LINUX Unplugged - Episode 198: Magic Device Cloud | LUP 198

Episode Date: May 24, 2017

NextCloud 12 is out & Jos joins us to chat about the highlights, Marius Quabeck joins us to discuss Magic Device Tool’s secrets. Plus we cover a bunch of project updates & more!

The case for open source in all of the things researchers have found the code in Volkswagens that was used to cheat emissions tests. And it's pretty sophisticated stuff. They would monitor all kinds of conditions like the position of the tire, how fast the engine was having, how hard the engine was having to work to move the tires, how fast they would spin. And it was all tucked away under something very innocuous, just something really simple called acoustic condition. Yeah, a little specific piece of code that was just labeled acoustic condition, which was a way to originally started as just a way to control the sounds that the engine makes, but it later became a euphemism for conditions occurring during the emissions

test. And the code allowed for as many 10 different profiles, as many as 10 different profiles for different potential tests. When the computer would determine the car was undergoing a test, it activated the emissions curbing system, which reduced the amount of nitrogen oxide that was emitted. I found that kind of interesting because there was, it turns out, also a less sophisticated version that Fiat was implementing. And this one didn't have to worry about the position of the tire or how hard it was to

spin the wheel. The car's onboard computer just simply turned on emission curbing software for the first 26 minutes and 40 seconds of the engine start. Nice. Yeah. So every time you started your engine, it just ran a little worse for the first 26 minutes and 40 seconds. If you were driving somewhere far, then, you know.

Yeah. And then that would cover most emissions tests by that point. Most of them don't run longer than that, and so you're out. Researchers noted that for both Volkswagen and for Fiat, the vehicle's engine control unit is manufactured by an automotive component giant, Robert Bosch. Oh, of course. Yeah, or Bosch. And car manufacturers are then, under their own choice, they can then enable the code

by entering certain parameters into the emissions control unit. This is why we need open source for all of the things. Because, you know, our buddy Chase got bit by this directly. Did he? Yeah. I didn't realize that. Oh, yeah, yeah. He had to give back his Volkswagen diesel, and he's now driving a Ford.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 198, for May 23rd, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that might just be planning a barbecue for its birthday. My name is Chris. My name is Wes, and I'm hungry for burgers. Hello, Wes. Oh, I know. I know. Actually, you're the one that dropped the word ribs. Just saying. You might have to own that one, Wes. You might have to own those barbecue ribs. Coming up, though, on this week's episode, we're not there yet. We're not yet to episode 200. No, we're going to talk about some of our favorite

open-source projects, one that I bet you have been looking for. If you've ever considered getting a Chromecast and want to integrate it with your Linux box, we'll talk about that, which I am particularly excited about because I have a Chromecast sitting around, needing to get a little more useful. If you want to update some Logitech hardware

under Linux, which I do, we have some good news for you. Big updates from Solus. A new version of NextCloud is in the house, and Joss will be here to talk about it with us. And then the Magic Device Tool. I mentioned it a little bit last week. It promises to make my Nexus 5 usable.

We'll talk with Marius, the gentleman who created the Magic Device Tool. a simple and feature-rich tool to install or replace operating systems on a lot of common phones. It's really slick. And then also, we'll tell you a little bit about our barbecue plans, a little bit of news that's going on, and of course, all of the wonderful discussions. But one of the things I need to do right off the top, because I neglected to do it last

week, right now, prepare yourselves. We're going to bring in that mumble room. Time appropriate greetings, mumble room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Dear friends. Hey, you know what? That intro right there, that whole show, powered by the new open source caster soundboard. How great was that?

Hey, you know what? That ding right there, also powered by the open source soundboard. 100% digital ding. It is so awesome. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should go to github.com slash jupyterbroadcasting and check out Caster Soundboard. Now with new art graphics, like look at that icon right there. You see that duck? Yeah.

Look at that cute little duck. Albert made us that. That's the system-wide ducking. You hit that and it ducks all the audio. Awesome. Brings it down to 33%. Such a cool piece of software, a legitimately competitive piece of software that was created by our community. And it's just so awesome.

And it's come so far so fast. Yeah. And we're using it in production now on all the shows. It's pretty neat. And you guys can go check it out if you want. We'll talk about it. We've got a bunch of stuff to talk about today. That's not really it,

but why don't we talk about something else that's up on GitHub? MK, so Mick, maybe? Chromecast. MK Chromecast, which allows Mac and Linux machines to send audio and video to Google Cast devices

and also Sonos devices, which is not particularly appealing to me, but I bet is to some people. You can find more at mkchromecast.com. And it's a program that lets you cast your audio or your Linux audio, whichever, you know, it's Mac or Linux. I don't think it works on Windows.

And it can also send video files. Nice. Super nice, over the LAN. If you've ever had like, in fact, it was like a, it must have been like Christmas or Thanksgiving or Halloween, some recent major holiday event. We had all these videos on my computer, and I wanted to play it for the family on the television. And I ended up, like, installing all these crazy Chrome extensions to try to make it work, and they were super rickety. You have to pay a bunch.

Yeah, yeah. This is just using FFmpeg and they were super rickety. You have to pay a bunch. Yeah, yeah. This is just using FFmpeg and AVConf on the back end. I think it's spinning up a Node.js instance, and then it's using some MP3 codec encoding to send it to this thing. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter because it's allowing you to stream high-end audio. You can do 24-bit, 96 kilohertz, high-resolution audio using this thing.

And the other thing that's really nice about it is it integrates in on either the macOS menu bar or if you're on GNOME or the Plasma desktop, it can also integrate with the desktop there too. So you get a little Chromecast icon. Look at that. That is slick. Yeah.

How fantastic would this be, right? Now, Sweet Lou, you were going to mention CastNow. Yeah, I'm assuming that this MK Chromecast program works similar to how CastNow works. I've ran CastNow a couple of times before, and it did the job in that, mostly during times when I was having issues with something like YouTube or something. I think one thing CastNow can do that this can't, but I'm not positive,

is I think CastNow supports torrents directly. But CastNow is command line only, whereas this integrates with the menu bar on your desktop, which some people would prefer. And it looks like CastNow isn't super... I mean, there are some people making commits to it. But on the readme there, it talks about how the guy's kind of moved on. He's using DLNA. So I know I'd use Cast now in the past too.

So it's interesting to see another contender. Yeah. Because kind of like Sweetly says, I know I've run into times where certain content providers are like, why are you not working? I could just download the file, play it on the TV. So, hey, there you go. Well, and there is some legitimate use for Chromecast, like, in the workspace, too. So if you could throw a Chromecast on a television in a conference room and now you can send stuff to it from your Linux box, yeah, it could be some money. It could be some money.

So it's MKChromecast. It's only $100. So you just go there. You give them your username. If you don't have an account, create one. Give them your shipping address. Make sure you have a U.S. credit card. They only take U.S. credit card. Yeah, maybe you don't have an account, create one. Give them your shipping address. Make sure you have a U.S. credit card. They only take U.S. credit card.

Yeah, maybe your social. And then it's only $100. I'm sorry, what? Oh, this is not the Mac Action Show. Okay. Oh, it's free on GitHub. Okay. I'm sorry.

It uses something called the open source, and it's free. It's totally free, 100%. Who knew? Can we trust that? Who knew? I wouldn't. But you know what? I guess if you want to take your own risk.

You come back next week with a paid version and maybe we'll talk. I'm just telling you, man. I'm just telling you. It's for people who like to mess with computers. That is not us. So I like to mess with my hardware peripherals. I have a bunch of, right now in front of me,

I have a bunch of Logitech hardware. And one of the things that's great about Logitech is they have these unifying receivers. You put one USB, little itty-bitty USB receiver, and you can have your mouse and your keyboard using one receiver. Well, guess what? There is a vulnerability, in fact, a whole suite of vulnerabilities. And when you put them all together, it even has a great name called MouseJack. It uses a whole bunch of different stuff, vulnerabilities that are targeted, the low-level wireless protocol that's used by the unifying devices. They

can do things like pair new devices without prompting the user. They can inject keystrokes. Uh-oh. They can inject raw HID commands with about $15 of hardware. You could be 50 meters away in doing this. So that typical imagine sitting in a cafe scenario is, of course, it's very scary. I mean, I have a little mouse I take with me everywhere. Yeah, me too. I'm all about these Logitech MX Anywheres are the best little laptop meese on the market.

And so I have these unifying receivers everywhere. And so Logitech, Bastille Security worked with them and Logitech acknowledged they had a problem. And it took them a couple of releases. But after a couple of releases, they have some updates that fix it. It took them a few weeks, but they got it. They fixed it. The issue is solved unless you're running Linux. So they call up Logitech and they're like, okay, here's what we're thinking about doing.

The cat's out of the bag on this whole mouse jack thing. So we now know how we can randomly flash firmware onto your proprietary hardware. If you gave us a little bit of official documentation, I bet you we could flash that secure firmware onto these receivers using FW Upload, which is a standard Linux utility. It took a couple of weeks, and they rewrote the previously reverse-engineered plugin for FW Upload. The new documentation from Logitech came in so they knew exactly how everything was supposed to match up, byte by byte. They compared it with the Windows Update version and they were able to push this new firmware. You could

actually test it too right now. If you'd like to test it, you need to get the new version of FW upload because you have to be able to talk to the hardware. So you need version 0.9.2-2 which is in Fedora 26 right now. And you can get it from Koji or for Fedora. If you scroll

just down a little bit there, doesn't it sure look nice in that GNOME software? Yeah. You just have that little update. This is the idea, right? Is they can then use this down the road via GNOME software update to update firmware like this. That's brilliant I think. And it shows you like how everything, you got to be thinking about

the update lifecycle on everything now. We're so used to talking about, we're about to talk about an update to NextCloud. We're used to talking about an update to our GNOME desktop. But there's even, like, bootloader code on these little receivers that the documentation... Turtles all the way down. And the turtles run horrible

ancient software. Yes, very well put. It is turtles all the way down that's why we always are looking for a little refreshing cup of tea um or maybe a nice relaxing bowl of soup but we got a little plasma in the soup this time oh yeah so ikea has a uh a rare blog post over at the sola site and it And it looks like, ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for the shocker of a lifetime. But it's early days, but the Plasma desktop is coming to Solus.

And I actually think this is a great combination. That's why I wanted to put it in here, because I think Solus is a great distribution. And I think this could be one of the great plasma distributions if they work on it so right now it's not officially supported but but somebody they have peter he's working in the project he's been he's been maintaining plasma packages and kd dependencies for a while because it turns out things like katie and live carita k3b pretty popular amongst solace users so they're already packing in all of the dependencies for that

anyways, and they're packaging. So it wasn't that much further to just... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the way Ikey writes this is he says Peter's ambition is to eventually support a full Plasma stack on Solus, and if you want to help him get there, you can help him evolve it so you can get involved,

work with Peter, help Peter report bugs, things like that. So do you think this would be something that you're interested in? Are you doing it over here now? Is this Solus here? No, I just wanted you to... Yeah, okay. Maybe.

I would consider it. I would definitely kick the tires. And Ike here has laid out two, who's now working on the different desktops Josh is working on Gnome Shell Ike's working on Budgie Peter on KDE Plasma Justin on Mate how the projects you know what they're each kind of focusing on yeah good for them good for them I'm pretty

jazzed about it I'm excited to see where they take Budgie I think it's great to have another distribution where Plasma could eventually become a tier one citizen patreon.com slash solace if you want to help them. I think this would be a great way, even if you're not running Solace, but you like what they're doing.

And I just, I really like the idea that there's a project out there that's making a really modern distro and they're not being religious about what desktop you have to use. And they're playing well with others too. Patreon.com slash solace. And keep up the great work, guys.

I'll probably be checking it out. I'll probably check it out. I bet you will. So NextCloud 12 is out and Joss is here to chat with us about it. So before we go there, before we get any further, let's take a moment

and thank our first sponsor this week, Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, a platform where you can learn more about Linux and all of the technology around Linux. I think this is a resource that if you would have told Chris from 10 years ago existed, he would have been delighted. When I first started working with Linux, I actually just went and got a bunch of books. And then I tried to find community college courses, and it was always hit and miss on how good the instructor was going to be. And I would

try to figure out what courseware would be the best investment of my time. And there was really no oversight or way to figure it all out, especially for somebody who's busy and had a lot going on. Linux Academy checks all those boxes and more. So it's built by people that are incredibly passionate about Linux. They have full-time instructors available when you need them. They're continually investing in content. Excuse me. They're continually investing in content to make Linux Academy more valuable. They have hands-on labs and exercises. They have in-depth cert training if that's the route you want to go.

You get unlimited access to the courses. They spin up the servers on demand when you need them. They're even doing deep dives into things like AWS and Azure and all that kind of stuff. Man, it is a new world and Linux Academy is going to help you meet it head on. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You go there, you sign up for a free seven-day trial,

try them all out, get a little idea of how it works, wrap your head around it a bit, enjoy. And if you have any questions, take advantage of that instructor mentoring. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Sign up for a free 7-day trial and support the show. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

See, I think at that point, you'd have to work hard to not learn something. Ah, man. You would really have to not want to learn, which would sort of defeat the purpose. Why are you doing that? So, Joss joins us again. Hey, Joss, welcome back to the show, sir.

Good to have you. Hey, guys. Nice to be here again. Thanks for inviting me. Now we have a new NextCloud on our hands, and it looks like it's going global scale this time. Congrats. Yeah, you like that, huh? I do.

I do. I do like that. There's also a couple other features in there that are actually more applicable directly to me, like writable public links, improvements to the audio-video chat. But, Joss, you're the expert. Where do you think we should start on the new release? Well, let's start, indeed, about the smaller features.

Well, I mean, next to global scale, everything looks small. That's kind of the point of it. But, yeah, I think the collaboration feature that you mentioned, like that you can send a public link to someone with like a Collabora file, you know, a docx or something. And then they can add it together with you. They don't need an account. That's really nice. Very nice. So it's essentially a very easy drop-in replacement for Google Docs because the end user you're just sending a link to, they just click it and they're in.

They don't have to worry about what the software is. Yeah, absolutely. Our Office 365, I mean, that's kind of inefficiently what we're going after. I mean, a lot of the other features, you see the same thing. I mean, obviously on top of that, you have all the control things, you know, that you can say, okay, file access control, you can limit access to files from certain IP ranges or certain file types. You can say like, yeah, people in the HR department, when they share an Excel sheet via public link, that is not accessible from outside of the company internal network, stuff like that.

So you can put these policies on top of it, which you can't really do with most of the other solutions because they're not self-hosted. They're not built to give you that kind of control as an administrator. Sure. And what are the, when you say the big changes for

the global scale, what does that really translate to? What are the real technical changes happening behind the scenes? Yeah, so global scale, what does that really translate to? What are the real technical changes happening behind the scenes? Yeah, so global scale, let me introduce it quickly for those who haven't seen it or seen our video. So the idea behind global scale is to transform the architecture of Nextcloud. So Nextcloud, when Frank started this seven, eight years ago, it started as a standard web app. So in a web application, you can scale by just throwing more hardware at it, at least to a certain degree. So with Nextcloud, you have an application server, Nextcloud itself, and then you have

database and storage and a user directory like LDAP, and you connect it to those three. And Nextcloud itself scales almost without limits. If you want twice as many users, you just put down two Nextcloud servers. But the thing is, they both need to connect to the same database and the same storage and the same user directory. So at a certain scale, and I mean, you're talking about 10, 20, 30,000 users is all quite doable. But if you get above 50,000, you really need to buy very expensive enterprise storage, very expensive enterprise databases. It gets very pricey and slow at some point.

So that's what we wanted to fix. And so that's also what makes it more than interesting for really big solutions. So global scale, the goal was to scale beyond 100 million users. Like seriously, huge installations should be possible. And the second goal was to lower the costs. As I said, you get really high storage and database costs at the high end, at the large installations. And the third was actually something a lot of people have been asking for,

which is to be able to say about the data that's on your Nextcloud, to be able to kind of split it up and to say, look, I want this data to physically stay in San Francisco and this data to physically stay in Germany. Now, you kind of could do that with Nextcloud 11 and 10 and other older releases by using federation. You would simply have two servers, and then the users would have to log in to one or the other,

and then they could share with each other because they were connected via federation. That's kind of nice. We still have multiple places to log in, and what if an employee moves from the US to Europe? You know, like you have to close their account and then create a new account, move their data, all their shares will be gone.

That's kind of uncool. So it wouldn't act like one instance, a little bit, but not really. So this is what global scale is about, to make these three things different. And it does that by splitting up, indeed, what Federation did, except that it adds a couple of components on top of that to make it act like a single instance. So you get the global site selector.

It's simply a server that when you log in, you go to cloud.nextcloud.com. It's what I do every day, right? That's our internal cloud. And from there, it automatically redirects you to the nodes where your data is. So in my case, it would be in Germany. And what's doing that redirection? Is there some global master login database that knows where to send people? Yeah, so that's the global site selector itself.

It knows where you are. The global site selector. Is this a new piece of server software that Nextcloud is publishing? Yes, correct. It's a new separate. We actually implemented it. I have to see how it was implemented. Give me a second.

Interesting, though. Because a number of things was done as an app, and I would have to look up the details there. But it's a separate server component. It's a separate thing that you have to run, and that's where the users log in, and then it redirects them. And the user sets a cookie so that they don't have to go over this server every single time, right?

Because your client logs in every 30 seconds, and that would mean with 100 million users, you get 300 million connections every 30 seconds. That's a little crazy. So they remember what the node was. But as a user, you don't notice that. It's not that your URL changes. You just go to cloud.nextcloud.com.

So you're in one place, but in the underlying there, you're actually connecting to a local data center with local data switch fast. It's under control of the local sysadmins. They can say this data has to stay here or there. And, you know, it's all transparent for you. So that's one component. Okay.

And there are two more. So the second component, that would be the lookup server so the lookup server it knows where you are it's actually the global site selector that would um that keeps a database um with the notes but the lookup server knows where you physically are it also also knows your user sharing ID, and when you migrate between nodes and your sharing ID changes too, then the Lookup server will keep a list of those. So that if somebody connects and is looking for an old sharing ID, then the Lookup server will redirect that to the new one.

So the Lookup server is all about sharing. Now, even if you would switch between, for example, providers, but I'll get to that a little bit later, but the Lookup server is really important also for normal users. Like this is not only relevant for 100 million user deployment, but also for smaller ones. I'll get to that. So it also stores information about you, like the quality of service metrics,

like your storage and quota settings, your reliability class. Maybe you want your data replicated at least three times. You know, maybe you're a VIP and, you know, you need always to be on SSD, stuff like that. That's all in the Lookup server. And then the third part is the balancer. And the balancer also runs on a dedicated machine and it monitors all the nodes so in next slide 10 you might remember we introduced the monitoring app which gives you either via the web interface or via an api information about the cpu load the memory load right you know the number

of shares number of users all this kind of information. Now, this actually fits with the balancer because it takes that data and it keeps track of it. And when it sees that the node is overloaded, it can actually initiate a migration of user accounts from one node to another. Yeah, so or if it sees, it asks the lookup server where a user is, and then it says, oh, this user just moved from the US to Europe.

Let's migrate the user from the US data center to the Europe data center. And bang, the balancer makes that happen. Or maybe you need to be moved on SSD because you bought an upgrade from your server provider and you need faster data transfer. So the balancer will make sure that you get on SSDs. So this is the kind of stuff that the balancer will make sure that you get on SSDs. So that's the kind of stuff that the balancer does. That sounds super high-end and fancy for enterprises. Sounds like it's probably amazing for a lot of…

Flexible too, yeah. Yeah, and probably very useful for a lot of state installations. Is there benefits that the home user or smaller, you know, small office user will also glean from any of this? Yeah, so that's a cool thing. There are a number of elements where this helps normal users. Now, first of all, of course, the ability to migrate between servers. Imagine you're at one service provider and you don't like them. You can migrate to another with all your data, with everything.

I mean, that's really cool. This is something we're working on, by the way. I have to give a little caveat here. So global scale isn't done yet. We have a couple of pieces. We have for example the lookup server. We have the global site

selector. The lookup server still needs more work but it's already up and running. We're using this already. The balancer still needs to be done. We've started working on the migration but at the moment this is only doing the data of the user, so it's not doing a lot yet.

Joss, speaking of the global server, if I'm Justin Trudeau and I want to move the entire Canadian government over to Nextcloud, can I run my own global server? Or is that something that's only hosted by Nextcloud? How does that particular part work? No, this is part of your own installation.

So all these pieces are fully open source. They're in our GitHub, and the idea is that well we would probably need to help a customer to set all this stuff up especially if you're big like the canadian government yeah but you would run all these components as part of your infrastructure and that would then be one massive next cloud system that consists of nodes in every major city for example so everybody has fast access but at the same you know, it's cheap because you're on all these small, you know, like two machines or something, you know, we're thinking that nodes would have two to maybe six machines and that's all commodity hardware. So that's way cheaper than this really high end storage stuff that you currently need.

So are you guys going to put feelers out with companies to see if they want to become like a NextCloud provider? So there is already like a few dozen NextCloud providers and some of the bigger ones will definitely be interested in this. This is also something that might be interesting for service providers like for telephone providers, for example, Telecom, T-Mobile, Vodafone, those guys might be interested in this as well to provide this to their customers.

Because until now, you know, with own cloud and now Nextcloud, you couldn't really do this because you couldn't get 50 million, 10 million users on a single system, right? I mean, that wouldn't really work well. And with global scale, you can actually do this now. So that's really a nice step forward. Another nice thing, because you were asking about what this does for home users, another nice thing is this lookup server.

Because we already had a lookup server, a more limited lookup server, and the idea of the lookup server was always to allow you to store your federated cloud ID and maybe some personal data that you choose, for example, your Twitter account, so that people could look up what your federated cloud ID is, so they can share with you. It's like an email address. They could look it up on the lookup server. They say, oh, I know this guy's, you know, I know Chris Lust.

That's his Twitter account. You know, you look it up, and then you get your federated cloud sharing ID, and then they can share files with you. That's cool. Yeah. Huh. So this is all in beta right now, yes? It's all still kind of...

Yeah, beta is a good term for it. I mean, we're putting all the pieces together now. But we want the people to talk about this, to help us test it, you know, to get involved with this, to give feedback on it. And the core Nextcloud 12 release is out and solid. Sounds like a lot of folks are already jumping on and doing the upgrade. Oh, yeah, it's totally, it's really cool, actually. I tweeted earlier today, you know, it's so nice to see so many people say like, yeah,

you know, we're upgraded and it was totally smooth as I've gotten used to. That's great. Now, you might remember in the old days it wasn't always like that, and I haven't seen a single person complain about upgrades yet, except one person was really angry on the forums because an upgrade from beta 1 to beta 2 didn't work well. Now, I personally take it as a compliment that the only fault you can find is in a pre-release version.

So, yeah, this is really nice to see that we really managed to get the update and upgrade issues under control. I gotta say, I really like seeing, as far as security goes, I like seeing rate limiting in there, which is kind of nice for developers to be able to specify

certain rate limits based on IP range and time periods, and looks like some improvements to two-factor authentication, support for other authentication mechanisms like OpenID and OAuth2 and Kerberos. That's all pretty solid stuff, Jos. Yeah, it's full of really cool features. I mean, you have a lot of functions like the guest app. You know, you can create a temporary restricted account to a customer or a friend or a partner to share data with.

You have an app that can, well, we're working on a backup app now. A lot of users will probably be very happy to hear that. It's Frank himself who started to code that together at the last Hack Week. Awesome. So that's really, really cool. And we have the Circles app, which is, well, it's like user-defined groups. You can create your own groups of people that you share with a lot. And one thing that its developer is already working on is to make it

then possible to also just share your mood, you know, like a status update. And at that point, then people who would follow you as part of a circle, because people can join circles and leave circles, they can see status updates. updates i mean you all know where this is going right yeah that's really cool stuff huh interesting interesting that'll be something to watch for see where that develops huh boy i mean you what you guys don't have enough things you're taking on yeah the thing is we have all the pieces already, right? We have this federation. This just kind of piggies back on that. Like with Nextcloud 12, one of the little changes to federation that comes together with other stuff is that we are now federating activities. So if you federate a file, you share a file from one Nextcloud server to another server, and then on the other server it gets changed by the recipient, then you will see that in your activity feed now.

Oh, yeah. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, and once we have this metadata sharing between servers in place, well, it's completely trivial. It's just a small number of lines of code to also share non-file-related events, which would be like Mood. It's actually quite a simple thing to just inject something else in there. So we're building this infrastructure, and we're just

using it. Yeah, and actually, as you were talking, I was thinking that very thing, and it just seems to all make sense. It seems like a good direction to go, and it seems like functionality will make sharing between NextCloud servers even easier. Well, suddenly, NextCloud is like a core part of the lifeblood of my system.

It could be like the utility of file sharing and collaboration that now different vendors could provide and you as a user could move between, it sounds like, with pretty easy... Yeah, so vendor lock-in, right? We just kind of kill vendor lock-in with this stuff. Yeah, provider lock-in. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, this is really quite awesome uh another thing that i don't want to i want to

make sure we don't miss it is the video audio and video calls right we we introduced this as kind of a tech preview in 11 yeah and in 12 it's becoming really solid uh we use it now internally for our company calls every week and it's's working really, really well. And you can now share your screen. So screen sharing is built in. That's kind of the one big feature. But there's one other feature that we're working on, which is already part of the server side, but it's not yet published in the client. It's coming.

This is push notifications. So on your cloud, you can call somebody, and then they'll actually get that call on their phone real time as a push notification. So you can actually really use it to replace WhatsApp or Signal or whatever you're using to call people. It's peer-to-peer, private, yeah, that's all there. So we're working on integrating that in the clients.

Yeah, that's all there. So we're working on integrating that in the clients. Wow. And one of the things that we want to do in time is also to federate these calls. So you have one server and you can call a user on another server. Combine it with the lookup server and suddenly you have a completely decentralized audio video call system from Nextcloud servers all over the world. So we've gone from documents and simple files all the way to a full, crazy enterprise-ready VoIP system.

And screen sharing too, that's pretty cool. The cool thing is people ask for this, right? I mean, in 2005, 2010, you know, you would share files and have them on multiple servers or multiple devices,

you know, your phone or your desktop. That was awesome. But, you know, if you receive a file from someone, it's shared by them. What's missing is context. You know, normally you would have sent an email and you would say, hey, I need you to review this. But if you share it via Dropbox or Nextcloud, you miss context. So we audit comments. But then, you know, you see in a comment that somebody says, well, this file, this is completely stupid.

And then you want to call, right? You don't want to have a whole yelling session in the chat. That doesn't work. So we need to be able to call. And then, you know, you say, okay, let's just make this document right together. And you want to have a collaborative editing solution. We got that too. So this is kind of a natural progression

that you start to need all these pieces coming together. Yeah. You can see some of the areas that we're using other tools, maybe commercial tools at that, that are getting really popular right now that can do some of this stuff, but there's not a big gap where if you just add a few more of these things to NextCloud, it can do all of the stuff

those can do and a lot more. And it's much, much, much more under user's control. You could obviously take advantage of the fact that it's open source. I mean, it's... All the stuff with monitoring and the management options. Yeah, with the recent features, too. Yeah, I mean, really, really exciting stuff. Yasas thank you for coming on the show and telling us hey my

pleasure guys it's always nice to present uh what we're doing to you guys i mean it's exciting stuff and i'm always glad that you guys you know see it for what it's worth and uh like it so i gotta tell you too uh it's obvious you guys are hustling over there too. So really a lot of respect too for how hard you guys are working. If I'm picking up just even half of what you're putting down, it seems like you guys have got a real vision on something you can go after and something that you're actually already executing on. Yeah, I mean, this started seven years, seven and a half years ago. And on one hand, it's the same vision.

And on the other hand, it has evolved since then, right? I i mean it started with just give people a way to control their data well okay now we add collaboration and you know communication to it but it's still the key is the same and the approach is the same right super easy to use you know super um like try to make it reliable first before you add you know the whole kitchen sink to it. These things have always been what we did and we keep doing that and it's working. People love it. It is

essentially a visioning of how this technology could be used if it worked out the way we all wanted it to work out. Instead of having these things locked off with vendor lock-in and cloud lock-in it's the opposite of that. It's the ideal version of how we could have done this, and it's really nice to see. Not only, by the way, is all this technical stuff impressive, but the UI is looking great.

Performance is looking great. Security is getting better all the time, too. So it's really kind of just firing on all cylinders. And, guys, check out all of the info about the new release. We have it all in the show notes. Next Cloud 12. There's links to blog posts and all of that stuff. Joss, is there anything else you want to toss in

before we roll? Yeah, somebody on the chat is just pointing out that I should really say something. So one big annoyance of a lot of sysadmins that would upgrade Nextcloud and before, obviously, is that you have to re-enable the apps always.

We fixed it. So if you have PHP 7 and you upgrade your Nextcloud, you don't need to re-enable apps. Nextcloud will automatically check if they're compatible. If not, it will try to update them from the App Store and after that re-enable them again. Hallelujah. Brilliant. Very nice. That's great, yeah. it will try to update them from the App Store and after that re-enable them again. Hallelujah.

Brilliant. Very nice. That's great. That's those little things that make a big difference. On the other hand, the fact that this was kind of one of the major issues that people still had with Nextcloud does tell you how far we've come. Yeah, that's true. It's a good problem. If that's your problem, it's a good one to have.

All right. Thank you. Thank you, Yas. Thank you very, very much. Thanks for having me. Bye, guys. Have a good problem. If that's your problem, it's a good one to have. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Yas. Thank you very, very much. Thanks for having me. Bye, guys. Have a good show. Thank you, sir. We're going to talk a little bit about the magic device tool here in just a moment. And I couldn't think of a better time to mention Ting. Two things that would go great together, like peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and chocolate. Ting is a smarter way to do mobile. It's how we'd have to do mobile today if we just all of a sudden had mobile service.

Like if everything was equal and the carriers had to compete fairly. You're dreaming. I know. But this is how it would work. It would be $6 for your line. You just pay for your line and then it would just be your usage, just whatever you use. That's how the market would work. There'd be no contracts or agreements, no early termination fees.

You just buy the device. You choose if you want CDMA or GSM and you'd pay for what you use. That's Ting. That's how Ting does it. It's a smarter way to do mobile. And one of the things I love about it is there are months where I am anti-social and I really do not pay much. There's some months, maybe like Linux Fest Northwest month, I might have like a like linux fest northwest month uh i might i might have like a

45 bill that month and then the and then the month after that because i i am so done talking to people i might have like a 20 bill it's really nice it at the end of the year i end up saving like two thousand dollars compared to my other service plans i had before i switched it's incredible linux.ting.com is where you go to save $25 off a device, or if you have a device that works with Ting, $25 in service credit. What? I know, and the average bill is just $23 per line.

So if you get $25 in service credit, it's going to pay for more than your first month of service. And that's crazy, because not only do they have nationwide coverage, no contracts, it's pay for what you use, and they have a great dashboard, but they also have fantastic customer service and a great range of devices. From ones you can bring yourself, pick up from the Play Store, or buy. They even will help you find one if you contact their customer service.

And I got to say, probably the best ever customer service experience I've ever had was when I've called Ting. They also have like a little giveaway going on right now. If you describe your home screen in a haiku, you know, the home screen of your phone, they're doing a giveaway. Ting credit, maybe a Moto G5, things like that. You can find out details at the

Ting blog. Just do me a favor. First, go to linux.ting.com and then head out from there. Check it out. See how much you might save. It's just such a better way to linux.ting.com and then head out from there. Check it out. See how much you might save. It's just such a better way to do mobile. And it's really, really, really fantastic for $6 a month to have like a couple of GSM or CDMA lines that you can activate devices for testing. It's a great way to test devices. It's a handy way to keep something connected like, say, a tablet that you use with your drone or something like that.

I just love it. It's so handy, all the different ways. Linux.ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Now, Marius joins us from way over across the world where it is way,

let me look, I thought I had the clock up here, but I think it's like 11 o'clock, 11 p.m. Thanks for staying up. Yeah, so Marius, welcome to, is it Marius? Am I saying your name right? Make sure I don't mess it up too long. You can say Marius or Marius.

That's fine. Thank you for having me. All right. All right. I'm sorry that I couldn't make it last week. Oh, no problem. No problem. It gave me a chance to mess around with Magic Device Tool, which I was pleasantly surprised

to see that all of the dependencies are in the AUR, and it's also a very easy snap to install. And if you have Ubuntu, it's just a couple of app commands away to get all the essential files and dependencies you need to be able to flash any of the more recent BQ Aquarius devices we've talked about, like the E5 or the M10, the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 2013, Samsung Nexus 10, the OnePlus 1, the Fairphone 2, any of these devices. Of course, I have the Nexus 5. You have made a tool that essentially makes these devices relevant again. I mean it really does. And I just – I wanted to bring you on just for a little bit to talk about how the hell are you doing this and how can we help you do it more.

So let's start with the first one. How are you doing this, and how can we help you do it more? So let's start with the first one. How are you doing this, Blackmagic? How are you hacking my phone and replacing the very secure and safe image on there with Cyanogen or Lineage or Maru or even that there Ubuntu Touch? What Blackmagic are you using, sir? So I have to tell you a bit of a story back then from the history of Magic Device Tool. So I have to tell you a bit of a story back then from the history of Magic Device Tool. When we started it back in, or basically when I started it back in July 2016, I had like all of the Ubuntu touch devices that were out there back in the time. And yeah, I wanted to make it easy to flash Ubuntu on it. But I also was one of the guys who got really annoyed by Ubuntu after a short time and wanted to get back on CinegenMod or on Lineage.

Lineage came later, but still. And yeah, I was tired of doing all the fast boot and ADB commands. And I was like, okay, you're going to write a script which is going to do all of this automatically. And then I added a few other devices and then it kind of exploded. And now I'm sitting here with, let me count, I think over 10 devices sitting on my desk at the moment. All of them are charging and I, yeah, basically after every new release of whatever ROM, I

have to check if the update is still working and if it's still compatible with Magic Device Tool. So it's a constant process. So I imagine you probably have a few micro USB cables around your house. Yeah, I would say too many. Well, it's a pretty cool tool. And I kind of wanted to pick your brain a little bit about how people are using it today. Because it seems to me that I found out about it because I was reading a thread on LineageOS. And I'd heard of it obviously before,

but it came back up on my radar when I was reading a thread about LineageOS. It seems to me there's a lot of folks that want to use this to flash LineageOS on their device. So how is it being used today versus how it was originally envisioned? Well, back when we started it, it was obviously mostly used for flashing Ubuntu on it

or making backups or some of the other functions. But yeah, well, thanks to the recent news by Canonical, many of the former Ubuntu people now got back on the Telegram chat and started asking questions about how they could get back onto Lineage or to AOSP. And yeah, unfortunately, I can't really track how many of what functions are mostly get used. I can only see the current download numbers from the snap,

but I think it's like mostly Lineage OS in the last few months. So, you know, what are the things that I would say, if I had like my critical head on, is I would say things like there's only a very small fraction of the user base that's ever going to want to install Lineage OS or Maru, which also looks very cool, or Ubuntu Touch. This is just something that only nerds want to do. Marius, what are your thoughts on that?

And what are your thoughts on sort of working on something that's sort of on the fringe like this? Do you think it's an uphill battle or do you find a purpose in it? Well, it basically makes my life much easier because sometimes I'm just switching devices because thanks to the Ubuntu project, I have so many things on my desk. And sometime or someday, I just pick up the Nexus 4 or the Nexus 7 and decide that that's going to be my daily phone or tablet for that week. Yeah, it's still usable and relevant. It absolutely is. Yeah. And we've also recently added other ROMs to it, like Mero OS and what's it called?

Phoenix OS, which is a bit like Remix OS, but for more devices. And yeah, it's basically just an... Well, if other people wouldn't say that they're using it, and we just recently passed 10,000 downloads from the Snap Store, from Edge device to it, so people are clearly using it. Yeah.

I also would have just bought it for myself, which is basically how it started. That's totally understandable. I really found it valuable because I'm like, I have this Nexus 5 here. My kids would love to have another device to play around on.

Why not flash it with Lineage or Maroo or just play around with Sailfish again? Make the device totally relevant again and make it usable. And the performance is surprisingly good. It's totally usable. And a lot of these devices, you know, you have otherwise. I mean, my mom has a Nexus 5. She bought it, like, six months ago.

So it was otherwise brand new still. Yeah. And it works fine for her. But I want her to have some, you know, I might even want to customize it more. I think also, like, what you were talking about, sure, there's, like, you know i might even want to customize it more i think also like what you were talking about sure there's like you know some niche aspect to this but this tool really bridges the gap for like if you were even considering trying it suddenly you have to become like kind of an android expert not so if you have something like this that's why i really like yeah it really didn't exist before i had no interest in in like all that other like all the other stuff you'd have

to learn but i just to try it really quick on an old nexus 5 i had sitting around it was the perfect level of resistance. It was, okay, I can manage to make this work, especially because all the stuff I needed was in the AUR too, which made it pretty nice. Mariusz, can we talk a little bit about the snap process? Is that something you were involved in, and what's your impression been so far?

Well, I think we've moved. To have to start with, the magic device was, a few months before, still just a bash script, which to have to start with the magic device was a few months before still adjust a bash script, which we had to start manually. And then I think it was like four months ago, Canonical started promoting the Snapcraft tool. So basically just this little one command line tool, which makes it easy to create your snaps and to upload them to the store.

And I was thinking with it for, I think, one evening, and the end result that I got was almost perfectly working, and then we refined it. And so it's very easy. Every change that we are pushing to the Git repository gets automatically picked up by the Launchpad server, which are then going to build the snap, and then re-uploading them to the store.

So I basically just have to commit to the Git repository, and then everything gets done automatically. It all just happens after that. That is the way the way of the future i swear that's so great yeah i i was so if i could if i could just interject yeah there's um what marius is using there's um if you go to build.snapcraft.io okay you can connect your GitHub repository to our build farm, which in turn is connected to the store. So every time there's a commit in GitHub, the snap is built on all of the architectures in the build farm.

So that's all of the ARM architectures and all of the Intel architectures and some of the more exotic ones if you choose them, and then gets published into the Edge channel in the store that's pretty sweet so and this is a reiki hooked up caster soundboard to the snap store that so that is great so caster soundboard is going to be is a snap yeah that's good that's good that is really good and and you mentioned earlier I was listening you said AIF doesn't play when you were doing things and you had to convert it in Sound Converter. So I've updated the Snap to add the necessary codecs so AIF works on the Snap. True gentleman.

A true gentleman. This is pretty great. I love seeing this stuff come together as these Snap packages. There was another, oh, yeah, Visual Studio Code was announced this week as a Snap Pack. That's right, yes it was. So that's a pretty interesting range from a very high-end GUI application to a command line tool that will flash a smartphone

to a Visual Studio Code editing tool. Wow, that's a big range. That's a big range. So Marius, where do you go next? I know one of the top questions people always ask is what do I got to do to get this XYZ hardware supported? Exactly. So where do you guys go next in terms of the project and in terms of hardware support?

Well, as I said, most of the emails that I'm getting, like 10 or 15 emails per day, which is like, please support device X. And I have to reply, no, it's not matching the requirements of our guidelines that we have set up. But still, what we are going to do next is, I definitely have to mention this because Max, who is also listening to this live, was just messaging me. He basically rewrote the whole tool. And he's a friend of mine. He's working on a community project that I'm involved with. And he basically completely rewrote the metric device tool. And the new release that will come out I hope

next month will feature a completely Qt GUI so it will no longer be, well it can still be a command line tool but it will also come with a GUI soon and we will maybe refine the process of how to add new devices and make it a bit more modular so that other people can

contribute to it which is already happening but I think we can do better on that front. Yeah, it seems like there's more interest now than ever. Yeah, absolutely. There you go. And if you guys want to check it out, we have links in the show notes. That's right. If you just Google Magic Device Tool, though, it's like the first thing that comes up.

Oh, Wimpy, you want to jump in? Maybe let me plug one thing real quick. Oh, absolutely. We also have got a Telegram group, which is basically an update and support channel where you can ask questions, and it's magicdevicetool.com slash Telegram. Oh, easy peasy. So easy.

Yeah. Magicdevicetool.com slash Telegram. Exactly. Now, Wimpy, you wanted to jump in with something. Go ahead. I was just looking at the store statistics, and I was bowled over. Do you realize how many installs you've had, Marius?

I know. We've recently passed 10,000 downloads. Yeah, over 10,000 snap installs. That's awesome. I'm one of them. I have no idea who these people are, but I'm glad to find that the thing that I produce is useful. Well, you know, I really think it's just about anybody who's not on Ubuntu that wants Magic Device Tool. It could be, yeah.

I think that's really what it is, because that was the first thing I thought of was, well, I could try getting these, I could try these things in the AUR, or I'll just go grab the Snap. And that's what I did. So I would imagine this would probably allow other people to do it, too. It's super handy.

It really is, yeah. I love it. Maybe let me add real quick to the point that Wimpy had before. Definitely, I wouldn't consider myself to be a coder or a developer at all. But still, with the bash scripts and the Snapcraft things that I did behind the scenes

and with the Snapcraft Builders tool that is also up on Git, it was really, really easy for me to snap it in just one evening or to make it completely run in like two days. And definitely for the non-developer kind of view, it's really awesome. Awesome. That's a great field report.

Yeah, that is. Thank you. Thank you, Marius. Thank you very much. Marius, I was curious, what's your daily driver? Is it a Linux desktop? Is it Unity? Is it a Ubuntu system? I'm still on Unity, yeah. I'm currently using 16.04. Hashtag no judgment here. This is a no judgment zone. You're welcome to use... At least today. Yeah.

Turth, I wouldn't call him out, but Turth in the chat room is totally using Windows right now, and it's no-judgment zone. You're using Unity. Wes over here is using – what are you using, Budgie? I forgot what you're using already. It was Budgie for a while right now. It's GNOME. Oh, yeah. Okay.

That's what I'm on to. I'm on GNOME. I'm on GNOME, and I have some thoughts on that. But I want to let Minimac jump in with Marius before we move on. Minimac, go ahead. Yeah, Marius. Do you touch the partitions of the phone when you're flashing the images? Do you change the partition tables, or does it always stay the same?

Well, I'm technically not changing the partition tables or the formats itself, but sometimes if I have to flash, for example, Sailfish on it, then I have to pre-format the system image, but I'm not changing anything about the partition layouts. I'm just formatting the partition itself. Okay. Thanks. So they'll stay the same.

You're welcome. Yeah, that's a great question, Minimac. Thank you for asking it. All right. Well, so, Marius, keep up the fantastic work. Thank you for staying up late, and if there's other developments down the road that happened that you want to share with the class, you are

welcome to join our virtual lug on a Tuesday and share with us. Or if you just can't sleep that night, we'll be here. We'll keep a chair out for you. Thanks for having me, guys. All right. Very good. So I do want to talk a little bit about GNOME. Not a lot. I know. I won't. You know what? I know. Just a hint. I'm just warning you.

I'm just warning you. I know not all of you are big GNOME fans. So first, let's talk about DigitalOcean. Then if you don't want to talk about GNOME, you can leave. But first, let me tell you about DigitalOcean because I know. Just a hint. I'm just warning you. I'm just warning you. I know not all of you are big GNOME fans. So first, let's talk about DigitalOcean. Then if you don't want to talk about GNOME, you can leave. But first, let me tell you about DigitalOcean because I know that's really what you tuned in for. That's what I tuned in for. DigitalOcean is my go-to platform now for when I need infrastructure. Essentially, if I need a Linux rig and it doesn't need a screen hooked up directly to it all the time, I'm pretty much just default DigitalOcean.

I'm default DO. Oh, default DO. DigitalOcean.com'm default DO. Oh! Default DO. DigitalOcean.com. Go there. Create an account. So sign up. I know I'm asking a lot, but trust me, you're going to use it. Create an account, and then apply our promo code. It's like taking gasoline and putting it on top of

your barbecue. It makes everything taste better. DO unplugged. One word, lowercase, and then it makes that fire go like crazy. Plus, it's like a barbecue in the cloud. Yeah, yeah. Oh, shoot. We got to talk about our barbecue coming up. Yeah, that's true.

Forgot about that, too. It's not in the cloud. Go back to it. No. But first, before we get talking about barbecue, let's talk about cooking in the cloud. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-U-N-P-L-U-G-H-D. SSDs throughout so you get really fast disk I-O.

40 gigabit E connections to the hypervisor so your network performance is great. Linux is the host operating system. KVM for the virtualizer. You can do huge rigs. Super, super high-end rigs. Crazy, crazy, monstrous, monstrous high-end rigs. Rigs that would make 64 kilobytes of RAM Bill Gates'

mind explode with the insanity in their size. And they also have a CDN system built in, monitoring. They have been integrating more and more features. My favorite one is block storage. And then, like the cherry on top, they have the best damn documentation on the web. Check it out at digitalocean.com. Create an account. Use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Get deployed in seconds. Enjoy that SSD performance. Work with teams. Have a little block storage when you need a little extra

storage. And deploy a pre-built open source application. DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code DEOUnplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the shenanigans that is the Unplugged program. So, Mr. West, we're almost at 200 episodes of the Unplugged program.

That is crazy. And I've been trying to think of what we should do. What should we do? What should we do? Because I'd love to do something. And one thing that turned out, oh, now Ike shows up. Now Ike shows up. He heard us talking about him. Yeah, that's true.

But I think there was some sort of transmission delay because we were talking about his fantastic blog post a while ago. The Ike signal. It's on the fritz. Anyways. The IKU signal. It's on the fritz. Come on. I think there was some fog or something that delayed it. So I don't know how long ago it was, but we did a barbecue and Wes showed up. And basically we made out during the barbecue. And what?

No. Oh, geez. That was somebody else. You weren't supposed to say. I know. But anyways, Wes showed up for the barbecue and things just went from there, and now here he is doing a show. And that was pretty fun. I don't think that's going to happen this time, but I still thought we could kind of have a tradition where when the show has milestones, we have a community meetup.

I love that idea. Like, you know, we have these extra chairs here in the studio. Oh, it's perfect now. So even if a couple of people could make it, because this is the middle of the weekday of, even if only a couple of people could make it because it's the middle of the weekday. But even if only a couple of people could make it up here in Podunk Arlington,

they could be sitting in these big comfy red chairs and they could be part of our lug right here in the studio doing the show with us. That could be just a super awesome way

to celebrate 200. But I feel like we need to give people a few weeks more heads up. Yeah, I think so too. So we were thinking it's possible around the 4th of July because we will have thinking it's possible around the 4th of July

because we will have an unplugged program on the 4th of July. Oh. And I was planning to go to Montana for the 4th of July, but Noah ruins everything. That guy. Totally Noah's fault. So I think instead we could have a barbecue. That might be a lot of fun.

It's going to be, well, it'll be a few weeks after our 200th episode, but it seems like a pretty good opportunity. Maybe that's more fair, too, because what if it goes terribly or the internet dies? I mean, it's better to have past 200. We've proved that we did it, and then we can all celebrate. Yeah, that would be probably the best. So that's sort of our tentative plan. So there you go, Ike.

You got your heads up. Now travel out here. All the burgers you can eat. that's true yeah so but but if you do want to come out for our 200th birthday and celebrate on the 4th of july which will be weeks and weeks after because we're only like two weeks away it's going to be literally a month after our 200th episode but uh it'll be fun it seems like because it could be a good chance people might have the day off from work yeah and uh turns out my boss never lets me have the day off so i'll be fun. It seems like because it could be a good chance people might have the day off from work. Yeah. And it turns out my boss never lets me have the day off, so I'll be here.

And might as well be cooking. Yeah, exactly. And we could fit a couple people in here. Plus, we have the TV in the living room hooked up. So you could watch from the living room. You could watch the show live. And so even if you can't fit in the studio, we'd have room for you in the living room to watch the show. And you basically would get fed by us.

Seems like a pretty good deal. It seems great. Seems like a pretty good deal. So we'll have more details. If you would be interested, contact me at ChrisLAS. And we're thinking on the 4th of July to celebrate the 200th episode of the Unplugged program. Yeah, my boss is a bozo that's true that is yeah he's a real jerk he's a real jerk um so i wanted to discuss just with anybody in the mumble room

that maybe has little experience i thought maybe i'd start with wimpy because i i suspect maybe he's played around with this yeah maybe under mate. I'm not really an expert on the plumbing of GNOME. My basic understanding is you have the GNOME shell, which then uses Mutter in the current configuration to do essentially the compositing, and Mutter talks to X. And in the Wayland setup, if I'm understanding this correctly,

Mutter takes on more of the X server roles. It does like the mouse tracking, all the stuff that the X server would traditionally do. And I don't know where these problems lie, but I've been recently having, I'm going to talk more about it on user air because I'm doing a deep dive right now. So tune into user air this week

where I'm chasing bug reports and I'm doing all this stuff. So I'll have a full report later. But I've been noticing. I wanted to just check in with the virtual log and I want to check in with you, Wes. Is it just me? Or if your system's been up for like a couple of weeks, does GNOME 3 start to slow down to like a crawl over time? Has anybody else noticed this? I have not, but I don't have any systems

that are up that long that have a desktop that don't get rebooted or suspended. So I don't know if I have that exact use case. Hmm. Okay. So you know how But I've seen it here happen at the studio, so I can definitely confirm that it's happening. Yeah. Actually, earlier in the show today, we just had

GNOME 3 crash on us, and we had to stop recording and start again because we weren't sure if we lost part of the recording. That's no good. And we did lose audio on the stream while GNOME 3 crashed for some reason. Wimpy, have you played around at all with benchmarking GNOME or looked at the performance of this stuff? Not a great deal, no. I have done some work to integrate Mutter with mate to see how how that works and aside from key bindings not not um you know passing through and what was the other oh um the alt tab and alt grave

um implementation just doesn't work the same as you would expect so So it works, but I've not done any serious profiling. I am at the moment doing some power profiling on the different compositors to see what the additional power draw is on the different compositors, but I've not concluded that yet. Okay. Yeah, that's a whole other aspect of it too, is when you do have a system like this, what kind of difference do the different compositors make on CPU or GPU usage and the power draw that they have? That's a fascinating conversation probably for a future show. Yeah, this is something I'm wondering about because I did not notice this under Plasma. So just a little background for those of you who don't catch every episode is for weeks and months, I was essentially since the last release of the Plasma desktop, I've been running the Plasma desktop on my main workstation.

This is a machine that I leave on 24-7. I've even recently started leaving the monitors on at like lower brightness. So that way I can literally just – I walk in the room, I sit down, I start working immediately. And the studio is always on. The Plasma desktop never ran into this issue, at least not that I noticed. I probably never made it more than two months without rebooting because I usually just decide, okay, it's time to get a new kernel.

But I definitely am noticing it within a couple of weeks, really, even a week on GNOME. And all of the machines in the studio that we've switched over to Linux that are running GNOME are exhibiting these symptoms. Really? So it's something I'm trying to dig into. It's not just a one-off on one machine. I can't swap out Mutter, right?

That's not something I can just do that. I can't swap out Mutter for KWin or something. Back in GNOME 2 days, you could do some crazy shit like that. But I don't think you can do that with GNOME Shell. So anyways, if anybody has any more information on it, I would like your help. Tweet me at ChrisLAS or check out the new subreddit, linuxunplugged.reddit.com. Sounds like Ike's

got a take on it too. I was reading his take in the chatroom which is pretty interesting. And that's what some of the bug reports that I've been digging into have been saying too, Ike. If you want to participate in our chatroom, we do this show live on Tuesdays at 2pm over at jblive.tv you can get it converted to your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendars like

marius there you know he has to sit there and do the time math yeah we were chatting about it this morning he's like marius says i hate time zones i'm like i totally know what you mean we solved that already we have these robots on standby at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar it will convert it to your local time if you think you you could make the 4th of July work, which I know is a little crazy, but if you think it could make it work, let me know. I don't know for sure we're going to do it, but I think it's like a 90% lock. And if we got a few people saying they'd be down, I mean, you and I are going to be here anyways. Yeah, we will. We should probably, regardless if people show up or not, have that barbecue going on the 4th of

July. So I almost feel like it's all lined up perfectly, so we should just do it. I think it's a lock. If we don't barbecue on the 4th of July, then what are we doing? I know. I think I'm going to say it's a lock. And basically, if you guys want to show up while Wes and I are cooking out and the beard's here eating our burgers. Then please do. Yeah, yeah.

It's one of your few opportunities to see the beard in person doing his thing. Yeah. Now, that means I'll have to tell people how to get here and all that. We'll have all that information. But, yeah. It's one of your few opportunities to see the beard in person doing his thing. Yeah. Now, that means I'll have to tell people how to get here and all that. We'll have all that information. But, yeah, okay. All right. I think we're going to call it a lock. So, Wimpy, I'll expect you here, of course.

Obviously, I'm sure you'll fly out. Marius, I'm sure you'll fly out. Ike, I expect you guys all to make it here. It should be no problem. I'm sure everybody in the mumble room will just make it. I mean, you know, it should be no problem at all. What was the date? The 4th of July, right?

America Day. Don't you want to come out for america day no i might be in the i might be in the area the week after that you know i key if you make it we'll have a wet t-shirt contest we might uh oh really wimpy it is possible hmm well yeah i if you're in the area let me know i'd make a trip out to see you uh if you'd like to make a trip out to see us, go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and grab a new episode, usually Tuesday evenings, Wednesday morning, depending on your neck of the woods. Don't forget we have the RSS feeds over there. I did mention it, but I'll just say it again, linuxunplugged.reddit.com. That's where you go to get involved in the conversation after the show and jupiterbroadcasting.com.

If you want to send us your feedback. And, Wes, are you ready for me to fire off the end of the show music with Caster Soundboard? There it is. That's it, right there. That's so awesome, dude. Now the show's ending. You have such power.

That is incredible. And I touched it right there. It's a touchscreen, and I'm watching it play across Caster Soundboard, now available as a Snap. It's amazing. So great. Listen, we have a new show out, air go check it out and linux action

news linux action news.com and user air jupiter broadcasting.com two great shows with more linux content user air a little raunchier it's more for an adult audience linux action news of course is your hardcore take super hardcore really rough so hard stuff it's okay now it's not that at all all right thank you for joining us we'll see you right back here next tuesday say goodbye wes goodbye bye everybody Thank you. What are the chances that the week that you don't have to record TechSnap, we're done super early? How does this happen? Yeah. We got thrown off a little bit, I think, when GNOME crashed.

But, yeah. when gnome crashed but uh yeah so ikey we uh we really crapped on uh how uh how ridiculous it is that you're shipping the plasma desktop about how everybody in your project's going to burn out because of the diffusion of resources and time and the chaotic state that the project must be finding itself in as a result of the fragmentation of your desktop focus did not say any of that fair question did not say any of that. Fair question. Did not say any of that. Did not, no.

I actually just think it's really cool. And sounds like Peter's a cool dude. That's pretty much what we said. Accurate. I will confirm. I don't know. I thought that was pretty good for coming off. Like, let's see what kind of armchair bullshit

internet criticism could I come up with if I just randomly... Let's troll as kind of armchair bullshit internet criticism could I come up with if I just randomly Let's troll as a service. Thank you, Mumble Room. You guys were great. Marius, it was great to speak with you. Yeah, that was awesome. Give me your phone, Chris. It won't be bricked.

Just flash away. Just flash away. I got him a little bit. I got him a little bit. That's good. Oh, I'm just kidding. I got him a little bit. I got him a little bit. That's good. All right, JBTitles.com. JB Titles. JB Titles.

JB Titles. We covered your blog post about plasma and all that. Plasma. Jeez, Bitcoin is $2,200 right now. $2,200. That's crazy. Did anybody else hear anything about Japan using Bitcoin or something about Japan making it more official? Yep, yep.

We're going to talk a little bit about it in user error. It's a good question. Oh, sweet. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. I can't buy things fast enough at the moment. The rate of Bitcoin keeps going up in value. It's gone up $400 in like six days or something have you had any problem with uh the transaction fees being too low and

your uh your purchases not getting um verified in time i had a huge problem with that i thought i was crazy yeah i was having a big problem with it too so i'd say half my transactions are bitcoin transactions and half are uh transferring bitcoin to fiat currency and then using that to fund the purchase i had to do like a dollar something uh fee just to make sure it would go through i tried 50 cents i tried 60 cents i tried 70 cents and didn't i'm like okay a dollar like what the hell it's just i think the network is super busy right now uh that's there you go ike there you go boy is this yeah what is this everyone well someone suggested in um in the event to podcast telegram group that how how much an effect uh wanna cry um bitcoin purchases oh interesting having on the

price of bitcoin at the moment which is an interesting point of view abuntu podcast.org there's still recording so i'm going to put that in here right now after this show is over what you should do is go get abuntu podcast.org right away then download Linux Action News, and then download Ask Noah, and then download User Air. And then, if you're missing iKey, download Late Night Linux.