LINUX Unplugged - Episode 183: Niche Distros Need Not Apply | LUP 183

Episode Date: February 8, 2017

Is software ever really finished? Should we avoid boutique or niche Linux distributions? We have a spirited discussion & attempt to finally answer both of those questions.We also chat about what's new in Kodi 17, why open source on our TV’s is critical & more!

It's so much better for remote desktops than even something like Budgie because obviously it's a lot lighter and you haven't got to worry about heavy compositing, heavy shadows and all these gradients and stuff. For a remote desktop in and to my Nook or the server, whichever is running it, it's fantastic. XFCE stands out for me as there was this workstation when I was at a school district that ran Debian and XFCE and then I I came back nearly 10 years later, and it was still running Debian and XFCE. And it was just like the same rock solid. They went to that machine. They opened up a terminal. They SSH into the servers, and that's all it did. So, yeah, I actually – I know a lot of people that still use XFCE.

I think it kind of gets less attention than it probably deserves, but mostly because of its very nature, I think. Are you not ever tempted to replace it? Well, I mean, going forward, I think the thing that's going to play against XFCE is the lack of high DPI for a lot of people. That's starting

to become a bit of a problem. Although maybe that might be the XFCE crowd might be sort of the later adopters of that, right? True. I mean, GTK itself, you know, you need GTK free for that stuff. So once they start to go that road, then, you know, they kind of solve those problems. And they're partially there.

As far as remote desktop goes, do you think Mate or Mate would also fit the bill? I mean, it could. Scott, there's Brisk Menu you might check out. Yeah, if it's got Brisk Menu. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 183 for February 7th, 2017. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that at least half of us can barely breathe. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And I don't think it's you. I think you sound good. I'll thank you. Hello, Wes. You know what, Wes? We've got a great show today. So we have some open source projects to get into that I'm very excited to cover. One of my favorite projects got a huge update this week. Actually, I shouldn't say one. One, two, three that I can see just on this list right here. It just keeps going and going.

I'm super excited to talk about. So we'll be digging into that. Then Google's got something that's going to blow your mind. It's really something. We've got a big warning for those of you that are using the Ubuntu on Windows environment. We've covered that in the past. If you've been trying that out, huge disclaimer coming up in the show for you. You need

to know about it because data is getting lost. Tune in at 11 to find out. Dun, dun, dun. And then towards the end of the show. Not even the end, but as we get into the final chapters. To prepare ourselves for the end. Yeah. We will be talking about something that I suspect has been on the minds of a lot of our listeners. Not all of them.

Those lovely listeners. Just the ones that are a little cranky. No, we're going to talk about some things that have been sent into the show as feedback. And I think are a great opportunity to address them. And talk about the bigger picture, what's going on here. Plus, Wes, on top of all that stuff, you know what else we got? We got that tried and true great virtual lug who's here to join us for yet another episode. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.

Hello. Hello. Hello. So let's start with one of the projects I'm thrilled to announce as an update today. Yes, we have breaking news here on the show. This is CNN Breaking News. Cody 17 is out. The Krypton release is here, which brings its new user interface, better organization settings,

and lots and lots and lots of under-the-hood changes on the video player, music library, PVR, audio support, and massive Android things. And tons and tons and tons and tons of small bug fixes and improvements to stability. So let's start with the new look. It's got the new skin, and it's been designed for the 10-foot interface, while touchscreens have their new touchscreen focused. I like that. Yes. And there's some samples here.

I was just kind of surprise updated on my NVIDIA Shield TV. Oh, really? Yeah, just one day. It opened up. I'm like, holy crap, I got 17. Like I was waiting and waiting and waiting. Then one day, boom, there it is. Check out this, Wes.

The video engine is undergoing a multi-phase rewrite, and Kodi 17 delivers the next wave of changes with improvements to stability, audio and video synchronization, refresh rate switching, decoding and encoding to video, which obviously is pretty important. They've also got hardware accelerated playback of DVDs, OpenGL dithering, new and improved support for lots of streaming protocols and upgrades and updates to things like RTMP support and MPEG-DASH. That's useful for us. Exactly. And I really like seeing this. Kodi on Linux can now use some simple color profile stuff to color correct displays on Linux.

That's really pushing into the premium stuff. It is, really. Yeah. You know, when you get a really nice television or whatever your display is. Yeah, right. If you have it, you might as well use that. Yeah, yeah. Also, the PVR stuff has gotten a lot of new functionality, which includes live TV support. But like I said, the one that I'm really excited about is with Kodi 17, there's one downside if you're an Android user is there's now a minimum requirement of Android 5. I think I can handle that.

Yeah. Yeah. However, that with it brings the official audio API for Android, which is probably a really good thing for multiple reasons, which means you'll also get DTS HD and DTS X and Dolby True HD and Dolby Atmos pass-through. Boy, when you combine that with the color correction stuff and whatnot, I mean, this is getting to be a seriously premium home theater product. Can I admit something?

Yeah. I've yet to try Kodi on Android. Oh, it's good. I know. Isn't that ridiculous? Oh, it's good. I wish Nvidia could bring the Shield TV down in price because I really think it's a pretty great box. I think it's almost $200. They just updated it. So you could probably pick up a used one off of eBay because they first-gen.

And, you know, Noah found one that was a lot cheaper that's pretty great too. So there's other good ones out there. The thing I would have to say about this – and I know I talk about it too much. But the thing I would have to say about the Shield TV is now I'm like six months into it, almost more than that, I think, and solid, consistent, really great updates. Like every update that lands, I'm like, oh, awesome. Let me download that. And mind you, I'm on a Wi-Fi connection, and I got two of these things now. So I'm downloading two gigs of updates because each are a gig.

You need that Steam caching thing we were talking about. Yeah, really. But, you know, like recently one of the updates not only brought the latest monthly Android security updates, which I'm a big fan of, but also turned on Prime Video. So now you get Hulu, Netflix, you get YouTube, of course, you get Prime Video, Sling TV.

It's really a few record cutters. Does it do DLNA? Oh, yeah. Oh, of course. Well, then you've also got full-fledged Kodi. It's also it. The Shield TV itself can be a Plex server, and it can also support external storage. Okay. Wow. Or, of course, it can be a first-class Plex client.

Right. So it's such a good little powerful TV box. You combine it with Kodi, and it is the most rock-solid home theater setup I've ever had. And I've been refining this for so many years. People have listened to Linux action shows since the very early days. Remember when I was talking to a gentleman who was building a PC where the only thing this PC was going to do was this entire multimedia center is going to be home automation and multimedia, PVR, DVR, and you put it in there. Everything from this monstrosity to different iterations of Myth TV to different iterations of different front-end players with back-end Linux servers. What I've really found now is big centralized storage, MBR Plex front-ends, and then Android

TV for the front-end player. And it's such a slick, smooth setup. Everything is supported, anything you'd want to play, and it's so trouble-free. If you want something where you just sit down, you wake the device up, and you start watching your TV, and you don't have to sit there and fiddle with things every now and then, this is so that. Does it trouble you that maybe your storage is FreeBSD

and then your client is an Android thing? Well, my storage is Linux for this setup. But here it's FreeBSD. You're right. Here at the studio it's FreeNAS. And the front end being Android? You know, the thing is, once Linux has gotten like

if they can get like Ubuntu Core or something where they have transactional updates where I get monthly images that come down it flashes my system, it reboots, and I'm running the new version. Maybe it has that recovery kind of rollback. Yeah. Then I think – then if you're willing to say, all right, well, I'll forfeit Netflix and Hulu and Prime TV and Sling TV for a little while, so that way I can use Kodi on Linux.

If that's really what your goal is, that I think is achievable, either through like – through using sophisticated snapshots or waiting for something like Ubuntu Core to come around with Kodi built on top of it, which could be a killer distribution. Yeah, that's true. Because then you get transactional updates or even Fedora with the Project Atomic, something that gives you transactional updates because you want – when you're sitting down to watch TV, you generally want to relax. Yeah, it's an appliance class. And even if you know how to fix it, like you you don't want to, hell, let me SSH in to my TV, I will... And you're just like, oh, everyone watch this cool video

I found, I want to show it to you. So embarrassing when it fails. It'll be fine. Having tried to pull this off in different iterations now for a decade, I have so many times been gone to show somebody something and it fails, and I'm like, oh, let me fix my TV setup first, and then I can play this video. And granted, maybe it's only five times over 10 years.

But each time it bites you. You never let it go and you've completely lost that person as a convert. Like they're not, they're totally not sold on your setup when you go to play a video and it fails. Right. So I've, that's where I've kind of slid to using Android for my television. I don't love it, but you get the apps, you get the reliability. And if you get a good

OEM, you get good updates. That's what I think it takes for me to trust to use Android. So, Cody17, Krypton release is out. I don't see Producer Michael in the Mumble Room. Otherwise, I'd ask him if he had any – oh, there he is. Do you have any thoughts on the new Krypton release from an add-on perspective or just from a general release perspective? Not as far as anything from the beta's difference.

It's more polished and it runs a lot more streamlined than I expected. What about from like 16? Because I didn't really use the beta as much myself. I just sort of waited. Well, as far as the interface is amazing. It's such a huge improvement. Yes. It goes from a thing that looked like

10 years ago to something that's modern and stuff like that yeah and everything's really quick like you get access to stuff a lot faster with this new layout once it's up to you can totally grok what everything does yeah the navigation's easier it's like where the old interface with confluence there was like to do one thing there was like four or five different ways and you have to like configure it in different ways to make it do it in the like the order you want it to do and now it's just so much better like uh as far as like the differences between the betas and stuff and the current release is actually not that much but um the difference between 16 and 17 is just massively drastic.

It's fantastic. And surprisingly, the new Krypton interface is actually really fast. I kind of expected it to be an underperformer, but it's not. Now, am I going to have all of my awesome add-ons break? No. You might have some add-ons break, depending on if they're paying attention or not. No. You might have some out on the break, depending on if they're paying attention or not. There are certain features that the APIs changed throughout the 16-17 switch, but there was plenty of time. Before the betas even came out, there was a lot of API talk for developers to have a lot of headway so that they have at least a year before their release was even out.

So they had plenty of time to actually make the transition. So one of the things that's really nice about Kodi is this add-on system allows for anybody, even somebody who might be a quasi-competitor to come along and develop an add-on. We covered this before, but obviously there's an MB add-on that uses your MB database. Oh, yeah, there is. So all your metadata and your watch status are synced across your Kodi machines. But the crazy cats at Plex also released a Plex add-on for Kodi, and I've had time to play with it.

Oh, I love you. Oh, good. It's like a full-on new – like you go into like almost a new UI mode for Kodi. It's a full-on application. Oh, interesting. And then you still are using Cody for the playback because you can still hear Cody sounds like the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Like little noises Cody makes.

That's the test of a true Cody user. Yeah, sweet, sweet. You hear that still when it's playing and it fast-forwards and rewinds better than Plex ever does. It's still solid like Cody does, but it's supporting Plex's automatic play the next episode features. It's marking them red on the Plex database as you watch them through Cody. It's nice. The kids were using it over the weekend.

And the thing that really pushed it over the edge is now you can mark it the Echo. And you can say Echo open Plex. Echo play Steven Universe season one episode 40. Wow. And it plays it on the predefined player that you've chosen already. That's pretty slick. Which can be the Plex player if you have Plex add-on open in Kodi and you set it up on the Echo, you can actually have the Echo remotely trigger videos. On the Plex API.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's pretty cool. It's crazy. Does that add-on support direct play? Like where the Kodi does all the Kodi? Yes. Oh, yeah. API. Wow. Okay, that's pretty cool. It's crazy. Does that add on support direct play? Like where the Kodi does all the Kodi? Yes.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Nice. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I believe, I don't know for sure because pretty much all my stuff is standardized now on x264. Yeah. But I think it will play back anything directly that Kodi supports. That's great. Yeah.

And I have not had a chance to try it yet. Mr. Michael, is there anything else you wanted to add on the Cody stuff before we move on? Not really. Well, there's actually an interesting article out talking about the reputation of Cody having a... Right. Other than that, that's kind of like... Cody is not a piracy app.

Yeah, exactly. That was the article yeah exactly yeah it's it's funny because there's a like the cody twitter account is it's kind of funny to watch yeah there might want to be interested in that like that's a good suggestion yeah there's there's people who will send messages to cody that are obviously pirating thing and cody will respond with a joke back to them saying yeah we don't care yeah they're basically publicly trying to shame people for doing piracy. And they're really trying to position themselves as we're not a piracy application.

Exactly. Probably a good thing. Especially the legal trouble they've been sort of – well, not they, but people that are selling Cody boxes. And like it would be a shame for that to be its reputation when it's just getting so good. Right. And meanwhile, companies like Vizio are legitimately screwing their customers. And this is why all of our hardware, even our televisions, really should be open. They're going to have to pay $2.2 million for what they did. But according to a complaint filed Monday by the FTC here in the U.S., the internet-connected TVs from Vizio contained ACR, which was short for Automated Content Recognition Software.

Without asking for permission, the ACR code captured second-by-second information about the video the TV displayed. The software collected other personal information and then transmitted it along with the viewing data to servers controlled by Vizio. Vizio then sold it to unnamed third parties for purposes of audience measurement, analysis, and tracking. Of course, you can see Vizio doing this. Like, we've got this great data on Vizio users, and Vizio televisions are featured

in Costco with millions of sales, and we'll sell this to you. And, you know, TiVo tried to do this. They all tried to do this. Oh, yeah. And you can totally see why advertisers and marketers want that information. And I doubt Vizio, very much doubt Vizio is the only smart TV manufacturer doing this. They just got caught. So check this out.

For all of these uses, defendants provided highly specific second-by-second information about the television viewing. This is according to FTC lawyers in Monday's complaint. Each line of the report provides viewing information about a single television. In a securities filing, Vizio states that its data analytics program, for example, will provide highly specific viewing behavior data on a massive scale with great accuracy. Oh. Yes, which can be used to generate intelligent insights for advertisers. So this is why I don't want podcasts to ever go to like, if you listen to this show in, what's it called?

Oh, I forget. It's like streams all of the podcasts together. It's a Stitcher, Stitcher, Stitcher, Stitcher. If you listen in Stitcher or if you listen to podcasts using the Google Play Store podcast directory, please consider getting your podcasts from somewhere else because what these companies are doing are trying to do this kind of data analytics to podcasting. So right now, we're going to get into an ad and I'm going to say go to linux.ting.com. That's the only tracking that happens.

If you go to linux.ting.com and you get a device or you sign up, that's where the tracking starts and ends. I know we sent you. Right. But what Stitcher does and Google Play does is they're trying to do to podcast what Vizio is doing to television where they're trying to figure out where you turn your volume up or down, when you pause, when you rewind, when you fast forward. They want all of that and they get that Google Play and Stitcher, collect that constantly while you're using their apps and send those metrics off to the advertisers. So this is a dirty thing that it's where podcasts are really on the line of this happening to.

And if some of these services start to get more and more popular, I feel like this could be a bad case. So, Vizio also, by the way, not denying this. They wrote in an official note, they say the ACR program was never paired with viewing data, was never paired viewing data with personal identified information, such as contact information. But they do admit they were collecting this information to aggregate a summary of reports. But here's the problem. If you look at the data, well, it turns out the software periodically appended IP addresses.

It also appended other data to make it possible to collect other information about the viewer, like your age, your sex, your income, your marital status, household size, education level, home ownership status, and home value, which all could be associated and provided to the advertiser. The collection occurred under a setting that was described as a smart interactivity feature that enables program offers and suggestions. The menu never informs users that the feature also transmitted viewing habits and other personal information. Now I kind of want to see like a Wireshark log as one of these TVs.

I've wondered because we have a Vizio here in the studio. And one day we were just sitting out there in the living room and a Wi-Fi access point on that Vizio came online for a little bit and then shut down. We hadn't changed it. We didn't – nothing. Yeah. So anyways, under the terms of the settlement, Vizio is going to pay $1.5 million to the FTC and $700,000 to New Jersey's Division of Consumer Affairs. The settlement also requires Vizio to delete all of the collected data before March 1, 2016. There was an aspect to the story, though, that really made me feel like,

God, I do not like this part of it, and I really wish Ubuntu TV had been more successful. Oh, yeah. Or something. Or Firefox. Yes. Looking back at it retrospectively, too, it feels like if Canonical had really pushed on Ubuntu TV maybe over the phone or tablet. Because by the way, the BQ tablet, the Ubuntu tablet, it's over a year old now. It's gone nowhere.

It's gone nowhere. So if they could have solved this television program problem, this host OS you need for the TV, there's still a hole for this. But here's the part I really didn't like. And this is why I really wish we could have gotten like Ubuntu TV or something. So for those of us who bought old televisions like we bought our TVs a while ago, like this one here in the studio, they retroactively sent software updates over the internet to these smart televisions to add this feature and to turn it on. So you could have a two-year-old television. You're like, oh, well, I checked off all the bad privacy things when I set it up.

Yeah. Yeah. And then boom, a software update comes along, turns it on and starts sending. That is. Yeah. That's like not even the chance for consent. No. And I just, oh, I just think that's so creepy.

And of course they're the only ones caught, right? So, yeah. Let's get some open source on all the things. Speaking of Ubuntu phone though, there is an update running out to Ubuntu phone users, OTA 15, to phones and tablets. Primarily a bug fix update. It's also going to address an issue with loading HTTPS sites on the stock Ubuntu web browser. There's OTA 15 to phones and tablets, primarily a bug fix update. It's also going to address an issue with loading HTTPS sites on the stock Ubuntu web browser. I do like me my HTTPS.

Don't worry if you're not seeing your update yet. This is the start of a phased upgrade procedure that they're going to follow, which should take really less than a day or two for everybody to see the update. So the other thing I thought was really great about this article that Joey wrote for OMG Ubuntu is he breaks down the difference between Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Personal because this is how Canonical screws it up every time. They sort of evolve the language or they weren't initially clear about it or it's changed as what they're doing has changed and the internet doesn't catch up. But where I think Canonical kind of trips up on this is messaging the changes. A lot of times it just gets appended to a completely non-story. So in the story about an update for Ubuntu phone that nobody cares about – I mean retro in consideration of the entire audience size. Obviously there's people like listening to this show that care a lot about it. But the entire – looking at the entire mobile industry.

That's Ubuntu users. I mean – It's not – yeah, exactly. Even if it's just Ubuntu users, it's not a big story. But in this big story is a great explanation of how all the vernacular works. So Ubuntu Touch is technically just Ubuntu. Wherever it runs, it's just Ubuntu Touch is technically just Ubuntu. Wherever it runs, it's just Ubuntu. And so Canonical says they're trying to evolve their terminology to provide better distinction between various eras of Ubuntu mobile devices.

Ubuntu Touch is the popular term given to the mobile-oriented version of Ubuntu based on Ubuntu 1504 that uses click packages and ships pre-installed on all of the commercial Ubuntu smartphones. Ubuntu Personal is the official name given to the Snapified version of Ubuntu that will form the successor to Ubuntu Touch, which is currently based on Ubuntu 16.04 and uses the Snap package format. So Ubuntu Personal uses the Snap package format based on 16.04. Ubuntu Touch is 15.04 that uses Click packages. Clear? Is there a diagram? I can see that.

That's what I would like. I can just print it out. I can bring it for the show so I don't say the wrong thing. I know, right? Hey, while we're talking about mobile, why don't I mention Ting? Linux.ting.com. Go there, sign up, and when you go to our website or our URL, I should say linux.ting.com, they'll take $25 off a device or if you bring

one and they have CDMA and GSM compatibility, they'll give you $25 in service credit. No contract, no early termination fee, and you only pay for what you use. It's $6 for the line and then it's just your usage. When you need help, you talk to a real human being. No hold, no phone trees, no transfers. It's the kind of level of service that you would think only like the hugest telco company could afford. And of course, once you get to that scale, what do you do? You outsource it.

Ting is a totally different type of mobile network. And this is why they're able to do things a little differently. So instead of having to invest in every single cell tower they build and fight with the local legislation and get all the licensing and figure out all of the clearances that they need. Ting works on top of other existing established mobile carriers to bring you sort of a hybrid mobile service. So you get to pick between CDMA or GSM, and they're able to focus on things like great customer service, fantastic tools to manage your account,

and, of course, a great selection of devices. They also just recently announced they'd be bringing on Ring Plus customers. I guess there was a bit of a, well, I guess there was a bit of a falling out between Ring Plus and their parent carrier. And, you know, Ting is a great company, backed by two cows, really knows how to do this, been around for a while. And so they're stepping up and they're going to offer service to Ring Plus customers. So if that's you, you're going to have until Friday, February 11th, to decide if you want to stay with Ting or not. And they're not going to make it hard to leave, too, if you don't want to. They're just a great company.

They've got a great blog you can follow, even if you're not a Ting customer. When you're ready to get started, go to linux.ting.com. See how much you would save by using this What Would You Save button right here. See the unbelievable prices. And then bring a device or grab a device from Google Play or Ting Store directly or just a SIM card if that's what you need. Linux.ting.com Thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged

program. They're the best. I love this update. This is good, good stuff. Speaking of the best, I think Plasma 5.9 is the best update to the Plasma desktop ever. Ever, ever, ever. And the best Plasma 5.9 is the best update to the Plasma desktop ever, ever, ever, ever. And the best Plasma desktop release just got better with Plasma 5.9.1. Just some fixes, some breeze fixes, some discover fixes, other little things like that.

I don't have really a lot to say other than I'm just going to check in with my plasma usage because typically in the past, what's happened is I've switched to plasma. I use it. I use it. I use it. Something breaks in production with the audio or with, you know, after an update, something breaks and I bail quietly. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind of check in from time to time. So you say, yeah, I'm still using it.

This is what I'm finding to be the best configuration so far. I've been really happy with Neon so far. That's awesome. But also had a lot of success with Plasma on Arch too. I still, to this day, am using it on my main workstation where it's just been super rock solid flawless. Oh, that's great. I don't know.

I think we're like week two or three in this. I think we've been having this update for like three weeks now. And I'm still at that stage where I walk in, the door opens, and I set my bag down and I sit my butt in the chair and my hands on the keyboard and I'm going to work. And until I finish working, it's completely flawless. There's been no issues. I've been able to produce multiple shows on it. I did some quick editing on it the other day under Gideon Live

it was nailing it checking all the boxes so if you've been considering trying the Plasma desktop 5.9 really good release one of the things I'm really loving is the notification for screenshots is great it just feels so good Wes

it feels so good so 5.9 591 is out. Mumble Room, does anybody want to jump in on the whole Plasma love thing before I move on? I just want to give them a quick shout out. Would you be willing to try it? Yeah. Oh, absolutely I would. Yeah?

All right. I'll get that going this week. You should. Yeah. Just give it a go and see what you think because I actually – I think in my head, even though I know better, I think in my head I got the idea that the KDE whole application suite and the Plasma desktop specifically were slow and bloated. And the little test I did this past weekend for the Linux Action Show, I threw it on a 10-year-old PC and just blown away by the performance. I'm consistently impressed like when we talk about articles about KWIN and other parts of the stack.

There's a lot of KDE applications I like already. There's a lot to that stack, too, though. That's true. But it sounds like the whole thing is getting to the point where I can just drop it on here. I feel like it's getting there. Scrapjaw, you want to jump in? Yeah, I switched my mom over to Linux about a year ago,

and I switched her over to Neon. She has it hooked up to an external TV in her family room, and she uses it all the time she thinks it's actually a lot better um she was on oh cool elementary she was on elementary but then it was too simple so because she's used to windows and it has more than classic desktop feel everything's right where she likes to you know or where she can find it yeah producer michael you were going to jump in there go ahead oh okay sorry it was just going to say that uh kde's approach to the whole framework and plasma itself is changing to a modular style so you don't need the whole stack of kde in order to use certain pieces of it so a

lot of it's being like you'll need you know uh k1 for plasma you kind of need that but like the individual apps are no longer needing the full stack to install them. Yeah, and I think you have, for me on Arch, I have sort of, I've done like a minimal, a smaller Plasma desktop install, which I think is sort of kind of what you're talking about. I didn't have to install

all of it. And then when I did Neon, it was, I wouldn't say it was minimal, but it was refined. And one of the other things I've really, really appreciate about 5.9 is I'm not spending all of my time tweaking it anymore. With past Plasma desktops, especially earlier in the 5 series, I spent a lot of my time screwing around with Plasma, Plasmoids, and just dorking around with settings, trying to see if I could create a Unity-style desktop or a GNOME-style desktop. And now I'm just basically using mostly defaults. Kabla, Miner, you know, took 10 minutes to tweak a few things, and I've just left it,

which is not something I've been able to successfully do in the past with Plasma Desktop. It would irritate me too much. But now the defaults are really working for me, and it's meant that I just get right to work. Nice. That's awesome. Another benefit to it, like a lot of people are annoyed when an update happens and it breaks some of their stuff.

KDE does not do that. I've had the same configuration since 5.6. Huh. I have had an update. I've had something happen with my config. It went all bad, and I had to trash it once. But it was so long ago, I can't an update. I've had something happen with my config. It went all bad and I had to trash it once. But it was so long ago, I can't remember anymore. Well, I mean, it's since like I create the settings for the applications and the layouts of my panels however I want them.

Yeah. And then I just save the config files for those. And then whenever I make a new – even if I build my system, I can just drop them in and it's all back to normal where I wanted it. I like that. And it's actually been 5.5 since I've had the same thing. It's all back to normal where I wanted it. I like that. And it's actually been 5.5 since I've had the same thing.

So it's like it's just it's a lot more seamless when you transition from one version to the other, especially when even in like an Arch update where if you have like a big update for most DEs, you're kind of worried that something might break. Yeah. With KDE, it's very unlikely that it will break. Huh. Well, I'll see. All right, MonkeyConf, you want to jump in. Go ahead.

Yeah, just don't mess with transparency or you'll mess up your desktop does it crash why what do you say that's that's a call out to rotten we were he he was trying to show me how to do transparency and within about 15 minutes i had to do a complete nuke i made a video that express expresses it specifically that if you do certain things with the transparency and you have certain settings, it can make it weird. But I also provided a warning, don't do this. And I pointed out that if you do certain things in KDE and KWIN, it will go, hey, maybe don't do that. Did you actually drop that level of sugar to the Linux community? Are you serious? We're all going to do it. My entire point is

to say, hey, this is really cool. You can do this, but you should know what you're doing before you do it because it could be weird. There's a feature in KWin where you can say force this setting. And if you force this setting on all of the windows for all of the applications, you could globally break your system in the visibility

of things. You should learn the KWIN structure before you start messing with that. So I made a video that kind of like walks people through how to do it more safely. Good idea. So that's what he's referring to.

It's not as bad as it seems. But if you kind of go, if you jump all in with not knowing what you're doing, it could be weird. With great power. So, Scrabjaw, you want to jump in about OpenGL? It might fit with the KWin discussion. Yeah, when I did the 5.9 update on my mom's computer, she has an older AMD graphics card on there. And any anytime a window it does that little transparent thing when they come up and go away it would flicker really bad

so i went into the compositor to see okay maybe i can just turn off all of that stuff and i noticed that it had the option for open gl2 and 3 i moved it to 3 and it was fine. So just a little nugget there. I have not really messed with K1 settings either this time around. I'm tempted to go in there and take a look. Are you installing right now? Whoa, you've already got it loaded. That was quite cool. I mean, I did launch it from GDM so maybe that's heresy, but it worked.

We're doing that right now too upstairs. Wow, so did you do the Plasma meta? What did you do? Just Plasma desktop? I just did the Plasma group. I just did Plasma. Oh, okay. Good. Good.

Very good. That is good. So, hey, we can chat about how it goes next week. We'll be Plasma buddies next week. So I want to shift gears and talk about something that runs on Linux that sounds like a Hollywood trope. It sounds like, in fact, this video sort of summarizes this old, old Hollywood trope. You all know. Whoa, hi there.

Hi there. That's not the video. That's a different video. Bam, chicken, brown cow. You all know this Hollywood trope where they've been able to, like, see in the reflection of somebody's eyeball the license plate of a car or, you know, the typical zoom and enhance BS stuff. Well, it's and hands BS stuff. Well, it's no longer BS stuff. Okay.

Now let's get a good look at you. Hold it. Run that back. Wait a minute. Go right. There, freeze that. Full screen. Okay, freeze that. Tighten up on that wheel. Vector in on that guy by the back wheel. Zoom in. There, freeze that. Full screen. Okay, freeze that.

Tighten up on that way. Vector in on that guy by the back wheel. Zoom in right here on this spot. With the right equipment, the image could be enlarged and sharpened. What's that? It's an enhancement program. Can you clear that up any? I don't know. Let's enhance it.

Enhance section A6. I enhanced the detail and... I think there's enough to enhance. Release it to my screen. Enhance the. Enhance section A6. I enhance the detail and... I think there's enough to enhance. Release it to my screen. Enhance the reflection in her eye. Let's run this through video enhancement. Edgar, can you enhance this? Hang on. I've been working on this reflection.

Someone's reflection. A reflection. There's a reflection of the man's face. The reflection. There's a reflection. Zoom in on the mirror. You can see a reflection. Can you enhance the image from here?

Can you enhance him right here? Can you enhance it? Can you enhance it? Can we enhance this? Can you enhance it? Hold on a second, I'll enhance. Zoom in on the door. Times ten.

Zoom. Move in. More. Wait, stop. Stop. Pause it. Rotate us 75 degrees around the vertical, please. Stop.

And go back to the part about the door again. Got an image enhancer that can bitmap maybe we can use the produce send method to see into the windows and they software state if they are the eigenvalues off with the right combination of algorithms he's taking elimination algorithms to the next level and i can use them to enhance this photograph lock on and enlarge the z-axis enhance Enhance. Enhance. Freeze and enhance. Yeah, so pretty much the biggest trope ever in Hollywood and, of course, the cop drama shows. And Google's making it a reality. It's called the super resolution Google Brain.

And Google Brain has devised some new software that can create detailed images from tiny pixelated source images. Google software, in short, basically means zoom in, now enhance, is possible. The first part, the conditioning network, tries to map the 8x8 source image against other high-resolution images. It downsizes other high-resolution images to 8x8 and then tries to make a match. And they have some examples here. Then the second part, the prior network uses an implementation of pixel CNN to try and add realistic high resolution details to the 8x8 source image.

Basically, the prior network ingests a large number of high res real images of celebrities in bedrooms, in this case, to match, I guess. Then when the source image is upscaled, it tries to add new pixels that match what it knows about the class of image. To create the final super-resolution image, the output from the two neural networks are then mashed together, and the end result usually contains a plausible addition of new details. Google's brain's super-resolution technique was reasonably successful in real-world testing. Now, this is going to raise interesting questions, and that's why I really hope things like this are open source, because think about this.

It's not getting the real image. It's adding details, which are literally called hallucinations in image processing jargon. They're best guesses, nothing more. This raises some intriguing issues, especially in the realm of surveillance and forensics. This technique could take a blurry image of a suspect, add more detail, you zoom and enhance, but it wouldn't actually be a real photo of the suspect. Why, that looks like you, Chris. Right.

Yeah, that is a little disconcerting. So like for some things it seems possible, but for that exact use case, it's like, no, this is not the technology that we want. I agree. It seems like you would really want, and if you do start to – if this thing would start to ever end up in like law enforcement, you might want it to be open sourced. Oh, yes. I'll get out.

Can you imagine that? Like you're convicted of a crime that you were – Not actually at the crime scene. And some software gets to make up the image. Google at that at this point. Oh, man. That's just a scary one. That is your scary story of the day.

Yeah. Yeah. That is pretty freaky. All right. Yeah, that is pretty freaky. All right. Yeah, well, obviously Scrapjaw asked if it would be admissible in court. No, not now. This is a future thing. Go ahead.

This is the reason I want this to become like a mainstream thing that everybody uses, right? That it gets dismissed as something that can be used in court. If it's something only accessible to some people, then yes, it will be admissible to court because they will say, well, the software is not really that admissible. It's only used in these kind of scenarios. We're taking all precaution about it. If it's in the masses and anybody could fake an image, everybody will be easily contesting it as validity for evidence and then it will be much easier to actually dismiss it as not valid evidence yeah yeah i wonder if it would be treated like the polygraph because i've heard a lot of people say the polygraph is crap i don't

know if that's true or not i mean who knows i don't know i've never taken a polygraph so i can't say polygraph have taken the polygraph before it is good to give you an indication. Now, if the individual is already aware and has done it before multiple times, the more you do it, the less intense is the fact that you're doing the test, the less it actually can detect. It requires also an expert examiner to actually look at the results of the polygraph, which is another issue as well. So you have to see if's also not it doesn't work at all um it doesn't work because it doesn't it shows someone's anxiety their blood pressure it doesn't show whether they're lying yeah if you are super chill then no matter what you say it will just say that you're chill so that's the other thing, though. However, we have subtle changes that this was supposed to detect. And this is why it also requires an expert examiner to be able to know those subtle changes.

Also, it has to do with timing. It has to have precise timing on answer to response of the polygraph. There's been decades of research proving that it doesn't work. So we should pick this up in the post show. But I think Minimac points out, going back to the Google brain thing, Minimac, you have a great point of why perhaps Google would want long term to be in the Google Photos game. I mean, yeah, you have a huge photo base. You have all the Android devices that are storing their photos on the cloud. So you have that Google brain just measure the physiognomy of your face and so that would be a good base to recognize future criminals or everything oh let me go check my upload status real quick yeah that's it oh okay all right so let's let's move on we can pick up

the i wouldn't mind picking up the uh the the whole discussion about the uh lie detector because i'm always fascinated by the last script a less creepy note it could also be useful as terms of savings bandwidth and space so if you can recreate the image with some base uh smaller image that you're storing that could be beneficial what about also partial file recovery maybe you recover a you know you recover an image file i I had recently, I formatted an SD card accidentally and lost a day's worth of footage and tried to do file recovery, but essentially managing the files back, but they were messed up. So you're working on your essay, it gets corrupted, then it restores, and you go, well, it's probably an okay essay.

This would be great if it could work for text. Oh man, journalism's never going to be the same. All right. Well, before we go any further, let's take a moment. And I wanted to mention Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to learn more about their platform with step-by-step video courses, downloadable comprehensive study guides. It comes with your own server. They spin them up on demand when you need them, and you can SSH in.

They've also got a new web console you can check out. If you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, you can sign up for a free seven-day trial. Get in there. Try out the different courses. Keep track of your progress. Get a sense of what it's like to work in the labs. Maybe try out that instructor mentor where you get full-time human instructors that are happy to help, a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members,

comprehensive downloadable study guides you can take with you. Linux Academy is a platform by Linux enthusiasts for Linux enthusiasts. Whether you're an experienced sysadmin or new to the world of Linux, Azure, and AWS, OpenStack, and DevOps, a sharp skill set is an absolute necessity to succeed. Meet Linux Academy, an online Linux and cloud training platform that uses self-paced video courses and hands-on labs to give you real world experience for a wide range of skills. Train for your certification, learn the latest DevOps tools, and grow your skill set to do better work. Linux Academy is not just a video library. Our scenario-based server labs and quiz system allow you to learn hands-on. We also have full-time human instructors who answer questions

and help you earn that certification or promotion at work. We add new training every week so you'll always be up to date on the latest tech. Sysadmins of every experience level use Linux Academy to stay on the bleeding edge of the Linux ecosystem. You should too. I've never installed GNU slash Linux. Linux Academy dot com slash

unplugged. Check it out and sign up for a free seven day trial. Really quickly before we get into the thing that I really want to talk about this week, there is an update for those of you out there running Windows 10 called the, I guess it's called the anniversary update. Is this what we do now?

We don't call it Service Pack 1 anymore? We call it anniversary, Chris. That's a much more special occasion. It's not because there's a bunch of things that need fixed. So there is, I guess, a bug that sort of screws you if you're running Ubuntu. The Windows Update 10 anniversary bug updates Windows 10 and wipes out Ubuntu Linux partitions. So I think what happened is, in this case, this guy was actually running Linux off of a real partition. Possibly.

I've never used this system, so I have no idea what I'm actually talking about when it comes to running Linux on Windows. But based on his stack exchange, or I'm sorry, askubuntu.com post, it looks like he was running it off of a real deal partition. That's genuine Linux. Yeah, and then this anniversary update just nuked it. So if you're doing this, consider reading this post we have in the show notes. We probably don't need to say more than that, right? I think that's it. Yeah, that's kind of it.

I also noticed this week before we go any further, it was an interesting week for, oh, well, oh, Scrapjaw, you had it happen to you. Well, then tell us details. Give us the deets. Perhaps you can give us the 411 on the bug. Scrapjaw? Oh, sorry, Scrapjaw. I had you muted. Start again.

That was my bad. Yeah. My wife uses it most of the time on Windows 10, so I don't normally mess with it. So it did its little reboot thing like it likes to do on its own. And then when it came back up, it skipped the grub. Like grub was gone. And then when I went in to try to find it, I was like, okay, I'll just put in the USB boot and I'll redo grub. And then grub was like, hey, all I can see is Windows.

There's nothing else here and then it found out that it was a really hard process because my linux was installed in one of those extended partitions because there's only one drive yeah you can only have so many primary partitions right because this is the dark ages right so an extenuating process of going through live boots with g parted and using some other command line stuff and eventually i ended up just having to rebuild the partition tables where they were and it was hard and i couldn't even begin to i put it on i put it somewhere where they some other people had the problem it's on a forum i'll try to dig up the link. I did document it.

Microsoft loves Linux so much that they couldn't take the time to test this. Ike, you said it also screws with UEFI? Yeah, we've had a couple of people reporting now on the forums and on Reddit that after they've had the anniversary update, not only is the bootloader gone from the ESP, it's also taken out the UEFI variables. So even if they do restore the files, it doesn't matter if the EFI variables. So even if they do restore the files, it doesn't matter if the variables

have gone. So for most of the people, they're not comfortable doing a true repair, so they're having to do full reinstallations now because of it. You know, I don't think Microsoft gets the idea of what anniversaries are about. They're a bad lover. They do not get this. They spend time together.

Yeah. Happy anniversary. Let me burn down the house. Yeah. God. Before we go any further, though, there was a lot of talk this week, surprise, get ready for this, guys, about containers. But the reason why I wanted to mention it is because they're just on such opposite ends of the spectrum that I just think it's adorable.

So this first article over at opensource.com is performance made easy with Linux containers and goes into different ways to get response time under peak load down, ease of use, getting it supportable, operational costs, figuring out your CPU needs. It's a good article for people that are going to be deploying containers in production and maybe have it. Yeah, it's high level, high level. Yeah, it is. Then there was another article or actually done an article.

It's a site that launched that I like a lot, containerhardening.org, which is a project that focuses on hardening Linux containers, and it's going to contribute patches to the kernel self-protection project. And they say they're going to help try to benefit all container runtimes by keeping the focus on improving the kernel and the subsystems used by the containers. I like

this. I like that as well. I think there's a lot of people that would argue that probably should have started with security first, and I'm not here to invalidate that, but, hey, this is going to be ruined. Containerized application technologies like AppImage, Snacky, and Flatpak promise a brave new world for Linux applications, free from the worries of shared libraries and dependency issues. But there's just one problem. This is a road long traveled before, such as in the application dark ages of Win32 applications and DLLs. And it just worked out so wonderfully there. And I will link you to Richard's talk.

You can listen to the whole thing. It's not long. It's just a great little talk if you want to catch it. Although, spoiler alert, I'm betting OpenSUSE Build service fixes everything. I bet. You can probably just skip to the end there and probably just save yourself the long journey. I find this whole thing of we now have this gray area of containers that are Docker images and LXD containers. And then we have people calling containers that are things like snap packages that install and cheroot themselves and have a mounted file system or flat packs

that are kind of containers, but they're not really containers. This whole thing is like people have barely- It didn't mean anything before. Now it means even less. That's what I'm trying to say. That's exactly what I'm trying to say is it means even less and now we're getting upset to here's how to optimize and make it better. And it's not even- we're not even using the same shared language, which is really kind of odd in the Linux open source community.

We start to have this weird hyperbole abstract language. Like it's not – usually we're very technically focused. It's – we call we're very technically focused. It's – you know, we call things – Maybe overly technical. I guess maybe what we should start doing is like start using like the very technical term for these things. So like instead of a container, if it's really more like a cheroot, call it a cheroot. And if it's more like just things – all the processes get tagged with a name, well, then it's really using namespaces. It's not really a container. Let's start using very specific language here because everybody's telling me all different

things. It's going to solve all of our problems. It's going to be the only way to scale, or it's going to be like Win32 hell. It's just a mess. It's just a hot mess this week, and I link to it all if you want to indulge. In the meantime, let's talk about lots of different options from containers to just running it right up on their systems. DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code over at DigitalOcean to get a $10 credit.

SnapOcean. It's one word, SnapOcean. What? That's your promo code. I think I'm thinking about TechSnap. Did you know, by the way, SnapOcean? TechSnap, SnapOcean, coming up just a little bit after this show. That's right, it is.

It is coming up a little bit after this show. Actually, you could use it. The thing about DigitalOcean is they're so great, there up just a little bit after this show. That's right, it is. It is coming up a little bit after this show. Actually, you could use it. The thing about DigitalOcean is they're so great, there's just like a ton of promo codes. I guess you could use SnapOcean for this week. And then next week, if you haven't signed up yet, sign up and then use the promo code D-O-Unplugged. One word, lowercase. But maybe this week. How about Wes?

If you're going to spin up a rig this week, SnapOcean. Create the account. You go over there. You sign up. You create the account, you go over there, you sign up, you create the account, then once your account's ready, you apply that SnapOcean or DO Unplugged to your account and you get the $10 credit. Now they got a $5

a month rig, they also have hourly pricing so this is a great way to experiment with different projects, try different services, or really build a backend infrastructure that works for you or just on-demand scaling too, which is made even easier with a really straightforward API and very, very, very intuitive control panel. They also have an HTML5 console that goes from post all the way up to login,

which gives you a lot of options. They make it easy to integrate teams and add multiple SSH keys and set up the DNS and deploy multiple rigs at once and take snapshots and revert. There's so many great community-contributed articles. Like I was just looking at one before the show, How to Set Up an Apache Virtual Host on Debian 8 submitted 23 hours ago. Really well-structured guide.

Not really DigitalOcean-specific either. I try to pick out some of the ones that anybody can use. Oh, yeah, there's a lot of things. If you're foolish enough to use another cloud provider, maybe you still have a dedicated box somewhere and you haven't gotten onto the revolution. I got a couple of those. I do have a couple of those. But hey, those docs are still

worth a lot. Yeah, they are. They're so nice. And there's also complete application stacks ready to go if you want to just deploy those. But check it out. DigitalOcean.com and help out the new TechSnap program by using the promo code SnapOcean this week or keep this show going by using the promo code to get unplugged.

You would get helped out either way. Look at you with the Double Tuesday Wes. It's a good time to show up live on the show. Yes, it is. You get here, you get to hang out with Unplugged, you can join us in the Mom Room if you want, and then you wind down with a little Wes and Dan doing TechSnap. It's nice.

That's what I do. It's pretty much what I do. So this came in from Vladimir. I'm sorry, it's Vermeer. It's nice. That's what I do. That's pretty much what I do. So this came in from Vladimir. I'm sorry. It's Vermeer. It's not Vladimir Putin. Vermeer? Vladimir Putin? It came in to the show.

Noah is right, which is always a good way to get my attention. Yep. And probably Noah's attention too. How could you not bite at that? Solus will always be a boutique distro, and there is such a thing as finished software. So he says, I have this laptop. I take it to meetings on site. He says, I tried out Solus after all the talk on last because you guys have been going on

and on about it. And the first thing I thought was, this is pretty good. There are packages for Sublime Text, Vivaldi, Steam, and loads of other software that had prevented me from taking it seriously in the past. For the first day, I thought it might be usable for a work distribution. I even considered installing it at home until I realized there was exactly zero amateur radio packages in the repo. Then, on Thursday, I needed to do real work. My preferred serial terminal emulator is Minicom.

Now, guess what? Minicom, long story short, not in the repos. So I opened up a bug report for your software request for Minicom. It was promptly closed because I didn't follow the guidelines for the request exactly. My bad. I reopened the bug with the required information. Built the package for myself and included the patch, hoping this would help with inclusion. A few hours later, another user posted to the bug asking why I wouldn't use Beacocom, which also isn't packaged.

He says, this morning, the bug was closed with the reason it hasn't been released since 2013, clearly not maintained, thus not eligible for inclusion. Well, for F's sake, is it possible for software to be finished and stable? A program for emulating serial terminals has essentially zero attack service, and the protocol hasn't changed since the 90s. The current release has dependencies on bash and end curses, and builds fine against the latest versions. I was planning on submitting some amateur radio packages

so I could use Solus on my main PC at home, but after this point, I've completely given up. There's tons of good amateur radio software that'll never be allowed in the repos, because, like Minicom, it's feature-complete, finished, and stable. So instead of wasting energy trying to help, I'm uninstalling. And then people in the comments chimed in, I don't understand the current last obsession over Solus. It seems to be just because the developer appears regularly on Linux unplugged.

I just can't see smaller distributions having the manpower to provide the same long-term support, software availability, or quality assurance testing as larger distributions. So I thought this summed up what probably a lot of people are thinking. Why do we talk about it? And is finished software such a thing? And why be so strict about how things get included in a distribution? And also I'd like to talk about the over and over thing and the reoccurring thing that I think we've talked about on the show in the past. People, when they get into a new project, they sometimes end up at the bug tracker, submit a bug and get shut down.

And then they rage quit all over the internet about it because they've been personally violated. Their ego has been bruised and they must take to the internet and decry this great wrong that has happened to them because they went through the official process and the bug tracker did them wrong. This is also something that happens in open source a lot. So there's a lot to sort of chunk up here. And the first thing I want to start with before we get into all of it is why I think, why for me personally, why I think Solus has a lot of potential over other – we'll go with his word, boutique distributions, distributions that have a handful of people to one person running them.

And I think a lot of it comes down to some of the same reasons I think Ubuntu Mate has done so well is because people at the top of the project in both these cases seem to really have their head on straight about certain things. Sometimes they will take a strong stance on something that seems perhaps like a bad choice and in the long term be proved it was a right choice. Sometimes they'll be working on something that was one or two years ahead of other distributions. In other cases, they're willing to solve problems that the other distributions just seem to stop at. For example, Solus with the Steam integration, or Wimpy with the Ubuntu

tweak that makes it very simple to recreate experiences and turn on desktop effects in a way that were almost accomplished in the past, but then he really brought it all done with the software, with his what is he called? The welcome software selector? Oh, yeah, right.

That really kind of. The welcome screen. Here's how you configure your look, and here's how you get started on your software. And it was like, wow, how come this was the final 10% that nobody else had done? There's so many things like that in Solus, too. And so I think a big part of looking at a distribution and how long they're going to be around is, what's the leadership look like? And I think the leadership plays a key role in just like any other factors, user base, software that their platform they're adopting, momentum, direction, all these things are

important factors. And I think Solus, along with other distributions that I've mentioned recently, have a unique mix of something interesting going on here. KDE Neon is another example of this. Ubuntu Mate, like I just mentioned. The Elementary Project is another example of this. Ubuntu Mate, like I just mentioned. The Elementary Project is another example of this. Smaller distributions in their own right, but doing something that the larger distributions are not doing. Now, as to why I talk about it so much, because this is a show for enthusiasts, and I am an enthusiast. I could sit here and do a show

about Red Hat 6, but no one would listen to it. I do shows about things that people that follow Linux are interested in. It's a pretty simple formula. I've been doing it for a long time. It's the same thing. If people in this thread are going after me for saying, oh, Chris is always following the new Shiny, we report on the new shit. That's what we do here. We talk about this stuff because we're interested in it, and you're likely listening to a weekly Linux podcast because you're interested in things in Linux. You're an enthusiast.

So we talk about those things. It does sometimes mean maybe we talk more about Solus than I talk about Debian. Although, probably not much, to be honest. But it's close. And that does happen. It also means there's times where we are talking about Debian or Fedora or Ubuntu or SUSE or whatever.

So that's my opening discussion and rationale. But Ike, I wanted – I invited you to the show today because I wanted to kind of get your take on this. It's a boutique distribution. It's too small to be taking seriously stuff and also perhaps I went and filed a bug, didn't get the answer I want. Now everything is ruined. This seems to be like a rinse, repeat

thing that I see over and over again on the internet. And I'm wondering from where you're sitting in the district, if you see this kind of stuff, have thoughts on all of this stuff, the floor is yours. Well, I mean, I have plenty of thoughts on this, but let's start at the most basic level. Let's take the title into consideration. This is a bug report, rant, complaint, whatever it is, against solace for being a boutique distribution and the argument here the premise is it's a boutique distribution because it doesn't ship my niche software which isn't applicable to its market so you've already started out in the wrong for so the bug report was done wrong first because we have over 600 bugs still open on the tracker

we're trying to be efficient if something's wrong it gets closed down you come back with it now it's come back it's something that hasn't been maintained since 2013 instantly the defense is well you know it's finished you know there is nothing wrong with it so i'm actually going to give you a link here right now on irc because i have looked into it now in the past this package has had two cves it's got over 17 bugs that have been in distribution and for the most part it's been good because nobody's looking I've looked that's a good point that is a really good point

and also I would I would also point out that the other way you could interpret this was fast and concise communication from the development team because you guys responded pretty quickly and were clear as to why it wasn't included.

There's no mystery. It's not like it gets left as an unanswered thing. All right, yeah, here it is. Yeah, I see. Yeah, and I've only had a very, very brief look at it. There was a reason why we have things to be maintained because while it might not have a security bug now, the nature of security bugs is they happen after the fact.

Sure. That is just how they happen. It could be something in a dependency that's changed. You know, one part of the API it uses now behaves differently. If nobody else is maintaining it, then you're taking on a responsibility that in a year or two years from now, you're going to have a CVE. You have to think in those terms.

The concept of – so the core concept, and I think what he finds to be frustrating is – and this is where he says Noah is right, is that software can be 100 percent finished, feature complete. Noah used Thunderbird. I tend to agree too because software does not stand alone. It is in a – is surrounded by a collection of libraries and processes that are all potentially vulnerable. And the whole system, especially Linux, is constantly moving. And if your application stands still, eventually the platform underneath will just open up a vulnerability that you're susceptible to. Let alone just incompatibility of any other kind. Right. Keeping up to date, compatible, yes.

Right. And I mean there is another aspect of this as well now we've had people before you know like the the general policy is if it doesn't meet the policy to close it if there is a problem with it because it's a very generic policy there might be some things that could skip through that policy right so if there is that case then you raise it you raise it through the appropriate channels literally the irc channels or you ping me you know you communicate with us what you don't do is then go and act the bollocks and then throw a rant on reddit just because you didn't get your way now if i'm going to work with people in solace i value one one single quality above all else

when it comes to working with other people and that is integrity yeah and it's clearly not demonstrated in this case. So I don't need to take the patch. Now, what we can do, if they wanted to talk about reviewing the process, then yes, we can do that. Unfortunately, we haven't had time to have that discussion. Now, what we did to cover our own backsides,

basically said, if it's not maintained anymore, we just can't afford to take that on because that's just shooting ourselves in the foot and asking for trouble down the road. Now, what we can do to actually address this problem, now, if he'd actually come to me and said, look, we kind of need this thing and there's no alternatives, what can we do about it? Is there any way we can lose the policy?

Because, Ike, to be honest, I mean, it isn't – I mean, so you can take argument with how he brought up the issue, but Vermeer's primary issue here is probably on a grander scale something you're going to face consistently. Everybody has their esoteric thing that they want installed. I mean this is the thing. So you get people come along, right? They've been with it for all of two seconds. They assume it needs to be exactly what they say it is. They ignore what the project actually is because it doesn't do exactly what they say it is they ignore what the project actually is and

because it doesn't do exactly what they have to do like we've had it before like um oh how dare you not have server software how do you think you're going to get anywhere in the market when you don't cater to servers right it's for desktops you jackass yeah although i did come as like wait a minute this is crazy all right it's for desktops in this particular case we have a bit of software which is from what i can now understand having looked at it afterwards it is the only thing that does what this particular guy needs to do right so fine we we have a review processes and we say all right so our policy at the moment is far too anal we know that and we're honest about that, right?

But what you do is you talked about this. Now, what my proposal would be to do there is we say, okay, if we can't use the age rule, which obviously is a very loose rule, it doesn't always work, then what we could say, if it exists in three other mainstream distributions, excluding Arch, I'm sorry, but if it exists in Ubuntu and or Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, then we could just skip that rule because we're then sharing the weight among all the distributions. That's something I would have been willing to discuss with this person, you know.

But then just to go up on Reddit because you've used it for a day, you didn't get your own way, and then you go scream to the whole internet. I don't want to work with you now. You know, we're looking for community maintainers people to come on board people who will engage in a responsible way and demonstrate integrity a relationship of trust then we'll onboard you and we'd love to work with you if you're going to go there and you're going to throw your toys out of the pram i've no interest in working with you at all because you're wasting my time and making you know just stressing me out for absolutely no reason i don't need to

work with people like that now while i you know i love contributions come into solace that would have taken me all of 14 seconds to package i don't need it but it does help us because those 14 seconds they all add up right so we can keep adding more and we add value for people but if you're trying to change what solace is i'm not going to allow you to do that by saying it's a niche when it's your niche that's not being met. It's just people need to understand. You need to understand when you're looking at something, you understand what it is. I think that's a great point is consider the audience. It's sort of the same problem that people have when they go use elementary OS.

It's like a very technical user goes to use elementary OS that is expecting more like a Plasma experience and they get elementary OS, which is much simpler. And they think, well, this is a distribution for noobs and it's a boutique and it's no good. And they denounce it online

and it's just, you're not the right audience for it. Right. And it's kind of like an interview, right? Like where it's a fit for both of you. Yeah. And you're not, we're not like by talking about Solace or not,

we're not trying to say Solace is the perfect thing for all of your things, right? We're saying for this use case, the things that we're using it for talking about Solace or not, we're not trying to say Solace is the perfect thing for all of your things, right? We're saying for this use case, the things that we're using it for, we found it to be enjoyable and interesting and worthwhile to check out. If it doesn't fit, then it doesn't fit. What we want to do in Solace now is we are aware that we have problems in the processes because they've existed since the beginning. And Solace now is, you know, it's established in itself. And as I say, we've got over 600 requests on it 200 of those are package requests so that's one third of the bugs we have

are package requests so clearly there is a problem with package availability right i'll hold my hands up to that solace doesn't have all the packages that everybody needs we want to address that so we want to get people on board who can identify these things but again can look at solos for what it is and say okay does this thing really apply to solos and you know we can change the process so it's not just well this thing hasn't seen a release since 2013 is it in free over distros yes can we distribute it yes is there 84 other things doing the same thing you know so sensible rules and then we can start to form a team we'll give people get access we'll give them publish access so they can get these

things on there is a right way to do thing and a wrong way the way that this reaction has gone on reddit they're just it's the it's the meme diff reaction that you get from people so on this one solace has no packages they're just a meme distro they'll get nowhere it's the same as when people rant about elementary OS. You know, they say they're only focused on design, but what they forget about elementary OS is they actually do focus on software. You know, if you look behind the scenes,

you've got things like Wi-Fi portal support. They've got their own Firewall D front end. And they have that whole templating system to get it set up to create apps on the desktop environment. It's really well done. Right.

So people ignore the actual reality of it when it doesn't suit their needs. I mean that's what it comes down to, isn't it? Yeah. You're angry with something, so you actually forget the reality of it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you're saying Solus is only about design. Solus is only about design.

And if it's not purple, I'm sorry. I'm not interested. But yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm not interested. But yeah, I mean, this thing on Reddit, I'm not annoyed at him. I'm kind of disappointed. I'm more disappointed with the situation. Yeah, so when these kind of feedback pieces come in, the reason I want to cover it is, Ramir is one case here, but really it's probably something that's been on a lot of, you know, you read the rest of the comments, people go as far as to say that I am damaging Linux because we're a large channel that is actively guiding less informed people to a niche within a niche.

And so we are going to cause Linux desktop usage to implode. Whereas we know the inverse to be true because what they're actually doing is stifling innovation and freedom by forcing people onto the establishment. See, this is where it does feel – doesn't it feel a little anti-change, a little pro-establishment, a little like why do something different? There is an element of that. Yeah. I mean the words you always hear out of people's mouth is why are you reinventing the wheel? And it never has anything to do with the wheel.

It's always the friction in the road. And unfortunately, these people are part of that friction and the road. Maybe Jupyter Broadcasting needs Linux plugged in so that you can only talk about Red Hat, Ubuntu, and SUSE. Yeah. What we'll do is we'll create an approved licensed Linux distributions that are mainstream and that are noob approved. We'll invite only approved PR representatives from those enterprises here to talk as guests.

No more Reiki. Because we all know how a monopolized industry with no competition, we all know how that goes, right? Yeah, right. I don't mean to be – I don't mean to come across as crass. But I was sort of shocked by the whole thread. It started three days ago because the the uh it just seemed it seemed a little over the top because really i don't think we ever say drop what you're doing and in fact i mean on this shit network you've had shows like what's the best beginner distro what's the best

distro to introduce to your friends right so yeah really have a different take on this okay go ahead so i start with with the first premise, which can software be complete? And people saying that now, as a developer, when you're developing something, you have to set yourself a barrier, a boundary. Otherwise, you will end your life and you're not going to finish it. So there is such thing. Feature complete, I agree. Feature complete. Yep.

And of course, if the ecosystem around is changing, but it's intended to support applications on its top and now open the vulnerability, maybe the fault is of that system on the way that it changed. Maybe the system recognized that it's no longer important or crucial to maintain that functioning of that application, which indeed needs to be considered by those that orchestrate the system. So in this case, it's on the responsibility of the maintainers of the distribution to decide they'd like to take that risk or not. I would say too, like in the case of Minicom, it has very small set of dependencies, like Bash is really one of its major dependencies.

But sure, they'll get into specifics of specific software because then it can be very different for each independent case. It needs to be evaluated by the core principles. Now, it goes to the second factor that I like to point out, which is how people tend to choose distributions. I've stressed this in this show multiple times,

and I still think people don't get it. It's like, stop choosing your distribution by the features or applications that come pre-installed on it and choose it based on principle. It's something that it says that I'm going to care for advanced users and I'm going to make my primary choices and target for that type of niche. Then you're probably going to be better served there, so on and so forth. That's so boring. That's so boring.

How do I distro hub? No, yeah. I think it's actually a good point. I have to disagree with part of that. Okay, go ahead. Once you've completed an application right so if i'm writing any software you do have a roadmap you know you do have this architectural overview of what you're going to do right and yes there is a point where you are as you say you are feature complete but as a responsible developer

you still maintain it it enters forever right wellilight years. Right. Well, the fact is, if you're going to have something around, you know, like that's not going to be maintained anymore, why would you take the risk in the first place? That's why I said, if there's free over distributions that did have that, then sure, because then we're all sharing the burden. Right. But if you've got to set a precedent somewhere, we can't just say, well, this thing, you know, we'll let this one in. but the other stuff of the exact same criteria which also isn't maintained isn't going in you know you you can't do that it's just bad form to take on abandoned software full stop it doesn't seem to get to the point where you go from

long-term supportable especially if you do have a smaller team. And we have a rolling release as well. It's not like we're a static release. The chances of those things breaking and falling apart is exponentially more dangerous than a static release because you can drop them between the releases. However, we've got to keep these things going on. So then we adopt technical debt. We've got to add that thing to our QA now. We've got to make sure this thing is working. And we've got to keep that thing to our QA now. We've got to make sure this thing is working. And we've got to keep this working over time.

It's much harder to get rid of something from a rolling system than it is another. And then you get to the point where you've gone from having, say, 5,000 packages or so like we have now, not 10, to the point where you've then got 15, 20, 30,000 packages and 40% of them are abandoned. And I wonder too if it was a popular open source project, maybe we could fantasize like about a situation where somebody takes it on, fixes some of the bugs, maybe starts repackaging it and it gets brought back to life.

You would hope that would happen but I kind of have to fall down with Ikea on this. You could maybe package it up and make it work for a while, but you pick up half a dozen of these and all of a sudden you've got yourself a nice string of technical debt that you have to... Especially if you're trying to have a standard for packages, you want your packages to work, you try to have QA and release cycles

and continuous integration cycles where things build, and if these things are suddenly going to start failing and you're going to have to investigate it, I agree that that's real work to take on. And given your project doesn't make sense, really. There is a solution. So people have little bits of software that they do love, right? All you would have to do is look at it one or two months, take over that project, offer to take it over.

Every one, two, maybe three months even. Just have a look at it. Make sure if they think builds are right. And then just bump a new tag. We need like an incubator, like where these projects can go. Like one, like a real incubator. It's not run by Google or something. All packages go to heaven.

Or maybe it's more like purgatory. I'm not sure. Closer, yeah. Then we can at least, our favorite things can get updated uh in the meantime i mean i guess you could always uh set up a docker container but put a put a buntu environment in there and load minicom in there maybe i don't know that's impossible i'll put minicom in but because it's the only one that does the thing and because at least three over distribution have it and i'll make that the rule going forward and we could have saved ourselves all this heartache all of this pain by not going on and doing a big thing

up on reddit you know just so everyone else sees you how unhappy you are it was no help to us yeah it was absolutely no help to solace at all because i've had to take time out of my obviously i love coming on and seeing you guys i'll make that one very clear now. He said, I've had to come on. Well, don't fucking come on then. Oops, sorry. But yeah, I've had to take time out of my schedule now to come and deal with a non-issue. Yeah, I think when people ask why Solus and I say the leadership, I think this conversation sort of underscores why I say that. sort of underscores why I say that. So I think, hopefully, if you've been wondering why do they talk about Solus so much, maybe that sort of sheds a little light on it.

And if not, maybe we'll get to hear more from you. Thank you for coming on and setting us straight. And it sounds like Mr. Vlammer there, Ramir, could look forward to freaking mini-com in Solus in the future. Yeah. So there you go. Yay. Yeah. Yeah, everybody wins-ish. Wus in the future. Yeah. So there you go. Yay. Yeah.

Yeah, everybody wins-ish. All right, well, that right there brings us to the end of this week's Linux Unplugged. We're going to skedaddle, so that way we can get out of here for the TechSnap guys, which are coming up in just a little bit. If you'd like to join us live and get even more show, go over to jblive.tv on a Tuesday. Get it converted to your local time zone at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Go check out IKI if you want more IKI on late night Linux over there. And check out Wes.

What's your Twitter handle, Wes? Where are people going to follow you? At Wes Payne. Magic. I'm at Chris LAS. You could give us your feedback or news ideas at linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Thanks for being here. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday.

Get it out of here. Zombies don't run Linux. I've never installed GNU slash Linux. All right, jbtitles.com. He didn't install it, and the zombie didn't install it. Who installed it? I don't know, Wes. I don't know.

It was the amateur radio. Yeah. He did it through Minicom. All right, everybody. Thank you very much for being here. Everybody now. Everybody now go to jbtitles.com. Let's pick our title, and let's get the studio ready for Wes. Alexa, turn on JB1.

So now we'll get the lights warmed up for you. Oh my god. That's bright. Quite a different environment in here. Oh my god. Alright. I didn't realize we were doing LUP in a cave. I know. But I liked it. I mean, it was a wonderful cave.

It was. It was very cozy. It was warm. There was beer there. Now I feel like we're on. Now we've But I liked it. I mean, it was a wonderful cave. It was. It was very cozy. It was warm. There was beer there. Now I feel like we're on. Now we've got to be on. Hello, everybody. Alright, let's see here. KDE Enhanced, that's pretty good. Solus is for jackasses, you desktop. It's for desktops, you jackass. What about

instead of jackass, we did you jerk or something like that? Something more palatable. Still going to piss somebody off. Lup Enhanced is also pretty good. Oh, come on. While you guys boat, let's see if, Wes, you knew the five secret Unity features that most people don't know. Number one. Number one.

No, let's do it in reverse order. You ready to do it in reverse order? Yeah, let's do it. Number five. Number five. You can reveal all of the different key bindings for the Unity desktop by holding down the meta key. Wow, we all knew that.

Yeah, that one. I mean, I feel like that one you just take a little too long doing anything and you're like, oh, what if I stumbled onto it? All right. Number four. Using the super key to open the trash. Super plus T. I did not know that.

I didn't. Let me try this on GNOME. Oh, that's nothing. Nothing. Okay, I did not know that. I didn't. Let me try this on GNOME. Oh, that's nothing. Nothing. Okay, I didn't know that. You could know that from the quick list that it pops up with the Super Key. Dude, don't even. You're about to ruin.

Number three, using the Super Key to launch specific lenses. Yeah, lenses are a thing. Super A is the app lens. Super F is the files lens. Super M is music. C is photos. And V is videos. And then number two, which Rod and Tom, we just spoiled.

You can figure out, oh, wait, no, was this? Oh, yeah, because it would show you thrash. That was the first one you pointed out. Yeah, yeah. You can launch a program on the launcher, but with the super key. It's super key and then one through the series of one through nine and the different icon positions. So, like, number one is files and this 2 is Firefox. You did SuperKey 2, it launched Firefox.

That's actually legit. That's not bad. I'd like that. I'd like that. So if I'm on Plasma for a week, maybe you should install Unity on there. Don't even. And then HUD, which is number 1, which everybody knows about. Pressing the Alt key while using any program in Unity reveals a type your command window,

which is actually kind of a neat feature. Yeah. Alright, so where did our titles shake out while we did that? Alright guys, we're checking in on your work. Yay, we have titles. Oh really, what is it? This is the quiz we mentioned. Popey says he has one. We don't know. Ladies and gentlemen, what is it? Come on, Popey. What is it? Come on, Popey. What is it?

Shift print screen. Oh. That takes a screenshot of your window, specifically. All right, all right. There you go. Shift print screen, everybody. There you go. Nice, Popey. Nice. Krypton infusability. Controls print screen is a window. That's a region, yeah.

How about it's for desktops, jerks? No, see, but then that guy's going to think we're calling him a jerk in the title. Right. When it wasn't actually aimed at him. Yeah. It was a previous book. Yeah, yeah. So that's the only thing about that. That's the only thing about that. Also, I have to say one thing to keep Popey happy, otherwise he's not going to let it go.

It's an operating system, not a distro. There you go. Oh! Is this a thing of yours? You don't call it a distro? Is that a... So my ambition is to build an operating system, not just... Not just a distro, but the whole operating system.

So apparently I have to say potatoes. Oh, you... Oh, damn it! No! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I just realized what you said to me. Ha ha ha ha ha! I love it! This is why you probably tuned in. That's amazing. This is literally why Popey tuned in, probably. Oh.

Or as we say here, spuds. Spuds. With a H. Or as we say here, sports. Sports. Boots. With a H. Happy football day, everybody, by the way. It was football here in the United States. Sports.

Yeah, sports ball. Sports ball. All right. So I don't know if we should go with it's for desktops, jerk, because it's for. I know. My Linux is not your Linux. A little abrasive so we can't do that. Enthusiastically enhanced.

Quantum of Solus played again. Solus is your grandpa's Linux. We're going to have to switch over for TechSnap here in a moment. It won't be that rough. We won't have to restart the stream or anything. There may be a standby screen for a moment or two. Just do what it says. Standby.

That's right. That's all you got to do is just standby. It's really easy. You can even sit by if you'd like standby wes uh linux nose plugged ah get it windows 10 anniversary surprise that's true that's that's good too just so long i just realized i forgot to mention like to comment on the fact that you said that Katie, what seemed more responsive and I was like, oh, that's a, that's a myth. What's that? Oh yeah.

Oh, that was my idea of a boutique distro myth was something like that. Something like that was my title. It was what I was thinking in the back of my head, but I forgot to suggest it. You know, the funny part there when he was asking about what a Bontemate's thing is called, it's the software boutique. Yeah, I thought so. That's right. I thought so.

But then we were saying boutique so much. That's just the software part. I know, but we were saying it so much that I was like, shit, am I now mixing up my words or what? Boutique. The damn word. Boutique distro myth. How about the myth

of boutique distros or something like that? Is that good? It's not bad. Not bad. I feel like myths played Is that good? It's not bad. Not bad. I feel like myths played out a lot, but that's fine. Yeah. The server distro myth. Busting the boutique mistro myth or something like that. I don't know.

WWE has submitted a boutique distro myth, but I feel like that's not quite. It feels a little clunky. Although I like those only three words. And there are boutique distros. Yeah. Yeah, there are. It feels a little clunky. Although I like those only three words. And there are boutique distros. Yeah. Yeah, there are. It's true. Damn it, Ikey. I feel like people don't take a pause to think about what they post before

they post it. Well, they get upset, you know. Well, in that case, that dude had this huge rant. So, I mean, he had to take a little bit of time to reread some stuff. Well, maybe he didn't read it. Maybe he just wrote it. The boutique battle. huge rant so i mean he had to take a little bit of time to reread some stuff well i mean maybe didn't read it maybe just wrote it the boutique the boutique battle i wish it would play better orally but uh the contender is kind of funny just with the k yeah not as it's not a title but i do like that play onwards

oh we could have had some communication puns as well. We missed out there. Some communication puns? What do you mean? Yeah, we really lost out there, didn't we? Like with a K or something? No, because the radio stuff. Oh, yeah.

We really missed an opportunity there.