LINUX Unplugged - Episode 208: The Stallman Line | LUP 208

Episode Date: August 2, 2017

We get philosophical about open source’s most modern problem & debate where we draw our own personal “Stallman Line”.Plus a we briefly discuss today’s big Bitcoin fork, Mozilla’s new Firefox experiments, Krita’s woes, Gnome’s moves & the groundwork for the Slackware Challenge.

I did have D&D on. I just opened up my phone. I actually forgot why I unlocked my phone. This is the other thing that happens to me is I pulled my phone out and I unlocked it to do something. But I saw I had six text messages about scheduling a car drop-off for repair.

And I'm like, and that took all my brain processing. And now I have no idea why I pulled my phone out. And that happens to me. Derailed. Several times a day. Like that's probably, that's a weird thing.'s like that that uh see this is why this is why i love the one plus phones with the switch the hardware switch you just flick the switch down and you do

not disturb that's it job done i i think apple's probably going to drop that from the iphone and i think that's the best thing about the iphone too is they've always had that that physical switch my bad was, and this is what you really got to guard against, is I saw the unread badge on messages, which there's only a couple of people that actually sent me text messages, and it

went right into the message thread, and I saw the whole thing, and I'm like, oh, it's too late. Now I've marked it as read, and I won't go back, and it was no good. But I did have it muted. I unlocked the phone to do something else. You should hide that somewhere really deep in folders. Lost into a world. I know.

I should, like, put it off on another screen somewhere. You guys sound like a bunch of old people. Really? Yeah. Because of why we forget stuff easily? Oh, you're messing things up on your phone. You like the hardware switches. I tell you what, being able to reach in your pocket and flip that switch.

Nah, Chris, the future is software-defined everything. We're going to live in a software-defined reality. I'm going to miss that when phone manufacturers drop in the headphone port is rough and drop in that toggle mute switch is rough. You know what the worst thing they dropped? They dropped the flip phone. Yeah. It'll be back.

It'll be back. They just want to build one small thing that's just metal and glass and nothing else. Mark my words, though. The flip phone will come back. Maybe it'll be a Nokia. Wouldn't that be something if it was a Nokia? See, this is a perfect time for a ting ad. Yeah, let's do a pre-show ting ad! Extra dose today, folks.

Don't you mean a Microsoft phone, Chris? No, no, no. See, there's still Nokia. I thought Microsoft kept the phone part and spun off everything else. Well, there's actually still... It's very confusing. The original sale had a time limitation on Microsoft making smartphones, so it always reverted back to Nokia for making smartphones after a couple of years.

And they started preparing for that very quickly. And they are actually already shipping phones. They are already doing it. They're shipping Android phones right now. They've started doing that. Oh, but yeah, Microsoft owns the patents, though. That's the important thing. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 208

for August 1st, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show where one of your hosts is literally witnessing his Bitcoin empire fork. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Quite the show today. And once again, ladies and gentlemen, the Beard joins us, a.k.a. Mr. Rekai. Hello, Beard.

Hi, guys. Hello, Beardsley. Thank you for making it again this week. What a champ. We have quite a show today. Quite a show today. Well, we had to because you're in, you know, you have such woes about your finances.

That's true. We have the topics of Forks coming up in a little bit. Some big transitions for the GNOME project. Windows users have yet another reason not to switch to Linux. Uh-oh. We're going to finally talk about that beautiful Linux based on Plasma that I forgot to get to last week. Corita's got some troubles.

Firefox has got some new projects. And JB's making a transition. Plus the start of a new challenge. We'll talk about. We'll kick off. That's what I'm looking for. We'll kick off the Slackware challenge this week on the show. We're going to kick off the Slackware

challenge. Are you ready, Wes? I'm so excited. You're going to do it with me, right? Heck yes I am. So we'll talk about the slackware challenge we'll lay the groundwork in this week's episode so we got all of that plus we have some breaking news that's happening right now as we record this show so before we go any further point of order right here got to bring in that mumble room time appropriate greetings virtual lug hello i love that i do too i do too Hello. And it's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is splitting into BCC and BTC. So a minority of Bitcoin, but yet influential community members are forking Bitcoin to Bitcoin cash. On August 1st, that was today, the Bitcoin blockchain split into two.

Now, it doesn't look like it's having really a huge impact on value or on people's balances. The value of Bitcoin has remained pretty steady today. It just essentially creates a new token. Now, it's up to different aspects of the community if they're going to recognize it or not. Bitcoin Cash will fork Bitcoin's existing software and transaction history, and it brings a new cryptocurrency tokens on a new blockchain with different rules. One of those big rules is the size of the blockchain, individual transactions and whatnot. This has sort of been brewing in the background for a while,

more than a year, really, probably since I've been doing Plan B. And as a Bitcoin user, I noticed that there is a massive, massive, massive delay now in processing transactions, unless you really kind of grease the wheels with an unusually high transaction fee. But after running into a few roadblocks this morning, miners were able to successfully create blocks on a new blockchain called Bitcoin Cash at roughly, I don't know why it's roughly, at 2.14 p.m. Eastern time today. This effectively means it's

happened. At this point in time, some pretty big outlets, though, are not really recognizing Bitcoin Cash. I believe Coinbase being one of them. Yeah. And it's taking off. It's growing from there. The big launch, though, I mean, some people may actually be able to make some money for this. And we may see that both these things continue to exist, especially if transaction fees are lower on the Bitcoin Cash network. So it may be that smaller transactions become popular on Bitcoin Cash

and large transactions become more popular on standard BTC. Who knows? But I know it's not a Linux topic, but don't tell me. Tell the Linux Foundation. It's the power of forking. I think it's just a non-story.

Really? I think it's just going to be another Litecoin. It's going to drop off. Here's why I think it's... a non-story. Really? I think it's just going to be another Litecoin. It's going to drop off. Here's why I think it's, well, maybe, maybe. Here's why I feel like this story has some legs, is the real thing that's the topic of debate here is the technology in the blockchain. Yeah, but just a few days ago,

a lot of the Bitcoin core team and a lot of the companies came to a consensus about how to go forward with that. Yeah, I don't think Bitcoin's screwed or anything like that. But I think, so I just made a little reference there to Linux Foundation. I think there's real money, like huge money, like game-changing, going-to-disrupt-the-financial-industry money in blockchain technology. And so when anything is happening in the open-source blockchain projects, I think there is a much bigger technology story being told there. This reminds me of the distros that forked off and did the non-system-y stuff. It feels like the same kind of situation.

Devon and similar. Although in this case, the Bitcoin Cash people might argue that they're the more progressive-minded folks that... Well, that's what the non-system-D folks said too. Okay. All right, well, I wanted to note it because it happened today. There are arguments against this fork. Larger block sizes mean there's going to be more delay in block propagation.

It'll be harder, more expensive to maintain a node. Starting a new node from scratch is going to take forever to download all that stuff. It's already massive. But it's kind of interesting that this is one of the, whether good or not, it's one of the interesting things about, you know, cryptocurrencies in general is that these sorts of things can happen and they can exist off on their own and do whatever they want and we get to watch. Yeah, and I just silently sit here and hope that the last remaining few

bitcoins that i have clutched onto uh are worth something in a few years amen amen to that so last week we talked to uh mr martin wimpress about the matey ubuntu matey's's project migration to GitHub. And it looks like this week that the GNOME project might be fancying themselves a move. Did you see this one, Wes? Yeah. I don't think it's going to be GitHub. It looks like it's not GitHub. They say, essentially,

that they need to improve their development infrastructure, and they want to provide developers a more efficient, integrated, featureful way to enjoy a set of tools. That's actually what they say. They say their current system is getting increasingly antiquated. They use a cGit for code hosting and

Bugzilla for issue tracking. Wow. Are we calling Bugzilla antiquated now? Yes. Are we allowed to say that? Because I don't think you're allowed to say things like that about open source software that a lot of open source advocates use. I think you're not allowed to say that. I'll say it about Seagate anyway.

I'm the proprietary guy that likes GitHub issues. GitLab is open source, so if they go to GitLab, all good. Yeah, so it looks like the evaluation has focused on two main solutions, speaking of GitLab. GitLab and Fabricator. If you're unfamiliar with these, they have a little introduction. But beware that they say that GitLab isn't simply a GitHub clone. I don't know exactly what they mean by that. But it sounds like in their inference in there is that GitLab is missing features.

So I did a little diggy dig. And GitLab is MIT licensed. So they could possibly extend gitlab gitlab uh has a bit of a reputation i don't know if it's fair or not so i'm not making any judgments but gitlab has a reputation for being a little snippety about upstream acceptance of new patches and stuff like they seem to be pretty not accepting seems to be the reputation fair or not i don't know so i don't know. So I don't know if that means that the GNOME project

would essentially end up forking a version of GitLab for their own use. That's not ideal either because what I like about Bugzilla is it was commonly used in the community. So there was more than one project

maintaining it. Well, if GNOME forks GitLab, they'll just remove features, so it's okay. Maybe the cult. I believe that entirely. Yeah, they'll just keep it simple. Yeah, well, it's easier to maintain.

In five years, it'll be really polished and we'll all love it. Yeah. It'll have a giant header bar, too. So they figure, I guess, I think they've played around with GitLab a little bit. So anyways, they're looking for feedback. And that's one of the reasons I threw it in our community news section, is they are looking for feedback from the community, especially the GNOME community, in creating a migration plan based on their concerns and things like that. So it's probably a good time to get involved. The issue tracker seems to be a big part of it for them.

I'd say, I mean, I wish them luck. Yeah, it is a good idea. Yeah, it is a good idea. And the whole, going from just something like Seagate to modern, interactive, really rich web UI source control platforms, it can be a remarkable shift for a lot of developers. There are those of us who live and breathe the command line, but for a lot

of people, that really makes it easier for them to understand, interact quicker, to develop with. So I can see that doing good things for the project. Well, you know, the number one thing you see is, now this is more of a GitHub effect than it is a GitLab effect, but the number one thing you see with GitHub is way more community involvement all of a sudden.

Now, GitLab benefits from a bit of that Halo effect too. Monkeycom, you wanted to jump in with a point about GitLab. Go ahead. We switched over to GitLab just because of the issue tracking. And we've switched everything. Well, we were SVN, so we had to, but all our developers are on GitLab and issue tracking and even integrating some of the bug fix technology

into our existing switching. It works seamlessly. Well, there you go right there. And I think we've seen other people sort of say that too, especially people in the community. Yeah, I just want to point out though, you can still use command line with GitLab and GitHub. I exclusively use command line for those.

Yeah, actually, I think I've only used the command line with GitHub. I've never used any. I usually just use the web interface because they are very. Oh, well, yeah. I mean, to browse it and stuff. But I mean, like commits right to clone software. Oh, which is useful for like casual users or people who I tend to like. If you're fixing a typo or something, never done a repo or anything.

OK. I tend to like it because I'm a very visual person. Sure, sure. They surface the stuff in a very easy-to-understand way. Yeah. You can even edit the documents, right, in GitLab, so you don't even have to do a remote commit. You just open the file, edit it, and commit the changes right there in the web interface.

That is nice, and I could definitely see how that would bring in a lot more people robert you had something you wanted to contribute go ahead well just saying um get that also has its own built-in ci server so you have one you only need to install one thing and you get all the features from issue tracking to a ci build server yeah yeah pipelining all built in one go and it's also it's also pretty straightforward to set up, which is, that's pretty compelling too. So let's talk about GitHub for a second. I guess they had a bit of an outage yesterday. That's right.

I didn't really impact anything I was doing, but probably affected some projects that have moved over to GitHub. But Wes, like he does, just loves to sleuth around GitHub all day long, and he found this project with no description, no topics provided, seven commits, one contributor. But ladies and gentlemen, you could be looking at Google's JPEG killer, a lossless JPEG replacement. It's called PIK, P-I-K,

and it's a new lossy image format for the Internet. And Wes here has this directory that contains an encoder and a decoder for the format. It requires a CPU that has a FMA little compute chip in it, so like a Haswell or better Intel or AVX2, I think. No, yeah, I think those are both x86 technologies. So it's like turbocharged by your CPU. And then down here at the bottom it says this is not an official Google product. it ain't but it's just on their github page isn't that funny so didn't google already create this with webp anyway yeah well webp would might be to do

something else this seems to be like one of the things that they've done here is they've built a a lossless jpeg repackager like Like, it's built to replace JPEGs. Huh. I don't know. I think it's because PIC is lossy and WebP is lossless. Well, didn't you just say it was a lossless JPEG replacement? PIC is lossy. Yeah, okay.

So what is the... I guess it just probably means you can convert from JPEG to this. You've already lost with JPEG. It's already compressed. What is the new image format that the internet phones are going to have with iOS 11? The HIF or whatever it is? HEAF?

HEAF format? It's actually like, I guess it's so standard. I have no idea what you're talking about. So I just, I think we're going to have a new image. This is probably for Android, maybe. Maybe? Maybe not. It's just we could have a new world of image formats.

All of a sudden, us Linux users have gotten real comfortable to be able to double-click on files, and we could have iPhone users and Android users taking pictures in formats that we can't open. Okay, so there is a GitHub repository for it. H-E-I-F HEIF. Yeah. So it sounds

like, at least from what I'm reading over on HN here, it's an image container format. Right. It's more like MKV. Can support JPEG, H.264, or H.265. So I think that Apple will probably be using a version of H.265. It's similar for image. In the HEIF container. Yes. Which is confusing, but think of it as

like MKV. You can have X.264 or a VP8 file in an MKV container. So if they use H.264 or H.265, then you may have some patent issues or other things with that, but not with JPEG. Does it really matter, though? Because Imgur is already using WebM and WebP, and that's like half the images on the internet.

Yeah. Okay, so some people here do also speculate, like we were just talking about, that WebP is lossy and is aimed at low-quality and YUV420 only. So PIC is perhaps a broader scope. I'm always disappointed when I'm accidentally on Google+, which is the only time I'm ever on Google+, anymore. And I want to grab something that's funny off of Google+, and I grab the image, and it's a WebP image.

I can't put that in Telegram. That's what I want to do with it, right? I can't toss that on Twitter. I've got to save it to my desktop, open it up, save it as a JPEG. It's jank. What? It doesn't work on Telegram? Aren't the stickers WebP? Yeah, I believe they are. Well, I couldn't get, save it as a JPEG. It's jank. Wait, what? It doesn't work on Telegram? Aren't the stickers WebP?

Yeah, I believe they are. Oh, well, you can't, I couldn't get it, I couldn't get to attach it as an image that would embed in the chat. Oh, really? Yeah. That's weird. I could try again. But yeah, I was like, well, this is disappointing. This is what I wanted this image for. Yeah, right, exactly. Alright, so, while we're talking about things that are

just applicable to just absolutely everybody on the sun, that's what, hey, can you tell it's summertime, everybody? There's something that's been cooking under the sun, and that's the Windows subsystem for Linux. Now, it's out of beta, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can get your hands on it yet. You know how Microsoft works, right? They like to announce something that's, this is a final product that you can get in three months. So that's what's going on, I think, with the subsystem for Linux. But Microsoft says they're damn excited.

They are damn excited to announce that in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, because that's what we have to name service packs now, due to ship in Fall 2017, the Windows subsystem for Linux will no longer be a beta feature, and will become a fully supported Windows feature. Whoa!

No more hacking your Windows box with those drop-down things that just put you in the Insider Program. And this is great news for those of you who have considered not switching to Linux and now need an excuse not to, because really what this is doing is signaling to people that you can now put this in production. In fact, Microsoft even promotes this aspect. They say, now you can go ahead and integrate this in with yourday developer tool set and become even more productive when building, testing, and deploying your apps on Windows 10. Which nobody's doing, so it doesn't matter anyway.

When your boss tells you you have to run Windows, then you can just install this and pretend. The problem is that subsystem's not going to matter to like 80% of the people that are doing development because you can't use SSHFS to connect your linux servers anyway yeah do you hear that that's a that's a quite an edge case just because you can't use it really is that really an edge case do you know how many people use sshfs to work on their linux servers but a lot of people that's my point it's there's plenty of people who develop locally and then deploy using other tools. SSHFS isn't the only tool to do that. No, but I think it's more common than you think.

I use SSHFS for something completely different. I think there are a lot. Go on. KDE Connect uses SSHFS to remotely access your phone, your file manager on your phone. I mean, it is definitely a helpful tool,

but there are a lot of things like with L-Sync. So why wouldn't you just use WinSCP? You could just use WinSCP, right? I suppose. Yeah. I mean, it would be nice to have it on the command line, but there's ways around it. But I've never tried this. I did consider actually giving this a go,

but then I realized it's not actually going to be out until the fall update. That's the fall update. That's the autumn update for our UK viewers? Actually, could you call it the correct thing? It's the fall creators update. Do they call it the autumn creators update? I know there was a whole debate about if they were going to rename it or not. I'm not sure which way they went. God, Microsoft.

I thought we were just calling them all Redstone updates now. I heard that's why they bought Minecraft. That would be better. Yeah, so the only thing you really have to do is once it's ready is just go into the windows feature area and uh check the uh the windows subsystem for linux this blog seems to imply that the only change most people are going to notice is that they just didn't put beta in parentheses next to the subsystem name. Like they really haven't changed much since then. Fascinating. We have gone from Microsoft and Canonical co-announcing this feature to now SUSE is on here.

Isn't Fedora too? I think so, yeah. You can hack Arch onto that. And now Ubuntu, and yeah, people are putting Arch on there. So maybe while you're doing your new challenge, you can see if you can put that on there put slackware on windows yeah that just seems like the ultimate you know machine for the slackware challenge segment i'm sorry toss it in there toss it in there i have to i haven't seen any promo from any other distros featured in there very quiet makes me wonder if maybe they're a little ashamed of it so not only

have they been very quiet since the announcement but uh they were mums when uh it was announced initially and i mean so we have two mums we have mumps on no details about what was going to go in there it was only something microsoft said and then and then once it's actually in there really no promotion from the projects either it is extremely awkward and i wonder once it's actually in there, really no promotion from the projects either. It is extremely awkward. And I wonder if it's a little bit of that Novell partnership shame when Novell teamed up with Microsoft back in the day, and then SUSE was just punished publicly for it so harshly. I wonder if they're just gun-shy from that kind of stuff.

But yeah, to me it seems like something you'd want to promote. And the Windows news outlets, like your Paul Theriot and your Mary Jo Foley's, they were talking about it quite a bit. So people knew. Anyways, I haven't got a chance to try, but now I actually feel like maybe now that it's coming out of beta, maybe I actually should just give it a go. But that would mean installing Windows 10. So I really got to make it worth it. I would really got to. It's got to be. Got to get some content out of that. Like something else I could do on Windows 10, you know?

It's like if you're gonna travel somewhere, you don't go there just for the sandwich. You might really want that sandwich. Is that my only person? No, no, no, you're right, you're right. Okay, because sometimes there's places that make really good sandwiches. Oh, you need to try it. I haven't eaten for a while. But you can't tell family members. It's just too embarrassing. I think I should have lunch after this. Yeah.

You know what? Let's take a moment. Let's take a moment and stop talking about sandwiches. Damn it, Wes. You know what? Let's take a moment. Let's take a moment. Stop talking about sandwiches. Damn it, Wes. Talking about sandwiches. Let's talk about Ting. Go to linux.ting.com to support the show and get $25 in Ting credit. Or if you're going to buy a brand new device, they'll give you $25 off the device too. That's pretty nice.

You go to linux.ting.com. It's just pay for what you use. Wireless. A fair price, however much you talk, text, or however much data you use. It's $6 for the line and then your usage on top of that for your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. Nationwide coverage. No contracts. No quote-unquote agreements.

A dashboard better than any other phone or carrier on the market. They support GSM and CDMA phones. They have a network for both, so check their BYOD page. You can buy directly from them or bring your own. I've done a little bit of both myself. One of the things I really like to suggest about Ting, too, is to constantly check their social network because they have been doing a giveaway of some Moto G4Ss, I believe it was.

And if you check their page for their shop page but start start by going to linux.tink.com they'll often have deals on stuff like they've got sim cards for nine bucks they got the cadillac phones there at the top and then you go down they got some they got some amazing deals especially depending on what you need from a phone like they have flip phone stuff they have my fives just tons of phones. Look at all these phones. Look at this. They have, look at this, Wes. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. They have seven phones under $100. Wow.

And then the E4 just added $129. You might as well just buy one so you have a backup in case you break your fancy. Stuff it in the glove box. Nice phone, yeah. What am I getting? Linux15.com. I know, right? I'm feeling, maybe one of the problem is my hand-me-downs don't run Android anymore.

That is one thing people complain about to me. They're like, yeah, but what if I need to go? I can't maybe one of the problem is my hand-me-downs don't run Android anymore. That is one thing people complain about to me. They're like, yeah, but what if I need to go? I can't go to the Verizon store or whatever. And I mean, I think one, you know, there are other stores. But two, like at those prices, you can just buy one as a backup. Well, and I've been with Noah on the road when he damaged his phone. He went into Best Buy. He bought an unlocked phone.

He put a Ting SIM in it. He was back online within minutes. It's really flexible. Linux.ting.com So I want to just mention Nitrix. It's the most beautiful Linux distribution ever and I teased it last week and then we didn't have a chance to talk about it. And I would

have just let it pass by because everybody likes to make these claims. OS is the most beautiful Linux ever! I've heard that before. Right. We've all been romanced with that. It's the most beautiful Mac clone ever. It does look a little Mac-o-icious, I suppose. But it has elementary-style launcher with a dock down below and a persistent bar along the top.

But it's actually Plasma 5 and cute. And it's based on Ubuntu 17.10. And I don't know. I've been recently looking at Netrunner and MAUI Linux. I'm going to review MAUI Linux. Chase and I are going to talk about MAUI Linux in the next user. So we got... I've been trying out different Plasma-based distros recently.

Sort of whittling my way to my final destination. I like this new distro hopping, Chris. Thank you. It's fun. I know. I've done like three distros in like the last week. I am getting around. So if you want a really fancy Nitrix or a Plasma-themed desktop,

you can go check it out. They call it the Nomad Desktop. Did we talk about this? I feel like maybe we did talk about it. We did. Okay. I used it a little bit. Did you?

Did you have a follow-up at all? It's a little clunky. Yeah. It's got a lot of cool ideas, but it's in massive beta. So I kind of automatically just classify the clunkiness to the beta part because they're basing on a beta and all their stuff is a beta. So it's hard to say that any of the bugs I experienced were game changes or anything. There you go.

But there's a lot of cool ideas they've been doing. Yeah, so there was some things that impressed you? Yeah, I want to use some of their applets in Neon. But I like the notification. I really like that applet because they rebuilt the whole system tray. Yeah. And I think they did that pretty well. But the SystemD module for system settings,

I want that to be put in the regular Plasma. Yeah, yeah, that jumped out at me too in the screenshot there. Well, thank you, Ron. Thanks for the follow-up on it. I started to get a sense we talked about it. I realized, you know, this is what happens if I don't drink a beer before the show. So I fast, and then I go in in here and these kinds of things come up so

producer michael coming in with the follow-up to save the segment thank you sir and uh while we're talking about uh plasma desktop type things like the plasma desktop applications there's a real situation going on with uh carita the carita foundation appears appears to be in a bit of peril. At first I was like, a foundation for Corita? Like, Jesus, does every project need a foundation? Like, what the hell is going on here? I mean, I was a little skeptical at first. But this is how they are able to pay for one of their full-time developers. It's actually

just sort of the way things go. Our buddy Ike today on Patreon announced that they're starting the legal framework to set up a company around Solus. Same thing. Like, you just, there's gets to it. That's why I did Jupiter Broadcasting eventually. It's just where you get to eventually where it's like, oh, crap, now I got to do this.

So the creative folks have a foundation. It helps pay for, you know, some things and people and things like that. And they're getting their taxes all in line. And they figured everything would be fine since they hired a lawyer to help set everything up. And they checked all the boxes beforehand, and they've been doing everything that lawyer slash consultant told them to do. However, they ended up getting flagged, and the tax inspector found two problems. And essentially, they're caught in a real catch-22 because they claimed back that for things that they bought by the foundation. But they also took, besides taking in donations, also sold some things like swag or documentation or guides.

And so they weren't 100% donation-based. They were also kind of a company. So they're mostly not a company, but they're also kind of a company. And so they're getting screwed on both ends of that. And they have a tax bill of 24,000 euros right now as a result. They got a little down to 15,000. But then the tax accountant bill came out to 4,000 euros. So it is a bad bad situation it is really bad um and there's also kind of confusing because the primary full-time developer uh was in russia and so they didn't pay some of the taxes that they thought they should have or something like that they weren't they

weren't required they were trying to charge them for things that they were not required to do because he was in russia yeah there you go there you go thank you so that's just a bad situation for them because you you you realize when you read this post that they essentially did everything right. And it's just like if you're in here in the States, the way you would get the way you would have gotten around this because I obviously can't apply it over there. But here in the States, the way you would have gotten around that is the fee for the books and the DVDs and stuff would have been a gift of a donation, a donation amount gift. and the DVDs and stuff would have been a gift of a donation, a donation amount gift. You know, you can make a donation of $5 or more and we'll send you these DVDs.

And that's how you get around this problem in the States. I don't know how you get around it outside the States, but that's, you know, because if you walk, you have to really be careful. If you're a foundation or a nonprofit in the States, you really got to watch that because the IRS will get you. And they got got. So it looks like now they've spun off as a separate company that will take that income and then the main

foundation can be 100 percent makes sense that's how you should do it and this is why even non-profits and open source companies have lawyers on retainer yeah and fees and things even though it costs a crap ton it's cheaper in the long run yeah wow man they've also spent other thing that is just – we've just talked the hard numbers and stuff. But think about the stress of this on these guys. Right. They just want to make great open source design software, great software. Then they have to take months of their development time to resolve this issue. It's eaten to their coding productivity.

They were too distressed by all this and too busy to do their usual may fundraiser so their revenue is down uh they thought at one point they were going to almost certainly go broke but like a couple of hero donors stepped up that's awesome and kept them going for a little bit and so you know you're sitting there at the end of the day you're like how we just haven't been as productive as we wanted well i wouldn't be like dealing with taxes like this is the entire this is the opposite of i wanted when i wanted to make my badass new you know illustrating software it's really sad because opposite of what I wanted when I wanted to make my badass new illustrating software. It's really sad.

Because you just want to make open source software. You don't want to do all this. Yeah, exactly. And you're not even trying to make money off of it. And they had a consultant tell them,

and you could see how years go by and now you've sold a few DVDs and you don't even think about it. And of course you think it's all going into

the foundation's pot. It's all going towards work and all that. But yeah. So Creda Foundation is in sort of a bad situation. But they're posting year-end reports. And I'm just kind of following this. I don't really see them

like begging for money here, but they do have a spot on this post which we have linked in the show notes. It's also at creda.org where you can make a one-time donation or a reoccurring donation. It's got a one dollar minimum so yeah if you know like i know albert westra is a huge user of credo if anybody really loves credo send them 14 grand yeah right help them out really loves credo i tell you yeah you

really gotta love it yeah you really gotta do so let's let's talk a little more community news i'm liking this so we're kind of sticking to community stuff in Linux Unplugged. And when I look at Firefox from like a community perspective, I don't hate it like Popey does. I know Popey's a big Firefox hater these days. Only uses Chrome. How dare you. But I actually get more excited about some of the things they're working on from that. Like Project Common Voice is really neat.

We've been covering that on Linux Action News. And now, my friends, I invite you to go to testpilot.firefox.com slash experiments. And check out some of this goodness here. So, this will be relevant later on in the show. VoiceFill, which is a speech recognition

in Firefox. VoiceFill lets you speak to your favorite search engines and fill in the information using Firefox to do the processing. Encrypt Send. This is the one we're to do the processing. Encrypt, send. This is the one we're going to play with probably. Send, which is an encrypted file transfer. It generates a link and you can send it to people like in an email or something like that. This one I really like.

Snooze tabs. Right website, wrong time. Snooze it until you need it. Snooze tabs lets you dismiss tabs now and set an alarm to open them later. That's neat. But then they take it up a notch. Containers. Contain yourselves.

Create different containers for each of your online lives. Your work self, your social self, your personal self to stay organized and maintain privacy. That actually almost kind of registers with me because my hack for that right now is either incognito mode, which is transient, or I spread it out across like three web browsers. So my three main accounts I like to bang around in all the time, I spread it out. And, you know, it's like my personal account, my work account, and then maybe like one of the show accounts that I'm reading the news or the email feedback for for that. But if I could do containers, well, that just sounds like the kind of ridiculousness I might get into. I'm not sure if they're really doing Docker or what. I'm kind of actually, let's go take a look. They also have a few other ones. Like I was saying,

they have the send one, which is pretty neat. Send lets you upload and encrypt large files up to a gigabyte. So that's another way you and I were just talking about sending files around before the show. The Firefox tab containers are not necessarily containers. They are individual session management. Sure, sure. Yeah, so it's not like Docker or something like that.

No. It's actually, to me, it's what I've been wanting for years. Yeah. And what I've had wanting for years yeah and what i've had to do like weird workarounds to like make my own browser structures and stuff it's kind of build like things built on electron it's containerization of like the user profiles or personas right yeah that's the profiles yeah yep that's the part which is great because that i have like 35 personas in chrome and this is one of the big things that has kept me from firefox i know i moan about firefox but this is one of the big things that has kept me from Firefox. I know I moan about Firefox, but this is one of the big things.

It just isn't currently very good at having a large number of very separate profiles and having all of them or a large number of them open at the same time. It just can't do that. Yeah. It's even a family share machine. There is an add-on. I have tried it, and it was awful. There's an add-on that does literally what this new feature is going to do.

Like, it's individual tabs that have different profiles associated with tabs. Oh, tabs. You just, like, choose which profile you want on what tab. Oh. So you could... Oh, yeah, it looks like you can do that with this feature, too. You'll be able to set it up. You can have each tab be its own.

That's even more useful. So instead of having multiple windows... Oh. Yeah, that's... I guess that's the way Chrome does it now because we have a family machine at the RV that everybody sits down at. So we have different personas there on Chrome, which is really nice. And then this mumble machine has Chrome with different

personas on it for different hosts that sit down. And we use that quite a bit, but it always spawns a whole new window. Yeah, it's not on separate tabs. This is like a full... This is just using electrolysis that it's like potential, like really what it's great for. So you're saying this is maximum electrolysis? Yeah, this is like the separation of processes, but also separation of profiles on top of the processes, whereas Chrome is just processes, no profile structure. Let's be real, though.

So like you have a full profile but you can't have individual tab sessions whereas this would do that people are only really ever going to have three containers they're gonna have a home container they're gonna have a work container and they're gonna have a porn container oh yeah i was thinking i was thinking like shopping and stuff but you're right a porn container would probably wait why do you even need a porn container surely that's what just that's the decognito is for. I suppose that's true. I guess he gets sick and tired of, because incognito doesn't save cookies, so he'd have to log in every

single time. I guess that's funny. It's not saving my comments. You'll have your encrypted porn container password cookies. Yeah, there you go. I'm totally not liking this video on Facebook, that's for sure. Just wait till you have the version that integrates into a

systemd, and then you'll have it down all the way contained. That's what I'm going to be excited about. So I sent you a test link there. Oh, where did you send it? Over in the chat, over on our Slack channel. Alright, I'll bring that up. So is this using the new Firefox send? It is. I installed it right there in Firefox and everything. So it works

in Chrome or Firefox, I noticed, so that's a good thing. It's interesting, too, because it's kind of like a web infrastructure play and not a browser play. Yeah, so they must be... They're hosting this somewhere, right? Yeah, right, yeah. Okay, so, yeah, the URL is...

It's an HTTPS, and it's send.firefox.com slash download, and then a character string, and then a hash after that. So that's like a... Oh, interesting. So I wonder if you... I wonder if that hashtag,

if that hash of the file is persistent. Anyways, yeah, okay. So I wonder if you, I wonder if that hashtag, if that hash of the file is persistent. Anyways, yeah, okay. So then it, is it safe to download? Yeah, that's just a crappy webcam picture of me. So I'm going to download, and then, yeah, it downloaded super fast. And boom, there it is. There's Wes. This is actually Firefox back or launching their Dropbox competitor.

Yeah, well, in a way, like, why does Mozilla want to get into the file hosting of... It's kind of funny. It sounds more like a competitor to WeTransfer. Yeah. But do they really want to be policing child porn and pictures of ISIS beheadings? In some ways, it seems kind of like a desperate ploy of, like, Chrome tries to be so useful

with all the things Google does, they kind of have to do the same. Isn't this... Are they doing a permanent thing? Because if they're doing a WeTrans transfer structure it's like every like once a day they wipe yeah there is expiration yeah aren't these so it's like it's basically like we transfer so you think that means they don't have to police it as much though is that true yeah because they're just going to delete it anyway yeah so you you once you use it's mainly for just like if you

have a giant file you can't reasonably send to someone, you can upload it to here, send it to them, give them a link, they download it, then it's gone. I don't think you deleting it quickly obviates you from sticking to the legal framework in the country that you operate. You can't say, I had the child porn on my computer for half an hour, officer, and it's gone now, therefore it's not a problem. Well, as far as the legal ramifications for Firefox, it's like, how are's not a problem well as far as like the legal ramifications for firefox it's like how are they going to find that they have this information

if they don't have you know they don't have they can't say oh we found this when reported to you you have 30 days to get rid of it or something you have to make action but it's already gone when they're when they're monitoring some nonce who's using this to transfer files back and forth and they're monitoring the URLs, they certainly can go after them for having distributed the data. Not that they're necessarily hosting it anymore, but they did distribute it. So the fact that it's gone isn't going to help them when it comes to their time in court. I mean, there's like 20 of these services right now. So I'm wondering how they handle that then, because they have the same situation.

I think what you say is certainly true, but I imagine they will be a much lower priority, at least it seems like a lot of these, like you can download this once and then it expires. So I imagine priority would be given to places that are actually distributing it in a meaningful way rather than one-on-one. Okay, so bringing this conversation back to Firefox itself,

it sounds like Minimac has been banging around on Beta 55. How's that been going? I'll tell you, it's a real pleasure. I mean, 54 was even what's getting better, but 55 is really cool. A lot of less memory usage.

You can use it on really small systems and it's running really great. I was really surprised. It's absurdly faster. Really? Yeah, it's noticeable. If anyone had a problem with using Firefox before, from Firefox 45, 46 or so, up to 54, they've been getting faster and faster,

but it's barely noticeable. If you go get 45 and then you compare it to 54, you'll notice a difference. But in between each individual, but 54 to 55, you can easily tell a difference. Yeah, definitely. I agree. I want to know what it would take for you to give it a go, for you to actually use it.

Because you are all in on Chrome. I have no reason to use it. So it's not even a consideration? What if it's faster? What if it renders pages faster? Is it less crashy? Because every time I've tried to use it. So it's not even a consideration? Like, what if it's faster? What if it renders pages faster? Is it less crashy? Because every time I've tried to use Firefox, I run into crashing issues.

I'll tell you this. I mean, it's less crashy for me, yeah. I would imagine, right? Because the technology changes they're making would have to lend us abilities. I'm also unusually use case, though, because I have literally hundreds and hundreds of tabs. I use about 150 tabs, so I don't probably have as many as you, but I have a significant amount.

And the new structure with the electrolysis plus the 55 speed increase is noticeably different. And if there is crashing now, it's a much cleaner and elegant replacement. It doesn't crash its entire latest. This process goes away. That's very encouraging. I'm also kind of tied into the Chrome infrastructure because there's a lot of specialized extensions that I use that don't have direct Firefox replacements. Yeah. They probably will soon, the with 55 and above

you can use web extensions that are essentially chrome extensions ported to firefox interesting that is yeah so 57 is going to be only web extensions but 55 actually 53 introduced like the web extension as an option so there's already a lot of extensions that are already built for that are ported to firefox right now in the firefox market like add-on market see the problem for me is and as a former firefox extension developer is that firefox keeps changing their extensions there's been like six different iterations of extensions so and like three of them are deprecated now so you can't guarantee that your extensions are going to be there in six months yeah there is that well i, that's one of the reasons they're using web extensions as the infrastructure now, because they're

making it to a consolidated type, like this one framework is what's going to be used for most browsers. That's what they did to pitch the last four extension things though. Yeah, but they were the only ones that controlled that framework, so people, the other browsers didn't want to agree with that framework,

and they, so Firefox is now, essentially Firefox is giving in to WebExtension. I'll tell you, so in the Discord chat, who just brought it up? Somebody just brought up in the Discord chat, Firefox's touchscreen support, Mozza did, and that is a limitation

of Firefox that we don't talk about because how many of us are using touchscreens? But yeah, guess what? We have a touchscreen here in the studio. And so every now and then I got to pull up a web browser on it. And Firefox is a disaster. And Chrome is much better. 55 has improved the touch a little bit

as far as the scrolling. Because Firefox touch scrolling used to be atrocious. And it's a lot better now with 55. I wouldn't say it's probably as good as chrome because chrome is a lot more uh cohesive but i would say by the time 55 comes out it's possible that it might so uh going back to the experiments for a second isn't that exactly the kind of thing that people were giving firefox crap about doing like 6 12 months ago where they weren't focusing on their core browser and improving

their core browser. Things like hello. Don't you think, well okay, send is probably the biggest hello. Okay, that I agree. But the tab stuff is actually and container stuff is actually pretty nice. Like the sleeping a tab and then having it come back

at a scheduled time. That's kind of genius, actually. Some of them are definitely improvements to the browser, but some of them feel like just ancillary projects that are taken away from the browser. The sleeping tab is already usable. You can do it now, but the timer stuff is really cool. I think the experiments are great because a lot of people talked about how Firefox is removing features and it's becoming a crappy clone of Chrome

not even using the engine or whatever and then just keeping these, you know, Firefox is changing all these things and it's making Firefox no longer as good as it was, but now they're introducing these potentially game changer features like the container structure of the profiles and session management that would make me

that would be the main reason I could say you should use Firefox over any other browser because you can control the session per tab. And if you want to go to like, I want to log into Twitter 10 times with 10 different accounts, no problem, ready to go. Yeah, that seems really compelling.

I'm going to definitely be giving it a go. Absolutely, 100%. I'm actually kind of funny. I'm at the point with Chrome where I was at with Firefox when I switched away, where the sync feature is finally, finally, finally biting me in the ass. It took a long time. So I got to give the Chrome folks

credit for that. But extensions that I removed, I pared down my browser extensions ages ago. Well, you tried to. Yep, they're repopping back up. And the ones that I need most critically are failing on the machine that I needed the most critically, which is the machine that's on the live stream. And so those things are all like, they're not, I can go back in, I can repair the extension,

and then I can reload all my tabs. So I have a workaround. But I'm looking at that Firefox and I'm going, I love what they're about and I love what they're doing. It's going to be time for me to kick the tires again. Absolutely. I love what they're about, and I love what they're doing. It's going to be time for me to kick the tires again. Absolutely.

Especially if you just want to try out the beta, it's definitely worth trying even now because it runs so fast, it's shocking. So there's a story that I wasn't going to cover. But I've been seeing in the chat room, and a hashtag, Blame Popey. It's coming up again. And it seems to be discussion worthy because the chat room is talking about it a lot. And there was a section in the new Red Hat Enterprise release.

So Red Hat just put out, I believe, a 7.4 Red Hat Enterprise. And you may or may not realize that in every release they have a deprecated functionality section. is that in every release they have a deprecated functionality section. So in Chapter 53 of the release notes of Red Hat Enterprise 7.4, they have the deprecated functionality chapter. Of course, that's what everybody uses. That's what everybody does with Chapter 53, right? That's my favorite chapter. Deprecated functionality.

And the one that is getting the chat room's attention today is they're dropping ButterFS. They're pulling back on ButterFS. And it seems to be what everybody wants to talk about. So I thought I'd open it up. I'll start with the announcement. They say the ButterFS file system has been in technology preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

And Red Hat will not be moving ButterFS to a fully supported feature. And it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Poby, is this a bad, bad sign for ButterFS? Is this essentially the death of ButterFS for the Enterprise file system? You know, I really can't tell. And I don't know. I mean, they're hedging their bets and saying it will be removed in a later release which they could always change those plans right and it doesn't say when that would be

so that you know those plans could change but i find it interesting that like two of the major players in endomics have taken a completely different stance on this that like for suzer it's like all in um default install yeah integrating into the package manager with that right with it's it's all there although i have to say i had a i updated my um when i saw the latest version of open suzer came out i updated my machine and it all fell apart because it ran out of disk space because all the snaps the uh what's it called the uh snapshots of um sorry i've got snaps on the brain uh the snapshots from all the updates i've done in the past caused it to run out of disk space so i had to go in and

manually like an animal sure remove these that reminds me of that reminds me of uh that damn slash boot directory on my fiance's computer that i have to keep going cleaning up oh i can't wait to trigger you i can't wait for that update in 1710 where it automatically cleans it up that'll be so wonderful. But yeah, I follow you. It is funny because you kind of joke and jest, but they are also building new projects on top of ButterFS. They have some stuff they're working on right now that's really integral to it. And so you're right.

It is two major deviations. And then unless I'm mistaken mistaken right now uh ubuntu like if i were to install uh the latest lts of ubuntu it would default to extended four correct right and then of course zfs zfs is available if you want it which makes affairs and all the others but right you know we don't we don't make better fs uh a first class citizen like suza do i wonder you got to wonder though folks in red hat legal right now are working overtime making sure that they can put zfs in future versions of red enterprise linux they've got to be getting that from their enterprise customers they've got to be getting that i don't think there is i would be willing to bet and this is my supposition i admit this

so this is just chris guessing but i'd be i'd be willing to bet like a steak dinner that there are at least enterprise customers exist that want to deploy ZFS. There's probably not nearly as many enterprise customers that are actively seeking to deploy ButterFS. There's just a difference in brand recognition.

So I wonder where Red Hat will go. Maybe they'll go with XFS. So yeah, that's the big story though. I do think it's hard because a lot of enterprises kind of gave up on getting DFS in a supported way, and so have large enterprise SANs or other

solutions that they've kind of adapted to. Yeah, a lot of those systems have something they just run on top of, and they just have their own solution, too. Yeah, when you're really doing large stuff. Anyways, it's a big release. or they switch to ubuntu chat the chat room really zeroed in on it though i wasn't gonna put it in the show i wasn't gonna put it in the show because i felt like uh it would just be butter fs hating but then i thought about it and i guess it is kind

of newsworthy that red hat's rolling back from it without really saying where they're going i even noticed recently my i i didn't even notice until i dug into it my netgear ready nas runs better fs by default i did i didn't know that until i ssh into it and happened to type mount for whatever reason i was like oh wow it's actually running it reliably i mean it's perfectly fine so that's good i suppose you know if you really know what your use case is and you can control all these things and, you know, it just, it's not like it's destroying everybody's data everywhere. There's lots of people using it. But there's just, it's like been labeled, though. It's been branded.

Yeah. Well, there you go. Also, by the way, Red Hat Enterprise 7.4 is out. Bum, bum, bum. I guess that also... Oh, hi there. I guess that also didn't make it into the news. Anyways, there's a few other tweaks in there for the desktop.

Nautilus Open Terminal is replaced with GNOME Terminal Nautilus, so brace yourself. Ooh. Brace yourself. I like that word ordering. Yeah. Yeah, there's a... When a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 ships, the Linux desktop market shakes. No, not really.

Not really. But maybe one day. DigitalOcean.com. Go over to DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O-1-plugged. After you sign up, it's one word. You apply it to your account. Boom. It's magic, Wes.

You know what that does? It enables you. It enables you with a $10 credit to go create a machine on DigitalOcean's wicked fast infrastructure with all SSDs, unbelievably low pricing, and data centers all over the world. The entire friggin' infrastructure is SSDs, and man do they

scream! Really, it's, they don't say what the bitrate is there, but it's fast. I'll just put it that way. You can get started in less than a minute. It's really nice, and they have lightning-fast networking everywhere. Beard, how

critical do you think DigitalOcean is to Jupiter Broadcasting? That's crucial and critical. I mean, we're live streaming from DigitalOcean right now. We're using at least three DigitalOcean droplets to make this show even happen right now.

And, you know, you could just spin up an Ubuntu droplet and stick some ZFS on an SSD on there. Yeah, and it's actually a really cool way to play with ZFS because they have block storage, which you can scale up to 16 terabytes, so you can mess around with crazy ZFS experiments

on their infrastructure. Just use our promo code DOUnplugged and you can do around with crazy zfs experiments on their infrastructure just use our promo code do unplugged and you can do it like run their five dollar rig and attach storage because you don't need like crazy amounts of ram and cpu just try it for a little bit and experiment around uh they they also are are working on object storage as well which is so excited they have a whole list we were also earlier talking about GitLab. One-click deployment, Ubuntu LTS, all up to date, nice and shiny, with GitLab ready to go, ready for you to use.

Just one button deployment of a lot of great open source applications. They have load balancing as a service. They make it really easy if you're in a team. And then an interface for pros or beginners and an API that's to die for. DigitalOcean.com. use our promo code DEO Unplugged, and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged.

A program, a program, a program. Got a couple of bits of community discussion I thought we'd pull in here. This first one is actually over from RLinux, and we read it so you don't have to. This came in, though, and I thought this was interesting. I really thought about this, and I thought, damn, this is an area where I was hoping by now Mycroft was going to solve. He says, he writes, I recently injured my hands and wrists, and typing is painful. Boy, have I been there recently.

Mouse use is not so bad, but still pretty sore. So I need voice control and or transcription software. Dictation for writing, but voice control for input would be helpful as well. I've tried Simon, Pocket Sphinx, Free Speech, all on Ubuntu 17.04. None of them work out of the box. It might be a cool gimmick. He talks about some of the other things that are in there, but for most people, but for me, I need it with my current disabilities.

And he says, now that I really need it, Linux voice control is a total nightmare. So there was a couple of suggestions that came in, and I don't know if anybody in the mumble room or the chat rooms has a suggestion, but here's kind of a somewhat messy workaround, I admit. But I actually like this one, and it was from the comments section.

Using KDE Connect. Now, I'm not a daily user of KDE Connect, but what if you used the voice dictation on the Android phone for input, and then used KDE Connect to send it in the machine? That's clever. Interesting. Is anybody a KDE Connect user? I'm actually a daily user of KDE Connect who does this. Oh, okay. Oh.

So is this a reasonable, like, actual workable solution? As far as transitions go, yes. So is this a reasonable, like actual workable solution? As far as transcriptions go, yes. It actually works quite well because it'll mimic a keyboard. Like if you set your, you do remote input with your KDE Connect from your phone, you can use it as a mouse or a keyboard.

So it uses whatever your keyboard is to input the content through KDE Connect to your computer. So anything you send through your keyboard will go through KDE Connect to your computer. So anything you send through your keyboard will go through KDE Connect to your computer. So you can have a keyboard that has voice built into it, and the voice dictation, if it's good, will send it to your computer, and it works great.

But it requires a really good voice dictation and keyboard integration. So I use Swype because it has Dragon dictation and keyboard integration. So I use Swype because it has Dragon dictation built into it. Oh, clever.

Yeah, Dragon's good stuff. The company who makes Dragon bought Swype Nuance. So they're both, they're integrated

together now. I didn't realize. And it works so well because you can just, because Dragon is so efficient, you just say whatever you want and it sends it in. This doesn't solve his problem about like management through voice, but it does solve the dictation. And I use it not all the time, but I use KDE Connect

input every day. And I probably do the dictation when I'm doing like a long email or something. So that's a good tip about Swype. So if I grab the Swype keyboard, I get to use Nuance's dictation when I'm doing like a long email or something. So that's a good tip about Swype. So if I grab the Swype keyboard, I get to use Nuance's dictation engine. Yep. Like people who use OSX for kind of exactly that reason. iOS also. iOS voice dictation is licensed by Nuance.

It's driven by Nuance. So like Apple just forwards that on to Nuance and they do the processing. But the other nice thing about it is it means you're not sending your voice to Google, which is kind of a, means you can still get voice dictation on Android without having to send it off to Google. So that's a nice way to kind of get around that. I saw that, Producer Michael, you also jumped in the comments to help that guy out.

Yeah. I basically explained something similar in like a quick way, like a, you know, this is how it works with me, but I didn't really go into detail, but it is a lot better than the basic Google, uh, voice dictation. And I think, I think swipe is a better keyboard in general, but the,

the dragon dictation built into it is way, way better. And it's a lot, it's very smooth for this. And the fact that Katie connect works on all D E's and it's just, it's made by the Katie project, but it's not specific to KDE Plasma, this is a great solution pretty much for all Linux users. The other thing that is sort of a long-term looking up kind of thing is, and like I said earlier, we've been covering it on Linux Action News a couple of times, is Mozilla's voice project, Common Voice.

And they're working on, if you go to voice.mozilla.org, they're working on essentially creating a common standard for this. Architect in the chatroom also says that BSD Now has talked a bit about using, I forget, Orca, he said, so BSD Now has covered Orca a bit. Orca's the reverse. It's not a control, it's a reader. Yeah, right. It's a screen reader. Right, Orca's a screen reader. But I guess that would be the opposite side if if that's something you want to try uh anyways if you guys have any suggestions i have a new way perhaps for you to get those

suggestions into the show are you ready for this no so jupiter broadcasting is uh crazy pants sometimes i swear i swear sometimes we just sit around and then boom, all of a sudden, it's total chaos right now. One of those moments is upon us. We are trying out a new platform to... Let me guess. Let me guess. The U.S. Postal Service. I know. I'm couching this a lot,

aren't I? I'm really building up here. You're right. Postcards, everybody. Can we at least use FedEx? I think postcards would be pretty bad. Actually, USPS is a lot more efficient for me. I also think postcards would be great. And, you know, if you look at how much a postcard or a stamp costs, it's way cheaper than using FedEx. What about carrier pigeons?

Or carrier drones. We could be hip. There's a lot of different things we're looking at these days. But we are beta testing a sort of community consolidation platform called Discord. That's how I'm looking at it. And it's one that we've had up on the chat room on and off. We've had that chat room up on the screen on and off, and it combines several features, and one of which

is I personally face a problem today. And I'll just take a moment and go to Chris's corner here. And that problem is that there are many platforms that folk can reach me on. I'm going to just do this off the top of my head so I'll probably get them wrong,

but of course there's Twitter, there's email, there is Telegram, there is Reddit messages, there are Facebook messages. Of course there's also Twitter DMs, which I consider separate than app mentions. There's the IRC room. What am I forgetting, Rick? I'm forgetting a couple of things, but I think I'm making my point.

Did you say Telegram? Yeah. I'm making my point. And that is, I would say those are the daily platforms that people use and expect me to reply to them. And it's just sort of crazy. It's just sort of nuts. It's a bit of a message octopus yeah and we got google plus and so oh thanks yeah google plus well i kind of stopped checking it

but google plus yeah since you're right it is one of them since i've started hosting shows i'm starting to feel some of this like i've been getting reddit messages and twitter dms and yeah so you know that xkcd comic about how there's too many standards so we need to create a new standard we're creating a new standard yeah that's kind of what we're beta testing right now. And the idea is to sort of funnel it all into Discord, perhaps using bridges to help people. So if you prefer to use IRC, but you still want to be in the conversation,

we could either use... We're looking at different systems, bridges, bots, front ends, all these different ways to make it happen and essentially create a mega chat. We could even integrate with Telegram. So we could have a JBLive.tv Telegram group that could be like – And Matrix, yeah. So you could have like – if you're a – like a lot of people just like to hang out on Telegram.

We could just have a dedicated group. We wouldn't use the existing one, but we'd have a dedicated group that would just be if you're in here, you're part of the live chat. So you could participate from different locations. So we're looking at ways to consolidate and make a mega chat. And as part of that, I'm testing Discord right now. We've launched it to our patrons. They've been beta testing or alpha testing it for us really for like, what, a week? It's been about a week and a day or so.

We've got a lot of people in there. And so now we're opening it up to the wider community to help test a specific feature. I mean, you can test all of it, but the feature that I'd like to test is consolidation of feedback. And I've launched a dedicated channel called Haircare. And when you join Haircare, it is a place for you to have a direct line of communication with me directly. This is a room where you can share a show idea. You can air a complaint or a concern. You can just give general feedback.

You can say thanks, whatever you want. I just like it to be tight, specific, and on topic. And if you say like, hey, review more applications, that's what Eric did, great piece of feedback there. I was like, okay, my first thought was, well, which application? So, you know, be specific. But this is a spot where at least for a while, I'll be watching this very closely. And if there's something you want to get in front of my face, this is the spot I'm going to try to suggest everybody go to as a way to help beta test this as a platform to see if it works for our community.

If you're curious about some of our motivations, about why we're trying this, if you want to hear both sides of that debate, check out recent episodes of User Air where we've been discussing the philosophical side of this and the community impact side of this. So I have a question for you. Yes, sir. Hair care, is that specific to Chris Glass' feedback?

It's like, well, what I was thinking was like, say you wanted to write a letter to the CEO. And it's like something, I mean, I don't know. I guess we could, anybody could probably, anybody in the staff could probably respond. Well, I was just wondering if I need to create a beard channel to get beard feedback. Oh, that's not bad.

You could, you could, yeah. Yeah, I was thinking it'd be like, it's not, I mean, you could give me specific feedback about some of the obnoxious, stupid things and tics that I have. That's fine too. fine too burping yeah but uh i what i was really like is like i wanted to let the ceo of the company know here's a problem or here's an idea or here's something i love or here's something they need to do more of and you can drop it in there and at least while we're testing this and of course while there's not as very many people in there

you're definitely gonna have my attention i don't plan to be in there all the time. I'm going to check it in batches. Yeah. We do also have a content corner channel where you can share stuff like stuff that you want to see on shows. Yeah. So I was thinking the difference there, the content corner might be more like, here's an idea I have and let's bang this out. So like, I'd like to see more application reviews was Eric's idea. So if you go in the content, so if Eric were to go in the content channel with that, he could say, I'd like to see more application reviews was eric's idea so if you go in the con so if eric were to go on the content channel with that he could say i'd like to see more application reviews what kind of applications do you think jb should talk about like what are what are applications that need

covered um and then that that would really kind of be useful for us to see like that too that conversation that discussion and see where people and then you know when somebody has a really poignant on the on the nose idea they can drop into hair care and get it in front of my face. Also, something I haven't decided on, should we have separate channels for each show in the Discord? I don't know. I feel like some shows, like Unfilter probably should. Yeah. I feel like we should ask the community.

Yeah. So that could be something we talk about in general. So how do they get there? That's probably a good question. That's probably something we should have said by now that would be discord dot me slash jupiter colony nice yeah we're calling it the jupiter colony so you can join our colony if you're a patron to go through patreon and turn on your discord perk you'll get special status in the discord system and i i don't know if it's on automatically i like like people have to go claim that perk in the Patreon area. No, the Patreon bot does it automatically.

Oh, it does? Okay. You do have to connect your Discord on the Patreon side, though. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You manually link the two, and then the bot gives you roles automatically.

I did notice one thing. People that are donating but aren't on a specific tier won't get connected so you have to be on one of the tiers ah that's that's interesting so like if you're doing like say like if you're doing like two dollars and 25 cents yeah that's not a tier level so it doesn't work with the yeah but if you if you bump it up to like three dollar tier then you will get it connected yeah we also you know we also while we're talking about that the jup Signal Patreon, which, plug, plug, plug, is a great way to support the network. We also, Beard and I released a podcast exclusive to our patrons that talks about some of this, too. We've been really, this is something we've been really thinking about a lot because there's obvious disadvantages to Discord.

And the biggest one is the fact that it is not open source and it is not self-hosted. And so that's the one where we've had the most reflection and conversation around. And I'm not going to repeat it all here. So that's in the other shows if you care. But do know that it's something we were giving a tremendous amount of thought to.

To the detriment of other things we maybe should be thinking about. To the detriment I should say. Much like Firefox. Yeah. But it's all in the beta stage. We're not making any changes. We're not replacing anything right now. It's all in the beta stages.

And this is cool, though. They use Linux for the hosting. They make a Linux client available. They use Opus for the codec, WebRTC, and all that kind of stuff. It's pretty nice. And it works at different scales. It works for large communities or just for my kids to have, have like a little spot for them to chat on their own server so yeah there you have it

so you can go to what was that URL again there Albeard what was it it was discord.me discord.me slash jupitercolony magic discord.me slash jupitercolony and we will have a link in the show notes too what do you think Wes because you know I know you like your tools to be open source

I do that's true I know that's source. I do. I know that's especially like the platform level. I know that's important to you, but I also know that as a practical man who's in the day-to-day, like, workforce, you're also in Slack quite a bit. That is true. So this is something you've probably dealt with at that level. Like,

do I use, you know, using Slack and using it with different systems versus IRC? What do you think about this stuff? Do you consider these tools to be precious and that these cut Discord and instead of Slack, if possible, you should be using Mattermost instead of Discord, maybe be using Matrix? Like, is that how much weight do you give to that debate? I'm glad it's considered. I mean, it is important. I would prefer to use, you know, as much open source platforms as possible.

But so many of these things you end up, you know, it's just like how many users do you have? Do you have the people that you want to talk to on the platform that is available? And I also understand your perspective in that like, yeah, between Slack and Telegram and all the other things, it can be, you know, there's a lot. It's hard to keep track of and it's hard to use well. Well, we've had a fragmentation of the community between Reddit, IRC, Telegram, and people who just, you know, are maybe occasionally write in on email. It's really spread out. So it's attractive to consider something that has the capability to bridge all these different networks and mumble to and bridge it all together into one space. That's pretty attractive. And then it has the feature set to spin up voice chats.

So that could be very useful as well. And that's why it's quite, quite featureful. And I think one thing that like Slack, at least, you know, for my day job and other things that had advantage over the other clients that we'd already been using for chat was just like, you know, first class platform support, first class mobile support. Quassel Droid on the phone is not bad, bad but it's not really it's not really the same it hasn't been designed with that sort of use case or interactivity um so this also i think would make it easier plus i've never really liked telegram groups all that much i don't find

them very usable i don't use telegram for anything else like that so having i have to mute them all the time and then i can't really tell if i've missed things or not i don't know so yeah discord it feels like a better place to have yeah plus with telegram and other things like there's already you know issues with it being hosted and that's true and really our irc chat room is hosted on a different service so i would it's on somebody else's system it's on geekshed i do think it is imperative that we continue to build things like rocket chat man or most matrix we continue to build things like Rocket Chat, Mattermost, Matrix. We continue to build bridges

so that we can kind of, you can communicate on the platform of your choice. Maybe some of your communications goes to a platform you don't like, but you can at least control that and limit it to where you need to. To me, these platforms

are not so important that it needs to be something that aligns with my self-identity. These are things, if Spotify were to go away tomorrow, I'd be fine. Honestly, if Netflix were to go away tomorrow, I'd be fine. Amazon Prime streaming goes away tomorrow, I'd be fine. Steam shuts down, I'd be a little butthurt, but if they gave me a way to keep my games offline, I'd be fine.

The systems that I choose to participate in that are hosted are systems that, to me, in that are hosted are systems that to me don't matter in 10 years. I could give zero shits about Spotify in five years. I really don't care. I don't care if they make money. I don't care if they make it. I just don't care.

Because to me, there's always something else to switch to. And there's always another platform that comes around. There's always another way to do that job. And so for maybe a couple of years it's one system and for another couple of years it's another system. Which seems to be how it goes. A couple of years after that will be a different system. And it's just the way it works.

And to me none of it really matters that much. You don't view it as building blocks. It's not the foundation of your life. It's just something that you kind of connect into and know that it will be short-term. It's a thing that is providing me value for probably a year or two. And at some point,

it's likely going to stop providing me value or the value proposition will be such that it provides more pain than it does value. And at that point i will switch to something else that's just how i see it yeah i'm kind of in the same camp i do sympathize with people who use irc all the time and have been using it for the past 15 years and don't have that same experience of hopping between clients all the time um but i i'm definitely in your camp i think think Discord is fantastic.

The only problem it has is the proprietary hosting part. But there's a lot of features that's great, especially the webhook system is fantastic. Can you explain that to me? I don't really understand what webhooks does. I saw it in the settings. It's kind of like its own bot built into the system. So you can make it where when you post something on Twitter,

it'll use a webhook to send it into the chat room. Oh yeah, I also saw like you can use it with GitHub, so like if a project doesn't update. Essentially lets third-party services push notifications to your Discord. Right, but you can also build your own webhook

using like, you can even use like if this and that, send using anything from there yeah into discord that's interesting but it's basically to push information to you this conversation's like it would be this feels like this conversation would be totally reframed if jupiter broadcasting ran their own irc server you know yeah but uh like this we this this, this problem, for me as a Linux user, I don't know where to draw the line. Here's where my confusion comes in. If this is a line I were to hold, say I were to just reject Discord out of hand for Jupyter Broadcasting simply because it is not open source, the hosted part of it.

Then where do I draw that line do i say well we can no longer use android devices either because they're linux but they have a proprietary layer on on top of them do i say the same thing about routers what about what about our edge routers like where do i draw okay go ahead yeah where do i draw that line i think the difference is um what when you're talking about using discord you're asking other people to cross the line whereas when you're saying what you're using inside your studio nobody gives a toss what you're using in your studio but when you're asking me to sign up for a service that's when it changes well first of all that's not true because plenty of people care about what we use in our studio. Probably too much.

But aside from that, then we should also not be on Telegram. We shouldn't be on Twitter. We shouldn't be on Reddit because we're not hosting that ourselves. We shouldn't be on any of these services. I agree, yes. If you're going to draw the line, draw the line. So I know, Pope yeah i i know you are in there uh so you use it you all i think you probably have slack so you're in as well i know

you probably use things like hangouts how where this is always a debate as linux users are having when do you choose a proprietary solution over the free one what about you personally i'm a pragmatic person so i have an nvidia binary driver installed. I have Steam. I have 300 Steam games installed on my laptop. But I'm not inconveniencing anyone else by doing that. I'm not causing someone else to have to install non-free software in order to interact with me. If you want to talk with me on a free software platform, you can do that. Right. Okay.

So are you saying – so the key then is to leave a way for people to communicate that is an open and free platform still. So like you could be on Slack, you can be on Discord but there's got to still be a way if you don't want to participate in any of that stuff. Exactly. That would be a reasonable thing. I think that's pretty easy to do with an IRC bridge where it could be really tricky is

there's no bridge for Mumble. I don't know if we'd ever replace Mumble but you could see the super handiness where you can integrate all of it in one place and especially when you consider the fact that there's patreon integration so we could say maybe these members of the unfiltered patreon can be involved in a listener edition of the show and it's just a matter of check a box and now they have those permissions if they delete their Patreon account, their permissions are removed.

We don't have to manage two systems here at JB, which we would suck at. That to me seems like, oh, well, shit, that almost would make it worth not using Mumble. But then there wouldn't be a free and open way unless somebody were to develop a bridge. So we need a Mumble Discord bridge. But then the flip side is,

one of the biggest hurdles for this here podcast that you're listening to right now is, hey, by the the way can you tell this is a summer edition we're talking about ourselves uh this here podcast is when we bring guests on they really have often never used mumble before and so most of the time i ping producer michael and i say hey oh rotten i know you're probably busy but can you reach out to xyz and can you help this guy get mumble configured and he always says yes and he's created he's created documentation for it too so but you can imagine like rotten if like i we didn't have to do that anymore if it was just go to this website log in and it just works i mean it's still kind you still kind of have to explain

discord if they've ever used it but it is it's simpler to set up in the sense you don't have to worry about ports or anything like that. Especially like the audio settings, like configuring which audio interface to use. And the troubleshooting your connection is really simple. It depends where you are on the, you know, the Storm and line. And there are certainly podcasters who won't put out their podcast even now as an MP3, but only as Ogg. And they use free software platforms and they have self-hosted wordpress and you know things like that they and they only use mumble and they would

expect you to um jump through the hoops in order to be a guest on their show now you're a bit further down the line in that you're going to um allow people to join the show but they'd have to you know they'd have to use some non-free thing and you also use non-free for distribution of your show which they wouldn't use and i guess it's just what you're personally comfortable with uh okay so uh is it rob brother arm is that what ro brother arm is it ro brother? Is that how I'm supposed to say it? Rob the Ram. Rob the Ram. How about, let's just go with Rob. Rob, you said you're in another community that's having this exact conversation right now. Are we being basic?

Yeah, it was identical. Not podcast related, but Minecraft server related. But yeah, we used to have an IRC server that bridged into the game server. And we all were irc people and we recently moved to mumble um discord because everyone else was on discord but we still have a mumble room right and yeah the conversation of well we've got people who already know how mumble works can easily diagnose or discuss with the person how to get them into Mumble.

Or the documentation. And it's the question of, do we really want to just move all the way to Mumble? It's a bit the network effect, though, isn't it? Because it's got a network effect. There's also a lot of stuff built into Discord by default that in some cases requires the beta version of Mumble to use. Like, for example, controlling volume of individual users is built into discord exactly whereas if you want to do that in mumble it requires you to have the beta version not only is it built into discord but the ui to use it is simple enough that i could do it on the fly while i'm saying these very very words right now and i

can adjust people without having to go uh okay you know so that's that also wins too. The UI, not only is it great for guests, but it wins on tweaking volume. And just one other UI thing that's kind of nice is if you think about it as somebody who's never been in the Jupyter Broadcasting community ever, and they're landing here for the very first time. When you open up Discord, one of the things that I think is sort of nice and helpful is the hosts are broken out and color coded patrons are broken out and color coded bots are broken out and color coded and people with ultimate admin power are broken out and color coded so you you immediately know who's who like it's not there's not like ambiguity like who is dvl who's dvl well oh now you know oh that's dan from tech snap that's dan oh shit that's dan from

tech snap like it's it's it's more friendly in terms of just the layout and the way it looks and the way people are broken out into groups it makes it understandable for somebody who's coming to this community for the first time ever and uh which could be a more and more thing on discord because of that network effect proprietary Proprietary software being prettier than free software. Who knew? This is why I'm talking about it because exactly that, Popey. Like this is a freaking classic problem that we have now. It is the problem of our time with hosted services and all of these sons of bitches are running on Linux.

They're all using Linux on the back end. It's really interesting because it's using Linux to create services that eventually get a big enough user base that they get profitable. But they start with this crazy venture funding structure. They have Nitro, which you can get for Discord if you want to give them $5 a month, basically, or $4 a month. They also announced they're going to add premium plugins in the future uh but everything currently they've stated everything currently that is free will stay free there's definitely some features in there that are nice for us like there's there's integration with things like obs that are nice for us and there's there's moderating features that are nice for us like one of the things that i've always kind of wanted is i'd like to be able

to review a log because a lot of times somebody comes to me and they say, hey, so-and-so kicked me for no good reason. And so this has a really good auto log so I can see what's been going on just on that end of the community, which is something

I don't generally get oversight over. And so that's pleasant. But there's other things in there too about the way the notification structure works. It has a mode for when we're on the live stream like we are right now where we can just immediately

turn off all notifications, which is really nice. Oh, and then the last thing, and then we'll get off this. And this is, again, going back, this is a classic open source solution versus hosted solution. Dynamite mobile app works great on tablets because I loaded it on all my kids' tablets because they have a little private server with them and Noah's kids. And just Dynamite app. Just really good app. Works well. Respects my D&D preferences.

All that kind of stuff. And that's always a problem. Like Rocket Chat. There's several Rocket Chat clients. There's several Mattermost clients. None of them are quite as good as Slack's client. And same with Discord. Like there's several Mumble clients for mobile.

Not really on iOS. but there's some. There's like one, I think. And boy, is it ass. It really is ass. And, of course, Discord's great. And so one of the things that we've heard from the community, and I think this is something just like when open source projects move to GitHub and GitLab, they get more contributors. When we moved to Telegram, we got more members of the community. Because one of the things I've heard is I'm on my phone. And when I have time to respond and interact, I'm on my phone. I'm not at a computer. And so that's why Telegram works so good for me.

And so we've heard from people on Telegram that we don't normally hear from because that's the tool they use when they have downtime. They fire up telegram and they chat with folks to kill a few minutes and now they're able to participate in telegram they were never participating before in irc or in the comments or anywhere else i suppose the the main issue is how many how often do we have people on mumble that are free software only well there's there's a good portion, I think. I know there's a few for sure, but I don't know. I think Mumble's a great tool, too. That's the other thing.

Mumble's pretty stable and reliable. Once you have it set up and you have a certificate and you have all that, so it's harder to justify replacing Mumble, I feel like. It does have the best audio quality out of all of them, too. Yeah, I think it sounds pretty good. And it's also a lot more efficient with detecting voice or not. Although, I'll give you where Discord wins, is I

do like that they're using Opus, but where they also in the UI department, again, is they give you a cellular signal-like equivalent. You get three green bars or red bars. You hover it over and it tells you what your ping is. You can click a little info button and you actually get like a chart of your average response time

of how your connection's been doing. It tells you the ping rate to the different servers you're connected to. And it's something we've already used it in testing when we were troubleshooting with Noah. We're like, alright, what are these numbers? And we immediately know what to expect and within, I don't know, 30 seconds,

Beard moved us over to an East Coast server because it's just you go up there, settings, move to East Coast, and resolve the issue. Wow. And it was really handy because it was just, here's the information. It was really easy for him to understand, even though it was the first time he'd ever even opened it,

or second time he'd ever even opened up Discord. That kind of stuff, Mumble doesn't do so well on. But once you get it set up. Just by making a server, it says, what region do you want to put your server in? Stuff like that. I could also see for productions like this show, sticking with Mumble,

and then for productions like a special one-off version of Coda Radio or Unfilter, using Discord for that, where it's like, hey, we're going to pull in a few people and we're recording a holiday episode and thought we'd have the audience join us where you don't normally have a structure and you don't normally have people showing up every tuesday that might be like the more impromptu voice shows maybe that might be discord sorry what were you going to say michael i was just saying i think mumble is a great software it's just it's the uh the luxuries that discord provides is what makes discord the current market

share of most uh most communities that are voice-based kind of stuff like even um team speak is losing a lot of its market share to discord yeah it's growing it's growing crazy because it's it's you know a lot of things that people have been building different systems to do in one you know i just thought of one thing that Mumble does that Discord doesn't that is critical to the show. I don't think Discord can do sub-voice channels like Mumble does, where we have, like, the on-air channel. By the restricted casting and, like, the mic check. But it does do UI.

I guess we could have different rooms, but it does do UI feedback, like if you don't have any mic level coming in and stuff like that. So it does walk the user through resolving issues. The only limitation, based on that point, the only limitation of not being able to sub, the ACLs in Mumble allow you to be inside the join queue and still listen to the show while you're waiting. Oh, yeah. Whereas in Discord, you wouldn't be able to hear anything. Yeah.

See, I think maybe we would keep Mumble for unplugged. Yep. Yeah. See, I think maybe we would keep Mumble for Unplugged. Yep. And then Discord would be like, all right, well, in 15 minutes, we're going to have a show where we want the audience and we get like 10, 15 people all of a sudden. That might be, yeah. Yeah, because really, it's just solid software once you get it set up. And, you know, we've got the Mumble server running on DigitalOcean.

So it's, and the ping time is ridiculously low for the studio. It's like we have like a 36 ping. It's just wonderful. We also should probably create an announcements channel so we can do like at everyone and just they'll get a push notification on their phone when we're like live or something. Oh. So like do people leave the notifications turned on? Is that something people do? I do.

Actually, if you're a big, if you're, there's a suggestion by the Discord team. If you're a big server, you should not even do that. You should server-wide turn off notifications except for at mentions. Because there's times where people will jump in and the more people you get, the more annoying it is to people who've never used Discord before. So you're kind of preemptively doing that for them?

Well, the idea would be to have a channel that only we could post in yeah only mods and whatever has the role to do it and then add everyone is a is a mention to anyone oh yeah that's right yeah and the other way it's set up currently you can also you can add mention like you can add mention groups so like yeah this is something we're just going to play with and you know right now we've got uh just a handful of people in there because we've just been experimenting. Like I said earlier, we launched with our patrons first and then sort of scaled it out.

Oh, man, we've got to go. Jeez. Oh, okay. So we've got to talk about the Slackware challenge. Then we'll scoot. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to support the show and sign up for a free seven-day trial. It's a platform built by Linux lovers for Linux users and lovers like us.

linuxacademy.com slash unplugged sports show and seven-day free trial. Go there. Try it out and sign up and check out their self-paced in-depth video courses on every dang Linux cloud

and DevOps topic. And I really love the hands-on labs because this is where you get scenario-based stuff over an SSH connection and you really know what you're working with. When you go do it in production, you feel like you've already done it before. And if you ever

get stuck along your path to excellent learning, they have instructor mentoring standing by, full-time human instructors who also love Linux, and they're there to answer your questions. That's such a deep benefit to Linux Academy and something pretty much no other platform has. That's huge. Also, you know what else? Just thinking pretty much no other platform has. That's huge. Also, you know what else? Just thinking about what no other platform has, the community. Such a vibrant, active community full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. And that's nice because there's certain functionality inside Linux Academy, some of the courseware that can be iterated upon by the community. And so when you have a good, vibrant community like that, it means that the content's

getting better constantly. And they turn that investment around into their infrastructure, into their courseware, and into their instructors. It really shows. And as a Linux Academy subscriber now for years, I still find value out of it. Even when I'm just sort of toying around with the concept, it's nice to be able to go in and get a real grasp from the basics all the way up to what the high-end stuff is. And if you're

looking for certs, I definitely recommend you check it out. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Slackware challenge, Wes. I think here's what I'm thinking. Yeah.

Now, here's, okay, I got to tell you what I'm thinking. Are you ready for what I'm thinking? Here's what I'm thinking, by the way. What do you think? This is what I'm thinking. I'm going to put it on one machine after this episode. I've already got the ISO downloaded. You're ahead of me.

Yeah, well, you know, I had it inside. I kind of knew it was coming. And I'm going to, I can't commit to switching to it immediately because I have unfiltered tomorrow, which requires my whole rig. But I will put it on my XPS 13, which I've recently been trying different distros on. I will put it on my XPS 13, which I've recently been trying different distros on. And I'll run it starting Thursday full time, I believe. I'll be able to run it full time. So I'll work on it tonight and tomorrow to kind of get it loaded up.

So by Thursday, I'll be running it full time. And I'll try to report back and share my experiences, what it was like to install some basic tools. We'll see. We'll see how far I get. Maybe I'll get all set and be like, I'm to install some basic tools. We'll see. We'll see how far I get. Maybe I'll get all of a sudden and be like, I'm not using this full time. I may bail. I may bail in the pursuit of other tasks. I may have to bail.

Is there anything you're really excited about, though? Well, as soon as I saw the website, it got me a little nostalgic. So there was that. That sort of took me back a bit. And then I almost went and just decided to put this off a week and order the six CD sets. Oh, that would be fun. Yeah. And get like an actual package.

But then I realized that none of my systems have a CD-ROM right now. You have to send them off to a kind of viewer who will convert those to USB for you. Or I have to go grab the extra USB one that we have floating around here somewhere. So I just downloaded the torrent. But I was kind of excited. So that felt old school. And one of the things that's really kind of fun and also makes me feel nostalgic is you can download the individual disks. So like you used to have to do, you can download disk 1, disk 2, disk 3, disk 4, disk 5, and disk 6. If you want the source code. You don't need disk 6 if you don't want the source disks. So like you used to have to do, you can download disk one, disk two, disk three, disk four,

disk five, and disk six, if you want the source code. You don't need disk six if you don't want to. And so, you know, during the install, it would be ejecting the disks and asking for the next disk. I miss that so much. I would never actually want to do it anymore. But like the one chance to do it again would be fun. Yeah, that sounds fun.

So I was tempted, but then realized that I don't even have the capability. So instead, I grabbed the quote-unquote DVD ISO, which I will never be burning to a DVD. But it's cute that they call it that, which includes everything except, of course, the source code. Yeah. And I'll be putting that on my XPS 13. Now, this is the – I did not intend to. I guess I could change it, but I did accidentally grab the 32-bit version.

And I thought, well, maybe I'll just go with that. Like, I'll just be old school and embrace it. You know, you could get spin up and do an install on a virtual machine and then have your like CD switching out fun, virtual fun. Yeah. So if you want to join me in this journey,

I say what I was thinking is if I can't run it as my full-time desktop, what I'm going to at least try to do is set it up for one specific task. Do that job or do that task. Have you decided what desktop you're going to run? No, no. I mean, I was probably going to go KDE, but I really hadn't given it a time.

We'll find out. What are you going to do? I hadn't thought about it. I really don't like old GNOME. I really don't like old GNOME. Although you go too old on KDE, Plasma, and I'm not... God, I don't know. Did you say Plasma is the is the best yes you're right

even old plasma even old plasma well wait wait wait are you saying that slackware only has KDE 4 I don't actually remember I don't has KDE 4 then uh monte sounds good where do I go here oh yeah monte would work yeah you're right I was actually Joe would probably love to hear this I was actually thinking XFCE, but then the issue is, and here's why this could already be bad, is that damn XPS 13 is high DPI. Oh. So what is Slackware going to do when I put it on a high DPI

machine? What is Slackware going to do? I mean, I've got to go with the more modern, I've got to. So I hope that it's using the current version of Plasma. Anyways, I wish I could say more. I wish we had more time, but we really should get going to make room for the TechSnap guys.

Join us live next week, won't you? It's a lot of fun. You go over to jblive.tv, and if you do it on a Tuesday, you'll be here for the show. You just got to get the time right. Go to jubilabroadcasting.com slash calendar for that. Now, here's the great part.

You tune in for the Unplugged show. You stick around. Guess what? Guess what comes next? Free extra show. extra show tech snap that's the one bonus show with wes and dan so uh we invite you to also check out the discord community and get involved in the hair care channel that's what i'm testing out to see if that works as a consolidated feedback mechanism and you can find a link to that or it was discord dot me slash jupiter gone there you go check out more of popey over there on the ubuntu podcast mechanism and you can find a link to that or it was discord.me slash JupiterGone there you go check out more of Popey

over there on the Ubuntu podcast new episode coming out soon check out Wes on TechSnap and he's at Wes Payne that's right check out Rekai Rekai where do you want them to check you out Mr. Beard? Rek.net R-E-K-D.net boom I'm checking him out I like it or twitter.com slash Rekai LP you bastard

you bastard thank you very much to our virtual lug for being here we hope you'll I'm checking them out. I like it. Or twitter.com slash crylp. You bastard. You bastard. Thank you very much, too, to our virtual lug for being here. We hope you'll join us next week, and have a great week. See you then. Thank you. Hot tip. Hot tip from Popey. For those of you who missed out outside the U.S. on the XPS 13 giveaway, those cats over at the Ubuntu podcast, I believe, are giving away an interwear Apollo soon.

Are these rumors true, Popey? These rumors are true yes we get episode goes out on thursday and it'll have all the details of how you can enter the contest uh contest runs for about a month uh so should be easy for everyone to find a bit of time to enter i'll snap very nice jbtitles.com let's go pick our title everybody jbtitles.com anything jumping out at you what about the amer Americans that want an enterware, though? I don't think they sell here. You're screwed. Yeah, they don't sell here.

Fight for the right to IRC. Oh, geez, that's funny. Discord not ethical. The only problem is that will create a movement to save IRC. Oh, yeah. Reality is a service dragging the line. The Stallman line, that's not bad. The Stallman line's not bad Have we used that before?

Anybody want to double check on that? Maximum electrolysis was mine But now in retrospect not as good as the Stallman line Chris switches to PSD You try it architect You could put a picture of Stallman's face Over that one scene in first contact with Picard. So it turns out Alien Pastures from Slackbook says that Plasma 5 does work on Slackware.

Cool. I'll find out. There we go. I will find out. So fight for the right to IRC is up there. Cut the Discord. Discord not ethical. And the Stallman line.

Really? The Stallman line's not getting more love? Like, we talked, because it's not just about Discord. It's about, like, this is a common problem now in open. This is, it used to be, like, Linux or Windows. It's not that shit anymore. It's this now. This is what it is.

We're using our proprietary, we use Linux phones with proprietary apps to connect to proprietary services running on Linux. We didn't even get into the fact that it's also... It touches on the Electron debate, too. You didn't even get to that part. That's a fun little nugget for next week. I'm kind of a fan of the title Reality as a Service. Reality as a Service is good, too. I'll give it a boat.

I'll give it a boat. Also, the IRC thing is... There's really no reason for people to save IRC. IRC wouldn't die because the only issue would be Mumble is the situation because IRC has a bridge so you could continue to use IRC and be indirectly connected to them in Discord chat. Yeah, that's true. Well, I'm told that...

Stallman line's moving up now that I gave it some love. Nice. Last minute promotion. I'm told that bridges are tacky and are only used by Minecraft servers and should never be used for IRC. Tacky, huh? They are wrong. So I did see someone had written

a very minimal JavaScript app to forward messages between Discord and Mumble. They said there's no reason it shouldn't be able to work so if anyone wants a project, there's a skillet. I've actually seen, I know of a bot I'm working on. The Intergos channel team, we're doing, we have

Telegram, Matrix, and IRC all connected and are working on adding Discord into it too. You should look at working with the, what was it? The Matter something project. Mattermost? No, hang on. I gotta look it up now.

Oh, beard. No, hang on. I gotta look it up now. Oh, beard. Ping, we announced... The Matrix bridge is the most impressive bridge I've seen for IRC because it makes IRC users react exactly like a Matrix user in the Matrix chat and

also vice versa. So you have a full power of both sides from either side hey uh rika you remember what episode we announced the winner of the xps 13 yeah his name was michael tonel i think it was the one previous to the last one number 18 yeah the rika tricked you because he didn't put it in the time. So a lot of people have been like, I listened to that episode and I haven't heard it. And it's like, ah, you didn't. You just looked at the time code.

That's what you did. All right. We got to run because the TechSnap guys have got to start. But I think, let's go check. Our winner is the Stallman line, which I think is a good, solid title. So that's actually Wes's. Hey-oh. Congrats, Wes.

That's a wonderful line by Mr. Popey. Hey, thank you, everybody in the Momma Room for being here, guys. You guys, like, crushed it today. What's the term? You smashed it? What is it? Right out of the ballpark. You guys smashed that Mumble button today.

Thank you really. Smashed that push to talk. Oh! Wow! I did it. Real quick, the name of the software is MatterBridge. It bridges IRC, Gitter, XMPP, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Rocket Chat, HipChat, Steam, and Matrix with the REST API. Yikes.