LINUX Unplugged - Episode 182: Death by Download | LUP 182

Episode Date: February 1, 2017

Remotely bricking Android devices, the new Plasma is looking great, first hands on with the new XPS 13 Sputnik, more btrfs woes & hacking Popey’s system.Plus Kernel.org’s big change, building your own local Steam repository & more!

Actually, you know what I got that's a really interesting... I wonder if anybody in the Mumba Room has any experience with any of this crap. I got one of these, uh... Logitech Harmony... Logitech Harmony Hub. My dad got this for me for my birthday last week. And, uh... So it's a puck-looking thing.

And it has... basically like a thousand IR blasters in it that shoot off in every direction. And you then pair it with a whatever. You could just use the app or you pair it with like an Alexa or you can actually control it from a Roku or lots of things. or lots of things. And it allows you to voice control your television and your DVR and your internet media set-top box, whatever it might be. And I don't know how much it is because, like I said, it was a gift. But I just got it, and now I'm wondering how the hell I set it up. Here, they got a little thing on it.

Yeah. One touch control, because everyone wants touchscreen. Who wants to use touchscreen controls for their... I do, I do. Hello, Wes! We've got to get, like, oily things different from the screen. Come on. Like, I want to be able to control my... I want to control

my TV with physical buttons. Like, I want to be able to feel them. Or my voice, I would take that if the thing had good enough mics to pick me up. So this would use the Alexa to – so the Alexa would be the front end of the Harmony Hub. I just got the Harmony Hub as a gift. Oh, shit. Yeah.

And it does basically – it is like this huge IR blaster, and so you kind of put it in the middle of your entertainment system, and it blasts out all directions to control your different devices and stuff. It comes with a bunch of apps that you can use. Yeah. You know when someone doesn't have an Amazon Echo or an Echo Dot is when they're quite confident in saying Alexa out loud. Oh, you're right. No, I've got one in this room. I've got one in this room.

I should know better. I'm working on it. I really am. I'm trying to say Echo. I'm also trying not to say OK Googs. this room i've got one in this room i i should do i should know better i'm working on it i really am i'm trying to say echo i'm also trying not to say okay googs you know i'm trying and and also hey hey s word i'm trying not to do any of that stuff because i i find myself saying it like people prudes from the past say the word sex like under their breath yeah yeah yeah that's what i do too usually yeah my son my daughter's i was do too, usually. My son's... My daughter's... I was just going to say, my daughter's been figuring out where she can use the word so that it doesn't trigger.

Yeah, my son's been... And she's figured out if it's mid-sentence, she can get away with it, but it can't be at the beginning or the end of the sentence. Yeah, I... And when she's talking about it, she calls it Lexi. Oh, that's good. I have noticed that my kids have adopted the a word they say the a word which is funny because that could mean other things but to them it means it means alexa you know what i mean it means wouldn't it be cool if amazon had thought of

this beforehand and called it a different name than alexa well i mean how calm is that name i had the most fun with this though because, because I successfully trolled a friend by giving him an Echo Dot and his wife's name is Alexa. No. No. That's awesome. Wow. No. What are the chances?

I didn't think it was that common of a name. No, neither did I. But as soon as I took it, I was like, hang on a minute. And he's also called Martin. I was like, Martin's wife is called Alexa. This is too much fun. That's incredible. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 182 for January 31st, 2017.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's so awash in new Linux hardware, we're not sure where to start the reviews first. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello there, Wes. Hello. It's a nice piece of shiny hardware you have sitting next to you we'll be talking about later on in the show today.

It's very nice. Yes. Yes, we've got a good show today. Later on, too, the part that I'm looking forward to the most, we're going to hack Popey's server live on the show. We're going to hack Popey, right? Live on the show. We're going to do that. And, of course, we'll do some open source project updates,

chat a little new hardware. There's some big, big things on the horizon that I'm working on that I want to talk to you guys about, pick your brains about a little bit. Ryan's here from System76 to make us drool over one of their new rigs. I know. I know.

I'm drooling already. Whoops. You know what, Wes? It's good to have you back. I missed you last week. It is a pleasure to be back. I was sad to be gone. You always give me.

You always give me. So, yeah, we got a whole bunch of good stuff to go over. Plus, we got the hack, and we got the new hardware. But bigger than all of that, Wes is back, and he brought us an Oaked Maple Hard Cider. I don't even know what that is. I think it's apples, right? It's gotta be. But it's so delicious.

It's a semi-sweet Seattle-based cider he brought us. Oak chips and back-sweetened with pure Vermont maple syrup. Shut up. It really is maple syrup? So it's a Vermont maple syrup beer that we're. Shut up. It really is maple syrup? So it's a Vermont maple syrup beer that we're drinking from Seattle. I'll take it.

I'll take it. All right. Well, we have many things to get into this week here on Your Linux Unplugged, so let's bring in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, mum-a-roo. Hello. Hello. Hello. Oh, man.

Hello, guys. That's good. Every time. It gets it every single time. You can have cider made out of other things, Sweetland. You can have, in fact, hard cherry cider is a real thing. It is real. Oh, yeah.

I'm just used to apple cider. Yeah, apple cider, I think, is probably the most. Yeah, pear cider, that's another one. Yeah. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We've got some Linux things. We do. We do.

I've had a very interesting week in Linux. I've, you know, I've been going on and on and on about this building this bulletproof Linux workstation for me. Just one or two of my systems that I want to last for like five years. I'm trying not to talk about it too much because I know not everybody cares. But it's really been what I've been living for almost two, three weeks now, actually, because it started when I had an Arch crash. Yeah, right in the middle of a project.

And then it just sort of got me down this path of, well, how would I build a system if I never wanted to crash again? And there's so many different ways to split this up. I kind of begun to land on sort of a soulless or arch with budgie desktop combo. And then that crazy guy, Ike, right after last week's show, like we get off the air with Ike last week. Just chatting. And he runs off and announces to the entire world that he's switching the budgie desktop over to Qt, which I think is probably a good long-term move. Because there's a lot of things they've had to do to make it sort of pretend like GNOME over the years.

And there's a lot of crazy folks out there that are rewriting their desktops over to Qt these days. There seems to be a trend. Yeah. Well, and I think there's a reason for it. It's not just because it's a trend but also because there's some real technical merits to Qt versus GTK when you're building something that's not GNOME and GNOME applications. when you're building something that's not GNOME and GNOME applications. And I thought that was all great and good, except for the fact that it leaves me all of a sudden with the Budgie desktop about to go through this large transition.

A lot more change than you maybe otherwise would have expected. Right. Even change for the better, you might argue. And I'm sure that they will only release it when they feel like it's ready for the end users. But even still, I'm building a five-year workstation here, right? And so really it was IKEE's fault. It got me thinking. IKEE and also producer Michael. I blame producer Michael also quite a bit for this too.

It really, really got me seriously thinking about the Plasma desktop. And so I installed Plasma 5.8 a week and change ago. On top of Solus? On top of Arch. Arch, OK. Yeah, I figured – I fixed my core Arch issue, which was a stupid inf change ago. On top of Solus? On top of Arch. Arch, okay. Yeah, I figured, I fixed my core Arch issue,

which was a stupid infidelity font issue, and I got the Plasma desktop set up. And it has been, it has been, it has been 5.8, has been, I didn't mean to turn this into a quick Plasma review,

but I have never used a more stable, rock-solid version of the Plasma desktop. I mean, it, every day, the week it's been installed on my system, and it's been a little more than a week, every day for that entire time has met the, as my butt is entering the cushion of the chair, as it's grabbing my butt, my keys are already being flicked by my fingers, and I'm already working, and every time it's ready to go.

It's ready to go. I don't have to fuss with nothing. Nothing gets in my way. I immediately start working the moment I want. And I've set everything up, dude. I've even got an echo in there so that way as I'm walking into the room, I can activate all the devices I want. So it's like this.

I enter the door. I spin around. I sit down and I start working and I issue. The spinning is really important. It is. A lot of spinning. You got to twirl. You got to take time to twirl and skip.

And then I issue an echo command. It powers up all my devices. And as I'm sitting down at my keyboard, I'm working. There is zero friction to getting to work. And that's kind of necessary when, like, sometimes I'm, like, running into the studio. I got a live show in five minutes. I got to get this thing done. Finish this thing.

Yes. You can't wait for the login screen to, like, just twirl at I got a live show in five minutes. I got to get this thing done. Finish this thing. Yes. You can't wait for the login screen to like just twirl at you for a while. Yeah. Yeah. And I have been extremely impressed with how snappy Plasma has been. Like just super snappy with how reliable. I have noticed it's been extremely reliable. I have noticed a slight continuous uptick in memory usage.

So I'm now using about a gig at resting more than I was a few days ago. But that can be explained by a lot of things. And how much – what did that peak at? Well, so far it's just sort of been steadily increasing because, you know, who's got time to reboot? Who's got time, right? So I was really excited when Plasma 5.9 was announced. And the KDE project says they're kicking off 2017 in style with Plasma 5.9. Now, Producer Michael, you're not by any chance running it already, are you?

Because I know you on Neon. Yeah, I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All. Yeah. All right. Without any further ado, are you ready for this? Oh, I think I am.

I'm very excited. The Plasma guys once again contacted me and had me record the video. I'll just play a little bit. Awesome. I just do the voice work. They do everything else, so it's great. It's perfect. They make the cool software.

Yep. After a few months of intensive work, the KDE community is pleased to announce Plasma 5.9, which brings many improvements and features to your desktop. Global menu bars for applications have returned and can be used with either a desktop panel showing the menu or neatly tucked away in the window bar. Due to popular demand, we implemented switching between Windows and Task Manager using the new MetaKey, plus a number key shortcut for heavy multitasking. It is now possible to create comprehensive look and feel desktop themes that will download all the extras needed from the KDE Store, such as color schemes and Plasma themes.

I can never win, Wes, because they just released Plasma 5.9, and here I'm thinking, I'm going to go Plasma 5.8 LTS. I'm going to go 5.8, I'll stick with 5.8, and then they ship 5.9, and here I'm thinking, I'm going to go Plasma 5.8 LTS. I'm going to go 5.8. I'll stick with 5.8. And then they ship 5.9, like days later. They get you all excited about these features and improvements. What are they doing to me? What are they doing to me?

So I don't know. Does anybody in the mumble room want to jump in on Plasma Desktop before we move on? I think it's a fantastic release. Lots of improvements. Little things that make theming nicer and whatnot. little things that make theming nicer um and whatnot it's not well i have been using plasma 5 since 5.4 yeah and it has only gotten it's more stable and more awesome every single release uh i have i'll have one machine that's going to stay on 5.8 just to keep testing it but 5.9 is is9 is a solid option.

And I think it's actually a fantastic thing that they have an LTS version of their PE. And with Neon LTS, you basically get both LTS for Ubuntu and LTS for Plasma. But if you want to have the latest version of Plasma, you can also just use the regular Neon, and you'll still have Ubuntu LTS, but you'll have Plasma will keep rolling, which is awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I've been tempted by it. It's on my short list now. Especially if you have the Ubuntu stuff, so you can do snaps or PPAs as well for that software availability.

We're going to talk more about snaps. I've tried snaps, and it works fantastic. Yeah, you see, so we're going to talk more about that coming up a little bit in the show because that is, I think honestly, it's getting to the point where that is a genuine consideration, especially for, like I said earlier,

a five-year distribution. So it's really nice. I think it's one of their best releases yet. And if anybody else wants to comment on it, you can, but otherwise I'll just leave a link in the show notes. The video covers pretty much everything. I really like that. I think a lot of more open source projects should do that. And if I have the time, I'm making myself available to open source projects that want to make a video, but they don't have somebody to do the voice work.

Maybe they don't have a good audio setup or whatever. Totally willing to do that for people as long as I can fit it in, like in a couple of hours on a Friday. I'll do it for you. And it really seems like that's the kind of fit and finish that kind of goes the extra. You know, you're like 90%. The software's awesome. They have a good website. But that makes it seem like a very professional organization, which it is. I think Gnome's been doing it

for a while, right? So it makes sense that the Plasma desktop. Yeah. Gnome started it and then all of a sudden they released KDE released a video that was terrible. You made fun of and then all of a sudden they released kde released a video that was terrible you made fun of it and all of a sudden they're like oh maybe we should fix that yeah and wimpy have you i know you've got uh a lot of community members that make spotlight videos of the matey desktop and of ubuntu matey have as this is this an area you've considered going down to help promote the distro or do you feel it's not necessary?

It is something I've considered doing, yes. But it's a matter of having time and having something that's demonstrable and usable for something like that. So we haven't done anything professional. Maybe we will in the future. We're just getting to the point where we've got enough crowdfunding coming in that maybe over the course of a year we could put a little bit aside each month and do something like that, but

I'd rather use the money that's coming in to work on the development stuff. I agree. I think that makes sense. We've got these community members. Yeah, it seems like every now and then there might be a few banner releases or features where it might be worth the effort or the trouble. As if I wasn't doing enough

for organising something like that. We need to just have somebody do it. You know, actually, Wimpy, not that you have all the free time in the world, but you'd be really good at voicing a video like that too. I'd watch that. Yeah, it's another thing I have all the time in the world for. Yeah, I know. I'll just do a British accent myself.

That's pretty good. All right, so Ajax, you had a question about Plasma versus other desktops. Are you in the mumbo-mumbo? Yeah, you are. Go ahead, Axe. Yeah, I'm not a new Linux user, but I have been using Ubuntu for a while, and I'm just kind of looking to branch out. And I'm wondering, you know, how better is Plasma? And, you know, what's the best way to go?

And why do you think it's better? Well, I'll just tell you my personal, I'm not going to say anything's better than anything else, but I'll tell you what I like about the Plasma desktop. First and foremost, it's very smooth. Everything renders very smoothly. The windows open really smoothly. But what I think I really enjoy now about the Plasma desktop the most is all of the like the tons of crazy ass configuration options that were wrong by default for so many years with the Plasma desktop are basically all set to sane defaults now. And so you can you can get one of the most incredibly powerful desktops and everything is powerful. The terminal get one of the most incredibly powerful desktops, and everything is powerful. The Terminal is one of the best

Terminal apps. I love the way I love console. It is such a great Terminal app. The way it handles tabs, the way I can easily send input to multiple tabs at the same time. Dolphin is a super fast file manager. When I have directories that have tens of thousands of files, it just

simply renders them and loads them better than files does, even though I like files still. Dolphin also has great features like side-by-side pane support with a terminal built into the file manager, which is great for me when I'm working on a filter. So I really like the file management aspects of Dolphin. I like the KIO slave. So I have, for example, I have a KIO slave where I take a screenshot of something and automatically uploads it to Imgur and copies the link to my clipboards and I just toss it right in the show notes. Little things like that that I can automate that are really nice. There's things I miss about GNOME, but for me, each little application you go down, they're generally more feature rich. There are things about the

Plasma desktop that I miss that I feel like I can probably work around. The biggest thing I really like on Unity and GNOME and really anything that uses the files or GTK file browser, even Thunar does this, is when I click on a Samba share it uses GVS

to mount it to my file system and then I can use VLC and whatever else I want to watch, video files. And even go to the terminal and interact. Yes, exactly. It's the path on my terminal, which is huge. I don't know how to accomplish that in Dolphin because Dolphin uses the KIO slaves, and it's uploading and downloading files to my server, saving them in a temp directory, and then trying to save them back up. So if I try to watch a video in MPV, it tries to pull down the entire video first and then open it up in MPV, which is a disaster. So there are some things I don't know how to fix yet, but so many other things are either

so much easier to set. Like one of my big frustrations used to be used to have to go to three different places to configure when the screen went to sleep, when the screen locked out, and if the screensaver was turned on. Now it's one spot. So it's streamlined. It's nicer. And also, honestly, the Breeze theme has just gotten a lot of nice iterative updates.

It looks really good. And GTK applications now look really good on the Plasma desktop. And Breeze has a very good dark theme. And I like a dark theme on my desktop. Agreed. And so it's Breeze has a very good dark theme, and I like a dark theme on my desktop. Agreed. And so it's Breeze again. And a lot of the white space issues I had with the Plasma desktop in the past, those have either been cleaned up.

Like Dolphin compared to Conquer is such a night and day difference. Like if you're coming at the desktop from like the days of Conquer and you sit down at Dolphin, it looks like they ripped off the GNOME desktop to some degrees, but only the best parts. And the thing that I really like about it now is with a nice universal dark theme, plasma widgets that don't crash all the time when I try to edit them, some same defaults, great performance, super reliable so far, and a file manager that's super capable in actually getting new features and not features removed? Let's check on my boxes. Let's check on my boxes, Wes. I really like what you said about the defaults there, because I'm, there's a lot

of laptops or other things where it's like, I can kind of install GNOME and just, you know, even if I don't have time to perfect it, it's very usable by default. And for a while, it didn't feel like Plasma was, but now, that, I mean, that sells me right there. Yeah, yeah. So I think if you're going to play with it, probably play around with Neon just to get a sense of it and then pick your distribution of choice that matches your use case. There's a lot to consider out there.

Neon is one of them, but I hear a lot from the SUSE camp. I know Kubuntu is still an active project. There's still a lot out there that you can pick and choose from. So, yeah. All right. Well, there you go. There's the Plasma 4 new update. Brand new version 5.90 is out today as we record this episode.

So you did see the story, actually. I saw the story come across the news feed, too, and I'm really glad you tagged it for the show, Wes. This gives me an unsettling feeling because I don't feel like we're getting the full story here. But Blackphone, remember the people that make like the super secure Android device with SilentOS? Yeah, like VPN to SGP technology. Yes, yeah. Silent Circle. Silent Circle.

Blackphone has been sending out an update to some devices that bricks them, to devices they say that are counterfeit devices. that bricks them to devices they say that are counterfeit devices. And it looks like, I'm not sure if they're counterfeit, but they weren't bought from a reseller. They were bought off of eBay. They may, I actually, I believe they may actually be legitimate used devices. That at least seems possible, right, from what we know. So a reader in Germany contacted ours after the update bricked one of his phones,

which he had purchased through eBay. The black phone, too, he said he received in the retail packaging. It looks just like the one that was reviewed on ours. It worked up to silent OS version 307. When silent OS 308 came out, it intentionally bricks the baseband on the device. When contacted, the Silent Circle technical support responded by saying, upon review of the IMEI number you provided, it's been determined that the device is not a genuine Silent Circle Black Phone 2. This device was not sold by Silent Circle or an improved vendor of Silent Circle, and therefore, we are unable to provide any further assistance. So hang up, basically. This is, now, of course course the Silent Circle folks contacted after this story, contacted ours and

the project management VP said Silent Circle is aware of unauthorized devices and we're working aggressively to stop the sale of those as we've counseled as we've counseled oh, as we've, anyways it's imperative for our consumers and companies that we work with

directly to use authorized sales partners when purchasing Blackphone 2. I'm not clear if this is used. I'm not clear if these are ripoff phones. Right. Exactly. Do you know what bothers me about this story at the core of it? Can you guess? It's Android.

Well, there's that. No, it's the – the aspect of the story that bothers me is the, well, we'll just issue an update and brick it. Yep. The hell is that? Like, fine if I can't use your software, but. Don't allow me to click to your cloud servers. Don't allow me to get updates from your silent server. Maybe I want to still flash something else once I realize that it was a fraudulent phone, but it's still a phone.

Maybe I still want to call 911 when I get in a car accident. It's unbelievable how we have no sovereignty over our own devices anymore. Samsung, bricking notes. I really think that highlights the different way we think about mobile devices and Android phones than a regular PC. The mistaken way. It highlights the mistaken way, the way we've been tricked. It's a whole product.

It's not like composable things that you could maybe repurpose. We've been bamboozled. We've been bamboozled. We really have been bamboozled. We just been bamboozled. We really have been bamboozled. Like, we just accept it like it's a toaster or something. These devices are sometimes the most important devices people have in their lives. Get ready for this, Wes. More important than their PC.

Shocker. This is Linux Unplugged. How dare you? And if you're somebody out there buying a black phone, you probably, like, really care about this stuff. Like, it's like extra. You're not like your average consumer. Like, this stuff's important to you. And so to have it be disabled, even if it's a knockoff, that doesn't justify bricking the device.

It's still a useful Android device. Push an alert message. Send me some sort of unauthorized, like, even Microsoft with illegitimate versions of Windows doesn't go this far. They might force you to reboot. They might put a watermark in your lower corner, but they won't nuke your PC. And if they did, I mean, that would be crazy. It's a monster, Wes. This, what we have created as consumers, and it's our fault.

It is our fault. This, what we have created as consumers, and it's our fault. It is our fault. What we have allowed to be created as consumers, what we let Steve Jobs bamboobles us all into is our own fault. I really believe it. Because if we as consumers would stand up and say something or refuse to buy devices that can be remotely bricked, this wouldn't be happening. Instead, we have devices that have God knows what on the baseband, can't even be controlled by the operating system. The whole other thing. The vendor who buys it can choose to brick it whenever they want.

Samsung. Now Blackphone. Who's the next Android vendor who's going to just remotely disable a phone? And maybe that'll be the new thing, you know? Oh, no more security updates, you're out of service anymore, oh, you've had your phone for more than two years, it's just going to stop working entirely.

Yeah. Yeah. Fader says he prefers it. And I think the argument would be that these are supposed to be ultra secure phones. And so if there is an argument there, that's yeah. Yeah. I so this is this is. But I feel like I've addressed that in my proposal.

My proposal is this. Disable connecting to TCP IP. Disable the TCP IP stack. My proposal is send an alert in the Android notification that says this device is not an authorized device. It is not to be considered secure. simply just doesn't work, that could cost somebody their life. Somebody could be stuck in a car accident and not able to call for help. Like that is a step too far. And I don't blame Blackphone. I don't blame Samsung because they're really in these horrible situations. Like Blackphone doesn't want counterfeit products out there.

Samsung doesn't want note devices blown up in your pocket so you can sue them and give them more bad press. So they're really in a rock and a hard spot. It's not like they're evil. Go ahead. How many people, while they're drowning in a car, do a firmware update on their phone? Drowning in their car? No, you do the update. You get in the car to go to work and you get in a car accident.

It's not that crazy of a scenario, right? No. And I agree with you that this is lunacy i think it's small company arrogance that they think they can do this um it's like a large company like amazon tried this like tried to reaching into kindles many years ago right deleting files from other people from consumer devices and look where that got them they've never done it since but this seems like the small company arrogance of we've made a fantastic product and you should be you should appreciate the support we're giving you not not we'll just throw not the the the chinese arrogant the chinese method which

is throw a bazillion devices out there and we don't really give a crap about them once they've left the factory. It's the opposite. They're caring too much about devices, whether they know about them or not. That's a great point. And I also like the idea from the chat room that that could be a new action movie cliche, like somebody drives off a bridge,

their car is sinking, but their phone is in the middle of installing an update, the monthly Android update. It's the new cliche. This is like a really boring black mirror. Even the car could be doing an update. Yeah, that's true. It could be the car itself doing an update.

And then someone has an Alexa dot or echo in the car, and they have to do an update on that as well. Hey, Jax, you want to take the devil's advocate position. Go ahead, Ajax. No, I think you guys are generally right. But the thought occurred to me as well. Say you're a big company or a small company, an employer giving this to your employees and you're working against corporate espionage and doing some really important stuff. Do you want your employees to be able to override that? Like, do you want, maybe as an employer, you bought the black phone because you want it

to break if it's not completely secure. Right. And if I'm the company that owns the devices, I get to say that. It's not the manufacturer of the device that gets to say whether my employees can use their devices or not. It's me as the employer, the owner of the device. It's always the owner of the device that should have control over the device, not the manufacturer of the device. That's my line. That right there. That's my line in the sand.

That's exactly it. It is. I feel like I should have root access over every device I own whenever it's feasible. Maybe I could understand like the car. Maybe. But that's – even like the Echo. I feel like I should be able to – I should be able to go into like some sort of settings mode, activate developer mode and SSH into my Echo and be able to control it. Tweak things.

Yeah. There's – we talked about it in Linux Action Show. There's some state laws that could help in the US, but I don't know how optimistic I really am. I don't know. I see cars as like a lethal weapon. It can be used as a missile on the road, but I don't see a phone as being a lethal weapon. I can see how someone might argue that the phone might shout out while you're throwing it. Don't throw me.

Don't throw me. It's against the end user license agreement to use it as a missile. I don't know. Yeah. If it's a note, it's okay. Bitmax. Bitmux. You want to go ahead. Bitmux.

Yeah, I'm here. I was thinking, you know, maybe we could reverse engineer the breaking system and just intentionally do the Galaxy Note 7 thing. Someone steals your phone and just blow it up in their pocket. Right. I actually think that'd be great. Like remote destruct.

Sure. I'm not saying don't have it. Let me control it. Ooh, yeah. I like that bit, Bucks. That's good. What if a kid picks it? Now you think it's with a burglar.

Now it's a weapon. It's in the hands of a kid. And blow up the kid. No, that's no good. That's no good. That is no good. Yeah. You got to – with great responsibility comes great explosions. I'm not quite sure how that saying goes.

It was something my uncle once told me. This is not a morality podcast. All right. Well, while we're still talking about mobile, even tangentially, let's take a minute and mention our sponsor, Ting. In fact, I'd like to mention Linux.Ting.com. Why? Ting! In fact, I'd like to mention linux.ting.com. Why? Oh, I'll tell you why.

Because you get to save $25 off a device, or $25 in service credit if you bring a device. And speaking of voting with your wallet, this is how you do it. Ting's no contracts, no early termination fee, and you only pay for what you use. Ting keeps rates simple. We don't make you pick a plan. Instead, you just use your phone as you normally would. How much you use determines how much you pay each month. You can have as many devices as you want on one account. That's good, because when you use more, you pay less per minute, message, or megabyte of data.

Your usage, plus $6 per active device on your account, plus taxes, is your monthly bill. Simple. That's what we mean when we say... mobile. That makes sense. You know what Kyra doesn't mention? Really great customer service. Oh, yeah. Top-notch customer service. You speak to a human.

They talk to you. They fix your problem. They stick with you. They follow up. I know it sounds like almost ridiculous and unbelievable to say, but they – Wes, by God, they actually care. They do. It's like that's what their job is and they take it seriously. It's remarkable.

Like they're passionate about building a business that helps people. You know what's great about it is they're backed by 2Cows, which has been around since before the dot-com crash. I mean these guys have really dialed in and figured out how to do this stuff. 2Cows also runs Hover, another company I'm a huge fan of. I use them for all my DNS registration now. They've really figured out how to build sustainable companies that feature the customer first. So they have a great control panel. They have CDMA and GSM you can choose from. They don't mess around with early termination fees, no contract shenanigans, $6 a month for the line and your

usage, plus whatever Uncle Sam's going to take. That's it. Linux.ting.com. Go there. Check them out. You cord cutters out there, check out their blog. Also, you tweeters out there, check out their Twitter feed. They are following some of the rumors about Android 1 coming to the US on their Twitter feed amongst other things like sometimes giveaways and whatnot. They are twitter.com slash tingftw if you'd like to follow them. And check them out. They also have a subreddit.

Yes, they do. They're all over the web. They're so hip over there. YouTube channels, Google Plus pages. They got it all. But you start by going to linux.ting.com. That supports the show and saves you some money. Linux.ting.com.

And thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. All right. Let's pick up the pace and keep moving. We've been talking about a lot of stuff. One of the things that is in my hot little – actually, it's in Wes' hot little hands right now – is a rig that we have in for review at this moment. Go ahead, Wes. Open her up. Oh, this is beautiful.

So Wes right here has got himself the new XPS 13. Who needs it when I got this new band? I know. Yeah. The XPS 13 Kaby Lake. It's got an i7 in it. It's got the PCI SSD 4K screen. It's currently running Ubuntu 16.04 with Unity as the desktop and just kind of using it in the default configs.

What are your first thoughts when you pick it up, you look at it? What do you think? And you have which edition uh like uh xps sputniky thing you have like a it's one of the first yeah you have like the first and i have like i have like the second or third and this is the sixth this is the sixth wow yeah it's well made i mean and they've like uh not radical departure from the one that you have in terms of the body. But yeah, it's pretty similar there. It's very sturdy. I haven't done much on it, but Wi-Fi connected. Yeah.

It's very snappy. Yeah. It's the screen is nice. The screen is very, very nice. There is a sort of a premium build feel about it, too. Like, yeah, listen, this is just listen to this. You feel it as a nice solid thud when it too. Oh yeah. Listen this. You feel that? That's a nice solid thud when it closes right?

I was immediately impressed by like adjusting the amount of resistance adjusting the display. Right. The display is on there. I like the way it goes back. It's a little shake hinge.

And yeah it is. Look at that. Look at that. I'm sitting there bouncing it buddy. I'm bouncing it up and down. That is not moving. No it's great.

And also a touch screen which you know you may or may not use but it's there. And also a touchscreen, which you may or may not use, but it's there. And Unity does work pretty well with that. Interestingly, so I've had my family. I've had Hadiyah using this. I've had Dylan using this. And interestingly enough, both of them just sort of intuitively, when they're like browsing Amazon or in Dylan's case, YouTube, reach out and scroll. Or when Dylan and I are sitting here both using this computer together and there's something he wants

to look at, he just reaches out and touches it. And he doesn't even know it's a touchscreen. I don't think I said anything to Hadiyah either. I saw them both sitting there on their lap and they're using it to scroll through webpages. So the touchscreen... I can see that for the consuming side, you know? Like when you don't have it docked. So what's the port situation like? Well, so here's what we got, Wes.

You got yourself a Thunderbolt USB-C style port. I don't know. I haven't really tested it yet, but yeah, it's USB-C shaped. Then you've got USB 3.0 headphone jack out. It's also got a little battery gauge on the side. Does yours still have that too? Is that something they've had since the beginning? Oh, yeah. Mine has that as well. Yeah, mine does too,

which I just like. I like being able to hit a button on the side of the laptop and see what the battery is. It's got an SD card reader and then it also has another USB port on the other side. So two USB 3.0 ports, SD card reader, USB-C which has the Thunderbolt icon on it, although I have not tested that under Linux.

I have used USB-C, so I know that works, but I have not used Thunderbolt because I don't have any Thunderbolt stuff that has the USB-C plug. But you see it has that little Thunderbolt icon, little logo next to it, the plug there. So, yeah, that's interesting. What is this weird future we live in?

I know, USB-C future, man. It's something. I got to say, though, that is a handsome device. I would be proud to take it anywhere. Yeah, yeah, it is. Exactly. It's not like the old Dells where you're like, well, yeah, I mean, I bought it.

It wasn't that expensive, and it works for me, but it doesn't look that great. It's not like like, well, yeah, I mean, I bought it. It wasn't that expensive and it works for me, but it doesn't look that great. It's not like that. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm, first impressions are pretty good in all those regards. So I've been getting my family's impression. I've been using it.

I'm going to, I'm going to reload it pretty soon with a different distro and just different desktop environment. See what that's like. Cause I always like to, you know, both in a lot of, well, I don't actually can't think of anybody that doesn't ship the hardware preloaded with Ubuntu. I mean they all – everybody does, right? I mean the ones that obviously come to mind are System76. They ship it with Ubuntu.

But all my System76 rigs, I've generally at some point loaded other distributions on there. Even if I go back to Ubuntu or specifically Ubuntu Mate, I still sometimes run Arch for a little bit or Fedora or anything else. And so it's nice to know the general compatibility with Linux 2, not just the Ubuntu compatibility. But so far, the out-of-the-box stuff, top notch. That's awesome. Yeah. And I came across this for the previous version of the XPS. Last year.

Which is – actually, no. Did I come across this or did you? Because you and I found some of the same links. Yeah. This – I can't remember. But this is getting macOS on the XPS 13, the 9350 edition. So I thought I'd just drop this in there. For those of you who are crazy enough to do that, that's a thing.

Hey, look at those K extensions. Yeah. Have fun with that after the next update comes out. Then also what showed up on Reddit slash R slash Ubuntu is a review of the xps 15 kb lake with the nvidia 1050 which is now starting to get into the range of like an actual like computer i'd really want to consider and uh this is is not an official dell supported configuration i don't believe but i think our local resident wimpy is has messed around with the xps 15 running Linux and has had some good success, right, Wimpy? I have.

I've got the fifth generation 13 and the XPS 15. Okay, okay. So, and have you had any problems running Linux on the XPS 15 even though Dell doesn't ship it in that config? No, because the Dell reseller I got it from offered configuration options that included the exact same Wi-Fi card as is in the XPS 13. Nice. So it just – everything else is the same apart from the Wi-Fi chipset in that model, and therefore it just works. Huh.

Okay. So that was what you kind of have to take away from that, I think, is make sure you get the – this is the thing. If you go off with the – I think that was then, though. I think now they only sell the models with both models of Wi-Fi chips that are compatible with Linux. Yeah, okay. It looks like in this review this guy didn't have to fight with wireless either. WW, you had a question about the 13?

question about the 13 yeah have you used it under a heavy load because i've i've heard um people in our own irc room that have used it under a heavy load and had a coil whine issue because when the fan kicks up uh so fast and high that you hear kind of a whining from it yeah i'm i'm actually gonna i'm gonna specifically test that because i've heard that from the community as well so it's interesting that you've picked up on that too. So the only real heavy load I've put it under, which did kick the fans a little bit as we watched a 4k YouTube video. Okay. HTML5. Didn't hear any whine then, but it was literally for like three minutes. So I'm going to do like some extensive testing. What is a good way other than like prime 95 or something from like the ancient days? Is there like a, is there like a really solid like

run this command and it generates a lot of CPU usage besides building software? I think you should I think there's a version of the Heaven's Engine benchmark for Linux that you could possibly use. I will check it out. I can definitely figure out ways to cause CPU

usage, but I would like to do sustained minutes. Just keep compiling that kernel for your MacBook. Yeah, right? So that's something to try. But, yeah. Worth noting, there's two things. There's a good benchmark for Onyx Test Week, which will, like, run a whole bunch of games and all kinds of stuff. But the thing to note is the coil

wine is nothing to do with the fan okay even under no load whatsoever the coil wine in the really old ones was it would just whistle just gently enough that to be really annoying but under no load at all oh i've not experienced this on either of mine I guarantee you I guarantee you I would be hypersensitive to that so if I it's one of those things like the first time you hear it and then you're done before it was fine yeah

I even I know a lot of you are like this I'm not trying to brag but I can walk in I'll walk into a room and I can tell you if a TV screen is on just by the coil wind of the TV screen. It's less prominent now with LCDs, but it's still a thing. And so it's one of those where I would be one of the people in the room going like, what is that noise?

And everybody else would be like, what are you talking about, Chris? I'm like, there is something ringing in here. I'm really sensitive to that. And there are entire machines I have stopped – Librem! Librem 15! There are entire machines I've stopped using because of the noise they make. So we'll see. I haven't had that whine.

I have not heard any whine yet. I would absolutely tell you if I did, though. Yeah. I don't know. I've got to figure out what the price config is on this one, too. Right. So I haven't done the whole price to performance ratio yet stuff either. So if you're out there and you have one of these machines, I'd like to know what you've thought, what you've run into.

Specifically, if you've had any issues around Kaby Lake, any of that kind of stuff. Oh, great, yeah. New chipset. Yeah. I used to, for years, was like, oh, yeah, no, it's no problem with Intel stuff. But then Skylight came around, yeah, and there was some problems. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of problems, are you just trolling me with this next one yes i think so are you really yeah legit yeah good man i did i saw it and i was

like okay well i have to at least send this to chris yeah yeah no i mean that's true at the end of the day i guess i decided yeah that's it was still low this so awesome. So we got an update on the ButterFS RAID 5 and RAID 6 status. This is on the Linux ButterFS mailing list. Yeah. And their update goes like this. They believe, and this is coming from Jan, and also it's an email thread between Jan and Hugo and others. others, and they think what they probably should be doing is updating the wiki to reflect the fact that things are way more broken than they initially thought. Like RAID 5 and 6 don't even go near them.

There's just some examples. No, in some respect, it's really great they found this stuff. So there's that. In other respects, the RAID 5 or 6 scrub will repair data while corrupting parity. Kind of ironic. So while you're fixing your data, you will corrupt your parity. Just trade one corruption for another. RAID 6 scrub can report false alerts on see-some errors.

The dev replace cancel sometimes can cause an entire kernel panic of your system. sometimes can cause an entire kernel panic of your system. And they also are seriously considering re-implementing ButterFS's entire RAID 5.6 configuring the entire thing using Device Mapper, which is tried and true, but old. So they may be rewriting the entire RAID 5.6 aspect of ButterFS. Does that make you want to build a nice big

RAID 5 array right now? Yeah, just go all in on ButterFS right now. I am so stoked about this. When you saw this, Wes, did you laugh? Were you disappointed? Because my initial reaction was actually a little sad. I was like, oh, we're never going to get there. We're never going to get there.

Yeah, it was a little – I think it was all of those things, right? I was like, it was kind of funny and I was thinking of you and just some of the quotes from the mailing list. Of course. But the part of me is like I still have a ButterFS RAID 1 system. So I'm glad that they aren't mentioning that in here. There's some mention of it later. Yeah, there was two links you sent me. What was the second link you sent me?

The second one was just talking about Chris over at Facebook who has given – Oh, right. The one that – the use case that is always mentioned for Butterfest. Right. Yeah. The singular use case. So they just kind of talk about how they've focused in the past on single drive use cases. They may change that this year. Performance stability and then maybe RAID 5.6 are on their list.

So we'll see. Maybe if there is a rewrite, Facebook will be involved. But who knows, right? I mean, and that's the thing is like, really, Butterfest has been relegated to, hey, Intel XFS has snapshots that are like fully worked out. Here's some snapshots for your root file system. Don't trust data in any serious NASA, right?

XFS, everybody. XFS. If you don't need all the features of ZFS please consider XFS for your home partition it's just a few letters less than Z

it's almost there it's close it's damn near close for maybe your VAR I don't care hey I'm honey badger about it but XFS my friends

please consider it and then if you want a grown up file system that's used in production ZFS I don't mean I'm not even saying that to be antagonistic it's just the reality now And then if you want a grown-up file system that's used in production, ZFS. I don't mean – I'm not even saying that to be antagonistic. It's just the reality now.

And, oh, this hurts so bad. This hurts. And remember, I know we are now like a year into Chris bashing ButterFS. But the year before that, I put all my shit on ButterFS. Like my actual – in fact – I mean I still have repartitions on ButterFS. I'm sure you do as well. The VM server that runs a bunch of the local servers here at Jupiter

Broadcasting is all of that stuff is stored on Butter FS. Like the back end NAS storage is ZFS but the server itself that's running all that stuff, we are Butter FS all up in this business still to this day. And we have Arch machines in those VMs running on that stuff. We are ButterFS all up in this business still to this day. And we have Arch machines in those VMs running on ButterFS. We heard you like ButterFS.

Jeez. And I'm not using any of the RAID features though. And it's really been fine for that. Yeah, exactly. And the systems don't fill the disks a lot. They're running kind of the same thing, the same jobs, the same tasks all the time. And it's actually been fine for that. So while I've been spending a year kind of trash-talking Butterfest,

it's just simply because I really want us to be competitive. Exactly, yeah, right, that's what it comes down to, is like we, it would have been great if Butterfest was the project that could have built a new GPL license, ZFS, that we could use and could be in kernel. Amen. That's not what's happened. Amen, exactly. That is exactly how I feel about it, and that's exactly what I wanted,

and that's why now I say XFS. Wimpy, do you agree? Yep. I've done for a long time. I've had good success with B3FS on root file systems. This was some time ago, but, you know, for out-and-out performance with the compression, it was brilliant but uh then uh not because of the issues that have since come to light with v3fs but i started using f2fs because i've moved to ssd so f2fs for um root file systems and then xfs for volumes of data will you denude me what is what is that f2fs is a file system developed by samsung and it's specifically

for flash and solid state devices so it's hot rocking fast on anything from memory cards usb sticks and how did you come across this it's been around for years yeah i imagine i imagine it just doesn't ring a bell for me uh yeah well i it was one of the things I was tinkering with when I was trying to build an OS based on Arch for the Raspberry Pi years ago, and this was a way to get better performance. And the only drawback with F2FS is that it doesn't have all of the user space tools. So, for example, there's no file system resize capability at the moment. Get it right the first time?

So, yeah, you get it right the first time. Been there. Will you put a link to that in the show notes, Wes? Because I saw you just found that there. Yes, I will. Yeah, I'm very fascinated by these and Bcache, FS, and others. Yeah, and that's the one that I tinker with on a spare machine and that's my little hobby file system that I like to keep up to speed with, yeah. be and folks like Ryan at System76 are in where I all of a sudden have to make the decision what potentially thousands upon tens of thousands of users may use as their default.

And that is such a head job for me. Like when it comes to the responsibility of choosing a file system, like there is not – when it comes to your core foundation, once you've chosen Linux, you've made the hard choice. Now it's like what distro and what file system? And you choose – generally people choose Ubuntu or Ubuntu Mate. And then you choose your – and that's like – those are the three big choices in my world. And I can't imagine – I can't imagine like every time I get in that position, I think, well, you just do extended four. Because nobody gets fired for shipping extended four.

Yep, that's the way to think about it. Or you're Sousa and you do ButterFS. And then you spend the rest of the year defending ButterFS into oblivion. But I digress. I think that's an interesting – I think that's – would you ever consider – OK. Okay. Wimpy, what would it take before you would flip the bit to make XFS the default file system for a future – like 1810. Say it's Ubuntu Mate 1810. What would it take to convince you to flip the bit to XFS for the default file system? It wouldn't take anything to convince me, but it's not a decision I could make alone because it would be something that would affect all of the flavors.

So there would have to be a consensus of opinion. Oh, it's all Ubuntus that would switch? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. It's a feature of ubiquity, yeah. We have kernel developers who are quite anti-ButterFS for good reason. They've done a lot of testing, like pulling out the cable while it's running kind of testing.

Do you mean v3FS or XFS? ButterFS, sorry. Fine. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting, Pobi. And so I guess the flip side to that is, so you could frame it as, well, we can't do XFS until all Ubuntu's do XFS. But the flip side of that is, once Ubiqu has drop-down checkbox support for ZFS, then all of the flavors get it.

Right, Wimpy? Yeah, and there is a capability to put plugins into Ubiquiti so you can have additional steps in the installer. installer and the only flavor i'm aware of that ever did that was um mythbun2 so that you could configure the um the back end and front end components uh individually during the install so it might be possible that using a plugin that could be overridden i'm not sure anything like choosing the file system is exposed in the plugin or not i think that's a separate a separate piece but yeah i'd um i'd happily go with um with xfs i mean it's proven itself over many many years now i didn't really think about that that that is a that is interesting because you'd really come down to having to either do a plugin if they didn't and if they didn't have plugin support

for the file system and you really were you about this, you'd essentially have to fork Ubiquiti to pull this off. Those are the kind of things I haven't thought about. So the choice is sort of made for you in some sense, but the net gain overall is totally worth it. Yeah, but when I install my machines, I just do the manual partitioning and just set everything up with um xfs anyway yeah i usually do the same ryan do you know if anybody over there at system 76 has ever you know kicked around the idea of switching around the default file system or switching around something like that is there is there any kind of like kind of like skunk works where people try out new file systems at System76? Well, we do try them out,

but we typically end up shipping whatever Ubuntu ships by default. Yeah, that kind of seems like a good bet. Yeah, it's safe. Yeah, and also you get the advantage of a huge user base that all sort of has the same common set of configurations, and that makes it much easier for people that are looking for support after the fact. So we kind of end up – this is one of those defaults that truly reigns supreme. So we end up with extended four, and I suppose if the market came along one day and really wanted something else, we would see a change. But for right now, for what we need, it's getting the job done.

It's getting the job done. All right. Well, speaking of getting the job done, let's talk about Linux Academy. Talk about a really great way to get the job done and learn more. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to support the show and you sign up for a free seven-day trial. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Take advantage of a platform built by Linux users

for freaking Linux users. That makes all of the difference. Linux and open source isn't one of the many things they cover. It's the only thing they cover. And that really makes a huge difference. I'll tell you one of the things I've really liked about Linux Academy

is I talked to them before they were really publicly known. And what I walked away from the conversation was, well, we watched Jupyter Broadcasting and we thought, what if we did a podcast network but we made money? And I thought, that's a great idea. I should have thought of that. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I'm like, well, then we kind of kicked that idea around. And this is what we came up with because they wanted to spread Linux.

They wanted more people using it, and they recognized there was this total, total gap in the industry for getting you credible, good Linux training that the rest of the industry would get behind and recognize. And that, to a T, is Linux Academy. They got course schedulers for your busy schedule. They got video courses. They got self-paced study guides. They got downloadable, comprehensive stuff you can take offline, listen in the shower. That's amazing.

A community full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, learning paths, which are very specific tracks for your career that are planned out by their instructors. Oh, instructors, yeah, they've got those too. Full-time humans who are happy to advise and answer questions. Nuggets, just little teeny bits of wisdom when you're busy, and study guides and audio that you can take with you.

And a notebook you can keep filled out. And here's the best part, note cards. Take advantage is one of the best things of open source. That is people forking stuff and making it better. They got those with the note cards. They integrate little things like that, some concepts from the open source community into the platform. It's genius. They've also got iOS and Android apps now, and they're building out content like a mo, adding stuff all the time. I think it's probably

one of the coolest companies I've watched grow up over the last few years. And one of the nicest things about Linux Academy is legitimately every single week, there's something cool and new to talk about. I love how much stuff they're doing. I love how hard they're hitting it. And I love the results our community is getting. You start by going to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Sign up for a free seven-day trial. Try it out yourself. See how useful it is.

Look at the public profiles. See how you can use that to tell management what you've been working on. And then when you're all done at the end profiles. See how you can use that to tell management what you've been working on? And then when you're all done at the end of the day, just sit back and play around with your lab servers. That's what I would do. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. What are you doing over here?

Did you go to sleep and have to wake back up again? Yeah, that's right, I did. What does that solve? What problem did you fix by sleeping your laptop and re-waking it? Sadly, nothing. Nothing. What's wrong? Did it lock up on you? Chrome was just being weird. It wasn't like clicking for the mouse at all, so.

What distro? I just tried out a distro recently. Oh, man. I can't remember. I just recently tried out a distro that had Chrome and Chromium installed. Oh, no. It was the Wait a minute. No, no, no. No, no. No. No., no. It was the – wait a minute. No, no, no. No, no.

No, no. Hold it. It was the XPS 13. It came out of the box from Dell with Chrome and Chromium installed. Like what the hell is this about? Interesting. Why do you have Chrome and Chromium? Like just do one or the other.

And not Firefox. Not Firefox. Not Firefox. and and not firefox not firefox firefox um this is this is a privilege of of um an oem that that works with canonical to produce their images a privilege they can they can install three web they can they can they can work with canonical or they can install three browsers but they can work with canonical to um change what's on the image. They don't have to use the vanilla image. They can actually make customizations.

That is nice. Oh, yeah. One of the other things I noticed is a pretty slick, actually, really slick boot up animation, music, animation. It makes Ubuntu really feel like a... Do you remember when macOS way back in the day, had these welcome to macOS animations that were kind of okay? This is like those, only way better. It's really well done.

So you boot it up, you get this whole full-screen video presentation, but yeah, you do get Chrome and Chromium. And so, is there... I understand that there is a back back and forth like we will – like how does that work? Like how are they able to add something?

Did they like carve out a deal with Google to redistribute Chrome? Is that what I'm to understand? I don't know what the arrangement is regarding Google, but I know that what they're able to negotiate as to what deviations they want to make from the vanilla image for it to still be recognized as Ubuntu and supported. So it doesn't become like a Dell Ubuntu?

No, Canonical will still recognize it as Ubuntu and it is supported. Okay, that's nice. That's nice. I want to just two stories and then I want to get into some new hardware that's coming out of System76 that's going to mine all the Bitcoins. Did you know that kernel.org back in – well, they shut it down in 98. But until 1998, you could mount kernel.org via NFS or Samba over the internet? That's fun.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I might have done it once maybe and i didn't even know what the hell i was doing back then and they were you ran a magic command and then like a kernel popped out and it was just the worst though wimpy did you ever do this i remember trying to get it working through our company firewall over NFS once. And about that time, then figured out this was a really bad idea and just worked out how to write a script to make FTP recursively grab. There you go.

NFS and CIFS, not known for their tolerance of high latency connections, not what they're strong at. Yeah. FTP, much better. But it is 2017, and 19 years later, kernel.org is announcing that they are terminating their FTP services. No more FTP for you, Wes. There's a good discussion just about, like,

that FTP can be tricky with firewalls and some good highlights, like they can be sent to random port numbers. They may originate from server or client. Destination addresses are negotiated on the fly. So I can see why it's just like a lot more of a burden to maintain than just use HTTP. Yeah, but not for them in a way. Like, well, yeah, I guess. As long as they keep rsync up, I'm happy, really, to be honest with you.

And HTTP, I'm good. Yeah. I don't know, though, because I still have muscle memory for ftp.kernel.org. ftp.kernel.org. Yeah, that's fair. That's going to be weird. That's going to be weird. But time moves on.

Also, moving on, I thought this was sort of interesting, and I'll just link it up in the show notes for you guys. But super quick, if you're like me and you're on a super limited bandwidth connection at home or maybe you're on a LAN with tons and tons of workstations running Steam, I don't know, Steam Pipe and other utilities like Nginx can be used to locally cache Steam updates, game files, and whatnot on your LAN. Ars Technica has a whole write-up about it that we'll have linked in the show notes. You can only cache games you own, and it caches them the first time you pull them down. So it's not like you can't take Steam Pipe, point it at the Steam store, pull down all of the things. And they just have it right there. Not going to work.

Doesn't work that way. No. And this is like a combination of Nginx and Steam pipe and other things to help you sort of solve the problem. Maybe you got a LAN game or you got a whole bunch of machines or like myself. Your roommates also use Steam. There are also times where my MiFi connection in LadyJupes is super strong and I maybe want to do this kind of stuff. And then there's times where it's not so good and it would be nice that when I reset up a machine or I'm trying out a system for review to be able to just pull them from a local system. You really want to install Raise the Sun.

When do I not? Yeah. When do I not? The answer is never. So this is kind of a neat feature and I don't really have much to add. We're not going to go through the whole how-to here. So this is kind of a neat feature, and I don't really have much to add. We're not going to go through the whole how-to here, but if you want to locally cache your Steam games, and who doesn't, right?

I also like to have my own local Pac-Man repo, my own apt repo. I mean, come on. I have all the things. So ours has a write-up on that. Now, Wes, when I say System76, you say – Fantastic computers. I say Oryx too. I say laptops. Oryx.

I say laptops actually. Yeah, laptops. Which is funny. Although they have desktops. I know. Some of my first systems – actually my second System76 machine was a desktop. So I know. I know that.

I know that. But you know what I haven't said for a while? And every now and then I mention it on Linux Action Show. But you know what didn't come to the tip of my mind? Servers. But System76 has a whole line of servers. I did not know that. And I have been led to believe that once people have been convinced of the System76 persuasion,

they usually end up coming back looking for more, like servers. I don't know if that's true or not, but Mr. Ryan Sipes is in the Mumble Room, and perhaps he can confirm rumors of a new iBix Pro. Ryan, is it true? That was Ryan Sipes. Yes the Mumble Room, and perhaps he can confirm rumors of a new iBix Pro. Ryan, is it true? That was Ryan Sipes. Yes. There it is. He was too busy playing with the new iBix Pro.

I liked it. I kind of got it. I was on the edge of my seat there for a second. That was really good. This is not just any old server, though, Ryan, right? Because this is like one that could have like a whole bunch of GPUs in it. This is like a Bitcoin maniac. Eight Tesla P100s, 5,000 CUDA cores.

It's a pretty big beast of a machine. 1.5 terabytes of RAM. I want it. I want it. 32 terabytes of SSD storage, if that's your persuasion. Eight GPUs. So, Ryan, am I kind of right, though? Do a lot of people, they end up coming to System76, they buy a desktop, they buy a laptop,

maybe I'm a school district, and all of a sudden I find a lab full of System76 machines, and next thing I know, I need a server, and people kind of get sort of, well, they get swayed by the whole System76 package. Is that kind of a common entry point for the servers? Can you talk a little bit about what System76 is doing in the server space? Because it's not something we talk a lot about. Sure thing. We offer a full line of servers from your basic 1U server that maybe is running, I don't know,

like maybe use it as a web server. Maybe it's something that's not really intensive on GPU. We offer from the small server all the way up to the new iVIX Pro, which is a beast. It's a monster. My kind of machine. Yeah, and the thing is that a lot of folks come for the laptops and desktops but uh they stay for the the awesome server line that we have

and uh they look to us for our fantastic linux support when they're considering that type of machine gpus in servers. A lot of them, yeah. I'm familiar with scientific workloads. I'm pretty familiar with live streaming use cases. But I can see a lot of different server-side workloads coming. I joke about Bitcoin. It's not really what you would use this machine for.

But, man, I could imagine there's people out there like in the design industry or the scientific community that must need a lot of GPU power, right, Ryan? Yeah, machine learning and render farms for like 3D video. These are common use cases that we hear about. I've said this before, I think, on the program, but we have some customers who everybody knows who does, who's really big into machine learning, maybe even autonomous driving,

those type of companies, and they've been looking forward to us producing a machine like this. How about we set up one of those Steam streaming servers? Those GPUs can render it, and then I can just play right here on my laptop. We'll have the Jupyter Broadcasting streaming service in one of these things.

It wouldn't just be for you and I. It could be for everybody. Yeah, that's pretty great. I think when I picture like the ultimate school district, I would totally like love like labs with System76 desktops, secretaries on the all-in-one systems and office staff and teacher computers would all be the all-in-one systems. Servers on these, not the GPUs but just that kind of stuff. That would be nice. That would be such a sweet

setup. So Ryan, you're telling me people are still buying local servers and installing them on-premises? I thought everybody went to the cloud. Well, those cloud providers have to buy their servers from somewhere. That's true yeah that's very true and they need more powerful servers than ever so you guys got to stay busy yeah fortunately we've had really really great reception to our server line and the demand just

continues to grow and so we've continued to grow our server line yeah demand and so i i would Yeah. And so I would encourage anyone who is looking to, who works at a data center or for, you know, a university doing machine learning, protein folding, things that are really GPU heavy to take a look at the iBix. You know, when you talk about buying time on one of these GPU servers. It isn't cheap. In fact, some of the cloud providers require you to enter into some kind of amount of time that you have to use it because they have to spin up that thing on site in order to make a instance available to you. And so sometimes it seems crazy when you're talking about a machine

that can range anywhere from $9,000 to $114,000. But if you're a big enterprise or university, sometimes having something like this on site can be cheaper than renting time on a cloud service. Hey, man, mine's only $41,000, so I don't know what you're talking about. I configured a system just for casual usage. Casual usage. Casual usage with how many cores did I put in there? Oh, I put 22 cores in there with 44 threads. You sure that'll be enough, Chris?

Maybe you should get two. Yeah. So that's the new iBix from System76. Holy smokes. I also wanted to bring some stuff up because lots of folks have been really excited to see that we're making a new product release and I wanted to reiterate that Carl is speaking at UbuCon

and will be releasing three products while he's on stage. So people who are in the Pasadena area or can make it out there should totally attend that talk. Cool, man. Awesome. And of course, check out the iBix over at System500Sex.com.

I'm just going to, you know, I like any time you have a system that has a configuration option of first CPU memory and then second CPU memory, and the option is 768 gigabytes of RAM. You're not playing RAM. This is a series.

Wow. And then 860 gigabytes of RAM. You're not playing around. This is a series. Wow. Yeah. And then the base GPU design is 2800 cores, you know, and it can go it can go all the way up from there to like 39000 cores. That is a beast of a system. Wow. I know what I want for my birthday. Yeah, that's a whole that's a whole nother level. Speaking of another level, let's talk about our last and. Wow. I know what I want for my birthday. Yeah, that's a whole other level. Speaking of another level, let's talk about our last and final.

But you know what? Honestly, the sponsor that I'm using right now as we do this very show, so you can't call them last and definitely you can't call them the least. They are Digital Ocean. Go over to digitalocean.com and use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. You get a $10 credit. You spin up a rig. Try it out. You got an open source project. You got a demo you want to do and a podcast in a

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Use the promo code DLUMPLUGGED. You create your account. You go in there. You get in thereUnplugged. You create your account. You go in there. You get in there all like a boss. You get your username. You do your email thing. Then you log in. You type in DLUnplugged. You get the $10 credit.

You go nuts. Say you get the $5 rate. Go crazy for two months. I'm not going to judge. I won't tell people what you're doing. I mean, you can tell me what you're doing, but I won't tell them what you're doing. Come on. I know it.

It's great. There's so many things. You know, right now, as we record this show, I'm using DigitalOcean to host my IRC. I'm using DigitalOcean to stream this here very show. I know. I'm using DigitalOcean to sync the files I'm using to play on this show and to talk about it. And I've been using DigitalOcean this morning to set up the files. I'm using DigitalOcean to talk to our virtual lug

because the mobile room runs on a DigitalOcean droplet. Hey, you. There's so many things we use DigitalOcean for. And it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or if you're an expert. You'll find their interface is fantastic. They've got data centers all over the world. So even our international audience will find something locally that hyper-serves their customers.

And then they have some of the best freaking best documentation on the web. Not because they copied it and set up a wiki, but because they've really worked with their community. They've rewarded the very, let's say, high-producing members of the community who create really great content. They've monetarily rewarded them. They've hired full-time, and I'm plural here, full-time editors to edit the documentation. Like they take every aspect of their business super serious. And right now, not only are they rolling out this really nice front-end system to help manage your traffic and spread it across your entire infrastructure, but the beta that I've been playing around with is their monitoring system. Oh, yeah.

Integrates right in with the dashboard. I can enroll my existing droplets and I can quote unquote upgrade them to monitoring. Nice, dude. So nice. So cool. Honestly, for us, like for a couple of our servers, we kind of guessed on how much horsepower we needed to like do

live transcoding video, but we didn't really know. And now with this new system, I can get a much better idea. So I can really kind of narrow in on the kind of performance I need. Do I need more? Do I need less? If you're pushing it or you're just wasting things. That's the thing, dude.

And it's really nice. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DUNPLUGGED. It just gets better every single week. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the unplugged program, DigitalOcean.com. And use that promo code DUNPLUGGED. So, Wes, do you see my screen right here right now? What is that?

Is that top? That's Popey's computer right there. I am logged into Popey's computer using – Fork bump. Come on, fork bump. You know, RM-RM. No, just kidding. Knock yourself out, Chris.

Yeah, I know. We were talking. Popey and I were talking earlier today. And he's like, well, maybe I'll set up a droplet for you because he doesn't want me to hack his system. But this is using Teleconsole, which is an app we featured on Sunday. And what's even better than this is I think – and I'm guessing. But, Popey, I think you kind of got involved in this because you found that either you did you help get involved with the snap or you found it had a snap and yeah i i i discovered teleconsole last week there was um it featured on hacker news and it rose up the github

uh trending projects and i i thought oh that looks interesting let's take a look and i contacted their ceo that the company that is called gravitational that that uh made teleconsole and said hey would you like your application snapped and put in the store and i had a conversation with them on late on friday night last week and i'd already snapped it by this point. It was already packaged up as a snap. And I had a chat with them and they said, seriously, you just want my permission to put it in the store? I said, yeah. He went, do it.

So that was it. I put it in the store and I'll hand it over to them shortly. I've created a pull request on their GitHub repo so they can take ownership of it. on their GitHub repo so they can take ownership of it. But basically, the directory you're in is just a directory on a, like you said, on a DigitalOcean droplet, but in there is a YAML file if you do an LS. Oh, yes. You'll find there's a YAML file in there,

and that's the config that I created. It's not hugely complex. Wow. That's all it took. I'm going to look at that again. Look at that. Yeah, it's like 20 lines or so. Well, no.

I mean, it's less than that if you take out the description. Well, yeah. If you take out all the metadata, there's like three lines. Yeah. Wow. So you have copy, and then you have a tar file. And this is made simpler because it's a Go file. I mean, it's a Go program that's pretty much all statically linked.

It's all ready to go. So it's not like a ton of extra depths have to be installed. But this is, I mean. And you're running this in a web browser. You're connected over a web browser. We're using Teleconsole here. That's amazing. This is the cool thing.

We're using Teleconsole to talk about Teleconsole. So I just installed Teleconsole Snap from the store and then ran Teleconsole and it gave me a URL. I gave that to Chris and he could open that URL in a browser and then look at my machine and actually interact with the machine. So I can sit here and this is great for providing support. If you've got family members who have got an Ubuntu machine, they can install Teleconsole or whenever they need help, they can run teleconsole, give you the URL, you can connect. And there's no port forwarding. There's no SSH keys or any of that nonsense. And you did mention on Laz that it is possible to do this with a GitHub ID.

You can do it without that. You can just give them a URL. Which is what we did here. It's brilliant. And what's fascinating is if you resize your window on your side, does it resize it on my side? Like it's – it is very much what I see. Do you want to make it smaller or larger? Try making it a little – try making the hair larger.

Does it – are you just – you're just dragging the window on your screen right now? So I'm just grabbing the terminal window and I've just made it slightly bigger. Oh, that's so cool. That is so great. And then you can revoke the session essentially and I've just made it slightly bigger. Oh, that's so cool. That is so great. And then you can revoke the session essentially and kick it out. Right, I can just press Control-D and it will exit out of teleconsole and I'm done. Or I can close the window because it's just a terminal. But it's

just so nice. Yeah. It's really, really nice. What I gravitate towards here is more and more things like this are showing up as snaps. And this is why I think I'm probably for my five-year Bulletproof distro going to end up on Ubuntu derivative. Some sort of derivative of Ubuntu. I don't know if it's Neon.

I don't know if it's Ubuntu Mate. I don't know if it's Ubuntu Proper. Right now on the XPS, I'm running Ubuntu Proper. I don't know if it's Ubuntu Mate. I don't know if it's Ubuntu Proper. Right now on the XPS, I'm running Ubuntu Proper. But this kind of thing between PPAs, snaps, apps, and maybe even flat packs, that is a whole range. And Docker.

It's a whole range of applications that are really simple, really easy to get going. And there's more and more stuff I'm seeing showing up as a snap package. Seems to be picking up, yeah. And there's more and more stuff I'm seeing showing up as a Snap package. Seems to be picking up, yeah. And if there's people listening to this thinking, oh, I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 and I really want to have a go with this teleconsole, well, SnapD landed in 14.04 like yesterday. Oh, wow. Oh, really?

Yeah. With isolation? Yep. Really? So if you apt-get install snapd on 14.04 you'll get snapd and the confinement bits and pieces on an uplifting kernel to kernel 4.4 and then you can snap install to your heart's content as well oh man what is what is toilet is that what is it's like it's just it's like figlet figlet is like a font thing that lets you put big banner text,

and Toilet is just similar. I don't know why, but it's great. So not only can I remotely control Poppy's machine, but he, of course. He can now control the stream. So this is great. Two people can have a text editor open at the same file. Two people can cooperate on the same thing. It's just amazing.

I love it. Maybe this is what we do tomorrow. Now our plans have been scuppered. We use this. Yeah, we can work together remotely via a session via teleconsole. It's great. Yeah, really. It is perfect for support.

It is perfect for support. It is perfect for collaboration. And it feels – so when we covered this on last on Sunday, I got the typical, well, this is just the perfect way to get hacked type responses. And I understand where people are coming from. But one of the things I like about teleconsole as opposed to giving somebody straight SSH access to your machine is it's session ID based and you can revoke sessions. So you actually in some regards have more control over who has access to your machine is it's session ID based and you can revoke sessions. So you actually in some regards have more control over who has access to your machine using teleconsole. And because you can watch them

you literally have more oversight. I will say then that goes back. I think we talked about it briefly on the show a while ago. The backing technology, it's basically a demo for Gravitational's Teleport, which is their own SSH daemon implementation and so if you're using one of our fine sponsors uh and you have your own infrastructure

where maybe you want this kind of auditability or control or seamless access for devs who aren't as you know you can use friendly you can use teleport or things like this to get similar functionality in your own infrastructure slick wes okay that makes. That's a great way to do it too. And that's the next step is I've taught the guys how to do a snap for teleconsole. The next step is that they're going to make a snap out of teleport. So you could have your own on-premises teleport or in a DigitalOcean droplet. I really like, Popey, how simple the YAML file is. So the YAML file describes to Snap what it should do. It's like the instruction file.

And it is ridiculously simple when something is a tar file that is essentially statically linked or doesn't have a lot of dependencies. But you could, if you wanted to, in this YAML file, couldn't you even pull crap off of like an FTP site to install? Right. You can pull from anywhere. And there are way more complicated. I mean, this is one of the more simple ones. If you actually type Snapcraft in that window right now, it will build the Snap. It will just open the YAML file and create the Snap straight away.

Oh, hello. Oh, you haven't got it installed. Well, you've got to have it installed. Well, let me install some software on your computer really quick here remotely. That's what computers are for. Yeah, this feels good. I like installing software on other people's computers. So, yes, you're right.

And some of the more complicated snaps are pulling in libraries from here and there or building something from source. And it can get a lot more complicated. It was quite beneficial that when I saw this last week, I looked at it and thought, well, that's a Go binary. It's a single binary that implements the entire solution as one thing. Oh, hello. What's going on there? Oh, man.

Yeah, that's broken. Well, okay. You would normally just type Snapcraft and it would build it. So, Ryan, you have installed several or a few or some snaps on your system? Yeah, I've been trying to install via Snap first before I install via any other method. And I thought I would have a really bad time just because it's still growing and things are changing. Yeah, sure. Generally, I've had a good experience.

In fact, so good that I've been working on a game with somebody else in the System76 community and it's called Code Breakers. You can snap install Code Breakers right now and we snapped that up and it was a lot of fun, and it works really well. Cool. I didn't even realize I was actively using snaps until this morning when I did a mount command and saw I had three snaps mounted. And I realized, oh, yeah, I have three. Yes, I've noticed that as well.

I have three Snap apps installed on my machine upstairs, and I didn't even, you know, once you get them loaded up and set. Yeah, they're on your path, and it works fine. Yeah, it just totally works fine. They also update as part of, like, the normal update procedure, which I guess I didn't really realize. Oh, they do. And so, yeah, I mean, like, as part of the update, it must run the Snap command,

but there's been times when somebody has been like oh yeah go ahead and up this update this package and you'll have the new sweetness and i go to update and it's like everything's up to date and i'm like well i didn't i didn't uh run snap refresh but apparently and somebody can correct me if i'm wrong but i've always had uh just to running normal updates always had the update snaps. Interesting. I have not I don't think I've ran any snap. I don't have not I have not ran a single snap command on my workstation upstairs since I installed

them. So I should look at that on Arch because I don't know what the situation is on Arch. I installed them a while ago and I think I forgot about them and I don't want that to be what happens with those types of applications because that's just a recipe for disaster. So I should try to... Walk the walk, Chris.

I know. I forgot. I honestly forgot I did it and I'm just I'm so used to my package manager installing everything else. Exactly. I didn't even think about it. But they've been running great. So there's that. So teleconsole combined with Snap combined with that GitHub thing is

a pretty powerful. It's the future. And I really think I'm – I at least am feeling inclined to use a distribution that supports Snaps. But I'm kind of feeling inclined to use an Ubuntu-based distro with Flatpak Snaps, PPAs, app files. They're just in the general repo. I mean like all that stuff is just really appealing to me. What are you working on? Jeez, look at that, Poppy.

Sorry, I just fixed that in the background while you were talking. Yeah, you did. I looked at my screen. Yay. Okay, cool. Look at that. See, that's what's so great about this. Right there, boom, you just have Poppy fix things for you.

Next time you have a problem, boom, fire up teleconsole. Now Poppy's Twitter feed will be filled with poppy help me that is that is really neat and i noticed too that they have an eu specific server for teleconsole eu.teleconsole.com well uh anything else poppy you want to touch on before we uh move on no uh if you want some fun that's not command line stuff i also pushed a game to um the snap store called oh my giraffe so if you snap install oh my giraffe then uh it's not it's not something i've written it's someone another guy wrote and i offered to snap it for him and put it in the store and it's a fun game so yeah oh my giraffe snap install oh my giraffe it's great you know before the show i tried to figure out how i would install teleconsole as a snap

is there like a is there a website the audience should go to to find a a list of the latest snapped up applications so the goal the goal really is for us to uh once once an upstream has um got something snapped and it's in the store, is to update their documentation, basically, so that rather than it say, go and get this source and build this source or add this PPA, it just says, snap install foo, right? Because that's the easiest way to do it. So once the upstream for teleconsole has taken over ownership of this and it's not mine, we'll get them to update their documentation so that it says snap install teleconsole, blah, blah, blah.

I should have just used the snap command to search for teleconsole instead of searching the web too. That would have – I don't know what I was thinking. I was being a noob. I was being a snap noob. That's what worked on it. I know. I got to get my S together. Next week, you better snap install something live on the show.

Prove that you know how. Okay. You better remind me because I'll forget. About snaps, about everything. All right. Well, that's pretty cool. I love it. I love it.

So thanks, Popey, for at least dedicating a machine, sacrificing a machine. Let Chris. Yeah, I'm going to burn it with fire now. It's clearly broken now. Yeah. It never again should be trusted. All right, well, we have to get out of here because as is a thing now, Mr. Wes has an upcoming episode of TechSnap.

Woo-hoo! That's right. And so while we can't just slack, we've got to be like a serious production here and make room for the new TechSnap program, which is live on Tuesdays. In fact, all our shows are live. You can find their times at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. You can leave us your feedback at linuxactionshow.reddit.com

a comment wherever you watch this or go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact and send us in your feedback. We'd love to have you join us live next week at jblive.tv. Hang out in our virtual lug. There's always more, so catch the whole live experience, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. I've never installed GNU slash Linux. You know what's been weird, Wes, is I've been trying this Bulletproof Linux. At the same time, a lot of folks are blogging about switching from macOS to Linux.

And so it's been interesting to watch their— What they reach out for. Yeah. And I've been following BitCannon, which is, by the way, hashtag this guy. At first I was like, is this Wes? Because his hashtag on Twitter is Wes on Linux. Wow. Yeah.

So BitCannon, a.k.a. Wes on Linux, he just posted another part two yesterday of switching from macOS to Linux. And it is a really good post. I debated reading it in the show. I just didn't want to rehash the same ground over and freaking over again. But long story short, he settles on elementary OS because of how it looks, how it works, finds a bunch of cracks and rough edges as time goes on, ends up back on Arch. This is a Mac OS user. Ends up back on Arch and installing the Budgie desktop.

Hey-o. Which is pretty much exactly where I'm at right now. Yes, it is. Wow. Which is really interesting. They tried GNOME 3, and then he went to Budgie. I don't know. He went with the Arc theme and the Arc icons, too, which is my exact setup.

That is, wow. Anyways, it's a fascinating, fascinating, fascinating post. Bitcanon.net if you want to read the rest of it. Yeah, I like his blog. Bitcanon.net if you want to read the rest of it. Yeah, I like this blog. It's good. Yeah, it has been really good to read this because as somebody who like is consistently thinking about this stuff, I love kind of reading, running through the kind of like path, you know, going down this, trying to read the same path that these people followed. How did they end up here? The context they were living in and how they're adapting.

Yeah. Why is he using Giri? Why is he using NeoVim? Why is he using Firefox? What was the thought process that led there? What is his opinion of files? All that stuff. Really good. Super good post. Bitcanon.net

if you want to read that. Almost made it into the show. Jambytotals.com Only because if we put one more Mac OS X link, everyone will kill us. JRPTitles.com. Only because if we put one more Mac OS X link, everyone will kill us. I have to stop talking about it at some point. But I love it. It's like finally it's happening.

Death by download. What's that a reference to? That's good. What's that a reference to? The Android store, I believe. Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah, right.

Brick in the thing. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Beam me up, Popey. Software license to kill. That's clever. That is clever, yeah, right. Brickin' the thing. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Beam me up, Popey. Software license to kill. That's clever. That is clever, yeah. I like James Bond references. Black phone hits the bricks.

Plasma heats up winter. These are good ones. You guys are on fire. Yeah. Needs more wimpy. That's what the red pepper says. Needs more wimpy. You hear that plane?

I do. Wimpy. You hear that plane? Wimpy's been typing furiously this evening. Really? Well, good for you. Black phone kill switch. Oh, Rekha. You just got to embrace the default. That's my path to happiness. Just use Breeze Dart. That's all you really need. You got to embrace the default. That's my path to happiness.

Just use Breeze Dark. That's all you really need. You got to. You have to and then you have to be willing to just accept like I'm going to be honest with you guys. There are aspects of Breeze Dark that don't hold up. Like you have a full – so you take like the system settings window and there's not – and you go to one of the settings that doesn't have a lot going on and then you maximize that you will see gradient bars in the dark theme oh i i am a picky son of a bitch so i am i am letting some stuff slide but only because with every edit of release they have improved stuff and i just feel like if i just hang in tight yeah it'll get better yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't look

worse than Breeze Lite. Do you have it on a very large resolution screen? Because I'm on 1080p. It's a 2K Asus screen, which I think is the perfect resolution for Linux. I think 2K, not 4K,

not 1080p, but 2K is perfect for Linux. Everything looks great. Everything scales fine. You can fit a ton of shit on your screen, but it's not where there's like the little issues. Like where's that XPS? So this XPS 13 out of the box has high DPI support turned on. However, in the installer, what do you call the top bar

in Unity? What do you call that? What do you call this top bar in Unity where all your menus hide? Panel. The global panel? The panel? So on the XPS 13, when you boot it up for the first time, the panel's doubled. Essentially, it looks like two panels, but what it really is is the background graphic for the panel is just repeated

twice. It's shitty. We fixed that. We fixed that. System76 fixed that. I was going to say, it's Ryan there. And then do you see those lines at the bottom of the screen? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Also, only shows up under their implementation of high DPI.

Yeah, we totally fixed that too. Yeah. It doesn't bother me. That doesn't bother me. I mean, actually, that does bother me. Right there, those lines right there. Now that I've seen it. Only Wes can really see it probably right now. I don't think there's not. There's no way. Actually, that does bother me. Right there, those lines right there. Now that I've seen it. Only Wes can really see it probably right now.

I don't think there's not. There's no way I can. There's no way, yeah. No, but they're there. So there's definitely little issues. So, Ryan, I'm going to say something and then you can carry on, okay? So Chris, fixes to those problems you've just described landed today. Really?

Whoa. Yeah. Ryan, over to you yeah so we fixed uh those problems actually david and our new kernel engineer worked on that um and cassidy that was a high dpi fix it that we blogged the fixes that we blogged about here recently they bugged the hell out of us too so we went ahead and did something about it, and those should be in the ISO in 16.04.2. Brilliant. Nice. Nice.

Very nice. That's awesome. It is getting down to some rough edges now, but they're rough edges really like that. Yeah, every once in a while we go ahead and fix Dell's problems. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.