LINUX Unplugged - Episode 201: Turbo Mode Ikey | LUP 201

Episode Date: June 14, 2017

Desktop Linux is about to get a lot more competitive, one of its recent biggest disruptors is going full time. Ikey, founder of the Solus project, joins us to discuss where this is going. Plus A dive into Fedora 26 beta, the security of Cockpit, Ubuntu Gnome survey results & opening some Windows gaming tech to all of us.

I totally don't mean to be like a Chrome hipster, but I am really getting to the point where it feels like Chrome is way too big. There's way too much stuff, and Google doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. Like they're adding in payments, APIs to the desktop browser in Chrome 60. They are making it – they're reengineering the way that it handles your mouse cursor. They're doing a lot of improvements, so I got to give them credit. Like it's making steady progress, but it's getting a little ridiculous as to the amount of things that Chrome can do. And the versioning is just getting out of control. It's like version 60 is the new beta.

It's nuts. And not that Firefox is too much better. As we record, they just released version 54 this morning. But this is what's awesome about 54. And maybe, Wes, maybe – i know you were joking about switching back to firefox but this could be it here because they're bringing the multiple process system to other operating systems besides windows hey that's exciting yeah so it's it's like i have been waiting for that me too me too me too very much so it's like i'm looking at while i'm looking

at chrome right now i'm going'm going, there's some extensions. Like Template is just such an awesome extension for composing our show notes. It's so great. What does it do? Game changer. It's a game changer. I don't know about this. I'm not hit.

It's an extension that lets me. So you see, so take this paragraph right here. You got a title that's probably like a header five maybe or header four. It's probably a header three or four. Then you have a paragraph here that has some links in it. It looks like it has two separate links. And what I can do, which is really great, is I can highlight this text on this web page. I can right-click.

Everybody's going to steal this from me now. I can go to template, and then I can say quote and link. this from me now. I can go to template and then I can say quote and link and what's great about it is, so if I go to text edit here, not test edit, but if I go to text edit, what it's produced for me is

simple, easy, clean markdown where it's giving me a markdown link for the URL. It grabs the title of the website. That's handy. It looks like it was a header 2. It doesn't actually accommodate header 2 ironically, but if say there it was a header too. And so it doesn't actually accommodate header two, ironically. But if, say, there wasn't a header there, it would put the text I selected in a markdown block quote, and then it does reference links for all the URLs in that.

That's neat. Yeah. Now, as somebody who does this 200 times a day, you can imagine how nice it is to not have to. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge part of what I'm doing for all of our show research all the time, for all the shows every single day. And it is so handy, especially when we're on the air and say, you know, Ike says something that's really something I want to cite in the show notes. Like, yeah, go grab this thing here or here's the post where he talks about this. I can quickly, while I have it up on my screen, grab that text and go drop it. And it's already ready for –

Right in the doc. And then it goes out as part of the show notes. That's super handy. So I love those things. No converting, no messing. But I bet you somebody out there in the audience could come up with a way that's not a browser extension, because that's what I'm going for here. Let's just get off the browser extension sauce completely and come up with other

methods to do that, to other ways to process text. Now, I don't know exactly. It'd have to be probably something that can read my clipboard. Because I could copy it into my clipboard and then something that could read my clipboard and output structured Markdown for me would really be all I need. And then I could start switching to Firefox. I could do GNOME web. I mean, it really wouldn't matter at that point. And I think that's the direction to go. And once I replace some of these things I can only do in my browser with other tools that are just more operating system based, then I think I'm going to go back to Firefox, which should probably be a

couple of releases down the road where this stuff's landing. It could be one big kumbaya, Wes. Oh, kumbaya. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 201 for June 13th, 2017. is Chris. My name is Wes. You know what, Wes? Sometimes you roll the dice and you have a 200 episode where nothing happens and then the next week it's like, oh damn, now that's the party. So I'm really excited because we've got some great follow-up stories of things we've talked about recently in the show just a couple of weeks

ago. A project that I think doesn't get enough attention has a new release. Then we'll get into a couple of new stories that we haven't talked about, do a deep dive into Fedora's, or I guess Red Hat's, cockpit. The security of it. Some interesting choices they've made. We'll discuss the new Fedora 26 beta as well.

And then the internet's friend, Ike, that's what I'm calling him now, everyone's favorite distro maker, joins us to discuss his big news and the resulting huge news for Solus users. And then, I'm really happy to announce that something that was locked down to Windows users and proprietary systems will be opened up to all of us. And it was opened up in such a big way. And then, I was so impressed by the project, I did a little deep diving and discovered, there it is, discovered the source of something magical. Maybe I'm overselling it a bit, but I can tell you it's better than a keyboard. If Apple can call a keyboard magical, I'm definitely calling... Can and does.

Yeah, they can and do currently. I'm calling this story magical, and that's more magic than their magic. So I think it holds up. I think it holds up. A lot of good stuff to get into. A lot of fun stuff. I think it holds up. A lot of good stuff to get into.

A lot of fun stuff. And we have ourselves, as always, a traditional virtual log. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings. Hello. Hello. Good day. Hello. Howdy.

Hi. Hello. Hello. Howdy. We'll let them be the judge of if you're overselling this or not. Yeah, you think so? Mm-hmm. They were so quiet.

They did so good. Like, I don't? Mm-hmm. They were so quiet. They did so good. Like, I don't know if you heard, like, I paused right before I introduced them because I had to, like, double check the sound bar. I looked over and I'm like, shit, I didn't mute them. I usually mute them, but, you know, we were just, you know, shooting the shit before the show, and so I just, I muted you and I left them unmuted during the intro and during that whole setup of the show, and none of you guys screwed it up. That is really –

We love you. Best, best audience in podcasting. I swear to God. It is so amazing. You guys are literally more professional than me today. By far. Job well done. I got so excited about the new Firefox that I lost my head.

So let's start with some follow-up. excited about the new Firefox that I lost my head. So let's start with some follow-up. The big gnome survey that Joey published on OMG Ubuntu. I didn't know when we were going to... I actually didn't know if we would hear the results. Could be months. Sometimes those things don't...

Maybe we'll find out when they ship the LTS version of the... This is what you wanted. But no. The results are in. I don't know. I don't find them to be too shabby. But I would say overall my reading of Joey's post on OMG Ubuntu was a little disappointed. He was like, well, a little uncommitted on some of this stuff. But check out some of these numbers.

And congrats to OMG Ubuntu for pulling this all in. Can you hear that? Yeah, you're squeaking. That's my chair. You're so squeaky. I got to get some ranch hand on that thing. Ranch hand, Wes. That's better than WD-40.

Get some ranch hand. So a massive 18,330 people took part in the survey. There were eight questions. If you recall, they were all optional. And they just asked people to rate how useful they considered various GNOME extensions on a scale of one to five. One being not useful and a 5 being very useful. The first question was about the dash-to-doc extension, and 17,948 people participated in that question,

and 80% of them, Wes, rated dash-to-doc as a 3, 4, or 5. 80% of people thought at least it was useful. And this is where I think Joey's maybe a slight disappointment seems to come through to me. And I don't mean to put words into his mouth. I might be misreading this. But he says, it seems like a slam dunk to him. So canonical response, dash to doc's popularity doesn't necessarily mean we should ship dash to doc as an extension by default. But rather, it shows us our users would like the doc to be visible at all times or shown hidden automatically, as opposed to only shown in the activities view. He says that sounds uncommittal by Canonical

and sounds like their intention is to persuade GNOME upstream to add dash-to-doc functionality in. Interesting. Which sounds like the beginnings of a rift. You know, I mean, that's how things start. We got this great idea for notifications or the way system tray icons should be handled. Hey, here's some suggestions in code. What do you think?

And GNOME says, well, we've already got that figured out. Thanks, though. Yeah, I guess it all depends on how the upstream would take it, right? Would you want dash-to-dock features built into GNOME? Would you use that? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I mean,-dock features built into GNOME? Would you use that? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I have it on every GNOME system. I find, I'm not a big fan of hidden UI elements to begin with,

especially for anybody who's using a system for a first-time expert user or total noob. When you rely on certain incantations, aka gestures, or putting your mouse in a certain corner to get the menu, or knowing that there's a particular button on your keyboard that you should press to activate that menu, I think you're expecting too much from the end user. car or a drill or a microwave and everything's laid out in front of them and then it's up to them to deduce how to operate that machinery and their intelligence will either make them more successful or less successful but when you completely hide the interface from them there's literally nothing for them to grok there's nothing for them to intuit from it there's nothing for them to instinctually poke at and so they either have to know well on a lot of systems if i flick

up from the bottom or i know that on windows if press this key, it brings up the start menu, which most users don't know. I find it to be poor UI design. And so, yes, to me, dash to dock is a must. Just like I also agree with 90% of the respondents who said that top icons is useful. 90% of the respondents say, yeah, we want top icons. And I think, again, this is another one of those, you have this little nubbin that likes to sit there and flatulate down in the corner of your GNOME desktop. And it's irritating as fuck, especially

when you have a full screen application, which, by the way, GNOME encourages you to use. So anytime you're interacting with the UI down there, you have this stupid little thing flatulating down there. Nobody likes it. Plus, again, it's hidden UI. And so I can completely become unaware that I've left Malleus sucking down resources in the background when it hides the icons or that Skype is logged in. These are things that I like to have a heads-up display about so I am aware of these applications sucking down resources in the background. You're saying your shell should tell you about the applications that you're running? Yeah, and I think most

GNOME users agree. So there's certain obvious things like this that I think if Canonical were to go to GNOME and say, well, duh, guys, you should be doing it this way, they'd go, well, screw you. We intentionally didn't design it that way. I don't know. Maybe I... Ike, do you think my reading of this is too extreme?

No. Well, not overly extreme. Appropriately extreme. I find... Yeah, I mean, I guess... An appropriate level of extremity. So I find some of these answers, too, to be pretty obvious. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. I mean, if you compare what Ubuntu was shipping before versus what they're going to go now a lot of it feels polar opposite and isn't going to be discoverable by their user base so if you look at things like top icons they're kind of a must-have and as for the dash to the dock well that kind of speaks for itself and then to say that perhaps it's not as important. It doesn't quite add up in my head. Maybe it's just me. Yeah. I can totally see them either implementing it on their own or just shipping the extensions.

I don't think Canonical has to play hardliner here. So they have sort of an advantage. Okay, if you guys want to do it upstream, we are happy to do that. But if you don't want to, we will package up these extensions and we'll maintain them and make sure that we test them before we ship you package upgrades to GNOME. Yeah, I mean, either of those sound okay.

So practically to end users, I think they'll still get the functionality. It was the most divisive result. Can you guess what it was? Of course, you'd have to remember all of the different options, so it's not a fair question. But it's one that Joe and I just talked about on Linux Action News on Monday. No top left hot corner and the applications menu, which is, I think, pretty not surprising because we've also talked about it on this show. They were the biggest deviations from GNOME's core design.

The applications menu gives you that drop-down applications. And the left trigger area, which is GNOME, I think really GNOME is almost reliant on people accidentally triggering it to discover how to use the desktop. It's inevitable. It will happen. And then the last one, which is cut right down the middle, and this is the one Joe and I were talking about actually, window controls, left or right, which on 1710 beta right now, or alpha, they're on the left, like a Mac,

like a damn dirty Mac. I don't really care. Is there like a, I don't know, whatever, I know how to close the window. Why the hell is it not configurable? Yeah. I mean... I suppose that could be, yeah.

If I switch over to arc, do they stay on the left? That would be a bit of a pain in the butt. Anyways, so there you go. Follow up on the survey results. I find the whole thing to be sort of a good inclination, or a good, not inclination, but a good forecasting, a foreshadowing of where all this is going. And I'm really kind of happy we got to see some of the results.

I wasn't sure. It doesn't tell us what their decisions are going to be. No, it does not. But hopefully we'll see some upstream activity or, I don't know, actual decisions forthcoming. You know, in some ways, I'm really glad they're not saying what their decisions are because it gives them the opportunity to try different things out go all in on an idea right yeah hopefully they like they can land on an idea that it will actually work and they can invest it allows them to bounce around without being constrained by constrained by the things they promised um so it's probably a good thing that they're not and and really the the the the core truth will just be whatever ships. Right. Exactly.

Okay. One more story that's sort of breaking today as we record the show. I've been trying to do these sort of at the top, not to take away from less news coverage. I've been doing a little less news coverage in this show and trying to do more community stuff, more project stuff, less news coverage in this show and trying to do more community stuff, more project stuff, more things that I think are applicable to daily Linux users, people who live and breathe in Linux, but

stuff that's not, stuff that's really super news heavy and headlining, I'm sort of saving for Linux Action News. That makes sense. So I'm kind of shifting some of the tone of some of this stuff to be more like community projects and things that are sort of under underreported but really great sources of discussion or really interesting things happening at.

And I've been enjoying it more and more. And one of the projects I'm kind of including in that, because I don't think it really gets a lot of discussion, it's maybe just more of a small community focus. People who love it really know it, but we never really discuss it, and it's Open Media Vault. And Open Media Vault 3 actually shipped today. Whoa! It's been, yeah. I mean, it was close to shipping when I reviewed

OpenMediaVault months ago, and so it is using Debian 8, Jesse, as you would probably expect. They've totally, quote-unquote, refactored the back-end, and they have quote-unquote, adapted that back-end to SystemD. Moving with the times, that's good to systemd. Hey, moving with the times.

That's good to see. Seems like that's probably kind of obvious since Debian made the switch to systemd. Anyways. Hey, they wrote new unit files. Yeah, that's true. Also added support for extended FAT, which would be nice for people hooking up external devices

to import them into their open media vault. LVM Snapshots. Yeah, and improved. Yeah, LVM Snapshots is good. And improved USB and rotational storage device detection. Mmm. I brought this one up because I think this is a direction I want to go with the Open Media Vault

server I set up for Angela months ago, is I want to, I was considering setting up another one here at the studio eventually, and then setting up some sort of rotational backup system between her place and this place. That would be pretty slick, yeah. Yeah, a little off-site exchange.

And maybe something like, because we're talking terabytes and terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data, so maybe something like, maybe I could do the initial moving of data would still probably take days, and then syncing over the internet would probably be sufficient after that.

I don't know. Something I was considering, so I was really happy to see that go into OpenMediaV as well no more i386 though yeah i mean you can still install it i guess but they will no longer be making an iso image yeah i first at first i was like so what but then i was like actually one of the really nice things about free nas and open media vault is this whole take something that you are maybe going to toss or has been sitting around in your garage or whatever for months or years and get new life, get new use out of it.

Yeah, that's true. I think that's- This is my old rig. It don't need much. I'm not doing a crazy array, but I can buy a little extra RAM, put some disks in it. That's a good point. You know, Mr. West, last week was our 200th episode. Is that right?

I know. And in tradition, we were pretty unplanned, pretty unorganized. I mean, this is the quote-unquote unplugged show, which suffers from time to time from proper planning. I admit that is part of it. It is a design flaw, if you will. But we are making up for it in a big way. making up for it in a big way. On America's birthday,

Tuesday, July 4th, 2017, we will be having a virtual lug become a real lug. Wow, how about that? It's not virtual when you're going to actually be here. It's hard not to say, though. We are inviting you, the lug, out there to come join us in person here at the JB1 studio for a little barbecuing.

Or Noah has advised me to call it grilling. Fair enough. I've been advised by my counselor. But we didn't invite him, so it's fine. You know, you should tell him he's not invited because then he would show up. Oh, yeah, right. That's a little Noah trick for you there.

Tell him he can't do something and he'll do it. Sorry, Noah, you can't come. You just absolutely cannot come. I don't think you can pull it off. I don't think you have the means to. It's not really your crowd. Yeah, and I just don't think you can pull it off. I don't think you have the means to. It's not really your crowd. Yeah, and I just don't think you could make it happen. So there you go.

Maybe now we'll see him. Yeah, so that will be streamed to some degree. I'm not exactly sure how the hell we're going to do that since we'll be outside. But people have – well, it's already been committed, so I'm going to try to make that work. I wasn't conferred with on that decision, but i can try to make it happen but uh be here dustin's gonna also be here i might have another sous vide going we don't know there has been rumors of ribs as well wes if you got any inclinations of something you'd like to make you are welcome okay you know like uh like a nice uh i don't know, mac or ranch.

I don't know. Fruit salad? I don't know. Oh, I could bring some Hawaiian mac salad. Yes. What? Really? Heck yes, I can do that.

Absolutely. Coming right up. Get down on that. We're going to have, anyways, we're going to celebrate 200 weeks, I think without interruption, too, of the Unplugged program on July 4th, which is not too long before I hit the road and head off to Montana. So we'll talk a little bit about in user error but i will be gone shortly after that i think actually i think i leave the weekend

after that barbecue so we have the barbecue on the 4th of july yeah and then i leave on the 14th so i uh okay so i'll be back i'll be here for one unplugged after our okay barbecue one and then i'll be on the road. If we survive. If the studio doesn't get burned down. So if you're going to be able to make it, I don't think we're having, you know, probably it's going to be a small crowd. Because not only is it only people in our neck of the woods are going to be able to make it, which is, you know, the tiny percentage of the audience. But then half the people that go, that say they're going to go, don't show. And people have, you know, jobs and kids and lives.

We get that. But, of course, I'm going to buy enough food for all the people that say they're going. So those of you who do make it, we're going to eat food. It's going to be great. We're going to have a very food coma episode that week. Anyways, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. If you think you could make it, we'd really like

to see you. And toss in there. We've got a little conversation going. meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting to have Wes and Chris cook for you. That's right. We got a little conversation going meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting to have Wes and Chris cook for you. That's right. As we're doing for 200 episodes.

What the hell? Who thought that was my idea too? Making more work for us. They should be damn it Wes. Take this down.

Take this down Wes. For episode 300 the audience cooks for us. Okay. Thank you. Make a note.

Thank you. Thank you. Okay? Thank you. Make a memo. Note is made. Yep. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Next time. You know, I'm new to this. I'm still learning. Someday.

Someday. Linux.ting.com. Go there to support the show. And if you sign up, you'll get either if you bring a device or if you got no device, you're going to get a great deal. You get $25 in either purchase power off a phone or $25 in service credit. Now, you're like, Chris, $25? Yeah, I know it's $25 because $25 matters.

Average Ting line, it's going to be $23 per month per phone. So that's $6 just for the line. I'm going to break this down for you right now. Ready, Russ? Ready? Like you never heard before. Let's hear it. $6 for the line and then just whatever you use,

that's what you pay for the minutes, the messages, and the megabytes. Oh, I got the chair squeak in there too. That was good. I hope that showed up on mic. Hold on. Let me see. Hold on.

Did I get it in there? Did I get it in there? See, the chair squeak's important. The chair, because that tells you I'm a thrifty person. And so you can trust my recommend. He's not spending money all over town. No. No, because I'm in a...

Buying equipment for the studio. It literally impacts the broadcast. It infects the job. I'll tell you what, when I see a good deal, I'll get a chair. And when I saw a good deal, I win it and I got Ting. Linux.ting.com, that's where you go to support the show and get the $25 credit. I think you're probably going to have a device that works.

Check their BYOD page to be sure. But they got a CDMA network and they got a GSM network. And so that's a lot of network. And that means it's going to work with a lot of phones. You have a great dashboard, nationwide coverage, no contracts, no early termination fee. You just pay for what you use. However much you talk, however much you text, however much data you use, that's what you pay for. Like me, much you talk, however much you text, however much data you use, that's what you pay for. Like me, I'm all on the Telegram. I don't, a month or more since I've gotten a text message.

What I tend to get is either an SMS alert about a system being down or a two-factor thing on one of my services that I use. That's maybe like three or four like text messages, maybe one a week. There's no way I'd want to pay for more than that. It's just a waste of money. It's just a waste. Pissing in the wind, is that the saying? Like throwing money into the wind? Yeah, well, I'd be like pissing on money and throwing it in the wind, which then it would just come back wet and smack me in the face.

It's gross now. It's super gross. I don't care. I don't care. Like, I just don't want it. It's a waste of money. It was literally a waste of money. Linux.ting.com. Great devices, either from Ting directly or you can bring your own.

They have fantastic customer service, great dashboard, and a blog that I follow. And this one, I'm going to put out there as probably the best retrospective I've read on Pokemon Go. Looking back at it, really what it was about was augmented reality becoming a thing. And I think long term, that's what we're going to take away. You don't really see people walking around playing- A little rite of passage for AR there. Exactly. So it's a good, it's a really good write up on it and on AR in general and the state of AR and the market and where it's going and the different vendors that are getting in on it, including Google and Apple and even Facebook in there and Samsung.

It's just a great write-up. Start, if you want to read that, but start by going to linux.ting.com. I got a picture of a dog with a Ting sticker, too. Linux.ting.com. You go there, look around, and even if you're not ready to switch to Ting, I recommend their blog. It's a good resource for pretty much any enthusiast out there. Linux.ting.com. It's a shame our friends from Canonical couldn't join us this

week because I'm about to talk about their favorite subject right now, and that would be snap packages. Snap packages have finally gotten something that flat packs can do, and they essentially make the snap packs smaller. So take CoreBird, a Twitter client. It's about two megabytes. The flat pack would be about 12 megabytes. And the snap of CoreBird, a Twitter client. It's about 2 megabytes. The Flatpak would be about 12 megabytes. And the Snap of CoreBird, 112 megabytes. That's good, right? I mean, you get more software that way. Holy, holy, holy shit.

Holy shit. And see, the thing is Flatpaks are able to take advantage of shared GNOME stuff, shared like stuff outside of just that flat pack, like the GNOME platform runtime. So snaps are essentially getting functionality close to this. Now, that's my rough understanding. Like I said, I don't want to misrepresent what it is. But my understanding is, is that now if, if there is a GNOME platform snap, you could pull that in as part of Corebird. So I think you would still be pulling that stuff down if you don't have it originally. Right, but then it would be shared across different apps that I'll use now. Yeah. Ike, do you have a better understanding of any of this than I do?

I'm assuming you must. Yeah, I mean, they're basically doing the same sort of thing at the moment as Flatpak is doing. That's basically what it comes down to, bundling up the shared libraries so you've got this shared, dare I mean, they're basically doing the same sort of thing at the moment as Flatpak is doing. That's basically what it comes down to, bundling up the shared library. So you've got this shared, dare I say, dependency to deduplicate the dependencies between the apps. So while the app may appear smaller, you still have that initial cost of that runtime. But once you've installed one app, they get it. But then it's shared between loads of them.

Right. Yeah. And at the moment, I believe it's limited to GNOME only. I'm not really sure how scalable this is going to result in being, though. Because while the GNOME is a very specific platform, if you start getting things that have these custom patch libraries, it's not going to work there. As soon as things are bundled in their own libraries,

you just can't deduplicate them. So time will tell. I mean, it's an early start, but it's a good start. Time will tell if people don't end up just bundling their own GTK stuff so that way it works and is stuck to the versions they expect and has the right theming and functionality. That option's there now. Some may use the shared stuff, and some people may find it's just more practical to just bundle it all themselves. I don't know. just bundle it all themselves. I don't know. Speaking of Flatpaks, though, there is a bit of a fundraiser for infrastructure for Flathub, which I think Flathub is a necessary thing for,

if we're going to have, Flatpaks are going to be sustainable. I think like a hub. You don't want to get them from GitHub and then compile them yourself, Chris? Or some gnome developer's blog where he just updates it every few months with new links. No, that's not been working for me very well. And what I like that – what Robert's doing here, Robert McQueen, is he also is intentionally trying to make this outside of GNOME. So this is more than GNOME. This is a bigger deal. So the GNOME Foundation agreed to support Flathub by offering support for legal advisors and whatnot.

So he sat down with them to figure out the best way to get the initial ball rolling in all of this. And GNOME has also offered their sysadmin to help with some of the setup and monitoring. But his intention is to keep Flathub infrastructure independent from GNOME so they can make their own app decisions about making it easier to install proprietary apps, collecting donations for app authors, et cetera.

So he wants to build up an infrastructure. And he's trying to raise, I think, 100 pounds. No, I'm sorry, 800. And he's already raised, as of this post, 532. Oh, that's great. But it looks like it's at paypal.me slash RamCQ if you want to donate. PayPal.me slash RamCQ. I think if you're perhaps – I don't know if this is a thing that exists in our audience.

But if you're an end user who's an advocate of flat packs, this seems like a pretty good thing to get behind, the flat hub. And I applaud Robert's decision to try to keep it a separate thing. I think that's a really good idea. Yeah, I think so too. So obviously, you know, it's a very useful GNOME tool. But speaking of GNOME and Red Hat, and well, why not mention Fedora? Fedora 26 beta is out today as we record. Ah, I lied.

There was one more app breaking story today. You texted. I was going to come on here and give you like my first takes so i downloaded it i installed it and um you converted no i mean it's it's uh it's fedora it's um it's it's great i mean it's fine it's it's fine it's fine it's just uh it's just a revving of Fedora. It's like GNOME 3.24. A quiet march. Yeah, it's exactly it. So I checked out Fedora Workstation, and it's got a new background, which is the one I have up on the screen right now. And that was what I took away from it.

You know, because if you're already on GNOME Current, there's nothing different. So when you install Fedora 26, it's just GNOME 3.24. It's great. It's fine. It looks like a good, solid release. I installed it with no issues. The performance was fine. But I don't have anything else to report. I thought I'd have a nice little bit of journalism moment there

and do a little deep dive on a topic. And I walked away with a realization that this is why distro reviews are not really a thing I do anymore because there's just nothing there to really talk about. It's a great release. Where it's the uncanny valley of distro reviews where it's just good enough. What it is, it sounds like what Mark Shuttleworth was talking about

early on where they're like, we're just going to ship Gnome and we're not really going to touch it and if you just want a Gnome workstation, fine. That's what this is. If you want a nice workstation and it has GNOME and it's got a decent package manager on it, you know, like, fine, have it. Done.

You're good. They're not screwing around. Yeah, that's what it is. So I instead decided to spend... I would listen to a whole thing where you just gave, like, really sarcastic and unenthusiastic reviews or, reviews or short little summaries of distros. I was actually thinking about doing a special for the patrons called the Linux Critic, where I would just do that.

That sounds fun. Yeah, you should. But I wouldn't publish it publicly because I don't want to hurt feelings. Yeah, there's bridges and all those. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it always causes controversy. But just for the patrons, the Linux critic, I thought would be a good one. That would be fun. Yeah. I have a few. I have a few.

Some of our – I could take some of our Slack discussions we've had. We could get you a little drunk and then – Oh, God. I don't want to get people offended. But, yeah. No, we've had some good Slack conversations. I don't make it on air because it's like – it's a little bit – some of it's sometimes slightly satirical. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking, AHRS.

AHRS is just add warning satire to it. And I think maybe that's what I would do. So you never know. You may see the – I should just do it now because somebody is probably going to steal the idea. So I decided to spend my time since I wasn't just spending all my time deep diving into Fedora. There's just not a lot to to really to parse for me it's just a great release but i thought maybe i'd spend a little time digging in the cockpit and so i was reading in and i saw on uh on um steph's blog i think his name is uh

he was doing a deep dive himself and i thought okay well let's go through some of his stuff i have it installed on a digital ocean droplet so i was kind of doing some side-by-side comparisons to kind of confirm what he said. And I liked it. I liked what I found, and I'll link you to his conclusions as well. I thought one thing that was interesting is that Cockpit actually runs as an alternative Linux session. So unlike your

webmins or your cPanels of the past that are running as an Apache server's listening and executing the pages, or their webmin where it's a self-contained thing. This, but it's listening as a remote port. This is actually using PAM and LogIndy and TTY. And if you have SE Linux, it's those things are being applied. So this, just right off the beginning, I was impressed with how Cockpit is getting you

logged into your Fedora system. I thought that was pretty cool. And then on top of that, Cockpit itself has no special privileges. It's the credentials of whatever user you log into. So this is, I thought, okay, this is fascinating. So if I log in as Chris F., I can perform exactly the tasks that Chris F. logged into that system has access to. Or more importantly, I can't do anything that I don't have access to, which is hugely important for remote remote administration. So I'm like, how the hell then how the hell am I able to do all of these amazing things, even though I'm authenticated as my user?

Well. Essentially, by using pseudo. essentially by using sudo. So when you log in to Cockpit, there's a little checkbox that says reuse my password for privileged tasks. You know, so instead of like remember my password, which is what you normally see, it's use my password for privileged tasks. And like you're probably guessing right now,

it's essentially using policy kit in the background to sudo me and perform admin tasks that I would be able to do via pseudo, which is also, I think, a brilliant way to do it. And then I thought, okay, well, this is great and all, but what if I don't want to expose my server to the web? Is there a way to still use Cockpit since it's a web-based tool? And Cockpit itself typically listens on TCP port 9090,

where you then connect to that. It'll launch appropriate software. And then, okay, but, you know, anytime you have anything facing the network, it's essentially a security risk. Anytime a computer is listening to the network, there is the potential for exploiting it and something that executes code on the other end. So this is, you know, a thought. and something that executes code on the other end. So this is a thought. So what I learned is,

and I kind of learned this the backwards way, is that if you install Fedora Atomic or Fedora Cloud, like my DigitalOcean instance, it installs Cockpit by default, but it installs it in a mode where Cockpit is configured for you to connect to it over SSH. Oh, interesting. Yeah, super interesting, because I'm going to have SS it over SSH. Oh, interesting. Yeah, super interesting. So I'm going to have SSH listening on my droplet, right?

And so you can log in the cockpit over SSH, which is, I think, super awesome. And anyways, just sort of doubled down my sort of deep diving into this, kind of expecting it to be a little underwhelming. And at every turn where I was trying to figure out, well, how did they solve this problem? I went, oh, shit, they really thought this through. And what's great about it is it's something you can deploy yourself. You can put Fedora Atomic, or maybe they call it Fedora Cloud. I can't remember.

You can put it on a DigitalOcean droplet, and you can manage containers this way. They also use Kerberos for single sign-on if you have that. They have authentication tools that you can use to help replace the back-end authentication completely if you want. It's well thought out and it's layered, which kind of matches the Linux system in general where it uses user permissions and policy kit. It becomes an alternative Linux session itself, so it's bound by SE Linux and I just, you know, it's not Webmin. It's not Webmin of

years past that I had come across. It is a legitimate tool to manage a server that's really been well thought out, and I was impressed by the security architecture of it. So if you want to be impressed by Fedora on a server, which I know is kind of an oxymoron for a lot of you, but it's interesting. Cockpit is such a great way to manage a Fedora server.

Yeah, I know. I mean, it makes me want to know another thing. Maybe there's a way to do it. I haven't really investigated that. Because it does seem very approachable, you know, especially with people who aren't like – Yeah, the UI. Maybe they sysadmin some of the time, but they know the changes they need to make, but, oh, I don't remember which flag that is. Yeah, or if you – this is another one that I was picturing while I was going through this.

It was like, gosh, you know what I would use the hell out of this for? It's back in the day I would set up test systems for developers, and then they would have to ping me to do things like restart a service or restart the box, and then I would have to stop whatever I was in the middle of, SSH in. You know, not a big deal, but if I could have given them a login to Cockpit where they could see all of their containers and they could go in there and turn them off and turn them on and essentially to them it would just be applications, that would have been so nice, man. So I could see Cockpit.

I could have seen some uses for it back in the day. And now I just was like, well, okay, if I got this running on Fedora, well, let's put SabNZB in here. Boom, container of SabNZB. I'm like, oh, shit, that was really easy running on Fedora, well, let's put SabNZB in here. Boom, container of SabNZB. I'm like, oh, shit, that was really easy. All right, let's try a mumble container. Boom. Oh, man, that was crazy easy. This is great.

And then you get also you get performance charts and metrics and information right there in Cockpit. It's a good tool. It's a really good tool. So server side, Chris, maybe he's coming back in this age of containers. I tell you what, there is something about it that's sort of feeling good, like I'm scratching an itch that's been on my back for a while. Oh, I finally got a back scratcher. Oh, yeah.

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Wes, I'm wondering if you heard the big news this week. There is a reason why Ike is joining us. It's not, I mean, other than I'm sure he just loves to catch up with his buddies, Chris and Wes. But, no, it's because Solus is going to have some big growth coming down. I mean like they have already, which is funny.

It's sort of – but I think it's all about – I think it's all about to look like small potatoes compared to what could be coming. So Josh did a blog post over on the Solus project site and welcoming a new team member, Stefan, I think I'm saying his name probably right, to the project. And then a little bit down in the post drops the big bomb that I think is going to have huge ramifications for Solus and announced that IKI is going to become a full-time Solus developer in about four weeks. Hey, yo!

So I heard a little bit on Late Night linux last night about it um and of course see there see there they they don't want to gush about solace too much but here i'm all about that and so we're gonna let's dig into this i keep like first of all uh congratulations and it must have been kind of a hard choice you've you've got a i imagine a pretty good gig at intel choice you've you've got a i imagine a pretty good gig at intel yeah i mean you've you've got away the pros and cons but you know eventually it comes down to do you want to follow your dreams or do you want to wait a few years and regret not having done them you know it sounds it sounds almost cliche but i i completely concur i it's been about six years i think five or six years since i quit my full-time it consulting gig, which paid much better to do Jupyter Broadcasting full-time because I just knew I would really regret it. I would just really kick myself down the road. happy for you, Ike. But this is often, in my experience, a transitional moment for an open

source project. When the founder of the project or a key member of the project is able to shift to full time, I think it's made big, big improvements and big changes for elementary as they've made some of those shifts. There's other projects out there I could name drop, but it's kind of pointless. I think it's going to be a huge shift for Solace. And you must already – I know you still have four weeks at your old job. And I know you've got to be focused on wrapping that up. But your mind must already be running very, very, very, very fast on all the different things that might happen,

all the directions you might go. Where are you at? How are you doing this? What is sort of the first couple of steps for you? So I'm not asking you way down the road, but like are you going to – are you setting up like an office situation where you're going to be working every day? Like what is like the first few steps you're going to take? And then we can – the future stuff, we'll just see where that comes.

But like what's next? Well, steps you're going to take? And then we can, the future stuff, we'll just see where that comes, but like what's next? Well, I mean, I work from home anyway, so in some ways the wall won't be that many changes. Um, the first thing is doing, you know,

the legal boring side of it, you know, the setting up as a limited company, all that, all that crap, you know, just to protect me from that one guy and his chrome install but um yeah i mean the the very first things that change is the cadence of the project so what i'm doing now

is i'm using energy between effectively two full-time jobs and while i've done a lot today and the cadence of the project has been pretty good to be fair now it's basically it's going to be my bread and butter and it's going to be like my nine to five if you like but without the connotations of a nine to five so i will be putting all of my work energy just into solace so instead of you know like having those two or three hours at the end of the night i now have all of the day to be doing that every day so first thing I'll be doing is storming through uh the issues that we already have and working on refining some of that stuff the after that you know things that I've wanted to do in the past but might have thought against

for how they might be perceived or whatever I'm kind of freer to do a few things now with Solus. There's risks that I can take. And essentially, it's applying the startup culture to Solus in a big way. Well, here was my first take when you announced the news. I think you'd probably acknowledge that a lot of the criticism that projects like Solus and others, even Mint, they take on is one guy can't do all this. He can't possibly do all this. And at some point, he's going to burn out and he's going to have to quit. And I think you probably just told all those people to shut the hell up with this move because essentially what you said is to me what it seems like you're saying is, well, when the rubber hit the road and I had to make a decision, I chose Solis. Is that sort of what happened? No, I mean, so I mean, to be clear, you know, it's, this is a transitional

movement. It's a, it's a personal decision, you know, like I've enjoyed my job now for four years this month. I've absolutely loved it. The, the thing for me is deciding what I want next out of life. You know, I'm, I'm not in a position now where I have to choose anything. It's something I voluntarily want to do. Call it an easing of the soul, if you will. And it is something that I feel like I want to do. And it's something I feel like I should do. Because, again, this is my passion.

It's something I believe in. And in terms of how people view the project you are going to have that connotation around the project uh you know oh well he's only doing it as a hobby you know and to an extent people are only going to take you so seriously but not not fully so for me this is like well you know i'm fully committed to this project and the community around it. I am going to make this thing run circles, right? And there's already been a positive uptake by the community as well. So on our Patreon page, you can see,

since yesterday, I mean, I basically dropped it to them privately as a Patreon-only post, and I told them, you know, like, well, first of all, I actually kind of clickbaited them first. I said, exciting news, come in, and told them you know like well first of all i actually kind of click baited them first um i said exciting news come in and told them nothing so i know i left it off yeah i left it off for about well i did that on google plus later i'd already done it on patreon right so i did that

for about four hours or something recorded late night linux went back and i basically told them about it the reaction was overwhelmingly positive there wasn't a single negative them about it. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. There wasn't a single negative comment about it. And then the beautiful thing that I saw was people was like, well, you know what? You're committing to it. So we're going to up our commitment as well. And since then, the Patreon has jumped up like about $250. Because people have taken it upon themselves.

Like, well, if you're all in, we're all in. And, you know, like for me the last few days have been very emotional to be honest with you yeah you know just having people believing that you can do it that's gotta feel good yeah i mean it validates a lot of things as well but when people have faith on you i mean take everything else aside you know take finance aside and take the methods way you're doing things for people just to believe in what it is you're doing. That alone is empowering. Yeah.

And it also means that in a very real way, your success personally and the ability to feed yourself is now tied to the success of the project, which not that you weren't 100 percent committed, but I think it just removes any doubt in in observers minds and that's probably why you're seeing an uptick there because you know i i kid you not ikey uh after you made the announcement i myself was like well i better make sure i'm on their patreon and i went there and go oh good i already i already was but i was like oh yeah okay i i just you know even though i'd been seeing your posts on patreon like my first response is well i gotta go double check that i'm you know because that was how i felt to me he's like this this is going to be a way for you to be able to keep doing this i would imagine so i should just say right now patreon.com solace yeah i mean the the main thing for us is as i said you're going for almost a couple of hours a day now i'm not trying to blow me on trump or anything but what we've managed to achieve as a project already in a fairly small

amount of time when you look at the grand scale of projects you know we've repeatedly been told that everything that we've done we've repeatedly been told that it's impossible you can't do that you'll burn out this isn't how projects work what do you mean is independent who are you based on you know like we've already done the impossible we've basically bootstrapped this project and now it's at a point it's not like I'm, I don't want to say I'm completely financially relying on Solus. I don't want people thinking now he's going to be scared to make decisions.

Quite the opposite, you know. To put it semi-crudely this is basically retrofitting the balls of a Volvo S back onto Solus. Because that was a ballsy project and that's effectively what I'm doing here. I'm going back, effectively back to roots with it.

That's an interesting perspective on it. Yeah, it almost matters more than ever now. It matters more than ever now, in a way. Yes and no, right? So, there are some people that would say, you know, like, we're dependent on this, this has got to be this way. Obviously, I've made sure I can make the transition, and

that, were anything to go wrong, that I was still covered to do it. And i've made sure i can make the transition and that were anything to go wrong that i was still covered to do it and i've made sure it's a safe time in which to do but yeah i mean people are basically then paying me to work on solace it's not like it's a hobby thing and it's just you know the usual we'll cover a hosting cost right it's quite literally keeping the lights on now i i guess i don't i couldn guess I can't really put my hands on it, but for some reason I feel different as a Solus user. So I've been just reconsidering all kinds of things about the Linux desktop recently.

I got a long list, and the desktop and distro I use is one of them. And I really, really appreciate the – just as an aside, if Ike wasn't here, I would say this. And Wes, I think you would agree. I would say this in our Slack channel too. I feel like Solus has a unique take and tackle on building a great desktop Linux. And it's not a great VPS OS. great desktop Linux. And it's not a great VPS OS. It's not

a great OS to run in VirtualBox, but it is a great OS to run on my XPS 13. And it's a great one to run on my desktop with a nice 2K screen. It's like it's... Aiki, you yourself are aware

of issues in the desktop world that most users don't think of, and you're fixing them in Solus before they're even a problem. It almost feels like in some ways I could make a comparison to what some people view elementary OS as for the beginning Linux user. Solus is kind of that for your advanced particular Linux user. Yeah, although it's simple enough that it's applicable to new users. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I guess so I say all of that to also say one of the reasons why we talk about it on the show so much is because in the 11 years or 12 years, whatever the hell it is now that I've been doing Linux podcasts, it's one of the distributions that stands out to me as a strong performer, rapid growth, huge community, quick and large community adoption, I should say, a well-spoken, well-communicated team who has clear blog posts that clearly explain what the project's goals are and what they're working on. And then, and now I can add to that entire list, a reputation of following through on commitments on what they're doing when they went, like,

when you said you're going rolling, it's a rolling method that actually works pretty well for me. It's not totally crazy and it's also not haphazard. It's like at certain times, new updates come down for me and it works. Like, it's fine. It's working. crazy, and it's also not haphazard. It's like at certain times, new updates come down for me, and it works. Like, it's fine. It's working. Like, everything you've committed to and now, in a sense, at a whole nother level is so far checked out. Those are five attributes that I don't say I could apply to many distros. You can say a lot of distros have been around for a long time. They've had a good slow burn.

They have a great reputation. They have a huge deployment. You can give different attributes, but there are a lot of unique characteristics to the Solus project that have kept it on my radar, essentially, since the project, well, got a new name. I think the best way to summarize it for the

Solus is, when we started out, I mean, back in, you know, like, when it was Evolved on Wednesdays, because in some senses, you've kind of got to ignore what came before, because it was like the first attempt and then wanted to go independent, because by that time, it's like you'd learned the things that you wanted to do with it, right? So then we have the lifetime really starting with Evolve OS. And we were very adamant from day one that we were building an OS. OS. And we were very adamant from day one that we were building an OS. We weren't telling people that we were building a distro. And we was very, very adamant with that messaging to everyone. And it became kind of meme worthy after a while. But once we'd got all of that nailed down,

because one of the things that I had learned from my previous experiences was how to say no. And I had to be efficient with saying no. And it was something i hadn't said before and that was what contributed to past failures now this time around it's like this is exactly what we're doing this is what we define it to be i don't care about all these other things you know package management and servers you know the usual controversals over here for me this is what we're building so wait wait wait wait wait so now wait, wait. So when you say no, can you expand that? When you say no, it's like when people say, well, I mean, because I'll just play devil's advocate. You know, you have Plasma Desktop, you have Matei Desktop.

There's a lot of different flavors now. It seems like saying no would have been no, we're just going to do Budgie and all of our resources are going to go into that. So my version of no is effectively a tool of scope limitation so when i'm working on something it's like okay at this current state we can't do such and such and such we need to do only this this is what we must focus on for now we pretend other things don't even exist until this is done and when we first started out you know our scope was limited to supporting budgie because at the time that was where our tooling our technology

our basis our process was at and then as time goes by well you know it stopped being just evolve os we'd gone in evolved into zolas sorry sorry you're allowed i think you are allowed yeah we'd evolved into zolas if you like and by that time it was the os itself which was taking precedence in some senses we made this mental differentiation between the the operating system and the face as i kind of ran out of recalling it so budgie became the face and at that, it's like, we have all this stuff. We know how to rapidly deploy a rolling OS at this point. It's like, okay. At that point, it became, let's legitimize as a distro as well.

So instead of just being an OS, because we weren't being assuming with most of our decisions, you know, like it's not, you don't feel belittled or anything, or the questions asked of the InstaHall or anything, you don't think it's trying to chastise you or anything or the the questions asked of the install or anything you don't think it's trying to chastise you or anything like that so there's no limitation on skill levels with the way it works you can use a terminal equally you can go and use this thing so it's like okay at this point we have all our basics down we've covered everything we want to be but we still have this os that other people want to use and at that point it became about also legitimizing as a linux distribution as well so it stopped becoming just being an os it became legitimized as a linux

distribution that is used as an operating system so that's when those two bits merged together conceptually and then that's when you started getting the other desktops and slightly more tangent use cases coming along with it but they're all done in a way that's improved everything else like everything that came in improved something else like the initial introduction of steam i never intended to go off and create all this gaming runtime and linux steam integration and patching this and the performance but it became something of a again, a natural evolution. Yeah, yeah. That's going to get really old soon. But then that forced us to basically make all of our processes better by doing that. So our support for what we call Emule 32, which is basically the 32-bit libraries, it became first class to the point where you just set an Emule 32 in a package build,

and boom, off it went. A lot of the things that we include, we do in that way. So we integrate them, they work well, and they improve something else as a consequence. Like we refine the core project and the core code base as a result of that. Yeah, and fair enough. It's, you know, just as going back to the Steam thing, for example, it's a serious differentiator of Solus. And it, out of, again, a lot of distros I try, it makes for a really smooth out-of-the-box experience. It's a stupid term.

I hate that term. But it makes for a smooth experience when trying to play games. When you just want to sit down and play some games with your kids. Which is how I pretty much play games now is when my kids are sitting over me or standing over my shoulder. Dad, can we play Race the Sun or something like that? And so I quickly install Steam. Can we play Race the Sun or something like that and so i quickly install steam and and we play race the sun and i tell you what uh when when when something fails to load like that it just it's so defeating as a dad like you're sitting there you want to have a good like dad kid moment around linux and all that and it doesn't launch and it's just so embarrassing

it's like it's like a shameful moment yeah i mean i've had a defining moment slightly like that before it was a few years back and well actually it was at the very beginning of the volvo s so i was with me at the time she wasn't the ex at the time but then what happened yeah i mean we didn't break up because of that. I remember at the time that the motor media codec support just wasn't fully baked at the time. And shamefully, shamefully, I had to download another Linux distro, nuke and pave the computer to watch a DVD. It was mortifying. And experiences like that, they will stay with you. Yep.

And you will make sure stuff like, I mean, it's a horrible term, you know, to work out of the box, right? There's no box. I downloaded this thing. But things like that, like enabling users to get stuff done and staying out of the way because an OS is not sexy. It's not at all like the the what you're doing is you're enabling someone to do something you're enabling a workload you're enabling a task you know that it's something to be done on the os the os itself like you i don't believe personally you can charge for an os supporting the project and what it enables around it yes but charging for

the os no it even windows they're not going to be charging for it right because you're enabling apple charges for everything people to do stuff on top of that yeah you know it's like how do they get their applications that becomes very important what something that didn't used to be as important in soulless history notoriously became very important how do you get those applications to them how do you keep them safe when they're doing their daily stuff, when they're accessing the internet?

You want to make sure that they're up to date and more importantly, that they're informed as well, that they are being updated, that updates are available, that this is a good process. So you're slowly educating them with good practices over time.

So those become the core considerations of the OS, not the OS itself. Like it's interesting to me and to lennox guys like how it works internally but it's what we enable people to do it's not the os itself that's what should be important and i think that's now one of the defining characteristics of solos what can we enable our users to do and what experience do they deserve at the end of it that makes me wish we had introduced the show with clips of the episode that would be the highlight of this episode no kidding right and that's that's what i really like that that that philosophy does come through in a subtle way but it's in like it's

like 15 to 125 different subtle ways when you start using solace and each one of them is a complete message that essentially i think reflects the philosophy that i could just laid out there and so i guess i was thinking about it as you were talking here, Ike, and I wonder, do you think that in some ways this is just sort of like, now that this is going to be your full-time gig, proportionately this feels like you're just getting started? Like you're really just getting started right now in some sense. Yeah, I mean, i've been lucky enough

to be able to have done what i've done um effectively as part-time right that's that's basically what i've done i've done it in part-time and i've had i've had colleagues i've had my teammates i've had a community which is now at a point where we've got so many patches coming in i'm gonna have to start having more gatekeepers to get the patches in on time right but obviously me working full-time i'm going to be able to do that more quickly but yeah now now all the pieces are there i've got the deck of cards now i need just need to build the house right that's a bad example did you did you not do that on purpose they're just they're really you know they're uh really structurally sound cards it's fine super glue super glue right um no we use wooden planks that look like cards and then we've got

iron rivets on them uh but yeah i mean i'm now just getting started out there's so much i want to do and i'm excited by it as well because it's four weeks from now, but also it's like it's four weeks away. It's a whole four weeks. But once that comes, I mean, again, it's back to that word, cadence. What we're going to be able to do is probably should terrify other projects what we're going to achieve because if it's taken that long, then you can dense that. I can do this every single day as well as doing the usual stuff you know like dealing with bugs and making

sure that you know you still stay in touch with the community it's one thing i've always done you know reddit twitter wherever i'll always try and engage with the community because i'm not above them you know and especially now you know i work for them right but so many projects that I haven't started, we're going to be able to get it done. For me, this is now where Solus breaks out. We spent all this time building this engine. We designed this engine. I'm now confident that that engine works.

Yeah, wow. Let's go take off. I'm so excited about that. I really can't wait to watch it. And I hope you keep us updated on what happens. I'll be keeping an eye out for this. Oh, yeah. I mean, I need the PR now.

I have the – I have to ask. I don't know if you can comment or have an opinion, but can you talk at all about what this means for the Clear Boot Manager or Clear Linux in general? I mean, obviously, that side of it, I'm very sad for that to happen. So I'm transferring what projects I have into the Clear Linux organization on GitHub.

Now, for projects like Clear Boot Manager, as much as I obviously won't own them, their Intel projects, I'm going to be sending pull requests to them. I'm still going to be contributing to them. So it's going to continue to use it? Yeah, no, definitely. I want to be contributing to them. So it's going to continue to use it? Yeah, no, definitely. I want to be clear here.

I mean, there's no animosity or anything like this involved here. There's a lot of sadness at work because I've been there four years. It's almost like a family at this point. I've been very honored to work with some incredibly talented people. I'm not just saying that the usual BS you hear, like you hear you know like uh some gangster was shot but he was great he was lovely you know it's not that right you know stuff but i've really enjoyed myself and for me it took me from a hobbyist open source contributor four years ago to an engineer someone who can rationalize the design process and give real solutions not give solutions where problems aren't present,

but consider the problem that's already there. For me, it's changed me a lot. So for the projects, because there is a bit of a special relationship, really, if you look at it between Clear Linux and Solus, as much as I am the common denominator there, there's a lot of shared philosophy in certain senses in the way that a distribution should be built and focusing on the task at hand. And I'm not going to sacrifice that. Again, it's open source projects. And you see that as an

example. I mean, I'm not here shilling, but too often you'll hear people complaining about a so-called corporate backed project not doing open source things right well this is an example with clear linux of it being done right because there is that collaboration collaboration collaboration and there is that crossover there is that sharing of patches and you know the slightly aligned philosophies so that stuff will still continue you know basically the the the patches and the prs that i send they'll just come from a different email address i i'm still quite happy to use that technology i'm proud of it you know i was involved in it for a long time yeah and and it's interesting too because you know it's a it really i think it's a well point well made that

it helped you sort of uh become an engineer in a sense that allowed you to build something in a way that I think a lot of hobbyists maybe don't build it. And it also made me realize in some senses this is really your – Solus is really – of course it's an evolution. But it's really your third go too because you've got Evolve OS, Clear Linux, Solus. It's not like it's like the first time you've tried this either, which explains probably why it's fairly well put together. Right, yeah. You've learned a lot, obviously. I mean, by this time, it started off in the old days, you know, contributing to Linux,

and I'm very thankful for the times I had there as well, you know. I know people might think there's animosity there. There isn't really, you know. I think the guys nowadays, they're servicing their community. And to me, that's important for any distribution to be serviced in their community um so started off humble beginnings all the way back there we had linux mint debian edition then eventually i went my own way with solos os um i was contributing to peppermint back there i was in talks with the crunch bank guys they was using some of my stuff back then. You know, go all through the history. I mean, to give you an idea,

my Freenode IRC account is over seven and a half years old, and that's the second account I've had. That's a good nerd brag. I like that. That's a proper nerd brag. And then you had Solus 2. Eventually, then we had this break, you know, this six or seven months or so away from it all. That was actually after I had started with Intel, funnily enough,

that Solar Subway itself was, and I hate to use the term, but put down. You know, like things took a bad turn during those days because I had come to the point then where I realized the stuff that I want to achieve is Linux distribution. I think we all know now the only way I can achieve what I need to do is an independent distribution. And I tried it with the upstream and, you know,

over multiple revisions, you know, it's like V1, V2, V3 of the spec. We finally got to a point where Evolve OS is like nailed it. We got the right people in the community coming forward and that community building around it.

So I would like to say I'm a fairly experienced distro engineer by this point. I think so. And I think it shows. And I think it's a good investment if you're a Linux desktop user. I think you should go to patreon.com slash solace. He's got 301 as we record. I think we should bump that up a little bit. And if you've already got a Jupyter Signal Patreon or Unfilter, you got all the details you need. Just go over to

patreon.com slash Solis and become a contributor. I'm in myself. Even if you're not, you know, don't use it every day. I think it's just really good for the Linux ecosystem. This is the kind of sustainable OS development that we need. really good for the Linux ecosystem. This is the kind of sustainable OS development that we need. That's one of the reasons why I'm also a patron of the BcacheFS developer. I don't use BcacheFS, but I think it's

really important for desktop Linux. So I'm also a patron of BcacheFS, which is another one I recommend. And by the way, if you become a patron, patreon.com slash solace, you get access to 27 Patreon-only posts. Now, some of them are going to be old, but the reason why I mention that is it shows you that IK and folks are clearly engaging with their patron community.

So the perks are actually worth it. You get, as a Solace patron, like you sometimes can get access to ISOs a little earlier. You just get an idea of what's coming down, like information about the new app center. It's nice. It's nice. It's nice as a user of the distribution to have access to this kind of stuff, and they actually give you value. Patreon.com slash Solus. For our people supporting us, I will just say one more thing.

You're not just supporting Solus as is. You're supporting our efforts and other projects as well. So, I mean, Brisk Menu, not quite because, you know, our beloved Wimpy is actually supporting Brisk Menu. But we've got projects that, you know, there's upstream contributions to GNOME, to Mate, there's software that we have that's used everywhere else. You've got the Budgie desktop as well that that supports. The Mate slate notification theme, Linux driver management,

which is becoming quite sexy to Arch derivatives, so they'll end up using that as well. So there's a whole slew of that stuff around there, and if you are our patrons, obviously you're supporting us and enabling us to do this, we will keep bribing you with secret ISOs and stuff, so you

do get goodies. Very nice. I think it's, you know, I think it's, I think Patreon is becoming a good way to support folks like Ubuntu Mate, like the BcashFS developer, like IKI, and the entire Solus project, and Jupyter Broadcasting. money off the internet it's because having um patron funded either content or software development aligns the goals of the project or the broadcaster with the intentions expectations and goals of the patron and not the advertiser or not a donor or yeah there's no third party. It's just you and them. It's a very clean, honest, you know, incentive and reward system that

I think works particularly well in both content creation and in open source software development. So it's, if you've been resistant to Patreon in the past, I would ask you to reconsider, not just because obviously it's in my best interest, but because I also think it's a way for us to get to sustainable software development for things that large corporations or whatever don't find a particular motivation to invest in, where we as end users who have

typically been underrepresented because Linux itself is underrepresented, have been just left to suffer. We now have a way to directly vote with our wallet that is completely unrelated to market share or strategic goals of Google or Apple or Microsoft. And it is directly connected to what we want to see happen on the Linux desktop or in Linux content creation, et cetera. And I think that is one of the biggest things that we're not really discussing because it sounds over self-serving if I talk about it too much. But now that I can plug Ike's Patreon, I have an excuse to say that, patreon.com slash solace. Great work, Ike. Very excited for you as somebody who

also, you know, quit a very great job to do this passion project. I think it's it serves the soul and when you end up doing what you love you invest more in it than you work harder than you ever have, which almost seems like an impossible statement for me to say to you right now because you've worked so hard already. But I can tell you, you'll work harder than you ever have and it'll be more rewarding than it ever has. So I'm very excited for you.

Yeah. We're excited to see what comes of it. Thank you for joining us too. I feel like it's a birthday or like a baby's been born or something. It's like you, Jay. I feel like it's a birthday or like a baby's been born or something. It's a lucky day. Okay, so I also want to talk about a very exciting project that is bringing something that's been locked down to Windows users or proprietary device users. And now it's available to all of us. And it's much further along than I expected and much easier to get started with. You're talking about Windows Defender, right?

We can run that on Linux now. Thank you. Yes, you know that is actually a story. You do know that. I do know that. He does know that is actually a story. You know, you do know that. I do know that. He does know that because it was one of the stories we discussed covering in this show. So he knows. And I just like, when I saw that, that is such a clickbait.

When I saw that, Wes, I was like, that's brilliant clickbait. I mean, the old IT admin in you, you want those firewalls. You couldn't find a great one on Linux. Do you know what the funny nuance story, the thing about that guy that got all that working? Do you know what the funny thing is? He's a Google employee. Yeah, that's right. Did you know that? You did? All right. So let's talk about your mind for a second. Let's go a little Benfold. Let's talk about your mind. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go

there to support the show and sign up for a free seven-day trial. Linux Academy is like a classroom in the sky, like an academy, like some sort of academy, but in the sky that you connect to telepathically. How about that? Is that- Cloud Academy. Wait, hold on. I'm getting a note here. No, that is not correct.

That is not how I should- It is a platform, and it does teach you about Linux and all the things around Linux that you would want for your... But it is not actually an academy in the sky. I think I was thinking of Iron Man. Anyways, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You go there, you support the show, you get a seven-day free trial,

and you can see really how it works. Get a little taste of the hands-on labs, or the learning paths, the practice exams, which I want to talk about more here in a second, or the video courses, self-paced in-depth video courses on every Linux, cloud, and DevOps topic. They have a vibrant community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members that are there to help you learn and enrich their experience. And they do that through parts of the Linux Academy experience that are actually forkable by the community. And if you're busy, and I understand, especially as a father of three and a small business owner, you can be very busy. It's hard to fit this stuff in. That's why I really appreciate

the Linux Academy course scheduler. You can pick a course, and then there'll be a time frame that you can work with. You set that up. It'll help you keep with that. It'll set goals for you along the way so it can be flexible. And if you ever get stuck and need help, instructor mentoring, a real human being is available. And if you're on the go, if you've got some downtime on community transit, or if you're a passenger in a carpool, check out their iOS and Android apps to study on the go. They have cloud servers. They spin up when you need them. You have to say

chin. They have nuggets, which are their cute way of saying, if you've just got a little bit of time or you just want to do like a single topic, maybe you've got two hours and you want to do it like five minutes to two hours. Like you got some time, a little bit of time, single topic, deep dive, and then you've got study guides you can download and take with you. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.

Also, the blog's got a what to expect when you're testing for the Red Hat exams. They have a whole rundown of what practice exams you should take, how to prepare yourself beforehand, all of it. It's nice because I know that's popular in the audience, and this is a good way to get ready. And you don't even have to really subscribe to Linux Academy to read the blog. Yeah, you'll get a taste of it right there. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring this here podcast.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. A platform for learning more about Linux by Linux enthusiasts. Unplugged, a platform for learning more about Linux by Linux enthusiasts. So Moonlight, it's not like a project to run mono on Linux. That's what I was hoping for. Where you was? Yeah. Yeah.

Lots of demand for that these days. Remember mono, everybody? What a big deal that was. So Moonlight is an open source NVIDIA game stream client. Now stick with me. Stick with me. Because I actually think this is a huge deal. Because it takes the NVIDIA GeForce streaming crap that you could only – you could only the game stream that you could like stream to a couple of tablets and the NVIDIA Shield TV, which rocks. Oh, yeah.

You would mention that yeah and like you know like i think a windows like it was it was like it it it was something that steam kind of worked on but some people say this is nicer and it was something that linux users just couldn't get access to and it kind of bugs me because i've thought about my kids have asked for because people at school tell them about these games so my my kids have been like, Dad, we want Windows. I'm like, not happening. Not happening. And so the first time they asked, I was like, okay, we won't talk about that.

The second time they asked, okay, he doesn't know what he's talking about, we won't talk about it. The third time they asked, I thought, nope, nope, we're not going to talk about that. And then the fourth time they've asked, I've thought, well, what if I did game streaming? So I've been sniffing around, and I found Moonlight, and I like the way it smells. So Moonlight allows you to stream your collection of games from a game stream compatible PC, read Windows, I'll tell you more about that in a second, to any supported device remotely. It's perfect for gameplay even on the go.

You can stream to Android tablets. You can stream to Macs. You can stream to Linux boxes, of course. No way. Low latency, 60 frames per second. Yes, really. Controller support, iOS, Android. You can even have a Raspberry Pi as the end streaming client.

Is that right? You can turn a Raspberry Pi, I'm going to say it again, into the end streaming client. So I can just throw my Xbox right in the garbage. I got this Pi. into the end streaming client. So I can just throw my Xbox right in the garbage. Just put it in the garbage. I got this pie. It's way better. Put it in the garbage here at the studio, Wes, would you? Yeah.

Just put it in the garbage. Yeah. Because the reason for this is it's really just using video streaming and a client that expresses back and forth the different input controls. And it shows up, and there's a little piece of software that looks for the game controller and stuff, and it communicates it back to the streaming PC. And then it sends everything over an H.264 stream, basically. Okay, yeah.

A GPU-accelerated H.264. So that's part of the magic is the GPU on the NVIDIA. You have to have a system with an NVIDIA GPU. And I have the requirements in the show notes. And it has to be running Windows. So my vision was something that has a 600 plus NVIDIA GTX card, which is probably anything still running anymore. I mean, I'm sure that's wrong. But, you know. One would hope.

Anybody that's remotely interested in playing games is probably. Yeah. Yeah. Check. And AMD's GPUs are not supported because this is an NVIDIA thing. Wah, wah. And you have to have a 720p or higher display connected to the PC. No standard definition for you guys.

Yeah. The one thing I'm going to test is there are, from my Bitcoin mining days, I know there are some plugs you can put in the back of the video cards to make it think there's a monitor attached. So there's a display. We'll see if that's really truly required. But here's my idea is put a decent-ish, older, but decent. I've got a GTX 970 card I think I could put in there and put that in the garage and then use this to stream to a Raspberry Pi device. Yeah. That sounds fun.

Maybe. We'll see if it works. I'm not sure because I was thinking like I should have it. What kind of controller are you going to go with? Ethernet, probably the, I guess for them, maybe actually the 360 controller. I was going to say I have the Steam controller. Oh, you have a Steam controller. Right.

Yeah, of course. But I think actually my kids would probably do better with the Xbox 360 controller. I might be grasping at straws, but Moonlight to me seems like a potential project to keep my kids on Linux but give them access to a couple of games that are exclusive to the Windows platform. I don't know if a Raspberry Pi is going to do it.

I might also experiment with the iOS apps. I think I might experiment with just setting up a client on the Linux machine because there's a Java client. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, which Java is working fine on their machines. So I might try that.

And then – and this is what I thought, well, for shits and giggles I might give it a try. There's also a Chrome extension to act as a client to the stream, to Moonlight Streaming. That would be convenient. It would be actually kind of great, in a way. Like, any system you have this on, you could theoretically connect to your Moonlight server and start gaming if you forwarded the ports on your firewall. Or your kid's got a Chromebook. You don't really want them using your, like, nice work machine,

but they can use your... Oh, Wes. Oh, Wes. Actually, they have Chromebooks at school, so conceivably they will be bringing them home someday, I suppose, as they go up in grade. You know, or Dylan just really needs to play Race the Sun. He doesn't want to listen to the instructor. That need is real.

That is a real thing. We've all been there. Yeah, of course we have. So Moonlight's the project. Moonlight-stream.com if you want to check it out. And yes, they support. So when you try it out, you can see, yeah, Chrome. Then they have a Java client that works on Linux and Windows and Mac.

And then they have the Raspberry Pi particular like image. So it's like, which fascinates me because if it makes it really easy appliance, like then I'm within like anytime they have an issue, like, well, dad just gives you a new SD card with a new Raspberry Pi because I got like two of them sitting right here. Here you go, kids. That fixes it fixes it plug that in and then problem solved like if if the Raspberry Pi thing works and it's super appliance like that could be a game changer for this whole thing because then it takes my troubleshooting down to basically nothing I like that and then are you ready for this last one which I'm never going to really test out

well maybe no I'm never gonna test this out they have an unofficial port to the Samsung Gear VR. Oh, cool. I guess. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I'd have to have Wimpy's opinion. I wonder.

I'll be interested to see about that monitor thing, because it makes me think, like, I wonder, could you go run this on some cloud GPU box, and then, oh, I don't have my nice machine on me, but I really want to. I'm sure the latency would be terrible but it might be worth trying. Yeah, to me it does, it's funny you say that because it did make me think like

well what if I could project the entire desktop this way? And I don't know like I'd want the Windows desktop but if you could use this, I guess it's reliant on the GPU feature so I mean it's driver dependent but it'd feature. That means it's driver dependent, but it'd be such a great way to maybe, instead of use Wine,

to have a Windows application like AutoCAD or something like that on Linux. Or Photoshop. Or Premiere. That's an interesting idea. Of course, you wouldn't have local file system access because it's on the remote system. You could have a mounted remote file system or something.

Yeah, you'd have to have like – or a NAS that both systems are connected to. That might be legit. Man, so anyways, it's an open – oh, so anyways. OK. I'm saying that a lot. I apologize. If you take a shot, everybody – we should create a game and then put it in the comments. Every time I say anyways, you have to take a shot.

The thing that I – it was like, geez, this thing seems really far along. How much does it cost? Well, yeah. I mean, what the hell? How can something like this be this far along? How the hell did they get this to work? It's created by Case Western Reserve University as a project at the MHACS hackathon. And then it was taken from that at another hackathon in 2014, and now it's a project that is ongoing.

That's neat. I thought so, too. That's a project that is ongoing. Wow. That's neat. I thought so, too. That's a worthy project. That's great. I thought that was, and it seemed really complete. And I'm like, how the hell can this be such a thing?

It's up on GitHub. It's open source. It's nice to have it on the, because, like, the Steam streaming stuff, it was always like, all right, well, they kind of just, like,

you know, put it out there, but there hasn't been much happening with it. And then on the NVIDIA side of stuff, it's like, for me, I'm like, geez,

if I could take a little PC with a 970 in it that has this capability and put it in the garage and it's just they never touch it and it just launches these games for them. Yeah, that'd be awesome. That's super great, but I was never going to do it if I had to have them using an NVIDIA Shield or a specific device that supports NVIDIA GameStream. It's a lot less useful. That was never going to happen.

But now that it can be anything from a Raspberry Pi to their Linux laptop, done. Moonlight-stream.com if you want to check it out. And if you've played around with it too, let me know, at ChrisLAS. I would be really curious to know about how that's gone for you. So just a reminder, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting if you want to come to our episode 200 meetup. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I don't know how much. We'll try to stream some of it. I'll put like a camera out the window or something.

So if you can't make it in person, which would be 99.9% of you. We'll try to make it. Something will happen at jblive.tv. Maybe I'll just have Wes run around inside the studio. Maybe I'll just do that. You could chase me with the drone. That'd be pretty good. That'd be pretty good, Wes.

I wonder if we could figure out a way to live stream from the drone so we can make sure that goes out on the live stream. That would be amazing. All right. Well, if you want a little more of Wes Payne, check out this week's User Air. I think it was episode 12. Or go grab yourself any recent episode of the TechSnap program. Maybe subscribe to that and get Wes every single week. Check back here on Tuesdays where we do this show live. We'd really love to have you in our virtual lug. You're welcome. We just check your mic and then we get you in. Go to jblive.tv, join our chat room, and then do bang mumble to to get all the info and join us in our virtual log and take part of the conversation we'd love to hear from you thanks for being here we'll see you right back here next week Thank you. All right, jbtitles.com. Thank you, Mumble Room. Yeah. Fantastic and wonderful, as always.les.com. Thank you, Mumble Room. Yeah.

Fantastic and wonderful, as always, jvtitles. You know, if Gnome was as reliable as the Mumble Room, we wouldn't have those kinds of problems. Yeah, we really almost made it through the whole episode without a crash. So I don't think people in the final version, I don't think we made any mention of it in the show. But yeah, we had another Gnome crash.

And yes, I haven't replaced it yet because, honestly, I got other things to do. Like, we put this in here and it's just supposed to be working. Yeah. And it almost, it's like 90%. It just works. Yeah. It really is just pretty much during the shows that it seems to crash. Like, it sits here and runs over the weekend.

Although, I suppose it could be crashing and we just don't know it. Because the stream does eventually come back on its own. So, who suppose it could be crashing and we just don't know it. Because the stream does eventually come back on its own. So who really knows? So no, it can't actually do work. Well, who knows really what the cause is? And by the way, for the record, I got a few people that have Arch, snicker snicker

Arch, well that's what he gets for running Arch. Well, first of all, first of all, LTS kernel and LTS NVIDIA driver. And I suspect that the – and it's not like GNOME has changed in the last three months. So I suspect that our culprit lies somewhere in either an NVIDIA driver bug, something happening between OpenGL and the NVIDIA driver or OBS, OpenGL and the NVIDIA driver or OBS OpenGL in the NVIDIA driver or something that causes GNOME to take a shit and then when GNOME takes a shit it reboots and in the reboot

process Pulse Audio restarts and technically the recording never stops but we lose all audio for a bit so if Pulse didn't poop out but what happens is we go back to GDM and then we go back and then we go back to GDM and then we go back and then we go back to GDM

and then we go back in and in that process Pulse takes a shit and people have suggested we switch to every distribution under the sun people suggested we switch to XFCE or LXQ maybe we should just run OBS in accession

just a single, full screen. You know, maybe. I'm suggesting just so people know what I'm suggesting. Yeah, the only thing that hasn't been suggested is Mac OS or Windows. Pretty much everything else has been suggested. Heart and Solace. How come nobody's voting? JBTitles.com.

I mean, people are voting, but it's pretty widely spread out. Look at that. Holy shit. Holy shit. That's one of the widest spreads we've had in a while. We got to hone that in a little bit. Get that. You spread it wide over there, Chris.

Yeah. Joom, joom. And the lights come on because we're getting so now you can look with the lights on you can actually see the uh touchscreen yeah yeah we're getting ready for a tech snap all right uh so i could get to promotion uh gnomes bad touch no that was from the pre-show let's see it was just so funny soul has plugged uh uh heart. Really, guys? That's what we're doing? We're doing Heart and Solas right now? The fuck's the matter with you guys?

Come on. You know better than that. Don't be a d- Reminds me of the Huey Lewis had the news song.