LINUX Unplugged - Episode 203: MATEs Wayland MIR-acle | LUP 203

Episode Date: June 28, 2017

Ubuntu’s skunkworks project, Mir, might be back with a vengeance to save the Linux desktop. Or at least prove quite useful for MATE.Plus one of the most well built Linux PC’s ever tested, the Dell Precision 5720 with Ubuntu gets tested in the lab.

Yes, I'm still using GNOME. Yes, but I've made decisions. Look at that. Listen to the tone in that. I know. Well, it's because they're right, and they know it's going to probably crash on me during this show, and I should know better by now.

But the thing is I've been stuck in Indecision Valley for so long, and now I've come out the other side, and I feel like I've seen the light, and I've gotten a cold drink of water. Now I just have to reload all my systems. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 203, for June 27th, 2017. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that screens are covered in fingerprints. My name is Chris. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Yes, we have a touchscreen-powered machine. It's not powered by the touchscreen, but it has a touchscreen. Yeah, that's right. And it's important that it does. Yeah. We'll be talking about this massive Dell Precision 5720 Linux rig.

What? I'm going to say right now, not getting into performance or other things, but in terms of build quality, just probably one of the finest built machines running Linux on the market today. So we'll give you a review of that Xeon monster in a little bit. But before that, Wes, before that, we've got quite a bit of community news and updates to get into. An old friend is coming back from the dead. It's not quite dead yet, and you're not going to believe what Mirror might be used for next. We'll give a plug for some upcoming

open source events. A couple of new desktop application launches that look really, really good. Mozilla's $2 million bounty that, actually, I think a lot of folks in the audience could probably get. I think so, yeah. So we'll tell you about their kind of cool idea.

A big problem that the Debian project has come across. Uh-oh. Yeah, yeah. And much more. We've got, like, all kinds of good stuff in here, Wes. It's been a very fruitful week for open source. So before we can get into any of that, we have to stop right here at the top of the show and bring in our virtual lug.

Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Greetings, Mumble Room. Pip-pip. Greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, everybody. Well, look at that. We managed to get a pretty good turnout today. You guys are the best. That's pretty nice.

Hey, guys, it's really good to see you all. And I want to probably start with the most newsworthy story because in some ways, Linux is ahead of the rest. But we'll get to that in just a second. Intel has a bug. And it's in their Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. It's related to hyperthreading. So if you have hyperthreading turned on, an unfixed Skylake and Kaby Lake processor could, in some situations, dangerously misbehave when hyperthreading is enabled.

If you disable hyperthreading immediately, you're safe. If you disable hyperthreading immediately, you're safe. So this is on Debian's mailing list. It's an advisory about processor and microcode defects recently identified on Intel Skylake and Intel Kaby Lake processors with hyperthreading enabled. The defect, when triggered, causes unpredictable system behavior. It could cause errors such as application and system misbehavior, data corruption, and even data loss. It was brought to the attention of the Debian project that this defect is known to directly affect some Debian stable users, thus the Debian advisory. Now, what do you know about this story?

It's interesting. You don't hear about these that often. At least not ones that are big, you know, really big news like this that are public outcries. The problem is like the under complex micro architectural conditions, short loops of less than 64 instructions that use AH, BH, CH, or DH registers, as well as their corresponding wider register, e.g. RAX, EAX, or AX for AH, may cause unpredictable system behavior.

Yeah, obviously this isn't a Debian issue. This is an Intel microcode issue. So you know that proprietary Intel microcode that when you install Ubuntu and you go to additional drivers and it has this little checkbox where you can install the microcode? This is the kind of stuff that is,

this is what the microcode is responsible for. And this is the kind of stuff that if you get new versions of the microcode, you get a patch. So on Linux, like in the case of debian here uh for debian they already have intel microcode packages that are patched for untable for unstable they have them for testing they have it for uh debian 9 debian 8 backports so they've already fixed it in debian and they're probably fixing it i would imagine in other distros too like ubuntu But you have to be installing this proprietary microcode package to get this. So this is one of the things your microcode, that weird, crazy package does. And kind of related to

all of this, you found this project, or at least this post this week, about trying to build a system where the Intel microcode could get uploaded directly from the Linux kernel to the processor and sort of eliminate the need for a NITRAM FS to do this. So Linux is maybe going to have a simpler way to update this stuff in the future via directly the kernel. Hey, that might be handy. Could be. Yeah, because depending on how you're trying to build a system, you know, if you're trying

to build a, basically, the goal here, the end goal they're trying to get to is a system that you can boot, a Linux system you can boot without any init RAMFS. I mean, really, an init RAMFS, as handy as they are, and they are very fun, handy, useful, it's kind of a hack. Yeah. This microcode stuff, though, this flaw at the kernel level stuff it's a spooky because it means you're hooked on the sauce you're hooked on the intel microcode sauce if you want to get this fix and it's like if you don't well okay but in some conditions you might trigger a crash but you're already hooked on intel dependent software in the first place like your whole bios spring up process all of your efi services and things that run you're already dependent on

and really do need to be updated as well. And in most cases, machine vendors will release new BIOSes, and those contain microcodes. So if you get the newest BIOS for your machine, it's very likely that you could get the microcode that fixes this issue. Like, you're going to get the thing that you could load in Linux after the fact.

But not all vendors do update their BIOSes. Some of them let them languish. So it's nice to do it in Linux, because you know that you're going to get the microcode update applied. Otherwise, you anything that's sort of non-transparent. Well, but if you do microcode, then you live with the defects the processor shipped. And this would be one of those defects. This is what they didn't see this edge case when they built the processor and shipped the initial microcode. So the microcode fix that you get now distributed with your Linux distro fixes this issue, which you would just never fix otherwise. That's what I said.

And I mean, it really highlights that we're at that boundary of hardware and software. We're hooked on the good stuff. It's becoming more complicated. This is some weird L1 cache behavior with two different lengths of instruction or register modifying instructions. So William, do you have an idea of how likely someone would be

to actually trigger this? My understanding is you're probably not going to find it in your typical workflow. It seems like if it took this long... Code generation that results in those instructions all fitting in the L1 cache and performing the behavior that results in triggering the bug. It sounds like

this bug was maybe first found in the OCaml community, and they kind of reported it. Yeah, it sounded like... So I think it also kind of highlights, you know, there's just a lot we don't know about what's going on at the hardware layer. You know, it's like we're already running all this microcode. You don't know what it is. It's not very inspectable or suitable

in any way. And then you have this kind of, I mean, you can go look on Hacker News and stuff, but the thread for this, there's a lot of people talking about, you know, questionable practices by hardware vendors around acknowledging hardware defects and how you do that, because we don't have the same kind of tools we've come to expect in the open-source software world for, you know, identifying and fixing these kinds of problems.

But at least Intel does seem to publish the errata. I think there's a thing. There should be an errata listing for each of these generations of chips. So for all the Skylake and Kaby Lake platforms, they have the errata published for these things. So you can go look up your chip and look at the errata and this will be in there. Yeah.

I mean, as the chips are becoming more complex, the errata is becoming much larger. So you're going to see a bunch more of these issues show up because chips are just becoming increasingly more complex and hard to validate. I got to be honest. I really thought when I went back in the day when hyperthreading first was announced as a thing, I thought, well, that sounds like a damn hack. And, you know, we really haven't really had much fallout from it. I mean, it's not the best thing ever, but it's kind of funny. So I guess one immediate fix

would be to just go turn off hyperthreading in your BIOS. So old-school skeptical admin Chris was like, yeah, just turn hyperthreading off. It's fine. What's funny is it's only this implementation in Skylake onward that's broken. It's actually not the older implementations. Skylake and Kabylake, they're the chips that...

And I guess that would mean that the chips came after Skylake and Kabylake maybe're the chips that – and I guess that would mean that the chips came after Skylake and Kaby Lake maybe also have different types of hyperthreading. My understanding is it's some caching behavior, I think, of the micro-instructions. Yeah, right, right, right, right. And that interacted with hyperthreading in such a way that you got this effect where you have multiple logical streams happening simultaneously and some kind of corruption happening. Whoops. So interesting. Yeah, it's hard.

It's a system that's hard to do integration testing on because as you add these features that seem like they gain you performance, they can interact in just really unsuspecting ways with other features you added before. But the sort of cherry on top for Linux users is it looks like a fix, I would imagine, for both, I guess, Macs too,

but I read somewhere that Microsoft won't have a fix, I would imagine, for both, I guess Macs too, but I saw, I read somewhere that Microsoft won't have a fix for quite a bit coming down. My understanding was Microsoft already released the microcode update, at least for the Skylake shit, so I don't know about the KD Lake. What I was reading is it looked like it would be included in the April roll-up. That may only be for Windows 10.

Okay, so what I was reading would be included as an update after summer. But I don't know. I really didn't follow that closely because I couldn't really care. But what I thought was, boy, what an interesting contrast, though, that I could have seen a time where Linux would be maybe just completely SOL or totally out of luck on something like this. Yeah. But Linux kernel has had the updating support for years. I want to say at least five years. Intel has been in there working with the Linux kernel community for years. Intel's been in there working with the Linux community for years now.

It's just a matter of actually having the proprietary package and then depending on your distro whether you have the update functionality. Because you may choose to go with Libre only stuff in which case you're not going to update the microcode. Exactly. So just disable hyperthreading I guess. Or don't worry about it. Or update your microcode.

Back up often and see if there's another way to update the microcode yeah because because see the thing is that so willie maybe you can clear this up because what i was my understanding was is the microcode with this fix has to be uploaded in every boot you can't write it to the to this processor that is correct the microcode has there's a rom on the processor that contains the microcode chip from the factory but the microcode updates you apply are applied at runtime every time they're not persisted on the chip. Yeah.

So how do you... And I think that's actually kind of a good thing, because if you uploaded a bad microcode, you could break your chip. Sure. Whereas now, if it comes from the factory working, you know it's going to continue working. So if you update the microcode and it broke, you can just reboot and do it again. Yeah. So how does the...

That is the nice thing about this process. How does a Triskel user do this, handle this problem? The Triskel user could update their BIOS, since maybe they're using a proprietary BIOS. If they're not, then maybe, I don't know, they're just screwed. They have to accept that they need some binary to be loaded onto the CPU. Stop running that horrible closed-source x86 platform. Yeah.

But yeah, if you're on Skylake or newer, I think you're basically stuck with proprietary code that runs at boot so you can do the microcode update. You're just going to have to deal with yet another proprietary process. So it looks like it hasn't been released for Windows yet, but

I'm sure they'll get updates out eventually. You sound so confident. Yeah. Now, how about this for a story? you guys ready for this now I'm gonna ask you something before I before I

before I get through this whole thing please stick with me on this okay but it's not dead yet Mirror may live on as a Wayland

compositor for the Mate desktop say that again just one more time one more time Mirror yeah

Canonical's display server project which was going to ship as the default in Ubuntu 13.10, which is very optimistic, is actually, despite what people believe, still under active development. I've been watching. It's still getting commits. And so this week, a friend of the show, Martin Wimpress, suggested that Mate developers could be talking to Mir developers about how Mir might be used as a Wayland compositor. And I believe, yeah, here it is. He posted a shot on the Google Plus stream somewhere. I'm not sure. I can't remember where it was. It's on one of those places.

And you could see a whiteboard of how they were kind of conceptualizing this thing out. So here's kind of the important thing to take away. Remember that Wayland itself isn't a display server. It's a protocol that handles the communication between a compositor like Mutter or Weston or KWIN. A thing that actually spits things to the screen. Right. And its clients like the applications and the windows and stuff like that. to the screen. Right. And its clients, like the applications and the

Windows and stuff like that. So Mate doesn't necessarily have something that speaks the Wayland protocol. So they would have to build that in to the Mate backend. And so Wimpy points out that migrating to

Wayland is something that the Mate desktop is going to have to do, right? That's just something that's going to have to happen at some point. The ship has sailed. They could add Wayland support to Marco, but it would be a huge undertaking. They could switch to Mutter, but Gnome Shell, I've covered some of my concerns with Mutter recently. I mean, that has a lot of caveats as well,

as Joey points out on OMG Ubuntu. So using Mir as the Wayland compositor. So they're going to teach Mir to speak Wayland. Mir will act as like a set of APIs that developers can write to that then will be able to understand and can speak

Wayland. It'll be the Wayland compositor. And Wimpy says that it's, yeah, it's a chunk of work but it's less work than rewriting uh Marco or switching over to say Mutter it's it's like it's it's even without explicit Wayland support mirror is closer to what they want than something like Mutter or K1 now I'm going to take this a step further and I think this is where this should go. I think this should go across every distribution. This should not be an Ubuntu-only thing.

This should be how almost every desktop environment on Linux speaks Wayland, with the exception of the really big boys and girls like K-Win and your mutters out there, who already are working on this and already have pretty solid support and have you know very special use cases but here's the reality without something like mirror that does the middle that does like the like a standard api that everybody can write to without something like mirror every single tom dick and harry desktop environment is going to have to create their own wayland compositor and it's going to be this patchwork of features and support that's going to fragment the Linux desktop in a way that we've never even considered fragmentation before. We think of fragmentation as package managers, or library versions, or systemd or nosystemd. But true fragmentation will be copy and paste,

highlight, screenshot capabilities, remote desktop capabilities, support of communicating between X applications and Wayland applications could be different depending on which desktop environment you're using, depending on which Linux you're running on top of, depending on which version of Linux you're running on top of. It is going to be a layer on top of layer on top of layer fragmentation. If each one of these Tom, Dick and Harry desktop environments have to go out and figure out their own way to communicate with Wayland, and not to mention all the stuff still new. So not only is it going to be rough because it's brand new code, but it's going to be rough

because all of these amateur projects are creating their own implementation from scratch. because all of these amateur projects are creating their own implementation from scratch. It could be devastating in terms of usability. So to have something that is well-developed in a company that is familiar with the problem set, that is trying to solve it for their own desktop interests, that can create a common API that desktop environments could just adopt across all Linux,

could save us from what is going to be years of fragmentation hell. Or it's just going to raise the bar. It's going to raise the bar way too high for entry for desktop projects. Because now you don't get X. You don't get the X server. So you've got to write all that stuff on your own. You've got to do all of that legwork now to get your desktop environment up and running on a Wayland-powered Linux desktop, or you've got to fork somebody else's open source project.

And that is a way bigger bar of entry than it used to be. So we are, in a sense, locking the Linux desktop to the establishment projects that have the resources, the know-how, the technical understanding of how to build a display compositor, and we are limited to those projects, they're going to be able to do something that's actually usable on desktop. Unless we have something like this, the multiple communities and multiple distributions and multiple desktop environments are all working towards. At least that's how I see it.

And it's one of the things that concerns me about the future of desktop Linux the most, and it's something we're barely talking about. So it sounds like to me you're calling kind of for like a bog standard display server for Wayland. I'm calling for like a common API set where, you know, this version of the API has these capabilities. I can take screenshots. I have copy and paste.

Well, there you go. So that's the thing. And I wish this article had talked more about that is because like, it's not that Wayland doesn't have those issues, that they're different levels of abstraction and you have different capabilities right so it doesn't provide those things well and right and different projects are at different points of progress in implementing those features

right so just because so just because the KWin display compositor is now making it possible to take screenshots doesn't mean that Mudder can do it and so you could literally have a reality where you can have some basic desktop functionality not work simply because that project hasn't gotten around

to making that work yet on Wayland. Right. So this would almost be like a desktop API where something especially like, you know, for Monterey or things like that, like this reminds me in some ways of Vulkan, you know, where like we have this newer layer where we give more power, right?

So like if you are a big project, you want to be able to implement those things because you're like, well, X does this terribly. I'm always going to get screen tearing and all these problems. Let me fix that in KWIN and we're going to get it right and we're going to have buttery smooth,

super great compositing. But as you're saying, a lot of projects are like, well, I just wanted to make a cool tiling window manager that did things a little differently. Is XFCE going to adopt KWIN? Not likely. Yes.

So I think what you're saying is like, well, if you can surrender some of that control, we need something that can be that middle layer so that you can be like, hey, I just want to take a screenshot. I don't care how you do it. Go talk to Waylon for me. Help me a little bit with those middle layers. I don't need to deviate from those. You still have to build some of the hosts and support into your desktop environment,

but this is what you write to. And if you write to this version of the API, you will get these things. And I imagine, like, I think the other thing I'd like to see more of is the comparison to Mutter because I understand the concerns. Like, it's not that I don't, but I think that it would be good to have those spelled out. And I think part of it may be, too, like that, like, GNOME, the GNOME project doesn't really think of Mutter as that, as the thing that you're describing, you know. Whereas Mirror kind of doesn't have a home as much anymore, or it's in, you know, the state of transition. So maybe this is something that really could excel at. Yeah. And why toss out good code? And if it can be open sourced, and, you know, I would love to also know what the

situation is with the CLA when it comes to Mirror, and if it could, you know, all these... That's a good question. And all, you know, would it have to be moved off of Launchpad and put up on GitHub, really, to get real community involvement? These are all questions you'd have to ask and maybe we'll get somebody on here and they can answer some of those questions. This is interesting though. Yeah, I think the concept is worth considering. And if you hear the name Mir getting kicked around again in community forums and discussion places, I'd say don't dismiss it out of hand. Give it some consideration because there's a real problem here that we're going to be facing.

And this could be solving the problem before we even start to struggle with it. Not that we can't engineer our way out of it once we're there, but it wouldn't be amazing if we just hit the ground running with a solution. That would be amazing. What a concept. This is so neat. This solves some problems I had just this weekend. Eternal Terminal.

Wes found this and it's a remote terminal for the busy and impatient it combines like some of the aspects of mosh which is the popular terminal we've talked about before auto ssh and ssh the whole idea here is that it'll reconnect without interrupting the session and it uses some fancy tcp to do it too wes i was i was looking at it that's kind of part of its secret sauce is as the they kind of break it all down in the how it works section, but they say the Eternal TCP is a layer between the application and the Unix TCP sockets that make the sockets robust to TCP disconnects, including roaming and connection failure.

And they go into why that's actually a particularly hard thing to do and how they came up with a reader and a writer. Yeah, I think this is really interesting. And it kind of, I've liked Mosh, but they talk about them here a lot. You know, it's like that Mosh does have some limitations, especially how, you know, Mosh only tries to communicate the current state of the screen. It doesn't, it's not, it's very different than how we traditionally have had these kinds of connections.

And this seems like it's, you know like it doesn't have quite all the capabilities. It has some different drawbacks and limitations. But if you're just tired of, you know, my internet went out or, you know, just be able to go from one network to another and then having that SSH connection reestablished, come back up and you don't lose your place. Yeah.

That's awesome. I mean, again, I think that it's, you know, if you can use Screen or Tmux, then maybe you don't have this problem as much and it's not that big of a deal. if you can use screen or tmux then then maybe you don't have this problem as much and it's not that big of a deal but it can be a layer of convenience and i think it's really good um software engineering to to try so it's uh something i'll definitely try out because this weekend i had a multi-day benchmark running in an ssh session and it was over the gigabit land so i was like this is good this is solid i mean these never these sessions i have running for

days i never, I died. And, of course, the whole thing just died. Oh, bummer, I thought. And then you linked this to me. I was like, oh, I could have used that just a few hours ago. Where were you earlier? I want to give a quick shout-out to OgCamp17, which is coming up very soon. You can find out more at OgCamp.org.

Saturday, August 19th, and Sunday, August 20th, 2017 in Canterbury. I think that's how you say it, right? Canterbury? Something like that. Canterbury, UK. Which looks like a lot of fun if you're over there. Oh man, doesn't it? Yeah, if you're over on the better spoken side of the pond. We're flying over, right? I wish, man. I wish. Also, tip of the hat to

Entroware for being like a platinum sponsor over there. Which is really cool to see them stepping up the community support. And Ogg Camp is an unconference celebrating free culture, free and open source software, hardware hacking, digital rights, all the things we love talking about on this show. So you can find out more at OggCamp.org. And again, August 19th and the 20th.

That's awesome. And then next week, very soon, our virtual lug, some of you, become an actual lug. You're going to come here to the studio. You know, we have this thing set to 12. Oh, 12, that's probably pretty good. That's probably pretty good. And you and Dan are doing a double of the tech snap, so we could even go long. Yeah, we can totally go long.

Cool. So, yeah, next week is the barbecue here at the studio to celebrate episode 200. Oh, I'm excited. Me too. I'm not going to eat for the whole next week. I'm going to do a big fast. I'm thinking like, okay, I better get an extra tank of propane. I'm going to bring over maybe a charcoal barbecue.

Got to make sure the sous vide machine is prepared. I guess we got to think about sides too because I feel like I've only thought about meat. Which is not that that's bad. That's the important part. But Hadid's thinking about making like an ambrosia salad so that could be one side but yeah we need like

beans and stuff oh beans we got a couple of chairs in here I figured we'll have the mumble room we'll have a couple of chairs the people come in here

we'll chat it'll be good it'll be a lot of fun meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting to sign up if you can make it next week I don't know how

we're going to stream I still haven't figured that out I'm like just going to take that right up to the red line and then figure that out at the last minute, I guess. In true JB style. Originally, I was going to vlog the whole thing

and then just do a big release, but then it... That did sound fun. I know, but then in all of the material we put publicly, it said we'll live stream it. I'm like, oh, shit. Okay, well, we're live streaming it then. We're doing it live. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting.

If you can make it, and the meetup will be here at the studio. So uh hopefully you know it's right up just uh what would you say west how how how many minutes up around noon or say around 11 on a tuesday is it from seattle it's a drive you probably make semi-frequently so yeah it's probably like um depending on traffic like 45 minutes 40 minutes plan for like a 45 50 minute drive to make it up here from seattle yeah from the seattle area that's but it's it's a nice drive it's worth it is this the burbs of seattle are we in the burbs getting that way you know when you live in the burbs you don't really consider is it because like outside of the cities the suburbs right you know you don't think of it as the burbs when you live in the burbs yeah but we do there you

go i guess i mean you might be like um you could think of Everett as a Seattle suburb and then you're like a suburb of Everett. No, no, no, I reject that. You're just going to skip over that middle section there. And here's the thing, too. Like when I travel and people say, where are you from? You say Seattle. Yeah, you say Seattle because like 500 miles away. When you're like 2,000 miles away or 3,000, but even like 500 miles away, like the nuance

of the difference between Seattle and anywhere else is totally is lost. So, yeah. Alright, well, let's take a moment and let's thank Ting for sponsoring this episode of the Unplugged Program. Go to linux.ting.com. Not only is that a powerful URL that you want in your history, but it's also the way to

support the show and get $25 off a Ting device. They got a lot of great devices that you can in your history, but it's also the way to support the show and get $25 off a Ting device. They got a lot of great devices that you can buy directly from Ting. No contract, no other termination fee, no weird quote unquote agreements. Hate those. You can also just bring a device and then get a Ting service credit. Now, I did that. That's how I got started with Ting. I was like, I'm going to be a little skeptical and dip my toe in here, dip my toe in the water. I brought a device. I got a $25 service credit, and that thing lasted me more than my first month.

And I realized, oh, man, something shifted here. Because you're just paying for what you use, your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. And that's it. It's just $6 for a line. So if you use, say, 15 text messages, you just pay for the 15 that you have to use instead of having to pay for a plan that gives you 800 texts just in case you use this. It's all kind of silly. It's all kind of arbitrary. It's all just really a scam. And Ting is here to make mobile simple and make sense. That's why there's no contracts. You pay for what you use. They have nationwide coverage.

You're in control with their awesome dashboard. They have tons of nice devices and a CDMA network and a GSM network, which means not only is that a ton of devices you can bring, but that gives you flexibility down the road too when you're traveling. I use that all the time. I bring a CDMA phone with me, and I bring a GSM either hotspot or phone with me too, one or the other, so I can always have good network signal wherever I'm going because it's just different areas. The different companies have different agreements

with different cities, and you just never know. You're looking to move or something, and you don't want to have to change carriers? Like, that's the last thing you want. Yeah, yeah. When we did the shows back at the house, I had CDMA coverage there that was really great. When we moved here, I got just a slightly,

it was still great coverage on CDMA, but I got just faster data on the GSM network. Nice. So I switched to the GSM network. But you don't have to do accounts. There's no canceling or sign up. You just boom. And it's one of those things

where you never have to think about it if you're not like a geek. But if you are a geek and you know what those things are it's great that you have that flexibility. Check them out. Go to linux.ting.com and save a little money.

Support the show and get started with a better way to do mobile. linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com. Thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. One of my favorite open source desktop applications, admittedly because I have the cutest kids on the entire planet, hashtag bias,

Digicam has a new update, Digicam 5.6, and this is the thing here that I was, I always wanted this because when I want to share my photos, like, oh, look at this really cute thing my kids did because they're the cutest kids in the entire world. I think I mentioned that. But I didn't really want to throw up a whole gallery on Google Photos and share it with family or what other photo sharing services are there. Is Flickr still a thing? I don't know.

Yeah, it's weird. And it's like, well, what am I really – this is a problem that is now solved in Digicam 5.6, which is what I wanted to call out this feature. This is a problem that is now solved in Digicam 5.6, which is what I wanted to call out this feature. It's a new HTML gallery tool that lets you quickly generate a web gallery from a set of albums or, you know, just a couple of photos. And then they get immediately uploaded online. You can show them to friends and family. And then there's also a tool built in there. They'll take a slideshow and just create a video that you can share.

So instead of trying to figure out how to do the slideshow thing it'll which this is a common question my family has so this is this is gonna be my go-to answer now is just use this digicam program it'll you know you build the slideshow and it will generate a video for you you just email me your mp4 and we'll all be fine you know my aunts and stuff are going to be putting that up on facebook the moment yeah that feature yeah and then for us geeks uh you're gonna love this digicam 5.6 comes with improvements for database backends and uh support for mysql databases so not only sql lights hey you get a real database yeah we're almost real i mean it's you know when you got a lot of photos or what i was and i think somebody told me that their setup was like this once is a shared freaking mysql database between your machines yeah there you go right you just have one and put the photos like on an nfs mount you put the database on a mysql server you throw you

need the high availability digicam because you need to edit at any time well to tell you the truth this honestly though yeah right i hate having like some of my photos on one machine that's one of the things google photos was really appealing is i could just put them google photos could be the canonical master source but i want the actual files on my file system. And so Digicam's sort of that nice middle layer because when I want the photo experience, Digicam's there, but I know in the back end,

they're on the file system. Throw it on a NAS, shared MySQL database. If I had an afternoon, man, I would seriously consider it. I also love the HTML export, like you were talking about. That is neat.

So you could just go throw that on S3 or whatever, or DigitalOcean's new object storage, and then just go run a website that way huh you know the other thing too i'll just mention i know for the paranoid this is not your top feature but uh for those of us that leave the gps coordinate taggings on for the phones that support it they've brought back the feature to show like where your photos are taken on our map stuff oh neat yeah it's always fun with the kids it always fun. Let's talk about this particular one. In Mumble Room, if anybody wants to jump in on this story,

in fact, I'd like to actually, maybe we'll toss some of this to the Mumble Room because I'd like to hear their ideas on how they would do this. So prepare your minds because Mozilla wants to give you $2 million. Up front, right? Like they'll just give it to me

and then maybe I give them deliver? No. Damn. No. The $2 million. Do they need my PayPal address? Yes. Or your Bitcoin address maybe.

I'm not sure. Chris, it's all about Ethereum these days. Come on. I know. That's what everybody tells me. Except for – I can't get into that. So this is – really it's a prize to decentralize the web and they're looking for people to apply today. Mozilla and the National Science Foundation are offering a $2 million prize

for big ideas that decentralize the web, and they're accepting applications right now. So to give you a little idea of kind of what they're looking for, they want something that would work off the quote-unquote grid when disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes strike. So keep this in mind. Mumble Room. Communication networks, they say, are going to be critical infrastructure, and they want vital messaging and mapping services to work after disaster.

The applicants will be expected to design both the means to access wireless network, i.e. the hardware, and the applications provided on top of that network, i.e. software. And projects should be portable and easy to power and simple to access. What do you think, Sweet Lou? What would you start with? I was thinking like some sort of mesh network in that. Like maybe. Okay, but you've got to give me hardware and the software you'd use to do it because it's part of the challenge.

So would it be like phone-based? Would it be laptop-based? Because you've got to have something powerful enough to route the traffic if the network gets busy. Probably maybe something server-based in that. You would have to maybe go a little bit high-end in that because you've got to have something powerful enough to handle the load in that, not having an unintended DDoS.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. TechMav, you say Ham Radio has already figured out some of this. Mr. TechMav, go. All right, fine. But I mean, I think that's a good point if I can speak for Mr. TechMav. Yeah. Just that for some of these things, if you don't need high bandwidth,

then that might be a legitimate thing because in emergency scenarios, you might just need like, hey, over here, or we need food or whatever. You need high bandwidth. You would definitely need high bandwidth. All right, Basharoo. What is it? Bash-flu-roo? Bash-ful robot.

Bash-ful robot. Oh, okay. Bash-ful robot, man. Thank you for looking across the room. Distance versus cost. Hit me with it. Well, because if you think about it even you look at traditional carriers they they don't reach everywhere uh based on you know last mile fiber or even you know that's why they're

jumping like a lot of the satellite or the uh point-to-point wireless uh in canada here i mean you we have good transit across the nation but you get us into the last mile and we're we're hooped like you just can't get it and no one wants to pay for it. There's like an S ton of dark fiber between Vancouver and Seattle. That's been sitting there from when, uh, what was it? Three, six, five was in there and no one wants to buy it because it's too expensive. Yeah.

Huh. Uh, I guess that kind of is sort of maybe in line with your thinking producer, Michael satellites. Uh, yeah, there's a, there's a project that's being done that allows anybody to contribute. It uses OpenStreetMaps and GPS to share data through – like without any kind of actual data service. So you just need to be able to access the GPS. So what is being done is anybody can go into the service, sign up for the project, and you can spend anywhere between five to 30 minutes. And they have like these tasks that you can take data information that's been provided

on the local level of like reporters and stuff. And you can go in and change and manipulate the map data so that people in emergency situations will get a notification really quick. Interesting. That would be... That kind of gives me an idea. So what about... Well, I think I know how I would do it. I think I know how I would do it.

Carry your pigeons. Maybe, dude. Maybe. Hey, let's talk about it. Do you have an idea how you would do this? To me, at least... There's two kind of challenges here, right? There's the off-the-grid and the smart community networks one and to me like thinking about it it depends on what disasters or other things we're talking

about here but it kind of seems like a software problem like we've already seen some chat apps or other things on mobile that will work without internet to do like nfc chat or wi-fi ad hoc chats so really to me it seems like the problem is that we don't have a lot of schemas or specs or things around how to share. Okay, sure, you have like a Windows Home Group or something. But realistically, there's not a lot of great ways to interact. So like you lose your internet connection for the whole neighborhood, but you need to share resources. You're already connected if there's still power between your – if you're on the same ISP. Like we could have a LAN.

But there's no tools, software, or management to do that. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could have devices that mesh network, even when there's no internet, and say you had a Wikipedia app and your phone had the articles cached that I wanted. I could retrieve them from your – like if the software was smart enough to not only announce what local data you had, but if it was also smart enough to know the privilege level, this is public information. Yes, that's important. Like I have no way to offer a service to my neighbors even though maybe we're all on the same ISP. The coax is connected. There's a switch that connects us all. There's just not standards for that. It's almost like it's like a proxy server for everything.

Okay, so here's where I was going with this. I think it's also a software problem because I don't think you would do just one particular fix. Like one of the things they mentioned in here is, here's an example. They said, a backpack containing a hard drive computer, battery, and a Wi-Fi router. The router provides access via Wi-Fi network to resources on the hard drive like maps and messaging applications. So like doing a data drop-off.

Here's a drop-off, but now you need a way to know that data is there and you can access it. So I think it is a software problem. And then the other thing I was thinking is why only have one approach here? Why only one thing? Why just satellites? Why just air balloons? Why not a full spectrum?

In some areas, it's a raspberry pi stuck in the corner somewhere at someone else's place they've got an x86 rig in their garage that's been sitting there providing resharing networking now for a year somewhere else it's something built into a television because it's a high-end television and this is a common wireless chipset that's now been created at another place it's somebody's phone that's just helping fill in a bit of a gap and in another area it's a dgi drone that somebody strapped a Raspberry Pi to the bottom of. But it's getting connection and sharing signal. And if the network exists, the software is smart enough to make the access happen.

However, the connection is being provided. If it's anything from a DJI drone to a x86 rig in a garage, like whatever is sharing the connectivity, that doesn't matter. You make that irrelevant so that way that could be just hodgepodge because that's going to be geographical too there's going to be some areas that are that are poor that can only afford certain things that have hectic wiring and power and there's some areas they're more affluent connections will be a part of this yeah yeah exactly so you know it reminds me of our conversation with michael hall last week and endless os and you combine what they're doing with offline things like recipes and Wikipedia and reference material and books.

And you combine it with something like this Mozilla challenge. I wonder. I just – I'm fascinated by the whole idea, especially when you use things like the lens of the net neutrality debate. Like say we go to some dystopian future with net neutrality and corporate lockdown of the internet, and the geeks had to save the world, how would they do it? Say you had to rebuild a new network, how would we do it? We'd have to use the tools we have.

And it would be our phones, our Raspberry Pis, our PCs, our phones. I mean, like, we're kicked off YouTube. We can't livestream anymore, and that's the only way you get videos on mobile. I've got selfies to post. Yeah, right? So join us over on the new internet, where you just take your tin can and piece of string and you tie it to your neighbor's house and it's, you know, you watch JB, it's cool. But I think we could come up with something.

So here's what I'm saying. Go to the Mozilla blog, read more about it, win the $2 million and then kick back a couple hundred bucks to JB for hooking you up. Woo! Speaking of Mozilla, they launched a new podcast this week. I wonder if they have it up on their website, their IRL podcast with Veronica Belmont. Did you hear about this? No. Yeah. She's got a new show working for Mozilla.

See, this is why you got to listen to the Ask Noah show. You got to listen because Veronica Belmont joined Noah Chalaya, our Noah Chalaya, on Ask Noah episode 14, Belmont IRL. Look at that. Yeah, and Noah talked to her about her projects, the upcoming show, the IRL podcast, and all kinds of good stuff. They had a little Linux chat in there too. Veronica

Belmont is a class act, and so it was a good interview on Ask Noah. That's super exciting, yeah. I think the new show launches today. So how about that? How about that? I'll be curious to see where that goes. Because I've liked her on things. I mean, I've been listening to Veronica Belmont since Buzz Out Loud. So I've liked her on a lot of that stuff.

So I would imagine she'd probably put together a pretty decent show. Oh, yeah. Episode one is now out on their IRLpodcast.org. There you go. Oh, you did listen to it yesterday, Bash. What did you think? It wasn't bad. It had a very produced feel to it. bash what'd you think it wasn't bad it had a very uh produced

feel to it uh kind of almost scripted but they went heavy with the editing on it for sure yeah that's kind of the new thing you know shows where we sit around here and uh just don't don't edit out when people don't answer and uh hitting the microphone that's a that's a we are a dying breed we are legacy yeah we are legacy podcast we don't. Yeah, we are a legacy podcast. We don't need season chapter markers and podcast apps and all these. I mean, it's just. It's a straight raw MP3 feed. Sometimes we're an hour long.

Sometimes we're an hour and a half. It's a real train wreck. It's a real train wreck. It is hashtag disastrous, hashtag need data. That's got to get that data. Well, speaking of data, Wes. Oh. Digital Ocean's got data for days.

Go over to digitalocean.com and sign up and use our promo code LinuxUnplugged and get a $10 credit. You heard Wes mention it earlier. They're introducing object storage. They have block storage, which is – okay. For me, I'm going to be honest. When they introduced block storage, I was good. I was like, this is all I need. This is what I've done.

But the beauty to object storage is then you can build your applications in a way that can scale for days. And this is probably, honestly, if I was starting out today, how I would do things as well. So it's pretty brilliant that DigitalOcean is launching this. And if you sign up for early access, you can get a terabyte to play around with until, like, October. Yeah, that's nice. So DigitalOcean is a really simple and straightforward way to spin up a nice rig on their infrastructure in seconds.

They call them droplets. I call them fast Linux rigs. They got SSDs for all of the different types of machines. They have lightning fast networking. They have a beautiful UI to manage it and a simple API with tons of pre-built command line utilities that really, that's really what matters about the API

is the open source community has really embraced it. Something else that's really cool is they have load balancing as a service. They have monitoring and alerting, and they have hourly pricing available. So you can get a 2-gig system with a 2-core processor, 40-gigabyte SSD of disk, and 3 terabytes of transfer for 3 cents an hour. Digital Ocean, I tell you what. Go over there, sign up, use our promo code D-O-Unplugged, get a $10 credit, and mess around.

They've got data centers all over the world, and you can even run free, I say fast Linux rigs, but you can even run the good old free BSD. DigitalOcean.com, use our promo code D-O-Unplugged, and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So I am up for interruption at any point, Mumble, as I go through the Dell machine I have here. So please feel free if you have any questions to stop me and I'll answer them. I had a chance.

I guess I should probably back up. So dell sent me a couple of weeks ago i've been running this machine for a few weeks the dell precision 5720 it's an all-in-one and this one came with ubuntu 1604 and this was probably one of the hardest machines i've ever reviewed i feel like it's getting hard because how do you review a machine like this? It's a system that has Intel Xeon E3-1275 processor. So it's a quad core with hyper-threading. This one had 3.8 gigahertz clock, which turbo boosts up to 4.2 gigahertz. Nuts. With an 8 megabyte cache.

You can put three drives. This one had a PCIe M.2 drive and a i think i was spinning terabyte drive in it i mean it's just it's super fast and so you almost know immediately if you need a machine like this or not like i don't really need to tell you if you need a xeon system with 64 gigs or up to 128 gigs but this one had 64 gigs of ecc ram like you know that you know that you know immediately if that's too much system for you. So then I was trying to figure out, okay, well, so who are these people and what are the workloads specific to the Linux desktop for a system kind of like this? And I kind of broke it down into a few different areas. Definitely for a high-end photo management station and photo workflow like Digicam, this thing's a slam dunk.

It looks like it would be. Super fast disk I.O., so if you have large megapixel photos from your DSLR, high resolution, super vibrant screen. Tal's been killing it with those screens lately. I also did some video editing on it. Linux itself is not super great at 4K playback right now, but if you get hardware accelerated video decoding,

it works fine. I did it. And this machine's a great one for it. But I think probably the other area that this thing would stomp would be software development. I ran a series of openbenchmark.org benchmarks on this rig, and what's really, if you're curious about any of this stuff, check out the Pharonix test suite.

It is really, it's really a great piece of open source software. We've talked about it before on the show, but goodness, goodness, or as Commie says, lordy, lordy, lordy. Is this thing not great? So first of all, it simulates all kinds of workloads. It installs the actual packages on your machine from your distro's repository and then goes through and executes different workloads. Documents it all, uploads it to OpenBenchmark, allows you to compare it to other similar systems, allows people to compare their system to yours. It is very, very useful.

And so some of the benchmarks that I ran on it, specifically to software development, were some of the most impressive. Wow. So one of the highlights is I was able to build Linux kernel 4.9 in under two minutes on this system. Now, that would be a way you could just a quick takeaway from this review.

If you're curious how fast the system is compared to yours, go get kernel 4.9 source code on your system and build it and time that. And that gives you kind of a baseline in some sense of how fast, just phenomenal how fast the system is. So this also means that if you have to use a custom kernel, you can't complain about it. Well, and I just try to mention, I just try to mention, it uses the stock kernel. I just mentioned that as a benchmark because if you can build, it just gives you a perspective

if you're building your own projects, how fast they might build on this comparison to the Linux kernel. And I thought that was just sort of an interesting perspective. But I have a link in the show notes where you can actually run the comparison benchmark. So you can click this link. You give it the address to the Pharonix test suite, and it runs the exact benchmark. So you can click this link, you give it the address to the Pharonix test suite, and it runs the exact benchmark I ran, and it gives

you the comparison result. I have that in there. So I spent about a week using it to edit photos and video, and I found it to be pretty exceptional at that. And so I'd say that whole sort of high-end media production workload, this thing's obviously great

for. Anything that has a lot of disk IO, this thing's pretty great for. And if you're clever enough to monkey around with your system codecs, or you're brave enough, might be a better way to put it, because it's really, it's maybe, it could be a stability issue. I really say you got to be willing to mess around with your codecs, but

you can get great 4K video editing. If you're just working with 1080 video, this thing is going to slam. Yeah, it's going to slam it. I worked with this thing. Even under heavy load, it never felt really bogged down at all. It was super powerful. It does seem like it would appeal for the creatives or professionals who are just trying to get things done because you don't – I mean like it's an all-in-one type unit. So you just put it on your desk.

You plug it in and then all right. You got a computer now. It's already running Ubuntu. Let's talk about that. Is there really – so if you're getting a system this powerful, who wants a system that's this powerful that's also an all-in-one? That was one of the other things I was trying to figure that out because to me at first it wasn't obvious. But having used it for a little bit, I can tell you it's pretty low hassle, and I think that's probably its biggest appeal. If you use the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard it comes with, and you use Wi-Fi,

you have one cord coming out the back. That's pretty nice. And it's very clean. It's very simple. The speakers are incredible. We'll talk about more of those in a little bit. That all is really nice. Where it gets kind of interesting is if you combine it with the touchscreen option, because the whole thing folds down, sort of like a Surface Studio, but this is way more powerful than a surface studio and that is actually kind of a useful feature for certain types of work especially for certain types of video editing so i liked i i could i started to use it more i was like i could kind of see this this machine is powerful enough i i feel like this machine spec as this was which is about 3600 which is still like half

the price of the imac pro um would probably last you 10 years you have usbc up the wazoo on the back of this thing you have thunderbolt 3 the back is removable the back is complete you you do two screws you do to pull you remove two screws and the whole back of the thing comes off. Wow. And you have access to all of the hard drives. You have access to the memory. I don't know about the CPUs. I believe they are socketed, but I don't know if you'd actually want to upgrade them.

And I don't know if that would void the warranty either. So it's much more sustainable than an iMac because nothing's really soldered. You can get access to all of that stuff pretty quickly. The screen is going to, you mean, there's not going to be better screens really for, I mean, there will be,

but it's going to be a great screen for a long time. It's, it is fast enough with, you know, 64 gigabytes of ECC RAM, 1.5 terabytes of super fast storage. It, the all in one aspect of it kind of makes more sense now than I think it used to

because you're not really going to be super hard-pressed to upgrade this thing. That's where I thought about it, from the business or small business or design company or something. You could just buy that for an employee. They're new. You don't have to think about anything else.

Keyboard, mouse, done, speakers. That's exactly that. When I put myself in the small business mindset and I thought, oh yeah, this could be a machine that you buy an employee. And you don't have to have IT staff who can set it up and network and's exactly that. When I put myself in the small business mindset and I thought, oh yeah, this could be a machine that you buy an employee. And you don't have to have IT staff who can set it up and network and all of that. Yeah. And you can buy the same one for your folks

that run Ubuntu or Red Hat and you can buy the same one for your folks that run Windows 10. Yeah, totally. And so that's sort of an advantage that Dell has. I wonder what kind of hackintosh it would make. Oh, I don't know. That's actually a good question. I'm not sure. I use Cadian Live in my testing, and I

find it to be usable if you use proxy media with high-resolution stuff. And I put out a vlog that's more of a real quick look at this that's more visual-heavy, because this is a very pretty machine. And it is. And I showed off some of my example work that I edited under this machine in the vlog. I have

it embedded in the show notes, which is sort of a more of a quick take and my impressions of it. And I thought that also be a good chance to show off some of the work you can do with the machine. So that's sort of the that's sort of the my my. Oh, I went through I had to go through several levels of realizations. And the one was there is a workload for this, even if it's not high resolution video editing. There's still several really good workloads for this machine uh software development being one that i think is probably high on that list uh and then then i had to kind of wrap my head around the whole all-in-one aspect of it like why would you want this as an all-in-one versus like like a little mini tower

under your desk or something connected to like a 5k screen i had to like i had to bridge that and it it wasn't until i sort of put myself in a small business like well this machine's fast enough i buy this for myself for an employee as a business this could easily be three four five six seven machine your machine then it started to make a little more sense because it's also uh it's also just a very portable in a sense it's heavy but you can you can move between desks it's not like you don't have to move a whole bunch of a whole bunch of extra stuff. It's kind of more appealing to me than it used to be. And they make it with this really heavy base that sits on the desk so that way you can move the screen around. I was watching that, and that seems nice.

It doesn't move around. It doesn't rock or tilt. So it means it's a little awkward to carry, but you're not moving around a lot. Right. Yeah. So there's sort of the first part of it. I suppose the second part of it would be sort of the thermals and the noise stuff.

I had an opportunity to punish this machine when it was very hot out. It's very hot in the JB lab when I did this test. So it was probably 90 degrees in the room. Only a small piece of the case melted. It's fine.

So I tested that. So Chris, what Intel CPUs are running? It's got, depending on, now this is, of course, you can get it with a range, but the one that I have is the Xeon E3-1275. They have a huge range of CPUs. Yeah, well, they also essentially have something similar to this in the XPS line, which then you can even get with i7 or i5s. So you have the XPS line of the all-in-one, and then you have the Precision line. And this is the Precision line, which is the workstation-grade, enterprise-grade line. So that's why you have ECC and Xeons.

It looks like on the site they still offer the i5s and i7s if you want, if you don't need the Xeons. And I think if you do that, I't need the xeons so and i think if you do that i think i might be wrong i think like starting price is like 17 and 18 hundred dollars 16.99 yeah maybe i'm shopping for one right now as we're doing this so that is even more remarkable when you compare it to the imac pro it's obviously not competitive really but you have a starting range yeah of 1700 and then you can configure upwards from there my favorite part here is uh you know, all right, well, it shows Windows for me.

I can upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise for $70 more. Yeah, that makes it look like a premium option. Well, you get the Red Hat support contract. Yeah, no, it's exciting. So in a sense, it is a premium option. Yeah. Yeah, I found it to be fun because I was like, okay, well, how the hell am I going to break this machine?

Like, what do you throw at a computer like this with that much RAM and CPU? So that's what I tried to do. So over the weekend, I really punished the hell out of this thing. I put it in a 90-degree room, not intentionally, but that's just how it worked out. Didn't have any other rooms. And, yeah, well, it was hot, too. It was a hot weekend. Sunday, especially.

Oh, yeah. That was when I was really. That was a hot day. Oh, my God that was when i was really that was a hot day oh my god not really but we're from the pacific northwest so our conception of hot is not that it's like a hundred and uh it's moist af i'll just say that i'll just say that it's moist af but this thing also yeah so the so the back's removable where you can upgrade the components but then just io wise you have display port out you have hdmi out you have etherPort out, you have HDMI out, you have Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet. I think it's got three USB-C ports on the thing,

plus USB-A, plus SD card reader on the side. So it's got tons of connectivity, including connectivity for external graphics down the road. This one came with the AMD workstation graphics with 8 gigs of video RAM. Nice. Yeah. So it was... It was an even

rendering all day. So I got another question. Architect was saying in chat that it has a base amount, but where is that located? Because I think this would be awesome if you had a base amount on the back of the screen so you have no base, and

it's like you could have a floating arm on your desktop, and it's like you have no – people will be going, hey, where's your computer? And it's just the screen. So I think you have two options, actually. I think so. I think the stand comes off, but that takes some trickery. And I believe on the bottom of the stand, too, the heavy part, the plate, there's a VESA mount capability, too.

So I think you have two options with this sucker to mount it, which is pretty nice. Yeah, because it would actually go really well on the wall. I mean, a killer system for something like that, especially like a doctor's office where you want it to be fast and reliable. All right, so let's talk about thermals, let's talk about the

speakers and all that stuff, but because we've got to prepare ourselves, let's take a moment and thank Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. I know. I know. You've got a machine. You've got to learn, right?

You've got to learn. You've got to learn. You've got to learn on a machine like this. When you've got yourself the precision workstation, why not go to Linux Academy and learn? Learn how to put it through its paces. They have self-paced in-depth video courses for every Linux, cloud, and DevOps topic. Hands-on labs and scenario-based labs that really help you work with the material. So it's not just checking the boxes. You actually walk away with experience and confidence to do the work

and instructor mentoring if you ever get stuck. And lots of really great vibrant community members from the Jupyter Broadcasting community that are working there, forking the flashcards, making things better, practice exams before you take your big quiz, iOS and Android apps for the go. It's a killer resource. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Sign up for a free seven-day trial.

Thanks, Linux Academy. So looking at this thing, I thought for sure that with Xeon processors and PCIe storage, which often runs hot, I thought for sure once I really started pushing it, I would hear it make quite a bit of noise. And I'd seen in

I think it was Swampy's review that he posted recently. Somebody else posted a review just the other day while I was finishing up mine and complained about some fan noise. So I expected to hear quite a bit of fan noise. And I think maybe depending on what you're pushing in the machine, you might get different results. But when I was pushing the CPU super heavy and really working that, doing things like builds and crypto benchmarks, almost inaudible in a 90-degree room, which really, really surprised me.

When I started pushing the GPU more and more, I could hear a different type of cooling kick. And I don't know if it's just one fan in the system or if there's multiple fans. I didn't take the back off to look to see how they're cooling it. But I could definitely hear a bit more of an increase in sound. But I actually tried to record a little bit of the machine noise to give you a sample. And the room, the lab that I was in, just the ambient noise of the room was louder than the machine noise even when I was pushing the GPU. So it wasn't too bad. I think probably the thing that I'm the most mixed on, and of course I don't think Dell is going to like to hear this, but the thing that I'm the most mixed on with this machine is the speakers

they is that right they some people have complained they don't look good i actually think in person they look fine they're not very noticeable i've so in like some photography of the machine i've i've i've lit it so that way you could see where the speakers were at and there's three speakers along the front three like a sound bar essentially and then in the base of the machine there's a sub. So it's essentially a seven-speaker system. And to say Dell is proud of this would be an understatement. While we were at Dell, they made sure to demo it to us and told us about the Grammy award-winning tuning. And then when they sent this machine to me, they included a literature that went on for

quite a bit about how advanced the sound system is. And it's interesting to see how companies, like there's aspects of their products they're extremely proud of. And the sound system was definitely one of them. So I feel like anything negative I say about this is going to be disappointing, but I have to tell you the truth.

And the truth of it is for mids, they're great. Anything in mids, like any music or a voice that's got a dialogue. So I can listen to some podcasts while I'm working on this, no problem. Yeah. Or, you know, anything with guitar or cymbals or anything mids is going to sound fantastic. I'm listening to a Spanish guitar podcast, Chris, obviously.

I feel like the highs began to distort a little bit at the high end, just a little bit. again to distort a little bit at the high end just a little bit but here's why i say i feel like because what it really is is these speakers brutal brutally handle bad audio like they just are brutal with it like i i guess here's a comparison i'm trying to make because i'm trying it's hard to like because we're of course i can't like play a sample because we're re-encoding this audio so like it's really hard for me to describe this problem to you. But take this sort of analogy, if you will. If you ever had a high-definition television that you brought it home, you hooked it up, and you plugged in your standard-definition signal to it, and all of a sudden standard-definition television, which looked just fine on your 22-inch CRT, looks like total ass on your 50.

which look just fine on your 22-inch CRT, looks like total ass on your 50. That is how bad encoded audio sounds on these speakers to my ears. To my ears, YouTube videos like a 480p YouTube video or even a 720p YouTube video, I can hear compression artifacts much more clearly with these speakers than I could hear them, say, on a standard set of very nice monitor desktop speakers and i think it's because these things accentuate highs and mids in a way that expose compression artifacts that if you if you know what to hear you will hear it constantly with these speakers because it turns out the internet is full of bad audio yep now if you have good and i did a little ab comparison i took uh mp3 tracks and i took WAV tracks and I played them side to side.

And noticeably, even with MP3s, I could hear improved audio. I perceptibly could notice the audio sounded better with these speakers. Like if you give them more material to work with, they do more. And if you give them a compressed file, there's just less for these speakers to work with. And so they produce less. And it's not that it doesn't sound good. It's that once you hear these speakers sound great, everything else sounds like shit. Right.

And so then you want everything to be uncompressed or to be flack. And you don't want to watch any YouTube video under 1080p. And Spotify has to go out the window. And like it's really just it's an interesting problem to have. And also then combine that with the fact that the lows are pretty weak. There's not a lot of bass. It's got a built-in sub. I mean, they're only so big, right?

So how do you? Right. Now, for most people, they probably don't need a lot of boom in their desktop audio. And if you're doing content editing or creation on this machine, these speakers are great. If you're doing podcast editing, speakers are great. If you're doing dialogue and stuff like that, they're great. If you're playing games, even if you don't want a lot of bass, I think they're really great. If you're watching a lot of YouTube, if you're listening to a lot of compressed audio, it sort of drove me crazy a little bit. So that was my sort of like, it was this really weird

torn issue on the speakers because yeah, I acknowledge they're great. And I can tell Dell's very proud of them. It's almost like, um, like studio um like studio monitor type thing you know it's like unless you've got a they won't compensate for your bad they don't base boost right they don't do anything you know it's like you'll just hear if it's good it sounds great if not then so the way i looked at it's like well okay so um when when i have that problem i could wear headphones which i might be more inclined to do anyways and then when i want built-in audio i have great audio available to me if my source is good right but it is kind of awkward because like, if you're an audio engineer, then you're going to have headphones or very nice speakers anyway. So you probably won't use those.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting. You're right about that. To me, they almost make more sense in the XPS line, which is more consumer focused. And yes, to answer the question, it does have a headphone port. So it's right there on the side, too. If you look at the shot I have up on the video, there's the SD card reader there, and then right below it is the headphone port. You're totally right, though, that in person, also that bass is heavy. I was just buying the bass. And you're totally right, the fingerprints do show up.

But you're right, it's like a bezel on screens that don't have great bezels, but you're looking at the screen, you don't notice the speakers at all. They don't take away. They stand out more when looking at the screen, you don't notice the speakers at all. They don't take away. They stand out more when I lit the face so you can see the features, but it has a very Infinity Pool feel to the front of it, and that's one of the things that's neat is because you combine it on this floating hinge,

and then it has the black Infinity Pool front, so when the screen is off, it just looks like this, it's just this infinite black hole sitting on your table. Your soul sinks right in. It's fine. And then when you turn it on, it's one of the best screens you'll see I think for a long time. And so it goes from this deep black infinity pool to this vibrant 4K screen that almost goes all the way out.

Here's a shot where I tried to demonstrate where you can see the edges. It almost goes all the way out to the edge of the screen. Dell's getting really good with these thin bezels. And it just makes it totally pop. And everybody that saw it commented on how good it looks visually. And so it's sort of hard to capture that. And then you combine it with the

great I.O., the super fast performance, then you have Dell's support that you get with it. You were right about the production quality like the build quality of the thing yeah it's solid yeah it's i i i i'm really impressed it's like they just when they decide to do it they really decide to do it it's it's so solid like i've carried this thing around now for weeks moving it between my place and the studio, doing different tests on it. Changing it on hikes, clearly.

I did. And I mean, I'm telling you, having moved this thing around, it is, even though that whole back panel comes off, it is super solidly built. Which makes me really happy. Even like, I feel like there are, like we've talked about the caveats. We've talked about like, maybe this isn't for you. You don't have a purpose. You being the audience member or whatever. But the fact that they can make something like this, I'm excited to see this trickle down

or be this kind of approach in other product lines. I honestly feel like, if I'm being honest, I'm enough of a gearhead that this would be a machine for me. I guess I can't always justify Xeons and workstation graphics and ECC RAM, but I also know that I like my system to be extremely stable. I also know that I want my business investments to last a long time. I actually – I don't think it's that big of a jump for somebody like me.

This would be a really – I think this is a really great route to go. And because it doesn't start at $5,000, now that Apple – see, Apple set the entry price for the iMac at five thousand dollars wow so the fact that this thing spec'd pretty nice as it is it was thirty six hundred dollars well now it feels like a deal you know like thanks apple you just sold dell's machine for me because yeah it's it's very nice so i thought it was shockingly quiet very low fan noise even after multi-day benchmarks and the sound system for, for the most part, is really great. And if you have invested in a good audio, like a good music collection, you're going to enjoy the shit out of these speakers. I took this thing, I took it out in the lab and took it out there

because it was too loud to play in here. It's too loud. I have clips of me. I tried to come up with a way to demonstrate how it sounds. But how do you really, if you don't have the speakers, if you don't have the speakers to play it back, you don't know what it sounds like. You have to have better speakers or, you know, at minimum. Or the same.

I do have B-roll of me playing music really loud on this thing and then trying to shout over it to demonstrate how loud it is. Which I don't know if maybe the patrons want that. I might release that. A WAV file that you upload somewhere. Or I have video of it of me trying to shout over this machine. I'm like, this will demonstrate it. And then I got back to the editing and I'm like, that is stupid as hell. I'm not putting that in the show.

That's a dumb idea. But they're pretty impressive. So anyways, it's a really nice rig. It's also got a 1080p front-facing camera. I think it's 1080p. Is that right? Yeah. So I can video chat with my grandkids?

And actually, a decent multi-array mic, too. So it's not too bad. It's the Precision 5720 if you'd like to get your hands on one. And also, if I've piqued your interest a little bit,

check out my review I posted. It's at vlog46. It's up at jupiterbroadcasting.com right now. I call it, in the vlog, the Linux-powered iMac Pro killer. It's very clickbaity, but the reason why I did it is I just

want to get the word out there. This is not a paid review. Dell did not... There was no exchange of goods for me to do this review. I'm just extremely excited by the idea of a really well-built all-in-one computer that really kicks ass performance-wise and it's less than half the cost

of the iMac Pro. And you can buy it from them with Linux on it. Right now. Right now. And the iMac Pro is not even available until December. So I actually think it's like it just underscores how late to the game Apple is with the iMac Pro and so much of the market that they used to address with a device like this is being addressed by this machine. Really, if you don't need Final Cut and Motion or Xcode. And we've talked a lot about how much the developer story on Windows has gotten a lot better with the Linux subsystem and all of that. You could buy one of these. I put Windows 10 on it and then run Linux subsystem.

And that's very enterprise friendly. Yeah. I think it's a very competitive machine. So I titled the vlog Linux powered iMac Pro Killer, not to be clickbaity so much as to just sort of set the conversation as, hey, there is already competition out here today, and it runs Linux. And I think that's a different state than things. Years ago, a machine like this that devastated something Apple released would have been a Windows machine. That would have been the big headline. It's a Windows, this Windows 7 workstation just destroys the latest Apple machine, right?

No, now it's an Ubuntu machine. And yeah, I'll put a couple of comparison benchmarks in the show notes if you want to compare it to your own machine, just to kind of see what kind of delta you'd have if you did an upgrade like this. It's just early days. I'm messing around with this open benchmark stuff.

So if you like it, leave me some feedback and give me suggestions of which benchmarks I should run. It's not about coming up with stats and benchmark numbers that we can sit here and look at charts. That's what Foronix is for. What I really want to do with these is just give you some value so you can have comparisons to your own computer. So you can actually walk away from a review like this and have an idea of what kind of difference it would make for your system if you were to upgrade. So it not really you know i'm not i'm not like some big some big benchmark guy all of a sudden i just think it's a great way for the audience to sort of have a comparison to their own thing you know it gives you something to make it more relevant you can yeah you know i

would love to get i would love to get people's feedback on that on what kinds they use and what what they'd like to see from us so yeah check it out if you're curious more go google the dell precision 5720 uh with Ubuntu. They have it on their developer site. And check out the vlog too. Mr. Wes, what else should we mention before we get out of here today? Because we, you know, I mean, we got some,

apparently people are already arriving at the studio for the barbecue. Did you hear that doorbell? They are early, I think, but that's fine. Barbecue's not till next week. Yeah, come back, or unless you have burgers now. Mom, any other questions or thoughts about the Dell rig before we wrap up for the day? Do you think your kids would use it if you put it in front of them?

Oh, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. But you'd feel bad. It's almost too nice for the kids. Yeah, I would go more for an XPS line. I guess if you had the extra money. But if you're just buying a family machine, I might consider the XPS line. I don't know.

For me, I've always found precision lines to be very, very reliable systems. I've always been a fan of the business class systems, and I'm willing to pay just a bit more for business class. If you know it will last you, right? Yeah. I don't know. That's a good question. All right, Mr. West, where should people find you throughout the week? You can find me at Westpain.

Or on the TechSnap program. That's right. Hey, just stay tuned. We'll be live with that right now. Yeah, yeah. That's coming up next on the JBLive.tv stream. If you show up on a Tuesday, you can hang out in our mumble room, hang out in our chat room, and then stick around, kick back, and wind down with Dan and Wes on the TechSnap program.

Go check out the latest episode of Ask Noah for his interview with Veronica Belmont. Check out the vlog for a quick video tour of the Dell system I just got done yammering on about. Nice. And I hope you'll be able to tune in or join us next week for the barbecue. Wow. That might be a fun show to make it live if you can. Heck yes. Okay, everybody.

Thanks for joining us and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday for episode 204! Thank you. now it is our duty to title this thing jbtitles.com i'll be curious to see what everybody's see if anybody actually takes me up on that open benchmark thing because i brought it up in the vlog too and i haven't really gotten very much traction i think people don't actually want to take the time to do it unless they're really serious about making maybe we need to make it a little more competitive you know like hey guys i think you can beat chris's sweet open benchmark i was what i was now i'm thinking about that is there's like a server i can go run this on and shame you or that should be a challenge like here run open benchmark yeah

yeah i thought about doing that in the vlog. I just never really executed on it. It didn't cross my mind really quick. That's what a lot of people do benchmarks for. There's probably like a whole subset of the PC market or enthusiast PC market that runs 3DMark and other benchmark tools to do that and go, okay, this is like the best score with this crazy-ass system. How high can you get and things like that?

So we've got the Dell review and I think also the fact that Mirror could save desktop Linux. So would you ever... No, just kidding. I don't know. It could go nowhere. That's true. Who knows? Who knows? I'd like to find out more about that. I thought the Sway guy was working on something like that too.

Yes. I was trying to rack my mind for the word Sway. I could not remember during the show. I need to try that. Maybe I'll switch. Since you're going to switch way from no, maybe I'll try Sway for a while and just see if I can get by with it. I wonder if we should get that guy on the show. That'd be fun.

Yeah. Let's do that. I think it's wasted effort. He's such a cynic. Don't listen to him. Mates, Wayland, Miracle. Oh, my God. That is some fucking maneuver in there, E.K.

Tell you what, that Dell looks nice. I got burn of the Dell product, he says. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hybrid graphics with Radeon, and guess what? I can't use it because no 1604 driver. Hybrid graphics is rough, man. Hybrid graphics is rough. Yeah.

Now, that's probably not going to happen with their new developer line of machines, I would bet. You'd hope not. Yeah. That, you know, we have the original Sputnik in production. We have an XPS from like two models ago, and they've all been pretty solid.