LINUX Unplugged - Episode 207: Return Of The Distrohopper | LUP 207

Episode Date: July 26, 2017

We get down to distros in today’s episode. Distro news, modular distros, some reviews & major new developments. Plus Chris talks about leaving Arch and returning to his distro-hopping roots & the major news that broke today.

Let's see, should we do a tech story of the week before we get into any Linux stuff? Let's see here. Let's see here. Scanning, scanning. Jiffy launches a new GIF maker tool. Hey, hey, big news everybody. Hey, I used that today. She's really, dude.

Did you really? Listen, listen, listen. It's integrated into Facebook Messenger and my mom sent me a GIF so I had to send something. And the value of this is negative. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 207, for July 25th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged with your host, freshly back from Montana. My name is Chris. Mr. Wes is actually en route. I think he's battling some sort of five-headed monster in Seattle traffic. But back from last week, because you demanded more Beard, is Mr. Rikai himself.

Hello, Beard. Hey, guys. Hey. So you'll be uh sitting in for with with us at least uh for a little while especially it's kind of perfect since uh apparently we can only fit two hosts and then one has to pop out so anyways we got a really really fun show i i a new season is upon me after years and years of running arch i'm beginning a new journey i'm distro hopping for the first time in years. We'll talk about where I've landed initially and the kind of things I'm getting into.

New release. It's really great. So much work's gone into it. Kick the tires. We'll be talking about it just a little bit on the show. Also, huge news today. Breaking as we go on air. We'll cover that.

Fedora's got some big news. We kind of hinted at it when we talked last, what, two weeks ago about Fedora 26? I guess it wasn't last week. Then there's a vulnerability that's actually a problem with Windows MSI files. Still manages to screw up your Linux box. It's actually kind of adorable.

It's not a big deal, but we're still going to talk about it. Then we're going to talk about what they say is the most beautiful Linux distribution ever. No other distro is more beautiful. And it's based on the Plasma desktop. I'm in. Yeah. Yeah.

So we'll be talking about that. Plus adapting GNOME for ADHD users like myself. It's true. I have to admit it. You may have noticed it yourself. And, of course, I was going to say my perilous journey. But I hope at the other end of it will be a golden rainbow as I switch from Arch. I'll tell you why and what I'm going to.

But before we go any further, I've missed him. You probably missed him by now. It's our virtual log. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Greetings. Hello. Hello, everybody. Good to see you in there.

Good to hear from all of you. Music to my ears. Yeah, good group in there, too. Good to see you in there. Good to hear from all of you. Music to my ears. Yeah, good group in there, too. Good to see everybody. So I got to say right now, even though he's not here, I just want to say at the top of the show, before I forget, thank you to Wes for filling in, and thank you to Beard for stopping by. And people like you. I'm not exactly sure why. Turns out when we get you off the show, the show just gets better. I think they just like you in general. We put you on user and they like you. I'm not exactly sure why. Turns out when we get you off the show, the show just gets better.

I think they just like you in general. We put you on user and they like you. We put you on Linux Unplugged and they like you. That's okay. I'll launch like 15 shows. Maybe they can tell. Maybe they can tell the impressiveness of the beard through the podcast. Like, you know, maybe it shows up on mic somewhere.

It adds a certain warmth to the broadcast. That's what it is, dude. So anyways, thank you guys for filling in. How did it go? Did it go okay? Pretty smoothly. Did the sound. That's what it is, dude. So anyways, thank you guys for filling in. How did it go? Did it go okay? Pretty smoothly. Did the soundboard machine crash on you guys? No.

Because when I got back, the soundboard stuff was all reset. I think I might have restarted the app. Oh, okay. Well, I managed to restore the soundboard files and it's just fine. I was like, hmm, I wonder what happened. But yeah, otherwise, the place was in pretty good shape, I got to say. Shows went out on time. The trains kept running.

I'm just going to take off more often. Good. In fact, I just posted about, what, two, three hours ago, the Montana fix. It is the vlog post of my trip to Montana. Ended up going down there with Noah and his family and had a great time and hit a technical snafu, which, of course, Noah and I had to spring into action

to solve, so that sort of ended up in the vlog, too, unexpectedly. I think it's a pretty good vlog. I think that's the bar now for the vlog. It's vlog 48, the Montana fix. You can just find it over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. And while we're doing kind of admin-y stuff here at the top of the show, probably worth mentioning that we've announced

the winner of the XPS 13 Developer Edition sweepstakes in User Air 18. Indeed. There's some other big announcements in there, too. There are. User Air 18. And I begin the conversation. It's a really good conversation.

We have Mr. Chase Nunes stop by, and he gives us his perspective of somebody who watches Linux from afar. And we talk about some, I think, compelling Linux stuff in that episode, like really good, good. Yeah, I really enjoyed having Chase on there. Yeah, me too. And it was like the conversation was great because you and I, we have our long held positions on some of these topics.

And Chase is coming at it with a fresh eye. And because he's dabbled with a certain amount of understanding. So it makes for a really interesting conversation. You can say it, Chris. He's a noob that knows things. Yeah, he's an informed noob. Exactly. And without bias.

So it brings a fresh, interesting perspective to it. So that's UserError18, plus the winner of the XPS 13 sweepstakes, which is pretty cool. All right. So let's start with the big news that I was teasing. This is what really is, it's like tangentially Linux related.

It definitely affects us Linux users. And it's the big news from Adobe today as we go on air that they are announcing the end of life for the Flash player. I don't get like crazy excited. It's 2020. Isn't this like the third time they've announced that though? It feels like it is. This one though has a different weight to it. So first of all, they're being specific. They say, specifically, we will stop updating

and distributing the Flash player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to new open formats, like they mentioned HTML5 and WebGL earlier. Adobe will continue to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers that currently support Flash content through the planned end of life.

This will include issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility, and adding feature capabilities as needed. Now, there was a line here that they said, Adobe will continue to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers. So I was like, is Linux in that list? And it is. It is. It is actually in that list.

Linux x86 is in that list. So we will continue to get updates. 32 and I think just 62. I can't remember. Who cares? I don't really give a shit. The real question is the ending of Adobe handling that also going to be the end of Pepper Flash.

Because that's handled by Google. So I don't know how that will affect me. Well, so the Chromium blog announced. So I went a little digging. I was like, well, what's WebKit got to say? What's Chromium got to say? And what's Mozilla? I haven't seen any posts from Mozilla yet,

but I did get a couple from Chromium and WebKit. And so they sort of, they have like a nice guy sort of like, yay, Flash is dead. They're like, Flash really helped pioneer our rich web experience. Also, it's an 80% usage decline, dropping like a rock. Well, that's still not quite answering Pepper Flash, though, because Chromium did flash through the native stuff, whereas Pepper Flash is Google. I don't know. So it sounds like they're going to continue to—Chrome will increasingly require— here's what they say. So Chrome itself, this is, of course, on the Chromium blog, so it's a little confusing,

but Chrome itself will increasingly require explicit permission from users to run Flash content until it is completely removed at the end of 2020. That makes sense. So that's at least the Chrome story. Of course, I actually already ran into that where I couldn't figure out why a website wouldn't work, but it turned out that Flash was disabled in that website by default. Oh. And –

Did Chrome do that for you? Yes, but it also didn't tell me that I needed to allow it, so I had to go digging to find the setting. So Safari has been starting to do that too, I believe. And so WebKit sort of where Google had like this really, really nice sort of Flash has helped enrich the web for years. WebKit had more of a dance on its grave kind of approach. It's interesting to see the different tones in the projects. And in fact, they sort of promote the fact that they've essentially been pushing this direction since 2010 and highlight the fact that they've been making Flash harder and harder to use in WebKit essentially. Well, really, they've been pushing this direction since they launched the iPhone.

Yeah, yeah. Without Flash. Yeah, I actually kind of call that out here. They say Apple users have experienced the web without Flash for some time. iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch have never supported Flash. For the Mac, the transition from Flash began in 2010 when Flash no longer was pre-installed. Today, if users install Flash, it remains off by default.

Safari requires explicit approval on each website before running the Flash plug-in. Interesting. So what do you think? I think I'll go with him then. Yeah, so what do you think about the hint then yeah well so what do you think poppy uh i think it's surprising it took this long it's sad that there's loads of little games and stuff that won't work and anymore but yeah goodbye good riddance agreed hmm bashful for you have a comment about, as in this should have happened in 2007.

Pretty much. I mean, they were in denial for three years, it sounds like. I mean, you could already see the writing on the wall and the way it sparked up in the developer community at the beginning. Yeah. Although, you know, you talk to folks and they'll tell you that Flash is still best at X. It's true. Nothing fully replaces its entire set of capabilities. And it seems to be the most capable live stream player.

We've played around a lot with that. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's mostly able to be replaced now. Stuff like VideoJS and that kind of stuff. But that's what? That's like in the last... How long has that been good? A year? A year or two, yeah.

Maybe a year. So to me, it's like we're last... How long has that been good? A year? A year or two, yeah. Yeah. Oh, you think two? Maybe a year. Yeah. Yeah, so to me it's like we're getting there, but there's still areas. There's still parts of it that aren't quite there yet, but I think with the announcement of the end of Flash that it's going to accelerate those things that are missing. And the announcement of DRM for HTML5, although that upsets a lot of people, will probably help usher this in. Interesting. That is a silver lining, I suppose. Because that was the one big thing for live streaming that was missing is the ability to do DRM. Yeah.

I suppose you could put it that way. Batch for Robot, you think it's going to be like IPv6? Well, yeah, no one's really going to touch it until they have to or until there's a better alternative, which, as everyone mentioned, it's taken this long, and maybe it's because there isn't something there. But until you have to do it, no one's going to do it. It's extra work. It's debt. I don't agree. Most of the major things that have used Flash have already transitioned to HTML5,

like YouTube and Twitch. They're massive, and they didn't have to transitioned to HTML5, like YouTube and Twitch. They're massive, and they didn't have to switch to HTML5, but they did. Twitch still is heavily in Flash. This is why we're going to transition Jupyter Broadcasting over to Silverlight. It's an obvious direction of the future, right? I mean, Silverlight's really the streaming platform of choice for users. No, we're going to use Java applets. You know what I hate is freaking dependency hell hate it and i'm gonna be honest it's one of the reasons i was initially

drawn to debian is because the app get command would figure out tons this is back in this is back before yum and dnf uh where you would just go raw dog and rpm onto a red hat box and then go figure out all the dependencies yourself and use RPM. Just, ugh, it was awful. And now you just use Docker. Well, yeah. And Debian went a step further, but it's still one system. There's things that depend specifically on other things.

You could use Apache and PHP, for example, here. When we talked last – no, I can't do that. I've got to remember. When we talked two weeks ago about Fedora 26, we discussed a little bit with Matthew Miller of Boltron, which as the name kind of sounds is kind of like bolt on. It's a modular server system that they're working where you could have individual components of Fedora be replaced or upgraded without causing this crazy ass dependency help. And I wasn't quite sure how this worked, but Langdon White did a post over at FedoraMagazine.org

that gives us some of the technical details of how Fedora is going to be pulling this off. So the Fedora Modularity Working Group, yes, there is such a thing, has an objective, and the objective is to generically work towards modularity. Its crux is to allow users to safely access the right versions of what they want.

So imagine some hotshot web developer needs a very specific version of whatever they use, Ruby on Rails. You can imagine your own scenario. The working group took on the requirement to impact Fedora infrastructure user base and package community as little as possible. The group also wanted to increase the quality and reliability of Fedora itself, the distribution, and drastically increase the automation and speed of delivery. I think this is one of the reasons why Rawhide is getting to a more usable point, too.

As a result, the group didn't treat this as a greenfield experiment, sort of like how ButterFS was created. Instead, they took a rational approach that took years towards working towards something. Like, you know, instead of taking like that kind of approach, they took a more rational approach. Instead of working for years, they took a more rational approach. And they just tried to keep the tool sets pretty minimal and implement them as they need and make slight adjustments to existing systems that eventually in totality provide something new. adjustments to existing systems that eventually in totality provide something new. The result is a package set that can be sort of thought of as virtualized separate repositories.

That's how they're doing this. So this is, in other words, the client tooling treats the traditional flat repo as if it was a set of repos that are only enabled when you want that version of a component. that are only enabled when you want that version of a component. Virtualizing out the repos is, I think, and the package set is pretty smart. And so Boltron is sort of this effort, this initiative, and they have stuff ready to try right now, and they're looking for feedback. I think this, to me, is a pretty important part of uh if you if you're going to use the package management system to deliver software this is what has to be fixed if you're if you're if you're not using docker or flatpack or snaps

and you want to deliver software to a server distribution or something like that this is what you've got to fix. But I kind of feel like it might be, it's sort of like fixing the barn door after the cows have gotten home. Speaking of the barn door, Mr. Wes Payne is joining us. Hello, Wes. Hello.

Hello. So we were just going over Boltron, the modular server preview of Fedora. It's getting out there, and they're asking people to try it out right now. The whole idea is they're going to do virtualized repositories and package sets so you can overlay very specific things and upgrade

individual components without dragging the entire OS of dependencies with you. I love it. I've got to say, when we talked about it on the earlier show, I was excited, but after having read about it a little bit in between, this seems like it's going to be great. I haven't tried it yet.

I kind of want to pick Wimpy's brain, but I'm going to ask you first, since you just sat down. Isn't this kind of solving last year's problem? Isn't kind of the future snaps and flat packs for this kind of thing? Or Docker even? Possibly. snaps and flat packs for this kind of thing or docker even possibly um but i some of some of those seem like they they fit different use cases this kind of excited me in a way that kind of more reminded me of things like nix os and where does it give some more flexibility on the you know the open source sort of how we craft the bulk of our packages and And I mean, maybe we'll go to a place

where everything is in a snap and that such, but it seems like that is certainly going to take a long time and is in many ways kind of a drastic shift. In other ways, not. But this seems like it's a little bit more, you know, it would let me maybe much more easily install three different versions of Ruby or something. Right, exactly.

But without like having a snap for each one, which would maybe break more of my, you know, current deployment strategies. Okay. All right. So that's good. That's good. Right, exactly. But without having to snap for each one, which would maybe break more of my current deployment strategies. Okay, alright. So that's good, that's good. I like that. Now you got me reconsidering. I kind of want to do a, so Mr. Wimpy, I believe, is a pretty big fan of universal package formats like Snap. And I'm wondering

if you think there's space for both, like major re-innovation in how the underlying OS handles packages for software delivery and universal package formats on top of that? That's a lot of questions. Yeah, that's why I tossed it to you, Iffy. I think Boltron is probably a result of the fact that Flatpak is not ideally suited for distributing command line applications, languages, and services and things like that. So I think it's not competing with Flatpak in that regard.

It's complementing what Flatpak offers. Okay, fair enough. Anybody else want to jump in on the mobile before we move on? I look at it as, in the back of my mind, I run this fantasy scenario where Chris Lastass runs Fedora for a year. And he runs it on the desktop and on the server. This guy's crazy. Obviously not real Chris Lass because that would be crazy.

But if he was going to do it, this would probably be something like this. And Fedora OS trees stuff would probably be a good way to pull it off. Yeah. If you want to read more about it and try it out, you can find a link to the Fedora magazine in the show notes. So there was a vulnerability going around that uses Windows MSI files to exploit the Linux desktop. What? That seems crazy. See, this is what happens when Ubuntu switches to GNOME.

No, I'm kidding. Yeah, right. So it's called Bad Taste, and this is so funny I want to talk about it. Obviously, I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not covering on vulnerabilities as much these days because by the time we talk about it, it's old news. Everybody knows. There's been the disclosure and everything, but this is a fun one. So this is a vulnerability that actually resides in Nautilus, GNOME files, but it's exploited by MSI files. So it's kind of funny the third party

thumbnail that's bundled in with gnome files uh tries to look into an msi file and extract out like a thumbnail and uh somebody was poking around and discovered that they could hide malicious vb scripts inside the names of msi files when the user accesses a folder on his or her computer where the malicious MSI file is just saved. So you're not even clicking it. It's just you go to that folder. So maybe, you know, somebody downloads something. I heard a story recently about somebody's mom or aunt

that was trying to watch streaming movies and kept downloading EXEs. And if it weren't for being on Linux, they would have been infected up the wazoo. Oh, yeah, right. So you can have these things just show up in your downloads folder when you don't even expect it especially for average users so the gnome files would try to automatically parse that file to extract an icon from its contents and they would display that in your window but the problem is once you

parse that msi file looking for the icon the thumbnail or script also reads the file name and executes the code found within. Ah, there you go. So it's, there's little tricks you can do right now. Like you can go nuke the user share thumbnailers file if you want. But I think that was just, that was the funny exploit of the week. MSI files that are screwing over GNOME files users. That's, I mean, yeah, you'd see that and you'd be like, well, whatever. I don't even have to scan this. Now everybody proceed to be scared.

Freak out. It seems like we've seen a number of these kind of things though where specifically different file types that we're trying to create previews from or sound. It happens to Windows too. We are not alone. But it does seem to be the act of parsing a file.

I suppose any time when you have a program executing code and it's taking input, if you're not super careful about the sanity of that input... So is this something like how they'll mark downloaded files sometimes or don't let you run downloaded files? Even if the file isn't marked executable

because the Nautilus thumbnail is reading it. What I was proposing is, do we need in the metadata on this file, do we need to specify something that the system then don't thumbnail, don't preview, don't interact with unless approved. I mean, a really obvious stupid hack would be just disable thumbnailing on

the quote-unquote downloads folder. Or containerize thumbnail generation. There you go. Oh, you know, that's actually the route it would go to. Like a whole fake file system would mount up. A Linux system would be spawned. X would be started.

Your browser would be executed. The file would be downloaded. Man, that sounds very Apple-y. Yeah, that's pretty much what Apple would do. And it might just work. Oh, man. So there you go. That is your cyber just work. Oh, man. So there you go. That is your cyber attack of the week, everybody.

You could just use Dolphin. Or Thunar, I'm sure, would also be. Or the command line. I just use LS. Because those inferior ones aren't capable of generating thumbnails. That's true. I guess it could happen there, too. Although I have not seen this story for Dolphin.

I don't, you know what? I don't ever have my directory in big icon view anyways. I'm always list view. I need as much information in there as I can. Yeah, totally. That's how I roll. That is how, you know, if you're like me, if you like a lot of information, you might like Ting.

Huh? Go to linux.ting.com. They give you all the information you need right there in their dashboard. They hide nothing from you. One of the things that made it really simple for me with our business account is I can name the lines in the web interface. And then on our bill reporting, everywhere throughout the UI and the apps on the phones, those nicknames show up. And when you have multiple lines, and why wouldn't you, it's $6 for a line.

So it makes giving phones out to staff and family members economical especially if you already have a cdma or gsm device to check their byod page then it's just your usage it's six dollars for the line whatever uncle sam's cut is and then your usage it's brilliant so if you got like the beard over there on the wi-fi i mean like that's chris forgets he pays for me that's like that's very true actually and if i didn't have like beard labeled and i know at it, and I see Beard never uses hardly any data. Like, you know, maybe makes a couple of calls. He's considerate. It's not a big deal.

It's not a big deal. And I love that about Ting because it's approachable for small businesses, it's perfect for families, and it scales to large businesses. You can get started by going to linux.ting.com, take $25 off a device, or save $25 if you bring one. Check out their Twitter page, too, at TingFDW. They're doing a giveaway right now of the Moto E4S and $250 in credit, which would last a really long time since the average bill is $23 a line when you add everything up.

Also, great deal right now on the Moto G5 Plus. Also, great deal right now on the Moto G5 Plus. This is a CDMA and GSM phone, so it's really nice on Ting since they have both networks. You can pick what works better. $274. You can get it unlocked. It's new. It's a great Android.

Like, they just made, like, small tweaks to Android that are generally good. And it's a solid, well-built phone from Motorola for $274, no contract, nor the termination fee. You can get started by going to linux.ting.com to get it at that price or bring your own device. linux.ting.com. Thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Damn, that's a good URL, too. Yeah, it is. linux.ting.com.

So I was looking at the world's most beautiful Linux distribution ever. Staring at it, really. I was a little uncomfortable about it. This is one of those things where I've never heard anybody say it out loud before, so now I'm going to be the first guy to say it out loud. I'm going to sound like a jerk. Or you'll be the tastemaker for this. I hope so.

I think it's Nitrux. What do you think? Nitrux, N-I-T-R-U-X. Nitrux. Nitrux. Nitrux. Anybody in the mumble room checked out Nitrurix, the world's most beautiful Linux distribution ever? That's apparently according to this review.

They say it's a Linux distribution focused on design. It introduces the Nomad desktop, which is built on top of KDE Plasma 5 and Qt. It's based on Ubuntu, actually Ubuntu 17.10 to be in specific. And it is obviously because of that still under development, although they say it's close enough. This is a quote from the devs. It's close enough to a rolling release model. I am. That's, that's no, that isn't no, that is... Using the beta of Ubuntu does not make a rolling release.

That is not how that works. That's not the math. I agree. Okay. We don't need to go any further. We're okay. So it does say that they're focused on portable universal app formats. Really?

You're going to disagree and say that using the beta is like... I mean, if you go from beta to beta to beta like some sort of hooker then yeah it's are are they saying they're not doing that i don't know if they're being hookers or not i can't say because you know when they say they're using the beta they could just be moving to the next beta when they have the the freeze man that sounds like the kind of desktop i want to run but then i don't get why they just wouldn't be using debian unstable as their base yeah yeah that's well because ubuntu does a lot of hard work that's why okay and they got those repos man have you seen how fast those repos are i'd love to re-host you those repos i'd love to just reuse those repos are you over here crapping on debian now ouch uh it's funny how

many distros are coming out based on 1710 when 1804 is clearly around the corner. And aren't you excited? Clearly the better way to go. One thing I noticed about this is they're saying it's a reincarnation of the old distro. I didn't even know they had an old distro. Yeah, they had an old one based on 1510 back in the day. Oh. Yeah, and they stopped development because of a problem with systemd and network manager.

They gave up. I don't mean to laugh at them. It's because they were using beta for that. They were using systemd. During the systemd transition, they were on the beta, which was like— You mean they were on the rolling release? Is that what you mean? Yeah, they were on their rolling beta-ish thing that was like right before the transition happened.

So it just started. Boy, that was a bad time. You might say they were beta testers. Yeah, only they're trying to build a distro at the same time. It's kind of confusing to have nx.org, which is like almost Nix, or nxos.org. It's really simple. To be fair, even people that just normally use their desktops

have problems with Network Manager. I feel like what this really is, and they're not saying it, is I think it's Neon. I think it's repackaged Neon with a nice theme. Because they say the current version of Nitrix is based on the dev branch of Ubuntu. On top of that, we're getting continuous updates to Plasma provided by Neon devs, for which we enabled both Git repositories and finally our home-brewed software like Nomad Desktop. All right. You know what?

I mean, I think it's – if you are a Qt fan and you like the Plasma Desktop or looking for maybe a different take on it, it might be worth a look. I mean, we're having some fun here, but, you know. Maybe something that's – It's a hybrid concept. Maybe something that's lighter than full KDE but isn't LXQt that's not finished yet? Well, I mean, I don't see how it's lighter when it adds more stuff. And also, KDE Plasma is not heavy at all.

So that's... There's a separation between Plasma and the rest of KDE now, is my point. Well, yeah, because KDE is a community and a project, not Plasma. community and a project, not Plasma. Well, so it's sort of like why I sit around and fantasize about what the Budgie desktop might be once IKEE stops fixing absolutely everything else in the distro

and focuses on the new... I want my new desktop, damn it! Well, I hear Budgie's complete, Chris. Well, no, it turns out that when a distro grows there are things that legitimately need to be replaced. And so I understand some fine plumbing is being done. But I do fantasize about a desktop that Ike and team have worked on that is Qt-based but not Plasma 5 itself but still uses KWin and GTK apps look like first-class citizens.

It just seems like a perfect world. And this actually, looking at the screenshots, I got to say. It's pretty. They have a very flashy website i actually i've actually used nitrix a little bit oh give me the new version oh yeah tell me what you think uh it is interesting you know and those things that they're doing the the customizations they're doing are kind of interesting like one of the most annoying things for plasma for me is the notification structure because it doesn't keep track of a history of

notifications anymore. And that is incredibly irritating and has been for over a year for me. And to the point where there's like a telegram group for it and there's some big bug threads for it and all this other stuff. Anyway, they built their own solution to that and I think they did it pretty well. It's, there's some bugs in it as in the structure because they kind of built all their system tray. Everything that's like a system tray widget would go into this new system tray they built.

So their notifications are stored into that. So it's pretty cool overall. But it feels like a Mac elementary style menu launcher. And then Mac everything else so they have like global menu and have the dock installed by default and things like that so it's interesting concepts and i do like the fact that they have they've built some cool stuff um one of the things that i i which wish that plasma distros had was a more cute-based graphical firewall, and they built one for their Nomad thing.

It's called the Nomad Firewall, and it's basically a system settings module that is front-end GUI for UFW. Interesting. Do you know, do you have, you happen to have seen what the license is for that? That particular one, I haven't looked at that, no. But they seem to be GPL3 on everything I've seen. Boy, it's...

I'm still kind of trying to figure out where this... This is nice, but with the world that has LXQt... What do you think, Wimby? With the world that has LXQt, where does this fit? I'm not sure where that this fits in it it i can't tell enough from the website as to what it is exactly

yeah it seems like if it's if it's something on top of neon or kubuntu or whatever it does seem to be their own custom desktop i don't want to say it's an entire environment but it's not a it's not the typical plasma shell. I will say that at least from what they showed, their settings interface looks way better than KDE. I think it is the KDE one. Is it really? It is the same. I think it is, it's just different. The icons

are way clearer, and then the borders between each segment are more... I guess it's just more clearly defined. Yeah, the borders are more defined. That visual separation makes it... The hover effect doesn't have that same margin padding structure, so it looks awkward.

But there are certain things about it that are really cool, and there's other parts that look like it's not finished yet, and it looks like it's on a beta. So the interesting thing about it is it feels like an enthusiast that doesn't want to edit anything that wants a mac approach so like you can start with this

mac approach and then customize it however you want because it does seem to be built on plasma i looked at the widgets and they're all very they all seem to be plasma widgets so it looks like they took plasma and then like made modifications to plasma itself and then also installed the latte dock and some other things so oh and the the menu that's in nitrix is as a custom menu they built as a custom applet so they are doing some modifications to plasma but it does feel like plasma and it seems like they're doing an ubuntu like rolling beta thing with the neon packages on top of it, which is kind of interesting and also kind of scary to me because those packages are made

for the 16.04 release of the stack. So it's kind of... That could be a problem. Have any of you looked at LXCube seriously? I was just going to say, this story is making me want to give it another go because it's been since it was

in an early stage of development since I looked at it. I haven't looked at it since it's come along. You've got an LXQ expert in the chat room at the moment. No, I was actually going to suggest that maybe Simon should chime in from his perspective of someone who works with LXQ what he thinks about this distro and Simon, can I throw

a random tech question at you too? Is KWin in LXQt? Is that part of... Can you explain that too? If I set up LXQt on my system, can I use KWin as a back-end window manager or whatever? I believe you can. I've done it in a VM just to test,

but I mainly use it with OpenBox. In fact, I'm running LXQt on my system right now with OpenBox. That's right, yeah. So, yeah, I can use K1 on the back end. Like I said, I've played around with it in a VM. The main reason why somebody would want to use K1 with LXQt is for Wayland support. And the only reason why LXQt hasn't gone to 1.0 yet is LXQt 1.0 is Weyland complete.

That's why that hasn't gone to 1.0. And we don't have an ETA for, you know, I've recently been doing some upstream LXQt development and we don't have an ETA for 1.0, but I know they're going to do, what was it? I think it was 0.12 that they're going to do upstream within the next month or two. Okay. Okay.

Well, I guess I'd put this out there to the audience, too. If anybody's tried Nitrix and wants to write in and tell us what it's like. I mean, no. Like, for me, though, I think my time would probably be spent better with LXQ. You know, I don't really want to bring it up again, but this approach is kind of the approach I was talking about when we were talking about Pop! OS. I feel like this is an approach that makes more sense. They're doing significant customization, but they're basing it on top of the distribution instead of spinning it off into its own thing. Yeah, from what I can tell, I don't know if it's a fork of plasma or if it's just something that sits on top of plasma with some themes that's i haven't been able to tell that from looking at the website

i based on what i've experienced it looks like it's just sitting on top yeah that's my guess too by looking at it is it and the difference there's some things i've used on it it just seemed like it's on top but there's there are there are things that are customized that are not plasma at all but it seems like they've they they changed it looks like they're just replacing applets i wouldn't necessarily um compare it with keyd neon because neon is is like plasma on top of the lts ubuntu and they're trying to do i believe like a whole different experience with this um and like i said neon is is just from what i can tell it's a plasma testing ground right i think the other reason the only reason the neon thing comes up

is that they say specifically that they use neon packages. Okay, gotcha. So it's an interesting desktop, but they're doing things that are cool, that they're basing on an existing distro with some existing packages already built for them, and they're just making modifications. But at the same time,

they are using a beta release of a distro that's weird. If you're going to provide a package that's all set up for you out of the box, why would you base it on a rolling beta thing? That's sort of something I don't know.

Why would they not do it on... Why would they not wait for 18.04? Or why not 17.04? I mean, I'm just curious to see if there's something new in 17.10 that they need or something along those lines. There is one more thing I wanted to point out. It's really cool that they built a custom module for SystemD inside of System Settings. So you can make all your modifications to SystemD straight into System Settings. So that's pretty cool. Oh, that's pretty nice.

Alright, so I gotta put the call out there to see what people think. I'm tempted, but I got a greater story to tell today, and I'm already on a journey. I can't deviate now, otherwise I might give it a look myself. This is where the community can help.

You guys gave me a hard time about Slackware last week. I didn't notice. I actually was thinking about taking a Slackware challenge in the future. I was thinking about it. It's just I'm really on a journey right now. I'm on a path to a new distro for our

production equipment and all my systems upstairs, my laptop. I'm on a journey of a process of elimination right now, and I don't want to get too distracted. You know, Chris. Because I can distro hop for days, girls. Last time people told you to take a journey,

you ended up switching the entire studio to that distro. So maybe you should take another journey. Well, see, this is the thing. This is why I'm taking it slowly and methodically. So I'll tell you more about it later. But first, stretch your middle fingers out for a moment because it may be time to point them once again in NVIDIA's general direction. Maybe you guys can talk me down from the ledge here. But an NVIDIA developer who works on the Linux graphics side.

So, Aaron, you shout out to Aaron Platner, I think is – I think that's his name. Thank you for your hard work. And now, uh, please accept this, accept this plea from your humble Linux podcast. Please consider supporting X Wayland. It appears right now that NVIDIA has no plans to support applications running under X Wayland with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver,

which to me seems like a bad thing since that's pretty much almost anything that's using the proprietary driver today. And it's not like we're going to get games rebuilt with Wayland support tomorrow. And I just, the amount of applications that would be effed in the A, you might say, seems great. Unless I'm misunderstanding the dramatic impact this is going to have. Well, doesn't that mean that LXQT 1.0 won't work on NVIDIA? As long as you're in under Wayland with KWIN.

Right. I don't know because it's, no, because that would be, no, because that would be talking Wayland. Anything that communicates Wayland will be good. Anything that's talking X, anything that's talking through X Wayland, that sort of X translation compatibility layer, it seems like... And this is... Oh, man. Oh, architect.

Every single time we talk about this. Everybody always brings up AMD. You know, I actually think that NVIDIA's position is a good position, because at some point, you need to just make a hard break

and stop supporting legacy stuff. All of the games that have ever been written ever. Well, then you can just go run them on X. Maybe what am I misunderstanding here? This, I guess. Yeah,

I guess. I mean, so the thing is, right, it's like, it's, they're not doing this thing, but no one's making any Linux gamer uninstall their X server.

I think. X is going to be abandoned at some point anyway so those games will eventually not work anyway well i don't know i mean well i'm sure are we that x isn't going to be around for another 10 years i'm sure something that'll probably still be around i'm just saying like eventually if the argument is the things that are going to be that currently available are not going to be available like well that will happen eventually anyway i'm sure there will be one distro just like DeNovo that doesn't use systemd that will continue to use X until the end of time.

But I think it's pretty clear that the future is Wayland. Well, the chat room and everybody listening right now shouting at their podcast player will tell you the future is AMD and open source drivers. The problem is there are millions of GTX cards already bought and paid for and one of the reasons people like to use Linux is because they get value out of their existing hardware. And now all of a sudden we're going to come along and say

hey, welcome to Linux, go get an AMD card. I don't think that's going to work. So I appreciate that maybe AMD has a better path forward driver-wise but it's like telling people to have battery life issues to switch to CyanogenMod or whatever. Also, just because the NVIDIA proprietary

drivers won't support X-Wayland doesn't mean that something like Novio won't. That's fair. Oh, by the way, a real-time update here in the show. Simon just chimed in saying the next version of LX Cute release will have nice things like high DPI support. That's really great, and tons of more polishing,

including compatibility with the latest Qt. That is awesome. I will be checking that out. So, what do you think, Batchelfruit? Is there going to be, like, a groundswell to fix this problem? I don't necessarily think it'll be a groundswell. It's more

of making a smart-ass comment that someone will just fork it and go back because they didn't want to go to the new one. Well, rumor has it the Debian project is working on rootless X, right? So maybe we just solve the problem of X's security issues and you could be sitting there running Wayland all day long and then when it comes time to game, you just launch rootless X somehow. Switch over to a different terminal. Exactly.

I mean, that's a hack, but it seems like would something prevent you from running Wayland and a RootlessX server on another console at the same time? I actually don't know that one, technically. Seems like that would be a plausible fix. Becomes almost compliance-like in some ways. I just can't really understand

can anybody, I mean so are we doing all of this work I mean if we set the security stuff aside are we doing all of this so that way we have tear-free flash video? Because I just I'm going to just mention, we're going to be flash is going to be dead before we're all using Wayland. That's my prediction. That's for sure. I think it's

more tear-free anything GPU accelerated ever. I get tearing. It is hard sure. I think it's more tear-free anything GPU accelerated ever. Yeah. I get tearing. It is hard, though, I will say. I mean, like, especially when we were, you know, niche to begin with, and then after, like, 20 years of X, we're like, yeah, all right, people are kind of supporting us now.

Great. So it's probably going to be a long time. So anyways, I guess, you know, it's not time to get the pitchforks yet because it seems like the Wayland, the big switch to Wayland, I don't know. I think 2020 would be optimistic. I just don't see it at this point. Yeah, I would say five years probably. Yeah. And so this might be a non-issue.

There might be other ways to run these applications. There may be some sort of compatibility layer that has a stable API set created by a company that's experienced in this area that works in open source. Who knows? Who knows? There may be other solutions to this problem. Maybe NVIDIA will become open source at some point. Who knows?

Maybe Mark Shuttleworth can sit down with Aaron Platner over at NVIDIA and espouse the great benefits of Mir. There you go. And we'll just get this ball rolling. So, Wimpy, I'm glad you are here, sir, because for about an hour and a half before the show, I got to play around with the latest alpha of Ubuntu Mate 17.10. Holy smokes. Holy smokes. Holy smokes.

And I have a couple questions, a couple grave concerns, and a few observations. So that I am very, very much looking forward to talking to because holy cow, what a release. There may be some Patreon leaks involved. I mean, it's some good stuff. I know.

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It's so stinking fast. It was actually a topic of conversation recently, just how stinking fast their systems are. Because first of all, it's SSDs throughout everything. And it's massively taken advantage of. I'll just put it that way. Then they have Linux as the host system. We all love that. KVM for the virtualizer.

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Yep, yep, yep. So there is a lot to cover in Ubuntu land these days. And so you could say thank you if you if you're not an Ubuntu fan, because I could have made this entire show about it. So I'm saving really the best right now. And I want to talk about Ubuntu Mate 1710. Actually, I think a new alpha release just came out today. I'm being sneaky on Patreon. Two days. Oh, in two days. Oh, okay. The patrons got the release notes early access, but the download is going to be on Thursday. Oh, teasing, teasing, teasing. Wow. So this is a huge release. I would say the number one thing that stood out to me when I tried it is how tight the Mutiny tweak option is.

When you run the Ubuntu or the Mate tweak and you go into the different layouts and you choose Mutiny. I mean, it really looked like Unity 7 after I made a few small tweaks and I turned on Compiz. I was pretty much back in Unity 7. So that was the mode that I played around

with this new release the most. I think my favorite feature, Wimpy, and I didn't even notice it until I went to do it, was the complete super key support, which I didn't realize how much that had bugged me until I tapped it and it worked. And I went, oh, yeah, that used to be a problem. Yeah. Oh, that's huge for me, too. Wow. Yeah. And me. You know, that's not there by accident.

Right. But it's funny, though, because it's one of those things where it's not just touching one project to make that work, right? Yeah, I mean, there are so many people that have been involved in making that happen. So in earlier releases, the Mate menu, which used to be called the Advanced Menu in Matee tweak had super key support, but it was like super key support in a lot of the smaller desktop environments and launches in that you could press super to open a menu, but it swallowed the super key. So if you had any other key bindings that used the super key, they just didn't work. Ouch.

So I key obviously cooked up budgie. Um, and then, uh, he, uh, budgie, the brisk work. Ouch. So I key obviously cooked up budgie. Um, and then, uh, he, uh, budgie, the brisk,

the brisk menu. Yeah. And we, I added a goal in there to add super key support and somebody from the community stepped in, um, Victor Carrar. I think his name is all career.

I'm sorry, Victor, if I've butchered your name, uh, and he actually landed the fixes in brisk to make it work but then he went around and started adding the same patches to the Marte menu and when he started doing that he realized that the underlying libraries weren't implemented properly and Marte settings demon wasn't doing the right thing and Marte dock applet wasn't doing the right thing. So he has been laying down patches all over the place

so that SuperKey works. But more importantly, if you've got other key bindings, they work as well. And it sounds like such a simple thing, but it's been a heap of work. And I'm really indebted to him because he's turned Marte from a thing that had kind of janky super key support to to real

first class super key support and it makes a huge difference to the way i use my computer now because i just mash super key type enter and i'm off i think there's several more systems that will now be on this next release i think as a direct result i i can't tell you to me it's like if for some reason it's muscle memory, smash, super key, T-E-R, enter. It has to be smashed. There's no delicate pressing. I command this thing. Okay, so I know something else

that's been getting polished, really, for several releases is the heads-up display, which was one of the really kind of cool features when I was using Unity heavily. I drifted away from using it, but I do remember during my heyday of using Unity 7, the HUD was handy. And for those of you that aren't familiar,

I think, at least in the Unity world, essentially it was this tool that you could execute with a keyboard command, and like Alt-Super or whatever, I can't remember what the command was. Just Alt. Okay, Alt. And I think it talked Dbus

and it would read all of the menus on an application over Dbus and then it would expose them as a command. Like, so you could type in, if you wanted to do file export, you could just type in export into the HUD and it would just pull it up instead of having to dig around.

So you didn't have to take your hand off the keyboard to use the menus. Is it, and Wimpy, am I i getting this right and is that what's coming uh or at least getting even better in mate yeah so we we started that journey in buntu mate 1610 and it was not ready so we we pulled it and in this cycle it's now ready for use so um this works hand in glove with the global menus that have also been reworked. And it means that, yes, just as you've described, you can open your application. And in Ubuntu Marte, it's a slightly different keyboard combination.

It's super alt to activate the HUD. Although Victor is determined, he tells me, to make the necessary changes throughout the various places so that you could activate it with just alt as well. So he's like a dog with a bone at this at the moment, chasing these issues down. But this is a really powerful feature, and it's one that I really valued. I've obviously been using Unity for quite a while on a day-to-day basis and have recently switched back to mate on my main machine and one of the features i loved was the hud particularly um like editing podcasts and you're in audacity and you want to find the appropriate effects and filters using the hud makes actually digging out those effects and filters really fast oh yeah and also in things

like libre office and gimp where you know image processing things are scattered to the four corners of the ui you know it's really useful for just quickly accessing stuff so i love that yeah yep me too in fact i was just sitting here thinking about how handy that is when i'm on air because it makes things so freaking quick uh also improvements to indicator support which is something that seems like it's a lot of work on every release. Is there still work to be done on indicators? No, we're done now.

This draws a line under it. Congrats. Yeah, that is good. Just in time, too, really. I mean, this is looking like one of those releases where if I was really a big fan of Unity and I wanted a home to move to that reminded me a lot of it and that workflow. With the Mate Tweak tool, it's like one drop down away. You choose Mutiny, and also I turned on Compiz as my compositor,

and it really felt a lot like home. Because we have a... I was doing an A-B test because I have a Unity 7 system right here that I'm running Mumble on to talk to you guys, and so I ran it on the system right next to it my main presenter machine and was doing sort of an A B and it's it's it's pretty

great it's close yeah it'll get closer in time as well but it's it's done without sacrificing some of the more traditional things about about Ubuntu that I liked so I it was a really it was a pretty solid I have to ask you though,

it would be a grave concern over this one, grave concern. Firefox 50? What is going on here? Can you talk to somebody? I mean, this is one of these, I mean, 54 is out now. This is one of those things.

Who at Canonical is in charge of this? This is just, this. This is what happens in the dev cycle. You'll find that packages that are being revved, you know, regularly in the released archives. Oh, so it's not like an upstream thing. It is your fault. Yeah, yeah.

I tease. I tease. I install Chrome immediately anyway, so it's fine. As does everyone else. Yeah, that software. Apparently. Firefox. Yeah, okay.

Well, that's what, you know. You're their user, are you? Oh. The best browser ever. Oh, I was going to give it a go, but it was so old, I was like, why does this feel so slow? Like, Firefox has gotten fa... Oh, oh, that's what's... So then I just...

You know what? Here's my tip for you. Ubuntu-Batay-Welcome space tack B. You hit that, right? Boom, software boutique flies right open. Cue up a couple of things and you go to the main screen the new i like that queue animation that it does there's like there's like a yeah there's like it's just tops it really is like i i i opened up i knew i went in there i

saw the internet section there was chromium there was uh um brave did fail to install um a live bug report there but i figured that probably that'll probably work later on i do want to give brave a go um and then and then i use that a lot now really right are you liking it yeah i i it's my the only browser i use on my phone and i'm using it about 50 at the time on my desktop now huh all right i'm gonna give it a go come back to this and it bothers us some that they remove ads from specific websites and put their own ads in? No, I like that feature. Why? Because it removes all of the privacy-invading ads and replaces them with sanitized versions.

Hmm. So people still make money? There's a lot of privacy-guarding capabilities, getting rid of all sorts of stuff that's buried in pages that you really don't want. So there's no need for things like Privacy Badger and stuff like that. Yeah, but then there's also the idea that the ads being put in are their ads and not the people who you're going to the website for, and they don't get anything for it. Yeah, I've signed up to their scheme to pay back the money to the sites that I want to support.

Oh, is that right? I did not realize that was a component of it. I've never even had that scheme. That sounds interesting. It's almost like they thought about this before they implemented it. The browsers of today are broken. They've been overtaken by a barrage of sneaky

and annoying ads. Trackers that follow your habits and cookies that build profiles and all sorts of other internet clutter that's taking precedence over the content that you want to see. In fact, these useless bytes can take up to a whopping 50% of page load times, with a third of it anxiously trying to learn more about you. To make matters worse, some ad blockers are even letting ads through when large advertisers pay them. But do you really want a leaky ad blocker? It's because of these very reasons that we developed Brave,

a new browser that kicks internet crud to the curb and makes it faster, safer, and better to surf the web than your current browser. With Brave, everything you need is built right in. We integrate a technology that automatically blocks trackers, With Brave, everything you need is built right in. We integrate a technology that automatically blocks trackers, annoying ads, and shields everything that can cramp your style and destruct your privacy. Wow. I don't want that. You can expect increased speeds nearly two times faster on laptops

and up to four times faster on mobile. So there you go. And unlike any other browser. That's the pitch on Brave. It's a Mozilla project. So that's, you know, sort of interesting. No, it's not. No, it's not?

The guy from Mozilla, one of the founders of Mozilla founded this. Okay. Mozilla people founded it. I see. That was the confusion. So is it WebKit based then? Yes, I think it's linked. It's a bit more complex than that, but yes, essentially.

Well, now I'm like half as excited, but I'll still give it a go. I was way more excited when I thought it was Mozilla realizing that Firefox was dead and they were starting a new product and they were going to revitalize Gecko and a new, more competitive browser. That's what they're already doing with Firefox, though. Yeah, except for Firefox. That's what the web extensions are for. That's what Servo's for.

Yeah. Yeah. And the web extensions are coming in three releases. They're going to be like the main thing in three releases. Right now, you can already use them. And they've already got electrolysis out and all this other stuff. It's good. Yeah.

You should use Firefox. It already has all these things, Chrome. You know, I really am so depressed about this topic. I don't think I want to talk about it much. Check out Linux Action News 11. I mean, we covered a story. It's just devastating, devastating for Firefox. It's just so sad, so sad.

And there's just nothing they can do about it because it's, you know, and I make this pitch a lot here on the show, but as open source enthusiasts, we are a particular kind of techie crowd and we are particularly susceptible to getting into arguments about things on their technical merits and we are less capable often,

I don't know, I'm trying to put this nicer, but we are less likely to have a better understanding of market dynamics. And the market dynamics are such that a monopoly in search and in web services is contributing billions of dollars worth of advertising space, i.e. the top of YouTube, Google search, Gmail, calendar, all of Google's premier products if you are not running chrome constantly nag you to upgrade to chrome and that's the terminology they use is upgrade to chrome yeah they do google google docs works better offline if you upgrade to chrome google calendar works offline if you upgrade to chrome having problems watching this video this is why i've seen this one on youtube

are you having problems watching this video try upgrading to chrome can you imagine how many users must fall for that? That's interesting. See, I use Firefox at work, but I only use it really for work things. So I don't watch YouTube. I don't check my personal email or any of those. So I don't see that. That's wow.

It's literally invaluable ad space because Google doesn't sell that to any AdSense customer. And the thing is that Firefox isn't competing against Internet Explorer anymore. When Firefox was truly taking over, they were being innovative and competitive in a way that the consumer base was hungry for. The issue is, is that, like the beard just jokingly said, oh, that's nice. You know, it also has that is Chrome what also has that? It's Chrome. Google has not stood still at all. They are not the stagnant monopoly that Internet Explorer was. They are

hungry as hell to shape the web, and they are moving at a breakneck pace, continuing to outpace Firefox. I wouldn't say that. Firefox's release schedule is fast. No, what I just mean is in, oh, I'm sorry. I mean, they're continuing

to get more users, too. Like, they're down with velocity. Their momentum is continuing to grow and they're continuing to develop the product. Like, it's just not the same. It's not like what IE was, right? Yeah, exactly. They have a vested interest in getting as many users as possible.

So it's just, you know, it's just a plus. Firefox had an unlikely ally in the U.S. justice system, which was beating Microsoft over the head about bundling IE, which slowed things down. Yeah, I mean, it's harder. The argument between Chrome and Firefox is really hard because both are very good browsers to use, and it's purely a technical aspect that makes one better than the other.

But see, Brave would be new and shiny. A chance at new branding. I mean, look at the attention Brave's getting already. Like, if this was a Mozilla project, it would be good for them. Well, they're only getting attention because of the ad thing. If Firefox did the same thing and added an ad thing, it would be the same effect. Well, there is a big problem with Brave, though.

It doesn't work on porn sites. That's the big problem. Oh, really? Why is that? Everything just is black because it blocks everything. So I'm told these websites don't work very well. For my friends that tell me this. I know a lot of unsavory characters use Brave for some reason.

That's what Firefox focuses for. Well, maybe they'll just start working in 2022 when they drop Flash. Okay, hold on. Actually, now this works. So you use Brave for everything else, and you use Focus for porn, and Mozilla stole the game! There's a lot of money in porn.

Oh, wow. So I guess, Flash update again. Another real-time update here on the show, breaking news. Mr. Wimpy reports that Brave is now installable via the software boutique. Good job, Wimpy. That was quick. You're welcome.

So there's a bit of a Patreon leak. Rumors are spreading. And, you know, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to address the rampant speculation that the Ubuntu Mate project is moving to GitHub. It just seems like that's just rampant speculation. Yeah, we have. In fact, we've moved all of our projects to GitHub. Wow. We're integrated to the max now.

We've also got Slack going for the core team, and we're expanding the team quite considerably. So at the moment, we've got Etienne, who's come in. He's been doing good work behind the scenes for some time, and he's now heading up the QA team. And whilst I'm here having an evening of podcasting, they're busy doing the ISO testing for the new release. Well, thank you for that. So really good.

Yeah, we've got a lot of improvements there to streamline our processes, and there'll be more tooling coming along. Just to make sure I'm clear, though, this means the project is essentially migrating from Launchpad, right? We have moved the few packages that we were maintaining on Launchpad to GitHub. And that isn't required to be a flavor to be on Launchpad? Well, we need to have our bug tracker on Launchpad and what have you, and that's still there. That's fine. Okay, I see.

Well, we need to have our bug tracker on Launchpad and what have you, and that's still there. That's fine. Okay, I see. So that's more about if there's a bug reported, we're able to close the bug by uploading a new package directly in Launchpad. But in terms of source code hosting, that's all on GitHub now. Plus there's also the mirroring to Launchpad thing.

No, we've just exported everything to GitHub. The only thing that we've left on Launchpad are the seeds because they have to be there. And do you suppose that this might lead to more contributors to the project, people that may be? Yeah, without a doubt. We've already seen it. The day after we migrated, we just ran a load of migration scripts and moved everything over, and we knew there was a load of URLs

and things that needed changing in the code before we could repackage them and the next morning there was a load of pull requests where people had just come in and changed all of those urls for us and that's the github effect right so yeah so whilst we can have a debate about you know open source code hosting and all the rest of it github is where most of the eyeballs are and you get more drive by commits there it's as simple as that yeah it makes sense that does and if they if it leads to more open source it seems to me a net to be a good thing and if it leads to more people writing open source than in that it's a good thing this seems would be like it's oh go ahead i was just gonna say it's it's so much better now that it's on github because it's a lot easier to just do pretty much everything

because like just by creating a launchpad account and trying to commit to a contribute to a project is so difficult that most people just give up i've had an account with launchpad for i don't know like 10 years i think i've used it maybe five times. Yeah. Okay, so this is just my impression. I'm not saying this is Wimpy's position, but to me, looking at this alpha, I mean, it's a freaking alpha. First of all,

I don't really, it's so damn, it feels so damn ready. It sort of blows my mind, but this feels like this is the release. It's really like, this is ready for the masses it's ready for people look unity refugees i mean this really feels like it's polished to the next level for this desktop release yeah so it has been a ton of work it's been three months we literally started working on this the day after 1704 was released we were the first people to commit anything to 1707 awesome

and it's been um late nights and long nights for three months and we've pretty much landed at this point everything that we wanted to get on the desktop for the final release that's three months from now so we're done in terms of features except we've got another three months so now we're going to go and circle back to something so you you will have heard the news about our new software boutique which is not in this release it's still the old one slightly refreshed so now work will start on finishing up the new software boutique and there's a few other little skunk work projects that some of the other projects are helping us with and um they should uh trickle along um uh between now and october so we're kind of done with the desktop

and now we're going to really start adding some more polish and improvements on top of what we've got here that's a good position to be in that's going to make for a this this release so it sounds so damn good you should have saved for the lts no kidding i guess this is just we're one step away right so i've not been doing you know the flavors in a bunty for very long but i have done one lts before and i remember what it was like when we were making 1510 and then the effort that was involved to get 1510 to 1604 yeah and that was hard work and i i realized that really 1710 needs to be your 1804 and then it's all about improving the quality and the stability in that 1804 cycle that's landing those last few features but really

making sure it's solid yeah totally that is that's going to make for a good song we're well ahead of where we wanted to be because this time last year we were transitioning from gtk2 to gtk3 and i'd originally planned we would finish that gtk3 transition about now about this time but we finished that last october so we we got like a cycle ahead of ourselves so i'm really and and ubuntu mate now is really starting to be the desktop platform that i wanted to use because simple things like super key and and the hud and global menus i don't use the global menus myself but i know lots of people like those these were all things that were niggling at me that i knew weren't quite right and it wasn't perfect and it's really feeling like it's falling

into place now and it's all coming together and the indicator support it's got the same indicators that you'd expect to find in unity 7 so everything that you'd expect to find in Unity 7, so everything that you'd expect to find in a Unity desktop you'll find here now, so I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up. It really comes through as a great release, just even trying out the latest that I got the daily build, and it was pretty great.

If you want to know about this stuff first, the people who support the Ubuntu Mate project, learn about it from the horse's fingers, I guess. Patreon.com slash Ubuntu underscore Mate. I'll have a link in the show notes, too, if you want to support the project. Not only do you get news, but you help the news keep on coming. Yeah.

There's a poll over there right now about which video player should be the default in Ubuntu Mate. Obviously, it should be GNOME MPV. It is the greatest. Just saying. In my humble opinion. I completely agree. Have you voted? Let me go. Yes. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Good.

GNOME MPV needs more love. Team GNOME MPV, please. It is a great media player and it's somebody who does a lot of media editing and work and then also uses uh really pushes it for uh unfilter it's just such mpv is such a great tool are you saying gnome mpv or just mpv well mpv in general and if you're going to use an mpv if you're going to use a wrapper around a gnome mpv is the way to go it really is great okay i was just wondering like uh like, I've always never noticed the reason why someone would want to use GNOME MVP versus MPV.

Like, you could just right-click and load the video with MPV. I was just curious if the… I could tell you why I like it. Oh, go ahead, Wimpy. Well, I was going to say I like it because it adds the typical interfaces to manipulate it that you'd expect to be there. Yeah, the user's expect to be there. It doesn't feel like an odd duck. Right.

But I like it because, so I use it exclusively to play back all of the crazy types of file formats we have for unfilter clips. It's just a whole range that we get stuff in. Whatever you can. Real player. I mean, I'm telling you, it's a whole range. Yeah, but that's an MPV thing, right? Right. No, I know.

But let me just say, so the nice thing about GNOME MPV is it gives you a super clean minimal but always available play bar indicator, pause button. I can always see where the play position is. And it is probably one of the best designed GNOME apps in the sense that it's almost nothing to it except for just barely what you need. And it's just enough that I can look down and know exactly where it's at play-wise. And if I want to go full screen, it's like F11 or, you know, a click away or whatever it is. So it's kind of like a perfect balance for me in that sense. So I guess it's more like it's a user experience is easier to get because you don't have to learn all the specific shortcuts that MPV uses.

There's that. And it's like while I'm playing something on the stream, I can't keep putting my mouse over the video to see where the play position is at and have that display over the video because that's tacky. So having it just below the video where I can still see where the play position is at but don't have to show anything on screen makes for a better presentation. Okay. I understand that. So there's always weird use cases. I to show anything on screen. It makes for a better presentation. Okay, I understand. So there's always weird use cases. I always have a weird one. It's very much a tool where regular MPV works great if I'm going to put on some

MPV file and just watch it for an hour. Yeah, like if I'm going to do a live stream, I just MPV and then the URL. I don't bother with DOM MPV. And there's really, MPV, in my opinion, has done such a good job at giving you information that is readable on the command line output when you use it from the command line. That even if you're not like a pro user, you can see like it's trying to fix, it'll try to fix video and audio sync for you and tell you what offsets it's using.

Like it's just brilliant. There's another thing that I've found recently MPV does that a lot of people don't, you wouldn't think that they would do this. mpv does that a lot of people don't you even think that they would do this but you can take videos that are like awkwardly slowed down or have weird cropping issues and you can like resume and recrop it i use that all the time automatically yeah i use that all the time yeah that's really nice vlc is a great tool as well we do use that in production here at studio but you know if i could only have if i'm on an island and i can only have one package mpv or no m MPV all the way. It's so great.

All right. So there's a couple more things I want to talk about before we wrap up for the day. And we also have, I think we have, I think we're going to get some more Alex Cute info out of Simon in the post show. Yeah, you know. So more to come. More to come. But I want to take a moment and I want to talk about something else I take on that desert island with me, and that's Linux Academy. Then I could sit there and train my mind.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to support the show and sign up for a free seven-day trial. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. A platform by Linux. I'll say it again. A platform. A platform. You see I got a little pop there.

A little bit. A platform by Linux enthusiasts for Linux enthusiasts. People that wanted to spread the adoption of Linux and kind of began to think about this project from there, then got together with real world educators, people with experience, developers, came together as a group, like a holy trinity, you might say. I mean, they probably wouldn't say that, but I might say that, of Linux education. And they built a system. They started in a reasonable, like, approachable, like, actually accomplishable product. And then it just took off like wildfire.

And they've been able to grow it. And it just adds so much value to the platform. If you've been a subscriber now for like a year, you've just seen it take off like nuts. Self-paced, in-depth video courses, hands-on scenario-based labs that give you real experience on servers. You get to SSH into those bad boys and use them like you really would. And, man, is that nice because it gives you confidence to actually work with this stuff. Oh, you're busy? Yeah, I know about that.

They have a course schedule that works with your busy time to make it all fit in there. They have learning paths too if you just want to go into a specific career track. Maybe you've got some type of certain mind. Well, they also have courses created specifically to prepare you for that. They also have a vibrant community that's packed full of Jupyter Broadcasting members and study tools

that you can download offline and take with you and iOS and Android apps if you have some downtime and want to do a little studying. Gosh, that's cool. Yeah, that's really cool. Linuxacademy.com

slash unplugged. Go there to sign up, get a free seven-day trial and support the show and then dig in. And I think probably, you know, I've got to say my favorite feature is the human beings, the instructor mentoring, like the actual help. Because that's really what takes them up to the next level. Because instead of just throwing on Linux as a feature that they have as well as plumbing and Adobe After Effects and Final Cut,

oh, and then they have your Linux stuff over here and your developer stuff, because you've got to have those checkboxes. You've got to check those boxes. Then they're not going to have anybody passionate about that stuff in their company. That's not their core focus. That's not what their mission's about. So Linux Academy, they focus on Linux, open source,

and all the stuff around it, which means they can hire people professionally, well, not just professionally trained, but passionate,ate about it. That means you can count on them that, you know, they know what they're doing. And if you get stuck or, you know, it just, sometimes you need two or three different ways of hearing something to learn it. The other way that it manifests itself in a way that is valuable to customers is that

since they're following trends because they're enthusiasts, they're on to stuff that is valuable. Like when containerization started becoming a thing, Linux Academy was having the best courseware on it. And the stuff like you could immediately go and apply to a job kind of stuff. Really practical, good stuff, always giving you value. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show. This is a great post. And it got me missing GNOME already.

And it was from a Metanova over in the unplugged subreddit, linuxunplugged.reddit.com. And he says, Greetings, Unplugged. I recently have made the switch back to Arch and GNOME 3, and for the most part, I'm pretty happy with the switch. However, I'm distracted easily. Huh? What? What did you say? Oh, I'm sorry. You distracted me. You weren't listening.

And so I try to do my best to adapt my desktop environment to account for this. My biggest problem with GNOME, or GNOME, as you say, is that the activities window overview is really disorienting for me. I used Ask to Doc for switching windows, but I still have problems when I open the overview to launch applications. Seeing every single window I have whoosh onto the screen is really distracting and can really knock me out of my flow. Boy, I can see that. Like, you know, your Telegram window comes up and you see you've got a shit ton of chats that you haven't answered in 15 minutes. Every single window I have whoosh onto the screen is really distracting and can really knock me out of my flow. Boy, I could see that. Like, you know, your Telegram window comes up and you see you've got a shit ton of chats that you haven't answered in 15 minutes. Or with Slack or the IRC or your email.

What was that? Oh, the easiest solution to this problem is to use another application launcher like GNOME do. Anyways, he goes through his goals here to sort of make GNOME a less distracting UI. And it dawned on me that this was the problem I ran into when I switched to Plasma for a while, is that there was just so many things for me to play with. Widgets that tell me my CPU stuff and my new messages and different ways to set up the panel. There's a ton. Yeah.

He's doing a plea for help. He says, does anyone in the Unplugged family, the Unplugged fam, know about this? Is there an extension I'm missing? I like that. Alternatively, if anyone here is familiar with developing GNOME extensions, creating extensions that hides window previews and activities, etc., it'd be greatly appreciated. Ultimately, I'm looking for an activities tweaker

or other ideas and experiences that the audience has had. And we have a link to MetaNova's thread if you want to toss in there. What about you, Wes? Do you suffer? Because you probably get a type of work that requires that you get into a flow and maintain that flow for a while.

Do you suffer from distracted UI? You know, thankfully not, especially not on Gnome. I don't usually. You know, if I am even using Dash to Doc, it's hidden. So there's always the problem of notifications, but that's, you know, usually a per app thing. So as long as I, you know, divide my screen in half, I got a terminal, I have a web browser, I can get in the groove. But I do know you mean like playing with plasma in the past, especially for me. It might be something that I've been using for ages now.

So I might just be used to anything that would have distracted me as a new user. I think that's probably part of it. W.W., you seem like a nice, rational gentleman. Do you have the problem of distracting UI? Right now, no, not really. Because I don't have any... Any background wallpaper, forget about asking me for what's hip or cool

because I have a billion windows up. I have tabs. Yeah. So tabs is pretty much my lifestyle right now. I know what the beard solution is. Full screen all the things. Oh, yeah. If you just run everything full screen,

then you can only look at one thing at a time. I don't know. Have we ever talked about that? The fact that you're a full screen maniac? I don't think so. He's all in on the full screen. Every app I have is full screen. I have like 20 to 30 apps. Oh yeah. And then you know

never a split. And then like my browser that has 200 tabs. So I can only ever see one thing at a time so I'm never distracted. That is a, it's an intense way to operate but you do seem to make it work for you. For me, like I get claustrophobic in that setup. Like I'm like I gotta be able to like, I need an overview and all that.

I need windows. For me, I need to be able to move stuff around. I just, oh. Yeah, see, I agree with Architect. If you can see your background, you're just being lazy. There you go. All right. That's not a bad note to end it on.

I just want to talk really quickly then about this journey that I'm starting. It's fun for me, and I won't go on and on about it. That's why I put it at the end of the show. But it's something that's different for me personally with my Linux use in a long time is I'm making, I've talked about this on user a little bit, so I'll just give you the cliff notes.

I'm switching away from Antigros and Arch. Love Arch. I think it's a great, great, great desktop workstation OS. Super stable, despite what all the haters say. Antigros has been difficult for me recently. It's a good project. It's a great way to get your hands on. But I just am constantly having package key problems

that prevent me from updating my system. And it's only about a five-minute fix each time. But it happens about once a month now. And when you multiply that across like five systems it gets frustrating and it's even the same commands to fix it and all that stuff but it just feels like well i don't want it i like the project a lot but it's it's just what happens is is it makes me skip updating which is that only makes it worse that's when you start going down a slippery slope with arch and you start you start not updating and you start running into problems.

So it's kind of changed the value proposition for the whole thing in some ways. The other thing that's been a big change for me is post Linux Action Show. I don't do desktop app picks and a project spotlight and a distribution pick. I don't have the picks. And so I don't have to try out. So the picks, we talk about one app that week, but we tried five or six other ones,

other contenders. So it means installing five or six or seven or eight or sometimes ten different things to try out which one really works and which one is generally available to the audience and applicable. And the AUR was just a slam dunk. If you want to try out all the different...

Yeah, it's always there. And so it made it... It literally made... It was just a slam dunk. If you want to try out all the different... Yeah, it's always there. And so it literally made... It was part of my workflow. Go into the AUR, find the application, try it out, review it for the show, probably uninstall it, maybe not, and rinse, repeat every single week. And now I don't really have...

I kind of have my stable set of applications I use. I'm just getting my work done now. I'm not sitting there trying to find new stuff constantly and i don't know so it's changed it's changed what i need from my distributions package manager too right and i would say like when you first switched to arch uh you know snaps were not flat pack they're not in the place that they used they aren't they weren't even a thing yeah so you have a lot more options even on you know a dog wasn't a thing even, right? So there's also,

that's the other thing is, there's like, I was experimenting with Solus and there was software I wanted that wasn't available. I was like, oh yeah, Docker. And of course- You can have a whole Arch system

running if you want. One of the things that, so it's funny because now I'm on the other end of this. One of the things that's true is, for me, is I don't, I wonder if it tells me right here.

I don't make it a priority to update... Yeah, so there's 231 package updates for the OBS machine. I don't make it a practice to constantly upgrade the OBS machine because that makes a production machine less reliable. I need newer versions of everything

underlying OBS, and I need newest versions of OBS, but I don't need my GNOME shell to change. I don't really need my GNU tools to change. Kernel updates, except for security, I don't. I mean, everything's working as it is. In fact, we have some customized drivers for these capture cards. So an LTS is starting to make a lot more sense to me than it used to.

You're just going to make Noah's Day, aren't you? You're making what I like to call the Rekai to Noah transition. Yeah, right, exactly. How so? Well, because I like the bleeding edge of everything, and Noah likes the LTS, so you're making the transition from one to the other. Yeah, I don't...

See, it makes sense on the production equipment, but it sounds boring as snot for my desktop. It just really... It sounds like it's sucking some of the fun out of using Linux. But I think you're also maybe in a place where you're very busy and you're doing a lot more content production that makes it. This is what I was thinking, too. I mean, you can always leave one system out. Have you heard of the Church of Neon?

Oh, you know, that's so that's the other that's the other wrinkle, isn't it? Because we've got a true blue GNOME desktop coming from Ubuntu very soon. And I'm very interested in that. We just talked about the super slick snot stuff in Ubuntu Mate that really makes it a contender. Then you do have the Plasma desktop as well. I just, like, the whole field is open to me again i feel myself i'm beginning to distro hop in a way that i haven't done for two and a half two and a half three years uh so i've i've been trying out right now i've been trying out mostly ubuntu based stuff because i keep thinking if i'm gonna go this route it seems

like i should probably rebase on ubuntu but But there's like this IK on my shoulder that keeps talking about all the cool shit that Solus is doing about how Clear Boot Manager would be great for use in production here. And then Fedora's got this Fedora Workstation OS tree release that they're working on. And I'm like, oh my goodness. So many good options.

It's so much harder than it ever has been to pick a distribution right now. And then Rika is saying Slackware off in the corner over there. You're so tempted. That's why I was going to do a Slackware challenge, but I'm right in the middle. I'm in the throes of this. My guess is Chris is going to, he's not going to be able to decide, and he's going to compromise and end up on Ubuntu Budgie. There we go.

That's reasonable. What do you think, Bashful? That might be a good way to go, huh? Yeah, I'm kind of a little one-sided on this one, but sure. You're using it as a deck. You could speak from the perspective of a daily user over there. You get your work done every single day, right? And you're running it on the last release right now?

I don't know, but you're using it every day as a daily driver. Yeah, I'm running 17.04, and I'm actually running it at work too, and that's over a remote session as well, and I haven't really had any issues with it at all. Another option is Nitrix. Good callback, good callback, Nitrix. See, Budgie is a great desktop, Good callback, Nitrix.

See, Budgie is a great desktop, but why would I switch to that? Just so that way I can switch again in a year or whatever? I don't know. Yeah, but you're going to run into that with almost any distro you pop in if you're not entirely happy. No, I just mean like I think that desktop is going to be going through a transition, where right now it seems like the time to get in on GNOME gnome 3 if if things are shaping up like mike mike mike when's the last time we crashed it's been it's been like two weeks right since we've had a gnome 3 crash yeah so the last time the last round of updates i did manage to apply did seem to improve stability so that's good yeah until the next issue crops well there's that there is that yeah so anyways my distro my distro hopping ways have

returned like and of course it's kind of fun it has to be happening right around the 1710 release cycle too so and you know you say that that that's a reason not to use budgie but don't you think that gnome is probably about to go through a huge transition as well no i think gtk4 is going to be more evolutionary well i was more talking about the effect that Ubuntu might have on GNOME. Oh. Boy, well, so far I like all those effects, I've got to say. I mean, I'm really, this is the thing is, when I was trying Ubuntu Mate and I rebooted this system, like, I realized as I was hitting the restart button, like, oh, I really like GNOME.

Like, I really like GNOME 3. It's really good. It's just I don't like it when it runs like dog poo and crashes a lot. But other than that, I really like Gnome. Like, I really like Gnome 3. It's really good. It's just I don't like it when it runs like dog poo and crashes a lot. But other than that, I really like it. All right, Chris, you can run Gnome on your desktop upstairs, and then down here in the studio we'll run KDE Everywhere. Well, okay, so if you're going to go – We can have both.

Then we can wrap this up. We've got to wrap it up for the day. But if you take it to its practical, logical conclusion, why not go Ubuntu LTS with Unity 7? Because this is a seriously – other than the few problems we've had with the sound interface, this mobile system that's running Unity 7 and Ubuntu is like 100% rock solid. Yeah, and I guess by the time that it's end of life we'll probably have moved on to something else and we've even done a couple of update batches on this thing so it's managed to take its updates and not shit the bed and it runs until we have some cockamamie reason to reboot it

and i mean it's just been rock solid and unity 7 opens windows real nice it has nice like borders to grab my windows to resize them. All the things I like about a desktop. I have Unity 7 on some stuff too. It does randomly and inexplicably spin up our GPU though. That is true. That did start happening. That did start happening.

I've been getting a lot of crap for saying nice things about Unity. People are really angry that all of a sudden I have positive things to say about Unity now that it's end of life. I think it's funny because if you look at the majority of the community, the transition has been much more positive for Unity now that things like all of the features that Unity had that people didn't even know existed. They're going, oh, wow, that's great. Too bad Unity's dead now. Well, yeah, good job. Yeah, but those same people just a couple months ago were crapping on Unity

because why does it move to doing their own thing? Of course. Anti-canonical rhetoric. It's a canonical hate. I never understood then, and they always pointed out how Unity has a lot of cool features, and now that it's gone, it's kind of sad in a way. It's still there. That's what I was saying.

I mean, as far as the innovation is all dead, the fact that the HUD, the concept of the HUD was abandoned and other people were trying to rebuild everything and bring back the global menu. The global menu has, every single global menu implementation so far has these weird massive holes

like the CSDs don't work. Well, I'm kind of hoping not an open to mount a 1710 i'm kind of uh-oh that uh mic drop canonical will bring some of those improvements to gnome and make it a desktop that i like more because i don't really like gnome right now yeah yeah yeah it's i am not really now plasma either so. Supposedly, Ubuntu is not changing that much except for already made extensions. Well, initially, but who knows what they're going to do down the road. I think it's too obvious. I think it's not about changing the direction of GNOME

because that's sort of the whole point of making this switch was to not have to to be that to be that to be that player now you're now the idea is you ride with upstream and you can spend your time fixing so we gotta go uh will you let dan know we're just gonna be five minutes so here's the thing the hard stuff isn't getting done in open source and a lot of us know it a lot of us know that the stuff that's really, really tough to fix requires people that are working in teams, that have a coordinated development standards practice,

that maybe have a PMO that's managing the things they're working on and telling them instead of them choosing by what happens to fit their fancy. The really hard stuff is the underlying stuff, like the hundreds of bugs in Bluetooth and things like that that require a real development focus and team to work on them. And that's an area where Canonical can really and is already adding a ton of value without having to fork the file manager or anything like that. And I think that is fundamentally going to be the long, long-term impact to the GNOME desktop. think that is fundamentally going to be the long, long-term impact to the GNOME desktop. It isn't so much about

them dictating the design future of GNOME 3, but more about letting the GNOME project make a great desktop, making modifications via the extension systems where it's appropriate, and working on the underlying, underpinning stuff that makes using a Bluetooth

speaker with your Linux box actually usable. And that's, I think, going to be the big benefit. End of rant. It was just a quickie. Well, I agree with that. But I also think that the fact that Ubuntu is settling on GNOME now lets you work better with upstream while also making changes. So it's more like it's not necessarily

you're changing the direction of gnome it's you're just helping improve the gnome experience right which is i think what was why some people it's though some of the unity haters didn't like unity yeah is the mixed resources thing oh we gotta we gotta fire unity 7 was way unity itself was way, Unity itself was way better than GNOME for years. Like GNOME for three to four years was utter garbage. Well, right. Well, you know what? On that positive note, because that's, you know, that is a story for another time. We were thinking about it.

We should do like a history edition, like a gather around story version where we go back through the good and bad old days of all of this, but not for today. That is a project for future Linux Unplugged. If you'd like to participate in the conversation, join us live on Tuesdays over at jblive.tv. We do it at 2 p.m. Pacific. You can get it converted to your local time

at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We also have the subreddit linuxunplugged.reddit.com, the contact page at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We also have the subreddit, linuxunplugged.reddit.com, the contact page at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact. The winner of the Dell sweepstakes in user error, what is it, 18? Yep, user error 18. Go check that out.

Great episode with Mr. Chase. Follow the network at Jupiter Signal. Oh, special outtakes were just posted for patrons too over at patreon.com slash Jupiter Signal. Tons of stuff. We'll see you right back here next tuesday Thank you. All right, let's go pick a title before we get out of here. Mumble Room, thank you very much. Simon had a couple of, I know he had several points he wanted to get in about LXQ.

So let me say this really quick. Go over to jbtitles.com. Let's see if we can't make our quickest title pick yet so that way Dan and Wes can get started ASAP. Simon, you wanted to jump in there real quick on a couple of things. That was your... Yeah.

So Alpha 2 is going to be released on Thursday and both me and Bashful Robot, we're doing the checklist tracking. So we're just wondering if anybody can help test if you're installing Ubuntu on a machine or if you're installing... The other flavors are

Kubuntu, which I believe they have the latest Plasma on this release. You have the Lubuntu Next flavor, which is the experimental image. And you have Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Chillin. So if you install any of those on your machine, if you happen Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Chillin. So if you install any of those on your machine, if you happen to do that within the next day or two,

it'd be great if you could at least let us know that it works, that sort of thing, because we're right now in sort of like a testing phase for Alpha 2. Return of the DistroHopper. I think Chris switches to BSD. We should save that one in case that ever actually happened. I doubt but boy so many people since i've mentioned this are like dude you should try out bsd and i'm like uh-huh i think i would rather run slackware than run bsd maybe i'm not sure bsd is like the greatest thing you should possibly want if you don't want to run a desktop you'd have to swap your hosting duties there chris yeah i mean i could fill in now yeah uh

let's see scratch by a thumbnail keeping keep killing flash i still think return of the distro hopper might be better uh so long and thanks for all the flash yeah that's good too but i've already that was taken by uh chromium um you didn't well what was architect what what oh you know i want to you know maybe one Oh, you know I want to. You know, maybe one day. Somebody actually pitched it to me. Somebody actually suggested I should switch to BSD so that way when I use Linux, it's emulated and it's consistent.

And so I'll have a more stable Linux experience because I'll be using an emulated Linux experience under BSD. There you go. Who was that? Was it Architect? Who was it that made that argument? Somebody around here made that argument in this neck of the woods, and that one really got me. JBtitles.com.

I think we're going to go with Return of the Distro Hopper just in the order of expedience here. Flashdance. Flashdance is good, too. I've got to say, Wimpy made me happy, and then he immediately made me sad. What happened? Because he talked about moving Ubuntu Mate to GitHub, and he moved made me sad. Why? What happened? What happened? Because he talked about moving Ubuntu Mate to GitHub, and he moved everything to GitHub except for the part that I hate about Launchpad,

the bug tracker. Oh, the bug tracker. Well, that makes sense, though. That bit of infrastructure. You can raise issues on GitHub. That's no problem. We'll deal with issues in GitHub. That's fine as well.

Oh, that's a good compromise. Both trackers are open, but we also need the one in Launchpad to actually close Project Milestones and stuff. You're welcome. That's brilliant, actually. Just work on Chris. Explain he needs a stable operating system for his production machine. That's okay. He'll walk in one day and the mate will be on every system.