LINUX Unplugged - Episode 173: Upgrade vs Nuke 'n Pave | LUP 173

Episode Date: November 30, 2016

After a slew of open source updates we contrast upgrades vs fresh install, get an update on the state of snaps & get geeky about performance monitoring our Linux rigs.Plus the fake VLC story, a live install of Plasma Desktop & more!

anybody had a chance to catch my new video series you guys seen the new uh the new video series i launched i think i've done three videos three videos are out now we're just now getting to berkeley and at meet bsd so i've got a question for you yes sir why have you struck out with your own individual youtube channel excuse me well because it's a couple of things is uh i have good question i have been uh i've been over last year, I've become more of a YouTube content consumer. You know, I've always just sort of viewed YouTube as the place that is, it's like another RSS feed. We just dump, we give it, we put another dump of our stuff on YouTube. And I haven't given a lot of thought to how people actually watch content on YouTube. And so as I

started watching more and more of my content on YouTube, because I don't have any other really great way to watch current daily television, and I got the Android TV and it just sort of changed how I consume YouTube. And I realized that I don't like the channels that post all kinds of stuff, political stuff, development stuff, tech news stuff, Linux stuff. It's like it's too much. When I sit down and watch the television, I'm kind of in a track. I have something I want to watch. And so because this wasn't technical, it's not really about Linux.

It's not about information security or networking. It's just – it's really more about me and it gets more personal as it goes on. networking. It's just – it's really more about me and it gets more personal as it goes on. It sort of felt like I would be disrespecting the subscribers of the Jupiter Broadcasting Channel because I was sort of dumping something in their feed that wasn't why they subscribed to Jupiter Broadcasting. They subscribed for technical content. Oh, and here's 10 videos which are tangentially connected to technical content but only for a small percentage of them. Enjoy. But people like it.

So it just felt like it was probably more appropriate to do something that was like this on my own channel. But long term, if there seems to be a lot of interest and it's worth a lot of effort on my part, I would probably continue to produce it as a side channel to Jupyter Broadcasting that's more like the show behind the shows. This is Linux Unplugged, episode weekly Linux talk show that's got a random craving for curry and beer. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Yeah, you've got me hungry. Let's be honest, Wes.

We have a news pack show, and Chris has been complaining for the last few weeks, hasn't he? Yes, it's the dearth of the news. What's going on? But now we've got it's back. I guess everybody was just on Halloween break. I'm not sure what they were doing. Thanksgiving break. Now they've got their food.

They've got fresh energy. They're making Linux. They're all back, and they're making tons of open-source updates. We're going to cover a lot of them coming up on this week's show. We're going to start with the only non-Linux stuff that's worth talking about just right here at the top. We're going to take our medicine and then moving on into the show, did you hear about the core VLC developer who says no one cares about Linux? That hurts.

It did hurt. And apparently it hurt him too, just as much. We'll tell you why. Plus, Debian's making a big change. Ubuntu's going to go with a rolling hardware kernel. What? Is that really what's happening? We'll tell you about that.

Snaps have some nice updates coming along. We'll get a little state of the snap. The new XPS is out, but there could be some big limitations. And then we're going to get super nerdy with Wes. We're going to talk about NetD, net data backends, data miner DB, and all the crazy stuff he's been working on in his day job recently. You know it. I'm really looking forward to this

because Wes, you know, we don't, I don't know if it comes up in the show very much, but you are heads down in this stuff all the time. And you're working on some of the most buzzword heavy stuff that we talk about. Ain't that the truth. It is actually your day job. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. Then also just sort of a heads up for noobs on managing devices in Linux. And then last but not least, I'd like to round out the show with a classic conversation.

It came up in light of the Fedora 25 review we did. And that is upgrade versus nuke and pave when you're doing a new install or like a new release or et cetera, et cetera. So obviously, if you just watch this week's episode of Linux Action Show, I'm referring to my upgrade from Fedora 24 to 25. I've gotten a ton of feedback. And by feedback, I mean extreme criticism. One nice probing like, hey, Chris, why did you choose to do it this way?

And about 95, you moron. So we're going to talk about those and talk about upgrade versus new campaign because I think that's sort of a classic that we really haven't tackled much on this show. So there's a ton of stuff to get into. I did mention we have some veggies. So to help us chew on these, let's bring in that virtual lug. Time for appropriate greetings. Mumble Room.

Hey, New Orleans. Hey, New Orleans. I heard a sandwich in there, and I am hungry. What are they doing to us? I don't know. Come on, guys. I don't know. You've got to get some chow am hungry. I know. What are they doing to us? I don't know. Come on, guys. I don't know.

You've got to get some chow, Chris. I do. You're right. Well, Wes is hooking me up, though. He brought in this Cozy Sweater Brew, which is from Iron Horse Brewery, which that sounds kind of interesting. Cozy Sweater, a vanilla milk stout. Oh, that is— It's nice. It's rich.

I haven't tried it yet. It's not too heavy, I think. Where's this one from here? Canned and brewed by Iron Horse Brewery in Washington. Hey. Ellensburg. You have yet to bring something outside the Pacific Northwest. There was one, the Melvin.

But wasn't that in the Pacific Northwest? No, I think it was like Wyoming. All right. Well, I won't count. But that was a really good beer, so there has to be an exception. So I'm going to give it a go. I'm going to give it a – hold on. Survey says –

Beer is delicious. That's a great beer. That's quite tasty, I might say. That beer is tasty, Wes. Thank you very much. Cheers to Linux. So this headline is a little revolting. I'm not going to decry fake news, but this headline is a little revolting. This, I'm not going to decry fake news,

but this headlines a little much. Microsoft is telling developers, whatever you're doing in Linux, soon Windows 10 will do it and better. Whatever Linux can do, we can do better. The tech giant, Nick Heath writes, lays out its plans for the future of Ubuntu and Bash on Windows 10.

There's a couple of interesting little tidbits in here I thought we might cover. It's laced with this language that I find myself exhausted by, and I'm really hoping as we move on, people can stop speaking and writing like this. And, you know, it's sentences like this. The firm recently updated Windows 10 to let users run a range of Linux tools from inside the OS. The firm. The firm being yet another way to refer to the tech giant,

which is another way to refer to the company in Redmond, which is another way to refer to Microsoft. I'm so sick of it. And then it goes into this sentence structure that implies that Microsoft were the ones to create this Windows 10 runtime, that Microsoft did the development work when it was Canonical that did the heavy lifting there. Microsoft did the kernel enablements, but that stuff was there for other compatibility layers they've had in years past. In the previous version of this sentence, it wrote, the firm quietly updated Windows 10 to let users run. Quietly updated. And they removed the quietly since we first started.

It's just kind of – that's obnoxious. But they say whatever – this is a quote from a Microsoft representative. Whatever it is that you normally do on Linux to build an application, whether it's in Go, Erlang, or in C, whatever you use, please give it a try on Bash on Windows. And they also want you to file bugs, they say. You know, it's a big part of it. The article goes on to say forthcoming updates, some of which are already available to those using the early builds of Windows 10 under the Insider program, include support for Ubuntu 16.04. Hey, hey. More Linux tools like ifconfig and ping,

which is really nice because there's a lot of tools that rely on ifconfig to get information. So if you don't have ifconfig, a lot of other tools don't work. The other major new addition will be increased interoperability between Bash and Windows environments. Effectively, this will let developers call Windows applications from within Bash, allowing them to write a Bash script to automate complex builds Wow. This all makes me feel very funny inside, Chris.

So all of this is moderately nice. Mm-hmm. Right. Good for them. At what point is Microsoft advocating that you stop using Linux and switch to Windows? Because the headline says, Microsoft tells devs, whatever you're doing in Linux, Windows 10 will do soon too. The tech giant lays out his plans for the future of

Ubuntu on Bash on Windows 10. The only thing the guy said is, whatever it is that you normally do on Linux to build an application, whether it's in Go, Erlang, or C, whatever you use, please, he says, please, comma, give it a try on Bash on Windows. That's a very... Right. It seems like really they just want users

and they want to make it better, which I mean, perhaps with no ill intent. Were you going to say something? I was going to say Windows does it better, except for running.NET and SQL Server. Linux apparently does that better. Hey-o, call out to a Linux action show story. Yeah..NET team was starting to run stuff on Linux

and was surprised by a 2x performance improvement before the identity optimizations. This is another kind of story, like I said, we just got a couple of non-Linux stories that are kind of Linux related here at the top. Can I just say? Yeah, go ahead. I am sick of them calling it Bash for Windows when they implemented the Linux kernel compatibility layer and they're still just calling

it Bash. It just seems so weird. Do you think they should be calling it for linux should they call for ubuntu on linux i don't know it depends on what their ultimate goal is yeah they might just want to call it like a linux compat layer because that's exactly what it is the technology is called windows subsystem for linux yeah that's its actual name i'm just it's the people calling it bash for windows but actual microsoft representatives are saying Bash on WSL or something like that. They say Bash on Ubuntu on

Windows. That's how it's pitched. Not in that article, though. I do actually feel like Ubuntu should get more prominence. Not only because it's a name brand that people recognize, but also because it is the Ubuntu user land you're using. And they did a lot of work to help make this happen.

Seems weird to lean on – it's not like – I mean I've seen Arch running on there, but I'm not seeing a lot of people running anything but Ubuntu at this point. And if you're doing anything in production, you're going to be using the official image from the Microsoft store. That's because Microsoft bootstraps the Ubuntu image and gets apt working and everything, whereas getting another environment working is incredibly painful the way they've set it up so far. So there was a bug on Azure that specifically affected Red Hat instances. Did you see this? This is a thing that I guess Amazon had probably engineered around because of their long experience.

But every now and then, you know, I mean, Azure in some senses is a newer platform. And the vulnerability was discovered by an Irish software engineer called Ian Duffy. Ian Duffy, I'm sorry. Man, how great would it have been if it was IKEE, right? I mean, how good would that have been? That would have been amazing. That would have been 100%. Anyway, so IKEE discovered and reported to Microsoft as part of its bug program.

IKEE discovered the glitch while working on a hardened Red Hat Enterprise Linux for use on both Amazon Web Services and Azure. Now, here's what was kind of interesting.

It's because part of the spec, it should have operated under a metered billing pricing model, consuming software updates from a

local Red Hat Enterprise Linux repository owned and managed by Azure, or Amazon, depending on what you're using. Both AWS and

Azure utilize deployment of the Red Hat update infrastructure. Boy, this is super boring. I'm sorry. Anyways, he noticed that some Red Hat packages, RPMs, contain client configurations for each region on Azure. From this, he was able to discover all the URLs

for all of the regional Red Hat update applications on Azure and obtain access to archives containing log files, configuration files, and SSL updates, and they could be used to gain full administrative access to the update appliances. He said that despite the applications requiring usernames and password-based authentication, it was possible to execute and run their back-end log collector on a specified content delivery server. When the collector service completed the application and supplied URLs to archives, which would then contain multiple logs and configuration files from the servers,

he said he might have also been able to get access to the storage accounts because he was able to read all of the information in those logs. Microsoft has since taken action to prevent public access to the log monitoring application and the Red Hat update appliances. But it's not really known if anybody ever exploited these particular vulnerabilities in the wild. So he's looking around, seeing these RPMs. These RPMs have all of the source URLs for the main servers.

He then goes to the main servers, discovers that the logs are available. By reading the logs, he gets the whole map of the Azure network and starts getting access to the systems. It's probably pretty hard to run in cloud. It seems like they're getting better at it, but there's always these little problems. You know what else is hard? Like I said, we're just going to talk about a couple of these. We're not going to spend a lot of time on this, but damn it, this pisses me off so much. This pisses me off so damn much.

Android is hard, especially the security on it. And this is an article that is probably worth your time. And you may have seen the headline floating around, Android security in 2016 is a mess. He points out the obvious. Vendors like LG, Samsung, Xiaomi, et cetera, after selling you the phone, have no incentive to keep your phone's software up to date with Google's fixes. And everybody knows this. And he goes in and makes some really brilliant points in here. He talks about the media tech and blue phones that were available on Amazon that were uploading all of your information.

Oh, right. He goes into how the A-list phone makers manage. He talks about how Google's incentives don't really stack up either. And then when we get to the what can we do segment of the article, he says, if money is no object, my only sound advice can be to buy an iPhone. Apple is still shipping security updates, albeit iOS 9 for the iPhone 4S, which was released in 2011. That's five years ago, kids. The iPhone 5 is still being kept up to date with iOS 10.

Furthermore, then you look at things like encryption implementations. iOS 4, released six years ago, was already more advanced than the encryption in Android 7 Nougat, released in August of this year. In short, already, Apple has made better choices in how exactly different files are encrypted, while Android went for a whole disk encryption, which tanked battery life, tanked CPU performance. Nobody used it. All the OEMs disabled it.

Yeah, exactly. And Android's finally gone to its file base, but they're actually not even doing that, and they're not encrypting important parts of users' data, which is detailed in another blog post. So he says, if you're going to go Android, if you're going to stick with Android, you've got to go Pixel or Nexus. So, Mr. Pixel, why didn't you get an iPhone? You know, I've had an iPhone before.

I had an iPhone 4 for quite some time. And it wasn't bad, but it's just so... iOS just feels like a different abstraction than a traditional computer or a computer that I recognize and know how to use well. That's a great way to put it. So it's not bad, and I can see how other people might like it. They've done a lot of very good things. But's a great way to put it. And so it's not bad. I can see how other people might like it.

They've done a lot of very good things. You're never going to get access to the file system. You'll never understand the structure of it. You don't have an understanding of how applications can actually communicate with each other. You have no visibility over the processes on the machine. I'm also someone, you know, who falls into weird little niches and I like to do weird things like try to run tink on my phone or whatever. And so it's just without jailbreaking and then breaking a lot of the security that iOS has,

I have no way to do that. Boy, that is a great point. William, did you specifically have – I know you and I kind of talked about this before. Do you have any thoughts on this particular topic? I'm so frustrated by the iPhone, but it's so much better than my Android experience, I think, overall, that I stick with it. What frustrates you? I'm frustrated that, like, a lot of applications won't run in the background

all the time and so you know like sync clients and things which i have three of i have to open manually when i want them to sync yeah yeah that is so frustrating and there technically is infrastructure to get that working but none of them have it working so i don't know what the deal is yeah yeah that is i can't check to see if you're plugged in or on battery which i think is frustrating like i know sync thing on android is super nice because you can set it so that it only activates when it's plugged in and it only activates on wi-fi and then you know you're not going to drain your battery by connecting to sync thing but when you and i were talking about this in pre-production i was like well do we have

anything new to really add to this conversation i mean you've got've got the Pixel, so you've made your choice there. I have the iPhone 7, specifically because of this reason. This was the thing that pushed me over. That and application stability. But your mom, she's on an older phone. Yeah, she's got the Nexus 5. No longer getting the new updates. Does that, as a geek, does that bother you a little bit?

Yeah, it does a little bit. Or do you feel like, gosh, maybe I should get mom a new phone for Christmas? Yeah, you know, it makes me think about that. Like, should I have just told her to buy the book, get the iPhone, even if it was expensive? And I wish I could give her more. There's just nothing I can do to help her. And she's not going to buy a Pixel. She doesn't need a phone.

She doesn't use it to that capability. She just needs a smartphone for the base stuff, you know? Wimpy's in there with the Ubuntu Touch. That's right. So he's like a whole other level when it comes to this because even when you're on the iPhone, you're putting your trust and faith in Apple not to screw something up or not to work with somebody or et cetera, et cetera. So I feel like Wimpy's like – he's like the prepper, like the crazy prepper who's got like the bunker that's filled with all of the stuff for Y2K. That's Wimpy right now. I don't want to be that guy. I thought that might wake you up. Well, but really, what are your thoughts on this? It was security one of the things that moved you

towards the Ubuntu mobile platform or was it what? What? Not security so much as just the data pooling um and you know in light of um oh yeah that's right the google aspect of which we haven't even brought into the conversation yeah good point and not not just not just the google aspect but now i don't know if this is um being publicized in the u.s but um the um investigatory powers bill has now passed as law in the uk i've done a little bit of following yeah replacing a um something that was declared unlawful by the courts um last year and was due to expire at the end of this year so fortunately for the government they must be so pleased this new law has been passed and enacted that now makes the previously unlawful thing lawful which is just terrific so yeah so um you

know with those sorts of things and therefore you know companies like google who obviously got access to a lot of data they now become the government's best friend when they're looking to mine information and it's not so much about my own personal data because it's all in aggregate it's how the we were talking about youtube incorrectly content ideeing stuff earlier um i think you know a trend that we will start to see is data mining for particular keywords and photo image analysis that incorrectly indicates that people are subject to or should be subject to further or deeper investigation in error is going to be something that's prevalent. Wimpy, a nightmare scenario would be, let's say you're using Google Allo for your text messaging.

And you have young kids, and sometimes you would pass photos back and forth to the kids. Those would be indexed. But then also sometimes like, I don't know, I'm just hypothetical, but maybe I'd put a joke in there about't know. I'm just hypothetical. But like maybe I'd put a joke in there about, oh, I'm so sick of the kids. Let's put them on the street corner and see if we can sell them for $50. Or some joke like that that is an in-joke between two people that know it's an absolute joke.

But now what happens if the government gets access to that data and can index all of it and build a personality profile about you or something creepy like that and the other example i've used in the past is that being in a family where there are lots of young children and as i've explained and any father will know young children have a predisposition to take off all of their clothes and run around butt naked um or or as near as when when photographs are taken of your children in those situations and you happen to have cloud syncing services turned on the flesh tone analysis algorithms that can run over those photographs aren't associating you as the parent of that child and the innocence of the situation it's just a whether this is a suspicious image or not and and if that then gets flagged up as you are now a person of interest you know that's not what you want so that these are where my concerns it's not about my individual data it's about how that data can be i think Even if you don't have a specific scenario, even if it's not about kids,

because that's sort of hard to connect for people that aren't parents, I think where my concern lies is if we're monitoring, collecting, and storing the data and records today, what information will they be able to generate and suss out years down the road? Because once you have it stored, what

you can analyze and look at that data, it's endless. And as we know, there are so many laws that it's easy to violate even unintentionally or without meaning to. So William, I heard you sign. Is there anybody else that wants to jump on before we move on? Jump on. Jump on. No?

No? Okay. Well, that took a weird turn. That on. Jump on. No. No? Okay. Well, that took a weird turn. That took a weird turn. That got weird. You know, we started with... Sorry. No, it's good.

It's good. How have you been liking the Pixel? Let me pick it up. Have you been liking it? Oh, you're going to let me hold it again? Yeah, sure. So you're what? Now two weeks into it?

Yeah. I still need to get a case. I'll probably order that tonight. Yeah. What have you thought so far? two weeks into it? Yeah. I still need to get a case and a screen protector. I'll probably order that tonight. Yeah. What have you thought so far? I'm liking it a lot. I haven't done much. I haven't customized it very much or used it.

But obviously I'm enjoying USB-C. That's very nice. It does charge fast as advertised. I am liking the camera. There's some differences. I did like some things about my previous phone as well. But I'm having a good time with it. And the battery life has been great.

So it feels like I'm on like a modern platform i'm getting i'm you know i've got the updates from google yes i feel like it's just a phone i can use and like not have to think about i do agree with the author that if you're on the nexus line if you're on the uh pixel line you're in a much better position that is i do feel like i if you set aside the other google privacy aspects and you just go for the os, we all know this stuff needs patches constantly. I mean if they're running Linux kernel in there, you know there's not only is their own software have vulnerabilities in it, but there's just core fundamental vulnerabilities in the underlying kernel. And so getting those security updates for me was sort of like a baseline. And I'm not trying to be fancy about it. I'm not trying to say like, oh, you can, I'm not trying to be like some like Android master race user that says you can only buy Pixel or

Nexus. I'm saying really, like if you care at all about like the security of your laptop or your servers or your desktop, you should honestly really care about the security of your phone. And I think that's why I talk about this because there is such a mindset out there. And I don't mean to call anybody out. But, you know, I go to these meetups and I see people and they pull out their old Android phones. And I'm not trying to shame them, but they're really old and insecure. And I understand absolutely when it's a budget thing. But, you know, even a 5X would be still getting updates and you could pick it up for fairly cheap.

Yeah, definitely. So I don't know. Oh, I really would like people to think about this. I would really like people to walk around devices that are getting updates just simply for not just them but for the rest of the network. Yeah, exactly. It's a community thing. Well, speaking of networks, let's stop right here. And we've been talking about mobile.

Let's talk about our first sponsor this week. Let's fit it all in. Let's bring it all together. That'd be Ting. Go over to linux.ting.com to get $25 off your first device or $25 in service credit. Ting is a great solution to this if you have a Nexus or a Pixel device. They don't have like an agenda to get you to install their version of a launcher or their skin. There's nothing about that experience that Ting uses to monetize the user that requires they stay in the way of the updates.

It's totally opposite of their business model. Ting does not get in the way of the updates from the upstream OEM. If you have a Nexus device, you get the monthly updates. If you have a Samsung device, when Samsung ships monthly updates. If you have a Samsung device, when Samsung ships an update, you get a day of on the Ting network. There's no incentive for Ting to delay it. And that's the business model you want. Now, that's sort of just aside. Ting is just great all around also because you only pay for what you use wireless. It's $6 for a line. So if you want a couple of phones, if you have a Nexus 6P and you have an iPhone 7

like I do because I'm working on both, two lines, $6 a month. Rekai upstairs, he's working in the upstairs basement right now editing this show as we go and I'll tell you what, it would be extremely expensive for Jupiter Broadcasting to pay for a traditional phone line

for Rekai. Oh yeah, like a giant family plan? Because he doesn't, you know, he talks to friends and family over Skype. They all do Skype. He's on Telegram all the time. And when he's here, which is most of the time, he's on Wi-Fi. And so, why would

I pay for like even a hundred minutes? He doesn't use it. Why would I do that? It's so great because I can give him total mobile freedom. If he wants to go outside the studio and go do stuff, he's got data. He's got cellular. He's good to go. From a business perspective, you can communicate with him as you need to.

Exactly. Otherwise, when he's here, I'm only paying for what he uses. $6 for the line. I think it's so great. So go to linux.ting.com to support the show and get a $25 discount. They have a Black Friday sale, and I think maybe Ting forgot to check their calendar. I think some of these devices are still on sale. Yeah, like you can get the LG Tribute 5 for $50.

Wow. And look at this. You can also get the Tintel. I don't know. Tintel? I don't even know what this is. A wearable phone and GPS tracker for $150 plus 50 in Ting credit. Look at that.

It's like a – that is so cool. It's like a little tracker runner thing that has a CDMA or GSM. Yeah, and Ting is great for that. Things you just need a data connection for, you know? I know because you can get just the GSM. You only pay for it when you use it. Look at this thing. It has GPS.

You can track it on a map. That's pretty cool. Pretty cool. And it has a phone in it, too. That's amazing for $150. Wow! I've never even seen it. That is the greatest. Check them out. Linux.ting.com. Mobile that makes sense. Shake

up the mobile industry and get your patches. Don't let your mobile carrier stand in your way. Linux.ting.com. Let's move into some more updates. Now we have things that are a little more controversial. You might have seen the headline, Core VLC Developer Says No One Cares About Linux and OpenHMD is a Joke. Oh, my gosh.

Over at VROnLinux.com, this is a spicy post, an email exchange between Norbert and one of the core developers of VLC. Or it was in Gadget. Do you remember the details on this? I can't remember the details. It was very heated. Basically, the Videoland dev said this is – well, let's get to the – because this actually doesn't really matter. Because this is the part that just caused everybody to get upset.

The Videoland developer said that no one cares about Linux and that VR has no shot on Linux. Mostly it's a driver issue. And this got a lot of attention today. And it's kind of disappointing because when the story was posted to r slash Linux, JB stopped by and answered and said, hey, I'm the guy that was being interviewed in this email exchange here. And I never said that about Linux. That's not what I said. Now, it's not clear exactly how that happened. Yeah, but I want to get into the quotes.

I want to get into what he says actually happened. But before we do that, this is all sort of gotten – the ball sort of got rolling here when VLC announced 360 degree view in the Windows and Mac OS versions of VLC but not in the Linux version. So the website VR and Linux decided to reach out to the VLC project and say what would the deal be? Hey guys,

how come we don't have 360 degree video in VLC? And as Wimpy will often advocate, this is a core feature that we absolutely have to have on the Linux desktop, is 360 degree VR video. And so, I believe... I believe...

So, the VR on Linux site reached out and got kind of, I don't know, a snappish back and forth. There was a bit of a culture clash. It goes into their IRC. They start making some typical jokes about Linux in their IRC that everybody kind of knows are just jokes. This journalist supposedly – quote-unquote journalist, this person that runs the website supposedly takes these quotes out of context and then creates the headline, VLC developer says no one cares about Linux.

That's the background. So here is what that VLC developer actually says. He says, the issue on VR is that there are a very large number of headsets and that all of them require some different drivers and different APIs to work with them. Even on Windows, it's not very stable. And unfortunately, the people writing the drivers do not care about Linux, hence the quote. But the very, very, very, three verys, large majority of developers of VLC are using Linux because it's the only sane system you can use to base your work on. Therefore, I have never, ever, ever said no one cares about Linux.

This is the most stupid thing I have ever seen, especially outside the VR context. about Linux. This is the most stupid thing I have ever seen. Especially outside the VR context. But yes, so far very few people care about Linux VR. The drivers are very bad compared to Windows, and the gamers using VR are very few

on Linux. Seems pretty fair. Very few anywhere, aren't they? Mm-hmm. Well, maybe. We'll see. If there's a star trek game coming out that might get me to get a playstation yeah if i could i would so that's vr on bst almost i had a prediction on that other podcast you know the other one um for this year which was that um vr would continue to lack adoption and i found some figures to demonstrate what the market thought the vr adoption would be this year oh and what the adoption has actually been and it is abysmally

below target by millions and millions and millions of units so i don't think calling out linux for poor vr support is an issue because there's very little vr support and what vr support exists is beyond the means of most people anyway unless you have an s6 or s7 and that i say that because i was at a thanksgiving event over the holiday and one of our family friends was there with a samsung s7 and the new vr headset and it was here how much does an s how much does an s7 and a matching headset cost you know the s7 is about the same as a vr gaming pc and you know what it's it's so bad it is so worse than than the oculus than the vive it is it is Vive. It is baby VR. It's baby VR with a diaper on it and with a stinker in the diaper.

And it's going around telling everybody it's VR. And I watched everybody there try it on, and that was their first VR experience. And I went, oh. Yeah, you can look at a dinosaur. Yeah. You can look at the jeeps over there, and you can look at a dinosaur. Yeah. You can look at the jeeps over there and you can look at a dinosaur. That's VR, all right. It is very disappointing.

It's very expensive. The hardware requirements are ridiculous. The headsets are not standardized. All of it is just – it's a total cluster. It doesn't really give a good approximation of what like the most exciting aspects of VR, at least like the good ones are. At least looking from the outside. And I got to – I will admit I'm not a VR enthusiast. I do not follow it super closely.

But at least looking from the outside, it does look like it is stacked for failure. Core companies haven't come together like I would have expected them by now. There's no standardizations like I would have expected by now. Big companies that I would have thought would be in it are not in it right now. Still kind of small in that regard. There's not a solution for the cable problem right now. We haven't seen like 2017

concept models of VR headsets that are totally wireless. What we're seeing instead are backpack PCs that have huge power cords coming off of them. This is not looking good. So maybe Linux not being on the forefront of it isn't the biggest deal. Yeah, I guess we'll see.

I'd love to be wrong because I really felt like my experience with the Oculus was sort of revolutionary. Yeah, and I know a lot of people who like the Vive a lot. Yeah, I hear good things. Do you have any thoughts on Debian putting everything in slash user? Screw it.

We're just going to put everything, all of the things. No, that's not actually quite true. But there is evidence of a shift that can be found in the bootstrap option that has arrived in the latest unstable branch where a Debian developer has posted news in the mailing list as well saying that if you use deb bootstrap

with a certain command, you can now merge slash user with slash bin, sbin, and lib. They'll put symlinks in their former positions or something to that effect. Do I have that right? You know, and it's just kind of a consolidation, like Arch has done.

Is that what you were going to say, Wimpy? I was going to say exactly the same thing. Isn't this what Fedora and Arch have done several years ago? Yep, yep. I think, I mean, it's funny in the historical sense that now everything is under slash user, given some of its original purposes, and we could just have this thing

just under the root directory, perhaps. I'm sorry, Wes. But I think practically, we have the file system, we have the legacy and dependencies on the file system structure, so this seems like a very practical thing to do. I was looking.

It looks like Arch did this back in 2013, which means I've been using, that's when I switched. I switched to Arch right as the systems I just first set up were switching over. And then the systems I set up slightly after already had this transition set in. So that's my milestone was this big switch that Arch did. That's a long time.

Anyways, if you're curious, the new option is sort of – it's sort of nice. One of the reasons for the change is that the current hierarchy creates busy work for developers. They have said like back in January, developers were talking about the change would mean that we don't have to try to harass a thousand package containers into doing essentially untestable busy work to move things around between slash user slash bin and slash lib to support a tiny handful of systems for which other approaches are available. And they also say another good reason for doing this, it greatly simplifies the creation of read-only file systems, which are useful for things like USB Linux distros and secure environments, transaction updates, things like that. Sounds like a good thing.

Not a big deal, really. Debian is just sort of coming in line with changes. But I guess this means that Ubuntu will also be making this change. That, I guess, is sort of newsworthy, too. And I don't really think it's going to— with symlinks left in place, it almost— I don't imagine the majority of people will see this as anything. I would like them to say, hey, no symlinks.

Nice and clean. I wonder what that breaks, though. There are distros out there that have radically different file systems. Mumble, can any of you be my external brain? What's the one I'm thinking of that has a totally different file system hierarchy that makes a lot more sense

that they're the only distro? Gobo Linux, maybe? I think that's it. Yeah, Gobo was posted there. NixOS also does something different where every package is stored individually. Every single build. Hey, you 1604. Where every package is stored individually, every single build. Hey, U1604 users, would you like a little HWE? Huh? Huh?

You want a little HWE? Yes, I do. A little hardware enablement? That's right. Starting with Ubuntu 16.04.2 and beyond, you're going to get hardware enablement kernels, which are backported from newer Ubuntu releases in order to allow new hardware to work on the older LTS release. That's not new.

That's not all of that interesting. But what is new is they're calling this new version a rolling hardware enablement kernel, a rolling HWE kernel. Essentially, consumers of an HWE kernel will automatically be upgraded to the next kernel offered in the subsequent point releases until reaching the final kernel offered in 16.04.5.

So it's not like true rolling, it's just that you automatically get your kernel upgraded to the next hardware enablement kernel with future LTS point releases. I think I'm getting that right. I mean, perhaps a more, yeah, not quite rolling, but at least more frequent. I like that, though.

Approximately rolling. I was talking with Mr. Tennell there in the Mumba room about Neon. And Neon is based on 16.04. And if I do decide to try out the Plasma desktop again, I think I'm going to do it on Neon. And I like the idea that I'll get a modern Neon desktop, LTS 1604 that gets hardware enabled kernels, which means newer laptops will be supported

and whatnot. So hopefully a very stable system that's not going to, you know, you get new things, but it's not going to break on you. Yeah, yeah. That is particularly appealing to me. Mr. Tunnell, is he in there? No, he's not in there. Oh, yeah. Oh, you are. What do you think about this as somebody who is kind of doing that very approach? Do you care about news like this?

Does this seem like this is going to be kind of a compelling feature to what you're now using as your standard desktop? This is great for future-proofing stuff, even though it's not really a thing. But it's more like my hardware is fine. I don't have a problem with it. But the fact that they're using a 1604 and their goal for neon is to always be LTS. So in a year or two, well, not two, but a year and a year and a half,

it'll be more of a problem that it's based on 1604. Just like every distro that's ever been LTS based, that 1404 like elementary or mint or whatever, they always had the same kind of problems with hardware support and stuff like that. So this kind of provides a benefit to that too. And also because the Church of Neon. Wimpy, can I pick on you? Do you know, does this mean like if I'm running a 16.04 install, will I have a newer version

of the kernel will it be like version 4.8 or is it stuff that actually gets backported to the 1604 kernel that shipped at release right so this this isn't so different from what's been done in previous years or previous lts's so the point two release is always the release where the hardware enablement kernel first lands. And traditionally, that has been named after the current interim release kernel that's out. So at the moment, that's Yakety. That's from 16.10. So the 16.10 kernel will get backported into 1604.

And traditionally, it's not just the kernel. It's also the graphics stack comes along with it as well. Oh, right. I remember that. Yeah, that is kind of a big deal too. But the names of the packages were always named after the interim release. So they were something hyphen yakety. And I think what's happening this time

round is that that naming convention will be dropped so that once you opt in to the hardware enablement kernel which you have to manually do it via updates if you're running 1604.1 or earlier all will be embedded by default in the 16.04.2 ISOs. Once you've opted into that, you will get the subsequent releases for Zesty and whatever A and B might be automatically through updates once you've opted into the hardware enablement kernel. That's pretty neat. pretty neat you and uh do you know if this is changed at all if i've also opted into the live patching service or can i have my cake and eat it too do you know uh i don't know the details on that i will imagine that the live patch will work but i tell you what why don't we discuss that next week and i'll get an answer for you from an authoritative source. I guess I'm sort of fantasizing about like a 1604 machine with a current desktop environment,

a hardware enablement kernel that continues to get backports and live patches. That's sounding like a great workstation. It really does. Yeah, exactly. I was about to say perfect workstation. But the only thing that's changed here, though, is that in the past you would choose to opt into a particular right um kernel release right it sounds more like how i'd want an hwe stack whereas this time it will now move with each of the interim releases automatically it seems ideal really yeah um and and sort of playing into this sort of making it the ideal workstation is uh i saw a really popular story today on Twitter was actually from OMG Ubuntu about I think it was five applications that already snapped up that you can install

right now. And of course, one of them was Telegram, which is of course, they're doing a good job, the top of my list. And it seems to me there's some serious movement happening around snaps. So I kind of wanted to pick Wimpy's brain if we go a little bit further and talk about this story I saw on Softpedia that says now you can package your apps as snaps without bundling their dependencies which i would think would make these snaps significantly smaller but i but at the same time that feels like it's sort of defeating the entire purpose i thought the whole point was that i downloaded this one thing and everything runs. Self-contained. What's going on, Wimpy?

Well, this is utilizing the content sharing interface. Aha. Which was tabled at the Snappy Sprint in the summer, which was the sprint that all the community people were invited to. So the likes of the Elementary Project and the kde team via blue systems and myself then as well so this is when we first heard about this content sharing interface and the idea here is that if you have got a common platform that lots of applications target then that platform can be snapped and it can share its assets so that applications can connect to them. So, for example, in this case, the article in question is talking about the Ubuntu app platform, which is essentially Qt-based applications.

So those that you will find in Unity 8, for example. that you will find in Unity 8, for example. So here you now have a platform snap for Qt, and you can now elect to connect to those assets in that common platform for your Qt-based snap. So does that mean the client is aware when I install something that says, hey, I've already got all of the Qt dependencies, and since that's something that says hey i've already got all of the cute dependencies and since that's that's something that's so specifically these are not dependencies this is a word you absolutely have to avoid this is this is a either a bunch of libraries or a bunch of assets but essentially a collection of files that another snap can connect to and behind the scenes they're effectively being

bind mounted into your application at runtime oh wait okay so um so if another application i've installed has those libraries the new application i install will mount that image connect to the and use the libraries in that image yeah yeah exactly so so how does that how does that affect like updates like if i update one snap but the other snap doesn't get updated but it's dependent i'm not depending but it's linking in order to control that there's a mechanism called assertions that make sure that you can um ensure that this particular platform snap can is compatible with this particular application snap, and those connections won't be broken in any way.

How does that avoid feeling like dependencies, though? Because doesn't that sound like, would that then prevent one snap from getting updated if another snap is using its libraries? Not necessarily, because the platform snaps can be versioned independently so in the gtk parlance you could have a gtk 318 platform snap and a gtk 320 platform snap and a gtk 322 snap okay and within the application that you're creating, so let's choose Get It, you can define in the Get It snap which version of the platform snap it requires. I see. Okay.

It seems like it's like a handy option where like you then, you know, if you don't want to depend on one of those, you still have all the snap capabilities to bring your dependencies with you. Exactly. And, you know, there are some big wins here. So the sizes of the individual application snaps come down considerably so yeah for the example of these cute applications they were looking at individual applications using about 86 meg and coming down to about 1.3 meg by using content sharing and also the build time reduces as well because it doesn't have to pull in all of that stuff. So the build time plummets considerably

from close to 1 minute 50 down to a few seconds. So those are all good wins. For sure. And it's not just the Ubuntu platform snap that's available in this fashion. The KDE team have been working towards snapping kde5 and the plasma frameworks and they've been using this technique for some weeks now and have demonstrated significant gain so i think their platform snap is like 160 or 180 megabytes

and if you repeat that many times over for each of the individual applications that obviously you know doesn't scale very well but they they create this platform snap and then the individual application snaps are you know measured in one or two megabytes or smaller so um you know it works 300 300k yeah and there was um a great introduction to this given by harold sitter who works for blue systems on kde at the ubuntu online summit a couple of weeks ago so if you go to summit.ubuntu.com and look up the um the kde presentation which I think was on the Wednesday, he gives a good introduction to how, and also actually shows the code behind, so shows the Snapcraft.yaml behind the scenes

in terms of the platform snaps and the individual application snaps and demonstrates how they're connected and how they work. So he did a great job of actually sort of showing this, you know, in real terms and how it's benefiting the kde team he's also involved in developing neon so in him yeah well i think most of the guys in blue systems are yeah you're making me you're making me uh you know you're making me want to use neon i gotta say rotten dang it maybe you'll find out on a future show

maybe so yeah well how hey rotten what do you do to mount samba shares what do you do you have Dang it. Maybe you'll find out on a future show. Maybe. So, yeah. Hey, Rotten, what do you do to mount Samba shares? Does that ever something you do? Yeah, just auto-mount. What do you mean? Well, okay. So you're doing it like when you boot up or you're doing it. So one of the things I love about Nautilus is I can show up at a network.

I join the wireless network. I hit browse for other locations. All of the different Samba shares and AFP shares and SSH servers show up. I can double-click an SSH server. I can double-click a Samba server. I can double-click an AFP server. And it mounts using the GNOME virtual file system as an actual folder on my file system, which we're going to get to in a little bit why that's a big deal.

And for me, the fact that Dolphin can connect, but when you double-click a file, it has to download the file to your local hard drive and then open up the associated application. That doesn't work when you're looking at a 20 gigabyte MKV file. It's rough. That is rough. Yeah, and that explorability, especially if you're roving around, you're taking your laptop to different networks. So you use, like,

you just mount into the file system rotten. That's what you do. I mount it as a network share. I'm tempted. I'm going to do it. I think you've talked me into it. I'm going to install it. I think you've talked me into it. I'm going to install the Plasma meta package. I will point out one thing. What? While Neon and

Arch are both currently up to date, Neon gets the newest release the same day. Arch is like a couple weeks at the most. So like a week, two weeks maybe. But Neon is day of within hours. That would be nice. Here's what I'm thinking.

I'm thinking I'm going to install it right now while we're doing the show. We'll see what happens at the end of the show. I'll log out and see if I can use it. See if we have a show still. Yeah. But here's my thinking. If I like it, then maybe I would go Neon. But I might as well dip my toes here. I love the Arch Package management tools.

I love just getting in there and installing things from the AUR like an animal, all of that. So I'm going to do it right now. I'm going to do it like just an animal. Do it, do it. Live on the show. I'm going to put in my S right here. 426 packages. It's only going to download, isn't that interesting, 154.

I like it. Yeah. I'm really excited to see download, isn't that interesting, 154. I like it. Yeah. I'm really excited to see how this goes. Thank you, XE. So as of recording, it looks like I'm seeing a lot of Plasma 5.8.4.1 packages. 5.8.4 seems to be the version I'm installing as we record. So I'm going to say yes to this, and we are off to the races. Look at the way it goes.

That's always so satisfying. Oh, it is. It is, Wes. The way it goes. That's always so satisfying. Oh, it is. It is, Wes. It is super satisfying. You know what that reminds me of? That same satisfying feeling when I install packages over at DigitalOcean. For serious. DigitalOcean, if you want to have a great package experience, install them on a DigitalOcean

droplet. What's a droplet? A droplet is an all SSD powered Linux rig or free BSD over at DigitalOcean.com. In fact, if you use our promo code of power, did you hear that? It's on paper. You know what that means? It's official because a tree died for this right here. You hear that?

You can't make those sound effects up. You can't put that in the soundboard. Nope. You can't find that on freesound.org. You can't do that. It's right here. In-house special effects. D-O unplugged.

All one word, lowercase. You create an account. You put that in there. You apply it. You get $10. You can go spin up a Linux rig. And guess what, Wes? They're not sitting around over at DigitalOcean.

They're now offering Fedora 25 images over at DigitalOcean.com. So you can spin up a Fedora 25 server. Of course, they've got the Ubuntus. They've got the Debian. They've got the CoreOS, CentOS, and FreeBSD. And they have data centers in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Toronto, Germany. The pricing is great, $5 a month for a basic rig. But you can also do hourly.

I've been getting a rig now that's like $0.03 an hour. It's great. That's so reasonable. It's so nice. And the interface is perfect. Like it's the perfect balance of powerful but easy to use. And their documentation is top notch. They just published on the 1st of November a guide on configuring NextCloud on Ubuntu 16.04.

So if you've been thinking about setting up NextCloud, want to roll your own cloud, you want to have some of the services. And what's really nice too is you can set this up on Android and iOS to sync with the NextCloud instance, and it's your own. And you manage it at DigitalOcean.com. You use our promo code. You can get it for two months for free. Just got to use that promo code D-O, unplugged, one word, and apply it to your account over at DigitalOcean.com. And you can dig around in their tutorials, and there's all kinds of handy information in there. And now you can deploy Fedora 25

fresh. Look at that. That's pretty cool. It's nice how much they keep up with the various Linux communities. What's also super nice about it is they're working upstream. They're working with the projects. It's not like they're just going off and taking the ISOs and they're communicating

with the projects. They're setting up channels for updates and patches so everything's handled super smoothly. It's great relationships, right? Yeah. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-U-M-P-L-U-G-D and a big thank you to DigitalOcean

for sponsoring the unplugged program. So I think this is a good sign. Now there are some concerns I have with this, but I think this is a good sign. The XPS 13, the Sputnik, that's been sort of like a trial balloon by Dell, is getting another update. Sort of right on the nose, I believe.

It's right on the anniversary of the Sputnik launch, too, which is kind of funny. The 59th anniversary. There's a new version of Dell's... And they call it like a developer laptop now? I don't even know if Project Sputnik is the right term anymore. But that's what everybody knows it by.

So they have a new XPS 13 developer edition. That's what they call it, developer edition laptop. It's got seventh generation Intel Core processors. It ships with Ubuntu 16.04 preloaded. The killer wireless card, which are the rebranding of Qualcomm, Atheros. And Infinity Edge display, either 1080p or in their 4K version. So it's a slight bump from what we're familiar with. And it starts at $950.

Under a grand. Yeah. That's nice. For an i5, 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigabyte flash. It goes all the way up to an i7. Apparently, they say with 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gig SSD. However, when I tried to configure one out of just curiosity, I couldn't get it above 8 gigs. So I don't know if maybe it was just Dell's horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible bad website.

Or if you really can't get it in more than 8 gigs. But it does seem to be encouraging that Dell is continuing to update it. Now, the commenters on Hacker News say it's not all roses. The battery lasts for 13 hours under Linux, which I guess is less than expected. Seems all right. When he said that, I'm like, good God, man, that sounds great. The headphone port is very noisy with Linux and not noisy with Windows. I have personally experienced that a lot with different machines. Wi-Fi, that's Wi-Fi.

The Wi-Fi performance is, I guess, horrible under Linux and supposedly fine under Windows. You know, I don't know. That's too bad. I don't know. The HDMI port, I guess, does not work under Linux and supposedly fine under Windows. You know, I don't know. That's too bad. I don't know. The HDMI port, I guess, does not work under Linux correctly. So there could be a couple of things that maybe are not perfect yet. Maybe if you ran Arch, you wouldn't have that problem. That's a good question as well.

There's not a lot of details there. But I think this is a good sign. I think this is a good sign from Dell that they're continuing to build this thing. And I look at a lot of the options out there, and I still think the XPS is a very competitive offering. I love mine. I love mine. And my drive just died last week. I was reviewing Fedora 25, and my hard drive died.

So that's like the MacBook, right? You can't service it at all? No, no. I can pop the bottom off, and I can replace it. It's just kind of a bummer that I've lost yet another drive. You just burned through those things. pop the bottom off and I can replace it. It's just kind of a bummer that I've lost yet another drive. You just burn through those things. Brandon, you just ordered an XPS 13?

Yeah, I did. Well, congratulations, Mr. new owner. Do you have it yet? No, not yet. It's replacing my MacBook Pro. Oh, wow. Dang. What was running on the MacBook Pro? Mac OS.

This is a big, this is, Brandon, this seems like a big deal to me. Am I right? This seems like a big deal. Well, I switched to Mac OS from Linux in 2008. So, yeah, this is a big deal for me. Well, I'm going to be really curious to hear how it goes. Will you come back and let us know and give us an update on the transition? Yep.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so Wimpy, you have the 15 and the 13 XPS models. What are your thoughts about this continued revisioning, even though it's not a very exciting one from Dell? Well, it's good because the new line of processors have just come out and they've immediately revved those two models with the latest stuff. So that's really good to see because they are, I mean, I don't know this, but outwardly it looks like Dell are trying to compete with Mac in terms of developer mindshare and high-end machines for developers. Yeah, high-resolution screen developers yeah high resolution screen uh seventh generation intel processors yeah and on the xps 15 dedicated graphics as well and yeah or you know hdmi ports and multiple usb ports is that 15 is that a linux pre-loaded

machine or is that something you put linux on i put linux on the 15. The XPS 13 came preloaded. My lady friend just loves the XPS 13. For her, it's gorgeous. It is that edge-to-edge display sitting in the lab. She's doing NaNoWriMo. It's got a decent keyboard

on it. She can do a lot of typing. For her, it's like a great machine. So it was a real bummer when the hard drive died. It makes me want to just... I mean, I've now lost a hard drive in my Apollo. I've lost the hard drive in the Librem, and now I've lost the drive in the X-Pistic. The only thing I do that's...

The only thing I... When I replace them, I replace them with Samsungs off of Newegg. So that's kind of a common theme. But they're all, you know, whatever the OEM ships them with samsung's off of new egg so that's kind of a common theme but they're all you know whatever the oem ships them with the only thing i do a lot is i reload distros on them constantly that's the only thing i'm doing that's unusual i don't i don't know it's that i mean i'm i'm loading distros on my machines like every day um i wouldn't think it would cause any issue

no no the right endurance on modern SSDs now is pretty significant. You're not going to – those concerns about, oh, am I going to burn through the right cycles on the SSD is pretty much a thing of the past now. I should get a hold of Dell and tell them to send me one of these new ones for testing. Because I've got – mine's like two years – mine's like two models behind. It's like three years old, two models behind. But it looks the same as the current model, right? It does, yeah. It's gorgeous.

It's gorgeous. That screen is gorgeous. That build is perfect. I really like the overall feel of it in the hand. It's a great little machine. A laptop to be proud of. It's just a little underpowered. And so I don't use it for anything serious other than when we're watching TV and we want to browse the web together.

That's what – and it's got a touchscreen. other than when we're watching TV and we want to browse the web together. And it's got a touchscreen. So when you're sharing a computer, she can touch the link and move the screen and I can move it. So it's a really nice shared experience computer. And it sits right there and the battery lasts forever. That's all really nice. But because it's a two-core slow – I don't use it for any production work.

I see. Not anymore. But I do use it for testing high DPI and it's great for that. That's green. Yeah. I love testing high DPI on that because it looks good. And so recently I've been testing high DPI on the MacBook Retina 2013, which is a 15-inch screen, and on the XPS 13, which is a 13-inch screen. And you really, I didn't realize this, and it seems obvious.

It's going to sound stupid when I say this out loud, but I didn't realize that high DPI made such a difference on different sized screens. I know that sounds so stupid to say out loud. But I just thought like high DPI was high DPI. But there is a significant difference to look at a desktop environment on a 15-inch high DPI screen versus a 13-inch high DPI screen. We'll even see that like your phone may have a very high DPI screen. But to see that on the 15-inch screen is something else.

Yeah, it seems stupid to say it out loud. But when I actually started testing – this is something that happened a while ago. When I started testing different distros on different screens and just getting blown away by how gorgeous some of these things can look. So, yeah. So let's talk about something that sort of blows my mind away, and that's NetData. So NetData is getting support for backend. So let's back up. What is NetData and why do I want a backend on it? NetData is a very handy utility written by the same person who has written the Firehole IP tables manager that we've covered a little bit before that I use personally to great effect. And so in his operational life, managing servers, et cetera,

he really wanted something that he could just look at to give him the real-time performance information, quickly assess what's the state of the server. Not like a huge history, but look past hour and then what is it doing right now. Snapshots type stuff of what's going on. Yeah, so NetData implements that. It's just a tiny little binary that you run. They've done, I think, pretty good work continually making it so the overhead on the host is less and less. I think we've talked about it a little bit on last before, too.

It's a really neat tool. Yeah. And it's nice because you just throw it right on the server. Yeah. And then it pops up a nice web interface that you go to. It uses dynamically updates, so you kind of have live, real-time information right there in the browser. Super gorgeous graph. the server yeah and then and then it pops up a nice web interface that you go to it all you know it uses uh it dynamically updates so you kind of have live real-time information right there in the browser graphs and all of that yeah yep yep and so like in a larger picture it's it's useful it's

especially useful if you have a couple machines i use it on a lot of my machines you know just start the service and go uh but it becomes harder when you really want to you know do you want to have historical information or you want to aggregate this information so that you can look across your entire fleet. And they have added some support so that one NetData interface can look at other NetDatas, which is really nice. That's huge. So this is where we start requiring on a back end. This is where you start working on multiple machines and historical stuff. Yeah.

So that works. It's kind of new. But a lot of places will already have had some sort of time series database. A popular one is Graphite, which was open sourced by Orbitz. Right, right. And so now NetData can interface with that. They support both Graphite and OpenTSDB,

which are two big players in that space, and both have protocols that other players support. And so this just means that either you can use NetData as part of your solution if you already have this infrastructure, or it just makes it really easy to connect. And then you have the real-time information of NetData and the historical trending and other stuff that works with like Graphite, which has a huge community of tools and other stuff to work on. So how are you using this? Because I know you're starting to poke at this, right? Yeah, I have poked at it. You know, right now I'm just using it for personal use,

and that's mostly because it didn't have this, you know, back-end stuff. And so for working on other things, we already have some graphite infrastructure. So we'd need something that would play along. And in the graphite world, you have collectors that kind of sit on the host, and every X intervals collect information,

send it to graphite, and then it stores it and gives you graphs, right? So NetData does the same thing, but before it was kind of its own system, often its own, which worked really well for small deployments, really well for you just want to drop something, you don't want a lot of configuration,

you just want, boom, you have graphs, it can do some like minimal alerting stuff, like, hey, send me an email when my disk is over 90% or whatever. So I think now, like, I may not actually use it at work, but I think that for a lot of use it at work, but I think for a lot of maybe smaller companies, middle-sized things, people who are building a new monitoring

stack, it seems like a great tool. No kidding. No kidding. Man, if you were building something today, this would be such a great way to go. And if you look at the GitHub, there's a pretty good amount of activity. People are adding plugins so that you can have it monitor other things besides just the base system.

That's cool. That's very nice. And Wes has some additional information and links in the show notes. You know, we should mention this. If anything we just said went over your head at all, if you're not sure about anything or if you're just sort of lost, maybe things feel a little weird right now. You got a little upset about that. You got a little verklempt like I did. Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to support the show and sign up for a free seven-day free trial. This is where you can learn all of

the basics, but also all of the really cool stuff coming down the pipe. The stuff that people are making money on, basing their careers on, getting jobs, getting contracts. And now with Linux Academy's public profiles, you can brag about what you've done, but really you can also show your employer or your client what you've achieved. Linux Academy is a platform to learn more about Linux. If you're an expert or a total noob, they got stuff for you. Video courses, self-paced, in-depth video courses on every freaking Linux cloud and DevOps topic.

Labs that give you hands-on real experience. Instructor mentoring when you need that human help. Learning paths, which are a series of courses and content planned by instructors. For specific types of tracks you might be going down, or if you're just going for the certs, they got courses specifically to prepare you for exams. They got a great community, I can say that, because it's full of Jupyter Broadcasting members,

and they got note cards that are forked by that community that help you prep and learn. And they have nuggets when you have just a little bit of time available. You can just do a deep dive into a single topic and they have a course scheduler to also work with your busy schedule. Servers that spin up on demand when you need them matching the distribution you've chosen. Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there and check them out. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Kind of speaking of the basics

there, Wes, there was a great article over at opensource.com by David Both, I think it is. And David wrote, Managing Devices in Linux Using the Slash Dev Directory and How the Slash Dev Directory Gives You Access to Your Devices. This month I cover some fascinating aspects of the Slash Dev Directory. Now the slash dev directory and how the slash dev directory gives you access to your devices.

This month, I cover some fascinating aspects of the slash dev directory. Now, I kind of say it in a mocking tone, but this is a super useful tool. When you switch from Windows and come over to Linux or Unix, devices as items on your file system is a mind-blowingly awesome concept. Total paradigm shift. It is a total, total paradigm shift. So I want to put this officially in the show notes for episode 173. For all of your friends that you have switching over to Linux that are a little bit savvy with Windows or the Mac

and they don't understand how this works, give them this article. This is a great article. And I feel like most of the time you you know, you interface with slash dev slash SDA1, you know, SDA1, that kind of stuff, but that's as far as most people go. You don't get into the details. These days, Udev, like, auto-populates slash dev anyway, so most

people don't have to deal with this or use make node or anything like that. So I found it helpful. I think a lot of new users will find it helpful too. Yeah, and it's well-structured with visual guides and all of that too. So you can find that over there. We'll have it linked in the show notes. But it was at opensource.com and it's managing device under Linux.

But I just – I remember when I wrapped my head around that, how awesome I thought that idea was and how cool it was the way the kernel does that and all of that was just – And it's such exemplified the difference where like Windows, you know, you would – anything you learned, you felt like you would just kind of scrape together, hack and claw to just try to pry this information from this black box. And there's Linux. It's just like – boom. Here's everything that I know about. So I got a lot of crap this – I mean it's only Tuesday and I have taken a beating on this particular topic already. So yesterday – no, two days ago, we reviewed Fedora 25 on the Linux Action Show. And in Fedora 25, I talked about my upgrade from Fedora 24 to Fedora 25.

And I just want to play a little bit of that moment from the show. Right away for it right here. I just jumped ahead. Let's see what it says. Air running transaction on libmpg123.so from install of mpeg123. Conflicting files. Oh, we have file mpeg123 libs conflicts with libmpg123. Wait, does that mean my entire installation is done?

Uninstall and move on. So am I stuck on Fedora 24 now? The struggle is real, and I'm pushing on using the terminal. I'm going to do a DNF system upgrade. I'm doing dash dash release version 25, and then tack tack allow erasing. That should do what I'm hoping is uninstall stuff that's blocking and just move on. So I want to take a minute and talk about upgrade versus nuke and pave. And so one of the big pieces of feedback I got is, Chris, you damn moron. Why the hell are you using United RPM's garbage? That's trash.

You should be using RPM Fusion. Apparently the Fedora community feels extremely strong about this. So I just wanted to make it clear that the reason why I was using United RPMs is because we had covered United RPMs as an announcement in the show, and they promised that I would use it to follow up on how it went. That makes sense. So that's why I was using United RPMs. So I got a lot of crap for that.

It's not that you're espousing or trying to tell the audience what to use. But really the whole concept of, well, that's a third-party repo. They got all crazy kinds of applications. You don't know what their standards are. How could you possibly expect your core distro to upgrade successfully? That's the core sort of sentiment that I was receiving. I don't really know where to come down on this. I used to be a nuke and paver like

nobody's business all the time. Every six months, a nuke and pave. Nuke and pave runs better, cleaner, et cetera, et cetera. I like resetting things up. I enjoyed the process. Now, in the last year or so, I've transitioned to I never want to reinstall kind of guy. And the last thing I want to do is set up a new computer. I just like it working out of the box. Where do you fall now with the nuke and pave thing? And do you think that maybe, is this something that distribution should work on, this upgrade path? Or

is this something that users should let go of and just nuke and pave? You know, it strikes me that people seem to fall very strongly into both camps. And I think it depends a lot on how you view your distribution and what you get out of it. So if it is just a tool, you know, if it is more, you view it more like a windows style operating system where you've,

you've installed it, you just expect it to work. You're not necessarily tweaking it a lot or you have made those tweaks, but you really don't want to do it again. You didn't spend, maybe you didn't spend the time necessarily documenting as you set up. You just, you know, installing Linux these days is supposed to be easy. It is easy. You install it. It just works. So in that regard, I think it, you know, especially when you feel like that, or it's an appliance that you just want to be able to upgrade it, right? Like you expect you, it performs very well. It's very stable. You expect that same stability in the upgrade process. Personally, I do like the Nuke

and Pave model. I don't have to do it that much. Arch is nice in that, you know, I only really do it when I change machines or if I'm doing upgrades or other things. But I do think the Nuke and Pave model helps you track your personal dependencies, helps you understand what things you do need, what makes a complete system for you. That may not be a journey that every person wants or needs to go on, you know. And if you're not changing machines very often, you're not changing setups or you're you're comfortable with you know and it depends too like some people if you're not installing a bunch of weird packages if you're not making dramatic reconfigurations to your system then you may not need to nuke and pave or you may not feel

the that you want to nuke and pave right but yeah sometimes like right now you know i'm downloading in the background and i'm upgrading to the plasma desktop i'm like yeah maybe this would be better as a nuke and pave this might be better as a nuke and Pave. This might be better as a Nuke and Pave. And if I decide I want to switch to the Plasma desktop for a little extended period of time, I probably would Nuke and Pave. And something that I think the Nuke and Pave does help or can help, maybe can help, is that it can teach you, like, make sure that your data is not local to your system. Yeah. That was why I was such a big fan of it even like a year ago. I was like, I'm going to Nuke and pave every time because to me, there was a period of time for a long time

West, like for years where like I could format a computer on a dime. Like if somebody was like, I got no problem. Like I knew persistently everything was synced. It was all backed up. No problem. I'll pave it right now. And even, you know, and maybe you use something

like Ansible or something else. Well, I didn't. Or you even just have a bash script that installs all your favorite packages. That means that you can go from nothing to you're running just like you were in minutes. Yeah, exactly. But that's not for everyone, and not everyone needs that. Yeah, go ahead. On Arch, if you Nuke and Pave, when you use the Plasma thing,

if you install the Plasma desktop, Nuke and Pave and install the Intergos build setup for Plasma. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. How come you didn't tell me that a few minutes ago when I was installing the Plasma desktop? What now? What can I do? What can I do? You can install the Intergos build setup for Plasma where you get all the modifications.

Well, what do I do? How do I do that? Intergos-kde-setup. Where you get all the modifications. Well, what do I do? How do I do that? Integros-KDE-Setup. Are you serious? Okay, I'm going to try this right now. Because all my packages, so I do Integros what? Okay, give me the knowledge here, Rod. Is it Integros-KDE-Setup? Yeah, all one package name.

All right, I'm doing it right now. Let's do it. Live on the air. Let's do it. Let's do it. Live on the air. Let's do it, let's do it. So we'll do... Okay. I like your colored terminal, Chris. Thank you. Ooh, look at all this stuff. So what is

all of this, Rod? I'm sorry, Mr. Tonello. It's all the modifications for all the stuff that you would install. K3B. Yeah, K3B. If you install if you choose KDE and install for the Nsenshi, it gives you this. This looks like a bunch of stuff I would have wanted installed. This looks like stuff why I installed Plasma-Meta.

Right. Like, for example, how is KDE base-lib not installed? How is Kate not installed? Like, what the hell did i install plasma plasma metaphor if this crap isn't installed well you asked for the dependencies of everything that's plasma console is not everything that's kde console was not installed by the plasma dash meta package console right yeah that's unbelievable it's it's understandable because that's what it's for it's a de you want the entire kde stack that's a it's for. It's a DE. You want the entire KDE stack

that's a totally different thing. So what should I if I wanted to use console and Kate what should I have installed? Because I thought installing Plasma Meta would sort of cover me. That's sort of ridiculous. There's not Arch doesn't have a solution for that. Ah, okay. You have to install it in this

big list of installation stuff. That's some horseshit. I've got to be honest with you. That's really disappointing because that makes it seem like the only way I can. So that's sort of the way to do it. That's sort of the way to do it, isn't it, is install that Anagross stuff. I mean, if people want literally everything and they want it modified by the, well, not literally everything.

That's exaggeration. You want the vast majority of the KDE stack, and you want the modifications that integros does with the theming and stuff like that then yeah you could use the integros package and it is kind of the integros value add on top of arch right like they're picking your defaults you don't need to go find all the kde packages you might want right so it looks like it's up and oh it's already it already feels fast i've got it i've got it up installed right now it it it it feels oh geez oh geez the multi-monitor setup it's no good it's no good wes it's no good didn't pick the right default for you no it did not but uh this is exciting so i'm going to play with this a little bit i have a feeling this might develop into a show i could have a show i've now

lost all of my notes yep yep i've lost everything i lost everything I had. Who knows what's ahead? It's just gone. We're gone. But I do have the Plasma desktop. And what's funny, see, on the video version there, you can see the windows that I can't see. I don't have those on my desktop. So those are on the monitor across the room from me. I can't. I can't.

You guys can see windows on the video version of the show right now that I can't see. How funny is that? How can I move? Okay, now I'm going to try moving it. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Where is it? Oh, hold on. It's back. I got it. Snagged. You know, this is pretty nice. This is feeling pretty slick.

You know, like, not like in terms of, like, how it's handling my dual monitors, but it's feeling slick in terms of, like, how smooth everything's moving across the screen. Have you done Arch and Plasma before? Oh, yeah. It's been a while, right? And every single time I do it, I spend the first three days

thinking about how much I love KWIN. That's really, like, every time. Every single time. KWIN's great. It is really good. But then I miss GNOME after a little while. Okay, I'm going to try unifying outputs. I'm hitting apply, and let's see. Survey says, hey, look at that.

Beautiful. Now I have dual monitor setup. And so now I've got mirrored monitor setup under KDE. I'm pretty much good to go. Your whole world just changed. And look, I've got Quake still, which – Nice. Yeah.

So I'm pretty much set. I think – Yeah, you'll totally switch to Uquake eventually. Yeah, or – yeah, Uquake, yeah. Well, let's see. So here's the question. While I have it installed right now, and I suspect I'll have it installed for the next few days, will I have it installed by Sunday's Linux Action Show, and will I still have it installed by episode 174? That's the big question.

We'll see. If you experience all the greatness that is KDE, yes. And will I still have it installed by episode 174? That's the big question. We'll see. If you experience all the greatness that is KDE, yes. Thank you, Mr. Tanel. Wow. That's an endorsement right there. Now let's get it working on Wayland. Let's just go all in, Wes.

What do you say? Yeah, let's do it. LinuxActionShow.Retta.com. If you want to go all in, submit us topics, show ideas, leave us feedback. Go to JupyterBroadcasting.com slash contact. If if you want to go all in submit us topics show ideas leave us feedback go to jupiter broadcasting dot com slash contact if you'd like to leave us some notes also

check out my new video series the ones that just published as we're recording today are yeah all about the meat BSD I've left like two weeks ago remember when I was gone that was horrible I

mean it was nice to see Noah but I missed you Chris I missed you youtube.com slash Chris Fisher if you want to see those thanks for joining us and I hope to see you back here next Tuesday. Thank you. Oh, I'm already setting up KWallet, which is the most obnoxious thing ever as soon as I open up Google Chrome. And Google Chrome doesn't look right.

That doesn't look good. It doesn't look like it belongs on the freaking Plasma desktop. Look at that. Look how crappy that looks. It doesn't really look like it belongs. Oh, wow. Even worse, though. Yeah. It sure feels good, though. Look at that. Look how good that moves. It's sliding around. That does feel... That's like KY Jelly on your screen right there. That's nice.

I like that. Does it have that option to use the system? Yeah. What is that called? Let's go there. Let's do that. I think if you right click on the top, maybe, or somewhere. JBtitles.com, JBtitles.com. Now we go boat. Now where do I go to do that? Settings?

I just instinctually go to banksadjust.com, but it's still that hover landing page, and it makes me sad. Use system titles. That seems like, oh, okay. That's better. That's better. It doesn't look like it, okay. That's better. That's better. It doesn't look like it belongs, but that's better. If you get

the GTK Breeze theme, it'll blend perfectly. Okay, GTK Breeze theme. Mr. Tunnel has all of the tips. There's also Breeze Dart for GTK as well. I'm going to go down the deep end. If you have any tips for me and you want to drop them in the Slack, that'd be good because I kind of think I might want to do

a last on this and I'd like to give people tips for... The first tip is to explore the wonders of window rules. Window rules. Yeah, this is what makes KWin the best. People talk about how with Gnome, it'll remember where you have your window and yeah this is what makes kwin the best people talk about how with uh you know gnome like you

it'll remember where you where you have your window and particular area and the size and stuff like that uh it doesn't remember workspaces unless you uh you know install that extension for it but uh there's window rules allows you to have a whole load more control. Hmm. That does kind of sound appealing. So like I can set every time, so I could say every time MPV opens up, do this or what is it?

What is it that it does for me? I don't hear him. Do you hear him? I think he's, I think he left. Nope. It looked like he was. He's red and mumble.

Is he talking? Oh, sorry. Dude, sorry, Rodden. There was a rogue muting of the soundboard. Go ahead. Sorry. Your answer got cut off. No problem.

So basically what it does is you take MPV and it would say load MPV on this list size, this position, this workspace, this monitor, whether it has window decorations or not, whatever, what gravity level you want of whether it has, it's above all applications or only in a particular priority, whether it has a specific shortcut associated to it. That could be great for playing clips on Unfilter. I remember Dolph, there was a problem.

Like Dolph, there was something wrong with Dolphin versus Nautilus. I can't remember. But with playing clips. You also choose opacity of the window automatically. That sounds nice. I've done like a little bit of that stuff with like when I was using Awesome a lot. But that sounds very nice to have in the Plasma desktop. The best part about it is that with Plasma, with KWin, you set the window how you want it,

like the size, the location, the monitor, blah, blah. And then you just activate the window rules on that window, and you go in and check the boxes like, okay, remember this, and we're done. Nice. That's cool. All right, so I'm going to play with that. That's a good one. Wes, you see any titles that are super awesome?

Latest Linux updates has a nice ring to it. State of the Snaps. It's a snap to run Linux, the latest Linux updates. That's not bad. That's not great, though. Will Chris get plasma burns? Oh, shoot. That's not bad. Not great. Will Chris get plasma burns? Oh, shoot.

That's not bad. Oh, great. I don't want you to get plasma burns. Oh, man. We've got to do a user error because Rikai tried out plasma desktop on his new machine. Oh, really? I wish I had more time to do user error because that would be a great episode. You know that people crave it. You know what I mean?

It's busy these days,'s just it's busy these days west it's busy these days with the holidays and the and the double recordings and the yeah there's actually something that kde does that even gnome can't do with gtk like specifically a gtk thing okay so if you if you have a program that has weird, like let's say for example you want to do dark thing, like a global dark thing, like you're going to do probably. Yes, I am.

Yeah, there are some side effects in some applications where you have some things that are dark that shouldn't be. And the biggest, one of the most obvious examples is Firefox and Thunderbird do it. Yeah, Noah's run into that. I don't use Firefox or Thunderbird anymore,

but Noah has run into that recently. Well, I've figured out the best option. I'm actually going to make a tutorial about it. But there is an environmental variable that allows you to invoke. Well, System T said it's the text boxes, and that's the biggest problem with all forms, basically. You invoke this environmental variable for GTK, and you can tell it to load a different theme

than your global settings, just for that one application. So you can fix it by making it ignore the globalization of it. Hmm. So do you set that in the desktop file then? Yeah, you do. Yeah, okay.

So let's see. I'm going to go to audio volume settings. How do I? The reason I brought it up is because GTK2 has that environmental variables function and also GTK3, but when GNOME introduced GTK3 support for it, they broke GTK2 support. So KDE is the only one that actually still has both. Hey, let's see if audio works. You want to see?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. You want to see? We have to see. You want to do a little testicacies? What you got for us, Mr. Fisher? This is Chrome. All right.

I am unmuting the computer's channel. We'll see if we have audio right now. I have a YouTube video playing in Chrome at this moment. Hey. Yeah, so I got audio working. Nice. You know what? Actually, in some ways, I like the way the Plasma desktop displays my desktop little notification tray items better than GNOME does.

I'm sick of that little slide-out tray. I'm done with it. I'm going to play around with Crusader, and then I'm going to – I don't know. We'll see if I can reproduce some of my workflow stuff. Yeah, see if it's production ready for what you're doing. Yeah. I'm kind of looking forward to this. I'm going to,

I'm going to put it on this. I'm going to put it upstairs on my machine. KDE, the Chris Lass homecoming.