LINUX Unplugged - Episode 200: Gnome in the Shell | LUP 200

Episode Date: June 7, 2017

It’s a Gnome lovefest this week, with a special look at the next release of Gnome 3, special features we’re looking forward to & new extensions that make Gnome even better. Then we chat about Google’s solution to old Linux kernel’s in Android, the differences between Chrome & Chromium on Linux, a killer Plasma desktop feature & more!

it's called slap and it's a sublime like terminal based text editor. So yes, sublime text comes to your terminal. I think it's actually, I don't know. It does. I think it's actually a pretty beastie installation because it runs on, I think it runs on node and you have to install it using NPM,

but it didn't try. No, I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't actually compelled, but I don't know is a big Sublime Text fan, so I sent this over to him this morning to give us his full review. Nice.

Isn't that funny? I think for some people, if you're a JavaScript dev, then it's probably like a super easy installation for you. That's a good point. This beer is delicious, Wes. I know, right? I was surprised. It is really good.

Oh, it's a blonde ale. I'm a sucker for an easy beer in a warm afternoon. Alright, I want the Wes take on the VR backpack. It's a PC that doubles as a backpack for VR, but then you can put it in a big old docking station. Whoa! And it's a desktop PC. HP's making this thing. What do you think of these backpack PCs?

Have you seen many of these? So my first worry, what if you're walking uphill, you're working up a sweat on a sunny day? Is that going to ruin the PC? Water damage? Yeah. I mean. Yeah. Well, I think they envision like you're in the living room still.

It's for VR, but without having to have all the cords all over the room. I actually think it'd be awesome as like a live stream broadcaster. Like put Linux on this, put OBS on this, connect it to some LTE modems, and now you've got yourself a portable broadcasting machine on your back. It seems like it'll all come down to weight distribution and heat. You know, like is it comfortable to wear? Can you do it for multiple hours? Right.

It could enable citizen journalism. In fact, if you built in LTE modems into this thing, I mean, I bet you— Can't we enable citizen journalism with like a Pi and a— Cell phone too. Or just a Nexus 5 that you built in LTE modems into this thing, I mean, I bet you... Can't we enable citizen journalism with like a Pi and a... Cell phone too. Or just a Nexus 5 that you put... Well, I guess you don't really need a PC. You know what they ought to do? You know what they ought to do, Wes?

They ought to just make the VR headset super powerful. Here's an idea. Why don't they put a PC in a headset? That's crazy talk. Or I was thinking like, what's the size like on this? Can you get smaller? Could we get like a NUC and then one of the little EGP things that you've just duct taped on the back of your shirt? Yeah, it's got a 1080 graphics card in it.

It's got the Kaby Lake A7 processor. You've got to buy the dock separately. The dock is $600 on top of a $2,500 computer. And I'm sure that dock works with all kinds of other systems you're likely to have. I'd say that's definitely future-proof. Look at all those ports. I see three. I mean, how could you not buy this with all of those killer VR apps? This is Linux Unplugged, episode 200 for June 6th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's been going for 200 episodes strong.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. I don't think we've missed an episode. I don't think so. We've had like some holiday specials. Yeah. Some flashbacks. Oh, absolutely. This week, we're

perspiring? We're perspiring? Perspiring. We're perspiring. Or conspiring. We'll find out. And postponing. It is getting a little warm here. We're going to hold off on the 200th birthday celebration for July 4th. More about that in a little bit. Instead, after we get through kind of a shorter, compact

amount of project updates and stuff, we're going to do a love letter, a love song, and maybe a little more. We'll tell you more about that for GNOME 3. I'm loving GNOME 3. I think it's a great desktop, and we're going to cover some ways you can make it better and why I'm pretty positive on the future of the GNOME shell. Some things that are coming up very soon to GNOME, and why I'm pretty positive on the future of the Gnome shell. Some things that are coming up very soon to Gnome, and things that are long, long down the road, but I think are going to have great long-term impacts. In fact, one of them is developing even today as we go on the air.

So we're going to cover things to make Gnome better for you today, even if you're not a Gnome user. Please stick around after we get through the updates, because I kind of want to just show you how the other side is living this week, better or for worse. We want to get your feedback on that. And then we'll talk about sort of where GTK is going, where the Gnome Shell is going, improvements to Mudder, GTK4, and a company out there that's making some big hires that could have big long-term impacts on the direction of Gnome. So 200 is a packed episode a packed packed episode uh and before we go into it too far you know we have one thing we got to do every single

week we got to start we got to start right here sometimes i like to wait a little bit but i'm feeling i'm feeling in the community spirit time appropriate greetings virtual log greetings greetings hello hello so we have uh we have the virtual lug joining us every single week Greetings. Greetings. Hello, hello. So we have the virtual lug joining us every single week. But to celebrate our 200th episode on July 4th, on America's birthday, now known as Linux Unplugged's birthday, we're going to have a virtual lug barbecue. The virtual lug becomes real. At least some of us.

No way. It's official. The meetup is set up. You can find it meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting if you can make it we'll be cooking and grilling and uh sous vide all the things yeah yeah i think uh my lady will be here is that right yeah hadia will make it the kids will be here this could be a lot of fun um i think angela's to make it. So you are also welcome to bring a significant other or somebody else. We won't say. No.

Yeah. It'll be everybody's turn. What happens at the studio, it stays. That's right. That's right. It's like mini Vegas right here. So meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. That's when we're going to be celebrating our 200th episode. But since we're not doing that today, we have some work to get done.

Uh-oh. We got some really, really great information in an interview that happened over at Engadget. No, I'm sorry. Ars Technica. With folks on the Android project. They talked to Android execs Dave Berg and Steffine Seat. Kubrickson? You know what?

I shouldn't have even started. Nope. I shouldn't have. I'm trying to learn to just. Some Android execs. Just, just yeah and i could have just left it at that nobody would have cared they would have been fine but i just kept going you think i haven't been doing this maybe by 201 you'll be there oh my gosh anyways you don't care about half the stuff in here i'm betting unless you're a huge android fan and you're probably listening to different podcasts if you are, or additionally.

But there was something in here that was really good and juicy for us Linux users. They talk in here about the really freaking old Linux kernels. And if you have not listened to a recent episode, we've kind of gone over this a little bit. Current Android Pixel, the one that, like, Wes has got there in his pocket, it is shipping with a really old version of the Linux kernel, one from 2014. And that was an LTS kernel which is no longer being maintained by Greg KH. Come on, Greg! It's a point he made a lot of noise about. In fact, he even did one more sympathy release of patches because he knows so many Android devices.

Oh, yeah. 3.18.31. Yeah. Which is no longer getting support upstream. So Google is now essentially running a unsupported, unmaintained version of Linux kernel and hopefully backporting fixes. I mean, it works so well for my router, Chris. I thought maybe on the phone it would be good too. Of course. And this is, by the way, best case scenario, thought maybe on the phone it would be good too. Of course. And this is, by the

way, best case scenario, this is on the Pixel. So if you got like a Samsung S6 or something in your pocket, I'm betting it's even worse. And so rightfully so, rightfully so, ours asked them about this. And they say, what is your thinking about the Linux kernel? You ship a super old one right now from 3.18. That's from 2014. What are you going to do about this? You're stuck maintaining this until 2019 because of the pixel. And so Burke comes right back and says,

well, we have 4.4 working internally. Now, here's the problem with 4.4. That means they're not shipping it yet. It means it might be shipping on the next Android device, possibly. That's a possibility. The next official Google Android device. But if they don't have it shipping now, that's not very – 4.4 is already getting old.

Yeah. And it's maintained until February of 2018. Google wants to provide three years of security updates, so it's going to have to maintain kernel 4.4 on its own from 2018, basically the beginning of 2018, until 2020. That's a long time. It's great they got 4.4 internally, but

it's not enough. Too little, too late. It is, I think, a big problem. And I think it's one that could really kind of bite them in the butt, especially because what's holding them back isn't their effort or their enthusiasm for it. It's silicon manufacturers. And this, if you recall, goes back to Project Treble. Yeah.

Where they're trying to abstract away the hardware manufacturers. So they say take the Pixel, for example. It's a Qualicom device. So we have to stick with what Qualicom supports. Now, we're going to try to be more prescribed about which kernel version you have to ship with a new device. And we're going to work with the Lenaro community. Where's my bell? That's a key point, the Lenaro community.

That is an organization and group that is structured in kind of like two main parts. Lenaro is, from my understanding, and this is my rough understanding, is Lenaro has a core fork of the company that's super focused on Linux kernel and drivers and Linux core subsystems on ARM. Then they have another fork of the company, the second branch of the company, which is really focused on ARM chips, the whole system on a chip ecosystem environment, getting those vendors to work with patents and licensing and all that stuff. That's my rough understanding of Lenaro. So what they are planning to do from reading this entire interview now I'm summarizing for you is they're planning to work with Lenaro to essentially pick up Greg KH's work. And Lenaro may become sort of an extended LTS maintainer with their own fork of the Linux kernel that Android is using. And they say in the interview that they're going to get more directly involved with that.

Interesting. So we could have like an Android fork of the kernel that gets maintained for an additional year outside of what the standard... I don't know whether I should be like pleased because I want more official or better maintenance or more upkeep or to be like, this feels like a compromise on all sides. Mr. Veritunda, you had a question about communities maybe moving to other projects. Well, it just occurs to me, okay, right, that there are... Hold on. Say again. You cut yourself off. It just occurs to me that there are already embedded Linux projects out there,

like OpenWrt and LEDE project, which have recently merged again, which already target Android or ARM platforms. I don't understand quite why everyone's trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to these kind of projects. Because, I mean, OpenWRT, very up-to-date with their Lakers kernels, and they have a good ecosystem of running packages and stuff. So why can't they base it around that? Well, I don't think they're going to base it around OpenWRT.

If they're going to do it, they do it with something like Infucia or whatever it's called, their new OS that's not Linux-based that they're toying around with. I think, though, the real answer is that Android is just simply its own beast now. It's its own ecosystem. It's its own everything. It is its own market force. And so it just doesn't matter what else is out there because it's so huge. You still enjoying the Pixel? Yeah.

Are you? Are you? Are you? Oh, probing questions. of questions about the WWC event and the pre-show and I thought maybe Wes has been looking over the fence and you know, because I look at these things and I'm not going to go on some sort of Android rant here, but I find it a little disappointing. I feel

like Google is a pretty big company with a lot of really smart people and I think a lot of them get open source and Linux there. I think you're right about that, yeah. but yet it feels like they've really compromised on this stuff and they just keep compromising on this stuff and i mean i would certainly say it is not up to it's not it's not so far away but it's certainly not up to the

fit and finish of ios or an ios device for me that's okay um the pixel is at the point where it's like pretty much good enough in that like it's not ugly it doesn't offend me to have in my pocket or carry around uh the performance is good it doesn't bother me with lots of the old android you know oh why is my app just installing or whatever so i don't see those things so it is like day-to-day use cases the camera i like and it's fast so those problems are mostly gone at least in my day-to-day uses yeah it doesn't have the kind of seamlessness it doesn't have all the thought that's put into it obviously but you're touching on something there at ww i'm wondering are you an android user ww yes i'm stuck on some older versions right now unfortunately i think i'm on kit kat on my phone

is your phone nearby because if you go into it, I'd be curious. And what do you think? Do you think like this stuff, like the kernel version on the phone and stuff, is it just something that only matters to me because I even understand what a Linux kernel is? Maybe I'm the only one that thinks this matters because it works, right? At the end of the day, it's a tool. I think it matters because you want it to be secure. I think most people would want their phone to be secure.

Exactly. Most average of users. But because of the ecosystem and how people like the vendors are pretty much, it's Google works with these third party vendors, whoever it is. But they're not in control of it like Apple is. They're the ones who are being bent over the barrel and being told, oh no, we're not going to support this. If Qualcomm says we're done, they're done. Exactly. It's like

this is why I'm sad Ubuntu Phone or Edge or whatever didn't take off as well as it should have because Firefox Mobile didn't do well because we were stuck with these companies that don't, you know, get that. There are people that want these phones, either cheap, secure ones, or maybe they want

to pay more for a better one that's secure and it's not happening. Yeah, I would. I would love, so the Pixel to me seems like a premiumly priced phone. So I would love if that meant you get premium security. And I would love it if it meant you got premium security too. How has there not been more of an enterprise angle here too? Say that again, Ron. I said, or reasonable security.

I mean, the fact that they're going to update to a funnel that was released two years ago. I mean, you think they're backporting, right? They're backporting fixes and whatnot. Well, they say that, but we don't know. Yeah, I mean, and part of it is, well, that's a good point. Like, part of it is they're backporting the big things that they are aware of. That doesn't mean they're getting everything. I think it's a little naive to assume that every fix makes it onto the bug list

and every security patch, which isn't just considered a bug fix, is properly addressed. In fact, Linus himself says that he considers security fixes and just like bugs to be the same kind. They're the same level of fix. They're just fixes. And I wouldn't be surprised if that mentality isn't a bit pervasive. And so sometimes things that might be a little iffy on the security side are just marked as a bug fix. Nobody notices because the developer has himself found it or herself found it, makes the fix, submits it, it gets accepted, and it's patched, and it just rolls out the next version of the kernel. And because there was never a CVE attached to it, it means

that it just sits there rotting in these old kernels. Right. I mean, that's why I care. It works okay, I guess, if you have the, you know, just update your kernels, which I think is pretty much what the kernel community would tell you, right? Just update your kernel. We try hard not to break things. Update your kernel. It doesn't work when you have based your project on this forking relationship. So, WW's

on 3.4, kernel 3.4. Ouch. I have Android 6, I think. That's not super old, but it's in there. It's getting there now. Well, I also have a Nexus device. So, you know, the fact that I'm in, I think it's like probably six months or so

that they're going to discontinue my device entirely. So that's fantastic. Oh, wow. Yeah, so Veritunda, you think it's kind of a shame that Android isn't known for one of Linux's better traits, which is supporting older hardware. Yeah. There you go. You're good. You're good.

You just got to hold down that push to talk. You're good. You just got to hold it down. There you go. Yeah. Shift home. Okay. So, like I said, okay, I mean, Linux is pretty much well-known for running on old hardware.

And even if you go back to the last incarnations of PCs 10 years ago, you can still run a pretty modern kernel on that kind of hardware. But you try and do that on a phone, not a chance. Because for one thing, the hardware manufacturers don't update their drivers to fix new problems, carry out new systems or anything like that. So I don't know what's going on with that. Yeah, it is a bit of a shame. That's a bit of a downer.

Let's talk about a part of a solution. This is just a natural segue. It's Ting. I mean, really, a part of it is the carrier. And Ting is mobile in a totally different light. It's a. I mean, really, a part of it is the carrier there. And Ting is a mobile is mobile in a totally different, totally different light. It's a much simpler approach. It's a much more understandable way to do mobile. And they don't have like this huge branding strategy, where they need to integrate in a certain part of their branding to the phone, which holds up releases, they just they don't even play in that arena. That's why I love Ting. Those are the top features for me. But what really draws people in is the way that the payment system works. So it's just $6 for a line. Just $6.

So you want two phones. You want one phone. Okay, it's $6. You want a second phone, it's $6. You want a third phone, it's $6. It's really simple. And then just your usage on top of that. So your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes.

And it's really clear. And often the average Ting bill for a line is like $23. They have nationwide coverage. There's no contracts. There's no early termination fees. You just pay for what you use. They have a very, very well-built control panel. They have a full range of devices, or you can bring your own CDMA or GSM.

You pick. And if you bring one, they'll just give you a service credit, which you probably pay for more than your first month. They have such great customer service too. And check out their blog. As a small business owner who uses Ting, I got to say it really does work well for small business. And they've been featuring a couple of different businesses recently. I probably would say I encourage family plans more. If you've got kids or people, you just want to have several people. Or in my case, when we had a nanny for a while, we actually got her a phone, so we always knew we'd have good, reliable communications with her when she had the kids.

And to us, that was worth the six bucks a month. And now you look at it, and now I think about it so much more as a business owner, about how I can, when we have events and things like that, how I can use Ting. They actually just highlighted a lavender farm using Ting. Yeah, for their mobile business. Pretty cool. You can get started by doing us a favor. Visit linux.ting.com.

Linux.ting.com. Take $25 off a device or get a service credit. And then visit the blog and read around. Even if you're not ready to switch yet, check out all the stuff. Just so you are familiar. So when that time does come, and it will, my friend, you will be ready. You will be prepared. Linux.ting.com

and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. Little community service announcement before we move on because I've seen a few people getting caught by surprise. Your old version of Skype that you've been hanging on to, clinging on to, version 4.3, yeah, the cute version of Skype,

is being retired before our barbecue on July 1st, 2017. Wah, wah. It goes away. No more Skype for you. You will not be able to use it. You must switch over to the new Skype for Linux beta, which I think as we record right now is at version 5.3. It's really getting pretty good, actually.

Yeah, I was going to say, what do you think of it? I know there were some early issues we had here in the studio with it. You tell me. You've been using it now for weeks on TechSnap. Working pretty good. Yeah, it really does seem to be. The video picture seems fine. The audio quality seems pretty good.

I haven't had any crashing or anything. Yeah, it seems much better than it was when the beta first launched. And it's nice that it has, you know, the Linux, hopefully this time around, you know, it feels like they're doing Linux with Linux in mind from the get-go, so hopefully we won't end up with like, oh yeah, never mind, you'll never get updates again. Yeah, no, the word on the street is that that Linux client

is the new Skype for life, like all platform Skype. It's nice to see that they're treating it seriously. So it is actually pretty decent. The thing is, they really have no choice because all the competitors are getting pretty damn good too. And WebRTC is maybe the thing now. Yeah, WebRTC is looking pretty good. Like Jitsi is great.

I use that a lot for guests because I can just send them a URL. And Skype really has to help. They're gay. That's pretty much what it comes down to. I'll leave this more as a resource linked for folks in the show notes. But I hear this question a lot. What's the difference between Google Chrome and Chromium on Linux specifically? Like, why do I want to run Chrome over Chromium?

Or do I maybe want to run Chromium for privacy reasons? So I guess the main difference is just a couple is colorful logo on Chrome, blue only logo for Chromium for privacy reasons. So I guess the main difference is just a couple. It's a colorful logo on Chrome, blue-only logo for Chromium, obviously. User metrics are sent if they're turned on. Report crashes are sent if they're turned on. Out-of-the-box video and audio codecs for Chrome are AAC, HD64, MP3, Opus, Theora, Vorbis, VP8, VP9, and Wave.

It has the sandbox to PPAPI non-free flash plug-in, which they maintain. It's code tested specifically. The sandbox is turned on by default, single-deb and RPM package, and it stores them in slightly different locations because one's called Google Chrome and one's called Chromium.

The major difference is on the Chromium side. So here's what you don't get by using Chrome. You don't get H.264 out of the box. It's dependent on your distro. It does support the Netscape API, and those are unsandboxed, which is how it runs Flash, which means it's a little more dangerous version of Flash. Living on the edge. It's, quote-unquote, considered maintained by distributions, not by Google directly. And the sandboxing depends on the edge. It's quote-unquote considered maintained by distributions, not by Google directly.

And the sandboxing depends on the distribution. You can go to about colon sandbox to confirm if yours is on or not. Pretty much the configs are saved in the same place except for the folder is called Chromium. Also, you don't get that colorful logo. Right. Blue only. And maybe the other big thing is the new releases and testing are dependent on patched up by the distro. Right.

Which is kind of a big difference. Whereas when you install the deb or RPM of Google Chrome, it adds a repo. And then you get updates from the Googs. I end up running Chrome myself. I just go straight Chrome. I have Chromium like over here on a system I don't use a lot. It's not like one of my main, like the soundboard system right here. I have Chromium on that.

But this system that I'm here presenting, I want to make sure that H.264 and AAC work. That's kind of important. If it's just a browser because, hey, I might need to look up something on Stack Overflow, it works just fine. Yeah. So I just wanted to pass that along

so that way you guys just maybe could reference this or reference that link in the show notes that people ask you because I get the question a ton. Did you know that Google, GOG, they're not good old games anymore. They're having a sale. The AI War Fleet Command is the one I picked up today. It's a pretty cool looking game.

It's like this, you have a whole bunch of bots and you send them to fight off against each other. That sounds fun. It actually, it was pretty enjoyable. You're telling me there's a Linux? Oh, my God. Jeez. Good old games. Autoplay god. Jeez, good old games. Autoplay fail.

Oh, sorry, guys. Just so you know, that hurt me more than it hurt you. This is, oh yeah, oh yeah, full on. Full on Linux support. $1.99 right now for some of these games. It's like some of these games are 80% off for some of these Linux games right now. That's why I mentioned it. It's their summer sale going on right now.

Okay, I'm going to have to take a look after the show. No sponsorship intended. No, what is it called uh no product placement this is just this is the game i picked up this morning before the show and uh it looks pretty good and with that big old sale going on it's kind of neat it's kind of neat they have a whole bunch of other stuff on there too so yeah $1.99 crazy $1.99 you can't go wrong with that can't go wrong with that all right mr west we are going to be talking about gnome a lot today that's kind of what i wanted to make the bulk of this show about was just so we had an episode that was just sort of dedicated to this where the title kind of matches what the content's about assuming we have a gnome title

you can do it guys hint hint hint hint hint so this is one of our last community updates for the week before we get into the GNOME topic. And that's just because it sort of segues us perfectly into it. There is a collaboration going on right now at Canonical's office in Taipei where GNOME developers and Ubuntu developers are in attendance. And they're working to greatly improve GNOME's high DPI support. Oh. improve gnome's high dpi support oh so uh hot damn if canonical hasn't even yet shipped an ubuntu based desktop and they're already i mean this is the exact kind of collaboration i wanted to see yeah when ubuntu switches to gnome and they're working on something called

fractional scaling which is more like how unity and i think elementary os is luna desktop instead of just like one or two, you can have like in between there. Yes, exactly. And it kind of requires a whole reworking. GNOME supports one-to-one and two-to-one scaling only. And on multi-monitor systems, it's the same DPI scaling across all displays,

which drives me crazy. Yeah, that's annoying. Some of the issues this hack fest is aiming to fix is to support different fractional scaling values in Mutter and GNOME Shell by upscaling the widgets and then downscaling to the requested value at the compositing time. So they want to draw a Shell UI at a higher resolution. They're going to draw the UI for the Shell at a higher resolution than what the logical pixels correspond to. Then they'll do non-integer scaling adaptations. And they're also working on X-Wale and client support to a degree.

adaptations, and they're also working on X-Wale and client support to a degree. So I'm really, really, really happy about this because this particular type of high DPI support is really sort of next level high DPI support. And this is one area that I would like. I mean, it impacts buying decisions. It impacts how I want to build systems in the future. So this could really change a lot of stuff. Yeah. And so there's more info in the blog post at the

blog.gnome.org site that we have linked in here for the developer who's going. Really cool to see this happening. Also crazy that Canonical has offices in Taipei. They're just all over the place. Today, I learned. Today, yeah, indeed. So that's pretty neat, and when do we see

the fruits of that labor? Who knows? Who knows? Maybe that'll get things pretty neat and uh when when do we see the fruits of that labor who knows who knows maybe that but maybe that'll get things a little bit just a little bit closer so that way your terminals look even better i actually can't need those sexy terminals i actually kid but you know the the high dpi terminal that's no joke that is that is no joke wes you and you're a gnome user right that's right okay so uh let's uh let's. So let's get ready to talk about GNOME because I have many things to discuss here and the future looks bright. Wes is running the GNOME shell. I'm running the GNOME shell.

Live, in person. We probably have some people in the chat room and in the mumble room running the GNOME shell. Maybe you at home are running the GNOME shell. That's so exciting. So let's take a moment and thank DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. That's so exciting. So let's take a moment and thank DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O-Unplugged, D-O-Unplugged, one word after you sign up.

Then you get a $10 credit and you can deploy a rig on their infrastructure in no time. Spin up a Linux rig in Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, CoreOS, FreeBSD, all with SSD performance, regardless of which one you get. free BSD, all with SSD performance, regardless of which one you get. A simple, intuitive API, lightning-fast networking, highly available block storage. And now, check this out, cloud firewalls. You will have a central location to define access rules and apply them to all of your droplets. They will enforce these rules on the network layer in their data center. Unauthorized traffic will never even reach your droplet. I like the sounds of that.

That is so cool. DigitalOcean.com, create an account, sign up, use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. You apply that, then you get $10 and you can play around with that $5 rig two months for free. D-O-Unplugged over at DigitalOcean.com. Let's start with my favorite GNOME extension getting a really solid update. This is the one that I think everybody who starts installing GNOME extensions installs this one. And I want to actually maybe stop for a second because I know I just realized I'm going to get flamed. But yes, this is going to come across as like, hey, load your GNOME system up with all these extensions and have that at Haas.

Just go crazy. This is a to come across as like, hey, load your GNOME system up with all these extensions and have that at Haas. Just go crazy. This is a disclosure here. The Linux Unplugged show recommends that you have a balanced diet approach to your extensions. Don't overdo it. Moderation is key, people. We're just going to give you some cool ones right here off the top. We're not advocating you run 1,000 extensions. And a lot of you Plasma users will probably be laughing at us as we do this but so dash to dock is a very popular gnome extension maybe the most popular

that takes the favorites and puts it as a as a dock a persistent dock that can hide well version 59 which is available right as we go on the air has added multi-monitor support oh boy we're getting real folks yeah multi-monitor proofs now, boy. We're getting real, folks. Yeah, multi-monitor proofs. Now, it's just the same damn dock on each screen right now, but there are a couple of nice things. There's also improved high DPI support. Ding, ding, ding, ding.

And if you're not using something like the app indicator extensions that puts them up by your clock, if you still have that little tabby default gnome thing where all your tray icons go, they've specifically built in some smarts to make sure they're not blocking that anymore. So Dash to Dock, solid extension you already knew about, gets a

pretty good update, so go update. Now let's start with something new that maybe you haven't seen. Big props to Joey over at OMG Ubuntu for just really killing it. Yeah. Dude has recognized a need for gnome coverage and is killing it. Arc is a new applications menu for GNOME Shell.

So not everybody likes the activities overlay. This fixes that. Arc menu is an alternative app launcher for GNOME Shell. It replaces the activities button in the top bar with a traditional start menu style launcher. And it works nicely with things like dash to dock and panel extensions. What happens when you super key? Can I still type to complete? That's what I want to know.

I think so. Because that's the big thing I miss from other versions. I don't know. See, for me, I'm not big on this. This is an extension I will not be installing. I like just the super key to type three letters and launch. I'm good with that. But I want, you know, this comes up because I'm kind of playing with like what systems would key, type three letters, and launch. I'm good with that.

This comes up because I'm kind of playing with what systems would I have for my mom, right? One of the problems I have, I like the Mate approach of explorable, but it doesn't work well once they've migrated to they know the applications. It's way too tedious. They do need something. I like that. I love that about the GNOME desktop. I don't understand

why they chose Arc as the launcher name. That's a bad name. It's overlapping with the most popular GNOME theme. And I did some digging and I can't tell. I don't think the projects are related. I don't know. It's very confusing. Very confusing.

This one's also going to confuse a lot of you Xmonad awesome Tiling Window Manager users out there. a lot of you Xmonad awesome tiling window manager users out there. gTile is an extension for GNOME that turns GNOME when you want it into a tiling desktop. And once it's installed, you click a little tile icon in the GNOME menu up top. You'll see a little overlay come up with a whole bunch of squares. The gTile overlay will hover over an open window, and then you can click one or more of the squares to place the window in that area. So it's like a grid.

The row of icons then display the dimension and the controls of the screen is titled right there, so you can see what the screen title is. If you just want to divvy up your screen into 16 equal chunks, you can do that by choosing 4x4. The really nice thing about gTile is you're not locked into tiling. New windows aren't automatically put on the grid. Boom. And existing windows aren't locked.

So you have the best of both worlds. And that's one that I might actually end up installing because there are times where I want to organize AF and then there are times where I want to just be wild. Yeah, that one's one of my favorites. Especially because the default of just left and right is not enough. Oh, go ahead.

It's not worth even bothering. Oh, really? The reason to do tiling is because you're using your keyboard. G-Tile is 100% mouse controlled. The reason, yes, I guess I kind of agree. The reason why I like tiling, though, for me, would just be for organizing a whole lot of windows and stuff. Right, but every time you close that window

or the next day you open it, it's not there. The reason I do it is I organize my tiling so that the next time I load the application, it's all tiled together in the same way. TG Tile is always, you have to do it manually every single time. What I really want is I want perfect, never fail placement of my windows. When I hook up my second screen, I want all my windows to go right back where I had them perfectly. There is an option for people who want the tiling that does have features that are more... Like recall.

...accounted to tiling. It's called a shell shape, and it's not really an extension. It's a replacement for Gnome Shell. So it's Gnome Shell, but it's a modified G gnome shell to make this possible because the reason why gta doesn't have these features is because gnome itself can't do the uh the full-blown structure based on the way it's built well michael you're a you're a

you're a fan of the gnome workflow so what is it about the gnome quote-unquote workflow that you try to adapt over on the plasma desktop uh well Well, I'd say the style of having everything all in one. So when you, like the activities overview, where you have the windows and you have the top bar and the dock and the workspace, I guess it's a dock too, all that in one thing. And also the flow of having all the workspaces in a vertical structure rather than a grid.

Because it's a lot easier to just scroll up and down on your mouse rather than having a keyboard shortcut where you've got to do the different arrows in different directions and stuff. So there's that, but I don't know if you could give the whole

one-click button, start searching for whatever you want as a GNOME thing. I'm not really sure what started that. Just like a launcher thing in general. And KRunner does a fair job of that. I mean, Windows does that too. Actually, now I think about it, it's probably Windows. I give the nod to Quicksilver myself.

I think that's where it started was Quicksilver. Quicksilver and then GNOME 2. And then GNOME 2 came over and Synapse. Well, Windows Vista had it. Now I think about it. So what's older? Quicksilver? Somebody in the chat room, go do some sleuthing online.

We believe in you. What's older, the Mac launcher Quicksilver or Windows Vista? I wonder. Although Windows Vista probably was in development before Quicksilver ever hit the market. So there's that. Okay, I've just got a couple more extensions. Would you have any other workflow things? Well, I mean, the other thing is I do like the dynamic workspace,

and that's the only thing that's not possible in Plasma. That would be really nice to have. But as far as the GNOME workflow, that is really cool. Yeah, I do like dynamic workspaces as well. There's also this one more thing that has absolutely nothing to do with anything, and it's really the only thing that bothers me that I can't have on Plasma. There's an extension in GNOME called Quick Close Overview. And all it does is allow you to middle-click a window

in the overview grid thing and just close it from there. And that is such a huge time-saver. You know what? This is so stupid, but you know what I miss when I'm on Plasma? Is none of the Plasma applets, whatever they're called, that check the Bitcoin price work. That's unfortunate. And right now, it's so much fun. It's just right there. You're watching it. Just looking at it.

It's fun. That's the glint in your eye. I really, you know, there's small things about it. Like, I really like the top bar on GNOME, especially when I have the top icons extension. So that way all of my system tray stuff is up there. And then it's, the rest of the UI is completely just my application I'm using. Full screen.

I just have a very tiny thin bar with a time date. It's an elegant little bar. I like it. Yeah, especially with the art theme. And then you hit the super key and you got a pretty good built-in launcher that can even launch things like the display control panel and stuff like that. Between that and then like the improvements to Dash to

Dock, it's really kind of the whole deal. So Quicksilver came out three years before Vista. Boom, boom. It might be Quicksilver then. Damn. That is a long time ago. Yeah. I'm surprised I don't even remember the name of it.

Or surely someone will tell us about an obscure window manager that was doing it before that. Totally. Hopefully. I would think so, really. Let us know. Yeah. The command line, actually. Yeah, right.

It was really the original launcher. Appropriate. Yeah. I got one more actually. Yeah, right. It was really the original launcher. Appropriate. Yeah. I got one more extension. Well, okay, I might have light. I might have two. And again, I'm just telling you these are, this one kind of feels like maybe a lighter one that maybe wouldn't wreck things. This is a Nautilus Git integration extension.

Now, hold on. Don't get excited. Wait, what? Don't get excited. It's not like, you're not checking in and out of GitHub with Nautilus here. I actually think it's better than that, though. It is instead a simple extension that just adds important information about the current local Git directory you're browsing. So when you browse into a Git directory on your file system, it gives you relevant things like the Git directory info, the status of the Git files.

You can open a remote URL. You can select a specific branch. You can compare commits in Nautilus. So this, again, the reason why I bring this up, because I have this picture. I have this picture after going to Dell of developers that buy Sputnik laptops by the millions to SSH into Ubuntu boxes, and they're pushing and pulling on GitHub with their continuous integration, and they're doing all this stuff,

and now when they want to browse a local GitHub directory they've checked out, they get a bunch of great additional information just overlaid right into their file manager. I'm going to have to try this. And because the damn thing's not trying to be a whole GitHub client, it's not like it's some huge hack in the extension. It's just pretty simple information.

Yeah. Wow. It's pretty good. That's great. I mean, I know a lot of people get this kind of, you know, you already have it maybe in your terminal and stuff, so this seems super helpful. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's pretty nice. It would be great if they added things like side-by-side diff and whatnot. And there's PPAs out there if you're on the Ubuntus, and of course it's up on the GNOME extension site and GitHub. And then, ladies and gentlemen, the one that out of all of these I think I will be setting up for our studio machines if they stay GNOME

is App Folder Management. So this is an extension that allows easy management of app folders directly from the applications view. That looks nice. Yeah. So you can create folders and as a bonus feature, it's possible to change columns in the folder and stuff like that. So it's actually, you can, you get additional nice features, but you can create new app folders. You get a nice dialogue to do it. You can add those applications with cool sub menus and stuff. You can remove applications from the folders. You can delete the app folder, and the application icons go back. It's sort of like how on Android or iOS

you can move all of your launcher items into folders, and it creates dynamic folders. And this kind of seems like an obvious feature. When I thought about this, I was kind of amazed that this isn't built in. So this adds that. Yeah, this is like a lot of the kind of customization that you would probably assume that you could do. So here in the studio, I could do like, you know, we could have in one folder, we could have the X32 mixer stuff.

You could have the Skype stuff, the Mumble stuff. That would make it easy for me. Yeah. And we are back. So GNOME just crashed on us. That's kind of ironic. I'm not joking. Summary of the show, folks.

This is a bit of an awkward thing for me right now. This is my love song to GNOME because I think it's such a great desktop, and I think it has such a strong future, and yet I think I'm switching away. And I'm going to be talking about that more, but I want to continue being positive about GNOME, but I do have to acknowledge that we just had to stop broadcast, and we had to stop and re-edit here and all of that because GNOME crashed on us again. So we are going down a path. And this is a system, by the way,

the one that crashes the most is the system with almost no extensions. Just for the record. The only extension it has is dash to dock and the ping extension. Yikes. There you have it. Yeah, yeah.

It's good times. It's good times. Do any other machines suffer from this in the studio? We have three GNOME desktops that crash every day. They're all similar hardware, NVIDIA, Arch, Core i7, like a generation ago. Yeah. It's happening quite a bit. That's kind of, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of drag. It really is. Like yesterday, I was in the middle of working, and so on my system upstairs, GNOME crashes three times. It crash, crash, crash. And the reason I know is because I was looking at the log

and looking at JournalCTL, and I can see it crashing, reloading, crashing, and then reloading. And every time it crashes, I just get a segfault. And then I get a whole bunch of errors errors from extensions and I get a whole bunch of garbage from when GNOME's starting up and looking for icons and loading caches and stuff and then it dumps again and then it tries again and dumps again

and here it seems to dump twice or something like that. I haven't quite because it's always when I'm in the middle of like broadcasting so I don't like study it like I do at my workstation and then on Sunday before Linux Action News I was just sitting workstation. And then on Sunday, before Linux Action News, I was just sitting here. Nothing was happening on this computer in front of me

except for Chrome, but I wasn't even using the mouse or keyboard. I was just sitting here chatting with Joe before Linux Action News, and it crashed on me. That sucks. Yeah. So that's three different systems, all with similar builds, though.

Yeah. I haven't seen very much of that, but I don't have any NVIDIA systems running GNOME right now. Or systems that are up for very long. It's making me rethink, like, go minimal, go small, go XFCE, go LXDE, just go tiny desktop for the OBS machine, because I just don't want that to be a factor in stability. We want it big. tiny desktop for the OBS machine because I just don't want that to be a factor in stability. We wanted big. We have a lot of people that are... We have different people. Some people use Linux more. Some people use Linux less.

They're using all of these systems. And so we wanted something very approachable. We wanted something people might be familiar with. And so Gnome Shell seemed like a good idea. Yeah. And it's also my... If I'm going to use a Linux desktop, it's my preferred Linux desktop. So if I've got to sit in front of a bunch of Linux machines all day. It's all there. It just works.

Yeah, and then I'm comfortable and I'm quick when I'm on air, and my sort of muscle memory to use the computer, I can rely on that while I'm talking, so I can edit something on OBS while I'm still talking, and it all changes when you're in a desktop environment you're not super familiar with. But I think the crashing, it almost impacts. Has it hit TechSnap yet?

No, maybe not. It's almost hit every show I've done. I'm sure it will at some point. This same machine before it was running GNOME ran for a year without crashing. I was going to say, yeah, right. And the machines that are exhibiting crashes now, it's only been within the last couple of months. Because they too have been running GNOME 3 on Arch for quite a while now. So anyways, yeah.

Yeah. There you go. I guess that's all I have. I don't see. Oh, yeah, you're right. Beard's totally right. That's what I was thinking. I was just getting confused because it's happened on this show multiple times now.

Yeah, yeah. So I couldn't quite. But it did happen. But it did happen to TechSnap, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a trick. It's kind of a drag. And it's even with systems that are pretty minimal GNOME shell desktops.

They're just kind of the stock basic stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it happens. I guess it happens. Anyways, we shouldn't let it drag down the show because there is still actually a lot of really good stuff to talk about for GNOME, what's coming up,

and things like that. So you can find links to all the extensions we talked about. I think the one that was sort of appealing to me a bit was gtile for light usage, but I don't actually think I'll end up using it. But app folders, the one we were just talking about, app folders does seem like it would be a good way to go,

especially if you have other people using your system. And if you are using Git a lot, the Git integration stuff seems to be pretty fun. Yeah, I'm going to give that a try just because I don't know how much I'll actually use it, but it seems like it would be handy if I just happen to navigate into a Git folder. Why not? Now, I'm going to just toss randomly a topic bomb into the mumble room there, but does anybody else have like a GNOME tweak or extension or setting or something that they do

for their GNOME desktop that makes it great and usable for them that you would want to pass along to somebody else trying out GNOME for the first time? I got two real quick here. I got Caffeine, which should probably be talked about. Caffeine's pretty useful. And the other one that i don't have installed now but i've used in the past is like it's one that just installs a wi-fi refresh button because it doesn't refresh when you open the list of wi-fi those are two great ones caffeine keeps your system awake and yeah the refresh button should just be built into gnome to refresh the wi-fi yeah i thought so i thought i maybe heard something in the moment yeah i was just gonna say that um

i think auto move windows is an extension that's pretty much vital for my usage. Okay, I've seen that one a lot. What does it do? It allows you to specify which workspace a specific application goes to. Do you get to say where in the window, or is it just go to workspace two, but you don't get to say where in workspace two? Technically, GNOME remembers where you want it if you have this, like the location of the pixels wise, but it doesn't remember the workspace, and this kind of makes it combine the two. The only negative thing it doesn't have is that it doesn't, if you have more than one monitor,

it doesn't remember the other monitor. But I think there is someone else working on a different extension for that function. I kind of like that when I have multiple monitors that my second monitor stays static when I switch workspaces. So I'll throw Slack chat, Telegram, maybe a live stream I'm watching, VLC, something like that. I'll throw that on my second vertical screen. And then I'm switching between four virtual desktops on my main screen and the Slack chats and all that stuff stay persistent across those desktops.

I can definitely, you know, there are use cases for both ways, I think. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. That's the hard part. Yeah, because sometimes it is nice to have a separate desktop. There's one more. It's the Maximus 2 extension. It automatically removes the title bar or the top part of the window when you maximize.

Hmm. Nice. Oh, yeah. Okay. Sort of make it a little tighter. Boom. Yeah. So it gives you more real estate for your window.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good one. Anybody else in the Mumba Room have any other ideas they want to toss in for their perfect GNOME setup? Chaotic has a sound input output chooser. That's a good one. Anybody else in the Mumba Room have any other ideas they want to toss in for their perfect GNOME setup? Chaotic has a sound input output chooser. That's a good one.

Yeah, and that's really nice because you hit the menu and then right there in the drop-down menu, you can choose what your output device is. That's handy. It's really nice if you have like a couple of Linux systems of mine in the past, when I booted up, they always defaulted to the HDMI audio out. And so I always had to just change that really quick. And that drop-down makes that super easy.

Not what I want. Yeah, exactly. One that I find quite useful is the num lock and caps lock indicator on the top bar as well. Oh, sure. Because my keyboard doesn't have that at all. It doesn't. Yeah, I got a couple of keyboards, like smaller keyboards now that I have that don't have any lights on them for the keyboard and num lock.

Yeah, so that's a good one too. Yeah, all right. keyboards now that I have that don't have any lights on them for what the keyboard and unlock. Yeah. So that's a good one too. Yeah. All right. And then Yuri in the chat room says that not only does he give a plus one to caffeine, but the taskbar, which I played with a bit. Oh, I have not. Yeah. It's, it's kind of nice to have a taskbar.

So it just puts a really small taskbar of all your open windows across all your desktops. And it's nice, but I find myself because I've used GNOME for so long now, that I never click it. I very rarely click it, because if I really lose a window, I just hit the activities overview and I see everything. And I feel like it's one of those things where if you just switched from a desktop that has a taskbar,

you're going to be inclined to add it, and you're just going to probably use it forever. However, if you sort of follow my take a balanced approach to how many extensions you have, I would encourage you to just try to follow the workflow of GNOME and maybe cheat by putting dash to dock on the side where you can see dots for which apps are running. Back in my day, we learned the GNOME workflow and we stuck to it. You know, I've said it a hundred times, but you know, that's what happens when you have 200 episodes.

I've said it 100 times, but that's what happens when you have 200 episodes. The way I made GNOME work for me when I first switched back when 3.12 came out. Yeah, those were the days. Yeah, that was like the 3.8, 3.10, and 3.12 were like, okay, GNOME started to get good. It's like where Plasma's been now for releases and after release, where it's just unquestionably getting better and better. And it's like features that you, like every release has several features you want and i decided at that point all right i'm going to try to make a go of this and what i'm going to try to do is i'm going to spend 30 days and every day i'm going to try to do something the gnome way that i was sort of resisting and And that included trying it without maximize

and minimize buttons, which I decided after trying that for a couple days wasn't for me, but I gave it a shot. But like the things I did get wrapped my head around was dropping the task bar, using the super launcher and not like installing Gnome Do or Synaptic, just like using the built-in note, like using

the multiple desktops, embracing, maximizing my screens more than I used to. I used to just have tons of windows all over my screen, and now I have one or two windows, and then I switch over to another virtual desktop and using some of the snapping aspects of GNOME. Taking that 30-day quote-unquote challenge, which was just something I was personally doing for myself, made my process of adopting GNOME more of an adventure, and it made tolerating the rough edges I felt at the time easier because, well, it's only for 30 days. And by the time I got done with it, I was like, oh, shit.

Oh, no. I'm actually working faster and better than I ever have on the Linux desktop before. Oh, that's what they were going for. And then I was a convert. that's what they were going for and then i was a convert and it's really only been until recent stability issues and um shell performance issues that i've really been and obviously the constant improvements of plasma and the great future of cute that i've been drawn into the plasma desktop more and more um but gnome shell isn't sitting still no No, it's certainly not. I mean, there's a lot of good things. I think we'll both be very curious to watch this Ubuntu canonical.

Yes. We already just talked about some of the fruits of that labor already. And there's other companies that are getting involved with Gnome that I think are going to make a big difference. We'll talk about them here in a moment. There's a big release of Gnome coming up just around the corner. And there's an application that I think is going to change the Gnome ecosystem. But first, Linux Academy.

linuxacademy.com That's where you go to support the show and sign up for a free seven-day trial. This is a platform that's being continuously updated and improved by Linux advocates, educators, developers, and now a whole team. Linux Academy has been growing

and growing for years. I think really it's been sort of a rocket ship because they're so properly addressing a large demand in the market. Specific Linux training. Not just one of the things they cover, it's what they cover with hands-on labs, scenario-based labs that give you real experience on real servers. Self-paced, in-depth video courses on every Linux and cloud, DevOps, AWS, Azure, OpenStack, containers, security, nitty-itty-bitties. They got great courseware for all of it. Instructor mentoring for when you get stuck, you need some help. They have real humans, full-time staff members who are there to answer your questions. They

have learning paths, which are a series of courses and content planned by instructors. Practice exams to help you get ready for the big test. Study tools, which are guides and lesson audio that you can take with you and notes. Stuff you can download. iOS and Android apps, which are great. And flashcards that are forked by the

community, and that community is stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to support the show, sign up, learn more about any Linux topic, and get a free 7-day trial. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.

And thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. GNOME Shell has a big release coming, and on the road to that release, we're getting Gnome 3.252. It's the second milestone in the development cycle of Gnome 3.26, which is the big one, and is expected to launch around September 13th, if all goes as planned. Now, they've been doing steady improvements, and there's many things we could call out.

I'm just going to call out a couple of things, because there's a lot that may or may not make it. But what has landed is Mutter 3.2522. And it's a big update to Mutter. It fixes some performance issues, not the big ones that I've outlined in user error, but it fixes some, especially on non-Wayland builds. It improves copy and paste operation between the Wayland and X11 display servers, which is huge. Yeah. And it fixes some glitches that occurred when opening Windows and maximizing Windows under GNOME and a few other issues that people have talked about, including support for other stuff.

So new Mudder, really great. Super excited about the new Mudder, which will be landing in the new version of GNOME. Like I said, there's going to be other stuff in GNOME, some which may make it, some which may not, but it looks like one that is going to make it is a new GNOME Disk Utility. This is great. This is getting to be a fully baked application now.

It's available for testing if you want to try it. And it's going to bring a number of improvements under the hood and cosmetically. For example, it offers a more clarified meaning of the encryption settings and mounting options. Well, that's good. Yeah. And it implements an intensive auto-clear switch for unused loop devices. It also is going to support different types of MIME reading for disks

so it can give you some of the names and model types and information that's on there. It's going to prompt users to stop running jobs that are running on devices before you eject them, which is really nice. I'm surprised it didn't do that before, actually. And it will also have the ability to implicitly auto-clear the handling for the lock and auto-mount buttons.

And also will have a new app menu entry that lets users create an empty disk image, adds a tool tip for the auto-clear switch, displays the UUID of selected volumes by default, and implements hints for your passphrase fields, and removes the unused erase dis dialogue. This is like a usable tool now. Yeah, I've kind of avoided it just because I'm more familiar with other tools already.

But she parted and whatnot. Yeah, exactly. But, hey, yeah. Yeah, I played around with the current version a little bit before the show, and they're really putting something that is confusing and difficult, and they're making it easy to use. They're going to make it easier to create blank images so you can use them. That's super helpful.

Yeah. You can use them as volumes to store stuff. Put your porn in here. Put your home clips in here. Put your documents in this one. Then lux encrypt them. And now you have these lux encrypted volumes on your system that you can mount and unmount easily using GNOME Disk. That's really neat. That's really neat.

That is really neat. So that's GNOME 3.26. If you're a GNOME user, it's just looking like such a solid frickin' release. Let's talk about an app that I think is going to help the whole GNOME ecosystem. It's called Builder, and you can find out more with the link in the show notes. It's an IDE for GNOME that's focused on bringing the power of the GNOME and GTK platform to users and developers in a way that's never really been accessible before. And they're doing it in such a smart way.

So not only is the development just continuing along at a pretty good pace with great features, but they're intelligently adding in support for new features of GTK when the timing's right. They've got auto-completion for some of the favorite GTK languages, the things that go with, like C, C++, Python, Vala, Rust, those things. That's awesome. Yeah. So it makes creating GNOME desktop applications much more possible, much easier, much more straightforward,

using a tool that's really, really well supported right now by GNOME. So that's GNOME Builder. And I think it's going to have a big impact in the long-term applications for GNOME, making them good. Like, look at this. It's basic, but it's really nice. It's got an integrated system-wide profiler for performance profiling. It's really come along. Like, I remember when they launched it a couple years ago, and I was like, okay, great. That seems neat. But boy. Now it's got performance profiling for your apps and stuff.

I might have to give this a shot just for some Python because that seems super handy. Oh, Markdown. Just pack man up some new hotness. And then I want to talk about a company that in some parts, in some ways I should say, is a little mysterious to me, and I hope to know more someday. But they seem to have a lot of passion around GNOME, and they have some funding, and they're making some hires.

It's Endless. Do you remember Endless? Oh, yeah. Yeah, the creators of the Endless computer with the Endless operating system. We talked about this a little bit. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Endless OS. Oh, look at this, Wes. Can we the Endless operating system. We talked about this a little bit. Yeah, Endless OS. Oh, look at this, Wes.

Can we explore? Look at this. We can explore. You want to explore? We can explore in English. Let's do that. Let's explore in English. Endless OS is a free Linux-based operating system that makes using a computer simpler and accessible for everyone.

Endless OS works easily from the moment you turn it on. Just like a smartphone, apps are open from the home screen with one simple click. EndlessOS is designed to be useful even when you're offline. Quality content is always at your fingertips so you can find the information you need when you want it. There's an encyclopedia with over 50,000 articles, plus tons of useful information about parenting, health, culture, and so much more. There's a built-in app center where you can access over 100 applications and add any favorites to the desktop. The best part is they're all free and pre-installed. EndlessOS is a great tool for

school, work, or home. It comes with LibreOffice completely free, so you never have to pay for software licenses. There's a word processor for creating documents, a spreadsheet app for budgeting, and an app to make clean and professional presentations. You can also open and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. And so if you're watching the video, it's kind of obvious. This is a GNOME-based desktop running on top of Linux. And Endless, you might remember them. They had, like, the bamboo-covered ducks. Do you remember seeing those? They. And Endless, you might remember them. They had, like, the bamboo-covered ducks. Do you remember seeing those?

They have these Endless computers. They have this circular dome computer. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, this thing that kind of looks like a subwoofer almost. It really does. And then they have Mission, the Mission Mini, which is the... Oh, that's so cute. Yeah, the little...

Okay, I want it. I kind of want it. Yeah. And this is for a different market than us. Like, the Mission 1 is a $249 Intel NUC that's wrapped in bamboo though. I mean that's like the most badass looking NUC ever. I'll run an arch on that. That's fine.

Damn, right? So Endless is doing some hires. Is that right? A longtime Canonical employee, Michael Hall, recently left Canonical. Wow. And I believe has gone to Endless. And other individuals that I probably shouldn't name have also been contracting and working with Endless. Several, actually.

So they seem to have some funding. They seem to have some products. They have a couple of deals with a couple of different stores where they're selling this. I think in California, in the store somewhere. You can just go into a store. That stores where they're selling this, I think in California, in the store. Oh, you can just go into a store? Yeah, that's where they're based out of. Okay, wow. Yeah, I think they have two offices right now.

And they are actively contributing, my understanding, upstream to GNOME. Because they plan to base this thing around GNOME. And they plan to use Flatpaks to distribute their software. It could be interesting because they are specifically hiring people to work on the community and to work on the code of the GNOME desktop. You don't often get a lot of companies that do that for an end user type. Like you'll get companies that want to improve the ARM code or the power management, but you don't, I mean, not a lot these days do we get companies that want to come in

and specifically make the Linux desktop better. They're trying to build computers for like the next billion people, essentially. So, you know, a bit ambitious. A bit ambitious. They say, our team, we're small but global. We're in 17 countries. We've assembled a world-class team

across design software hardware and operations united one goal to make computing available for users everywhere using linux and gnome would be a great way to do it absolutely yeah uh i'm uh i'm fascinated by all this the gnome you know it seems like their their base is pure enough for this kind of thing like where you can build on it and you can get something that's simple enough for people to use, especially with what we're talking about like the disk manager and things like that where we've been griping for a long time about like, yeah,

we don't have these features for things, you've redefined things, you're building from the ground up now, but maybe we're at the point where what they have is really sound. If I recall, the idea is that they're going to deliver updates forever? Or something like, I can't remember what the Endless part comes in,

but yeah, you could be right, Wes. You know what they probably say on their website, endlessos.com if you guys want. The Endless OS comes with everything your family needs. There you have it. Can we get a clip of that? It could be right, Wes, just right there. It's a pretty cool company, and they seem to be pretty involved with GNOME.

So you combine that now with things like GNOME Builder and the path of GTK. So I also thought maybe we'd talk a little bit about GTK4, which is coming down the road. It's not going to be like a game changer like GTK3 was from GTK2. There's going to be some things that change. Right now they're at GTK3.91. It's available. That's going to become GTK4, the toolkit. They have support for macOS now.

GTK apps will be able to target macOS. Probably a smart thing because Qt can do it. Yeah, totally. So now you're able to run on Windows. You can run GTK apps on be able to target macOS. Probably a smart thing because Qt can do it. Yeah, totally. So now you can run GTK apps on Windows, Mac. Okay, that's pretty nice, I guess. It just feels weird. It does. You're right.

It's probably good. Yeah. There's a lot of other work they have queued up for GTK 4, which you can follow up in the show notes if you want. You just want the Cocoa apps on GTK, right? You know, somebody needs to do the reverse. Let's get some of the Mac apps on the Linux desktop. Yeah.

Either way, I think the future is bright. If you look at GTK 4, they seem to be – they really have their senses about where it's going. Like there's some improvements. There's some things they're adding, like some nice Vulkan support in there too. Yeah. I mean there's some good stuff. But it's not like throwing everything away and we will have forks for a decade because of the change.

It's not going to be that dramatic. Yeah, it's going to be, Rikai says, I'm sure GTK on the Mac will be just as native as it is on Windows. Hey, at least you can run GIMP on Windows. It can happen, and that's all that matters. That's all that matters. I've used that really actually more times than I can count, so it really does. It is actually quite matters. I've used that really actually more times than I can count. So it really does.

It is actually quite useful. Yeah. And, you know, I think Apple killed off their X server a while ago. Oh, did they? I think so. I just remember seeing it there. So I think without this, you wouldn't have a way because you could always do X on the Mac and then run the GTK apps. But now I think with this, this will solve that problem.

So the future is bright not only for GTK and GTK4, but the future is also bright for the GNOME desktop, for the companies getting involved. You've got such, this is such a DBAG term, but you have quote-unquote bilateral support, if I could steal a political term. We have bilateral corporate support for the GNOME desktop. We've already got Canonical working on ways to improve it.

You've got System76 working on ways to make it more palatable to consumers. You've got Endless working on ways to make it more palatable to the next billion computer users. Got to be Endless. Yeah. And they're hiring actual people and paying them to work on this stuff. GNOME 4 is just around the corner. It's all pretty good. It's all pretty good.

It's happening. It's funny. It's like, what kind of dick am I for now switching away, right? Year of the GNOME desktop, Chris. Where are you? I know. It is the year of the Gnome desktop. And I'm like, all right, well, peace out, guys.

Thanks for all the fish. And I'll be over here in Plasma Land trying to make it as Gnome as possible. Right. This is the curse that you have bestowed upon yourself. Oh, man. I mean, what are you going to do? Are you going to wait until Ubuntu comes out in October with their GNOME version and hope that the updates get pushed

to GNOME and they go, yeah, we'll take that, or GNOME's going to go, no, we're fine. We're not going to do that. Well, in the case of this fractionated coconut oil, high DPI scaling, it's a GNOME developer and a Canonical employee working together

in the same room. And Canonical has... The nice thing about that is the guy shared this on Google+. Canonical has a whole bunch of high DPI monitors they can put in the room for testing, which he didn't have access to. So it's not like they're just developing it in a room somewhere, in some white room, and

they're just going to throw the code over the fence. They actually have the guy on the GNOME project working on this in their office. So that's like, that's a whole new level of collaboration for them. It really is. I think the future is bright there. Maybe, maybe I'll be back sooner than later, you know, because this, like this crashing problem, if this went away, the performance issues I suffer with, I feel like, yeah, you

know what? I could reload the GNOME shell every few days. Easy enough, right? It's easy enough. It's, right? It's easy enough. It's not ideal. It's easy enough. But the crashing, that's where I draw the line. That impacts business. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

But I am confident that whatever it is, it will eventually get worked out. If it is an NVIDIA bug issue, if it's a GNOME issue, if it's a... The grass will be green again for you. Some weird USB bus issue for all I know. Who knows?

It's weird that also when GNOME Shell crashes, our audio cuts out for a little bit in OBS. I don't know what that's about. Either way, our problem to figure out, GNOME's making good progress. So this is sort of my love song to GNOME as I begin to switch away for a little while. I'm sure I'll be back one day, friend. But thank you for all the great times, Gnome Shell. Thank you for all the fun extensions, and the enthusiasm and energy around Gnome Shell

is higher than ever. Cool, great extensions are being created that weren't around a year ago. Joey over at OMG Ubuntu is doing great write-ups, making it clear and easy how you get the stuff that he's talking about, which is one of the things Joey really excels at, is he's like, here's the thing that's really great.

Here's a few screenshots of it. And oh, by the way, if you're on one of these distros, this is how you get it. I love that. I try to do that too. We have links to everything we talked about in the show notes. It is going to be the year of Gnome. It really is.

So don't take my switching away as a sign that it's going away and I'm condemning it. I'll be back. I'll be back. In the meantime, I heard Plasma 5.10 hit the Arch repo stable today. Oh, boy. So all I've got to do is go upstairs and update my system and I got Plasma 5.10. Maybe it's time for Chris tries a tiling window manager all over again.

Oh, don't start that again. This time on Wayland. What about Plasma Desktop and window rules? Maybe that'll just do what I want where it puts everything where I want Oh, don't start that again! I want to see if I can... This time, on Wayland. What about Plasma Desktop and Window Rules? Maybe that'll just do what I want, where it puts everything where I want.

I don't know. Maybe I'm dreaming. Let me know. LinuxUnplugged.reddit.com. Don't forget, the barbecue is official. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting.

If you can make it, Telegram group. Bit.ly slash JBTelegram. Join us live. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash Calendar. Wes, say goodbye.

Goodbye. join us live jupiter broadcasting.com slash calendar west say goodbye goodbye Okay, Producer Michael, did you leave? Or can you break me the bad news? Am I going to be screwed with my dreams and hopes for plasma window rules? Uh, no. No, that'll do it. That'll do what I want? Good. It's awesome.

Okay, good. For some reason, when I read your comment in the chatroom, I was like, uh-oh, that might not be a good way to go. I see. I was saying I'd do this. Oh, okay. Awesome. Oh, good, good, good. Window rules is...

It's more complicated to set up, but it is awesome. So, it's actually... You have to set it individually. So you set the window however you want it, and then you apply a window rule. And what the best part about it is that once you set it to however you want, like regular just moving

around and stuff, it's detecting what the current settings are. So if you try to just make a window rule in the system settings, it's a pain in the butt. But if you do it from right-clicking a title bar, it'll give you an option that's like, oh, okay, just activate this, and whatever you currently have, it will use that setting. Okay.

So it's actually not that hard to do if you know what to do in the right order. Okay. But the other part is that Plasma has built-in tiling, essentially. It doesn't have the automatic, you know, it's going to tile it based on what people expect tiling window managers to do. But it has these shortcuts where you can do, you know, horizontal top and bottom, the side left and right like people, you know, are used to. It also does quarter tiling, so you can do the top left, and right like people you know are used to it also does quarter tiling so you know the bottom right tiling okay but none of that is none of that has a shortcut by default the functionality is in the system it is there you have to manually go and put what

shortcuts you want that i've run into that before and been confused trying to get those shortcuts right yeah like what i do is with my keyboard uh the it's perfect because the you know the the insert home page up that little set of six things cluster i have i have a super plus the uh top left like the insert key is top left of the screen tiling, and then et cetera for the rest of them, and home and end are horizontal tiling. Hmm. So what I do is set it up for that. Nice features. If I want to keep it however it is,

I just use the shortcut, puts it where I want, and then use window rules to remember it. Okay. That sounds actually pretty... Maybe we need like a Plasma 101 with Mr. Tanel. I may, if I end up switching, do a few videos on it. I'm actually working on doing that. Oh, are you?

Oh, nice. Good thinking. My idea is to like kind of... How to use Plasma and avoid the headaches of not understanding how to use everything. Yeah, because like I've got the GNOME thing down. I can install GNOME, a couple extensions, and it's there. But I would like to get there in Plasma 2.