LINUX Unplugged - Episode 193: Ubuntu's Bare Gnome | LUP 193

Episode Date: April 19, 2017

Community efforts to port Unity 8 or recreate the Unity 7 desktop are popping up all over & one of them is showing some real promise. Plus why Ubuntu Gnome left us feeling a little underwhelmed.Then, Solus has a Gnome edition now. Ikey stops by to tell us about it & other new things coming out from the project.

Man, I tell you what, that Windows 10. That Windows 10. I am impressed at how Windows it still is. It really is just Windows still. I tried it recently on that $10,000 Dell laptop and not impressed. First of all, I am shocked at how badly Windows 10 shits the bed when you have previously had Linux installed on it. So say you have existing Ubuntu partitions, like just extended four, nothing even fancy. And maybe they're GUID instead of MBR.

I don't know. So Windows 10 will see all of the partitions. You go to click a partition. Say you just want to use the same sizes. The sizes all work for you. You go to delete the partition. Okay. So far so good.

You create a new partition. It automatically says you wanted this size, which is the maximum size available. You hit apply. Okay. Good to go. It says it's formatting. Then when you go to click next, you get an error message that says BitLocker is enabled on this disk. Go to control panel and then it tells you where to go in the control panel, which obviously you can't do because you're in setup.

The only thing you can do is do control F10 and bring up the emergency console. You can't go to the BitLocker control panel and turn off BitLocker for that drive with the instructions. So it's unbelievable that this company, in their latest version, has an error message in their installer that comes up, which is completely wrong. The drive has totally been reformatted with NTFS. It doesn't have BitLocker turned on. But then the error message comes up, and it tells you all these steps to go to the control panel, which do not exist. And what you really have to do is you have to bring up the emergency console. You have to use their disk utility emergency thing.

You have to go into the volume and you have to select the partition and then you have to reformat it again from the command line and you can't reboot in between. If you see what I did is the first time I did that, I made the mistake and then I reboot it

just to make sure everything was good and clean and went back in the installer. Same exact problem. Threw me for a loop. I'm like, oh shit, that didn't fix it. I thought for sure that would have fixed it. No, no, no, no, no. What you got to do is you got to delete it again in the installer.

Then you got to go to the emergency console. Then you got to run the disk utility, go in there. You got to reformat it again, close the emergency console, and then go back in the installer and finish the installation. Well, that's probably what happens when less than 1% of your users use your drive encryption technology. And even I don't think they totally test for installing on a system after Ubuntu. But what I was surprised by was how little.

Hello, Chris. I hear that Microsoft loves Linux. I was surprised. First of all, when you search for that error message, you get very little information. I was surprised by that. Thank you, Mr. Beard, for stepping in. I hear Mr. West is here. Yeah, I hear that, too.

I hear that rumor. That jerk, for stepping in. I hear Mr. West is here. Yeah, I hear that, too. I hear that rumor. That jerk, he's kicking me off the air. Yeah, you know him. I would never. Hello, Wes. I missed you. It's good to see you. So that was my Windows 10.

I mean, it's like just that whole thing. It's just such garbage. Crazy garbage. Crazy, crazy garbage. What are you doing with Windows? Oh, well, I stole this laptop from Dell, and I wanted to try out Premiere on it to compare it against Lightworks 14. Okay, that sounds reasonable. And was just blown away by the amazing problems that you still have with Microsoft. And it's a fully anniversary update or creator's update or whatever they call it.

Whatever stupid name they have for it. It's all fully, like, the latest ISO. Yeah, latest, all that, and it still does all this stupid shenanigan. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 193 for April 18th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, and yes, the band is back together this week. We've got a great show, and my name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes.

Very excited about some of the things. We have like a new segment. A new segment. That's one of the things. Yes. And we also have a very interesting introspective look at Ubuntu 17.04 if I don't say so myself. There's something in there that nobody's really covered yet.

It's kind of a shame, so we're going to talk about that. Yeah, that's right. Wes and I have been kicking the tires. We have some interesting hardware news to discuss in a little bit, and we're going to go through a bunch of our favorite open source project updates. Maybe add a couple of new ones to the map as well. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we'll tell you about those coming up in a little bit. It's good to be back, Wes. Wes. It is great that you're back. You did. You did a fantastic job. Now I feel like I can go all the time. Well, there you go.

I feel like I can leave all the time. I mean, I think it's in the network's interest for you to adventure. How did it go? It was good. It was a lot of fun, yeah. I heard there was a bit of a mixer situation where something was going on and you had to unmute all the channels. Yeah, something crazy happened.

So, you know what I'm going to do? I was thinking about this because I know that software mixer, that's like the worst thing about it, right? It is, right? Absolutely. For me, I use it every day, so it's no problem. I'm getting better. Don't worry, don't worry. I have good news. Oh. I think probably before the next time I'm gone better. Don't worry. I have good news.

I think probably before the next time I'm gone, we'll have a big old huge Linux-powered console right here. That would be awesome. Physical switches and dials. You can look at it and you'll know what's going on. I can press buttons.

I think it's going to be real good. That'll be nice, right? Sweet, yeah. It'll be a good upgrade, yeah. So look forward to that. All right, well, before we go any further, what we really got to do is take care of a little business. We got to bring in our virtual lug.

Time-appropriate greetings, Mumbaroom. Greetings, Mumbaroom. Greetings. Hello, hello, hello. Have you missed them, Chris? I did. I did. You know, I wish I could have joined in the moment because that's always fun.

Yeah. But it turns out you never know what kind of reception you're going to get. You never know. Speaking of reception, the reception to the announcement that Canonical is discontinuing their efforts on Unity and switching to GNOME, go figure that happens when I'm gone. Right? What the? Damn it, Mark. Like right after you left.

Damn it, Mark. You know, I thought we were buddies. I thought you and I were buddies. Kind of ironic. I don't know if Noah got to share this tidbit. He must have. But I got the news on my phone. I got a push notification to my phone as I'm sitting with the Project Sputnik team,

who, of course, are basing these products around the Unity desktop. And so I had to break the news to that team. Wow. That's kind of a bummer. Yeah. And it was like, well, it was just a very interesting position to be in. Yeah, right. Because I got to watch them go, oh, shit.

I guess we're going to be responding to that. So that was interesting. And so that's going to sort of flavor our discussion a little bit later coming up on 17.04. Yeah. But I want to talk about something kind of from like a project standpoint that is inevitable. And, of course, this is going to happen. There's a lot of different takes on this, a lot of different forks of like the mobile aspect. The guy behind UberPorts is keeping that going.

There's also folks that are going to try to create their own version of the Unity desktop. And the one that grabbed my attention this week, you guys may have heard about it, is the, I'm going to say, Njade? Yeah, I think so. Desktop. Yeah, and so right now it's early days, but they call it a modern unified desktop environment. What it really is is Plasma that's been sort of mixed up to look a lot more like Unity with a few other things. The way they describe it is a community project to recreate and continue the Unity desktop environment. From the versatile dash down to the global menu, NJ promises to provide a familiar experience that Ubuntu users love while adding new features to keep it up with the latest trends. I don't know what that means, but I think that sounds good.

It does sound good. The entire desktop created from Plasma. Compatibility with Wayland. Ooh. Distribution through Snappy and Flatpaks. Hey. And it's going to have a search function. Okay.

You know what? I'm good on the search stuff. Yeah. I'm good on that. Let's put our efforts into other things. Because we just, it always, like, the indexer always manages to go crazy. It always – anyways, right? And people are sort of downplaying this one.

But something about this one to me feels like they've got some real momentum behind it. First of all, I think the idea is kind of solid. Some of us were looking forward to a QT Unity 8. Yeah, absolutely. It kind of seemed like a good idea. And I've been a big fan of the Plasma desktop recently. I'm running on half my machines right now. And it's very possible to make the Plasma desktop a lot like Unity.

There's just a few things missing. Yeah, totally. And the Plasma desktop is very extensible, configurable, so it seems like a natural platform to try to build that on. Yeah. Well, we'll watch and see where it goes. There's a few other projects out there, including ones that are just like themes that can be applied and styles that can be applied to the platform desktop.

So clearly there's a lot of interest, or at least right now. Yeah, and we're going to talk a little bit more about it later on in the show, but I just want to talk about that. And then on the other end, so if you're a GTK desktop fan and you're not going anywhere, but you did like a few things from Unity, a lot of people have said to me, boy, you know, the thing I really liked about Unity was the HUD. In fact, Wimpy. You remember when Wimpy used to come on this show? Oh, yeah, that Wimpy guy. That was back before there was some things going on at Canonical, I suspect. I haven't heard from them in a while. But back when Wimpy used to come on this show,

one of his favorite things about Unity was the HUD. They've even worked on it for the Mate desktop. So that's something that I think a lot of people that are coming from Unity and going to the GNOME desktop might miss. It's kind of a neat feature if you get used to it. Yeah, it is. And it's sort of unique to Unity. Well, there is a GNOME extension that sort of recreates the whole Unity HUD experience for GTK applications. So if you're familiar with like Sublime Text or Atom's

command palette that you can fire up, it's a lot like that. You get essentially anything that the menus can do, you can do from the keyboard. It brings that to every application that uses GTK3. It automatically extracts all available commands, and it does that by also observing what is the running application. It will adapt the UI to match the appropriate application, which sounds really cool, all sorts of relevant actions, and it requires no

modifications to the applications because it's using just the features of GTK. It looks pretty slick. I might give this a try. Yeah, it actually looks really cool. You know, it really if you think about it, if HUD is one of the things you like the most about Unity but you're trying to get on the

you're trying to get to where the skate is going to be hit by a Canadian or something. I don't know what to say. Yes, that's what that's going to look like. Something about Canadians and pucks. If you're going that direction, this might be something to try. Absolutely. Pretty cool. And we will have that linked in the show notes because it's up on GitHub.

But how do you say it? What are you going to say, Wes? Plotinus? Plotinus, yeah. Plotinus. P-L-O-T-I-N-U-S, Plotinus perhaps. It looks really nice. And it's an example of ways that you can tweak GNOME. Ryan and Noah had a conversation about System76 making modifications. If I were System76, I'd probably be looking at extensions like this. Yeah, definitely. And then the market will decide if they like something like that. Wow. Now's the time we can

dissect what we like about Unity. Spread that across the other desktop environments. In some ways, I wonder if in a few weeks, in a few months, people will be speaking more positively of Unity, because now that they know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, that this great travesty that was committed against the Linux community will finally be coming to an end. Right, the part they hate, which is just the, you know, not invented here or fork or whatever. That part's done.

Yeah. So now we can talk about all the great things that Unity did right. I don't know about that. But maybe it's coming a little bit. So I'd also, if you're switching over to GNOME for the first time and you've discovered a new extension, tweet me at ChrisLAS and let me know what you're trying. I'd like to know. I want to talk a little hardware here for a second. So I was just talking about the Sputnik team.

This is a blog post by Barton George, and he is announcing something that we got our hands on while we were at it. Yeah, it's their new Precision desktop. It's an all-in-one. Now, I'm talking about this for a couple of reasons because I think this is a super badass machine. And this is one of the reasons why I was recently really considering trying to switch to Lightworks. It's a 27-inch all-in-one, but it's like this Precision one has a Xeon processor.

You can get it with ECC RAM. You can get it with, I think you can even get it with Ryzen graphics. Oh, wow. 27-inch screen. It's the Dell Precision 5720. I think you can even get it with Ryzen graphics. 27-inch screen. The Dell Precision 5720. I got to play with it. I don't know if it's Ryzen or not. They say the latest

AMD Radeon Pro graphics. Does anyone know what the hell that means? I don't know if that means Ryzen or not. Because it's the latest Pro graphics. But it's the Precision 5270. It's a pretty monstrous machine.

The thing that I should be talking about is probably like the graphics and that stuff. I got to impress upon you the coolest thing about this machine was the sound bar that they've built into it. Really? It's essentially a sound bar. Okay. It shouldn't be the speakers, but you guys got to understand how cool these speakers are. We had a little demo, and it doesn't convey very well because, you know, we're just listening with a microphone. But I'll give you a hint of what it was like.

I cut out a part of the demo that we didn't air because it doesn't really translate very well, but it gives you an idea. It's this integrated soundbar here, basically. It's this integrated sound bar here, basically. So we actually partnered with a multiple Grammy award-winning record producer, Jack Joseph Puig, to design and tune this audio solution. So it is best-in-class audio solution in a PC, hands down. It's got these, you can see the six front-firing speakers. There's two down-firing speakers and two passive radiators. So it's ten total speakers.

It is the only system that includes both the front-firing and the firing and the down firing speakers so we're going to do an audio demo um this is a kind of a mix playlist here so we'll kind of get the experience and hopefully you can hear the the audio come through now remind you this is, this is right on Noah's directional microphone here. You kind of get a sense of how loud it is. But what I did is I cut out the audio demo here because a very funny thing happened. And you've got to picture the scene. We're in a large conference room. The room, you can kind of tell by the audio, it's a very large room.

You could easily fit 25, 30 people in this room. Wow, okay. Thick walls, thick doors, double-paned glass. I mean, this is like an industrial conference room where people can have hearty conversations. And we kind of disturbed the entire office. Wow. I'll cut a little bit here. Somebody walks in, and they're like, you've got to turn it down, turn it down.

And then we're like, well, no, they're doing a demo. They're filming right now. No, you've got to turn it down. You've got to turn it down. It's so good that we've got the teams over here enjoying it. Now, what's funny is I cut in a little bit of the Dell promo for this where they show the speakers. That was pretty slick. And check this out.

In the promotion, they make reference to disturbing the neighbors. So watch this right here. Not this part, but that is kind of cool too. So they show you how all the speakers are built, but I thought this was right here. So the neighbors can enjoy it too, which was very ironic when I went back and watched this

promotional video because they had to come in because the rooms next to us, it was too loud for them. And then what she says after we were done, she says, yeah, that was only like a half volume. Wow. Okay. So you're legit impressed with this thing. I was really, I was like, okay, all right, this would be a great machine for editing because, you know, you can get a really great processor in there. You can get a ton of RAM in there. See, that's like one of those features where I would be initially skeptical of it.

You know, like it will probably be substandard. I'm going to get other speakers anyway or use headphones. But that's awesome. Sounds like a good deal then. What I think is interesting is – so you have this – so what I now understand about Dell is that I like the dimension and precision lines. I didn't realize that. But these are like the workstation class stuff. It's a lot better.

That's when you start getting like the Xeons and you get the high-quality build materials and all this kind of stuff. So now it all clicks, now that I've gone there and seen it. And the reason why I think this is a big story is, so not only is this obviously a vendor that has tons of enterprise relationships and school relationships and an incredibly large brand recognition. But they're now – they have transitioned from a company that when they first – when I bought – oh, it's in the other room.

When I bought the XPS 410 from Dell a decade ago, I bought that computer actually almost 11 years ago from Dell. It was one of the first what they call client devices they ever tried to sell shipping Linux. And the whole idea behind it was how cheap can we sell a computer? Because if we knock $100 off for Windows, we put a 5,400 RPM drive in there, how cheap can we sell a computer? And part of making it cheap is putting Linux on it. That was Dell's approach. And to me, that was what I was always extremely skeptical.

I even sit in my predictions episode for the last – at the beginning of January. It's like I don't know if Dell is serious about Linux because that to me was like this is – you're screwing around here. Yeah. You're not giving it the right – You're not taking it seriously. I want a nice computer. Yes. So now we've – now what we have is we have them shipping the Precision 5720.

We have them shipping like that crazy $10,000 laptop that we covered. That monster machine. I think it's called the Precision 7720. They have these really nice systems now that they're shipping with Linux that they're not shipping

because they're cheap. They're shipping them because they're high-end workstations with Xeon processors and ECC RAM. Doing it right. I think it's going to be big for them. He said just on their developer laptop program, they're seeing a year-over-year

100% growth. So in two years, they've seen a 200% growth. Those are big numbers. Could be huge. It would be pretty nice, too. Imagine you get a new job, you get a new laptop, you can get this supported right from Dell. Well, maybe kick Lenovo in the butt a bit. Yeah. Get them on their game.

Get them off their butt. Get them off the pot. Realize there's a market here or could be. It'd be really good to get some competition in that area. And then everybody wins. The more people in the market, the more competition, I think it's better for everybody. We'll see. We'll see where it goes.

You know what else there's competition for? Highly skilled folks. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and become one of them. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Support the show and sign up for a free 7-day trial. This is a platform to learn more about Linux. Now, you could be somebody who's worked with Linux for a decade,

and you know there's still little things you can go learn. That's what I love about the Nuggets. Even if you're a busy person already with kids or a job, I know how it feels, and sometimes it's hard to continue your education. That's why I love their course scheduler and their Nuggets. These are features I probably talk about the most in these spots because they relate to me the most.

It's where I continue, even after a couple of years now, to get value from LinuxAcademy.com. You go there to support the show, and you sign up for a free seven-day trial. One of the things that I really realized that Linux Academy was clicking with the community is when they developed their flashcard feature. It's simple, but it's perfect for somebody like me who just needs little bits to study from, but they can get stale after a while. The Linux Academy flashcard system not only can randomize a set of cards for you to study from, but they can be forked and improved by the community.

And the community is full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, so it's really, it's like top grade stuff. They have nuggets for just little bits of wisdom when you have just a little bit of time, and they have study tools and lesson audio and personal notebooks that you can take with you offline, iOS and Android apps to help you study on the go, they spin up cloud servers on demand that you can

SSH into, they have learning paths, which are a series of courses and contents planned for very specific types of certs or exams. It's great. And to top it all off, like the sprinkles on top of

a delicious cupcake, they have instructor mentoring. What that means is they have real full-time human beings that can help you with the subject

material. That's huge. Huge. Very big. Also, if you're at DockerCon this week, stop by and say hi to Justin.

He's there from Linux Academy. He's down there taking notes for the team to see what's coming up. I think also, I think he's going to be at the AWS Summit as well. I mean, guys all over the place. Check it out. Check out Linux Academy on Twitter as well, LinuxAcademy.com, where they're telling you about

all this kind of stuff. You can stay apprised. If they're at an event you're going to, check out their Twitter feed. You'll probably see about it. And you can go say hi. Go check out the booth. Maybe get a little penguin plush from time... I hear they have those from time to time. What? My kids love them. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug

to support the show and find them on Twitter linuxacademy.com and probably coming to Mastodon sometime soon. Mastodon reference. Okay. I wanted to call... I wanted to start a new segment in the show and it's one... Mastodon sometime soon. Mastodon reference. Okay. I wanted to call – I wanted to start a new segment in the show. And it's one – I wanted to take projects that have been in a darkness, a silence, perhaps a cone of silence.

A cone of silence. I want to take these out of the cone of silence. Shine some light. I don't want to shine some light because I think these are fascinating. If anybody in the mom room has any experience with any of these, feel free to interrupt with your set experience. The first one up, Wes, is Torrent Peak, a new contender for our favorite open source projects here on the show, Torrent Peak. Distributed search engines. Got me there. Using BitTorrent Peak. Distributed search engines. Ah, got me there. Using BitTorrent.

Oh, you're hooked already. Okay. And SQLite. Okay. Okay. Now, this is a real fresh product. I mean, we're talking like updated just doesn't matter a couple of days ago. It's a distributed search engine using BitTorrent and SQLite,

and that's kind of a cool idea. So site owners create a SQLite database and create a torrent file from this. They then proceed to seed this torrent just like they would seed any other file. Site users then start downloading the site torrent, but rather than downloading pieces of a torrent, they download pieces based on a search query they've performed. In other words, a given search query, such as Indiana Jones, TorrentPeak knows how to download pieces of a torrent where data for Indiana Jones is likely to be stored at. Results are given

to users in a timely manner without having to wait for the entire database to download. And since search queries are just regular torrent piece downloads, a search query can be satisfied by many different peers in a swarm, effectively allowing for distributed search. That sounds nice. Yeah. It does have a couple of other pros

too. You can create – hosting your own is just as simple as seeding. So if you can seed a torrent, you can do this. That's pretty great. You don't have to buy a domain name. You don't have to put it up on a server somewhere. Since you control your address, your public key, which is broadcast via the DHT, it's much harder for governments and institutions to block the content you're sharing. HT, it's much harder for governments and institutions to block the content you're sharing. And via SQL torrent, you drive your users – I don't even know what this last – it's hard to read.

Anyways, here's a couple of downsides. Read-only sites for now. Your site doesn't have – doesn't get a pretty name and there's really not like any standards in place to do this. But the idea is kind of interesting. Yeah, definitely. So I thought maybe we'd add it to the watch list and see where it goes. This seems like one of those things where you might not use it. Maybe it's not even used as a library, but it pushes things forward. We're building the tools slowly that we need to solve these problems.

And Yacy is great, but it hasn't gone very far. I keep playing around with it, and it just is sort of the same. And I just wonder if something like this might come along and move things forward. Yeah, definitely. There's always a conversation when Noah is in town. There will be when he comes in for LinuxFest Northwest. You wait. You watch for it.

I'm calling it right now. It's the you can do anything on the command line. And it usually goes, well, actually, you could do that on the command line. And then the conversation between Noah the Bear and I for the next hour is, no way could you do that on the command line. And then the conversation between Noah the Bear and I for the next hour is, no way could you do that on the command line. And usually it's video editing, podcast editing, photo editing, something like that. Sure. Where maybe you technically could do

it, but... But you're just so much more efficient if you have a... Well, maybe Noah can check another one off as you can do it on the command line list, because I think he's going to have another one for his list. It's audio editing of images. Audio editing of images.

Yeah, check this out. This guy, I believe it's a gentleman, has come up with an incredible way to edit images as if it was audio data. He calls it AudioShop. images as if it was audio data. He calls it AudioShop. AudioShop is a simple script that was cobbled together that gets you started with mangling image data as if it were audio data. The script wraps three individually

excellent tools, ffmpeg, image magic, and socks. The way it works is by first converting an image to a raw format, like YUV. This is done to prevent audio editing from destroying the structure so you still have the original PNG or JPEG or whatever. If converting to a raw format, then after it does that,

it imports the raw image data into the audio editor. And he can then apply audio editor techniques to the image to get the results you'd expect. So for example, he can overdrive the signal to overdrive the image, and you get a very blown-out red and green image. Yeah, look at that.

He can apply a reverb or an echo, and you get multiple – so he has a picture here of the Eiffel Tower, and you get four instances of the Eiffel Tower because he applied a reverb or an echo to the image data. You never open it up in a graphical application. All done with it with a script. Audioshop. It's got a great name, too. Yeah, definitely. So that just came out.

I think I will play with this one because it seems kind of cool. Yeah, yeah. It's up on GitHub. I'll have a link in the show notes. So that's another project we'll be keeping an eye on. It's actually not that complicated. It's like 300 lines, self-scripted. You can go check it out.

Because it's really sitting on top of FFmpeg, ImageMagick, and Socks. Yeah. And so they're all doing the heavy lifting, and they're all tools we're familiar with. I mean, maybe some—so Socks, for those of you—because you're probably all familiar with ImageMagick and FFmpeg. But Socks stands for sound exchange. It's a cross-platform utility that can convert various formats of computer audio. So you can use it—I've had clients that even use it on Windows for like a call answering system once. Oh, really?

Yeah. And then this is your language warning for a moment. Hello, everybody. Get it out of here. You've got three seconds left before we use a swear word. The next open source project is called The Fuck, which is an app that corrects your previous console command. That's what they've called it, The Fuck.

And they have a little animation here that shows it. Essentially, you type the wrong command here, and it says, that command's not found. Did you actually mean this command? And if you did, you type fuck. And then it corrects the command and then runs it for you. It's pretty cool. It's just nice if you, oh, I meant to type Python, but you typoed Python.

You know, the fuck takes care of it for you. Yeah, definitely. So that's a project that I've actually, I think I've seen before, but it looks, you know, this repo, okay, yeah, I have seen this once before, but it was updated just as of eight days ago. Nice.

Yeah, so I wonder how broad the support is it was updated just as of eight days ago. Nice. Yeah, so it's... I wonder how broad the support is. It's apparently pretty active in development still. There was an original version where it just added sudo in front of everything. So you just screw up and forget to put sudo, and you type it, and then you... And the next thing you just type in is that,

and then it just puts sudo in front. It, like, just converts it back into and puts in sudo in front of it before you tend to do anything. But this is kind of cool, because if's like detecting what you're is even better. But if it does that and this, that's pretty cool. Yeah. So, OK, so now if that's too obscene for you, that's too intense.

Then on the other end, we have tiny care terminal, tiny care terminal with emoticons, with heart emoticons, a little dashboard that tries to take care of you when you're using the terminal. Isn't that sweet? It's wonderful. It is so wonderful. This is a little dashboard that tries to take care of you. It tells you you're cute. It tells you to take care of yourself.

And it tries not to stress you out. It shows you the last tweets from at tiny care bot, at self carebot, and magicisrealbot. Oh my god. Speaking of echo chambers, the first two tend to tweet reminders about taking breaks, drinking water, and taking a look outside. The latter tells you strange, whimsical stories. If you don't like these bots, they're completely configurable. Your good commits from today and the last seven days will also be shown.

And when you get stressed out because you think you haven't done anything, it turns out it will show you all of the hard work you've done recently. And also, it will tell you about the weather because you might get rained on. Oh, my God. And so they have a screenshot here. And they show you your commits today and for the week. They show you that maybe you should download a mindfulness app for your phone so you can

meditate. There's an end curses type animated parrot that tells you to breathe. It looks pretty good. I mean from a design standpoint it's a pretty handsome looking terminal app. See this goes right back into just you can do anything

on the terminal, and this will help you maybe feel more at home while you're there. That is so true. Oh my gosh. This would be great. This would be fantastic to replace people's shell with this. Somebody leaves their machine unlocked, this is the new thing. You change their

shell to this. And then they open, what the hell is this? They're being told to breathe deep. So they're upset, but they're not that upset because they meditate about it. They're like, okay, well, it's cool, man. If they get upset, you just give them the Care Bear stare. Oh, that always helps. So there you go. There's a couple of open source projects to help make things right in the world that we're watching.

And then also one that's not really a project, just kind of a neat idea. I think it's by a guy named Scott. So Scott had a great idea. And I don't know why Red Hat or somebody else like the Linux Foundation hasn't thought of this, but it's linuxlifecycle.com. And guess what it does? It tells you how long the support cycles are on major distributions in one place. Simply easy.

I mean, it's not an official page put together by, like, Linus Torvalds. I mean, it's not, you know, it's a guy named Scott doing this, and I, so. But hopefully he keeps it up. And so he breaks it down with Red Hat and CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian, and he tells you which releases are still supported and when the end of life is. And it's focused on enterprise, but it looks like Scott plans to set up an API, a data as JSON, so people can...

This could eventually be a legitimate resource for this kind of thing, and it could be expanded to cover a lot more, especially if there's a JSON where you could pull out other distros and display it on your own page. The API, you could have monitors. Your software's going to go out and see. How does DistroWatch not have this? How does this not have it?

They have individual things. I like how... Wikipedia has a list, too. Maybe he's just collecting all the information and putting it in one place. Yeah, it's nice. You see how he displays it in these easy... He's got it at RHEL 7, RHEL 6, and RHEL 5.

Green checkmark, green checkmark, Red X. Nice and clear. Really straightforward. Easy to understand. So if you don't often – this would be perfect for somebody like me. Like if I had mostly worked when I was in IT, I'd either be RHEL, CentOS, or Debian Ubuntu. I wouldn't very often sit down at a SUSE machine after I left banking. But if I did, I could easily just go to this page and say, OK, well, I'm on SUSE Enterprise 10.

Oh, man, it was end of life on July 31, 2013. I've really got to get this client to update. I mean it's just those sort of simple things because when you go look it up from the vendor themselves, you read all this weird vendor speak and you have to dig through these knowledge bases. It's nice to see that. It's linuxlifecycle.com if you want to check for yourself. Pretty handy. Pretty handy. I'd be okay with some free BSD or other things on there as well.

I'm sorry, what? Just saying. I blacked out for a second. A broader list, right? Just maybe on a secondary page. It makes so much sense for a BSD kernel to be on a website called Linux Lifecycle. I mean, it's not like there's a lot of BSDs to keep track of either. See, it's a small ask.

We have some huge BSD news to talk about today on the show. We've got to talk about FreeNAS Coral. In fact, we're going to do that in just a second. But I wanted to ask you before we do it, do you mostly now use Ubuntu at work for the server side? Yes. No CentOS Red Hat? No, there is some CentOS. Oh, okay. But for what you touch? Yeah, I hardly ever. Pretty much exclusively Ubuntu. You know what

you need to get your hands on? A new Linux Action Show t-shirt. What? So Linux Action Show, there's three episodes left and people have been like, Chris, you've got to do a going away swag. Teespring.com slash allgoodthings. It is my favorite version of the logo we've ever done, and I kind of wish we would have done this all the time. We wanted to have something special as like a final edition. So we tweaked our Linux Action Show logo to represent the runtime of the show.

So it's like a commemorative edition of the shirt. But we also gave Tux a dignified badass beard. And it – I don't know why everybody – I don't know why all Tuxes should have a beard like this. Yeah. Like this is something the community should take and run with. But it starts here. The revolution starts here. You go to teespring.com slash all good things.

We've got a t-shirt, a hoodie, and a long sleeve. I'm mentioning it in this show because with only three episodes left, it's not like this is going to be something we're going to be promoting very much. You've got to get it right now. Yeah. And so anyways, check it out, teespring.com slash allgoodthings. And you've already got one on the way. Ooh. Mm-hmm. Rumor has it, Wes.

Rumor has it. So this is a big story that I think happened while I was still in Arizona. And I tried to follow it as closely as possible. I'm not putting Rip on the back. Oh, my gosh, I'm a con. Oh, my gosh. A purple hoodie. You know, they have, by the way, I think.

Sorry. Blame I'm a con. He's just sidetracked me again. Blame him. It's totally his fault. So I think if you look at the shirt, they have some interesting sizes this year. I think they have like different sizes or something. So you might look at the – yeah. Okay.

Okay. I'm looking at the long sleeve too. Anyways, teespring.com slash all good things. And if you guys are Star Trek fans, you probably get the reference to the – do you get it? Oh, yeah. You do? I'm proud of you, Wes. I'm proud of you.

So anyways, this was a huge story that I was trying to follow because we have – we're a FreeNAS user here at Jupyter Broadcasting. We have friends that work on the FreeNAS project. I love the folks over at IX Systems who are the sponsors of the FreeNAS project. I love the folks over at iX Systems who are the sponsors of the FreeNAS project. It's like, it's the BSD thing that even gets Linux users to turn their heads and use it, right? Like, everybody loves FreeNAS. Noah's all in on FreeNAS. It's sort of

the number one, like, DIY NAS solution. And then when you combine it with some of iX's hardware, it can be like a serious business solution too. So everybody, everybody had their eyes on FreeNAS

10, aka FreeNAS Coral. And Jordan Hubbard, which is one of the guys that's been at iX for a long time, he's up in the high ranks, very involved with the FreeNAS 10 project. And he gave us a demo when I was at MeetBSD California. Yeah, he gave us – and man, Wes, he was showing – first of all, this was like this revolutionary new UI for FreeNAS.

I mean it had gone from the FreeNAS UI we might know to this totally new dark-themed click and drag. He did this maneuver where he added like 35 hard drives at once to this FreeNAS server because they had this huge crazy setup back at IEX. He had VPNed into. And so he VPNs into his – he's up on stage at MeetBSD. And he VPNed – and this is at a Berkeley – one of the Berkeley campuses. So everybody is like in this auditorium. And we're all watching Jordan up on stage as he gets up there and VPNs back into IEX systems and connects to this monster demo FreeNAS rig, Coral rig. And he's talking about all of the massive changes and he's talking about the fact that

they're rolling out Docker support and this totally new UI and this engine and they're rebasing on this version of FreeBSD and all of these fundamental changes. And it was my last show before I left for Texas, the last show with Linux Unplugged I did. I sort of gave like a heads up. I was like, I'm hearing some bad things about – I mean I'm hearing people are getting a little concerned about FreeNAS 10. I'm hearing some bad things like plugins are getting disabled. Your data is safe, but you got to reset up all your plugins in Docker. Like people are not super thrilled.

Just FYI. It was kind of like the general vibe of the coverage right before I left for Texas. And then while I was gone, huge news. Huge, huge news from the FreeNAS project. And it's the kind of news that sort of sticks to a project for a while. And I think maybe it explains why when last time I was on the show, we talked about Jordan leaving IX to go into the biofield. Well, I think now we know why he left. And so we're going to talk about all of that.

First, I want to say thanks to Ting. Go to linux.ting.com to support the show and save $25 off your device. Or if you have a CDMA or GSM device, whoa. Yeah, because, you know, everybody's got one these days. Heck, yes. Just check their BYOD page. It's probably compatible. Then you get $25 in service credit.

And you know what, Wes? Average monthly ting bill, $23. What? Mm-hmm. It's pretty cool because they've got – so this is the genius of it. So it turns out, guys, it's 2017. And the cellular infrastructure in the United States is pretty much in place. Everybody's heard of cell phones at this point. We've all kind of got it

figured out. So Ting wanted to do something that was really different. Now, I've been a Ting customer now for like two and a half, three years. I don't know. I mean, it's been a long time. And I love it because they are an MVNO. They are able to ride on top of other carrier networks that they create agreements with. And they can create these agreements sort of as business needs drive it. So they have sort of an incredible flexibility here. But the big thing is they're not out there digging holes in the ground and putting up big towers. I've actually had clients that were responsible for designing and zoning cell towers. It's an entire industry on its own.

It is the kind of industry that only multi-billion dollar corporations can even think of getting into. And so Tink said, well, let's just short circuit all of that. So they took the MVNO approach. And by creating agreements with multiple cellular providers, CDMA and GSM networks, they can invest in things like an in-house call center of human beings that work there in the office with them. Their support staff actually works in the building. That's where they can spend money on their website and on their app and on customer service and on creating incredibly competitive pricing plans. It's pay for what you use wireless.

It's $6 a month and then just your usage on top of that. They got a great dashboard. You can turn services on and off as you need it. You want to turn off a line. There's no early termination fee. There's no contract. You don't want data. You need data.

You only want calls. You only want text. You can do it all with Ting. And they've got a savings calculator you can try out. And when you go there, linux.ting.com, also check out their blog. If you've switched to Ting since you've heard some of our ads and you have a story to share, you could win a $100 Ting credit. Just start by going to linux.ting.com,

and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring this here unplugged program. So Mobi, let's finish the FreeNAS thing because we started that, then we'll get to Mobi. Mobi is happening right now. There's a DockerCon going on, and it's all happening. But while I was gone, FreeNAS Coral was canned. Development was halted. It was considered relegated to technology preview status.

They're going to revert back to the FreeNAS 9 code base. My rough understanding, and I'm going to tell you that I don't know much, and you could get a much better, much clearer explanation tomorrow on BSD Now because I think they're going to have Chris Moore on. Oh, yes, they are. To talk about all of this. So, and Alan happens to know Chris. So that should work out pretty well.

They should be able to cover this. I would expect BSD Now to have probably the best coverage out there tomorrow. But what we know, what I seem to understand at this point is that there was essentially two teams on FreeNAS, working FreeNAS. There's the FreeNAS 9 team kind of keeping that going and supported. And then there was Jordan's team, which was sort of creating the new revolutionary product, the Freenaz Coral. And what happened is their internal metrics were showing that they were having a massive abandon rate of Freenaz Coral, like something like a huge percentage. I'd say I think it's maybe somewhere in the 50% range or greater.

We're reverting back to FreeNAS 9. And so they were just seeing – I think that metric – this is my – from what I've read. I think that metric freaked them out the most. And they probably said, Jordan, you should probably go find something else to do. We're going to not do this anymore. And the team that they had kept around working on FreeNAS 9 in the meantime was shoring up the existing base, was developing a new UI, and actually has a lot of super great plans in place already for FreeNAS 9. Chris Moore was pretty clear about some of the features

they're working on in a forum post, and he was already showing screenshots of the new UI. They're working, I think, maybe on getting some of the FreeNAS Coral plugins to work as well. Oh, okay. So, I mean, they're definitely doing a pretty tight about face and have a pretty good plan B. But there is some egg on the face here because FreeNAS has sort of achieved this rock-solid appliance status. And when you take a big leap like this and it doesn't land right, it can sometimes, that can stick to the reputation of the project a bit. Now, I got to really think that any serious enterprise

installation wasn't jumping to the next version of FreeNAS yet. The effect rate is probably exaggerated. Who are curious about it? I think probably because the type of user base that was updating is the type of user base that goes to Reddit forums and IRCs probably say it's probably more of an exaggerated

issue but they have their own internal metrics that showed that there was a high abandonment rate. That's my understanding at least. And it sounds like they have a pretty good plan going forward but that is a rough thing to do. And you know.

Not the kind of thing you want to see for your storage plates. Yeah. 50%. It was 50% says your storage plates. Yeah. Yeah. 50%. It was 50% says the chat room. Yeah. That's a huge, that's a huge reversion rate. So Chris will be on BSD now tomorrow to talk more about it.

So I'll be watching that because that, that affects us. So let's talk about, we have a little right now while we're recording this show, there's a little bit of a breaking news. What? This is CNN Breaking News. The DockerCon in Austin, Texas is going on right now, and the Docker company announced Moby. And I wasn't really going to talk about it on the show, but after going back and forth

a lot in chat, you and I actually kind of whittled down what the hell this is and why it actually matters and why it could be a good thing. So we're going to talk about it now. But I want to start just reading it to you, and I want to see, okay, somebody, let's see, let's, we got to pick, I say let's, let's, William, are you up for a game? Is he there? William, are you there? How about, okay, let's, let's pick on Rotten.

Michael, are you up for a game? Somebody. Somebody. Nobody. It depends on the kind of game. Well, I'm going to read to you the description of the Moby Project, and I want you to guess what it is that it does.

Uh, fun. Okay. So the Moby Project is a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement and help the ecosystem take containers mainstream. Okay. No, I wouldn't have a guess, but that's their description. All right, I'll read a little more.

It provides a library of components, a framework for assembling them into custom container-based systems, and a place for all container enthusiasts to experiment and exchange ideas. Is it a store or something? I know, or a form. It could be like a discussion form, right? All right, well, I got a little more for you. I mean, you know, we just got to go through this corporate ease. Maybe we can figure it out if we just read a little more.

It turns out that Docker has been innovating in open source. As a company, Docker uses open source as their innovation lab, they say. And last year, our customers started to ask for Docker on many platforms beyond Linux, Mac, Windows, and Desktop, and Windows servers and cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Googs. We created a dozen Docker

editions specialized for these platforms. In order to be able to build and ship these specialized editions in a relatively short time, with small teams in a scalable way without having to reinvent components, but also assemble components and borrow an idea from the car industry where assemblies of components and reuse to build completely different cars. Okay. Oh, see, I know exactly what this is now. So, okay. So we've read, we've read, we've read quite a bit. In fact, we've read through the entire description of what this is now. That is the extent of what

it is. Then they then later reiterate that as's a library, a framework, and a reference assembly. I can't, can you, I mean, it took Wes and I, it took Wes and I five minutes in chat to parse what the hell any of this means. And I bring this up just simply because I find this astonishing, that first of all, a company, well, actually, I think it plays a larger role here. I think I figured out what my problem with Docker is. My problem with Docker is they're shipping – they're basically taking advantage of a feature that comes built into the operating system. And so because that's such a commoditized product, they have to commoditize the ecosystem.

They have to monetize the ecosystem. And so Docker has to come up with a way to be relevant when you can mix and match your environment. In fact, in here in this blog post, they talk about containers have been massively adopted. But in a lot of cases, customers are building their own unique individualized component stacks for their particular industry like manufacturing or healthcare or web hosting. And that translates to Docker not being in the game. The problem is that people – because you can just use built-in components in the operating system, you don't really have to use Docker if you just need something specific – if you don't need to share with the wider Docker ecosystem, right?

Yeah. So they had to come up with a way to solve this problem because the issue is – How do we get it there? The issue is they're selling water to a community that has a town well. And so they have to either sell the cups or the buckets. And so they've come up with a way to sell more buckets in a sense, right? I mean, so what is Moby, Wes? Help me understand. Moby is like a toolkit for making something like Docker. So it's frameworks, libraries, tools to help you take various pieces of what you might need for like a full containerized application, maybe even distributed, right?

So like schedulers, loggers, storage appliances or abstractions, networking configurations, all of those things, right? You can get with different pieces. Sure, right now it uses all the default Docker things, right? So container D is their default runtime. Right now it uses all the default Docker things, right? So container D is their default runtime. But in theory, they're trying to make it so you can then easily and with tools to help distribute them, package them, slot these pieces in and out. So you could use Rocket or LXT maybe instead of Docker as the runtime, but you could still use the Docker. Yeah, or maybe even something as minimal as like run C or other things.

Yeah. I don't know. I've not played with it. They do have a GitHub page up. It actually looks like Docker is moving all of their open source things under the Mobi project now. So here's what I found interesting about the story is essentially what happened at Docker is they had to come up with a way to create Docker for Windows and for the Mac and all these other web cloud platforms. And I have wondered like how the hell are they building all these additions and not being crushed by the weight of maintaining all these different web cloud platforms. And I have wondered, like, how the hell are they building all these additions and not being crushed by the weight of maintaining all these different versions of Docker?

Because the whole idea seems like it's just insane from a maintenance standpoint. Especially if it's like the same, you know, it started as this very like Linux specific thing. Yeah, yes. So what they did is they took the tool that they created to do all that work and they're now releasing it open source and calling it Mobi. And that's what this really is. This is what let them build this mix and match pieces. So on Windows, you can use the Docker runtime,

but use the Windows event log for logs and stuff like that. So anyways, Mobi project, big news everybody, and it probably actually will be a good way for Docker to stay in the game, even when you're not using a Docker stack. Well, I think the thing they're missing is they haven't really convinced me yet because they have to tell me about their

synergy. Right? Yeah, definitely. You should read there and count how many... Wes and I were joking in chat that they had a quota of how many times they had to say open source. They were just throwing open source in there randomly. Yeah. It's super thick. It's almost like they don't want you to understand

what it is they're doing because there's easier, clearer ways to describe that. I think the way we just describe it is more clear and they didn't choose that. And then you have to wonder what's the intent behind that. Why are you choosing to write so thick? That's the best I can describe it. Like, you know, you take a look at the Solus Project. Nice, concise, clear communication both in social and on their official blog posts. And part of that is because, you know,

Josh is a great communicator. That's right. Our friends over at Solus have a new release that I think we'll talk more about next week after I've had a chance to run it, but what's interesting about this release is it's the first official GNOME edition of Solus. And also,

if you recall our conversation with Ike a couple of weeks ago where he talked about Clear Boot and doing bulletproof boot management. Yes, I was very interested in that. This is the first version that ships with that. So the Clear Boot manager is in there now, which means down the road it'll be easy to run different types of kernels, it'll be easy to roll back

if there's a kernel upgrade gone wrong. I thought what was interesting is they've done a few tweaks to the gnome stack. So it's gnome 3, 2, 4, and they've made a few patches to like the EJ – where is it? Oh, here it is. They made a few patches to resolve items not appearing in the GNOME menu. They've tweaked a few options in Nautilus, a few things for SDL games. Pretty minimal stuff. Pretty minimal stuff for their – so it's a pretty –

oh, and they even turned on a couple of extensions, like a dash to dock and a couple other things. But otherwise, they're pretty straightforward. Gnome implementation. And now they also have the Mate edition as well. Three flavors now of Solus. Those are all tasty. So if I want to play with the Clear Boot Manager, which flavor should I pick?

I want to ask Ike if Solus Gnome Edition is a hedge against his whole switching budgie to QT blowing up. Ooh, yeah, that's a good question. Is he like, or is there, I mean, which is a fine motivation, is that why you're including it because you want to give the people who are going to cry wolf over

the changes, you want to give them a place to go? Gnome is just everywhere now. Yeah, it is everywhere. It's just everywhere. It's like overnight. 2017 is the year of GNOME. It's what the entire internet is talking about right now. I feel bad for my Plasma Desktop friends

because I'm over here running Plasma Desktop and I feel like I'm a loner now. We need to talk about the Church of Neon. There yes are you feeling this at all heavily yeah i mean i'm yeah i've had i've actually been on uh in conversations with many people who were all the time they were like they would say they would say something about uh gnome beings like it's so great they're switching to gnome like not not really because it means that they're kind of abandoning all of what they were doing, because they even said that they're going to ship basically what Gnome wants.

So, Gnome is not typically known for being receiving and receptive at all to anyone's opinion from any topic, from any place in the world. i would be uh i'd be shocked if

canonical had anything changed in gnome ever so i think that it's going to be basically just gnome with not with a bun too slapped on top of it as like a branding and that's it which i consider that incredibly sad i want to talk about that too Let's go right into the 1704 review right now because I've been running Ubuntu GNOME 1704 and while it's fine, it's very sad in a sense because Rotten, it feels

like there's no character to it. There's no distinctiveness. There's nothing unique about it. It's just GNOME. It's GNOME with Ubuntu branding. Which was great when I needed a refuge from Unity. Which felt very Ubuntu

heavy. But when there's nothing that represents Ubuntu anymore and it's just, they've got to do something. And it's got to be more than a wallpaper. I think that they're probably not going to do much at all. I mean, I don't even think they're going to try to take over extensions at all,

like even try to make a global menu or anything. I think they're just going to accept, you know, just wash their hands of the situation of the customizations and just ship GNOME, which I think would actually be a kind of a travesty because all of the cool innovations that they have done will be just thrown away. Yeah, I completely agree. And it was weird because I didn't expect it.

When I loaded Ubuntu GNOME, I was like, okay, here we go. I'm going to go to the future. I'm going to see what it's like in a future Ubuntu. Oh, my God. It's so sad. It's so – like, and it grows. You could say that 17 1710 will be different. They might do more presentations because they weren't really technically backing them yet.

But I still don't think so. Yeah. Antigros has way more character and unique. And Fedora even. It's just way more character and feel to it. And so does. Why do you pick Ubuntu? You know, is it, you know, once it's known, is it just for their package repository? Why do you pick Ubuntu?

Once it's GNOME, is it just for their package repository? It seems like other... Software compatibility. Right, but then how does the GNOME desktop, how does it market itself there? How does it fit in with that? Well, now GNOME can be the... It's the same thing as what it was seven years ago when it was just 2010, 1004, whatever, where it was basically GNOME but with like skinning. Okay. So I don't want to go too far down this path because I think this could be a separate discussion.

But I disagree now because GNOME with GTK since 3.20 and with Flatpaks and the Software Center and all of this work they've been doing with Builder, it's more now of an application target, like come write a GTK application for the GNOME platform. It's much more of that now than it was back when Canonical was originally shipping a GNOME desktop. I just wanted to – before we move on because Ike just joined us and so I want to talk about the Solus GNOME Edition 2 while we're talking about GNOME. But Popey – remember when Popey used to come on the show? That was great. I love that. I miss those guys. I miss to come on the show? That was great. I love that. I miss those guys. I miss those guys.

Yeah, they're great. I would like to go. I'd love to go visit Popey. Yeah. I would love that. That would be a lot of fun. Love that. But he did a really great blog post about how he configured GNOME on his 16.04 desktop.

So if you want to stick with the LTS, to look more familiar. So if you want to stick with the LTS to look more familiar. Yeah. Just want to just speaking of the plasma thing, I made a video explaining how you could make plasma look like unity and function like unity with the global menus, merging title bars, all that good stuff like the system menu and all kinds of stuff. And I think that if,

if, if it wasn't even remotely possible for the canonical to even consider it, that plasma would be a fantastic foundation for Unity. And I don't mean like they should switch to Plasma. I think they should switch to Plasma for a foundation to continue the focus of Unity. Yeah, but I always thought that should have been the case when they were going to use Qt to begin with. Maybe Ike can tell us why he's not doing that. But before we get there, before we get there, I also just wanted to say in the land of 1704 releases and all of the associated Ubuntu additions. Our friend Wimpy has really blown the doors off with Matei 1704. And I'd say that even if he didn't come on this show.

This is this. I said it on last and it's true. This goes back to the era where there was a time where the dot 10 releases were so damn good that you were willing to throw out the LTS and upgrade. I remember that. That's what this is. This – he's had work with – iKey has gone into this, work from Daniel from Elementary OS has gone into this. But a lot of folks have put a lot of hard work in this and I think it's just a killer – I don't know where my – oh, there it goes. I think it's just a killer. I don't know where my... Oh, there it goes. I think it's just a killer release.

And in fact, there's even a credit for Producer Michael in here. What did you do, Producer Michael? I helped with the graphic stuff for icons and high DPI support, stuff like that. Yeah, and we got the brisk menu

in this one that Ike helped with. It's got a really nice theme, but the other thing that I thought was just a standout feature that just makes deploying Mate desktops really nice is the software boutique now, by default, does queued installations, so you can queue up a bunch of stuff. I like that. You combine it with the fact that you've got a genuine GTK3 desktop using the traditional desktop paradigm. There's more options now for like pre-configured desktops

that are really great. Yeah, I like those. And the theme is, it's the, I can't even believe they can make Mate look this good. So it's 17.04, I think out of all of, the Mate edition of 17.04, I think out of all of them is. It's just an easy win, you know? Yeah, it's a real nice win.

If you want Ubuntu, if you're installing it for anyone, you know, it would work for so many people. I wish I could have all of these things on the LTS because I have a couple of computers in the studio that I want to reinstall. And I would love to put – so I have this machine over here that runs my mixer that soon will not be running my mixer anymore. And I'd like to put Linux. I'd like to put Ubuntu Mate. But I want it to look like this. Yes. But I want an LTS.

But you don't want the, yeah, the temp. Damn it, Wimpy. Also, people should definitely, if they install it 7.4, they should make sure that they check the box for the Ubuntu Mate welcome update because it activates a PPA that you can continuously get things, which is really important when applications are removed from the software boutique because of like they're not building for

17.04 and then as soon as they start building for it, it gets added back. That's nice. If you get the latest version, you get that? Yeah, it automatically if you check the box, it'll automatically update Ubuntu Monte Welcome, which also updates software boutique, so every time they make a change, you get it.

I also want to shout out. So for those of you who, like me, are trying out Ubuntu GNOME again for kind of like the first time, trying it out again for the first time. It's, yeah. You may run into a few problems if you just have straight up Chrome or now Firefox. So I have a link in the show notes on getting extensions installed. But cooler than that, you can also sync GNOME extensions between your desktops using Google Chrome, between your GNOME desktops.

Really? Yeah. Tell me more. Yeah, sure. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Yes, you have to have Google Chrome or Chromium, and you have to install the GNOME Shell extension on your desktop

using – there's a little sync feature in there. Once enabled, you can sync your Gnome extensions from, say, your desktop to other machines pretty much automatically. Now, you have to go in and turn the sync feature on on each computer. Right. But once you do that – Hey. Yeah. And you don't have to have straight up like binary from Google Chrome.

You can just get Chromium from the repo if you want. Isn't that neat? Yeah, that is awesome. You have to have the corresponding GNOME Shell extension, Google Chrome Shell. You've got to get that. Actually, I also made an extension for

basically every browser. It gives you access to download the zip files for each extension, so you can just store them if you want. Oh, good idea. Yeah, that's nice. You need the tweak tool, the GNOME tweak tool, but you just get the zip file and just install it from there and there you go.

Let's mention DigitalOcean and then let's talk to Ike. I would like to talk about the GNOME edition and also if Ike feels like he's more on an isolated island with Qt now than ever now that Canonical has gotten cold feet and running away. Running away from their dreams.

DigitalOcean.com, go fulfill your dreams with a server in the cloud on their awesome infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, you could go rack it if you want if you're insane, but DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering an easy and intuitive way for you to get going. Sign up, create an account, and use our promo code DEO1PLO, one plug, one word, and you get a $10 credit. You can use that to spin up a $5 rig. Run it for two months, try it out, put a project on there, a blog. Maybe you want to try Mastodon. I've seen a couple of guides now that I was looking on the pre-show

for setting them up on DigitalOcean. Or what about Mumble? Yeah. Mumble's another good one. If you want to try out an Elias sync engine, run that on a DigitalOcean. I should probably try that again. Yeah. Yeah. Mumble's another good one. If you want to try out an Elias sync engine, run that on a DigitalOcean. I should probably try that again. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, they got a new version out which uses less syncing. Oh, less. But you can still run a component on your own server if you'd like. I mean, it's seriously easy because – so we were talking about Docker earlier. One of the things that's really nice about DigitalOcean is you can deploy an entire application stack with everything installed for some apps, or you just do the base installation, or the sweet spot is Ubuntu LTS, Docker preloaded, with

the repos from Docker, with the right GPG keys in there, with everything up to date, good to go. Yeah, that's crazy powerful. That's just, you can get trying something in no time. When you use our promo code, DOUnplugged, you can try it out for free. They've got data centers all over the world, and they have the best interface in the business with an API to die for.

An API to die for. I'm trying to make it rhyme, but I need something. An API to cry? Cry for the API? I cry for that API. I'm trying hard, Wes. You really are. Crying for that API over at DigitalOcean.com.

Use the promo code DOUnplugged. Go spin up a Linux rig on their infrastructure. They use KVM for the virtualizer, Linux for the host, 40 gigabyte e-connections into that hypervisor. I know it! And a beautiful control panel to top it all off at DigitalOcean.com. Also, check out their block storage. It's all

SSD-based. It's crazy. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-Unplug. Ike, you're supposed to be in bed. You weren't going to come on the show today because you are supposed to be asleep right now. That was the last I heard of it. You're a maniac. Well, you said things about Solus. It's sort of like –

The bells went off. I turned off. That's amazing. I don't know. That's almost spooky in a sense. So, Ike, first of all, congratulations on the new release. Seems like a big deal. Got Clearboot out the door.

Very excited about that. Yep. Well, let's talk about the GNOME edition because that's the big news, I think. And I say, sir, you're hedging. You say I am hedging. Well, I don't know about that. But it seems like it could be a possibility. No, I mean, we've had GNOME in the repos for ages like you've had gnome shell gdm you know it's been up on the

wiki and now the help center and basically it kind of felt a bit stupid not having an iso for it because we have the infrastructure tool in and all that just to put one out and especially with budgie going towards q in the future having that GNOME stack there and then not using it and then not making an ISO, it kind of feels a bit stupid. And there are going to be people who are diehard GNOME. They want to stay on their stack. So it's like, okay, well, here's an option, and here's GNOME how we think it should be within SOLAS,

you know, like kind of fitting with our sanity. So that's what it mostly comes down to. So Josh is responsible for that ISO, and, and he uses Gnome Shell daily. Well, thank you, Josh, because I think it's going to be the one I'll be loading on my machines for a bit, too. It's fairly sexy. Tell me about the EGL device for EGL streams in Mudder. What the hell is this, and why does it matter? Yeah, I mean, that's certainly not the sexiest news on the segment.

I found it interesting. That's what Ronix picked up on. No, I'm sitting here, and you bum reading right off the blog post here. Yeah, it's basically preliminary support for the NVIDIA proprietary drivers on the modder. Ah, no wonder why Pharonix is covering it. Yeah, that does make sense. Yeah. I like that though.

That actually – I'm excited about that. I'm glad I asked. And then, of course, I have to ask, how is things going with Budgie? And do you kind of feel like you're off on a cute island now? No, not at all. I've got Budgie 10.3.1 out now. We've actually fixed Altab. Yeah, congrats.

Yeah, so basically I kind of knew the way the release schedule was looking this weekend. And I was like, okay, let's be sensible here. I'm not going to get it done because I haven't got it done so far. So I put a bounty up and I basically said on Thursday, I think it was, if anyone can get it done before Sunday evening or is it Saturday evening? Yeah, it was Saturday evening. I'll pay you 500 euros. Wow. Yeah.

I mean, I wanted it done. I didn't have a way for the community to get involved. I love it. That's great. I think it's awesome. And then there was free pull requests in and i basically said the first one that was you know first valid pull request came in would be merged yeah um so we had two active by the end of it and basically they were both making fixes in parallel it's like well it's kind of hard to

see who really came first now i was like okay, there are bugs in each, and this particular one, which is by a member of the community called Tim, kind of ticks the boxes, and it's something I can extend and fix afterwards, which it did. So Budgie 11 has been blocked by the lack of Budgie 10.3 because the idea was we fix these last little regressions and these annoying minor bugs like Alt-Hab, right? It was like the meme of budgie so if we can fix those get those out of the way then it's almost like 10.3 became a bit more like

well i guess our unity 7 really already already i know too soon so that becomes like our kind of lts thing and it buys me time to get Buddy 11 done and done how I want to do it. So, yeah, it's going to be cool. All right. So now I got to go get this installed on a machine. Oh, yeah. OK. Let's just – let's play armchair futurist and let's speculate for a moment.

Let's speculate for a moment. What if, like, what if you wake up one day, you look at some statistics, some metric that you look at, and you say, holy crap, the GNOME edition has become our number one download. People are downloading the GNOME edition above and beyond everything else. Does anything change? Is there a change in plans at all? I mean, not really,

because it's kind of hard to gauge that with an existing user base as well. I mean, I can tell you now basically how they're doing. Let's look at Linux Tracker and the torrents. Hmm. Because, you know, I mean, Ike, think about it. I mean, we are coming in this weird, weird, weird time in Linux land. Yeah, the resurgence of GNOME. It's huge.

And, I mean, it's across, I mean, even Solus now you can get a GNOME edition. And so it's really becoming, it could become this really close to universal desktop. Almost. I mean, the other benefit that also brings in as well is Flatbite. Yeah, exactly. When you think about it, because it's like they go hand in hand. So now we know across every distribution, there's going to be GNOME, there's going to be Flatbite. Right.

Well, that depends on your definition of benefit. Well, yeah. I mean, just loosely skating around that one but uh looking at the download numbers now just for the torrents because i know earlier on between two of the mirrors there've been 800 and 700 downloads until earlier on we released i think like five o'clock this morning or something stupid uh so the mate iso um has had just 241 downloads the gnome one has had 347 downloads. So it's more popular than the MATE one now.

And the Budgie one has had 499. Hmm, the GNOME one's repping pretty well. Of course, people are curious, right? They're taking a look. Oh, it's now 500. Real-time updates. Well, and of course, I don't know how I'll pull it down. I'm debating which one I want, right? I think I've got to do the GNOME one, I think. They are probably, I don't know. I don't know how I'll pull it down. I've debated which one I want right now.

I think I've got to do the gnome one, I think. They are a little bit bigger this time. Like last time, there was 900 makes or so. And, you know, like, it's been four months since we've done a release, so it's been a bit of a while. You know, you're getting a bit rusty doing this kind of stuff. So I started looking through some of the older YouTube reviews and, you know, even listening to some of the old Linux on blog things.

And it's like you start to collect some of the problems. And one of the ones that kept coming up is like, why is there not an Office Suite? I was like, ah. So now they all have an Office Suite in them, which is basically LibreOffice. It's standard, but it's a bit chunky. So we put that in, taken out VLC, and put in GNOME MPV.

Good choice. But the mate one still has vlc because gnome mpv just looks weird there sure like you have to go for traditional yeah so now it's just under 1.2 gigs so we got a little bit fatter i think the choice to know i think the choice to switch to gnome mpv was a good one when i saw that in the release notes i thought i think pretty and enabling dash to dock uh by default i think is a good choice too especially for people that come in from Unity the one I'm most fond of in terms of the extension there

is the tray icons plus that he's put in there what was that dude? well normally you get the tray icons come out on the little legacy tray on the bottom left of the screen and just pokes out like a little freakish antenna I never liked it and now they're all up in the tray so it's the top icons extension

yeah I think it's like top icons extension kind of. Yeah, I think it's like top icons plus or something. Yeah, top icons by legacy tray. I see. Yeah, that is, that little tab just never quite, I just actually literally just accidentally activated it. What is this? While we're talking, I accidentally just triggered it.

Go away, go away. And it shows up on screen all the time. Yes, it does. So we also have brisk menu now in the mate edition 0.3.5 i think we're on now uh basically the same version as ubuntu mate like we're going parallel on there that's great and they've got a lot of theming in which i'm jealous of martin got the theming sorted out so it's it's even better integrated into ubuntu mate's theming now so it looks really nice over there.

Which also brings in with Mate 1.18, also brings in lib input, which is nice. Yeah, there was a bit of a bug in the last release we did back in January, where unfortunately the lib input driver got dragged in on one of the updates, which isn't fatal, but it stopped some of the configurations from being configurable. But then as soon as we put Mate 1.18 through, it's just like, well, now it has libinput support.

So that fixed that out. Which means they're all using libinput now across all of the ISOs. I couldn't help but notice, too, there's several things in here that seem to be, well, overall improvements to NVMe drives, but also sort of a secondary effect is a couple of things in here ended up making

MacBook support a little better, including better backlight support, it looks like, and support for the 2016 SSD. Yeah, I was looking at the 2013, 2014, and 2016 ranges of MacBooks and enabling support for them. So we've got initial support for the new MacBook Pro from this year, 2016. There's going to be some device drivers still missing, basically,

until we backport more from 4.11. But we do have initial support for their NVMe drives, which was the one that was up in the news last year. You couldn't use Linux on that at all. So backported that while it can. We've got the NVMe power saving patches backcorded from 4.11 as well. So they'll save like two to four watts or something overall.

So it's a slightly lower power consumption. We've also changed the, basically the way that we do the CPU governor now. It used to be back a while back. We would, well, about a year back, we were always using the performance governor. Then we changed it to on-demand or power save depending on whether you was using intel p state or cpu free now we

boot up all the time in performance and once we got to the multi-user target you know using the dreaded systemd which everybody hates but it was really useful here so i like it for this yeah we'll then change if you're using intel p state then you'll go down into power save if anything else then you know you'll go down into so you end up with maximum performance for boot up and then once the system's loaded exactly so you boot up as quick as you can and then save the battery afterwards it's disabled under virtualization so it'll just stay in performance mode which is kind of logical because then it's controlled by the system outside the hypervisor anyway that is really nice good that's a good good that's a good way to do it so you're telling me that if i blow up the

arch install on my 2013 macbook uh when you get known 3.24 yeah you're telling me like well you're telling me it's possible to put uh that solace might work pretty good on that 2013 hardware yeah i mean i'd love to get some feedback, and if it's not, then, you know, we can just start doing more rapid snapshots. Interesting. I mean, I can't get myself one anyway. I would love to, but I can't really go out and justify

that kind of money on one. Yeah. So the more feedback they get in it, you know, the more I can fix, really. Yeah. Yeah, if they made it with 32 gigs of RAM, I would almost consider falling on that sword just so I could also have a faster Final Cut machine. But it's just you can't.

You just can't justify it. You can't justify it. Yeah. It's a bit of money. My machine would literally have to die before I could justify it. The battery is not as great as it used to be. It's still OK. And the speakers are – they're all right.

It's just too useful. It's just like, damn it. Why won't this stupid thing die? And then the problem is, but then I would still have a mourning period if I had to buy a MacBook. I would mourn that purchase. We'd have to talk about it. A big buyer's remorse. The only way I'd feel better is if I could somehow improve a distribution support.

So I'd do it. I would do it. Well, Ike, I'm pretty excited about the release just for myself personally because I love the GNOME edition. I know it was in the repos, but you know what I always do is I would install the Budgie edition and then I would go, yeah, I'm good. Yeah. Now you have something that's actually set up to be sane out of the box.

There's no fiddling. And obviously you've got the normal stuff installed, so you've got like the Chrome GNOME shell extension stuff, GNOME tweak tool, that kind of stuff. Nice. Oh, we were just talking about that. Cool. there are a couple of updates coming through in the next day or two um i basically wanted to speed up the boot even more because apparently i have something wrong with me i can't stop yeah i don't just can't stop it and i was like oh i spotted an opportunity

so you don't quite get a silent boot at the moment and part of that is regressing the boot time so i fixed that today so it's an absolutely silent boot like i don't want to splash in there because then you're adding like 30 to 40 meg to every upload because you're including plenif and then you're adding like five six seven seconds the boot was like let's just make it silent instead so i managed to do that so until x starts you'll see nothing but black screen it's lush and that in itself on my system so i'm already booting in about 1.7 seconds on this broadway today i've managed to shave in over 450 milliseconds off of that so if that's my ss SSD booting in that time on my Broadwell Nokia,

you can imagine how something like Skull Canyon is going to go. Yeah. Or even people with older systems because then it grows exponentially. Sure. So those updates we come through, we now pre-link all of the binaries in the unit RAMFS and strip them so that they actually start up quicker. Wow.

Because they haven't got to work with a linker to find anything. We've now got AMD early boot code support now as well, so that'll hot patch the microcode onto the CPU when it's starting up. So we've got all of that sexiness to come from in a couple of days, and that'll be 4.9.23, which I've got packaged today. That's awesome. I mean, he doesn't fall asleep at the keyboard because he's staying up. Yeah, and it're just like, why

does the commit message just say ZZZ? Well, congrats. So the snapshot for 2017.04.18.0 is out. I'm going to go download it. Yeah, yeah. I like also the nice clear snapshot notes by Josh. It's nice to

read through all of that. Did you see the changelog at through all of that. Type-free. Yeah. Did you see the changelog at the end of it? Yeah, actually. You know what I was thinking when I saw that? That one's machine-generated. Yeah.

We'll be honest. But it's been a long time since I've seen that, really. That doesn't happen as much anymore. There's a few projects that still do it, but... Yeah, I mean, we do that for the primary one, and then when we looked at it, it was like, Jesus Christ, that's obscene. We've got to include it now. I love that.

That must be. We've definitely got to put that in there. That's basically four months, but that's only showing what's changed on the budget I saw. Oh, really? Yeah. That's quite the list so that's not like the the repos themselves which have now grown to such a point that well you can imagine when we started out with solos like certain scripts and systems that we used everything just worked and we've got this script that monitors the

packages coming into the repo and that's been fine for a long time but we started to get to a point where we'll keep freeback versions and in between those you have the deltas which is fine if you follow that bit so far then when i actually counted the packages the other day in the repos there's like 75 000 eo package files flown across the repo and the script that monitors them has to index the repo every single time. Oh, boy. So it's going through 75,000 files just to add one new one each time. I was like, right, this might have been a design flaw. So that made our release 104 minutes late the other day.

We started off with a different version number. It was the 17th. And then because the script took so long, we was pushed back to the 18th. I'd already put up the Twitter post as well with the version of it. That is funny. That's a good story.

Yeah, the behind the scenes secrets right there. Well, Ike, thank you very much there for coming on. I'm glad we're able to make it work and we'll have a link to the release notes in the show notes if you guys want to download and check out Ike and the team's fine, fine work. I also have a link to the release notes in the show notes if you guys want to download. And check out IKI and the team's fine, fine work. I also have a link to

the 17.04 releases in the show notes. There's just so much good stuff to try. Also, go check out more of IKI on Late Night Linux. That's a great podcast. They just had an episode come out a couple of, or yesterday, I think. So go check all that out. Mr. Wes, where can people find you on the Twitters?

At Wes Payne. And also on the TechSnap program. That's right. Just stay tuned. I'm at ChrisLAS. The network's at JupyterSignal. Find us live at JupyterBroadcasting.com slash calendar. We'll be back here next Tuesday. Thank you. I secretly use Arch Linux. Oh, probably stop by. That was good. I'm glad he was able to pop in there for a second. That's Puppysawby, that was good. I'm glad he was able to pop in there for a second. That's nice.

Mr. Buzz. I think you should take the Solus challenge, Wes. Yeah. I think you should do it. All right, it's happening. I think this machine too right here possibly could be good for Solus. Yes. You know, now that I'm not going to be doing LAS,

I don't have to install a whole bunch of apps for the pics all the time. That actually changes a fair bit, yeah. It's changing a lot of things for me, actually. I'm realizing all the little things in life that will be different for me. Yeah. So, yeah. All right, jbtitles.com, guys, jbtitles.com. Did you guys see the new Google Earth came out today?

No, really? Yeah, check this thing out. This is, like, serious, like, 3D rendering happening. So, like, yeah, look. This is, yeah. Using WebGL, we're going to zoom in here to the Eiffel Tower, and look, they 3D render everything now. Wow. Yeah.

That is actually kind of neat. Looks pretty neat. And then they have this feature now where you can randomly go to cool places. Like you can roll the dice. Why fly when you can do this? Yeah. So like let's go over here to like a vroom. Over to you can roll the dice. Why fly when you can do this cool stuff? Yeah, so, like, let's go over here to, like, over to Hawaii.

Look at that. Zoom right in. It's actually... That's pretty cool. You see how it renders the mountains all cool-like and whatnot? Like, it really puts some work into this damn thing. JBtitles.com.

JBtitles.com. Oh, sorry. Hello, Momaroo. Hi, I missed you. Thanks for being here, guys. All y'all.com. Oh, sorry. Hello, Momaroo. Hi, I missed you. Thanks for being here, guys. All y'all. Yes. Very much so.

Look at that. How cool is that, Wes? Wow. All right. We'll have to play with that later. Yeah. It's smooth, too. Yeah.

Well, it's not on all my computers, but on the ones with the higher-end video, dedicated graphics, it seems to be working pretty well. Now we're going to go to Lake Superior, one of the large Great Lakes in North America. Look at that. That is big. So that's the view. And then when you zoom in, you can go to 3D mode here. So if you tap 3D mode, it starts

to render everything out. Oh, wow. Some are better than others. Yeah. Look at Google Go. Look at them go. Oh, you can better than others. Look at Google Go. Look at them go. If you think about it, Big Bend National Park here.

Look at Big Bend. We're going all around the world, Wes. All around the world, Wes. You do podcasting, you get to travel the world. Look at that. Cool. JBtitles.com. Let's pick a title. Is there anything in the mobile room that we wanted to pick up that didn't get covered in the show?

Anybody want to open the floor for a couple more minutes before we go? Ubuntu's Bear Gnome, that's not bad. The Giant Gnome rolling in the Linux. The Chaos of Disunity, Gnome Hunter. Gnawing on Gnome, Year of Gnome. Docker's Whale of Disunity. Gnome Hunter. Nine on Gnome. Year of Gnome. Docker's Whale of a Tail. Oh, WW, you're so funny. I like it.

I see what you did there, WWs. I see what you did there. Tee hee hee. Tee hee hee. Tee hee hee. We love you. Tee hee hee hee. Tee hee hee.

Oh, my God. oh my god amazing oh my god that's fantastic all right and you guys you should send me that so i can play it without so i can play it with high fidelity over here because that's good. Yeah, that's probably not good through my mic. Is it online? Can you link to it? I'll play it over here.

That's funny. I don't have the files right now, but I can get it. Let's see. Fairly sexy. I had it on my phone. A quote from Ike. You'll probably get copyrighted. Yeah, right.

I know. Ubuntu's bare gnome is up there by Kawasaki. Oh, I'm hungry all of a sudden. Didn't I have lunch? I did have lunch. What the hell's up with that? The Giant Gnome. You've been podcasted, man.

Yeah, I worked up an appetite. Woo! Alexa. Appetite for a nap. Turn on JB1. Get those lights going for you. Okay. Get those lights going for you.

That was really well done. Now that's really stuck in my head. What do you think of Ubuntu's bare gnome? It's not bad. Yeah? You don't love it? Yeah? I don't know how I feel about it.

I don't hate it. I mean it. I don't hate it. I mean, the people seem to like it. Gnomeo, gnomeo. I thought, you know, as far as echo commands go, I think that echo one's safe because probably nobody else has any devices called JB1. Yes, that seems pretty easy. Are we going to have to get to the point where all your commands are random strings?

These are. I call these Shatner's hair lights just because there's so many lights in here that Alexa starts to get confused and mixes. Cancel. Stop. Shut up. There we go. She wants to be with you. She gets confused because they all have light in the name.

So you've got to come up with these totally diverse names. So I got flow lights and I got hair lights and ambient lights and accent lights. Yeah. So you should just like – have you tried Alexa, what is a Whopper? I know actually. I haven't tried that. Alexa, what is a Whopper? The Whopper is the signature hamburger sold by the international fast food restaurant Chain Burger King and its Australian franchise, Hungry Jack's.

I didn't know that. I didn't know they had a Hungry Jack's subsidiary. I didn't know that. It's really cheap. I mean, Hungry Jack is not nearly as – I'd rather be the Burger King personally. Okay, Google. I'm amazed at the Burger King personally. Okay, Google. Yeah, that Okay, Google thing.

I'm amazed at how well that works. My phone was completely across the room and that TV was able to trigger my phone. That was – because actually – so Google says they put out a command to stop it. But what it really does is it still recognizes the trigger word and it still bleeps at you and then it just immediately cancels. But it still triggers your phone and wakes it up interesting so it's still annoying yeah you know it's you know it's actually kind of genius and like the mad genius way of trolling where bugger king was like we know yes it was going to break yes that was the man that was that was next level marketing actually and i don't think it was a flop at all i think it was actually brilliant and here we are like

a week two weeks later still talking about it. That's even better because they knew that Google was going to break it. And then like they did the same type of thing on TV marketing, TV commercials. And it was a different phrase so that when Google broke the previous phrase, the next one would still work.