LINUX Unplugged - Episode 185: Plasma Injection | LUP 185

Episode Date: February 22, 2017

Austrian schools are switching, Wes is trying & Chris is reviewing the Plasma desktop this week. Why the heck we keep talking about it & what’s really bugging us about it.Plus the 7-Inch Ubuntu Laptop that might be legit & Linus reflects on what he really hates after 25 years of Linux.

Oh, man. I'm glad we got a head start on the show yesterday because I had the hugest time suck this morning. What was it? So my dad, very nicely for my birthday, got me the – let me look these things up. Have you seen the Logitech Harmony? Are you familiar with – you're familiar with Harmony remotes, right? Like the big remote that like – Oh, yes. And you can have like modes where it turns on your receiver and it turns on your soundbar and it turns on your sub and it turns on your DVD player. It turns on your TV and changes the input to the DVD player or Blu-ray, right?

It's these very functional – So it's a poor man's Echo? No, I'm just kidding. Well, I guess it kind of – it was a little bit in some ways, wasn't it? Wasn't it? Well, it's funny you say that so the uh the harmony this is the latest and greatest in this and it's this is a hub that uh has like a thousand irs blasters that it shoots out everywhere plus has a little remote ir blasters that you can set up in your home a little naughty

and they recently announced echo support so you could use this as the intermediate hardware between your echo and your television. That's pretty neat. So you can say things like echo, turn on the TV, turn off the TV, turn on the soundbar, things like that. And so then anything it can control with IR, you've suddenly got access. Yes. So then Chris got very interested

in this hub. So if you're curious so far, this is Logitech Harmony Hub. And you can all have to have, if you're a masochist and just want to use your smartphone to control all the things, you could also use this with your smartphone. And it just looks like this. Oh, that's cute. It's a little unoffensive puck. And what's nice about this particular puck is the entire surface and all of the edges is made of IR blasters. So it just shoots off IR in like every direction,

which is very nice for getting to a lot of your devices. And then it comes with, in the box, one additional remote IR blaster that you can set up. Yeah, it looks like the remote is kind of an optional thing. So you can buy the hub on its own for like 90 bucks. Right. MSRP from Logitech, or you can go up with like the touchscreen remotes and stuff.

So this pushed enough of my buttons. I was like, interesting, but not enough that I was going to spend my own money. But my dad said, hey, I'd like to get you a birthday present. My birthday's back in January. I said, all right, well, this would be something I wouldn't buy for myself, but I'd like to try. So good old daddy did. He got me one of these and I have, I just left it in the box since January because,

you know, I'm not like super excited about this. I'm just curious about this. And so I thought, well, today will be the day. How long could this take? I've got a half hour. You've set up things with the Echo before. I'm actually, I'm kind of in a groove, right? Because I've been setting up TP-Link power adapters

and Belkin Wemos or whatever they are. Like I've been in a groove recently. So I'm like, yeah, you know what? I can bust this out. Dear God, this was literally one of the most brutal setups I've ever done in my life. It is so bad. So first of all, it scans your whole network and tries to find anything that it thinks it might be able to pair with, Bluetooth devices, Wi-Fi devices. And so if you have multiples of any device, it, of course, isn't very good at differentiating them. So I have two NVIDIA Shields in the RV.

So it just has Shield 1, Shield 2. I have no idea which one is which. Then after it detects everything, it calculates activities for me automatically like playing games and listening to music and then tries to create these dramatic formulas that you have to then go edit in this really awful app. So I spent 45 minutes fighting with the app, trying to figure out how I could go in and change settings. Yes. It was rough. Because really all I want is turn on my TV, turn on my soundbar, wake up the shield.

You don't need like the whole, hey, I'm in my theater room. Turn it on now. By default, it wants to turn on the TV, select the input for me, then turn on the soundbar, select the input on the soundbar. I don't want any of that. I just want you to, and then after that point, it assumes you're going to use it as the actual remote for the television. And I don't want any of that.

And then it's just – it's compounded because anytime you go through the app to change a setting, it automatically plays a woman's voiceover tutorial in the background. So you get to points where you just start hearing the same thing over and over again. But they don't cache it locally. So if you're on a MiFi connection, you sit there and wait for that voice in the rest of the UI does not respond until the voiceover loads off of the internet every single time. So that's literally one of the worst things ever.

Really awful. Like nails in the eyeballs, awful waiting for that every single time. This is the only way to configure it, I assume? Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, there's one more, which I'll be getting to. But I managed to get through all of this eventually. And it's bad. And dear Lord, help yourself if you don't correctly put in the device.

So I have a Continuous TV, which is, silly me, did C-O-N-I-T-U space U-S. Okay. That's no good. No, it's dot U-S, not period, like the ASCII dot. So you have to get on your mobile phone, you have to put the ASCII dot in between continue and us, which I just put a dash in there the first time I tried to space. I think it's a smart little device here, right? Figure it out.

Yeah. And then you have to get the model number just right, which thank goodness I scanned the RV manuals and paperwork so I was able to pull that up. Because otherwise it's under the mount for the television. Ah, yep. How are you going to read that? It's like, yeah, get it off the back of your television. It's on a mount.

I'm not going to unmount my television to get the model number. So I go through all of this, finally get it turning on the television and turning on the sound bar, which is all I want, after an hour, which is just – I'm like, okay, I've got to go. But now that I've gone this far, I must make sure it works with the Echo. Otherwise, what the hell is the point of all of this? sure it works with the Echo. Otherwise, what the hell is the point of all of this? Because I'm trying to set up a system where Hedia or the kids or myself can say Echo, turn on the television and it turns on the soundbar and it turns on the TV. And the soundbar is particularly hard to turn on because you have to get the remote in just the right spot.

And it's kind of tricky for like, you know, four-year-old or three-year-old or five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, eight-year-old. You know, they're good, but they're not like, they don't know the fact that there's this little IR surface on this otherwise large soundbar that you have to hit just right. Those are exactly the kind of things you don't want your users to have to know anything about.

Right, and if they wake up super early and they want to watch Steven Universe, why come get dad at 5 a.m. when, you know, so they can just say, Echo, turn on the TV, and then they can say echo start plex echo play steven universe and it all happens automatically but you have to have this device to make it all work this is the grand vision after all starship enterprise on lady jupes so i finally get it online i finally get it controlling the devices i go to scan the network

with the Echo. It doesn't see the Harmony Hub. So, you know, I'm looking up stuff. Okay, I have to have this particular version of the firmware on the Harmony Hub to be compatible with Alexa. Cancel. So, sure enough. Is that firmware the newest firmware or is it like some new release? One newest. The absolute newest.

And I'm one release behind. One release behind. But the real gotcha is how you update it. Now, I don't know if this is the only way, and I think it might not be, but at this point, I never use this thing, so I'm going purely off their documentation. I just don't know what else to do, and I don't really have even the patience to Google it even further, but this is where Google has gotten me so far. It's Logitech documentation.

Download this DMG file to your computer, it says. Well, I'm on Arch, so I've got to close all my stuff. I've got to log out of Slack where we're talking, you know, planning the show. At least you can do this because you're on your MacBook, right? Yeah, and I reboot into Final Cut OS, and then I have to go back to that web page through my same Google search hierarchy that I went through to get there because, of course, I didn't bookmark it. And then I download the dumb DMG, and I open up the installer, and I run it. And at the end, the installer says, the installation is finished.

Would you like to move the installer to the trash? Yeah, okay, fine. Then it gets in some sort of loop where it can't delete itself because the process is active. But then it wants to – so after I just force close all of that, I then have to – this is such a crazy thing on the Mac. I don't think people think about this because I dip into the Mac OS to go do something like, Jesus, this is how you do it? So after you use an installer because you're supposed to click and drag software on the Mac to install it. Like back in my old Mac OS days, this is how you did it. And a lot of people still distribute software that way, especially under DMGs. Yeah, sure.

But not Logitech. No, Logitech distributed an installer file which just dropped an application somewhere on my hard drive. But there's not like there's a menu entry that's updated. There's – I don't know what name to invoke in Spotify search. If it's not in the applications folder, what are you going to do? That's the whole thing. No, it's worse even if it's in the applications folder. What's it called?

What's the name of the app? There's no way to know on the Mac. And even if you sort by modified date, you don't get the right date because they've decompressed it from a file system image and they've copied to your file system and they've preserved date and time. So I can't even sort by modified time to find what the new application is. I don't know how Mac users do it. And so then I figure out, well, okay, it's Harmony something, so H, nope, that's not there. Okay, Logitech L, nope, that's not there.

Oh, they've called it MyHarmony. Oh, of course. Now the app on the phone is just called Harmony, but of course on the computer, it's MyHarmony. It's a little more personal there. So I double-click MyHarmony.app, and yes, of course it's not signed. And then I'm

greeted with, before I can proceed to update the firmware on my hub, I'm greeted with the prompt to upgrade Silverlight. It's a Silverlight application. What? It's a Silverlight. What? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. I say to myself, fine. All right. You're on the frontiers of the digital world here. We're going to press on and skip the silver light update and see if this thing works. So then I go to update the firmware and they've got this big button on the side that says this big silver light pulsing button that says upgrade your harmony. I'm like, and I'm reading the website too. And I just double check the documentation. Documentation says, click the upgrade your Harmony button to update the firmware. All right.

So I click that button and it takes me to a screen where it wants to upsell me on additional devices for my Harmony with no firmware update. I'm like, what? So I go back to the documentation and I kid you not, it says,

or if after you click upgrade Harmony, you don't get an upgrade, click the sync button up in the right corner. What? Sync button to update my firmware't get an upgrade, click the sync button up in the right corner. What? Sync button to update my firmware? Okay, so I click the sync button, and it starts syncing my... First it asks me if I want to log into Logitech Harmony and either use Facebook or Google to do it.

Oh, great. Okay, so here you go. Click my Google thing. Now Google's got this too. They had it all. Don't worry. It starts syncing with the Logitech server. Syncing what, you might ask?

Well, apparently the first thing it syncs is the new firmware, so that's great. Although, you don't really know this. It just says syncing. It never says upgrading firmware. So, you don't really know it's doing that. And then it syncs all of your settings to the Logitech servers. And by sync all of my settings, it pulls down all of the wrong settings that I had just fixed on the damn thing before I decided to update. And reverts it one revision back where nothing works. Even has the wrong settings that I had just fixed on the damn thing before I decided to update and reverts it one revision back

where nothing works. Even has the wrong TV model in there. Gets the new firmware, breaks all my activities. So then I have to go through the activities app, another brutal time, to get the activities updated, plug it back in, and now it's all working. How did you not just smash this thing

halfway through? I thought about it, but I just didn't want to give up. I guess if it's a gift. I didn't want to give up. And now, now I'm there. Now I've got it. So just never touch it again. Jeez, yeah.

Now I'm going to go down the road, and the IR blaster's going to come off the mountain. That'll break it. But other than that. So how do you like it now that it's working? I literally only had it working for five minutes, and I just needed to get here. So tonight will be the true test.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 185 for February 21st, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that is currently and presently bursting at the seams with good news. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Hello. You know, Wes, I am just thrilled with today's lineup. I am really looking forward to a chat that you and I are about to have sort of right at the top of the show. Then sort of at the end of the show, just really great clip from Linus on Reflected on 25 Years of Working on the Linux Kernel.

We have some great project updates, some big new features coming to all of us Linux users, some great news from the elementary folks, and a hardware device. And it's already exciting. And a hardware device, and it's already exciting, but a hardware device that if Noah heard about this, well, it would blow his mind. We better not tell him. In fact, I've tried to avoid telling him. I stuck it in unplugged so that way he might have missed it. Right. Because he's busy right now.

He's busy right now. And, you know, that's just sort of the tip of the iceberg. That's just sort of the tip. I could sit here and tell you all day what we're going to be talking about. We've got some really good GNOME stuff, too. We've got some great Plasma stuff. Oh, but Wes, we're going to start the show with a big news, big news story coming from the folks over at Qt and NVIDIA. So before we can get ourselves mentally prepared.

There's something we have to do. There is. There is one duty we must perform. And that's bringing in and welcoming our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hey there. Hello there.

Hello, hello. So, gentlemen, upon us today is a great show. Every single story I am so thrilled to talk about. And this first one is going to be good for those of us on Linux that want to do a little 3D modeling. Just something I like to do from time to time, playing with 3D studios, Blender, things like that, that I don't know. I don't have any idea what I'm doing. It's like an adult version of The Sims, right? It is exactly a great way to play.

And so, of course, other people will find other reasons to find this great. Other people will find other reasons to find this great, but NVIDIA is open sourcing and contributing to Qt the NVIDIA Drive Design Studio, which is a designer-friendly 3D UI authoring system. It's now released with the name Qt 3D Studio or QT 3D Studio, depending on your persuasion. The contribution consists of several hundred thousand lines of source code. It consists of a runtime component, designer-friendly tooling, and Qt integration. This allows us to bring save the art 3D tooling to the whole Qt ecosystem. And they say it's complementary to existing technology. They have a

video here. It doesn't say much in the video, but it shows you a little bit of what the tool does. And the video is 3D. Oh, it is? Oh, are you being funny? I'm just a jerk. YouTube does that, actually. They have 3D video Oh, it is? Oh, are you being funny? I'm just a jerk. YouTube does that, actually. They have 3D video and they have AR video. Now I'm going to look, Wes.

No. Ah, a shame. That looks like Windows, though. I guess that's an advantage of Qt, right? Yeah, you know, also, he's on a Wacom there. And did you see the news today that I think in kernel 4.11 we're going to have some specific Wacom tablet support? Yeah, some latest gens of their tablet support.

It's great to see that continue. They've had good support. Do you or does anyone in the lug there know of an application on Linux where you could take handwritten notes? I ask that because – That's a good question. I find myself a pretty forgetful man. But if I write something down, I almost never even need to look at it again. There's something about the act of writing. Yeah, you've got two notebooks. You literally have your laptop propped up on two notebooks.

You have two different notebooks with you right now. So you probably do find it useful to write things down. Yeah, I really enjoy using the written word. But ultimately, I end up wanting it on a computer, right? Because I want to search it. Maybe I want tags. Maybe I just want to archive it and I don't want paper all the time. I was just telling you about how I was able to look up the model number of my TV because I have a system that I can go back and search for documents for the RV. Same thing.

So I was really wondering if you or anybody in the virtual lab there knows of a system in Linux where if you have an input device, like a pen input device, like maybe it's a tablet, maybe it's on a touch screen. Or a Wacom. Is there any note-taking application on Linux that accepts handwriting? Not necessarily recognizes it even, but it'd be nice. I don't know. That's a good question.

MumbleRoo? Not sure, really. There hasn't been any that I've heard of. Well, if anybody out there listening knows, I'd sure like to know. Xjournal. I've used Xjournal and I've heard of it. Well, if anybody out there listening knows, I'd sure like to know. X Journal, huh? X Journal? Hmm.

Yeah, I've used X Journal, and I've also used Draw with just a Draw pad, a cheap one I bought off of Monoprice. And you can just write on it, and it will actually show up in Draw, so you can do notes and whiteboarding. Oh, this is – Whiteboarding space. So is it X Journal or X Ernal? Zernal? Zernal? So people in the chat room are calling it Zernal or something, which I'm going to look it up right now.

Yeah, Zurnal. Okay, Zurnal. Oh, look at this. This looks old as F. Yeah, it hasn't been updated since 2014, but that's all right if it works. If it works, yeah. If I can build it, do you think it could be in the AUR? Do you think it could?

Oh, let's try it. Live on air. Let's look right now. We could embarrass ourselves. Let's find out. Let's find think it could be in the AUR? Oh, let's try it. Live on air. Let's look right now. We could embarrass ourselves. Let's find out. Let's find out if it's in the AUR. It is in the AUR. Let's see if it builds.

Look at the guy in GTK3. Oh, my gosh. I'm going to try the Git GTK3 version just because reasons. You like to live dangerously. Reasons. Because, I mean, that's probably the only thing that really needs updated on the thing if it works. And then there was another suggestion too, right? Yeah, and look at that.

Look at that. It's installing right now. God, I love the AUR so much. This is why I can't leave you, Arch. This is why I can't leave you. I can't. How do you give that up? I don't know.

How do you give that up? It's pretty hard. So, okay, there you go. Okay, I'm going to play around. You know, the Wacom tablets are not crazy cheap, but they are also very good devices. And I could probably use it in editing, too.

They have such nice Linux support. Yeah, well, the one that I've been looking at, which is the more reasonable priced one, is going to be in 4.11. Everything is in there. Even Plasma. So this is a great story. This could be a Runs Linux if we had recorded Linux Action Show this week. this is a great story this could be a runs linux if uh we were had recorded linux action show this week this is a good deployment of plasma desktops in the australian schools

now i don't know how many of them total looks like 34 classrooms two counseling rooms some teacher rooms and some labs it's not like all of that uh island over there i think it's just just these but it's also 75 teachers that use it and 700 students. So there's a lot of exposure here. It's a great user base. In fact, there's been some good bugs that have been found already in this user base and fixed. I thought this was really good. So this was an interview with Thomas who helped set all of this up.

He's the guy over there that sort of I think pushed this because he's an open source software enthusiast. He's a teacher. He's a web developer and a father, but not particularly in any specific order, he says. Although I bet there is. He says that at least 75 teachers are going to work within the system and most of the 700 students won't be on their computers. These are going to be like computers just for the teachers. And this is an interesting kind of breakdown that they have.

So first let me tell you about the hardware. Then I'll tell you about the way they're breaking down the systems for usage. Because he likes two things about Plasma for this. One, the customizability lets the students go crazy. And the kiosk mode, which prevents them from going crazy. So I'll tell you more about that. But here is the hardware. First, in some rooms they have like old triple E PCs.

It's rough, right? So they've been able to switch to more powerful Acer laptops, some with four, some with eight gigs of RAM. Nice. That goes a long way. Yeah. And, you know, in my 10-year-old Linux test that I did on that 10-year-old PC, Plasma desktop, the latest Plasma desktop ran just fine with four gigs of RAM.

32-bit would be a little rough depending on the distro. But one of our computer labs just got an upgrade with new HP desktops and big Samsung screens. Everyone loves those. And he says everything works like a charm. They did have some problems mirroring the displays to a projector without losing configured widgets, but a bug was fixed in Plasma 5.9.2, thanks to Marco Martin, which I want to stop right there. I don't know if you've ever been in a deployment where you have end users where there's a bug in the software that prevents it working correctly for your users. if it's a commercial desktop like Windows, your only hope is to wait for the, maybe a service

pack if it's something like this, but most likely the next version of the Windows release, which could be years away. And in this scenario, he was able to submit a bug and work with Marco Martin to get this fixed. You could rely on the open source community. If you have enough resources you could hire a developer to try to fix it yourself. There are options at all. That is an unbelievable level of

freedom. I think when we talk about freedom we don't consider that level of freedom. And by the way, yes, they're using KDE Neon so they're getting those updates fairly quickly. So here's the breakdown. They bet on Plasma because they made it just kind of out of the box, and it's also pretty easy to customize it to make it look like Windows 7, which is really important for the acceptance of the teachers. I have experienced this myself, too, specifically having put Linux in labs before, making it look more – and this is one of the reasons why we eventually I think – it was either GNOME 2 at the time or it was XFCE.

I can't remember. We ended up spending some time making it look like Windows to increase the acceptance by the teachers. I was honestly shocked and I'm sure this isn't the case everywhere. But in our little podunk town here in Arlington, Washington, I was shocked at the resistance I got from people who are educators. You think they're about learning and knowledge and analysis. And they were – it was pure rejection for change sake alone because they weren't necessarily happy with the Windows machines. They were having lots of problems. But they didn't – it wasn't a change.

Yeah. But they're also probably kind of old, right? So change is hard for them. In some cases, yes. Yeah, and definitely, yes. I definitely had teachers where it was the case where change was hard and there's only so much change they can do at a time. And that's just something that's like way out of the scope of teaching. Like teaching and all that stuff already consumes enough of them that changing their operating system isn't necessarily something they want.

Yeah, it's like any busy people, right? Age was – yeah. Age was commonly higher in those cases. But honestly, anybody who had the mindset, I'm too busy to handle what I already have now. I can't take anything else. That was off – that could even – that was even sometimes some of the younger teachers. But yeah. I have some sympathy.

Yeah. I can kind of understand too. But at the same time, it was a huge problem for us time-wise because they were constantly getting messed up. It was a big problem for them because they were constantly being taken out of order because they weren't working appropriately. So we needed something to change. Sometimes you have to. Change is inevitable. So making it more Windows-like was a huge acceptance factor.

So I buy it here when he says they went with Plasma because they could make it more like Windows 7 in some ways. So they hadn't heard about Chillin' yet? Yeah. What was the name of it? Yeah, yeah. So he says, the first hour working with students is all about 3D effects, custom fonts, widgets, and custom themes. After a half hour, every single student desktop looks completely different. And the students start to see it as their own system.

Totally. Now that clicked with me for a second. Because, you know, Dylan, his laptop he took it on when when we were able to start changing things the way he liked it like it turns out when i gave it to him i like i had every app he would want to use in his dock i'd put it like a special background on there he didn't like any of that stuff he only wanted one icon in his dock he wanted he wanted a very specific minecraft background and then he really kind of took more he took a lot more ownership of it now i thought this was interesting though in the classrooms the classrooms, it's different.

It's absolutely necessary that everyone leaves the computer in a usable state for the next teacher. So that's a reason the Plasma Shell was also picked, because of the kiosk mode. He says he's had to work a lot of bugs out with the Plasma developers, but they've done an amazing job fixing all the bugs

since like 5.8 and above. He says they now have a desktop that is completely locked to make sure nobody accidentally removes or reconfigures important parts of the user interface. And I honestly, my solution back in the day to solve that problem was I had a GDM logout script or I can't remember if it was logout or login. I think it was logout script that just deleted the home directory and then would copy over from like a template directory I had. So they're not planning to do shared home directories, basically. Like they're trying to just do isolated instances. Yeah. Well, in my case, we did network home directory.

So when the student would log in, they'd get it mounted in their home directory. And then when they would log out, I would delete the home directory and then I would copy over a template directory that was from a tar file that I could then SCP to the lab machines to give them a new desktop. I just SCP to a new tar file and log out, log in. You get the new desktop. But if you have the whole home directory isolated per student, would that even matter? It shouldn't matter. As soon as they log out, it all gets cleared away. Yeah, and one of the reasons we are able to do, one of the reasons we went this route

is in the labs, we just had a lab account, and all of the students used the same lab account, which you can imagine how awful that was under Windows. It had to go. And of course, here comes Hot Shot Chris, well, we've got to get user accounts set up, everybody's got to have their own logins. Oh my god, you want to talk

about resistance to change. And I was like, okay, these are the labs, Students want to come in. That's fine. But then at the same time, we've got to have some way to wipe these things out and make them usable. And it's probably a little easier today when like 90% of what they do is just going to be in a web browser and other things, even the school stuff. Yes. Back then it was a lot more. It was GIMP.

It was LibreOffice. There was a lot more stuff that students expected and Flash and browser plugins all had to be just right. And if anything got monkeyed with it, it was a mess for the students. So that was a different time. And now kiosk mode sounds like it would do a lot of the work for me. So when I was in high school, we also had Linux, which was pretty – Oh, really? But I think a lot of the teachers had Macs or I think a couple Windows machines as well.

So it was a mixed environment. But all the labs were Linux, yeah. Yeah, we had a mixed environment for sure. It was an old gnome too. But, you know, it worked well and that was still the days of OpenOffice, I think just when it had started,

but that was working pretty well, Firefox, yep. Wow. My university was still using GNOME 2 two years ago. Great, so now it's 6. Nice.

Woo! Good times. I didn't, you know, I didn't know it was that, I thought we were kind of a weird off, because you know,

this is a while ago now. Yeah, totally. I thought we were a little bit of a weird off – because, you know, this is a while ago now. Yeah, totally. I thought we were a little bit of a weirdo. Well, it's interesting reflecting back because at the time, like, right as I was graduating, I kind of got into Linux. So that was before – you know, I'd compiled a few C programs and played with them. But honestly, it was like, I just want to play games when I shouldn't be studying, right? Yeah. But it really did work well, and I hope they're still doing it.

I should check back in on them. Yeah. I mean, I tell you, I've told this story before on the show, but the couple of times Linux – first time I thought Linux was interesting and I realized, oh, this is a really powerful OS was when I accidentally RMRFed a running system, my workstation in my classroom. Totally. And I was like, geez. Not only was I impressed that I could even do that, and there was no like – I don't

think you had to do tack-tack. There was no, there was just, it just did it. And then the other thing that I was amazed by is that it took me about five minutes to realize what happened because OpenOffice and GNOME just kept running, you know, because they were in memory. And it wasn't until I went to go do something that wasn't in memory that I was like, uh-oh. I think we've all seen that. And I was like, okay, this is a really cool system. But I didn't really do anything with it after that. And I've told you, I won't go into it, but we used Linux a few times to really save the day network-wise, just change things for us.

And then I was like, okay, this is really – screw network. Screw Windows NT. This is what I like. One more – actually two more quick plasma things and then we'll get going here. This was just kind of an interesting at this point technology experiment. It's too bad none of our canonical friends are here to tell us how great this is because I'm not particularly impressed. But it's a good first step. I'll put it that way.

So we've talked a lot about flat packs and app images and snap packages. And it looks like Alex has taken the challenge of putting all of Plasma in a snap. So one single snap and you get the entire Plasma desktop. Pretty neat idea. But, you know, snap is still kind of new. And so he ran into some really interesting things. So first of all, distributing binary builds would be less of a hassle for them.

Testing is more accessible. Confirement in various ways can lessen the impact of security issues and confined software. So these are good things, reasons to consider distributing with Snap format. But there's two main challenges that it breaks down to. Snap software is mounted in changing paths that are different from the installation directory. And confining Plasma is a bit tricky because of how many actors are involved in a Plasma session, some of them needing far-reaching access to system services. As it turns out, problem one in particular is biting plasma fairly hard.

Not exactly a great surprise. You know, when you relocate an installed plasma, it isn't exactly something that they normally do in the past. So they had to essentially go through and figure out what dependencies would break when the session – when the installation path moves. And for one of them, for example, one of them is like x-whalen. Things like that have to be refigured out.

But the other thing that I found to be more interesting and wondering if this isn't going to be a really bigger problem and sort of limit the potential for confined applications. Confining Plasma as a whole is fairly straightforward, albeit a bit of a drag, since it's basically a matter of figuring out what is or isn't required to make things fly. A lot of the logouts and logins is just basically what it takes. Fortunately, SNAPs have a built-in mechanism to expose DBus session services offered by them. A full-blown plasma session has an enormous amount of services it offers on DBus, from the general-purpose notification service service to special interest plasma activity services.

Being able to expose them effectively is a great help in tweaking confinement. To get plasma to start to work with confinement, a bunch of holes need to be poked in confinement that are outside the scope of the existing interface. KWIN in particular is taking the role of a fairly central service in the plasma Wayland world, so it needs far-reaching access so it can do its job. Unfortunately, interfaces currently can only be built with SnapD's source tree itself, so we had to make an example interface which covers most of the core services relevant. But unless you build SnapD, it wouldn't be easy to try because you'd have to be

building the latest version. So in summary, there's a lingering question of whether confining like this makes sense at all. Putting all Plasma into the same snap means this one snap will need lots of permissions and interaction with the host system. At the same time, it also means that keeping confinement profiles up to date would be a continuous task and feat as there are so many things offered and used by one snap. and used by one snap. So it may be that the things like large desktop environments, all one snap, it's not going to be really possible to say, here's the plasma snap.

You're probably going to have to break it up into smaller components like a KWIN snap and whatnot. I do think it's painful when you run into these things, but I feel like it's usually helpful when you are forced to sort of enumerate exactly what access your stuff requires, especially as we become more security conscious as a community. I know I see that a lot with deployments and stuff where you're like, oh yeah, well I require all these things

and suddenly when you have to specify them, you understand really what your requirements and dependencies are. And it is always good to always be looking at what those are and re-asking. And I know the switch to Wayland has invoked some of that too. Yes, definitely.

So let's, one more Plasma thing. And I wanted to pick up from where we left off last week with you. So during the show last week, you switched over to the Plasma desktop for a little bit. Oh, that's right. And we've also got the state of Plasma that was posted at netrunner-mag.com, which we'll have linked in the show notes. So I kind of wanted to go over your experience, cover his experience, because I've been so impressed with the Plasma desktop, specifically 5.9, that I've had a hard time articulating

what's wrong with it. People said, so what's not working still? And I'm having a hard time articulating it because I'm not like in review mode. I'm just like in use mode. I'm like I'm just like geek out mode. And so I haven't really had to turn on that part of my brain until I started really getting this question more and more. And so now I've slipped into more review mode of the Plasma desktop.

And so I've got some observations of things that I think should be improved. But they're still not major things. And so I'm curious to hear what your experience has been so far. I've been pretty impressed i think it's been a year or two since i really had like plasma kd anything as my main desktop some things i like like i already use quassel and other other cute applications so it was nice to kind of have that be my native environment but i have been approaching it very much like what you said, just install and the defaults work. I was kind of interested in exploring with that because that's really what I

do a lot of the time with gnome, at least on like this laptop, which we refresh for the show a lot, that kind of thing. So I, so I really just kind of installed KDE start or plasma started working with it. It took me a while to like get used to some of the trivial things,

just like the, uh, like the mouse cursor is a little bit different. Plus some of the applications I use, like I have a lot of like Telegram or Slack. They didn't integrate quite as nicely or look quite as nice with just the default theme as I found that they did with GNOME.

Really? But I have not customized that much. So I'm kind of interested to hear. So another part that I like, I've been using Unity at work, mostly just because I got my desktop refreshed there. Haven't taken the time to customize that either, because, you know, get work done.

But I have been thinking about either installing GNOME or Plasma. So now Plasma's on the list. But, like, one of the things I think Unity does well is imitate a tiling desktop, or give me some of those features. A lot of times, really what I want, and Cinnamon does this well, is just, like, quadrants. Even just splitting half

their screens, but especially Quadrants, just gives me enough flexibility when I have multiple terminals open. Have you played at all with the dragging the window and snapping it to an edge? That's fine, but especially when I'm on a trackpad, I really want... So like Unity, you can do... I forget what it did, but like Control-Alt-2, you can do the Quad... It works nicely. Cinnamon, I think, is the best.

It does the pretty native little keyboard. Yeah, and they're really simple. Yeah. And no more so can you get the sides. You can do quadrants which frustrates me or at least not without like g tile or other things like that i feel like keyboard commands that is definitely something you could set up in the plasma yeah so i would that's one of the areas where we appreciate feedback because i'd like to figure out the best ways to kind of get those because with that i think it's very workable i've been impressed impressed. For a while before I got all the KDE wallet stuff set up right,

I would have problems where it's like I switch between GNOME and then Chrome breaks. So that was kind of frustrating for a while. I got that working. Really, everything else has been top-notch. It's been smooth. No crashes. I'm very impressed with KWIN. Everything just transitions.

Do you notice the way dragging the windows, it feels a little different than GNOME? Yes, it definitely feels different. Everything's a little bit smoother, or it feels like it has more effect in it, but not in a slow way. Not in a showy way. I also have turned the speed of mine up

one notch, too, so they're a little bit faster on my system. It does it in a way where it feels like a solid system. It feels solid. It does feel solid. So I would also say like on here I'm running it with 4 gigs of RAM as well. It runs just fine. No problem.

I experienced my first two crashes today for the first time. And they weren't major. The first one was actually almost sort of pleasant. I know it's a funny thing to say but the panel faded out. My widgets faded out. My background faded out. Faded to black for one second really and then faded back.

I think that was a crash. Then about a couple of minutes later, I had it – they cut out and cut back. I think it was because I had done updates but I hadn't rebooted yet. I'm not sure. So that's something I have to check. I still haven't even checked on it. So I wanted to read this state of the plasma. I didn't want to read the whole thing.

Just a couple of notes because I thought this first part really resonated with my past experience. And I also, you know, before I get into this, I'm a little on tangents today because Wes got me this Kickstarter energy drink. That's right, I did. People sometimes say, God, you guys talk too much about Solus. Or

geez, you guys have been talking a lot about Plasma recently. And there's that undercurrent of Arch just all the time. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So I have – I think what it is is a misunderstanding of the philosophy that I've begun to adopt for this show. And I haven't articulated it because I don't often talk about these things. But I believe – It's a fourth wall kind of thing. I think one of the number one things missing from tech journalism, which you know I've gone on plenty of tirades about.

I think it's just the worst. You love tech journalism, don't you? One of the things I think is just the worst is we come out with these big, huge reviews of stuff. And I love – my favorite whipping boy is Windows 10. Cortana is going to change everything. Windows 10 is so amazing. This, this, this, this. Well, where's all the follow-up reviews about Cortana and how useful it is? Where's

all the follow-up? The ones that really mean the most. Where is it a year after using it? And so my philosophy is, first of all, this is a weekly show. So we've got to have something to talk about every week. And second of all, what I'm trying to do in some sense is create a story arc of our experience with these things. So that way if you are a weekly listener, every week you are getting an update in the story of our usage of these.

Sort of like for you Star Trek fans, it's like the difference between TNG and Deep Space Nine. We're more Deep Space Nine. Linux Action Show is more TNG. You don't always get the little encapsulated, it's not the, yeah, right, you don't get the full review type thing, but you get dialogue with the creators. You get our chats about daily use.

Yeah, yeah. And so that's why we're talking about Plasma again, because in a few weeks, maybe I won't be using it anymore and I won't be talking about it. But for right now, that's part of the story of the show. And we're going to take just – we'll just take a couple of minutes and talk about it. So he had something here that I thought was really poignant because it's essentially been my feelings.

He says, since 2014, Plasma has kept me entertained and disappointed in equal measures. At some point, I had it crowned as my favorite desktop, and then it started going downhill steeply and fast, struggling to recover. Not helping was the slew of bugs and regressions across the distro space, which exasperated the quality of Plasma and what it could show to the world.

I think that's so right on. That is so right on with what was wrong with the Plasma desktop for a long time. That is so freaking right on. And, you know, you guys have even heard me come on the show. I'm like, yeah, I'm using Plasma again. It's great. And then a few weeks later, I'm back on GNOME.

And that is exactly where I've been at. And I think Neon is playing a huge role in showing us how – other distributions have gotten so damn close. But what Neon is doing is really light touches, same defaults, and here's your packages. Here's your packages. Here's your packages. Oh, and yeah, it happens to be the folks behind the desktop are pretty relevant to the project itself. So that helps. And, you know, one of the things I have found by switching over to it again after using GNOME for a long time now is that Plasma retains some of the functionality that's disappeared from GNOME-based systems, including just like trivial things

like being able to create new files using the right-click menu, being able to right-click, and it just built in. I don't have to go find like some script on the internet and put it in my action systems. It's just I right-click in a folder, I go to the actions menu,

it says open terminal here. I use that. I love that. I use that 30 times a day, every day. I use that because I organize things for different shows and different folders on my file system, and I'm constantly opening up a terminal in that folder and doing work in it. 30 times a day I do that. It is so nice to have that.

I can't even explain to you how nice that is. And it's these little things that we just used to take for granted that have just started to disappear on some of our other desktops that Plasma still has. They still have kept those traditions. So with part of this, you said that maybe, is Plasma targeting like a loftier goal? And so GNOME has an easier time of reaching what their deliverable is? Or GNOME has a narrower goal? Yeah, right.

It's like it's a simpler thing to reach. Yeah. Right? They are kind of pursuing a more minimal path. Plasma, you know, GNOME has just a – you copy something, you paste it. You don't get notifications about it, nothing about that. Whereas the Plasma desktop has like one of the best clipboard managers I've ever seen or used anywhere on any OS. And they're like, yeah, we're going to make this the super badass clipboard manager it can be.

Or yeah, we're going to have the best – That was one of the things that impressed me right away was that clipboard manager. Yeah. And the screenshot tool. Like all of it is like some of their best stuff. The calendar, even just being able to click on the – Yes, I like that. It's very useful the way that all props crops up,

and I have a bunch of different time zones now that show up for me really simply. I like that a lot. Now, I'm going to get to some criticisms that I've observed, but I'm just trying to articulate the differences having spent over a year on GNOME 3. I don't know. How long have I been on Arch? Two, three years now? Two, three years, yeah.

There are some issues that I have also observed. They're not bad, bad anymore. This is the one that bugs me the most. Some windows open at rather odd default sizes with less than the full width of the drawn elements, and I have a 2K resolution screen. So this is really, really obnoxious because they open at like

640x480 size, which then truncates a portion of the window to the right, and there's no automatic wrapping or rendering of window content, so you can literally miss critical elements of the UI. You don't even know that setting exists, right? Yeah, and then they have awkward scroll bars that aren't centered with the element that you'll actually be scrolling.

And then if you just look at the screenshot here on the left, workspace, desktop effects, and screen edge options, all the same size icon. Then screen locking, a different size icon. Then virtual desktops, a different size square icon. Then accessibility, a round icon. And then activities, three dots. So this is just this one screen shows you this really bad mismatch that they have going on UI-wise. They've come so far, but yet they have these consistent inconsistencies throughout the UI.

Same thing with the open and save dialog. Consistently opens way smaller than i need it to be again a 2k resolution the first thing i always do i click and drag it better thank god that the k win drag uh effect and look is so smooth and nice because i sure do it a lot you do it a lot and then the second thing i do is i expand the modified the kind and the name columns because they're never long enough. They don't resize when you redrag the UI. They stay that same small 640 by 480 size, and you have to go redrag those. This adds three seconds to every file save and open process. What's the point of that? It's ridiculous. Again, consistent inconsistency. There's other small things. I think if you use the default theme, breeze, and you use it in the light mode, you really run into a lot more problems.

If you go breeze dark, it solves a lot of issues. So, for example, with the default theme, the menu is slightly transparent and the descriptor text under icons is so light you can barely read it. If you go dark theme, it looks fine. There's a lot of little wigglies in this article that we're going to link to in the show notes too that he ran into. If you go dark theme, it looks fine. There's a lot of little wigglies in this article that we're going to link to in the show notes too that he ran into it. If you use dark theme, it's fine. Here's another one that's a little odd. When you're playing music, when you click on the volume icon, it's a really nice widget. You get live album art, track information. Other desktops do this as well, but this one's really nice because it's got these big play controls, but they just look awful.

They don't even render correctly. There's displacement in the play circle. It's just small stuff. You know, the functionality is there. The way it's implemented is great. It works with, like, Spotify and my Google Play desktop client that I have, and it's really nice. The UI of it's just a little awful is the only problem. There's just little things like that.

But from where they were, these things are minor enough now that in my opinion, even as somebody who gets a little annoyed by these things, to have this workstation class desktop environment that offers all of this functionality that seems to be running as well as it does

is totally worth these small little nuance issues that I think eventually probably even get worked out. That's kind of been my take. Oh, and, oh, okay. First of all, the wallpapers, the wallpaper setting thing is the worst of the, of the system setting applets because I have a folder with like 200 wallpaper images in it that I'd like to rotate through and you have to add them one by one. And then there's no live preview, even though a lot of the other settings do have live preview, there's no live preview, even though a lot of the other settings do have live preview.

There's no live preview for wallpaper. So it's like basic functionality stuff. And then I think the thing that most new users of the Plasma desktop run into, and it's the thing that I should probably lead with, the number one issue with Plasma is this download new stuff from the internet screen that comes up when you want to add a theme,

a color scheme, a Plasma widget. It's one of the best and worst features of the Plasma desktop is instead of like having to go in your web browser and find a tar file and download it and then go and like drag it into like a dot folder somewhere like an animal, the Plasma desktop says, hey, would you like to just download new widgets directly from our directory on the internet? And it pulls down new add-ons or new widgets or new themes. But the reality is most of them are broken. Many of them have to lead you to an external website, which sort of nullifies

the entire point of using an applet like this. And many of them do not work at all, especially when it comes to the widgets. And when it comes to the themes, a lot of them are incompatible with current versions of Plasma. And it's just simply that no one in the project, and I've gotten some fairly good confirmation on this, no one in the project has the time to go through and weed this thing out. It's a problem nobody wants to tackle. But it's one of the most unique things about the Plasma desktop, and it's one of the first things I think a lot of new users try, and it's one of the first things that breaks and doesn't work correctly.

Which doesn't give you a great impression. Yeah. So there are some of these problems. Like you often get a prompt that says, this downloaded an HTML file, which indicates it's a link to a website instead of the actual download. Would you like to open the site with a browser instead? And then it opens up your browser, and then it usually takes you to like KDE Look or something like that. It's vague what you're even supposed to do. It's just a really bad experience. So there's issues. There's definitely

issues. I tell you what, if you're willing to live with things like that, I think it's a pretty good desktop environment. I think you should give it another week. Have you messed at all with the launcher? No, I have not. So alt space will launch K runner. Nice. Okay. Yep. It's basically, it'll do anything that the nicest launchers do. So you can, you can, you can get, and you can actually pass commands into, so you can

start console with stuff happening. It's really nice. So player, I'd say take the week to play with, play with that. Are you using a dark theme? Yes. Okay, good. Are you Breeze? Yes.

All right. Well, good, good, good. You're good there. Yeah, so play around with that. You've got KD Wallet set up. I'll play more with some of the keyboard shortcuts, see if I can make that work for me. Yeah, I know you can do that. Yeah, I'm sure I can.

I think one of the things I had to do, which I thought was kind of weird, is I had to go in and set up like the keys I always use to switch between virtual desktops. Yes. I was surprised that wasn't set up by default. Yes, exactly. That wasn't that. Yep. So I'll do some deep dive. KWin lets you do a lot of stuff.

And there is like an action area you can go in and create even things to do from. Yeah, I mean it's pretty nice. Yeah, you can also – here's a chat room saying there's a KRunner widget you can put on the desktops. You can see like applications. There's also one thing that – do you use that at work, that laptop? Yeah. You might find – I've never cared to use it. And I struggle to really justify even the feature.

But it has activities and you could create a home activity and a work activity. Oh, interesting. They're essentially totally different Plasma desktops. That's kind of interesting. You can have different widgets, backgrounds, panel layouts, console profiles, all that stuff. It's kind of cool. So, yeah. Well, I'd be curious.

Oh, my God. You're right. Pixel Pimp. Jeez. Yeah. And then, of course. Oh, my God. Yes.

KDE Connect is awesome. Oh, you already have it set up? I have not. I've used it before even on GNOME. I have not installed it this time around. So maybe I'll do that tonight. I want to try it so bad I'm half tempted to use my Nexus 6P again. Oh, yeah, right?

Does anybody know of a – what is the equivalent to find my friends on Android? I don't know if I know what find my friends is. Yeah, you don't. William, do you know what I'm talking about? Wait, do you mean find your phone? No, find my friends, which uses the same thing, but you can set up friends where you can share location. I've never used that, but you could use Waze to something similar no no it's it's it's always on tracking yeah ways does that though i think oh really mistaken like there's a mode you can put ways in i don't want to be deprecated

at this point but there was a time like at least four years ago where that was a thing so i have the kids phone which is just like a shared phone they have i have my phone and hadiya's phone and we can all look each other's location up. Which is really cool. I feel like there's a way with Google Maps though or something to have it always on. Go ahead, SK. You had something to say? Yeah, if you use the device manager

app on Android and you have to have the, whatever Android devices you have on your account, like my scrap job Gmail. I can see them and I can also add like my wife's account also. Oh, so. And so I can. So what it does is it allows you to be able to see where those devices are.

You can lock them from remote if you do all the things, you know. But she would have to then be on Android, too. So there's actually a cross platformplatform thing with the Google app. What? And I guess Android has that built in. So as long as you have Play Services and the Google app, you can enable location history and then share the location histories. And that's always on. I actually use that on iOS.

I would be. I'll have to play with that because. So. All right. So. So what is the app that you use on the iPhone? I think it's just called Google, is what they call the Google app. Oh, wait, really?

Huh. Yeah. Okay, yeah, that's. Yeah, I mean, I save my location history continuously with that, and that is actually a sharing feature. Boy, I have, it's one thing about using, I know this is an arbitrary line, but for some reason, I just get creeped out about using a Google location tracking app like this. It just creeps me out. Rude kid. Yeah.

It is interesting sometimes to review that. It is cool, though, because they have a great dashboard for dealing with all your personalized data like that. And you can view your trips throughout the day. Yeah, I know. No, I know. Yeah. Yeah. I know.

I just worry about years and years and years and years and years of analysis of my location data. Like I'm not worried about right now. I'm worried about like 10 years of using something like this. Yeah. What kind of things can they infer and what kind of things could be subpoenaed? That's my only concern. Do you really like Jimmy Johnson? Yeah, right?

Yeah. And what happens to CEOs from now or one CEO from now? That is a very good concern. Do they make a partnership with my health insurance company? Because, you know, from that data, they can derive also how fast I go. Sure. Yeah. If I'm walking.

If you're walking. They can subpoena any of those applications. So it's really just a matter of are you putting your data there or not. I feel like Apple has demonstrated a willingness, though, to not participate in some cases. So has Google. Absolutely. Yeah. I know.

That's why I say it's an arbitrary line I've drawn. It's a pretty arbitrary line. I just would rather – what I would really rather do is roll it on my own and have an app that just works on either platform. But I've experimented a little bit with that and they tend to be really crappy UIs and really, really bad on battery life. Even though they say they just use locations. Right, if it's not integrated well.

What, do you have like busy polling for your stuff? Ah, interesting. Alteris says that Google has recently made an announcement about this. Well, we should probably move on because this is not really – Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Trusted Contacts app will let you share your locations in emergencies. No, that's kind of not what I want. But, yeah. wearing gimmicky jackets. You just go pay for what you use. This is really brilliant because it's just $6 for the line

and your usage on top of that. So you don't have to worry about getting a set amount of minutes or a set amount of data or a set amount of text messages. And you don't have to worry about adding additional lines if you need something

for a monitoring device or a family member or a tablet. It's just $6 in your usage. I often have it. It just, I think I'm actually out now, but I have in the past, and I guess I have to order some more. I've just had Ting Sims around, and I've had a tablet that the kids were playing with when Pokemon Go was super popular.

And this is just like, hey, let's all go out as a family and walk around the trails and catch Pokemon. But you've got to have a data connection. Yes, you do. So we get all set up up and then that dawns on me. What do I do? You should probably buy a plan where you have to get a two-year contract, like 10 gigs

a month. Not a contract, a commitment. A commitment. We changed the words. We sure did. No, none of that. I put the Ting Sim in an Android tablet that I already had. It was a Wi-Fi device that had an empty SIM slot. And we had data for the day.

In fact, I just left it in there for a while because it's $6 a month. And I was like, well, maybe we'll do it again. We didn't do it again. We didn't do it again. But I was so thankful I didn't bother going down. Because I have been there with friends in the past. I've been to the game myself. Like, here, get this free tablet after an 18-month commitment.

Don't worry, it's not a contract, but it's a commitment. It's an agreement to be our customer. You know, recently, the other big guy, the other big duopoly guy announced more plans for more money. That's right. And I find it fascinating because if you look at the way Ting customers save money, the average Ting line is $23 per device. So that's your data, your minutes, your messages, $23. So when Verizon is announcing $140 plans and even $80 plans, it just blows my mind. This is not my cable bill. The cell phone bill should be better than that.

Yeah. I mean I guess there's people that will buy like a $12 cup of coffee, right? And meanwhile I'm like, yeah, that's too much money for coffee, right? So the other day I accidentally ended up paying $40 for pizza. I never pay that much for pizza but I went to Roundtable. I walked in there and I had the kids with me and I got two larges. The next thing I know, I'm $46 done. I'm like, what?

I could have done this for $15. Yeah, right? They don't care. The kids don't care. This is the problem with these guys, and this is why they can come up with different gimmicks. They can announce different services with different things or different ways of destroying net neutrality. They can come up with these different gimmicks, and they can call it freeloading or whatever

they call it. What do they call it? Backdooring net neutrality. What do they call that where they offer you the ability to stream YouTube for free, and then they call it a good thing. What's that called, though? They have a name for it. Yes, they do.

Oh, yeah. What is that? They all have different names, though, don't they? Yeah. Like T-Mobile. Oh, my God. T-Mobile is so prevalent, and they advertise it all the time. Someone in the IRC has probably already got it.

It has it all the time. Some of the IRCs probably already got it. Yeah. It's this – it's this – it's this – it's this – it's this cliche gimmicky way of calling basically – Binge. Well, yeah. No. Binge on. Yes.

Binge on. You got it. But what they're doing is like they're like pro – they pay the bill or something for it and it's just going to destroy net neutrality, right? It's going to – here's what it's going to do is it's going to give YouTube an absolute monopoly because if you want to watch Jupiter broadcasting shows and you don't want to go against your data, guess what you've got to do? You've got to watch it on YouTube now. You can't watch it from our website, which doesn't get takedowns from Python bots. It is available in HTML5 WebM. It doesn't track you.

And yet, guess what? Because they're freejacking this thing in the back door, that's what I call it, they're going to give YouTube a monopoly. this thing in the back door. That's what I call it. They're going to give YouTube a monopoly. These gimmicks, these bench on gimmicks and all this data, this is a smokescreen to get you to buy in.

Meanwhile, you're paying for more than you would originally use anyways. I definitely was. It really gets me fired up. Linux.ting.com go there, save $25 off a device or if you bring one and they got CDMA, you can just get a $25 service credit, which probably pay for more than your first month.

And I didn't even have time to tell you about their great control panel or awesome customer service, linux.ting.com. So speaking of Linux, Linux 4.10 brings in a new feature that sounds really cool. Hey-yo. But for all I know, it could be bunk. It is virtual GPU support. This release adds support for the Intel GVT-G for KVM, a full GPU virtualization solution with mediated pass-through, starting with fourth-generation Intel Core processors, so Haswell.

That's a pretty large market of devices. Yeah, it sure is. That really got my attention there. This feature is based on the new VFIO mediated device framework. And so unlike direct pass-through alternatives, the mediated framework allows for KVMGT, by the way, to offer a complete virtualized GPU with full GPU features to each one of the virtualized guests.

This could be huge for our OBS in the cloud. William, is this a development you were actually following? Kind of. I don't actually necessarily plan to use it, but it's definitely cool to be able to have new device types that you can virtualize and share, so you can have a bunch

of KVM instances using one GPU instead of having to have new device types that you can virtualize and share so you can have a bunch of kvm instances using one gpu instead of having to have an individual gpu for instance on the back end is the video is the video hardware accelerating these these virtual yes that's what that's partitioning being done inside of the gpu to allow each instance to run i don't know how good the like quality of service type stuff is at this point for say intel interesting i know amd also this release has something similar. Right. If I'm not mistaken. Or it landed in 4.9.

Might have been 4.9, but it also could have been 4.10. I kind of forget. But yeah, Intel and AMD should have this capability in 4.10. This is so slick. Seems like people have been wanting this for a long time. It could be big for a lot of different kind of virtualized solutions. You know, there's definitely times, I wonder what this could mean for Windows, too. You're not going to do much gaming with an Intel graphics,

but it could mean some graphics, right? I guess it would depend on the driver. It's especially nice if you're, like, say, DigitalOcean, and you want to provide GPU instances. Right, right. Because then you don't have to buy an entire GPU per VM, which would be kind of costly per month. You can partition it down.

Yeah. And so you can have cheaper GPU instances. Right. Our needs were, really we just needed some accelerated video support for OBS or OBS to work up on a DigitalOcean droplet. That could provide this too.

Suddenly you just have the base support, or even if it makes your virtualized desktop suddenly not as heavy. I think for OBS and I think for virtual desktop type stuff this could be great, because then you could do a bunch of OpenGL all your browser stuff then works flawlessly. I wonder what it could also mean for video playback in VMs for like desktop sessions. I wonder if video playback.

Yeah, VDI. Right. Yeah. I'm excited about that. But there's, of course, there's a crap ton of other stuff in 4.10. But that just seemed like a good one that people might want to know about. There's a whole list of stuff. Is there anything else you wanted to?

There's a couple of things like. Is there anything else you wanted to... There's a couple things like improved write-back management. So they should hopefully without having to switch your I.O. scheduler, you should be able to get some like less you know, you're writing to a USB drive, you're copying a giant file. It should have less interruptions now on your day-to-day desktop usage. I also thought it was interesting that you can now

attach an eBPF program to cGroups. So you can use this eBPF program to... It's the Berkeley packet filter,s. So you can use this eBPF program to, it's the Berkeley packet filter, right? So you can use this to filter packets, drop things, that kind of stuff. Now you can easily apply it to all your programs in a cGroup. That's huge. So that could be big for containers. Seems like it.

Hmm. Yep. That is a good one. And in the same vein, better support now for the Nexus 5 and 6. Oh, really? 6P here. There's a bunch of driver updates basically in all of the hardware categories, but specifically in USB and camera, again, getting

another big round of updates. Isn't it great how often just a new kernel comes out, you can install it, run it, bam, all of these updates. Some of this stuff, like I say, again, with commercial desktops, you'd have to wait for the entire next version. Exactly. So cool. Speaking of next versions of things, GNOME 3.24 is entering beta.

Final release is expected on March double deuce. With one day delay, the beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment is finally here for public testing. We got a revamped GNOME Control Center landing in this one with updated user printer and online accounts, keyboard and mouse, and Bluetooth

panels. Also, a sharing framework to make it easier for users to share things with other apps to other various online services i'm curious about that one furthermore no music app gets a tag editing and own cloud integration next cloud will be available via online accounts panel gnome photos will import your photos epiphany web browser got a lot of new features and a revamp design. And GNOME Calendar brings the Week View. And GNOME Software will handle Snap and App URLs now. Hey! Yeah. And of course, a flyback. And it looks like

Nautilus File Manager promises to let users browse files as root. There's also, there's another big feature coming that I'll mention here in a second, but I wanted to segue and say 17.04 of Ubuntu will be the first Ubuntu in a very long time

that will actually ship with current GNOME. What? Which has been a big criticism of mine for a while because it's so annoying. Yeah. The upcoming beta of Ubuntu GNOME 1704 is already showing the promise, but there is a bit of a caveat. Not all of GNOME 3.24 will be in it.

I'm sure there's a great reason, but this is so Ubuntu. This is so Ubuntu. The latest version of many core GNOME apps will be available, including GNOME Calendar, Totem, and GNOME Disk. Others are earlier versions because there is no recent update available, like GNOME Weather, or Ubuntu opts to include an older, a.k.a. patched version, like Nautilus. GNOME Software, a.k.a. Ubuntu Software, is also stuck to the older version, the GNOME 3.2.2 version, though it's a much more recent build than the 3.2.0 release that shipped to 16.04, 16.10.

And yes, they'll include Flatpak support and Snap URL support in it. Now, this is the big feature that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about, is the nightlight feature in GNOME 3.24. This could be pretty badass. It's a, as you kind of could probably guess from the name, it's a

new setting that automatically adjusts the color temperature and brightness of your display, depending on the time of day, to help reduce eye strain and help promote natural sleep cycles. You're probably familiar with a lot of – we've talked about a lot of different apps. F-Lux, Redshift, et cetera. Yeah. But now it's built right in. Yeah.

GNOME Nightlight reduces the amount of blue light the display emits. It becomes warmer and the overall brightness is reduced. It is one of those things where it's like I can install GNOME and just not have to configure that. The less things I can configure, it's just – that's nice. I think that's kind of a cool thing. Yeah. And there's been some extensions to do this. And while we're on, before we move off of GNOME, I wanted to put a call out.

And I'm going to probably have to mention this again too. But the GNOME conference, Guadec, in Manchester is coming up the 28th and the 2nd – through the 2nd of August. Guadec brings together free software enthusi, professionals from all over the world. It's six days of talks, demos, discussion, parties, games, and more. Wow, six days. That's awesome. Yeah, and I would be willing to go get my passport and go. And I got an invite to do so.

And I just can't really figure out how to make the money work because, you know, my hack to going to these events is I take, I live in an RV and I take my- You just drive there. Yeah. And that doesn't work so well when it's in Manchester. So I don't think I can- Float the RV over, Chris. Yeah, I don't think, I think that's probably way expensive.

I don't, I don't, I don't think I can make it. I just don't think I can swing it. I would love to go. I would, first of all- So your job, audience, is to just all start saying you're going and just force them to go. No. What I'm hoping is maybe somebody legitimately wants to cover it for us because I could probably get you press coverage if you're really willing to work with us. I can't pay you for it.

But if you just want to work with us and do some recording for us and probably just audio, I bet we could probably get you in as press if you're willing to officially work with JB. Maybe be my eyes and ears on the ground. God, I would love to go because I've never been to an event outside the U.S. like this. I mean the only other country outside the U.S. I've gone to is Canada. So that would be awesome. But not this year I don't think. If I had more time to plan, but July when you own a small business, July is not that far away. It is not.

So if you can make it to Guadalcanal the 28th of July through the 2nd of August, you don't have to go the whole time, I suppose. But you could go a good portion to find out. You can go to 2017.guadalcanal.org. We'll have a link in the show notes. I'd love to get maybe a couple of eyes and ears on the ground even. The JB perspective. Yeah, really get some – I think this sounds like a fascinating conference. It sounds like a hell of an event for six days.

It's got to be a party. So I would love to get a sense of that. Also, congratulations to our friends over at Elementary. They successfully funded their open – or their new Pay What You Want App Center initiative. Ah, this is great. Yeah. So they're going to be going to Denver and doing a rush over there to put this thing all together. And I'm sure we'll eventually get our hands on it and get a chance to review it and see what they've come up with.

But for those of us like myself who think this is an interesting idea at least, even if it's not going to be a huge thing that takes over Linux software distribution. But even if it's just something that we get to try out in a corner of Linux, I think it's a fascinating, worthy effort. And so I'm really happy to hear they got funding. And it's nice to see a community backing them and wanting them to keep doing this. And you know, they've had some success now. Their community has come

through a couple of times now. It's pretty cool to see that too. We need that in the open source world. Word, Wes, word. Oh, my gosh, we have so much more to get to in Tech Snaps coming up. So, you know what? I want to talk about something

that I think is going to change Noah's life. Something that I wouldn't be surprised if you have stacked on that little stack of notebooks and laptops you have there, Wes. So let's take a moment and thank Linux Academy for sponsoring the show. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug to sign up for their platform to learn more about Linux with labs, with hands-on scenarios, instructor mentoring, real human beings, course schedulers. You can pick a timeframe that fits your schedule and learning goals.

Learning Paths, which are a series of courses and content planned by instructors. They're lab servers which spin up on demand. They're video courses which are self-paced, in-depth courses on every damn Linux, cloud, and DevOps topic. They have a great community stack full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, comprehensive study guides you take with you, audio you can listen to on the

go. Speaking of on the go, they've got iOS and Android apps, smart tools that really work with the particular session or lab you're doing. I should probably mention it three times, but I think the human instructors are a huge component. Linux Academy has been blowing up. And you can check out their Twitter feed to get a little sense of that.

They've got a great guide on managing Docker containers with Ansible up on their site now. And they're just expanding their content on a weekly basis. So much. Your management is just throwing buzzwords at you? Linux Academy has got those covered. Bam. Containers? Configuration management? Linux? is so much. Your management is just throwing buzzwords at you. Linux Academy has got those covered. Yeah. Bam.

Containers. Configuration management. If I worked at a place that offered any kind of budget for learning because Linux Academy

is super straightforward and you can sign up for a seven day free trial just to get a sense for it at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. This would so be my go to. They have profiles

that help you show your employer what you're doing or a potential employer. It's a great way to try out something new with their lab servers. You can really get a sense of how it works profiles that help you show your employer what you're doing or a potential employer. It's a great way to try out something new. And with their lab servers, you can really get a sense of how it works. So then when you go to use it in production, you know what the hell you're doing.

Break it on Linux Academy. Don't break it in production. Exactly. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So it's the GPD Pocket, a 7-inch Ubuntu laptop that's going up for crowdfunding on Indiegogo. That's right, a 7-inch laptop. This thing is a little mental. It's got 128 gigabytes of storage, 8 gigabytes of RAM.

It runs Ubuntu 16.04. It's got an Intel Atom Z8750 CPU, which is a quad-core clocked at 1.6 gigahertz. Okay. Yeah. 7,000 milliamp battery, which they estimate to be around 12 hours. You're right. 802.11ac, Bluetooth, a couple of USB-C. Type C.

Yeah, buddy. And headphone jack. Hey. You have to say that these days. You just have to. Look at that keyboard. When I saw that, I went, oh, this might actually be legit. Right?

Can you believe they got a QWERTY keyboard that size on a device that small? If those are even slightly okay to use, that is an incredible layout. Now, obviously for you audience listeners, there's huge compromises. The arrow keys are a mess. The shift key is a disaster. The caps key, they shouldn't have even bothered. I'm sure the key travel

is incredibly shallow. Yeah. But still. Damn, look at that thing. Look at that thing. It would still be really cool just to pull out of your pocket and be able to use. Ten times more useful than a tablet, I dare say. Plus, do you see that full HD resolution? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's got, did I say earlier, it's got an SD card slot so you could expand storage just like on the go. It's essentially a seven inch laptop. They don't have a great, they don't have a great video, but it does show you some of the different sides. It almost looks like a baby MacBook. It kind of does, yeah. Yeah, it is.

This is really something. I actually am extremely excited about this. I do actually believe the 12-hour battery life given that processor. That processor draws almost no power. Really? Well, okay. And. That processor draws almost no power. Really? Well, okay. And I guess the screen isn't huge. So it'll be a little slow, but there are other laptops based on it that are somewhat okay.

It would fit in your coat pocket. Yeah, that's the nice thing. Or a purse. That's the real draw. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's still more powerful than a phone. It has a full keyboard.

It has a, you know. What exactly? Yeah. What do you think of that nub and mouse, though, Wes? What do you think of that? Oh, there it is compared to a MacBook, if you're looking at the video. Whoa. What do you think of that nub and mouse for?

It's essentially like the Lenovo nipple. Yeah, I've always been a fan of those. So, I mean, I do use a regular trackpad, but I think I could get by just fine with that. The only thing with the nipple, though, is it's in a weird place, because on most other things, it's where, like, the F and the G and the H are. It's a little farther down. Whereas this one's down at the space bar which is kind of yeah you're gonna have to retrain your muscle memory a bit yeah but for me i think i would primarily end up using this as a terminal type interface you know where i've got the full keyboard power and if i've got my keyboard shortcuts for most things pay yeah this is a crowd funder and uh so this i

like to take a little bit of a skeptical view. They've already popped their goal. They're 709 percent of a 200,000 goal. They got 1.4 million U.S. greenbacks right now, backed by 3,460 backers. So they've hopefully got a good shot. The thing that I'm not loving is a lot of these photos are mock-ups with gimped-in screens that are so badly gimped-in that we could tell. Yeah.

And like this one, these are just plastic keys. They're not even – it's not even a real keyboard. In fact, most of these promos, that's not a real functional unit. None of these are actually – all of these are gimped-in. And that's it. It looks like they put macOS on that one. It looks like Safari on Facebook. So it's that – and like this one, this one doesn't have any ports.

Like these are not production. Yeah, some of those are kind of strange. Like the key travel looks, or the keys themselves even look huge compared to what the mock-up 3D thing looked like. Yeah, the 3D render looks good, but it kind of looks like, it just kind of looks like it's – I would really like to see real physical units. It looks like it's going to be a brick though a little bit. It's kind of thick. Yeah. And they say it's going to be about $790, I guess.

Wait. I don't know. You get two of them for $790. Damn. Yeah, exactly. It's like $400 each, I think, for the promo price. Yeah. For the promo price, you get an estimated June 2017.

Geez, if I had the money, I would buy this for NOAA. Wait, wait, wait. They don't even have a real unit and they're planning to ship by June? They must. I mean, see, this is. I feel like they must not be native English speakers because they're not being clear on some of this stuff. Because where are they going to get a. Anyways.

Where are they going to get a what? Well, the screen. Look at the IPS. The PPI on the screen. It's an IPS display with a 323 ppi oh this is probably just a phone screen though more or less or a tablet it's gotta be yeah these exist though yeah but that's a i mean that that has to be that screen in the nexus line that would have to be an already manufactured display is what i'm getting yeah i think it is though

it might be they're just bolted it on? So you can get it at $399. What's the funding like right now? $399 for a base unit, $409 if you want it with a Type-C hub. That's cool. Oh. Oh, look at them getting fancy. Look at them getting fancy. Then you'll get $200 off the final retail prices.

What? We will give you an incredible low price. This perk we will provide a GPD Pocket Win 10 and Type C hub. Oh, you just get a hub. I see. And you get $200 off the shipping unit. Yikes. It's confusing. Can I just say that I love the

newfound prevalence of USB-C? Yeah, boy. Yeah, Pixel owner, I bet you do. I sure do. So their crowdfunding price looks like you get it for like $400, and then retail price is going to be $599 U.S. Greenbacks. Are they close to being funded? Oh, that's great. Oh, great. 709%. Wow.

$1.4 million of wanted $200. $200 seems like it was never going to be enough. So is this for you? Or were you forever burned? You know, I don't know. I don't know if this is really for me. I think if I don't I basically, I don't know. I don't know if this is really for me. I think if I don't I basically I don't

commute outside of I don't I mean, I drive to the studio like I drive around, but I'm not like you're actually driving, right? Yeah. If I if I was on a train or a bus a lot, I think this I think I'd be a big candidate for this. If I took a lot of public transit or I, you know, Uber taxi,

that kind of thing, or if I'm Noah and I'm going to a lot of clients every day, I could see it. You need especially with how good things like the XPS 13 are, where you're already at a pretty reasonable size if you have a bag or anything. This is really, I'm putting it in my pocket.

That's a big part. This is great because you can just carry it around. That's a big game changer. I got some big pockets. carry it around. That's a big game changer. And I got some big pockets. So they would be – or a purse, you know, like – Or a small bag. I'm so jealous of Hadiyah's purse because I'll just like – sometimes I'm like, can you just carry my wallet? This is so sweet. She's got a big old phone.

She just puts that in there. And this could be one more thing. It would be a little heavy. But if you needed to carry something around with you – geez, 8 gigs of RAM too is generous on a device like this. And I could get by on 120 gigabytes of storage. No problem. I think it's interesting they call it 128 gigs of ROM. Yeah, yeah.

It's not ROM or whatever. I know, yes. I know. It's a little, like I say, there's warning signs. They say the screen, this must be a tablet. Because it's got a 300, not only does it have the 323 PPI, but it's got Corning Gorilla Glass 3. And it's multi-touch with a 16 by 10 aspect ratio wait this is touch i didn't see i didn't realize that either that's what it says

that's what it says yeah that's what it says see you look at that screen it does almost look at that it almost looks like a tablet bolted on a little bit you know it's kind of is why would it not be and that's what everyone wants anyway, right? Tablet with a keyboard that might make it more doable. It might make it possible to actually ship this thing because if they don't have that screen, if they don't have that screen, this thing's, this thing's dead on arrival.

There's no way they're going to build it. Boy, that is screens are cheap. So I wouldn't be surprised if this is just not an issue. I don't know, man. I don't know. I,

well, so, uh, it weighs 0.480 kilograms. It is tiny. Look at that guy holding it there in his hand. That is – I would love to get a device like that eventually. That's still a pretty hefty thing though, a pound.

I have been – yeah, I know. I think my 6P with a K sometimes is almost a pound. It probably is. You're right. The only thing is I have been so burned. I have like a 30% success ratio with crowd funders. Yeah, right? Really.

Like, you know, Blaster and I ordered like this brew-it-yourself brew kit. Never came. Never came. Never got it. I'm still waiting on a Kickstarter from 2013. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and then I got.

I think they're going to deliver. They keep telling us they're going to deliver. So we'll see. I'm kind of excited just to see if they actually pull it off. This one I got really burned on. I ordered a really nice cast iron skillet. It's a light cast iron skillet. Oh, that sounds awesome. It's great for the RV because it's not super heavy, but it's supposed to be really high quality.

Now it's changed to from the cast iron skillet. I get a $200 coupon. What? What? Yeah. That's kind of what they're doing here, too. Wait, wait. You get a $200 coupon. What? What? Yeah. That's kind of what they're doing here too. Wait, wait. You get a coupon for what?

To buy the $500 skillet. Oh, my God. The price has turned out to be a little more than they could afford. So they're like, here. But now it's just another couple hundred dollars. And I'm not going to do it, but they keep sending me emails about it. Oh, last chance. Last chance.

Last chance. Yeah, whatever. Nope. Whatever. Not happening. All right. So I last chance, last chance. Yeah, whatever. Nope. Whatever. Not happening. All right. So I've got to play this quote from Linus. So this is where we're going to take out the show with this.

And I often have rants against the tech media. I think they're awful. And Linus was asked to reflect on 25 years of releasing the kernel. I like this, yeah. I thought it was pretty great. DigitalOcean.com. Go there. Sign up. Support the show. I like this, yeah. I thought it was pretty great. DigitalOcean.com. Go there, sign up, support the show, DO Unplugged, apply to your account,

and get a $10 credit. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up your own server like that. You go there, you get set up, and you're a boss in total boss mode. Great distributions to choose from, preloaded applications, one-click deployments,

and then an interface to manage it that is beautiful. Simple, but extremely powerful. Yeah, such a thing actually exists.

Go see it in the wild at digitalocean.com and use our promo code DLUMPLUGGED. It's probably worth it just to see how you should design an interface to manage virtual servers

all over the world. Yeah, they got data centers all over the world. And use our promo code DLUMPLplugged to get the $10 credit. You can spin up a $5 rig, run it two months, absolutely for free. Or try out their hourly pricing. Get a really nice two-core rockin' rig, two gigs of RAM.

Go try it out. Use the promo code D1plugged. And by the way, you know, I was joking in our chat. I was joking like maybe it's time to replace our libsyn downloads with this new digital ocean feature because this could be like set up a couple of droplets put this in front of it this could start changing the game for a lot of people uh i i just starting to just sort of think about like how maybe different projects could use something like this especially on release day digital ocean has rolled out a load

balancer service you You can scale your web apps and stuff, of course the servers, and improve availability across your entire infrastructure, all just built right into the freaking DigitalOcean interface. Just a couple of clicks. You don't have to be like some sort of server maniac.

You don't got to be like this West guy who's spinning up LXD containers on systems all over the world to handle capacity. You can improve availability. You can scale to traffic needs. It's very simple to set up. It's $20 a month. Hourly, it's basically like pennies.

Less than a penny. It's less than a penny. With no additional bandwidth charges. It's available in all data center regions. And, of course, you can also use their really straightforward API. That API, man. I love it. I know.

I'm a believer. I am a real believer in this now. It really is simple. It is really nice the way we've been able to integrate it with our workflow. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DEOunplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this here unplugged program. So Linus was asked to reflect on the last 25 years of Linux.

And he's like, oh, gosh, well, I'll play the clip for you. He's like, I get this question a lot. Let me tell you what I hate. I thought this was great. This question, you know, 10 years is a long time. But you've been releasing the Linux kernel for 25 years. external for 25 years uh you know it's just an amazing amount of fortitude for anyone to do the same thing for 25 years i understand you took a six-month break it sounds like to do this git thing uh but it was actually more just two months like you're in a very short break for a minor effort. But the last question is sort of, you know, you got almost 900 organizations that participate in all the different Linux Foundation projects here that are creating code in almost every aspect of computing.

And these aren't just, you know, fast-following projects. These are the core main projects for the automotive sector, the telecom sector. What, for you, was there a moment where you thought, aha, this is huge. This is much bigger than maybe what you thought when you started. Can you imagine how many times you must get this question? Oh, yeah. This has got to be one he gets, like, almost every time he does one of these things.

Any particular thing that you... I've answered that before. There hasn't really been anything like that. There's been a couple of moments that took me by surprise, but the big moment was actually when it went past being personal. And that was within six months of just releasing it. I don't even know the people working on sending me patches like know them personally i mean obviously now i know them

by email but but there's a ton of people i've never met and just going past that initial personal phase where the project was just for me i do want to kind of mention the whole 25-year thing. I'm a huge believer in just the 99% sweat, 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration thing. Any technology project, the innovation that this industry

talks about so much is bullshit. Innovation, anybody can innovate. Don't do this big think different. Don't do this big innovation thing. Screw that. It's meaningless. Like, 99% of it is get the work done, right? And there are, I actually, that's my least favorite part of the technology,

like, news cycle, is this constant innovation, new ideas, and this will revolutionize. All that hype is, that's not where the real work is. The real work is in the details. And I'm obviously one of those people who just, I like to concentrate on one project. I don't like flitting from one idea to another. And you need the people who just flutter about

and come up with ideas, but they're not the really useful ones. They're the ones who, they end up being the ones who maybe give ideas to the people who then do the work. So I hope you guys, I mean, that's what anybody should take away

from this talk is the people who actually do the work are the ones you should really listen to. And these days, I don't actually do the work anymore. I merge other people's work. Conferences, too, to be less about the visionary innovation thing and more about the day-to-day, what are my problems and how do I want to solve them. I thought that was pretty good. I like it. I did. I will link to the entire video. I did enjoy that entire talk.

But I thought that was kind of the newest stuff we had heard from Linus was in that particular moment. You can watch the entire video. We have it embedded in the show notes. Thank you for joining us for 185. Find Wes on the Twitter. Where do they go, Wes? At Wes Bay. Indeed, you coffee maniac.

I am at Chris LAS. The network is at Jupiter Signal. Thanks for joining us. Join us at jblive.tv next week. You can participate in the virtual lug, hang out in our chat room, and don't forget to give us your feedback at linuxactionshow.reddit.com.

Thanks for being here. See you next Tuesday! OK, Wes, do you want to see my old Bitcoin mining? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Does it come with some Bitcoin? So I was asking, no, I was asking Angela to send me photos because I was going to rep about how long I've actually used KDE. So this is a photo of Angela from like 2008.

And she's using an old busted CRT monitor. But what you can't tell there is she's using OpenOffice or StarOffice. I can't remember what we used at the time on the Plasma desktop. Oh, that's amazing. And this is her upset when she couldn't get her screensaver to unlock so she could log into the KDE. It wasn't called Plasma back then. It was just called the KDE desktop. Yeah. But there it is. The first Bitcoin mining iteration I had, I had a Windows box. I tried it on. And this here was, I can't remember if it was SUSE based, but it was also a KDE desktop. I think that was like the entire distro was the point of the entire distro was to mine Bitcoin. Wow. That's just what it did.

Is that Windows on the right there? there yeah and then this here is yeah well this is uh this way this machine ran through various different iterations but i was always kind of switching depending on which one mined the bitcoin and uh depending on how the testing was going but see what i liked about of course using the plasma desktop here and others is you could put widgets on here and if you look below wes ladies and gentlemen there it is the very dell i reviewed just recently on the linux action show in service as a bitcoin mining rig that machine has been hell, and I just booted it up recently. Look at that retro look. Yeah. Yeah, you can see over here, too, I had the Radeon drivers up so I could watch the CPU

temperatures. And same thing here. I'm watching the voltages and the temperatures and setting all of that. Yeah, boy. That's how you got so rich today. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, oh, boy.

There you go. JBTitles.com. JBTitles.com. Now we got to go boat. Now we got to rich today. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. There you go. JBtitles.com. JBtitles.com. Now we got to go boat. Now we got to go boat. Thank you, Mumble Room. Thank you very, very much, you guys. Always the bestest.

You're welcome. It was good to have you here. Now help me go pick a title, won't you? And then we got to get out of here because Mr. Wes and Dan are going to do – Turns out everything's broken and will infect your system. So, you know, we have to talk about that. I recognize that crazy monitor. Yeah, Rikai.

Yeah, it's old too. You know what's funny about that monitor? First, this screen right here, this KDS, which I don't even think is around anymore. First LCD monitor I've ever bought. VGA monitor. Power and VGA cord are integrated. I think I spent $300. And Angela was so mad at me for spending that much money on a screen.

So mad at me. Literally still using that monitor to this day. It's out in the garage hooked up to our Proxmox server. Really? Wow. I mean, and I bought that. I bought that when LCD screens, when 15 inches was just when it got to like the $300, $400. Price range, 15 inches was just when it got to like the $300-$400 it might have been $400 price range. 15 inches. Horrible refresh rate, response time, just

the worst. But the damn thing still I mean I haven't turned it on in weeks but it still works. Alright, plasma injection, plasma pontifications. Did you like that Deep Space Nine thing? Oh, I loved that. I realized we hadn't really explained why we sometimes talk about it. We just sort of got in defense mode of we're going to talk about this stuff and I

never really got into the reason why we do it.