now you try doing a hey, Siri. Hey, Siri. Ah, okay. Okay, so iPhone, it worked. Well, at least that little bit of security is nice

so what do you think overall you really happy with the purchase you regret it i mean obviously you saw the state of my old five yeah it was terrible i needed a phone i was waiting for google's next phone just i mean i like stock android i like that i'm getting updates now it feels good in the hand yeah it feels really nice nice on the table i need to get a case or at least a screen protector i'm kind of running dangerous right now, but it's beautiful. I love feeling it. I also went with, right now I'm using Google's Fi, the wireless service. Oh yeah, yeah. How's Fi? It was crazy easy to set up. I already had the number I wanted on Google Voice. You did the no going back switch yeah there's no they

warn you there's no going back once you do this you can in some cases and you can port away your number how can that be uh but you have to no longer you can either use one or the other yeah exactly yeah and that's fine because i was mostly using google voice to forward to my carrier so if i can just have that number on my carrier then yeah and i get all the features and it has visual voicemail and such too, which is nice. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm actually an active Fi subscriber.

Oh, there we go. Yeah. I find it to be totally underwhelming and not that compelling at all and a big disappointment. But that's my personal experience. You know what? I've only just started. I just thought it was – because I had it on Google Voice, it was so simple to get started. I was very – I was just like I clicked a few things and then suddenly my phone worked. You know, so I, I might've broken you accidentally because, uh, just if,

if you want to subscribe to a Google Fi and I bet a lot of, I bet they're getting a lot of subscribers with the pixel. Uh, don't install the apps from the play store that tell you how it's using the networks, because what you will discover is that Google is calculating their cost as well when they choose which networks you go on. I believe that. And it's not just your pure which one's going to be better for speed and signal. And once you realize that they're making that calculation and they sometimes put you on a slower network just because it saves them money,

it's super frustrating. I can totally see you being frustrated with that. Yeah. Well, I'll have to test this out and see how it works. Yeah, the idea is nice. And one of the other things that's nice about Fi, if you're okay with giving Google all of the things. Every last thing. One of the nice things about Fi is like Glass for a short period of time and other things, it's a part of Google's hyper-focus right now where they actually give a shit.

They care a little. Yeah, right. Yeah, and so they actually help a shit. They care a little. Yeah, right. Yeah. And so they actually help you and they have good customer service. And so if you're ever going to use a Google product where they take all of the things, it's the one to use. That's what I figured. I mean, I don't know that I'll stay long-term, right? I already have Ting SIM cards laying around.

I just thought, you know, this is the first phone eligible. I'll give it a shot, see what it is. And it's an interesting idea. And also it's another way to give the middle finger to the carriers. Yeah, right. Totally. I like it from there. But you'll have to hear more.

I'll use it, you know, give it a couple of months use and check back in. There is a – do you hear that? There's a check going. Are we being bombed right now? I'm not joking when I say there is an extremely high probability that it's Paul Allen. So Paul Allen – I had a client that shares warehouse space with Paul Allen here at the Arlington Airport. Oh, interesting. So the studio is a stone's throw away from the Arlington Airport.

And Paul Allen has a jet from like the Vietnam War era that he just bought to just like – I feel like – you know like how some of us might buy like a go-kart or I don't know, something like a bike, like a mountain bike? You just pick up a jet. Paul Allen buys like a World War II or Vietnam era jet and he stores it. This is all 100 percent true. He stores it here at the Arlington Airport. And I don't even know if I'm supposed to tell you this because my client had to sign an NDA.

However, I did not sign an NDA. But so a section of my client's warehouse was fenced off with a chain link fence with a door in it and a bolt. And in this chain link fence section was Paul Allen's personal toy fighter jet that he takes here at the Arlington Airport and flies around like a maniac. So we may be being bombed by Paul Allen. Okay, good to know.

Thank you, Chris. So that could be who we're hearing right now. That is actually legitimately true. Also, you know what else is absolutely 100% true? Those crazy Russians over at Kaspersky apparently have their own operating system. Did you know this? Yeah, isn't this nuts?

Kaspersky OS. They seem very excited. They say it's designed for networks with extreme requirements for data security. For like layer 3 switches, they say it's got a microkernel architecture. And they give the middle finger to Linux. They say, yeah, I know what you're thinking. It's not even the slightest, quote, unquote, smell of Linux. All the popular operating systems are not designed with security in mind, i.e. we could do better.

So it's simpler and safer to just start from the ground up. This sounds like IK. Doesn't that sound like IK? It sure does. Yeah. And that was just exactly what they did. I tease. I tease. But really, yeah.

So Kaspersky has their own OS because nobody else could do it better, they say. Is the source available, or are they keeping it closed and you have to buy it from them? Oh, that's the first comment on the story, by the way. The very first comment. Good job, Wes. Scroll down.

Look at that. Look, are you going to put the source on GitHub? It's right there. Oh, that's great. Okay, no, it's not the first comment anymore. Okay. It was when I read it. Full disclosure, it was when I read it.

But, yeah. That is Kaspersky OS. What a pile of horseshit. I'm so sick of people creating their own encryption telegram. I am so sick of people creating their own operating systems. Kaspersky, just give me a break. Yeah, wait until they have to update it. Exactly.

I just – Yeah, I wonder if we'll see any – Would you have any confidence deploying this at your business? No. You would not do it. It's just – it's so ridiculous. I mean there would need to be at least some really good reviews and then – I mean I don't have to be wanting to buy a proprietary replacement for

these sorts of things anyway. I don't see it happening. You hear that jet? That's Paul Allen. I tell you. Get out of here. You know how you know? Because if it was an actual jet with a purpose that was here to do something, they'd be flying on. The fact that that

son of a bitch is circling, is Paul Allen! Paul Allen is truly the show. In the Pacific Northwest, the mountains are out. Yeah, you know, Alan Jude on TechSnap totally destroyed LastPass for me. I was pretty fired up about LastPass.

No synchronization required, open source, and then he's like, well, this and that, and he made a lot of good points. So now, now I'm getting all fired up about Bitwarden. So you're back on... Well, this is really Mr. Tunnell here. He produced the last week's Linux Unplugged.

Oh! Yeah. Alright. Ooh, this is different. Let's talk about Mr. Michael Tunnell right now. Mr. Producer Michael Tunnell, aka RottenCorpse, last week produced Linux Unplugged for No and he did a damn good job. Yes. Damn good job. So, as

sort of a nod and a thank you to both him and Noah for filling in to last week's episode, I wanted to cover something that he's kind of excited about and that's Bitwarden. And Bitwarden is an open source cross-platform password manager and it's on Kickstarter.

Hundreds of accounts online. Websites, apps, email, work. How do you keep up with all those passwords? platform password manager and it's on kickstart hundreds of accounts online websites apps email work yeah how do you keep up with all those passwords i don't know most of us just end up reusing the same passwords everywhere because you tried to be smart you're constantly battling with forgot password resets your last pass isn't a thing security breaches happen online every day right your usernames and passwords are stolen by hackers that can end up ruining your life i trust this guy because he has a sammy beard he has a gray shirt and three monitors they are nicely set up there yeah i would like the desk

yeah although he does seem to be wearing running windows whenever you reuse the same passwords everywhere you're inviting those hackers in to all your accounts. That's right. Using strong, unique passwords for every service you use online is essential, but seemingly impossible. That's why we created Bitwarden. Bitwarden is a password management application that keeps you safe online. Bitwarden automatically generates unique, secure passwords for all of your accounts. Next time you go to log in, Bitwarden will

automatically fill in your login information for you. It's that simple. That did not look automatic. It looked like he clicked that. Okay, so let's, okay, so 155 backers, they've raised $3,000 of $49,000 goal. 40 days left to go. Michael, how is this even interesting at all to you? What is interesting about this?

I mean, I put it in here, but I mean, like, really, what is it? Because this sounds super generic to me going once uh-oh did he leave wes is he in there that bastard you know ladies and gentlemen running away ladies and gentlemen i would like to introduce you to linux unplugged uh the only weekly linux podcast with as many listeners where we just toss it to people that don't even exist. It's unplugged,

people. That's why we call it that. Now you know. Since he's not here to defend it, I'm going to assume what he was going to say is well, Chris, I just don't like Log Me In and I don't like LastPass because Log Me In so therefore I'm willing to throw my money at anything. I think that's probably what he was going to say.

That's probably... It does seem to be open source. I just willing to throw my money at anything. I think that's probably what he was going to say. That's probably... It does seem to be open source, so that's good. Rekai just cut all of that from the show. Just cut all of that. Let's just... Let's just cut all of that. We tried. No, leave it in, Rekai. Leave it in. That's the kind of thing that people that podcast five years ago did. That's not what we do now.

You got between... Chris has standards now. Between Paul Allen and Rotten Corpse. This whole episode is ruined. It's whole ruined. Let's talk about $15 production Kubernetes clusters on DigitalOcean. That's kind of interesting. Wes, can you explain to me what Kubernetes are?

Because it sounds like they're delicious, tasty morsels. It does look like that, right? Kubernetes is an orchestration layer for running containers. It provides you a bunch of abstractions so you can have pods and sets of things so that you can be like, I need this number of containers running this service. Usually microservices that you're

putting in containers. And then you can abstract away your hardware. You install a bunch of these on different hardware. Right now, usually on cloud boxes, but you can have it on bare metal as well and then this provides you a bunch of ways you can kind of schedule things you can make sure services are running it'll automatically restart things or auto scale as needed with traffic it's kind of provides you a whole like production environment so they handle

like secret management as well and you know provide like key value stores for you know different configurations no kidding that sort of stuff uh so it's a lot it's one's one of those, you only need this stuff when you're really running something big, but that makes it kind of hard to learn, right? So if you're installing a big infrastructure, there's a lot of things you might not do if you had a small infrastructure. But if you work in a big environment, you probably need to learn those things anyway. So they have something called Minikube where you can run it in a VM on your desktop. But I just thought this was kind of neat. It's not something to ever do for production or like run it he didn't need to do this for his end goal uh it was just kind of an example of like if you hear here's if you

wanted to mock up what you might do at real scale uh on you know cheap digital ocean hardware which is really easy to get using five dollars yeah you can spin it up use it test it play with it spin it down practice your configuration management so i just thought that was cool. Poby, can you help me with official pronunciation before we move on? I don't care how you say it, but everyone else says it Kubernetes. Kubernetes. Is that the – I feel like it doesn't sound as delicious when you add the netties part. Now it sounds like something I put in my nose, not something I put in my mouth.

But Kubernetes. How would you say it in a way that you'd want to eat it? Kubernetes. Yeah, that sounds like a cookie. Yeah, Kubernetes sounds like a delicious cookie with cream in the middle. Right. I think this header image has biased everyone for the whole thing. Chris will never think of this as related to cookies.

Well, why don't we take a moment right now. Since we just mentioned DigitalOcean, let's talk about DigitalOcean. They are our next sponsor here on the Unplugged program. DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O-Unplugged, that's one word, and get a $10 credit over at DigitalOcean.com. It's interesting,

you know, at $5 a month for a droplet, you can play with things like Kubernetes. It makes it really easy to do things. You can spin up a whole bunch if you're only going to use them for an hour, you know. I like that flexibility. Also, if you're maybe doing a new release of a project and you want to spin up a little additional capacity, DigitalOcean is some of the infrastructure behind some of our favorite open source projects out there,

and it makes sense. At $5 a month, you can get a pretty great machine. Or at just a few cents an hour, you can get a fantastic machine. It really just depends on how you want to set it up. And they have a fantastic interface to wrap it all up and put it together. And they have an API that's so simple and so straightforward that there's been tons of great open source code

written to take advantage of it. Go to DigitalOcean.com and just start working. Use our promo code DEOUNPLUG, get a $10 credit and run it for a while. $5 drop will get you two months for free. Woohoo! DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code D-O-Unplugged, get a $10 credit, and run it for a while. $5 drop will get you two months for free. Woo-hoo! DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code D-O-Unplugged.

Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD, Debian, CoreOS. They got data centers all over the world. Just give it a try. DigitalOcean.com. In fact, speaking of, you know, the Fedora 25 release recently, I think I went from Fedora 23 to 24 on DigitalOcean Droplet, running MB using Fedora Cloud and then using, I can't remember what the name of the web interface was,

but I managed to deploy an MB what? Cockpit? Yep, cockpit. Thank you, Wes. And I used Cockpit to deploy an MB image, and then that was on a DigitalOcean Droplet, and then I upgraded that from 23 to 24 without a problem. Look at you in the cloud, Chris. DigitalOcean.com.

Use the promo code DEOUNPLUGED. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring. The Unplugged Program. I want to talk about something that's really bothering me. And I want to get there via the Oryx Pro. Get there via the Oryx Pro. So, Wes, I feel like what's happened in the phone industry is happening in the personal computer industry. The single vendor, single platform, single I design the software, I design the hardware, and I put it all together.

Spoke. Yeah. Microsoft is doing this now with the Surface Studio, the Surface Book, the Surface Pro. Apple is doing this now with the macOS in a way they never have before with the touch bar. It's becoming less and less Linux compatible, more so than ever. Every single vendor that has a major stake in this is often – even if it's Android, it's their own variant like Samsung. Yep, running custom software. They're creating these bespoke, siloed, monolithic platforms that are less and less general computing platforms and less and less Linux compatible.

You can often get it to work. But like with the Surface, it only works great on a couple of versions of them. There's a couple of hurdles you have to go through. Or like on the MacBook, it works pretty good, especially if you do this and you install this patch set against your Linux kernel, then you're really in a pretty good position. And we have these stories, like even for Chromebooks. Yeah, you can get it to work pretty good, especially if you buy this Chromebook and you do this thing to the bootloader or you remove this screw. Just make sure you don't forget to push the thing or you delete your thing. This is becoming more and more commonplace, especially as general purpose vendors have less and less incentive to be in the PC business.

As the x86 platform is making less and less money for people, they're just going off and making their own products, these narrow siloed products. So I want to talk about that and how I feel like that's a particular bad, bad, bad precedence for Linux. First, I want to let Paul Allen buzz the studio. He's having a great time. Paul Allen's having a good time. I'm good. I'm really glad. As long as one of us is.

But in route to get there, I wanted to first talk about System76. They have the Oryx Pro. They've recently revved a 4K. Now, I've experimented a bit. I've got one of the Dell machines. It's like a Sputnik edition that has a 4K monitor. And I found that there's some rough edges but overall not too bad.

And so when System76 announced the Oryx Pro with a 4K screen, they did it in a way that was sort of more intriguing than average because they said we also made some tweaks. We made some changes. We made some patches. We've sent these upstream to make 4K Linux even better. And I thought this would be an interesting way to discuss this because System76 is one of the few vendors in the general x86 platform space that is all in on Linux. Now, there's others. I just mentioned earlier, like you're working on my Apollo Entraware right there. There's Zahreason. There's Dell. Like I said just a second ago, ships a Linux machine.

There's other vendors in the space. It's not like the oxygen has been sucked out of the room, but it definitely feels like when I climb up a hill, I'm starting to hyperventilate a bit. And so I thought maybe we could segue into this discussion because Ryan, Mr. Ryan Sipes, has joined us from System76. And I think he has a few insights in the new Oryx Pro. So, Ryan, welcome back to the Unplugged program, sir. Hey, I'm happy to be back.

So, Mr. Sipes, what's the lowdown on this new Oryx Pro? Rumor has it there may have been a few tweaks. And I'm wondering, when System76 started to go 4K, did they find, like, everything just worked great out of the box? Or is this one of those things where you kind of have to ship a custom image to make everything work? And what led you from point A to point B? Go for it. So we are really, really focused on producing a good product that feels good from the ground up and uh one thing that prevented us from shipping 4k earlier was we just didn't feel like it was a very solid experience um some people have not had you know a bad experience but i've heard a lot of folks who

you know purchase like the sputnik and they're like, well, if you just run stock Ubuntu, there are a lot of problems and it's not really the best experience. And so, uh, we were kind of waiting for, um, Ubuntu and Unity to really have excellent 4K support before we shipped. And ultimately, we kept testing it once every week or every other week. And then finally, we realized, hey, this isn't so bad. We could probably send some patches upstream and work and work with some developers, uh, over at, uh, canonical and Ubuntu and in the Ubuntu community and really make it,

uh, a very nice experience. And so, uh, we started working on that and, and yeah, I've got, I've got a list of things that we did.

Um, and I'd like to share that with your group here. I'm curious, Ryan, my experience with Ubuntu out of the box is it's not aware that I'm on a high DPI display, but I can go in there, I can drag that little scaling slider

up a bit and the launcher looks better and stuff generally looks like it renders better. I'm assuming what you guys did was more than just by default set that DPI scaler to higher. Yeah, that's one of the changes that we made. And we do that through our driver that ships with every machine. But we also have been working with the Unity developers, and I have to give a shout out to our engineers,

both Jason Droz and really David Jordan, who I think you may have shared a video of him once when talking about System76 on one of your podcasts, but he's been doing the lion's share of the work on making adjustments and making patches to make this all really a great experience and then uh cassidy who's part of the elementary project he's our web developer he's actually the guy who's been pushing really hard for um 4k for us to ship a 4k machine for for a while good man nice shout out to cassidy and he uh he has done a ton of testing

as well and i him and david have both sent uh filed lots of bug um reports as well as um sent patches where they could uh so we so i know david's been working working with some of the Unity developers to get proper high DPI scaling support into Unity and the Unity settings daemon. And he also went ahead and set the scaling in our driver. So if somebody gets one of our machines, it's all out of the box. It's already got the proper scaling we also set the console fonts um on the virtual terminal so that it's the proper size that's out of the box yeah for sure nice touch we also have been filing bugs against applications that are used on ubuntu but aren't quite perfect because of the toolkit that they use and so for, for instance, like GIMP with the scaling settings looks okay,

but really a lot of these applications, not just GIMP, could use like if they're GTK2 apps, if they're reported to GTK3, they have much better support for high DPI displays. And so we've been trying to work with those projects and file big reports to say like, hey, this is something that you guys should be thinking about. And then we've also been identifying the issues and documenting them along with known solutions or workarounds. So one of those things we documented was where to get a high dpi theme for gimp and we're going to be releasing that in a blog post and then also a support doc

for anybody out there who's using a high dpi display to take advantage of and it will just have a ton of resources for how to change settings so that they better support high dpi or in the case of things like gimp and other projects like where maybe to better support high dpi or in the case of things like gimp and other projects like where maybe to download a high dpi theme or something like that and then finally we're we're talking about backporting the default theme and 1610 to 1604 because it's a little bit crisper and it just looks better in high dpi and we still ship some we still ship machines with the lts so we think that people would appreciate that ryan what's your sense of the conflict between creating a product that is unique and stands out

so in this case high resolution display uh maybe better battery life, things that you want. You guys want to ship as a company, as a product. How much discussion happens internally from, well, what can we break off as our own driver PPA and package? And we're just going to say, this is where we're going to deviate from the norm, from the Ubuntu base. And how much does trying to stick to the Ubuntu base weigh

on you when System76 making a decision? Because what I'm hearing a little bit, and I think this is perfectly understandable, is in order to make a standout competitive product, System76 is having to go more off into the weeds a bit and do some of their own engineering, do some of their own presets, and do some of their own engineering, do some of their own presets, configure some of these things out of the box that are forking a bit from the Ubuntu defaults and probably forking in a way – not forking is the right way, but deviating in a way that makes for a better product. How much of a line is that to walk internally?

Do you have a sense of that? So we always do that to walk internally do you have a sense of that so we always do that to some extent and also we unlike other vendors that are shipping computers we are shipping an open source operating system so there's some onus on nice to see maybe more on the part of people reaching out to vendors like us and maybe helping to plan around a release. And this goes for like Sputnik as well. I'm not sure how, how often Dell,

the Dell team over there talks to canonical or the community, but when working on this release, it would be nice to have maybe some more communication, but, but I guess, I guess that, on this release, it would be nice to have maybe some more communication. But I guess that could be achieved via the community route. And oftentimes, with this, we didn't want to be really loud about it in the community and raise a bunch of issues on behalf of System76 for the 4K high DPI product because we were worried about running into serious issues and not being able to ship it,

but having gotten people's hopes up. But at the same time, I guess to answer your question, there's a lot of onus that fell on us with this product. But we couldn't have shipped anything else because of our dedication to not shipping a substandard product. And we wanted to make sure that high DPI support was really solid before we shipped it out. I have heard from probably 50 different listeners that said, yeah, a system that I can put five terabytes of storage in and get 4K display. I'm going to buy that.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That's that, you know, I look at that and I go, as long as all of the applications you need are available under Linux, there's really no reason that that wouldn't work as a serious workhorse. That's a nice machine. I don't want to classify myself or label myself as doing a particular thing. But when I look at buying a laptop to run Linux, I could give – I could really give two shits about the out-of-the-box experience of the installed OS because if it's going to be Ubuntu Unity, I'm likely going to be reloading anyways to Arch and GNOME 3. And so I really want fantastic hardware for me to get my work done. GNOME 3. And so I really want fantastic hardware for me to get my work done. And I really think that this is probably one of the best machines out there. I haven't tried the 4K Oryx. I would love to get my hands on it and try it because I am a high DPI Linux skeptic. I believe it on

some platforms, on some desktops, and on others, I'm a total skeptic. So I think that's one of the things that's really tricky about 4K under Linux is it absolutely depends on your implementation. If you think you're going to go run XFCE under 4K, screw you. Don't talk to me. I don't want to hear it. You're off on your own. I know it can be done. Yeah, fine. You know what? Put your glasses on and squint. Fine. But it really is going to depend on your implementation. So that's why I'm curious about some of the tweaks System76 has made.

I'm curious about people that end up with a 4K Oryx and load GNOME 3 on there, something GTK 3.22 with beautiful high DPI support. I got an email a couple of days ago from somebody that said, Linux high DPI support is a disaster. It is

just totally unbaked. It is unusable. And I was reading it on a machine that's high DPI that I've literally had zero high DPI, and no problems. Really, anything that's GTK just looks great. It just looks better than macOS looks on the same hardware. It really honestly does. And I'm not – it just absolutely just looks better. It looks so good.

So when I – and I'm reading this guy's email where he tells me how high DPI support totally doesn't work under Linux. Well, yeah, you're using XFCE. Yeah, exactly. That's what you should expect right now. I'm sorry. So the implementation really, really matters. And I – Sometimes even the programs you end up using and what toolkit they use. I think the majority of our audience just needs access to very powerful hardware with great resolution screens.

And they will figure out if they want to run Unity with the System76 package installed or if they want to run GNOME 3 or if they want to run Plasma 5 or Unity. It's just a great machine, I suspect. for Unity. It's just a great machine, I suspect. And I mean, it's only a good thing if more people have access to 4K hardware, can start figuring things out, you know, helping the community figure out what we need to do better. And we're going, like I said, we're going

to release a blog post that has some of the things that we've noticed still kind of suck under 4K. And I'm hoping that the hive mind here can, you know, help out those people working on those projects or at least file bugs when they get their hands on, for instance, the 4K orcs. There are some things about the orcs that I want to share because I work for the company. I want to share because I work for the company and it's,

and I would love to take this time to use my 10 minutes of, of fame to, uh, put a bug in their ear. Uh, so one thing that we heard a lot during the Mac book pro blow up was, why aren't you shipping a 4k device? And, uh, we are now shipping a 4K device. And it has 3.1 million more pixels than the MacBook Pro Retina.

Whoa. The Oryx Pro, a lot of people talk about its size. Well, that's what you get when you put a desktop grade gpu in a laptop and i would love to see somebody uh use some of the same applications side by side on a macbook pro and the oryx and tell me which one they want to use for their day-to-day work on on accomplishing big boy stuff ryan how many times do you guys get questions asking if they can be Hackintoshed? Because I've probably gotten about 35

emails asking if the Oryx Pro can be Hackintoshed. You guys get that? Do you know? I get that a lot. And they're not going to not run Linux. They just want all three of that triple boot goodness. I would tell you my semi-educated guess would be ain't going to work because the GTX 10 graphics card, there's no Mac that ships with good graphics.

So you're kind of left there. So I get that question quite a lot. that I'm hoping that all of Linux will benefit from is recently we started working pretty closely with a couple guys over at NVIDIA. And we have a direct line to them now. And we've used that relationship to improve people's experience on using NVIDIA and, uh, NVIDIA and, and say like, Hey, this is a problem, you know, and, and talk about things that need to be patched. Um, so, uh,

that's great. Yeah. I would, so I would, I say that to encourage people to, uh, if you can, you know, don't throw Mac OS on this beautiful machine, run Linux on it. And, and, uh, we're, we're making sure that the hardware just works out of the box and is a great experience. And, um, there's other stuff coming down the pipe that I think people using these machines will really appreciate. And so, uh, give us a shot, you know, the, uh, we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this release specifically. And we'd love to have this set the standard for what a 4K device can be with Linux preloaded. And to your earlier point, and I think you're going to talk about this more, to your earlier point, and I think you're going to talk about this more.

As far as we know, we are the largest Linux-only vendor in the world at this point. So just want to put that out there. So I would encourage folks to give us a try. We have a 30-day guarantee, so if you don't love the machine,

we'll refund you. You know what, Ryan, you should get a bonus stipend as a natural salesman. You know what, Ryan? You should get a bonus stipend as a natural salesman. You are great at that. And I think that was pretty well said. It is – I think System76 has really gotten a lot of people's attention just based on the emails I've gotten from Coder Radio. So just a side note.

Michael Dominick has recently gotten the lemur. And I would encourage you if you're curious to hear about a macOS primary – he's a developer. And he just really cares about shipping apps. And he has been switching from a app store, creating phone apps for Android and iOS to server-side apps. And when he started looking at doing more and more server-side stuff, he kind of started looking at developing for Ubuntu. And he needed a new machine. It all kind of lined up, and he got a Lemur.

And the first couple of weeks, like, he hit— the first couple of weeks went really good. A couple of weeks in, he hit some road bumps. And now he's, like, five weeks in, and he's, like, sprinted past them. And they're all kind of documented, like, the last four or five weeks of Coda Radio. If you're curious at all and want to go check that out. Just to hear – somebody who's switching for completely practical reasons. Has real work to get done.

Not for advocacy reasons. And, yeah, it's fascinating because like in the latest episode, he goes on his trip for a family trip. And he can only take one machine with him. So he brings the lemur, huh? He brings the lemur. And that was interesting. So anyways, I want to now talk about a little bit, Wes, just your thoughts on 2020.

The year 2020. The future. Microsoft's making like the Studio 3. Apple's still shipping the same exact MacBook they shipped today, but it's got this touch bar on it still, right? The touch bar, it's like twice as big. No, they don't do anything. It's just – it's the same exact Mac. And more PC vendors are falling by the wayside.

Is this a legitimate scenario in your mind? Is this something that we should actually worry about? Are we heading towards this monolithic vendor platform where the general PC that you throw together is going to be extinct? And one last thing before I completely throw it to you is, I'll tell you what, hand on heart, it seems like it is getting shittier and shittier to build your own PC. Like you order, say you're going to build like four or five PCs at once.

You order the parts off – oh, I don't know. That goes – those jerks over at Newegg. And they all show up and two out of the three parts don't work. And when you – now when you build a PC, it's constantly, well, do I have to RMA this part? Is this not the right thing? It's the worst. It has gotten – if you do one PC and all your parts show up and everything

works, good for you. Congratulations. You win the internet for the day. But for those of us that might try to build multiple machines at once, and you get all of the same effing parts. It's not like you get all weird parts. Three of the same motherboard, three of the same video card, three of the same sticks of RAM, etc.

I think you'll forever be burned by this. Well, it just recently happened to the beard too. Oh, no. Yeah. I'm sure he'll tell you all about it on user error coming up. Anyways, my point is it's getting to be shitty out there. For those of us that want a general PC platform based on the x86 chip that I can just throw Linux on there.

Thank God there's still vendors out there shipping Linux-specific machines, but I'm worried about the year 2020, Wes, and do you share my chicken little outlook, or do you think things are just going to be fine and dandy? For those of us who want a non-secure boot, non-lockdown, non-arm

licensed platform that we can just install Linux and get work done. I think it's plausible. I think there's still a large inertia in the enterprise sector. I think Dell has that pretty well and their competitors in that arena in terms of business workstations. Just for right now, I don't know how long that will take, but I do think what you're saying is very plausible in the consumer space, kind of the mobile phonification of these.

And then it's a couple large vendors. It starts getting blurred between like what do they make? It's a tablet. It's a tablet and a computer. Oh, your computer is just a big touchscreen. Where does this draw? So I could definitely see that people will get used to buying in that model, a normal computer where you just have an LCD monitor that isn't a touchscreen where you have a keyboard or mouse, unless you're doing like a lot of work at home,

or, you know, you can't get like a nice little keyboard. I could see a lot of people doing that, especially, and then maybe they still have their Dell OEM thing at work for their, you know, engineering job or something. But I don't know where that puts a consumer person, you know, who just wants to buy one, doesn't need to buy a thousand, it probably will mean that market shrinks. It may mean that building your own computer is no longer less expensive or even competitive with buying something that you could get. And you may just need to start doing things like maybe, you know, the people like System76 still competing or iX systems and get yourself built a custom system. But I definitely see it could be bleak.

We'll see just how bad it gets, though. Anybody in the Mumble room want to jump in on the topic before we move on? If you have any thoughts on the year 2020 and how it's going to look for the general PC platform and loading Linux? I know it's kind of out there, but it's something I've been thinking about when I look at the response to the Surface Studio and people are like, oh, my God, Microsoft is innovating. Oh, man, this is incredible. Look at them. Oh to the Surface Studio and people are like, oh my God, Microsoft is innovating. Oh man, this is incredible. Look at them.

Oh, the touch bar. Like anyway, anybody in the mobile room have any thoughts on that? I still think that going second, let me see, going secondhand would be better or I still believe in building your own. I know you've had issue and maybe Rikai has issue but that

doesn't necessarily mean everybody's going to and most people that i know who still build know that's going to be a thing that they watch out for that so unfortunately it's a thing that you have to watch out for so keep in mind and it'll always be there yeah i feel like building your own is the ultimate and me personally i still try to build my own but also if someone's asking me or family member or friend i still try to suggest something that will be linux friendly like dell still does xps with linux XPS with Linux. You know, System Center V6 is definitely up there. IntroWare. Even Purism. I mean, you know, I try to just do that because I still feel it's better.

I'll say this, too, just in defense of Build Drone. The systems that we successfully, where the hardware works and all of those, those systems are so unbelievably rock solid. They're like the best computers ever. In fact, that computer right there is a system we built years ago that was first built as a Hackintosh. Then it was the main presentation machine that I used for visuals on the stream. Then it was my primary workstation. Then it was a temporary editing system for Linux Fest Northwest. And now it's our mumble slash Skype system. And it's got to be six years old. And it is a custom built

system that has just been a rock solid, totally great performer. But Bitmux, I wanted to give you a chance to jump in on why you're not really so worried about the commodity market drying up. Go ahead. I think it's definitely going to shift. I think we'll see perhaps a reduction in number of individual parts available, or a number of manufacturers available making motherboards and individual parts and pieces.

But NVIDIA's not going away and ASUS and Intel, they're not going to go away. And they're always going to be building hardware that's going to work in the server market because obviously that's not going away either so i think x86 i mean as a platform is going to be competed with by other other platforms arm is already competing and yes it's closed yes that's not good however i don't think it's going to disappear on us until you get something like

quantum computing or some completely generational leap in which case I'm not too worried that the Linux community is not going to jump on board there if it's at all possible. I like that. That's a fair take. I think that sounds pretty rational. And Mr. Sipes, I'll give you the closing thought on the topic. Go ahead, Ryan. topic. Go ahead, Ryan. So the only thing about building your own, and I have a machine beside me that I built a couple of years back that I still love and it works great, is that when you build your own, the vendors of like, for instance, NVIDIA and intel and the motherboard have no idea what operating system

that you're running on that machine and so uh versus like buying something from system 76 or another linux vendor those people are actively saying to the folks the vendors vendors, like, hey, we're running Linux on this. All these purchases that we purchased from you are for Linux machines, and that equals voting with your wallet. And so you see better Linux support as a result of that. There's a reason why NVIDIA is now, we're now able to talk to NVIDIA directly. And that's because we've managed to buy enough of their products that it's worth their time to have a conversation with us. And so there is an element when you buy a machine of voting with your wallet. And that's why I discourage

people from buying Windows, machines with Windows licenses, because that's being chalked up to another Windows sale, which means more, more time and resources going into making sure that that hardware supports Windows well, and not into making it support Linux well. And this was one of the reasons that I joined System76 so that we could have, you know, so that I could help a company that's going to make Linux a better experience on hardware, period. And so I would just ask that everybody take that into account before you buy a machine from, like, Lenovo that's got Windows pre-installed and throw Linux on it.

You know, think about what that is, what you're voting for. You're voting for Secure Boot. Get it out of here. Gollum has been thrown down, Mr. Sipes. I like it. And I tend to agree. In fact, I often – I talk about voting with your wallet in a big sense because I think just being able to represent that market is pretty important. And I don't know if until you really think about it, it might not cross your mind. You look at, oh, I look for this kind of thing.

I want this keyboard or I want the nipple here or I want this functionality that does this. And that's sort of what predominantly might drive your decision. But as you sort of look at this from an advocacy standpoint, you do have to think, well, what is in my best long-term interest as the platform that I want to use to get my work done? For me, not only do I use Linux because I love it. Right, I love it, Wes. I love it.

But I use Linux because it's the best platform for me to get my work done, my work. Wes, the work, the stuff that I use that pays the bills, that puts the cereal in my children's mouth. They love that cereal. Well, unfortunately. The work I do depends on Linux. And so when you think about it in a platform that makes you money, it's a whole different way of thinking about it. It's a whole different way of thinking about it. It's a whole different perspective. It's a whole different lens to look at Linux and your investment in its long-term success. The reason you want to use Linux as a general computing platform is because it doesn't have that strategy tax.

And the way to make it a successful long-term platform on desktop hardware is by voting with your wallet and buying from companies that support Linux out of the box. And I mean I'm often tempted because myself, I have a workflow that works best with Final Cut. So I'm tempted like, gosh, it would be nice to have a faster laptop that I do will boot Final Cut. I mean Mac, Mac OS, whatever they're called. Essentially Final Cut OS and Arch Desktop, right? That's what I would like to be able to do.

And so it's tempting from just like I can get more work done faster standpoint. It's very practical. It's very like right now. You know what it means is if I can get this done faster, that means I get to go sit on the couch and snuggle sooner. And that is what it's really about. It's about being able to YouTube and chill. I don't want to have to work extra when I can have a machine that does a job faster.

And so when I look at that Oryx and I look at other systems like that that are just super-ass fast, I just – oh, man. I hope more and more professionals go that way so that way one day my workflow is available on there. I can do like 98 percent of my job. It gets closer every year, but it's like not quite. And now I am so close. I'm like on the boat and I'm starving and I can see the coast, but I can't yet get to land. It's torturous. So, Mr. West, you have the Apollo there running Fedora 25 supposedly.

I don't know yet. I just noticed that you have given me back the gauntlet here, the red Toshiba 16 gigabyte thumb drive. The flag has been laid down. So let's find out if you went into legacy boot mode, if you used EUFI, and if Fedora 25 is booting. But first, Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged is where you go to support the show. It's a platform created by Linux enthusiasts. For those of you who want to learn more about Linux,

make some money, improve your career or your skill set, or even just challenge yourself. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to support the show and sign up for a seven-day free trial. I like this because it doesn't matter sort of what your bent is on training. If you want to go after certs, they have course tracks for you. If you want to just actually improve your skill set, they have hands-on scenario-based labs to give you real-world experience on real servers.

If you're interested in certain types of content, they have learning paths that give you highlights on those particular tracks. And the other thing that's really nice is if you're a company, they have team accounts. So a bunch of you can work together. Say you're going to implement something new at your business and you want to train everybody on it. Linux Academy has courseware on that. They just recently closed another round of funding. And every time they do that, they invest back into the courseware. It just gets better and better.

Improve on the existing courseware and then create new stuff that – I mean like at first when they launched the – I'll be honest. When they launched the Azure courseware, I was like, really? Azure? But now like months and months later, it's like, oh, yeah, obviously. Of course. Because it's not just the essentials like how you build a Linux system or how it works or how you fundamentally interact with Linux or how you do some of the basic networking essentials. But it's all of the stuff around Linux, too, as a platform. And I think that shows that they're not playing catch-up.

They're giving you things like when they're hot. And before, when Linux Academy sees that people are really using them, work's getting done, they are professionals in the industry, so they know. It's kind of nice, too. If you're a listener of this show, you're going to love the community. It's stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members because they've been a sponsor with us since the very beginning. LinuxAcademy.com

slash unplugged and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. So I want to ask Ike Mr. Solis on Twitter, Mr. at Solis Project on Twitter, the heart

behind Solis, a distribution that puts the middle finger to everybody else's face and does it its own way. And I really got to respect it because it really is a desktop operating system designed for modern computing. We were talking about it on the pre-show, which maybe will be in the post-show of this show, that sort of makes Solus stand out from a woe that I was suffering under Arch. And we've kind of been checking with Ike over the year as he's been doing major improvements

and of course Josh is a long time community member as well and he's stopped by. And so I've been thinking about something recently that seems impossible and it's only going to get me trolled. So I thought Ike would be the best person to consult. Obviously. So Ike, welcome back to the Linux Unplugged show.

Thanks for having me. So I wanted to genuinely, and I really truly mean this, I wanted to test the usability feel of different desktop environments and distributions. Like comparing KDE Plasma and KWIN to, say, GNOME, Clutter, Mutter, GNOME Shell. And just the feel of all – like how do you measure the feel of something? And the reason why I thought of you, Ike, is because Solace feels like it's one of those distributions where how the desktop feels, how fast it feels, how it all goes together, how software is installed, how all of that feels is part of the consideration. It's one of those unquantifiable things that almost just comes down to taste and perception. And so I feel like maybe this is an impossible goal of mine, but I wanted to pick your brain

as not just a distro maintainer, but as somebody who's thinking about the feel of it all the time. How do you measure it? How do I review and benchmark it? Well, I mean, it's kind of a case of benchmarking real performance versus perceived performance, which is how fast the user thinks something is. And the changes we've had in operating systems in the last few years, especially with the advent of System system d with having things start later in the boot process we've kind of moved towards perceived performance um as an example when you log into your desktop your networking isn't actually ready yet it's starting up and then it's ready after

you've logged in so i think that's more of the question isn't it like how do users think things are fast even if they're're not? And the best example of that really is with material design. It's completely focused on the perceived performance of something, which is why you have short, snappy animations that can't be beyond, say, 300 milliseconds, and they've got to use circular tweening. So it doesn't look like there's any delay in the start and end of any animation. And I think that's what it all really comes down to is how fast does it really look? Does it feel like it's responding immediately to a click? And as an example of that, one of the quite clever tricks I've seen in Unity 8

is even if an application's not launched yet, there is a window there. And that window is a placeholder until that application is ready. You see something similar in Endless OS as well, where they have a placeholder until that application is ready you see something similar in endless os as well where they have a placeholder window waiting for the application to load you have a spinner and then the application is there so it feels like the system's responding immediately the alternative would be something like libra office where it doesn't show up for a couple of seconds and then you see that window so you're thinking okay it's slower on this distro i don't know why it just seems like this distro is slower and we've had that said about

solos as well libra office feels slower on solos it actually takes the same amount of time to start up it's just that splash window doesn't show at the same time so it's not really a case of real performance has been measured anymore it's how long a case of real performance as being measured anymore. It's how long did the user wait for a reaction to an input event? That's kind of what I was thinking. And measuring how the windows move across the screen as you drag them and things like that.

What's that impact like when you move something, when you interact with an object on the screen? There's probably an element too of, you know, like where's the user's focus in this event? So as long as that part is snappy and responsive, you can have other things in the background that they're not paying attention to. Yeah, and they have to feel like they've got absolute control.

So the example of the window, something I remember from Compass a couple of years ago, dragging the window across the screen, it felt like the window was slightly drifting. It wasn't quite stuck to the mouse and it's like okay is this just slower it just wasn't slow that was at the time that was the cool thing to do because it was gliding across yeah yeah but nowadays it's like no it's got to be exactly where i am it's got to be the immediate second i do something it's reacting but that that also has the downside of nowadays it's let's have spinny bars and progress bars and radial progresses everywhere instead of actually making the thing

itself faster or asynchronous all right so just between the cone of silence between us not this again uh i don't uh so you have i i understand pretty clearly on the Plasma desktop you got KWin which is responsible for throwing all the shit up on the screen and under GNOME 3 you've got Mutter right I think so far I'm on track and under Unity you have Compiz what do I have on Solus

that is throwing the shit up on the screen you know and maybe theoretically talking to my GPU so at the moment with uh well with the budgie desktop we make use of motor as well now to make a distinction because people often get the impression that budgie is a gnome shell that's not gnome shell we use some of the same libraries but basically i don't like motor anymore and I know I'll get flack for that, but it's for Gnome Shell. It should be for Gnome Shell.

I shouldn't be using it anymore. So basically the way it works with Mudder and that particular pipeline is actually quite heavy. So instead of just having a window rendering directly to this bit of memory and it's shown on your display, because you're using compositing, that's actually rendered to a buffer first and then the compositor basically does them all, you know, it's compositing them. So you've got all these different windows and it's

making a new texture out of them before it shows them to the GPU. In Mudder itself you've got several layers for that. You've got Coggle, you've got Clutter itself and now they have private forks inside that. So Clutter is basically the scene graph on top of Coggle which is a

GL abstraction layer on top of OpenGL. So there's quite a few layers. Now in terms of Gnome Shell and one of the questions people asked before about Modern, they ask it for us in Budgie as well, is why don't you implement better effects?

The chief among them that everybody wants is from compass right it's blurs everybody wants a blur behind the window or a panel because ios made it sexy so investigated the same thing uh for budgie myself but the way in which mother is set up with the pipeline and process i can't apply say like you would in a game you just apply a shader right and you've got that bit of transparency there well you know obviously to blur that bit behind it you have your zed index that's all fine the way that things are done in motor is completely different each one of them is a sec is a separate object on the frame buffer right so you would then have to apply behind that object. You'd have to read the pixels behind for every time you did a render, which would make something like a blur effect incredibly expensive on modder.

But if you was to say, I don't know, write a new compositor, then perhaps it wouldn't be. So if a new compositor were to come along, that would be a bigger undertaking for someone yeah like say i don't know if it was a goal for budgie 12 to drop the last of the components because budgie 11 were departing from budgie from gnome basically um budgie 12 we'll see is completely disconnected from the the underpinnings of gnome itself so we still want to be compatible with gnome applications don't get me wrong gnome apps are kind of cool but the way that we went about it is a lot of the time budgie pretends to be gnome shell to make things work like keyboard shortcuts yeah because that's the way the gnome stack has gone in the way it's not really as reusable as it once was uh gnome settings demon when you take a screenshot it tries to talk to org.gnome.shell.debus

so things like that we have to pretend so budgie 11 time to remove all that budgie tell it'll be completely removed i not even mother will be left hin hin so i what i'm hearing is i mean sort of indirectly is if i want the absolute smoothest desktop i should probably use KWin still. I mean, like, that's what... Is there a way to use KWin as my compositor? Because I don't know. I want to test super smooth

desktops, and I'm worried. I'm honestly worried that Mutter is going to fail this test is what I'm thinking. And all of the desktops that use Mutter will probably fail as well. Basically, yeah, I mean... Mutter itself, I i mean it works for gnome shell it does what they want to do and i don't want to knock that but for what we want out like the other guys who are thinking beyond gnome shell what we want from the desktop which is you

know like super fluid and a genuine opengl compositor and hopefully vulcan in future but i know they're not receptive to that at the moment, then yeah, KWin is probably your best option because Compass is basically, you've got two versions of Compass. You've got Unity and you've got Mate. Yeah, you could probably make your own custom desktop session using KWin. Okay, all right. Whippy, do you have any thoughts as far as this stuff kind of matters,

the end user experience? I mean, I'm not actually clear on how this works with the Mate desktop. I know with Ubuntu Mate, I can switch to Compiz. I can switch to software rendering. And I generally switch to Compiz if I can. And I'm wondering if you have any kind of closing thoughts on this particular topic. So in the Mate tweak, you can switch between different window managers and compositors. And if you install MetaCity and Mutter,

they will appear as things that you can switch to in Marte tweak. And the reason that Mutter has never been, you know, installed or advocated by myself is because it's completely inappropriate for the Mate desktop, just as Aiki described. It's not a window manager that I should be using. And I'll actually pull that intelligence out of Mate Tweak that runs with that. With regards to compis,

I made some changes to compiz that adds the Marte support so that it comes pre-bundled with a set of plugins sanely configured for the Marte desktop specifically. Now I feel like I should go on a KWinBender. Should I have installed KDE on here? I'm thinking, yeah, I'm thinking so. So Wes, how did it go? Let's tune in here real quick to find out.

It's for people who like to mess with computers. I secretly use Arch Linux. So how did the Fedora 25 challenge go for you, Wes? How did it turn out? Were you able to get it to boot? I don't know how you managed to screw that up, Chris, but here, give it a shot.

You know what I think it was? Reclaim all the space, hit enter, and then I let it go. Oh, look at that, Wes. Right there. Right into the right... Boom. Boom. That's nice, Wes. That looks good. It's on the Wi-Fi.

It's on the Wi-Fi, ready for your use. I will say, you have two hard drives in there. It did use both of them, so it set up EXT4 on top of LVM. It has a swap partition as well. So hopefully that's what you want. That was what I tried to do originally. So that's perfect.

Wow. Very nice. You know, so what were your, you know, just quick impressions using the Apollo? What did you think? I like that machine. Yeah. I could see getting a lot of work done on that. Yeah.

I feel like it's going to be. The screen is nice. I feel like it's a five-year machine. Yes, definitely. It's a good size. It's a good weight. And it looks premium. I feel like it's a five-year machine. Yes, definitely. It's a good size, it's a good weight, and it looks premium. I feel like that metal look is not going anywhere.

And I'm just sitting here holding it with one hand just tossing it around, and it still feels super solid. I love the backlit keyboard. So, Fedora 25. This will be probably one of my primary drivers, but I think I might try the... I'm sure there's a KDE version, right? I've never really done

that during a Fedora review, so that'll be weird for me. I should probably get ISOs downloading or something. Because there's no option when you install Fedora. It's just no. There's no, like, you don't choose your desktop environment. So you're gonna, yeah. Alright, well.

So I think that's probably all we have. I think we're probably done. Now I got a machine I gotta go try. I got Fedora 25. There's so much more Linux to do. I think we're probably done. Now I got a machine I got to go try. I got Fedora 25. There's so much more Linux to do. I got a KWinBender I got to go on. Real quickly, I was just going to mention too that I could just – I had a new update go out.

The Solus project just shipped a kernel 4.88 support and some junk for you AMD GPU users, which is probably nobody cares. What? We have 4.8.10. Where have you been? What? I'm reading Twitter right now. I'm reading the Twitter right now. Yeah, I mean, we got 4.8.10 in since then.

Well, alright. You were supposed to talk about the 80 AMD Radeon GPU junk because I was doing that to troll all of the AMD GPU users and they're going to hate me now. They're going to get so mad. Yeah, well, I mean, it's not as impressive as people think because everyone's troll all of the AMD GPU users, and they're going to hate me now. They're going to get so mad. Yeah, well, I mean, it's not as impressive as people think because everyone's getting excited about the AMD GPU stuff.

Of course, we have the XOR drivers, and that stuff is all cool. Yeah. However, the kernel support isn't there. You need 4.9 kernel to make use of the South Island, is it? Whatever name it is they have. Anyway, the AMD SI stuff, you cannot use without the south island is it whatever name it is they have anyway the amd si stuff you cannot use without the 4.9 kernel and enable an experimental option so as much as the new amd gpu drivers out the new radion drivers out they're still not going to make any difference without

the kernel so yeah they gotta wait till like december the 4th assuming that the 4.9 kernel doesn't slip back a week which it may do so it's like minimum until December the 4th, assuming that the 4.9 kernel doesn't slip back a week, which it may do. So it's like minimum December the 4th before anyone gets to play with it, unless you want to run RC like a lunatic. So it'll be a good Christmas for you. My kind of lunacy. Yeah, good Christmas. That is my kind of lunacy right there. Well, thank you guys all for joining us in the Mumble Room.

Stay tuned. We'll be doing a little post-show discussion. But our Mumble Room is open to the public. If you'd like to hang out in our virtual lug, just go over to jblive.tv.

We do this show live on Tuesdays. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to find out when. Everybody always says, hey, Chris,

when's unplugged? All these guys up in here, they ask me. Every day. They all be asking me that. They all be asking me that. Calligrabing you during the show. You know it.

jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar is where you go to get it converted to your local time zone. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com is where you go to submit contact. Or actually input and contact information is at JupiterBroadcasting.com slash contact. It's obvious. Just go there. Duh. Do it. I don't know what your problem is.

Do it. Figure it out. God. You're so annoying right now. I don't know why that's not obvious. Anyways. Linux unplug the show that's not obvious. Anyways. Linux, unplug the show that does not hold your hand. And judges you along the way.

What? That's a hell of a pitch. Thanks for joining us. See you back here next week. Bye, guys. Most of the web runs on servers powered by Linux. That's true. You know what? That's a great point.

And you know, every time he says it, it sounds very authoritative. Most of the web runs on servers powered by Linux. That's how reliable it is. Android phones are based on Linux. All Android phones run Linux. That's true. That's the operating system. That's a good point.

You're probably using Linux all the time. Maybe you don't even know it. Idiot. So you can get a free version of Linux. There are many, as I mentioned. Ubuntu is a good one. Yeah. Ubuntu.com.

That's Leo talking down to me. You can download it and install it on your XP machine. In fact, I would wipe out all of XP and just install it. It doesn't run Windows software very well. It does, in fact, run it, but not very well. But that's okay because it has an entire Office suite available for it for free, LibreOffice. It has all the software, you know, Photoshop clone called the GIMP. I'm impressed he went with Libre.

All the software you'd want is free and available on the Linux platform. Yeah, yeah, that's all fair. That's all a good point. But then Leo had a few drinks, and he took a call. And mind you, this is all before Leo tried Linux. So he's a changed man now. But before he had switched to Linux, he was drinking, and somebody called in, and they asked Leo about switching to Linux.

And this was his response after a couple of beers in. It's for people who like to mess with computers. And you know who you are, if you're somebody who doesn't want to mess, I just want to surf, just want to buy something on Amazon, send an email to my kids, look at some websites. There you go. The image of him just frustrated and drunk trying to send pictures to people on the internet is just... You know what? I'm damn impressed. He's still rocking. I think he got... Did he get an Oryx actually, speaking of Oryxes? Oh, maybe.

He might have. He did. He might have. And I think he's still, like... I think it just might have now gotten replaced by the new MacBook Escape. I think it's just maybe now gotten replaced. I see. But he was rocking the Oryx for a while. That's pretty cool. Last Windows Weekly, he was rocking

the Oryx. Yeah. So, JBTitles.com, Mr. Sipes, are you still in there? You had a point you wanted to make about Mudder and Elementary OS, which I wanted to pick up on. Yeah, I don't know if Ike is still in here, but it looks like he is. He is.

You might talk to the elementary guys because they had quite a few features that they actually, I guess, helped write for Mudder. And then at first, the Mudder guys said they'd accept them, and then they 180'd on that. And so they share concerns about Mutter as well. So is Gala – so Elementary OS, so when I was thinking about this performance, like the feel benchmark, I was thinking I should try Compass, Mutter, Gala, and KWIN. That seemed to be like the way to – but is that boring? Because that's just my curiosity. And then on top of that, like what's the hardware should I use? Should they all be on Intel? Should it be an NVIDIA GTX 960 or a 10 series? Like what should be the benchmark hardware that all of these get compared against?

Well, KWIN is part of the the Holy Trinity in the Church of Neon. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you trying to get me to use KD Eneon again? Praise the Father. All hail Neon. All hail Neon. All hail Neon. You know, you keep mentioning all these issues that KD completely solves.

So, you know. Oh, yeah? What issues? What issues do I keep mentioning that KDE completely solves. So, you know. What issues do I keep mentioning that KDE solves? KDE has a scaling for high DPI. Yeah, once you turn it on, once you go in there and turn it on and still the mouse cursor never looks right. Come on, you're coming at

me with high DPI support when I'm looking at elementary OS and GTK 3.22. You're coming at me with high DPI support when I'm looking at elementary OS and GTK 3.22. You're coming at me with high DPI support? Really? Can I make a comment about the high DPI support? Because there's something I slightly disagreed there earlier. Ryan, you mentioned about

the high DPI support on the devices and now this is not a driver level thing. Obviously the drivers have to support the resolution. We know this. It needs to be 4K native. This is something at the toolkit and desktop level. This is not something you implement at a driver level. So I just wanted to correct that there. Our driver is what we call our piece of our software repository that we ship with every device.

You mean the System76 driver package, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, no, it's not implemented at the driver level it's it's just something that we we ship in order to handle those sure i just wanted to clarify the word in there because you said driver i gotta be confused to be honest with you yeah it's confusing to me too but it's but that's what uh but we haven't yet changed the name of that package okay it's not like a system 76 defaults kind of thing yeah it needs to be something like defaults or like i don't know extras or something

like that um you can just play this episode for people out there now and well you know you'll have no argument one it's not x It's Wayland is currently our top title. This is not bad. I also like mixed desktop feelings. That's not bad. I like that one as well. I really genuinely. So, okay.

Honest response. If I want a great Fedora desktop, can I get one with Katie with a recent version of the Plasma desktop right now? Is that possible on day one of Fedora 25? I don't think it is, right? I see you as Spin ISO in the Slack channel. Oh. So there is today a spin with a modern Plasma desktop. It's probably pretty bare, but I think I'm going to give it a go.

You can get a modern Plasma desktop with KDE Neon. If you're not convinced yet, Chris, Chris, if you're not convinced yet, KWin has the desktop cube. So do you think, oh, okay. Do you think I, okay, so maybe I should do the Neon Challenge in a little bit, but I got to get through the Fedora 25 review first. I got to stay focused. Hey, Chris, when's the next episode?

Sunday. I'm going to review Fedora 25 on Sunday, and then after that I could be up for the Neon Challenge. Yeah, there you go. It depends on how it goes with KDE. Hey, Chris. Yeah. When is TechSnap this week?

Good question. It's going to be at 10 a.m. our time because of Thanksgiving, so we're going to do it on Thanksgiving Day. We're just going to do it early because I'm a maniac. You'll be cooking a turkey mid-TechSnap? It's 1 o'clock my time. Yeah, I'll be cooking. I'm on the East Coast. Yeah, I'm going to have

a turkey fryer going off to my side. We'll be frying the turkey. I wish. Oh, you could live stream? I would watch a live stream of Chris cooks a turkey. I should.

I actually think that'd be a lot of fun. So do we like It's Not X, It's Wayland? Yeah, that's not bad. I do like the mixed desktop one. It's sort of like an inferred reference

to Fedora 25. I also like mixed desktop desktop. It's sort of like an inferred reference to Fedora 25. I also like mixed desktop feeling. So jbtitles.com, why don't we give it just a couple of more lawnmower seconds. So when the lawnmower is done, we'll pick our title. Get it out of here I think it's wasted effort yep it's winter now no need for this Moen

then your description is not accurate now he's questioning me come on Stallman what's wrong with that alright so by the end of the Lawnmower Man, our final victor is, it's not X, it's Wayland by one boat. In back eight. Nicely done.

One boat. And a title with a comma in it. Yeah, that's unusual. Unusual. Going to break everyone's everything. The internet was never the same.