LINUX Unplugged - Episode 180: The Theory of Liri | LUP 180

Episode Date: January 18, 2017

We take a look at a material design influenced distribution, the FSF’s new high priority list & much more this week!

Wow, an abominable winter ale Wes brings us. World-class beer, sustainable, Portland, Oregon. Huh. Turn scene. 17 degrees, 70 IBU. 17 degrees, what is that? 17 degrees Plato, what is that? I've never even heard of that.

It's like a beer metric because it's like – it says it's 70. It's got a 70 IBU, which is International Bitterness Unit. It's got an alcohol volume of 7.3 percent. Those are all things I understand on the side of a beer. And it's got – it's one pint. I understand what that is. But then it says 11 degrees Play-Doh. You guys ever heard of that on a beer before?

Maybe I'm, am I, it's P-L-A-T-O, right? That's Plato, yeah? I mean, let. It's a beer. Come on. What does that mean? That means it's degrees proof? What does that mean, Diddle?

There's apparently a Wikipedia page about beer measurement, which mentions degrees Plato. Really? I've never heard of that before. No, I've never heard of it either. Wait, they think Greece philosopher is in there? Did you see that this has a beer measurement metric on it, which I've never seen? This thing is 17 degrees Plato. It's got a 70 IBU and a 7.3% alcohol by volume.

And it's 17 degree Plato. Wow. How many Platos do I want i don't know i think this is the most platos i've ever been aware of compared to zero i know i'm like thinking is this like the philosopher like this is how many beers this is how many of these plato would have drank boy he could knock them back. Yeah. Apparently, it's Fritz Plato. It's what? Exactly. German chemist Fritz Plato. Oh, I see. The Plato scale differs

slightly from the Balling scale. Whatever that, or the Baling. What is this? Which is the, okay, the measurement of specific gravity used to determine the dissolved solid. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, so you're getting, you're getting like, you get to know how they measured it. So this is, like, a dish.

This is, like, really, this is for people that are really into beer is what that is. You know what that is? That's a little nod to, like, if you're drinking this beer, you're a beer connoisseur. So we're going to tell you about it. You get to know everything. Even the Play-Dohs. Interesting. Beerandbrewing.com.

I mean, they would seem to be the ones to know. The Plato scale is used by most brewers worldwide, although brewers in the U.K. and those using British brewing traditions tend to prefer to use the specific gravity scale instead. This is derived by measuring the specific gravity of the wort, multiplying by 1,000, and then subtracting 1,000 from that figure to give the degrees of gravity. Thus, a wort is specific gravity of 1.048 is said to have a 48 degrees of gravity. The Plato and gravity scales can be approximated by multiplying P by 4 to give the degrees of gravity. Well, there you go, guys. Duh. Didn't we know this? See, drink beer and you learn things.

It's some science. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 180 for January 17th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that prepared for this week's episode by learning more about how to measure your beer. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. That's a true fact. True fact. True fact.

We like our beer. We did learn a little something about beer today. I love the pre-show. Wes, we have so many project updates. I actually started today thinking we wouldn't have much to talk about. I know, but people have been busy. Yeah, they have. We got some good ones to go through, so we'll start with that.

Then we have a new distribution that says it's inspired by material design. It's going to create cohesive Linux desktop and apps. I know, it's a totally radical idea. I've never heard it before. So we're going to take a look at a new distro you likely haven't heard about today. And then there's some crazy kids releasing some crazy assistant on that crazy raspberry pie. The Crasberry.

Raspberry pie. Crasberry. I got one here it is Wes look I think I found it. Right here I got a pie 3. Pie 3. Right in the box. If we had a screen for this sucker and a keyboard and mouse I'd say we should try it live on the show today but we'll tell you about it how you can try it out. Yeah. And maybe report back. And then at the end,

I'll be getting some feedback. So I'm going to address something that we've been covering on the show recently, and it's generated a lot of feedback in the audience. Chris has got to get real with you guys. Just a minute. Just a minute. We're going to take a moment.

Yeah. Just a little real talk. Mind meld kind of thing. So that's coming up on episode We're going to take it a moment. Yeah. It's a little real talk at the end of the show. Mind meld kind of thing. So that's coming up on episode 180 of the Unplugged program. Lots of stuff to get into and more stuff that I couldn't even remember right there during the intro. But one thing I can't forget is that mumble room. Time appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Greetings.

Hello. Hello. It's good to see all of you. And I'm glad to have you all here to help us go through the week's news. So let's start with this first story, which I kind of think is maybe one of the bigger stories. It's definitely an interesting trend that's developing. It's now possible to use OpenSUSE inside Windows 10 using that Linux sublayer. SUSE's senior product manager was intrigued by the fact that Microsoft chose to enable the wrong Linux distribution. Ooh, strong words.

By default. So within the Windows subsystem for Linux used by the company's latest Windows 10 builds, and he decided with his own agenda he would go off and teach people how to use SUSE inside of WSL. And he says, why SUSE? And this is some really sound, solid reasoning. Really gets me fired up to go try this. Why SUSE? Well, SUSE knows what they are doing because they have been in Linux business since 1992.

Try to find a Linux vendor, or in that case, a distributor, which is older. You won't. There aren't any. That was the senior product manager's solid endorsement for using SUSE is because SUSE is old. Fired up. You know, I think people sometimes ask Chris, say, hey, Chris, how do you say, is it SUSE, is it SUSE, is it open SUSE, is it lowercase, oh, uppercase, oh, how do you say, is it Sousa? Is it Seuss? Is it OpenSeuss? Is it

lowercase O, uppercase O, all uppercase, lowercase U? Part of the confusion might come from when your own team doesn't even use the right language. So the product manager at Seuss is calling OpenSeuss Seuss, which just confuses the general public. And then the news article is rightfully just quoting the words of the senior product manager who's calling another product, OpenSUSE, the name of his own product. Which is like, yeah, OK, maybe it works for the people who like you're all using it and you're familiar. But for any outside observer, it's just – yeah, it's just confusing. Now, that aside, pretty interesting to see this developing pretty quickly. The Windows Linux subsystem or whatever it's called.

Windows subsystem for Linux? Yes, I think that's it. WSL? WSL. Pretty cool. And the instructions do work, I believe. I have not confirmed any of this, but I believe they also work for SUSE Linux Enterprise. So you can also run SLES on there.

I would want to try – I think I would definitely want to – if I was doing this, I would definitely want to try SLES because that seems to make the most sense because if I'm doing this on Windows, it's probably to match my server environment that I manage. Right. That's kind of what I envision. Probably a dev or admin who needs to test stuff locally. Yeah, you've got SLES servers and you want to have a common local environment just so it's sort of the same, I think, the big draw for having Ubuntu. So have we seen Fedora or CentOS on the sub? I don't know. No, I don't think

those, but we do see there is a couple of different efforts to get Arch on the Windows subsystem for Linux. Like here's one I have linked in the show notes where you can get Arch on there. Which would seem to look a little bit like what just needs to be done. Obviously it's not that much if they're all getting it working.

I'm sure it's just some dealing with the boot, maybe getting the, you know, not boot, but starting the user land, getting everything working. You know, this makes a lot of sense. See, in this screenshot for Arch, under the Windows subsystem for Linux, they're using Yort. And now if you got access to a lot of the AUR command line applications on the Windows Linux subsystem, that would be very useful.

I know they're just poking fun, but to say that Microsoft chose to enable the wrong default distro, I feel like that's sort of the opposite of the truth. It's obviously the right distro because of the massive cloud penetration, and that's really why Windows admins want it in the first place and not really why anyone was ever asking for SUSE. It's also funny to kind of imply like, well, Canonical jumped at this or worked with them to develop this. You guys did not. It's hard to make that wrong when they were the ones taking some of the initiative here. Right. That is true. Although it does demonstrate that there's nothing specific about WSL to Ubuntu. That, I think, is the more promising thing.

Is anybody in the Mumble room trying this or using this? I thought about it for a hot moment over the weekend. I thought about trying it because I saw this story come up, and I thought to myself, I wouldn't mind dual booting into a system and trying Premiere again and then using this for the tools I would undoubtedly need while i'm there right and i could see a use for that but i just i can't bring myself to use windows then you have to install windows that's the most painful part yeah yeah thing is we're not the target audience for this really it's people who run windows full time who want to have an environment in which they can run linuxy tools yep you know natively just in

a window. So your audience are probably not likely to use it and not likely to use it on a daily basis, but someone whose employment demands that they run Windows, but they want to be able to have a shell. There probably is a fair amount of people listening. And I see a huge thing for the enterprise where it's like, yeah, your developers are complaining.

Maybe they want MacBooks. But if you can be like, no, here's our already domained, everything's in Windows already for everyone else. Here's your Linux shell. Go crazy. That's a pretty big sell and a good compromise for a lot of people. Yeah, especially if you can offer them a piece of hardware that's attractive, you know, like some of those like XPS 13s and 15s. 13s and 15s, if you run Windows 10 on that and then you put SUSE or Arch or Ubuntu on the subsystem, it does seem like a – that does seem like just the right mix of enterprise compromise for people that need to use the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem like Active Directory.

Yeah, it's interesting to see this developing. I just wanted to give them a shout out. And more so than that, guys, if you want to try SUSE out or open SUSE on your Windows 10 box, there is instructions in this article on how to get it set up. And then the one we've linked for Arch, it's a script that does it for you, I believe.

And it gives you a minimal Arch Linux distro that you can then go all crazy on. Can we run the show in it? Do a whole episode just ran from subsystem for Linux? I don't really feel all that fired up. I don't really feel too fired up about that, Wes. You know what I am fired up about, though?

N1 going free. Now they're calling it Nileus Mail instead of Nileus N1, and they're introducing Nileus Basic. Basic. I really am excited. This is my mail client of choice. I've been trying to very cautiously recommend it because it costs money for the pro version. And if you don't want to do any work, you have to run off their intermediary host.

But this is really nice. So N1 has been renamed to Nellius Mail. And they're launching a free version of Nellius Mail called Nellius Basic. And by free, they mean also open source. That's great. Yeah, I got the GitHub link linked in the show notes. They're still working on it, so there's not much to see there yet.

So does this mean that they're comfortable enough with their monetization as a company with their being pro-only for a while, that they're ready to... Because that was one of the things I was a little disappointed at when they did go pro-only. I mean, they still had the open source, but it felt like there's a lot of hoops to jump through. They weren't really welcoming that tier, so now that there is a basic tier, does that mean they're feeling more established source, but it felt like there's a lot of hoops to jump through. They weren't really welcoming that tier.

So now that there is a basic tier, does that mean they're feeling more established? I think it's the opposite. I think it's the opposite. I think they need more people. They're hoping to sucker people in here. Well, I don't know about sucker, but I think it didn't work out. I think, first of all, it's funny. Being a pro user, it was not easy to give them my money and it was clunky. So I don't know.

I would not be surprised if they saw not a big success with that. Plus, who wants to toss a bunch of money at a no-name company, at least a company you don't know, building an upstart mail client that's Electron? There's not a lot of people that are going to get in on that when you've got good old Thunderbirds sitting there. So I think that was an uphill battle for them. when you got good old Thunderbirds sitting there. So I think that was an uphill battle for them. And I'm betting this is more of a, well, this is a plan B. This is a bit of a pivot.

Yeah, actually, it's funny you ask that. Daniel from Elementary OS jumped into a conversation thread that we were having in the Linux Action Show subreddit where an Alias employee stopped by and said, there's no Linux builds yet, but we're going to get them out soon. And Daniel Foray jumped in and says, well, my big question is, what's your funding model? Like, how's it changed? How are you going to remain profitable? He says, to me, hearing that the service is now free is scary.

Who's the real customer? Am I now the product? I think Daniel's asking some good questions. So I'm excited that it's going open source, but I don't understand how they're going to fund and continue development. And I know a lot of you are probably like's going open source, but I don't understand how they're going to fund and continue development. And I know a lot of you are probably like, oh, I don't care. I don't care. Well, that's because you are so wrong about life right now.

It's a really good mail client, and you don't... And it's nice to see innovation in this sector. Like, what Thunderbird reinstalled, and Geary stopped it. Like, it's just disappointing that we can't be like, yeah, okay, we don't have Outlook, but you don't want Outlook. You want this better Linux product. And so, if there's a good open source client that we can tell be like, yeah, OK, we don't have Outlook. But you don't want Outlook. You want this better Linux product. And so if there's a good open source client that we can tell people to use, that would be awesome.

Here's a fundamental problem I have with email. And this is something that Nyleas or Nyleas I guess it is, Nyleas Mail, has made better for me. So email is a son of a bitch because it allows anybody to all of a sudden create an expectation of you without you even knowing that an expectation has been created and now being held against you. And so anybody can drop any turd in your inbox asking something of you, requesting something of you, telling you about something. Hey, FYI, heads up. Any of these things, they all create a different set of social expectations and we all have different – we have our own different internal calibrations of how we – Unspoken, uncommunicated. For me, some weeks, I check my email once a week, maybe twice. Some weeks, I check it daily.

It just – it really ranges. But people that email me, I often get emails from people that I work with that expect me to be – not like – not at JB but outside of JB. People in JB know. But outside of JB, people will often send me an email expecting me to respond within the first maybe half hour I receive the email. Let alone the day, right? Yeah.

And it will be sometimes days before I get back to them. I just have to say, I'm sorry, I've been busy. And the thing that N1 does for, or now Mail does for me, is it allows me to take a couple of extra steps to manage that situation where I can take an email, get it out of my inbox, but then have it come back later and say, you have to be reminded about this tomorrow at 8 a.m. Guess what? It's time.

Here's that email again. That simple function, along with its really sophisticated read receipt system, it's better than anything else out there before. It has a great set of signatures and good support for GPG. And now it's open source. It is a very good mail client. It works on every OS you want to use it on because it's Electron. And if you're an Electron app hater, you're like, I don't like the overhead with Electron. That's stupid. I understand. That was me. I was totally that guy. And then I got a few Electron apps that are actually pretty good because that's the thing. There's bad Electron apps and there's good ones. And this is one of

the good ones. So I think it's encouraging for Electron as an app platform. It's encouraging for people that are looking for some innovation to make email, not such a life suck that it is. It's great. And I don't feel like it gets enough attention. And I'm hoping now that they've gone this route, they've gone free, they've gone open source, maybe more people start talking about it. Hopefully they can be sustainable. Yeah. I will say it seems like Electron fits well with your lifestyle where you're maybe distro hopping or on random computers. It's like you don't have to

worry about being in the package manager. It just you know it can run. Yeah. It is. And also it's not like these are 3D games or video editors. They're not something where I have to have the just unbelievable desktop performance. And then let's get off our high horse here for a second

and stop pretending like Qt and GTK are these hyper-optimized, lightweight toolkits that make application rendering lightning fast that no other, we all know that's a load of crap. The Linux desktop is not the fastest, snappiest desktop, and part of it is the toolkit. I mean, one thing I hate about using Windows is that GDI system is so crappy and old, and the Windows toolkit, I forget what it's called, is such an ancient piece of crap,

and then they managed to throw it all into a GPU buffer now, post-Vista, or 7 even. It actually, like, Windows fly open on Windows. Like, that's the one thing Windows is good at is actually opening Windows. It's funny, but that is actually what it's good at, is opening and displaying Windows very fast. Linux, you often, with a super high-end machine, will still sometimes see parts of your UI render. So yeah, we can be on our high horse about Electron apps.

I hear that shit every time I talk about Electron app. I get emails and tweets. The chat room goes on about it. People watch the show afterwards and then come back in the chat room and trash. Can't believe Chris is once again promoting Electron apps. People get all their high horse about Electron apps. Meanwhile, Qt and GTK are not like they're the second coming to UI speed. So just give it a shot.

If you have problems with email and for you, you struggle with email like I do, it's worth looking at. And they do have some pretty good stuff. I've always enjoyed their blog posts. They have some interesting discussions about how they, a lot of their stuff's in Python and how they package it and that kind of stuff. So it seems like they're kind of contributing their good upstream people. I want to give a little attention to something that I see

happening more and I want to also get some participation from the audience to help us with something. So there is a trend that's beginning to take off and clever projects like this guy that runs the Ubuntu Mate project have been reaching out with their community using Patreon and other funding. Men's been doing it for a long time too using their own custom system. A lot of different developers and projects are starting ways to get funded, and Patreon is becoming a pretty common one. And I wouldn't be surprised eventually if people start feeling Patreon fatigue.

But what I would like to try to do is use the audience reach of our shows to help promote some of these funding methods, at least for a little bit. Maybe we spend one episode on it. Because I have a feeling that that's probably something the audience feels would be a good use of our airtime, would be giving recognition to, like, this one I have up on the screen right now is a GIMP developer who is rewriting the GIMP backend image processing core. core, and if he's successful, GIMP will then have high bit depth support, full CMYK support, full layer effects, and all of it's impossible without this rewrite. And now he's launching a Patreon. I think he's got like 100 and something patrons.

And this could really change the game. And we've seen that this actually work now. We've seen some different projects, some better than others, really pull this off. And I think the audience would feel like it's a good use of our time to give them attention and airtime, but I need their help

finding a lot of them. I have, I know about the Pulse audio developer. I can think of three or four or five off the top of my head. But I know there's

got to be more. And so, wherever you're watching this, I'm asking, I'm asking in the last and I'm asking in this episode, please let me know in the comments or in a tweet. Or submit them to the subreddit. And so I just thought maybe – I actually haven't watched this video yet.

But this is some work that's going into GIMP that will eventually yield in some big, big improvements. Lots of stuff that we've wanted to see in GIMP for a very long time, which could be landing in GIMP 2. Some of it could be landing in GIMP 2.10. I haven't seen this video yet. Oh, yeah. Okay, I have seen this. That's right. It's just a video

of a giant goat or whatever that is. It's just a... I don't know. I guess it's kind of cool to show off what you can do with GIMP. I forgot.

For some reason, I blocked that out of my memory. Anyways, it's really cool work that's happening and I guess I'm just... I'm kind of saying, hey, if you think that we should spend

some of our time giving attention to this stuff, well, then I need your support making it actually happen. Exactly. Wimimpy do you have any thoughts on this topic i currently back a couple of projects through their patreons that i'm interested in uh and i'm sure there are others so yeah i'd be interested to hear what else is out there um so that uh if there's things that i'm already using or something that i think is nifty then i've got a way to support the project yeah obviously because patreon has been hugely

successful for ubuntu mate and i would like to see other developers um have similar success yeah i agree and i think uh one of the nice things about Patreon is once you're signed up, it's not too much more barrier to then go support somebody else and you can set limits so you don't overdo it and stuff like that. So it's a system that makes it possible to support multiple content creators without having to go create an account everywhere they decide to go. And we do need this scaffolding in the free open source software community because I want to be able to give back,

but there's just you need a minimal set of hoops that people have to jump through. Yeah. All right. So let's brainstorm more. We can do more brainstorming too in the post show if you guys want. I want to keep going though because there's a topic that we have kicked around a lot and haven't gotten updates on in a little bit. And so now we'll have one.

Plus, the FSF has a new top 10 list that they want you to focus on. So first, let's take a moment and thank Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program, linux.ting.com. Go there to save money off your first device or off your service plan, depending on if you buy a new phone or bring your own phone. And one of the really cool things about Ting that you're going to love is no contract, no determination fee, and just pay for what you use. Just your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes.

And $6 for the line. I love it. Such a simple system because it means if I want to turn something on, I just pay $6 that month. And then when I get rid of it, it's gone. That's really nice for MiFi, for backup MiFis when I'm traveling. It's also been really nice when I've had a problem and I'm traveling and I was able to use their customer service, you get to speak to a real human being. But I've always pretty much gotten done in the dashboard and they have CDMA and GSM networks

for you to use. I think the perfect combo, Nexus device or maybe a Pixel device now. I guess I should stop saying... It's dead, Chris. Get over it. I would do this. I would get a device from the Play Store or get an unlocked device somewhere and bring it to Ting, because Ting's not going to

lock it up. They're not going to stay in the way of updates. Personally, if you could afford it, I would recommend either an iPhone or a Pixel. I think that's really the way to go these days if you can go there. Ting, though, they got all kinds of great options because I know those are expensive. Unless you get like a Nexus 5X or something. I mean, you can start at $9 for just a SIM card if you have a device. You can get a feature phone for like $20.

And then they actually, this one, by the way, the Kielser Odura, they have this one back in stock now. This is like the indestructible phone. If you want like a phone that has like a week-long battery, you can hear the ringtone from anywhere in the house, and it will almost survive a war like Indiana Jones in a fridge. Check that thing out. Lots of other phones, though. Wow, the iPhone 4 is only $87 now from Ting. Wow.

Wow, yeah. iPhone $591, iPhone 5C, and then they have of course all the other devices like the OnePlus, the Motos. I think you should go over there and just see what you might want to get if you don't have a device already or you want to start fresh. You can see the whole lineup

over at Ting, including that Pixel phone. Or you could just bring one and enjoy the Ting savings by going to Linux.Ting.com. Linux.Ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Now we go into the future and look back at last year. Yes, that's right. To go into the future, we must look back. The future being Mir in Wayland, of course, and to look back to see how Mir is doing. This was just posted on the insights.ubuntu.com blog, I guess.

And they go over some of the things in 2016. They say it was a good year for Mir. It's being used in more places. It has better upstream support, and it's easier to use by downstream projects. 2017 will be even better when we see version 1.0. Will somebody in the mumble room define what upstream is for Mir for me? I'm not trying to be clever either. I really don't understand what upstream is for Mir.

Wouldn't upstream just be Mir's project itself? Nobody knows? I wasn't paying attention. nobody knows i don't i wasn't paying attention so what is what in the context of mirror when they say uh it has more and um this was alan griffiths on the uh insight blog okay he says uh it's being used in more places it has more and better upstream support and is easier to use by downstream projects so what does upstream support mean? Maybe he's talking about back-end support for things like Qt and different toolkits and what have you. Okay.

And then there was a piece here. Enabling Mir on Ubuntu non – I thought this was a good one. Enabling Mir on non-Ubuntu Mesa or Mesa distributions. Ubuntu currently carries a distro patch for MESA to support MIR. Work is planned for this year to update it and then upstream this patch. We've not done so yet. As we know, there are changes needed to support current developments such as Vulkan, which brings us to the next thing, which I thought was interesting. They are working on improving the graphics API to support things such as Vulkan,

which requires development of the mirror plugin module. And now that they've actually done the work on getting the Vulkan support in as one of the first major plugins, they've also discovered a bunch of stuff needs to be done to the plugin architecture. Looking forward to 2017, they'll see a cleanup of the toolkit API and better support for platform plugin modules, after learning so much from Vulkan, I would imagine. And they'll be working to upstream their Mesa patch soon. They also have a snapshot of all the progress, include they've been reducing latency and big wins in performance, which are available right now. And we're going to complete changes and believe they will see the MIR 1.0 release in 2017. Wow.

Yeah. Something to look forward to. That's been a long time coming. So M release in 2017. Wow. Yeah. Something to look forward to. That's been a long time coming. That's a, so Mirror in 2017. Get your predictions book out here, Chris. I didn't make that prediction. I just kind of was like, you know what? I just, I couldn't do another year of predicting Wayland and Mirror.

Even though it feels like this would be the year of all years. Doesn't that say something? I was just done, Wes. Despite that, you're just, nope. I couldn't do it. Nope. nope. I couldn't do it. Nope. Wes, I couldn't do it. I just, I had to put it to bed.

And because I had to come to a personal acceptance, Wes. I had to come to a peace with the fact. X11 forever. This stuff is hard, Wes. And it takes a long time. And you know what else I realized? Is even once this shenanigan ships, I'm probably going to be one of those old codgers on X for a long time because I'm going to need my X11 forwarding or I'm going to want VN.

I'm going to want something, Wes, that these newfangled Vulcan-powered Wayland and mirrors don't. Capturing screenshots from every witch browser and desktop environment. Maybe I want my clipboard to share contents between all my applications. Maybe I want my clipboard to be able to monitor my screen even when I have X lot. I like my apps stealing all of my credentials. That's why they're there. So, yeah, I figured this wouldn't be the year to really get excited about Wayland or Mirror because it probably won't be the year for Chris anyways because all of the reasons that we just stated. But you can read more about the post on the quote-unquote blog,

where they also have a screenshot of the obligatory screenshot of GIMP running on Mirror, which feels like you've got to do two things. You've got to have a terminal, and you've got to have GIMP running to show that your new display system works with legacy applications. What should we show? I know. GIMP's a UI monster. Let's show that.

That's what everybody does. It's a monster. Let's show that. That's what everybody does. It's a monster. Let's put that up on the screen. But it works. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm going to stick with X for life. I'm going to pull it from my cold, dead, insecure hands.

All hacked. So the Free Software Foundation, I don't even need to tell you guys this because I'm sure you all probably check this daily. I don't even need to tell you guys this because I'm sure you all probably check this daily. So for those of you that maybe didn't know about this, that don't have this as your homepage, it turns out that the Free Software Foundation has a high-priority software projects list. Now, I know. You guys all knew that. You're checking it constantly.

That's how you make your morning prioritization decisions. What should I work on today? I better go check Richard's list. I know. I understand. But for those of you that weren't aware, the Free Software Foundation has been working on this since 2005. And they got where my money goes if I donate to the Free Software Foundation? It's a bunch of committees. The High Priority Projects Committee.

What is this, a government institution? The High Priority Projects panel recommended extensive updates to the – yeah, to the High Priority Project list. To the high-priority project list. The high-priority projects initiative draws attention to a relatively small number of projects of great strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users. This list serves to foster work on projects that are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software applications and free software operating systems. And here's where my issue begins because that is a very fine statement to make if you just did one thing, man, they speak as if they are the ultimate. They're the absolute. They're the free software foundation, ergo they have the ultimate authority to declare what is and what is not important, what must be – our attention must be directed to and

what must be ignored. And it's not – it's just – it's something about the way this is framed to me. I find it to be slightly sort of – It's almost like in their mind it's a foregone conclusion. There's no element of convincing or storytelling. It's kind of just like these are the facts. These are the things. We've decided this.

We are the bastion of your freedom. Please read. Yeah, I guess it does kind of – so here, you ready for it? Are you ready for it? This is the things. We've decided this. We are the bastion of your freedom. Please read. Yeah, I guess it does kind of. So here, you ready for it? You ready for it? This is the list. Here are the high priority free software areas. A free phone operating system.

Smartphones are the most widely used form of personal computing today. Thus, the need for a fully free phone operating system is crucial to the proliferation of software freedom. Yep. Yep. Okay. Accurate. Decentralized federation and personal service as a software substitute. Clouds. This is quite the little phrase they've got here.

Yeah. I like that. Service as a software substitute. Yeah, that is good. The large and fragmented space deals with increased centralization of web activities and user reliance on servers they don't control or service as a software substitute, clouds. The free software community provided extensive feedback regarding many projects that fall under this initiative. Also, this is on their list, free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs.

Man, it's a good thing they got a committee to come up with this list because otherwise they might have missed some of this. Maybe our community should come up with a list and we can compare and contrast. Real-time voice and video chat. So this is their list. Okay. I guess I feel like there is this does nothing. There is probably nobody who's sitting back going, well, man, you know what?

I got 40 hours free this week and I just don't know what to do. I'm going to go check Rick's list and see what he thinks I should be working on. I mean the idea is preposterous. So instead of my money to the Free Software Foundation going to actually funding some of these projects or paying a developer for a week to do this work, it goes to creating committees and updating lists from 2005 of no shit statements. Of course we need a free phone operating system. No shit, Sherlock. Of course we need to use WebRTC better. No crap.

Yeah, we need free drivers. People have been working on that for years now. None of this is useful. What are they doing? And it really feels like it kind of lacks the community aspect that makes a lot of these things important, right? Like it's not an ongoing discussion. It's just kind of like put out there as a list, right?

So it's not let's work out together what we should work on as a community bettering things. You know what would be great? You know what would be amazing? If this was a list of how they were organizing action around these items. The Free Software Foundation has identified these as critical areas to freedom. And so we are organizing groups of people around these particular items. We don't need to sit around and wait for Google's Summer of Code. Here's their Patreon pages.

Go fund them. They'll be working on these items. Here's how you can help. Why does it take some stupid podcaster in Arlington, Washington to go around and go, hmm, you know, I ought to come up with a list of ways we can contribute to open source developers so they can financially afford to work on free software. I can come up with that idea. But the Free Software Foundation can't come up with a list of ways we can contribute to open source developers so they can financially afford to work on free software. I can come up with that idea, but the Free Software Foundation can't come up with that idea. Why aren't there links to Patreon pages on this?

Why aren't they telling you how to actually take action? This just feels like they're preaching from on high to us. I don't know why this list offends me so much, but it literally offends me reading this list. All right. So there you go if you want to read that masterpiece that uh took a committee since um go ahead is is there anyone here who's donated to the i have recently oh yeah recently last year do you um do you get spam from them yes yeah yeah i wasn't impressed about that yeah so i i So I did a talk earlier in the year, which I was paid to do, and it was all about Linux and open source stuff. And I said to the organizers that I wanted to donate that money, so I chose to donate it to the FSF, because why not? And now I just get spam from Richard Stallman with choice photos of him gallivanting around the world and what have you. Right. And the verbiage is, would you like to join our low volume mailing list and receive a monthly newsletter? That's the verbiage when you sign up to donate.

I'm getting a paper newsletter as well from America. Wow. Like a little pamphlet. You know, I might if I was getting mail. I don't get much mail because they have my old address. But I didn't ask for this. I just sent them some money and now I get email spam and snail mail spam. And, you know, like the chat room said, well, maybe they're not linking to Patreon pages because Patreon is negative in the freedom dimension.

But they'll happily accept you to pay by credit card or PayPal. And they'll also take Bitcoin, which is how I donated. But they'll also happily accept PayPal. So I don't think it's about some sort of moral reason why they're not linking to developers, Patreon or bug bounties. I mean, it just almost doesn't have a problem with people making money from free software. So I, yeah, it's a wimpy that there is, it's sort of, I guess where I'm going with this and I didn't even realize it is there is a real easy way for people that are creating something really

great to go out and seek direct funding and there does seem to be less relevancy for this particular function of the FSF. Not that it's irrelevant, but for this particular organizing and function, like this makes no difference in the community, in the direction of what people work on this is this is them basically shouting into the wind and pretending some sort of pretense of relevancy here we talked about it there's like a couple news stories maybe and then that's it right it's done it's in a way it's an average it's advertising the little bit of sway that they they seem to be lacking now over the free software community it's sort of it sort of undermines their

position in a way to do things like this. I should move on because I'm probably pissing off a lot of people. And there's lots more fun things to talk about. Yes. Including Wes, I have right here in my hot little boxes a new distro that

I bet you've never seen. Whoa. Yes, never tried. Bespoke distro. It is very bespoke. Whoa. Yes, never tried. Bespoke distro. It is very bespoke. It is very, very bespoke. And I did a little sniffing around under the hood, and I got a full report. If you like going under the hood, then, friends, I recommend Linux Academy. That's right.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged is a platform to learn more about not just Linux, but all of the great things around Linux, the nitty-gritty,y-bitsy details all the way up to the high-level stack. I mean, this is a serious platform with downloadable comprehensive study guides, instructor mentoring, content getting updated all the time, a great staff behind it. It's legit. Whether you're an experienced sysadmin or new to the world of Linux, Azure, and AWS, OpenStack, and DevOps, a sharp skill set is an absolute necessity to succeed. Meet Linux Academy, an online Linux and cloud training platform that uses self-paced video

courses and hands-on labs to give you real-world experience for a wide range of skills. Train for your certification, learn the latest DevOps tools, and grow your skill set to do better work. Linux Academy is not just a video library. Our scenario-based server labs and quiz system allow you to learn hands-on. We also have full-time human instructors who answer questions and help you earn that certification or promotion at work. We add new training every week, so you'll always be up to date on the latest tech. Sysadmins of every experience level use Linux Academy to stay on the bleeding edge of the Linux ecosystem. You should too.

That's also a great point, just to stay current and up to date on these technologies. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, sign up for a free seven-day trial, kick the tires, see what I'm talking about, use the course scheduler for your busy week, figure out how these learning paths can help you lock into a specific type of learning path, which help, you know, in those moments where you're like, I just got to get this done and I know exactly the type of content I need to buzz through. And instructors have built these learning paths just for your particular career task you might be in.

This is really a slick system. And one of the things I continue to use it for and I never ever would have thought this in my – and I guess it's probably because of the way my mind works is this feature that I thought was kind of silly at first called Nuggets. Who calls it Nuggets? Nuggets. Sound delicious actually. And they turn out to be just like these deep dive topics where you can go in, get something. It's like maybe five minutes long. Maybe it's an hour long.

It depends on the content. It's just whatever the content dictates. And you just learn that one particular thing. So it's not like how to do Python on Linux. It's not that broad. It provides a little like sandboxed area. You're like, OK, I'm going to learn this one thing. I can understand this one thing.

And you come out of it with a new skill or tool. I mean, I got 45 minutes. Yeah, exactly. Check it out. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. Sign up for a free seven-day trial. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So they call it Liri, L-I-R-I, L-I-R-I.

Liri is an OS and apps built with modern design and features. It's available for download right now. They say we're building some exciting features including atomic upgrades, powerful notification support, not average, powerful, and much, much more. We're leveraging the latest and greatest Linux technologies including OS Tree, Wayland, Qt 5, and much more. Wow. They say by utilizing elements and principles of material design,

we'll be able to create a framework that incorporates components and animations to provide more feedback to users. Additionally, a single underlying responsive system across all platforms to allow more unified user experiences. Leary is a mediocratic consensus-based community interested in developing an OS and apps with modern design in mind. We believe in the power of open source, free software, and worldwide collaboration as we want to build, share, and improve software together and make it available to everyone.

A modern responsive framework based on material design and universal integrated apps. Leary ships with a set of modern and flexible apps, and the core apps are tightly integrated into the OS. Yeah. So I did a little sniffing. I went to the downloads, wanted to get a little idea of what I was dealing with here, and something jumps out at me. You can try Leary OS with a live image and eventually install it from there.

Or if you're already using Arch Linux, you can add a repository to install the packages and build them for yourself with the AUR. Interesting. Yeah. So I could just turn this thing up into a... Material design desktop. Yeah.

Now, how are they going to do atomic transactional updates using... I don't know. They probably got some distance to travel. So, yeah, I loaded it up here. Oh, look at that. Yeah, it is. Let me expand the size. Now, this feels like one of those distros that does not really, that deserves to be, I should put it this way.

This is a distro that deserves to be tested outside of VM. Bare metal. They're talking about animations, and I've already noticed some of it. It's usable, and I just wanted to show it to you guys. Check out this CrayCray launcher, Wes. Now, for those of you on the audio feed, I'll describe it to you. You click on what looks like it might be the GNOME applications button

because I've got one right next to it. It looks almost just like the GNOME all applications button, but when you click it, it brings up a... what would you... a modal window... It's like a modal file manager, almost, but it's got like a search bar at the top. Yeah. And it's, you type the application name.

So you put in like terminal there and then, okay, you can't hit enter, but then you click it and it, it launches terminal. They have a, their own terminal window decorations here. They have their own like bar there. There's a gap between where the applications are and the launcher is to where the clock is and the notifications are at. Notifications slide out on a slide tray. Same with, like, network settings. They slide out in there.

And disk information as well where I can see what disks are mounted and the date and time. But there's no calendar in there like you might expect, like, say, from, like, Solus. I think it's kind of interesting. It has built-in share buttons in the terminal window. Or no, maybe – oh, I'm sorry. Those are open in a new window. It has a tab support even though it seems to be their own application. So they are building some of their own apps too, which is –

Right. They mentioned that. Do you see anything else in there that looks – Let's take a look because there's not a lot of apps pre-installed apparently. And now all you get is Terminal. Now I bet – here we go. So, yeah, this is pretty much it. This is pretty much – let's check out the file manager because that's kind of my only other –

I'm betting this is – oh, nope, this is their own file manager. Look at that. Wow. It does look like material design. It really does, yeah. It looks very Android. But not in a – it even scrolls like Android. Do you see that? Yeah, I do see that. Wow. It does look like material design. It really does, yeah. It looks very Android. But not in a – it even scrolls like Android. Do you see that?

Yeah, I do see that. It's got a little momentum to the scrolling. It rolls a little bit after I finish scrolling. But not in a bad way. It's not crappy. It really could be worse. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the Android flashback there.

Yeah, it looks like an Android dialog box, doesn't it? But it really – I mean it really could be worse. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like an Android dialog box, doesn't it? But it really – I mean it really could be worse. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I don't personally in my life have any room for another distribution that wants to whole cloth create all of its own apps and its own desktop paradigm. But you use those X apps every day, Chris. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That's right. This is using Wayland. That's right. It's no good. It's no – no, I'm kidding. But what about this as Like on a Chromebook? On a Chromebook or as the

desktop component to a Convergence-style phone device like Maru, but if instead of a Debian XFCE, it launched something like this? I've always been a fan of a desktop UI that has animations that serve a purpose,

that explain to you the position of Windows or they explain to you where an alert's coming from or they show you where an application's landed once you've installed it. There's certain animations that I find to actually be... They help you intuitively understand this. And then there's some animations where it's just excessive and when your system's under load, you're like, okay, that looks like crap. So you've got to walk that line, but I actually feel like there's

more room for that kind of stuff in desktop Linux. And I like that there is a project out there that's willing to mess around with that. And if they're really going to build some sort of unified core running on top of Wayland, I mean, I'm going to check you back in on it. I'm going to see how they go. Oh yeah, absolutely. We should put it on bare metal in one upcoming

episode. No word, yes. No word on on it. I'm going to see how they go. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We should put it on bare metal one upcoming episode. No word – yes. No word on touch support. I don't see that. The governance model seems interesting too for a distribution like this. The Leary is a mediocratic consensus-based community. OK. That seems very specific. And they have documents out that describe their governance model.

So they're like – I feel like they're big into it. It's nice that they're upfront about it, right? Hopefully that means a constructive, good community can form. They have app rovers, maintainers, chief maintainers, decision makers, lazy consensus. Decision making typically involves the following steps. Proposal discussion, discussion by, consensus maintainer, if consensus is not reached, and chief maintainer. They really got some of this stuff dialed in. Like they got some stuff seriously figured out about their organization.

Anybody in the moment have any thoughts on Leary building a new distro with a new desktop paradigm, creating their own apps again, anything like that? I'll open it up to you guys for a moment before we move on. No. No? No, I think Wes was right. It looks like it'd be something that'd be good on Chromebooks, but outside of that, I'm not sure we need more of the same when people are already doing this work.

Yeah, I don't want to discourage them from doing something cool, but it's probably not for me for a little bit. It might be fun to play with if you got an extra machine. Like when Wes finally gets a new Sputnik or whatever he's going to get, totally be cool to throw it on that guy. I'll throw it on here. I left like half the hard drive here just for distro. There's no

apps though. I guess if you have the AUR then that sort of... You'd probably have to pull down all of the GTK. I'll make that sacrifice. For you guys. Wow. Wes, you know what else we should try is that – what happened to the Raspberry Pi story? We never covered the Raspberry Pi story.

Should we just talk about it real quick? Yeah, I guess we should. Because we forgot to – so this week Mycroft released images for the Raspberry Pi. So you can put – I secretly use Arch Linux. Yeah, I know. I know. I know that.

You don't have to interrupt the show. You can put Mycroft images now on a Raspberry Pi and go all Amazon Echo style using a Pi. So I got one right here. So I was thinking maybe I might try it eventually. What do you think of this, Wes? Is this something you'd be willing to kick with, kick around, see if that works? I don't know if I have an SD card for mine at the moment. Yeah, that was my limitation.

Maybe I'll order a new one if I can't find one tonight. Yeah, I mean, I am kind of curious, especially after you got the Alexa here in studio. Let's see if it canceled. No, it didn't. And there is an element, like I've played with it a little bit. I've installed the desktop version, that kind of thing, but

there is something to be said about just being able to flash it onto a drive, stick it in a pod that really I'm just like, same with you. It's like sitting on my shelf. I've been waiting for a project to use it on. So if I can certainly start talking to it and connecting it to things around my house and it seems like a very, it seems like a platform that's easy. A lot of people have it and it makes the barrier to entry a lot lower. Yeah, that is a huge thing to start playing with. What I would hope for is that this creates some serious adoption because right now we have this, I think, we have this really bad habit in the open source Linux community and maybe general tech community as a whole. It's probably not just us.

and maybe the general tech community as a whole. It's probably not just us. Where we get all hot and bothered on specs and features and technical differences that matter to some degree but don't matter in the wider market. It's that premature optimization thing. So we're kind of sitting here like, gosh, it's going to be so cool once Mycroft is about as fast as an Echo and can do about half the stuff that the Google Home or Echo can do. It's going to be great cool once Mycroft is about as fast as an Echo and can do about half the stuff that the Google Home or Echo can do. Like it's going to be great when it gets to that point.

It's not even at that point. And we're still here talking like it's a possibility that this thing has a chance in the market. But that's only because we're geeks. Like the reality is the market's already moving on. And I really – I mean to that end, Wes, I believe that so firmly. And I really, I spent a lot of time on this show, like bringing attention to Mycroft and talking about what important it could be. And I'd still love to see the project continue. I'd love to see it work on Linux desktops.

But I really think like the home market, I, here Wes, what's in, you tell me what's in this box. Oh, this looks new. Yeah, it just came today, actually. So it's kind of funny funny we're covering the story this is a new brand new inbox amazon echo yeah the full one the big boy built-in speakers and everything yeah i got that for the rv i uh um you're sold huh yeah yeah yeah it is really once i actually like i actually think it's i know people are worried about monitoring but in some ways it's actually improved my network security.

So I like it for that reason alone. But – How do you feel about Amazon's platform versus Google? Well, I definitely feel safer about Amazon. See, Amazon I think is on the – this is why I think really the Minecraft doesn't have a shot. It is – Amazon has this huge institutional priority to get these things in your homes. They don't have a storefront. They can't guarantee you're going to go to Amazon.com when you need to buy something.

But if they can get an echo in your house, then they have essentially – get ready for a D-bag term here. They've disrupted the store. If they can do – if technology can give them a quantum leap over even needing to establish stores, although I could see Amazon opening stores one day. But I think this is so fundamental to their long-term business because it's not just about buying shit on Amazon because having three dots or two that I use and one for the beard, I've never bought one thing from Amazon. I don't know if I ever will buy anything from Amazon using an Echo device because it's like

a minor feature. That's not what you bought it for. You know what I do buy from Amazon is I buy shit that's compatible with Alexa now. So a lot of stuff on Amazon says works with Alexa and it's becoming a massive part of their like accessories and technology that they're selling related to the Alexa. So there's that entire market. Then there is the fact that a lot of people will use it to buy stuff off of Amazon. That is something that a lot of people will and do use it for.

There is a massive strategic priority for Amazon to have a device like this in your home, and they don't need it for monitoring your metrics, your data, your mood. They don't need it for the reasons Google needs it to sell you ads. They need it to make their business profitable and sustainable. They need a storefront in your home. Nobody else needs that like Amazon does. So they have a real incentive to make this thing work with as many third parties as possible to make the API as generous as possible.

They have the biggest incentive to keep updating to give it more features. They're going to keep pushing the price down. Nobody else even has a multi-device ecosystem now. There's like three Echo devices you can buy directly from Amazon, Dot, Tap, and Echo. Now, after CES, like a dozen other manufacturers, including freaking Ford and Cars, has announced Echo integration. So we're sitting here and talking about Mycroft. Now, the conversation around Mycroft is going to have to be, how can us geeks incorporate it into our homes and our desktops?

Not, how is the market going to adopt Mycroft? That's not happening. I found it interesting what you were talking about about the perhaps market pressure for third-party integrations, which I think is important if we're going down this road of a proprietary semi-documented interface. It would think is important if we're going down this road of a proprietary

semi-documented interface, right? It would be way better if you could use the Echo and use Mycroft in the same way because the integration spoke the same language. But probably that's not where we're going to happen. I would love that. So at least we would need an ecosystem that is, right? It matters less to Google to do that than it does to us.

So Lipsy in the chat room says, this is a lot of self-rationalizing going on. That's the kind of tech arrogance I'm talking about where you think, well, because it's open source, because I can run a lot of devices and people could create plugins for it and make it extensible, it's obviously going to win one day. That's such bullshit. Like if that was the case, we'd all be using free software on our phones right now. That's not how the real world works anymore. It's all about ecosystem. It's all about who you integrate with.

And all of that integration is closed up behind these stupid APIs. The world's all gone to APIs. Well, APIs mean I control what you have access to. That's what an API is. And so that's how the entire world communicates now. And Mycroft isn't anywhere in the spectrum unless there's somebody like Hughes or somebody else who just has a general public API they make available. Service integration, things like that, only Amazon and Google and Microsoft are going to be able to make those kind of deals. And right now, I don't think anybody has anything that competes in nowhere near to what the Echo can do.

That's not self-rationalization. I thought this was a joke product. For like a year, I was skeptical of this thing. I finally got one because they put the dot on sale at $40, and I thought, all right, I'm going to give this a go. And you know what? I've changed my tune. You really have. Yeah.

I think it's a really legitimate product category. And it's not just me. It's my entire family uses it. Like when the kids are here, when Hedi is here, they've all taken to using it for all kinds of things. Like it gets frequent use by other people besides me. I think 2017 is going to be really interesting. Like I'm really curious to see if you say the same thing at the end of this year right now about the family, about the excitement, about your uses. And then at the same time, like is this like first out there advantage?

Is Amazon just going to take off with it? Or are we going to see some competitors? Are we going to see this as a general enough category? Who else has the presence they do too? Like they constantly are pushing on every box you get from Amazon. It's covered in Echo branding. They have the Echo plastered all over their page when you go to Amazon.com. Any device or service that works with the Echo, it says it right there on the product.

And I agree. I mean, I think they have all those advantages. I only ask because it's still early days in some ways for this industry. I think it shifted with CES and a little bit before. I think it shifted to a couple – I think also people are more – the industry is more willing to get in bed with Amazon because they're already in bed like selling stuff through Amazon. Whereas Google is bigger risk. And Amazon seems more consistent right like Google's the often they're like high castle out there doing their thing deprecating what they want stopping agreements whenever they want they you know like the whole they bought Motorola just to sell them to Lenovo

you can't really trust Google to do except for their core advertising business right yeah and I I think what I'm concerned about with Mycroft is it's sort of the smartphone problem only way worse. Like the smartphone is sort of – was made – like the iPhone – part of what made the iPhone successful was the whole ecosystem of content, apps, music, videos. And when Android first launched, Google didn't really have that stuff. There wasn't a Play Store. It took Google like three years to really get that stuff all figured out and dialed in. And now they have a pretty successful ecosystem. It's the same with this only to a higher degree, because now it's not just the music and the videos that you integrate with, but it's also all of the hardware products and the home services. And it's things like alarm companies and business relationships

are being made. And if your device can't do those things... If your Amazon device can unlock your house or lock it when you leave, but the Google one can't, then what are you going to do? You're not going to relock your whole house. Now, I'm not saying everybody listening to the show wants those things. No, certainly not. And I think there's, for me, there's still a – I'm still going to play around with Mycroft. I'm still going to see what I can do. I would prefer that it does everything the Echo can do.

But I'm pretty skeptical at this point. And not happily so either. I'm kind of bummed out about it. I think it's kind of a bit of a bad situation. Right. I think that's something to be clear about too is like you're not saying that you don't have these other qualms or this desire to use minecraft right but you're you're exploring this in a practical sense of like you have a studio that you run you need you want something that can help you and to help automate your day-to-day life and the echo is

meeting that need yeah it does it it uh i think I think it's hard to describe the value of the product until you have one because it really depends on your setup. And if you don't have hardware to control, it's less valuable. It immediately, I would be 40 bucks. If you're just asking it things, it's like, well, I can do that with my phone, right? Exactly. Yeah, that's not a

compelling use case for it. The kids and others like it. I don't do that. That's not what I use it for. I use it specifically to automate things in the kids and others like it i do not i don't i don't do that that's not what i use it for i use it specifically to to automate things in studio and whatnot um all right well let's let's move on there's been something i got some feedback on a lot of people said uh you know we we've talked a lot about recent mac switchers and a lot of people oh chris you're such a mac hater such a mac hater um and i thought there was the man – or towards the man who's made how many Hackintoshes and other things. Well, I don't – it's just they're just – I don't think they're good value propositions.

So there's another post that was posted just after last week's show. And I wanted to instead of go through his whole why I switched to Linux, but it's yet another why I'm switching to Linux from Mac OS, which is interesting in itself. But what I wanted to cover was some of the replacements he came up with for his Mac apps, because I thought that would be kind of interesting. So for iTunes, he switched to no music. For Photoshop, he switched to GIMP. Not too surprising there. For Sublime Text, he went to Emacs.

For Lightroom, yeah. Wow. Yeah, I know. For Lightroom, he went to Darktable. For Albatron Live, which is audio processing, he went to Ardour. For DD, he went to Gnome Disk, which is funny that he switched from DD. I know, right? Yeah.

Textual, he went to HexChat. Mail.app to Thunderbird. iCal, the Gnome Calendar. Address Book to Gnome Context. iTerm2 to Terminator. Good choice. Reader to Feed the Monkey. Twitter for Mac to just using the website.

He says I basically stopped using Twitter, so it's not really a big deal. He switched from no password manager to KeePass. And he uses TypeTalk, which I might try out, which is I guess it's an app that allows the computer to read articles to you and whatnot. TypeTalk. Nice. I can see that, especially if you're like, well, I want to read this, but I'm doing the dishes. There is something fascinating about peeking into their experience because they're looking

at some of these applications for the first time, say, in 10 years. They haven't watched them evolve for the past 10 years necessarily. So to them, it's like, look, there's this contacts application. GNOME has a calendar now. And me, I'm like, why does GNOME have a calendar? And they're like, GNOME has a calendar. But coming from Mac, like, that makes sense. You expect that.

Yeah, yeah. Talks about how disk is better than the disk program in Mac OS now. That is true, though. Yeah, it's – I was just recently experimenting with Hackintosh, and I don't even know how you format things in that just go to the terminal I was like this is how the disk management

works in Mac OS now this was bad so why did I switch this is the summary this is the part I thought we'd touch on I think it started with some dissatisfaction about OS X and the desire to be at least in theory able to change things so they would work like I want them.

This translates directly to the GPL, which is the license most of these programs I use is under. Add that to the feeling of membership, because everyone at work is using Linux, and also pride in curiosity, I'm able to look behind the scenes, which he likes a lot,

directly at the code. This is not possible on OS X at all. And to top it all off with the fact that I use Linux on so many different hardware, my laptop, my desktop at work, the security cam I'm running in Poland, the Raspberry Pi I have, embedded devices in my car, on the phone, my router, and so on, all this together right now is so compelling, macOS doesn't stand a chance. mac os doesn't stand a chance that's it's interesting that the the pressure of everything else using linux is encouraging him to give linux another chance to he did try linux back in the day like he was a mandrake user

uh he was you know i think there are a lot of mac mac users in that same position like well we tried it we dabbled with it but but then here was this beautiful, shiny Unix-compatible thing that, well, we were going to go with. It was kind of... Also, just a couple other things. He says, you know, I started off... I just love this because this really fits my prediction. I'll be honest, that's really why I love this, because I've been seeing this,

and so it's fascinating to see this materialize. So this is exactly what I've been thinking, because he writes, after five or six years of – he admits I fell in love with macOS. But after five or six years, I started seeing the cracks. First, small. They introduced spaces and a desktop manager that wasn't working anymore. Thus, I wasn't able to change the speed, which I could change between virtual desktops, which are central to my workflow. Then they introduced iCloud into a text editor. And instead of starting it and then you could save anywhere on my hard drive, I had to take

an extra step and tell it not to save to iCloud. I hated it so much that I rewrote text editor myself so it would work like it did before with plain text. And he links to text ed. iTunes started getting out of control. Accurate. Yeah. He says, and it gets worse and worse with time. I wanted my computer to work a certain way,

and it often worked that way before. Then came OS X update, and it made it possible to keep, and it made it impossible to keep my workflow. So I don't use macOS much, and so I don't often upgrade, but I have the MacBook Pro that, you know, we installed Arch on during this show, and a dual-boots

Final Cut OS. And so I went into Final Cut OS and I decided, well, if I'm going to use Final Cut, I should update the latest version of Final Cut OS because it's totally free. So from the Final Cut App Store, it downloads Final Cut OS and does an install and updates to Mac OS Final Cut Sierra. I don't know. And you know what the first thing it does? And you know what I wanted to do? Two different things.

I wanted to edit my video and go to bed. It wanted to re-index all of the photos on the computer for some sort of deep learning analysis, which pegged my processor cores at 40%. So at least they're doing it locally, right? But that's why it's pegging your processor. And is it not set as a low priority? How is it not falling off into the background when I go to use Final Cut? How is that not a thing they thought of? It was nice.

Yeah, well, actually what I did is I was so frustrated I just rebooted back into Archon's and I'll edit it later. That sucks, though. It does because what I ended up doing is I just, oh, yeah, this thing. So in the morning I booted it up and let it sit there and do its thing and then just shut it down again so that way it's done. So now you can edit video? Yeah, yeah. Cause I just let it go for a while, but I really feel like I had no domain over that computer. I like, I guess it's not too unusual after an upgrade for some backend process to work like that, but I don't need my photos. I don't use photos on that Mac. I don't need it to do those things. There's just probably stuff that's in that library because that's where stuff gets dumped.

Like I don't need that to be done. Like, I would just like to go and check that box. And I looked around in the OS. I couldn't find anywhere that allows me to turn off that feature. It just does it. I don't need my photos analyzed, you know? Right. That's the kind of thing that just drives me nuts about that. And I feel like if they were focused on that platform,

like it was the only, if they didn't make an iOS device, and it was the only major platform they had to worry about, these kinds of little cracks wouldn't be so bad. Well, I feel like iOS has really – especially with how popular and how much it defined the early smartphone era, I feel like it changed the idea of who their product base was, right? And so that has changed the way that they design products. Well, you know, I mean they might sell 100 million iPhones in a year and they might sell 20 million Macs. And no one thinks that an iPhone is thinking differently, right?

Like that's just, it's incongruent. Yeah, that's interesting too. So I wanted to move now that we've had that little brief aside, unless anybody in the moment wants to jump in. And I thought we'd go something more technical just to sort of refresh our palettes. This is an interesting talk that you found, I think, right? Building a Billion User Load Balancer. This was at the Usenix conference, I think.

Is that right? And this was a gentleman from Facebook, Patrick Schuff, I think. And he gave a talk on that. And I just thought I'd play just a moment for it because it's very interesting. And I'll jump ahead a little bit here into the presentation. A single server served all of Facebook, so the entirety of Facebook. Every request comes in. And we're going to slowly build up one by one, layer by layer, each of our load balancing infrastructure pieces

so that we get to the point where we have a multi-data center, multi-continent load balancing infrastructure to serve all of the requests. A couple of points I want to make here is we use a lot of open source software. So almost all the pieces in this talk are going to be open source. There is going to be some custom stuff Facebook specific to our environment that aren't necessarily open source, but all of this stuff is easily done in open source. And I will talk about all of those different projects as well. And lastly, my goal for this talk is for you guys to think about the patterns that we use. Doing what we do for load balancing might not make sense for everybody,

but kind of looking at the patterns and how we evolve our infrastructure and applying it to some of the things that you guys are building. Now, he does get into numbers here. So when people ask me, what does a traffic engineer at Facebook do, this is the image that comes to mind. So this is a visualization showing all the people on Facebook and all their connections to all the other people on Facebook. Our job is to make sure that no matter where you are in the world,

when you open up a Facebook app on your phone, or you type facebook.com into a web browser, that you connect to our servers as fast and secure as possible. So our job is to make sure that, you know, we were able to connect the world. You know, that is the mission of Facebook is to make the world more open. I thought. Wow. So just to kind of quickly go over the agenda for today, we'll talk about different types of requests that kind of make up Facebook. It's kind of hyperbole, but I suppose

in a way, it is sort of true. I think most of my family that's not technical uses Facebook to stay in touch. It's like they sometimes use email for planning big family events, but

mostly everything's... And since I'm not on Facebook, when I show up at family events, I'm like out of the loop on half the stuff. And I get the feeling too, in that way where it's like, well, we used email because grandma isn't on Facebook, but she does check her email once in a while, you know, and then you're like, so suddenly you're lumped in a very different technical group. I still get the question, what is Linux? What is Linux?

And you can say, you know, to something that really connects with people, it's what powers huge websites like Facebook. Lastly, I'll open it up for Q&A. And you guys, you know, can ask any questions about load balancing, Facebook, production engineering, anything at all. All right. Now here's the numbers, I believe. So let's dive quickly and talk about some numbers real fast. These are company-wide numbers. Every month, in the month of September, 1.79 billion people use Facebook. And on average over that month, 1.18 billion people use Facebook. So these numbers are really cool. And these are Facebook numbers. But I think about these in terms of a traffic engineer's perspective. So that means every day, assuming there's only one TCP connection per device, and this is,

you know, I think you guys all know this is probably very improbable. You know, that means we at least have to terminate 1.18 billion TCP connections every single day and serve requests from those. And also the really important, interesting thing is 1.09 billion are on mobile devices. So we have to think about people who are using high speed, you know, LTE or, you know, landline cable modems. We also have to think about people using networks like 2G and 3G. Wow. You know, all these different networking environments. And we need to make sure. When you hear numbers like that, it gives you an idea of how entrenched Android and iOS are. When the numbers of mobile active, I want to just make sure that this didn't go over you.

1.09 billion mobile daily active people. They're not even like fudging that. It's daily active. So it's not like you have an account but you never log in. It's daily active people. Can you imagine building an infrastructure for that? And that's just mobile. That's just mobile.

I mean, it should be said they probably engineer their app so that if you ever install the app, that it wakes up at least once a day to ping their servers. But that's still real load pinging their servers, right? So they still have to design for it. That's probably true. Oh, I like the way you think, Wes. That's probably very true.

That is probably something there to it. But damn, even if that's the case. They are responding to those TCP requests. think yeah i don't think most people could handle that kind of load unbelievable so it's just cool like whatever you may think of facebook and obviously we both have our qualms there yeah they do you don't use it either not very much yeah i have an account i have an account as well i I do use Instagram sometimes. Yeah. I've experimented with Facebook more as like a means to drive traffic than anything else. Right. Exactly.

But they do some serious engineering. Yeah. And that's all laid out in this video. Well, not all of it obviously but a lot of really good stuff is laid out, at least the 16, and you can get access to it. Usenik.org, you can find more. But I would probably just start with the link in the show notes and then go out from there because that's a big site. And that's an interesting talk. And, yeah, like Wes is saying, regardless of your opinions of Facebook, the technical feeds.

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It's the best word. D01plug. Unplug DigitalOcean, but not really because, I mean, that would be cray-cray. Because you know what happens? That's a lot of 40 gigabit connections. Right. Would you take you all day? Yeah, all day.

All day. And they've got data centers all over the world, so you better get prepared to travel. And then they'd have one of those talented engineers from DigitalOcean just plugging them right back in right behind you. You'd never win. They probably could outnumber you. Yeah, that's the thing. And it's just way easier to use the promo code DL and plug. Go create an account, apply it to your account, and then get started.

They've got a great interface, very simple and intuitive to use. $5 a month for one of their machines, or you can go hourly. I love the hourly system. So great for trying out open source projects. Lots of nice stuff that I'll often just burn a DigitalOcean droplet for an hour. Yeah, exactly. Oh, some cents on my account. Fine.

Totally worth it. Three cents an hour? Okay. All right. Well, I can do that. I get two cores. One of the best parts is that, unlike some other cloud providers you may have used, they're so upfront about their pricing. It's like, bam, this is what you're going to pay. Here you go. You know it.

And it's all SSD-based. So even with the $5 one, you're still getting a 40-gigabit e-connection. You're still getting SSDs. You can still pick from a data center all over the world. You can choose any distro you want or that free BSD, which I hear people like. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D01plugged And by the way, they

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So, you guys, I don't think I need to build the case that I think the MacBooks are a bit of a train wreck or that I think people are switching from Mac to Linux and Windows to Linux, obviously. But I'll tell you something that was super disappointing in my test. And you might have heard me mention earlier that I was experimenting with a Hackintosh over the weekend.

I tried it on three different computers just to kind of see what the state of Hackintoshing was. And that was following a test I did which was massively disappointing. We frequently have a conversation on our different shows about media production under Linux. And a lot of times people say, have you tried KDE and Live? Have you tried Blender? Have you tried OpenShot? Have you tried all of these?

And there was a question posted on the rlinux subreddit about the current state of Linux video editing in 2017. And I just happened to go through another round of this. I tried it on my XPS 13, on the Enterware Apollo, on the Librem 15, and on my custom-built Hairmaster machine, which is a six-core i7 with 32 gigs of RAM and all SSD storage. It's with a GTX 9. It's as handsome as you are, Chris.

It's not a GTX. Thank you. Well, thanks Wes. You're handsome as hell yourself. It's not a GTX 10 series graphic, so it could do better there, but it is a GTX 9 series graphic. So for video editing purposes, it's pretty capable. Out of all of the machines that I used in my testing,

none of them could even play back my test footage except for Hairmaster. And to do so, it took all the six-core CPU performance I have, which didn't leave much left over for applying effects. And I'm not talking editing. I'm not talking rendering. I'm saying just trying to play the footage back that I intend to edit. The systems literally cannot do it. So there is now footage that is available in consumer grade equipment that the codecs on Linux are just not capable of playing back. I'm talking things at 4K resolution, not crazy frame rates, not well, high bit rates, but not unbelievably high bit rates. And they just do not play.

They just chop or like in the case of some players, they freak out and it goes all green or they flip the image and it's two frames a second. In 2017, I honestly believe the state of Linux video editing is worse than it's been in a while. What we have right now are half a dozen half-baked tools that are almost good enough but not good enough. And we don't have a supporting media pipeline under those tools to make it all connect and to make playback streamless and to guarantee that if something works in one editor, it'll work in another editor. Like if you want to even get in there, that's an entirely different dimension. We are in a really bad position. If you're trying to do anything with it, if you're trying to work with any camera that was sold in 2016 or 2017.

I was going to say, like, is it safe to say that, like, we're getting there in terms of, like, video from 2009? But, you know, like, yeah, all right. You've got, like, 720, maybe 1080 video. You can edit that. You can do it. 1080, 30 frames a second. You can probably do that.

But modern video, which is not that anymore. Like, the world has moved on and we are not catching up. Right. And so this guy on Reddit kind of had the same experience. He said some 4K wouldn't even play back on my machines. They were only five minute clips. I recently went through I tried KDN Live, PDV,

Blender, Lightworks, OpenShot as my main ones. I spent the most time with KDN Live and Lightworks because those are the ones I always tend to like the most. Out of all of it, time with KDN Live and Lightworks because those are the ones I always tend to like the most. Out of all of it, I like KDN Live the best. So if you have a straightforward project, it's really – but it's not even KDN Live's fault anymore. Like the fault lies in the underlying – Hello.

Yeah. In the codecs, they're not hardware accelerated. Yeah, in the codecs, they're not hardware accelerated. And depending on which ones you get, if they are hardware accelerated, they don't support the right resolution and frame rate, so they have to fall back to CPU decoding. And we are leaving the world where CPU decoding is not possible. It just doesn't work anymore. Yeah, it took a six-core system playing from a fast solid-state storage to play it back.

NVMe. Yes, thank you. And I – so when this question came in about the current state of video editing on Linux, this is an area where it's still – it's – the thing is, is a 2013 MacBook Pro that I have can play this back. Not only can it play these files back, but I can apply real-time color and I can speed them up and slow them down and I can apply those effects. You can interact with them. I can – so like – that's a 2013 MacBook Pro running a system. It's the same as the 2015. But – Hey-oh.

But you get my point. Exactly, right? Like – And yet you could buy the latest XPS or whatever and not be able to do it on Linux. I mean these are – this is a sky like system over here. Let alone the Oryx. I mean it's a pretty bad situation. And maybe it's just not a market we're ever just going to be able to capture because maybe the technology is moving too fast and maybe it's just not possible.

Maybe there's just certain things that open source isn't equipped to tackle. I hate that to be the conclusion I come to, but I just... And it's frustrating to be in the position where, like, there's so many tools, right, where Windows has, or Mac has the, like, power user light option, but then you can go to Linux and get the, like, oh, no, you're an expert. This is the real power. But video editing is not that way, right? Like, the second you go to Linux, you start making compromises. And you're like, well, but yes, I want to intermediate codec? Or what about working with proxy media?

You know, you could do, Chris, you could do this with proxy media. That's the first thing Noah suggested. That all takes a ton of time. And it doesn't allow for sort of a flexible creativity that is, when you can take a set of mixed resolution, mixed frame rate footage, drop it all in your timeline, put your piece of music down, and just start cutting and working with the music, with the footage, it's an entirely different process than I'm going to import all my camera footage, I'm going to load up this program that transcodes all my footage into this output directory, then I'm going to take this output directory, I'm going to add it to my project folder,

then I'm going to add this project folder into the editor, and I'll only work with this media, and then once I render it out, I'll replace this media with the final foot, with the final cut, with the final, you know, high resolution footage and just hope that all of the color effects and all of the speed up and all that translates well to the final footage, even though it's a different frame rate, it's a totally

different codec. It just doesn't make any sense. And it would be one thing, like, if you worked at the local news station or something with the support crew, right? But especially with like the vlogging you've been doing, et cetera. Like I don't know if people understand the workflow where like you're on your own. You've got like three different cameras. You've got one laptop.

You've got a truck. And you're trying to – like you're trying out experimental shots. You need to be able to review that footage right there on the scene and figure out what's going to work or not. Yeah. It's this weird paradigm because we have all of this flexibility with hardware. We have all this flexibility with software, but it's left us sort of incapable of answering certain types of workloads, and it's the most frustrating thing because it would be perfect. So I'd say for depending on your workload and depending on your camera footage and depending

on the bit rate of your clips. What your expectations are. Yeah. If you wanted to jump in with Linux video editing and you were working with some pretty straightforward stuff, I just went through it again. I mean I've done this on and off for years, but I just went through this. I think KDN Live is still my favorite. I go KDN Live. I go with a dark theme.

I think it looks really pro. It works well. It sometimes is a little sluggish the it's weird some of the effects the way you change the settings are super arbitrary and weird and and not like any other editor you'll ever use but you know as far as an editor that just works and uh is pleasant to use and allows me to to have your audio tracks and your video tracks and intermix and have multiple tracks. And it's really simple.

Works in a way that a person who's edited video would expect. Katieandlive.org. We should throw that in the show notes too. Put that in there too. All right. Mumble Room. Anybody have thoughts on media production under Linux before we wrap, before we go? I know – and I also should just say that I don't feel like any of this applies to audio production under Linux.

No. Ironically, I feel like – It's very different. Yeah. I feel like if you were going to only use – if you can only have one platform to do audio podcasts, Linux would be it. Yep. Especially with some of the cool stuff Wimpy makes, some of the cool open source projects that are out there, some of the stuff we've built internally. Yeah.

The scriptability and automatability. I think XMN might be right is what Final Cut is is sort of what you get when you control the operating system, the software application that runs on it and the hardware.

That's the upside. The downside is anemic hardware, a company that has an unsure direction that's focused on a different product, and has way too expensive prices. I mean that new MacBook is a killer. So that's the downside of the Apple approach just in a nutshell and the lock-in obviously. But the upside is for one particular application, this entire stack integration …

It's all optimized. I mean they know their quirks and how to write for it. So yeah. All right. I mean they know their quirks and how to write for it. So yeah, all right. I'll get off my high horse. But I wanted – I think part of the reason why I wanted to talk about this with you guys is we spent a few episodes in a row talking about how people are leaving the Mac and about how the Mac is crap and about how macOS is junk and about how they're switching to Linux. and about how macOS is junk and about how they're switching to Linux. And I just also wanted to give you a little bit of a reality check and say it's not all roses. Like that platform is still viable for a large portion of the workforce that right now Linux is, in my personal opinion,

falling behind more on now because equipment has pulled ahead. And so the situation right now is worse in some ways than it has been in a while because it's now getting to the point where Linux isn't even capable of playing some of these files. So I know I've spent a lot of time harping on the MacBook and people switching to Linux, but I felt like

this was sort of a counterbalance to some of that. And I'll keep testing it. I'm not ever done testing. Oh, no, certainly not, right? None of these are foregone conclusions. It's more of a what's the feeling right now in the field. This is sort of like I've gone through around it all up, and this is sort of where it lands for me personally. The other thing about it is everybody's workload is different.

The footage you're working with is different. The aspects and goals of your project are different. What's your turnaround time? What's the – yeah, right? There's a lot of things that affect that. Huge part of it. If I did one, two shows a week, I might – You could do proxy or like whatever, right?

Exactly. Exactly. That would be – but if I'm trying to do something every single night, totally different. And during the day too. So it's not like it's like I do it all day long and then I go home and I do it at night now as a side project. So it's like it's really got to be pretty tight. And there's really no time for extra bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. And so that all is a totally different thing. But I feel like that sort of probably more better. My my view probably is more representative of the larger industry

and and maybe less and less and less of the personal hobbyist. But I think it's probably where the money is, where people would be coming from, where the switchers would be coming from. And when people are looking for certain requirements, that group, I think I have a better idea of what that group would be looking at. And I'd say right now we're soft in some ways. Right.

And I guess it comes back to that story of like, you know, are you trying to sell someone? You're like, yeah, you should pick up this new Linux rig and it'll do all your things. But if they're the new hobbyist vlogger, can you honestly say that and not say, yeah, but here's the capitulation job to make? I'd say it depends on how professional you want your stuff to look. That's one thing. And like, if you're doing a screencast and you're cutting up the screencast to make it a little bit shorter or take it out of mistake, that's great. Or you have

a New Year's party video that you shot and you want to make a quick three-minute video and share it around. It's going to be awesome for that. Even maybe like a trailer for a Kickstarter project. There's a lot of things you could use it for. So it really just depends on what you're doing. So that's

sort of my answer to the state of video editing in 2017. And I wonder – I hope. It's a good question. I wonder – I'll definitely know. I mean I try – it seems to be almost every other month or so I sit down and I go, all right. Let's take a project. I get all of the same footage and I say I'm going to take the same footage. I'm going to try to make the same thing three or four times.

It's extremely monotonous but it's the best test I have. And I try to create the same thing three or four times. It's extremely monotonous, but it's the best test I have. And I try to create the same exact product as close as I can. And you know what? In this test, sometimes I feel like I end up with something better than I did in the other editor because the way it works and the workflow, it's better with the way my mind works. I get a little more creative. It's better with your creative spirit. Yeah. And then other times I'm like I just basically make –

This is doldrums. Yeah. Grinding it out. It's the awful stuff. And it other times I'm like, I just basically make – This is doldrums. Yeah. Grinding it out. It's the awful stuff. And it could all change, right? Like maybe we live in the Vulcan Wayland open source AMD driver wonderland in two years, but we're not there now. Manny, you had a question before we wrap up. No?

Oh, sorry. Manny. Oh, sorry. I had you muted. I i'm sorry i'm a jerk go ahead talking to me yeah i had you muted i'm sorry repeat what you said i'm sorry so did you do your tests on the x server and wayland or only wayland only x server no way i think that's no wayland do you think that that had that has an influence on it i mean you know.

A good try. Oh, are you wondering for video playback? Yeah. Yeah, I don't really think the display server was the limiting factor. I think the issue was that all of the codecs were dumping the decoding job off to the CPU. And even on like a Skylake, you know, system, it just wasn't. The throughput wasn't there. Yeah, four cores, but not enough to.

Six core system could do it, though. Yeah. Yeah, I thought there was something else I thought I saw in the chatroom, but I think we'll wrap it up there. I think I've made my piece about it. Oh, yeah, that was Mr. Go-Go says that the Linux Gamer is a good example of someone who will use Linux for video editing. Yeah, Linux Gamer

and Linux Gamecast. Exactly. There's projects out there that are being done on this stuff that you use Linux for video editing. Yeah, Linux Gamer and Linux Gamecast. Yeah, exactly. There's projects out there that are being done on this stuff that you can go check out right now. They're producing content. And like I say, you know, if I was doing one or two things a week. And it might be a great, like, you don't have money to shell out on a new Mac system. Totally. Or the most professional editing software,

but you want to start making your vlog or whatever. Like, yeah, Linux is still great for that. Yeah, and you got to really, too, like, one of the nice things about Linux is where the software tool might not be as quick, or you got to make proxy media, or the toolkit might be a little clunky, but you could also get, like, a 12-core Xeon with 64 gigs of RAM and all that. Like, you can go nuts on the whole. Yes, and it'll all work.

It all, yeah. So there are areas where you, where it's one part might be slower, like you can go nuts on the hotbed. Yes, and it'll all work. Yeah, so there are areas where one part might be slower, but you could go way faster in another aspect of it. And, you know, the other nice thing is with Arch and Ubuntu and all of these different distributions having these video editors packaged for them, you get just as part of your package updates. It's already there. You get the new improved editor, which is nice, actually. It is nice. Generally with these, it there. You get the new improved editor, which is nice, actually. It is nice. Generally with these, it's nice to get that new stuff.

You don't have to install the new OS that wants to re-index your pictures. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You don't get drug along with that strategy tax. So there are huge benefits to doing media production under Linux. I guess my advice is don't ever try Final Cut. Don't ever.

Don't do Premiere. Don't use Cut. Don't ever. Don't. Don't do Premiere. Don't use Premiere. Don't use. It is always easier if you haven't tasted the, you know, sweet, sweet grass on the other side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Don't use. What was the other? What's Sony? Vegas. Don't use Vegas. Don't use that. Don't use it. So don't use Vegas.

Don't ever work at Pixar. Oh, wait. No, that works on Linux. Yeah, I know. Wouldn't it be nice if some of their tools, yeah. Filtered down occasionally. Although I feel like their tools would be more like using Blender. And it's so funny.

There's people, a lot of, one of the number one comments I get is, Chris, have you tried Blender? And I always, my response is, have you tried Blender for video editing? You have to create 3D views to just do the simplest. And this is, again, back to that, like the like weird Mac Windows professional hobbyist type thing, right? Like it's like you're not bargain basement. You're not beginner. You have some budget for this thing,

but you're also not like, this isn't necessarily your like $200,000 a year day job thing. You fall in the middle where you have serious expectations. You want to get stuff done. And it's just not there. But you also can't spend 50 grand on a software license, right?

Yeah. No, and then on the other side of it, you just have lackluster hardware that costs too much. So you pay one way or the other. That is Chris's take on the current state of video editing in Linux. And thanks to – it was Gleezweb for asking that question because it got me chewing on the topic a little bit. It's a good discussion. It's good counterbalance to a lot of the coverage we've been doing recently. All right.

That brings us to the end of this week's Unplugged program. Would you like to contribute? You can do it several ways. You can spread the word about the show. Maybe somebody out there that would like a Linux podcast. Let them know. That's a direct way you can help the show. You can also join us live in

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The other day, it might have been on Laz. I think it was. In between segments, you were talking to Noah about your laptop and things you like to keep installed on your laptop. And you mentioned SabNZB and Couch, I think. Well, actually, keep installed on your laptop. And you mentioned Sab NZB and Couch, I think. Yeah. Well, actually, not necessarily on my laptop, but yeah, on my workstation upstairs. So is it those two?

Well, it can be those two. Right now, my setup is Sonar and NZB Git, but I could also do Sab NZB and SickRage. Couch Potato I care less about. There's also Raw or something. Yeah. I don't care as much about Couch Potato, but it's nice to have. Because I made a snap of SabNZBD and Couch Potato. No.

No, really? Just to make it nice and easy to install them. It's stupidly easy to install. But I wonder which others you would use. Okay, so here's the question. What is the mechanism now for that to get updated? That's kind of what my Docker question was about. If I get a Docker image, am I going to get behind on SAB?

What is that mechanism? So the ultimate goal would be for me to contribute this to upstream, the main project, and for them to have their continuous integration system push it into the store whenever there's a new release. And so you would just do nothing. It would just update automatically in the back end. Much like my NextCloud box updated. I didn't even realize it. It upgraded from NextCloud 10 to NextCloud 11.

The snap just updated in the background, and I had no idea, and it just carried on working, and I didn't do anything. So that's the kind of thing. Boy, I love that. idea and it just carried on working and i didn't do anything so that's the kind of thing boy i love that but it would need to be update um adopted by upstream so they would push it to the store that's uh those applications are a good example of something that's a bit of work it's not impossible but it is a bit of work and if you could have snaps for it that's really nice it's a great idea that's exact and i signed up for a new service just so that I could test it because I haven't touched these products for a while. So, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it is a pretty slick – you know, it's a pretty slick setup once you get everything all set up because essentially they're set and once they're configured and the programs you want to monitor or the movies you want to monitor are specified, you just kind of walk away and everything will find – it will automatically find the content, download the content, extract it, rename it to a naming convention you want and put it in the folder you want so that way your media server sees it. It's pretty – it really is nice. I just got the push notification on my phone about Chelsea Manning's sentence being, commutes the bulk, the bulk of the sentence. Yeah.

That's amazing. That's great. Wow. Well, I might try that out, Poppy. That's really cool. Yeah. Give me – I'll try the others. I've looked at Sonar.

Do you say NZB Git? Yeah. NZB Git, which is – I guess after I talked about it, I got a note from a couple of people who were like, you should try NZB Git, Chris. It's actually a lot better. Actually, I am using it. That's what I am using now. Sab NZB just seems to be the one that has more traction. Well, I'll do these

and commit them upstream and see what they say. I mean, it may well be they say no, because some projects we've talked to say, no, no, no, we're not interested. If you want to put it in the store, do it yourself, and then I could set up a cron job that will just grab the latest and push it to the store or something but it's entirely up to them it's their project yeah they can yeah yeah i hope they i hope they take you up on it because that would be that would be really great