LINUX Unplugged - Episode 210: Total Solus Eclipse | LUP 210

Episode Date: August 16, 2017

A new version of Solus is out and Ikey joins us to chat about whats new, building in Snap support & a peek at the future. Wimpy sets us on the straight and narrow about confinement & we have some follow up thoughts on Slackware.Plus some great desktop app picks, community news, Gnome’s birthday & more!

I don't love this, like, your Discord's out of date. I won't run. I know. Let me download it. That shit is, and especially, so that hit me on Arch, and here's what happened. I was on air, and I asked the Discord room a question, and then went down to my second desktop, realized Discord wasn't open, which it normally is. I was like, oh, crap. Well, let me just go launch that really quick.

Oh, nope, sorry, you must update. Well, okay, it can't auto-update because I installed it using oh, crap. Well, let me just go launch that really quick. Oh, nope, sorry, you must update. Well, okay, it can't auto-update because I installed it using Pac-Man. So let me update it via the Packer real quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And nope, can't do because, of course, dependencies are missing. Well, let me install that dependency real quick. Nope, can't do that because that conflicts with something else you have installed. So here I am on air doing a show trying to get Discord installed on Arch.

And I'm like, yeah, I I'm going to install solace. Hey, you want to know how I, uh, well, speaking about the one on solace,

um, we got basically a warning on Reddit from someone who was like, uh, there's a new discord out there. The one that you have, it's just stopped working. We're like, wait,

well, if you've pulled a Skype, you just can't get into it. All right. Yeah. We'll go update it. This needs lip C plus bus. Okay. Oh you just can't get into it anymore. It's all right. Yeah, we'll go update it. This needs libc++. Okay.

Oh, we don't have that. Which normally wouldn't be a problem, but libc++ is part of LLVM. And if you know anything about LLVM, it takes hours to build. Like it literally takes hours. Like the way that we do the build, it also has Clang, it has LLVM,

now has libc++, LLDBdb lld all of that in a single tree and it's also got to build it to 32-bit as well all because i was like yeah we're gonna use libc++ now why so just why the the quick fix on solace these days would just be sudo snap install discord oh it is a snap yeah very good i should have done that on arch we didn't have snap either we were screwed this is linux unplugged episode 210 for august 15th 2017 Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's literally reloading its Linux right before the show starts. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

Hello, Wes, and hello, Beardsley. Welcome back. Hello, guys. We got a really good show lined up today. We have, of course, a few things to follow up on from last week, but before I address those, we've got to talk about a big birthday today. We've got a big, big birthday in the community. We have not one, not two, but three awesome app picks for you guys in this week's episode. Just some really cool open source projects that need a little attention. And then, the internet's buddy, Ike,

has stopped by the program today to chat about Solus 3, Snap and Flatpak support in Solus, and I might have a little thing or two to say about it as well. Then we're going to do a little follow-up on the Slackware challenge. It turns out I've been using Slackware a little more since the show.

And I have a couple of more things to say about it. You're hooked. This is probably the point at which we should say this week we decided we are going to punt the Gen 2 challenge just because neither one of us felt like we spent enough time with it this week. There's a lot there. And part of my problem was I kept using Slackware for a little while. And then I'm doing good. I was like, okay, I'm ready to just really get into Gen 2.

And then that son of a gun Ike, hashtag blame Ike, goes and releases a brand new version of Solus. Which I immediately this morning downloaded. Somehow it was just on all of your USB drives automatically. I have it right here on this thumbstick, right? That's the thumbstick right there. And I loaded it up on my main AirMaster machine that we use to send all the images and play all the clips and stuff out to the stream. So I loaded Solus 3, and I'll tell you about it, why I decided to go with Solus for my arch replacement on this machine, and all of that. So I think we just have a ton of really good stuff to get into.

Really excited about the community news, the app picks, and having Wimpy here and Ikey are both back. I can't wait to chat with those guys. So let's start right there. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Greetings. Hello. How do you do? Hello.

Hello. It's good to see everybody. I guess it's probably pretty well known by now. I sort of snuck up on me, but today is Gnome's 20th birthday. Happy frickin 20th birthday, Gnome. That's impressive. There have been 33 stable releases since Gnome 1.0 in 1999. God damn, I am old. Holy crap. You mean, I was using Linux before GNOME. I guess that's wow. That really makes me feel old. Anyways, 20 years of GNOME is being celebrated right now, and a website's been set up.

HappyBirthdayGnome.org And they also have a handy donate to GNOME button there, and they have a timeline where the project really got started in 1997, which is about when I started to become a... And they've got that handy dandy gnome 1.0 virtual machine if you want to relive yes glory days look at this screenshot too um you know i remember i remember thinking how badass it was that the icons and the menus had textures like the gnome foot and the toolbox they had like textured backgrounds i thought that was so cool i thought that was so cool it is cool i'm such a geek um i mean that would look just fine on

your slackware rig chris and isn't that uh isn't that don't they call that uh that uh that theme on the um control bars there don't they call that crux isn't that called i mean that's where that's what i think of when people say crux anyways they have nice, nice timeline at happybirthdaygnome.org. So, yeah. So what's interesting about that is there are other projects that I use today that are older than Gnome. Like Wine. Wine, for example, is older than Gnome. Isn't that something?

And, of course, Gwadik just wrapped up. And you can find all of the videos from Gwadik up on YouTube. There's probably a couple that would be worth watching, probably a couple that aren't. And I don't know. It's kind of a big milestone. Of course, today's the day I also switched off GNOME. Yeah. At least on this machine.

It sucks. But I'm still using the hell out of GTK, so there you go. I also, just before we go any further, wanted to say next week might be just in studio Bearden West. I'm not sure. Everything should be fine. But I am going down to the solar eclipse in Oregon. And I'm starting to a little bit get worried about the amount of people that are going to that thing. So it could be a different show next week.

I may be here. I may not. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting if you're going to get your butt out to the eclipse in the Oregon area and want to meet up with us, that's true. That should be pretty good. Meetup.com slash Jupiter broadcasting. And then if nothing else,

I should make it back in time to the show. But what I'm worried about is because I'll be traveling, I still might not really get enough time to fully deep dive into Gentoo. Okay. So I'm like, let me know. I'm like worried that we might need to do a double punt, which I feel bad about.

But at the same time, like the audience has been asking for a Gentoo challenge for so long. And it deserves to be a good one. Right. That's what I figure. It's like if I, so this week I ended up, I ended up playing around with Slackware and then jumped over to Solus and

like, well, wait a minute. I was supposed to, I didn't really Gentoo. Like I got Gentoo started. I got a machine cleared off and I got like that process all started, i didn't really go much further than just getting started i'm like well i need to run it as a desktop no long compiles or yeah it's okay chris it's gonna take you

it's gonna take you about two weeks to compile kde i'm gonna put it i'm gonna put it on that uh ten thousand dollar dell laptop and i'm just gonna let that thing rip through the the compiling jobs if it if it does if it does half as good as it does as of encoding video i think i think i'm just gonna let that thing rip through the the compiling jobs for all of if it if it does if it does half as good as it does as of encoding video i think i think i'm gonna be fine so anyways uh that'll be so that could be maybe we're gonna punt then the gender challenge for two weeks but then i was thinking that's not necessarily 100 bad because that gives people time to try it out too yeah like what do you think beard you want you want to do it nah not even in a little little virtual machine?

I like using my iOS. I knew exactly what he was going to say. I just asked to have a good laugh because I knew what you were going to say. I didn't even need to really ask. I knew what the answer was. Anybody in the mumble room want to do a Gen 2 challenge with us? Come on, guys. Nope.

Busy doing it. Gotta wash my hair. Can I claim to be above it? Everybody else is busy getting things done. You bastard, Wes. You brought this upon us. You brought this upon us. Who, me?

You dirty dog. You dirty dog. You called me out during the outro music of last week's episode. The music was already playing. I mean, I had to say yes. Actually, it's kind of a good... It's kind of a perfect timing, too, because it's going to be, in a way, going back to my roots. Actually, it's kind of a perfect timing too because it's going to be, in a way, going back to my roots.

That's kind of ideal when I'm sort of... I'm distro shopping right now, and right now I'm seriously considering leaving Solus on the AirMaster machine. Doesn't necessarily mean that's where I want to use... That LTS Ubuntu has been working great for that, and this could work great for OBS,

so... I just don't know, I just don't know. I just don't know. Times, they are a-changing. So, yeah, happy birthday to GNOME. Sorry, you guys, no Gentoo Challenge, but we've got plenty of other stuff to talk to with IKI here and all of that. Did you also see, Beard, that there is a new release of OBS today? OBS 20, I think it is, came out today.

I just saw the update come down. Yeah, it's OBS 20. It's just come down. And one of the things they're adding is a totally dynamic reshuffleable UI. A whole bunch of new stuff. It's just really good. It's really there, really. That is an open source project that is getting, it must be huge in the Twitch

crowd, too. I mean, it's just getting huge. Yeah, it's like every point release adds a bunch of useful new things. Yeah. And I was just looking again for a new webcam. Is that right? Like a Logitech webcam. And on the box, now they're listing OBS support.

Oh, that's really cool. That's big for the OBS project. Like Logitech's putting that on the box. So congrats to them. So OBS 20 came out today. Lots of new features. If you're looking for a way to do a screen cap and live stream it, or even just record it to a file and maybe also attach a mic into a voiceover, the lower third. You know, if you just want to even produce an instructional video for work, you could do it in real time in OBS.

Instead of putting it together slowly in an editor, just do it live. Go through the process. Like, say, you want to convey to another-worker how to do something on a server, just screen cap it with OBS and record the whole thing, attach your mic, and then you have an MP4 file, and give it to them. And you don't have to use it to live stream your podcast network. You can use it for all kinds of things. Yeah, that's a great point. Be the next big Twitch streamer.

And it's really gotten to be super competitive. As somebody who's followed these applications for years now and paid thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars into alternative software, Wirecast. I mean, you can remember back when you couldn't quite switch yet, and now it's come so far. And now you're there with version 20. They've come so far. I'm so proud of them.

So anyways, you can check that out too. So lots of good stuff. But we do have some apps. I thought maybe we'd get into some of these. So let's take a moment to thank Linux Academy for sponsoring the program. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. It's a platform to learn about Linux built by Linux enthusiasts. And it really shines because it's all they do. It's what they focus on is Linux and everything around it from the low level stuff up to the big topic stuff. They have all kinds of different courseware depending on what you're going for.

If you want something that's self-paced and in-depth, this is perfect. If you want something that can automatically nudge you a little bit to meet your goals, they've got that too. If you just want to get some certifications, they have courses created specifically for that. And check out this thing they've recently posted.

I don't know if you saw this, Wes. BuildYourOwnLinux.com. It's a site that Linux Academy put up. I don't know if you saw this, Wes. BuildYourOwnLinux.com. Oh. It's a site that Linux Academy put up. I don't know exactly when. It's new to me, so I think it's kind of new. And it is a rundown of how to completely build Linux from scratch using just the tools that come with the operating system.

And it's just a fantastic way to learn what all this stuff does, how it's all put together. It's just, I mean, it's brilliant. You could go do Linux from scratch or do Gen 2. That's also an extremely really educational process. But the nice thing about this is that it's recent, it's up-to-date, it's well-formatted, it's well-written, and it's extensive.

Yeah, it's long. You'll spend a while doing this. Yeah, and they have it in, they've broken it down into what are major sections. So they have six major sections, and then they have individual subcategories in there. This is a massive post. So you can find it at buildyourownlinux.com. I mean, these guys and gals are really, really just intensely passionate about Linux. That's why they started Linux Academy.

And you can sign up at LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Thank you, everybody, for visiting there. Even just go in there and read more about Linux Academy. You know, let them know you heard about it here. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Slash unplugged.

Everybody loves KDE Connect. Even GNOME users are cut at KDE Connect, right? So this is why I was kind of interested to see MConnect integration and KDE Connect integration for GNOME Shell via an extension. Ah, yes, very, very good. The KDE Connect is a great app. Met the developer, just really smart guy, and just a really handy application. We just talked about it recently as a way to dictate text into your Linux box. Of course, it allows file sharing, notification sharing, sending of text messages, all other kinds of features like media playback control and whatnot. And there is now an extension that takes all those features of KDE Connect and builds them in in a real GNOME-like way.

And it does all the other kind of stuff you'd expect. Like if you send files, it'll use Nautilus to do the file transfers. It'll mount the phone in Nautilus. And it can use, if you have your online account connected to Google, it can use your Google account contacts to autocomplete SMS messages. That's so cool. This is a full-fledged KDE Connect integration with Gnome Shell for us Gnome users. Well, for you Gnome users. I'm going to have to try that.

I'll have a link in the show notes, Wes, if you would like to indulge. You can check it out. And then, now we're getting into some of these app picks here. So that was the first one. Now how about one for everybody? Windows users, um, well... That's not a thing, Chris. Don't worry about it. You gotta wait a little bit. But everybody else, Linux and

Mac users, you're good. You are good if you would like to try out Alacrity. Alacrity, Wes. It's got a powerful name. Alacrity! It is the fastest terminal emulator in existence. That's a bold claim. It uses the GPU for rendering.

And why wouldn't it, Wes? I mean, you're sitting there with your terminal just wasting your GPU away. Why wouldn't it, Wes? So Alacrity is a... Not everyone has videos to render, Chris. They just want to use their GPUs for something. It makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're just sittings for something. It makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're just sitting there doing nothing. It's a cross-platform. I suppose if you have the free stuff, too, it would work. It's a cross-platform terminal based on simplicity and performance. You got like a thousand lines of text scrolling across your screen. Lag no more, my friends. It's also available for us soulless users. And Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, and Asusa.

So can I watch a movie in this terminal now? Wait, now do you want it to be ASCII? No. It's GPU accelerated. Why can't it paint an image over the terminal? Maybe you could submit a suggestion. Is it written in Rust, too? It kind of looks like it, because you didn't even mention that.

You know what? You're right. I should always mention when it's... I should everything. I don't know if you should, but you seem to. By default. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe I just love pushing buttons in Rust, lovers. And if you sudo snap install alacrity dash dash edge, you can install it. Look at that. Fantastic. Wait, this thing has soulless build instructions? Yeah, that's what I was saying. I wasn't interested before then, but no, tell me more.

Isn't that something? Right there. Isn't that something? I mean, I knew it had to be Rust because of that first line. Maybe they just figure soulless users are the type that might want a GPU accelerated terminal. Because you know that's going to be triggering some listeners out there. I'm sorry, what? A GPU accelerated terminal? What, that's going to be triggering some some listeners out there what I'm sorry what a GPU accelerated terminal what is it written in an electron no it's rust calm down well I might just have to package it now you know reading the uh the about here it sounds like they're taking the uh the gnome approach of uh removing uh features though because it says uh the simplicity goal means that it has no tabs.

Yeah. And it doesn't have such niceties as like a GUI configuration editor. Nope, nope, it doesn't. However, it does have a nice YAML file that's easy to follow and with good sane defaults. Once your GPU accelerated, why would I want a GUI when

I could just use my super fast terminal to edit my text file configs, Rikai? Yeah, I mean, it's obvious. This is the way. I mean, why else? This is Alacrity, and it's up on GitHub if you'd like to check it out. I actually think it's kind of cool.

It's kind of... I'm building it now. Are you? Man, it's even available on BSD. Oh, really? Well, I mean, they already did Mac OS, so they kind of put themselves in the crapper anyway. I didn't know they had 3D acceleration on BSD now. They must be doing that through the Linux emulation layer.

Probably. I would imagine. I was just teasing BSD guys. You don't have to write me. All right, so that's Alacrity, and we'll have a link to that in the show notes. And then are you ready for your third? Look how fast we're going through these, you guys.

This is amazing. We are really doing a good clip here. We're turning the show out. So I started a journey. I mentioned I stuck around on Slackware. I was trying out the Plasma desktop. I was trying out... I also tried installing the latest Plasma desktop

packages on Arch before I reloaded AirMaster from Arch. So I've been thinking about what producer Michael has been saying to me for months now is he talks about how he has a Plasma desktop setup that's actually very kind of gnomish, but it's it's plasma and so i was thinking about like toying with that idea is that something i could really do is that something i could sit down and get a nice clean minimal plasma desktop but still have you know the the performance of k win and the the the tools and of like i like k snapshot a lot and console is one of my favorite terminals and you know like a lean kind of run and config. Yeah. So during this process, which eventually completely backfired on me,

but we'll get to that in a moment. But during this process, I landed on LatteDoc. Now I have become a doc denier. I am a doc denier these days. I've got my gnome favorites, you know, that come up and that's a doc, I suppose.

But I'm just, I'm over docks. They're an awkward use of screen real estate. They often are dumb. Like, they hide, even though they call them IntelliHide and stuff like that, they hide when I don't want them to hide. And, you know, they're just dumb. It seems like we've kind of half all gravitated to just, you had mashed the super key, and then, you know,

your application appears. Yeah, you know, your application appears. Yeah, you know, really these days, what I want is I want something that lists what my running applications are graphically and lets me click between them. And I want something that kind of outlines what virtual desktops I have. And bonus points if I can tell what applications

are in those virtual desktops. And I really just need something that stays out of my way because I'm not really using it to launch new applications. I'm not even going to probably, except for a core set of applications, I don't need anything even pinned in it because like you said, I searched,

I, you know, just run it. So anyways, in this process, I came across LatteDoc and it's a doc based on Plasma Frameworks that is pretty nice. It is, it's animated a little heavily for me by default, but you can turn that down. And it has a pretty good tweak system that lets you set things that you would normally want to set for a dock in a really smart, intuitive way. Like what edge it's on, how it behaves, how you add separators.

It was nice. And you can right-click and you can lock things. It's not one of these docks that prevents you from getting to the action items of a dock. So, like, if I right-click on Chrome, I still see open new instance, open incognito window from the dock. You can somehow put applets down there,

although I didn't figure that out. It has really kind of a smooth feel to it. I was able to crash it a couple of times. So I inevitably ended up to not to decide not to use it on my machine that's on the air. But I really felt like if I was going to go back to a dock, latte dock would be the one. It really felt like it felt like it wasn't like too compromised, but it wasn't overly done. It wasn't it wasn't overly built't overly built. It was just really kind of smooth and straightforward. It has a couple of really nice features in the version that just came out four days ago, version 0.70.

It has a Wayland support preview, which is probably a good direction to go. It has a new layout editor, which I liked quite a bit. There is a new dynamic background option that dynamically switches when a window is maximized versus windowed, which just makes it look really nice. That pretty sounds slick. Yeah, there's all little things they've added that... Oh, oh, oh, I should probably mention this one

because it's my favorite one. An audio streams indicator is now built into the dock. Oh. Yeah, so you could increase, decrease volume, or even mute volume. Right from the dock? Yeah. That I really appreciated.

Maybe docks are making their way back. Let's LatteDock. LatteDock for you Plasma desktop users. I think it's pretty good. And so I got Plasma desktop installed, and I got it configured, and I got LatteDock set up. But, you know, it just doesn't quite click with me. There's something about the cute applications, the complicated aspect of them, a lot of the little tweaking that I was going to have to do,

and I was doing this an hour before the show started. Not in your tweakiest mood. Yeah. I ended up deciding to just take the Solus plunge. And I went and grabbed the Budgie ISO, and I etched that to a thumb drive, put it in the machine, installed it, just cleared out my old partitions

and left my data partitions alone, and just went all in on Budgie right now. So we're set up. I'm on the live stream i'm on firefox 55 too so it's not only did i switch to solos but i switched to firefox why would you want to stay still that's just nonsense you know for me it was it was sort of the best of both worlds because i like the gtk applications i i i'm very familiar with gnome settings and those settings applets so that for me it's just sort of a nice sort of familiarity.

I like the new art and look that we're going to talk about a little bit in the new version of Sol. So that's the other thing. Of course, it's a new release as well. It came out today. So those all kind of played a role. But for me, what it finally was is it just seemed like, well, I'm going to take a little bit of a GNOME breather. But this is a good stepping stone because it's all of the GTK apps that I know and love.

It's all of the themes and icon sets that I know and love. Very comfortable with, yeah. Super comfortable with the terminal, comfortable with all that stuff. I've even learned to use current Nautilus files. But it's things like, it's Mudder, and it's themes like the size of Gnome Shell and all of these things that I've just added to it over time.

It's not even necessarily all Gnome's fault. And so the Budgie desktop was sort of this nice sort of stepping stone to not completely switching away from GTK, but sort of stepping away from some of the things that have been causing me issues recently. To wean you off of it. Yeah.

So LatteDoc doesn't really have a spot on a GTK desktop so much. But if I was going to go to a Plasma desktop, I think I would consider replacing the main panel that the Plasma desktop uses. Yeah, I can see that being very nice. So we do need to talk about Solus, though.

We sure do. I think we've talked enough about community updates and app picks, but if you want to see any of those things we talked about today, we have links in the show notes. LatteDoc, also kind of cool, is one of those useful Plasma applications that you can actually just install from the Plasma store, quote-unquote, and it's sort of distro-agnostic, which is pretty cool.

So you don't necessarily have to go find the show notes. You can just search around in the Plasma desktop or whatever they call it store and install it there. How about that, Wes? That's so easy. How's your build going? It's still building. Is it?

Well, I think I'm installing a bunch of Rust dependencies now. It's a wild ride. Ah, good, good. Well, I'm glad. See, I have installs going in the background right now. You've got installs. This is one of those episodes where we're installing software. We're Linux users, damn it.

Yeah, we're installing our software while we do the show today. And, you know, hey, that's what's part of the fun. That's why we do it. We have so much fresh open source software right at our fingertips. We love it. I'm drunk on the power. We love it. And you know what?

There's more and more software coming, and some of them are getting wrapped up now in these universal package formats. And Ike and the Souls Project just announced support for Snaps, along with Flatpaks, which already existed. But it's not just like baby support. It's full grown-up, proper sandboxed support. So we're going to talk about that with him, and we're going to pick Mr. Wimpress's brain as well, because I believe there was a little cross-collab involved to get some of that stuff working. So I want to figure out what all of that was and get the scoop on that. So let's take a moment and thank DigitalOcean.

DigitalOcean.com. Go over there, create your account, and then use our promo code of ultimate power, D-O-Unplugged. D-O-Unplugged. One word will give you a $10 credit over at that DigitalOcean.com. Now they've got a $5 rig. $5 rig. For $5, you could run that rig two months for free with our promo code Dio Unplugged

because we got a $5 rig. That's nuts. I can't even get a burger for $5. Ew. I might be able to get the fish sandwich for $5. But do you want to? Exactly. But you know what?

That $5, much better spent over DigitalOcean. Oh, premium. You can spin up a droplet in less than 55 seconds. All SSDs for the hard drives, 40 gigabit connections coming to the hypervisor, Linux for the server. They have KVM for that hypervisor, which is brilliant. They have a dashboard for days that's super easy to use. They have an API that's straightforward, brilliant. And it's so well developed that they use it themselves to build their own systems on top of DigitalOcean.

Then they have all kinds of really crazy advanced features like block storage, and they're working on object storage right now. They have firewalls that deploy at the network level, so the traffic you want to reject never even reaches your system. They have load balancing as a service, monitoring and alerting where you get metrics and alerts when things go down. And of course, they have entire stacks of pre-built, open-source applications ready to go with a single click or, you know, you can just build it from scratch yourself. I was going to say, does that sound

too easy? Don't worry. You can just install FreeBSD, figure out what you're doing, and you'll have it by the end of the week. Yeah, if you get stuck, you just email those BSD Now guys. This is the way I go. When I'm just trying out something like either for the show or I want to play

with something or a new release of a distro comes out that I want to throw on a server, they have a three cents an hour machine. Three cents an hour machine. Easy to justify. That is. That is. Just find some spare change in your couch. Yeah.

Throw it on the floor. Well, DL1 plugged. Yeah. You get the $10 credit. You could run that three cents an hour. You could get that for quite a while. And, you know, you could destroy and create a couple of machines in that time. It's great.

It's just so much fun to play around with, too, or to put it in production. They've got data centers all over the world, so you get something nice and fast wherever your users are at. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DL1 plugged. Big are at. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-Unplugged. Big thank you to DigitalOcean. Also, while you're over there, go over to their community section and look at the open source projects built around DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-Unplugged. D-O-Unplugged. So, Ike, welcome back to the show, sir. It is really good to talk to you. And I don't think you've been on the show since you've gone full

time either, although we talked right before you did go full-time but congrats on the transition it looks like time's been well spent well thanks for having me on and thanks for the grand congratulations soulless 3 is out and i got it loaded right here on my machine and it is looking really great so i i guess let's start there because that's like the big that's like It's pretty sweet looking. a Linux LTS kernel, and that was actually what pushed me over the edge, because I've been thinking more and more about using LTS core stuff for our production machines, but having faster-moving applications like Chrome and OBS. And so when I saw the fact that I could pin it to LTS, which is the default, I could use current, but it was pinned to LTS.

It's default on the existing ones. So let's talk about this. So in the new ones, so we have two kernel branches. I mean, back in the old days, pre-ClearBitManager, we just had one kernel, and it sucked. And if you updated, you were screwed. And then we spent ages. I mean, basically, it updated the same way as Arch, right?

We know how that goes. My modules are gone. It was that same story. But nowadays, we have Linux Current, Linux LTS. Linux LTS basically follows Greg's branch. So that's going to update again in September to 4.14, and then it's going to stay on that for a long time, and then it'll update again.

So users can now freely have them both installed, and then they can go between them. We've got all the NVIDIA drivers for both of them as well. So you can quite happily, you don't have to build them. There's no DKMS, none of this, you know, pixie blood crap. You haven't got to go through that. So you can just pick either one of them. This new ISO is defaulting to the Linux current branch,

which is basically the stable kernel most of the time. But there might be times when we say, eh, we don't want to update it. So we're not going to call it Linux stable. So are you saying with ClearBootManager you made the switch from shipping LTS as default to shipping current as default? No. Yes and no.

So the ISO itself is now using the Linux current package, which means it's on 4.12.7. Right. But because we now use Clear Boot Manager, you can use either. We can have as many kernel series as we want. Which is what I opted to do, which I think is great because – and then you have the appropriate NVIDIA packages to match up. So it was just really –

So easy. Yeah. It was really straightforward. Nice. So, okay. So that was something I really was like, okay, now you know what? I'm going to do the LTS kernel. I'm going to go with that. So let's talk about some of the stuff that's in that kernel that, that made snap packages possible. Let's start there maybe, because I think, didn't you have to make some pretty low level changes for the sandboxing support? It must have required at least app armor.

Basically, there are AppArmor patches that have gone up for 4.13 and 4.14. The canonical guys are very diligent in getting all that stuff upstream, but that stuff does take time. A fair amount of it has gone upstream, but it's not all there. So for the two kernels I've backported from Zesty and Artful, I've basically backported their implementations of app armor which are the future upstream ones which means that solos is now using the exact same implementation of app armor that ubuntu is using that's bad which also means that we're the only over at the time of saying this

i want to be very specific at the time of saying this we're the only non-abuntu uh the next distribution to have full snap confinement like as a like for like with ubuntu right that's awesome well debian9 has it as well well shipped how did this come about so Well, it's his fault. Well, I thought so. But, I mean, you're also, your position has evolved on this. But for some people listening to this show, they'll remember you as the anti-flat pack, anti-snap guy. Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, like the whole thing about having the angel and devil in your ears, right? Sure.

Wimpy has become the angel in the air. And I've got about four of my own devils in the air the whole time. Sure. But when we first decided on it, I mean, it was a long time ago when the whole debate started coming about. And it took a long time for facts to change. And facts have changed, you know. And certain things would have

accelerated it you know but now snap is looking to be the agnostic platform that everyone needs to support now from the solos perspective when we first went for a flat pack it was basically replace the aging crappy third party which you had the pleasure of enjoying recently yeah that is a bit of a it is a bit of an uncomfortable end-user experience. It sucks. It sucks. So you want something that, you know, something that just works for the users, you know, like minimal friction.

And when we first said, oh, you know, we're going to go for Flatpak, we wanted the least invasive change. And I guess it was basically bang for buck at the time with least amount of intervention from us. You were essentially getting it with GTK to 3.5. Yeah, it was that GNOME world, wasn't it? You bring in OSTree.

Well, that depends on GLib. Well, we have all this stuff. That would have been easy enough. And it's a C GNOME library, essentially. But, I mean, since that time, it's got to be six plus months, eight months or something like that now. It's changed a lot and then nowadays flat pack is more about these run times very much about these run times but as a vendor i mean we're effectively an osv we have no say we have no influence there and there are times when we're going to want to add value so you can imagine to draw a parallel if you're

a samsung and you're manufacturing chromebooks you're going to want to add value so you can imagine to draw a parallel if you're a samsung and you're manufacturing chromebooks you're going to want to add value on for your customers right you're going to want that value add not just shipping that we want the opportunity of we're doing things with third-party applications to actually enhance that and do cool things say with the solace i want to pause you there so because i think that comparison will probably make a lot of people sort of uh retch a little bit um because it sounds like you're justifying – Yeah, I mean it's basically about value add, right? Yeah, right.

So what about using Discord as an example there? Because I think Discord is an example where a lot of distributions sort of just got screwed a little bit. And I think if you are – like this is what I was thinking, Ike, is the thing about Solus is you guys are really on top of packaging. When you do decide to package something, like you really think it through and you commit to it. So Discord was pretty quickly fixed. And there was a dependency that Discord all of a sudden required. And, of course, it also required to be running on a current version. This is the way these things go, especially new applications, especially for vendors that are still learning how to support Linux.

especially new applications, especially for vendors that are still learning how to support Linux. And in my experience, Solus handled that pretty much the best and was able to get the additional dependencies bundled in there and shipped and pushed down to the end users and fix the problem pretty quickly. But it does kind of raise the argument for, I mean, there is the whole thing of if you're an application developer, I mean, we all like to give them a lot of problems, you know, like they're not bringing this stuff over to Linux, but there is the whole part of which Linux do you target? It's like the joke I made about Solus, which arm would we target? Well, it's kind of the same for which Linux would you go for? So you're giving them a common target that they can all go for

that just happens to run on all the Linux distributions. It makes a lot of sense. So I'm not interested in terms so much of the open source software because, well, you can distribute that anyway. But stuff that we can't distribute, to give an example, I can now,

well, bad example, but I can run NextCloud on my local box we're testing through Snap. That's all fully managed. That's not something we're ever going to package in Solus. How would it change in Chrome? Like if there was an official google chrome snap or flat pack how would that change distributing that for you so i mean it comes straight from the vendor which is a great thing and in many ways snap operates a little bit like a package manager anyway in in terms of their indexes and there are updates and there are these blobs that it goes to fetch

when we do it now we've got to go to our third-party repo and effectively mark the new URL for the original dev file and then put the hash in there. That's, you know, basically someone said, I tried to install Chrome, it failed. That's how we know. That sucks. I mean, that really, really sucks.

So there's no update. There's no automatic update for it. Snap kind of takes that away in that the software vendors can be responsible. I mean, regardless of the application, they can be responsible for when their stuff goes out. They can test it themselves before it actually gets to the distributions. And there are built-in update mechanisms as well. So being able to swap out the hacky, us-tracking-it stuff versus these vendors that want to put out their own software and say well this is what you're getting then it takes the pressure off of everyone in that circle

so what going back to flat pack and snap one of the things that does sort of stand out is it sounds like to do full-fledged proper big boy matching ubuntu snap support it was a bit more work than flat pack because you just sort of you sort of just got flat pack uh reflecting on that did did snaps focus on not just desktop but also including server software was that a motivating factor here because well traditionally that'd be a weaker area for solace right so if snap yeah we're Yeah, but this could sort of fill in gaps that Solus has right now that, you know, if some user wanted to run, say, SabNZB on their Solus system and there's a snap for that, problem solved. There's a snap for that. I mean, a lot of it's Martin's fault. I'm quite happy for the blame of Martin.

I mean, there's stuff that we can't distribute, but not only i mean there's stuff that we can't distribute but not only that there's stuff that we won't distribute and that that was the angle that martin was taking this like there's going to be stuff that your inclusion policy is just not going to go for but some people are going to need and from the solos perspective it's sometimes it's going to be a bit like a get out of jail free card instead of just saying to people no no we're not putting this in and then everyone's unhappy it's like however you know there is this other approach that you can go that you can go the snap route and the the other part of it is that basically the the snapcraft and the ubuntu teams have very much been there over the last few days and i think we started on

something like the thursday or friday or something like that but in the end we started the first day i got back from holiday yeah and it was like two days later we got to the point where we actually had the first kernel patched so it was the linux current kernel and we had the full confinement and on the next morning we then had compatibility with classic confinement as well what is So without that help... Wimby, can you explain the difference between confinement and classic confinement? Okay, so there's three confinement models. There's dev mode, which is what you start with

when you're creating your snap at the beginning, and that tears down much of the confinement. And then when you actually want to publish your snap, you've got two confinement options there's strict confinement which means the application is entirely sandboxed and only has access to the things that you define via the snap graft yaml so think of it like a firewall you've got this application in a sandbox this application needs access to your webcam so in the yaml you tell it it can access the webcam and there are dozens of interfaces to give applications discrete access to different things on the host operating system usually hardware devices and so when it's strictly confined it

can only access those things that you've prescribed it can access and it can also only access files within its snap or if you add a home interface to a sandboxed portion of your home directory so even if you have the home interface enabled you can't see dot files and dot folders from the snap and that's to prevent the snap being used to maliciously get at, you know, GPG keys and things of that nature. Hmm. So what was required sort of on a backend? What is missing for Linux distributions to support this?

Well, to support what exactly? This confinement. Well, that you need AppArmor, basically. Is that sort of the more controversial thing about this? Is that some people just don't want to roll AppArmor? Not so much. I mean, OpenSUSE are using AppArmor. Ike was in the position where he hadn't chosen an LSM at this point.

I don't get ESC Linux. That helped. What? NSA? they make great software i mean but um part of the problem is that classic confinement is basically allowing a snap to run pretty much without any confinement whatsoever so there are specific use cases for classic confinement so for example um aliquity that we mentioned earlier is a classic snap because it's a terminal and it needs to execute shell commands from arbitrary locations on your hard drive so that means no so it has so well it has to have no confinement over what it can see on your hard disk because it has to be able to execute arbitrary things.

And compilers, if you want to snap a language or a compiler, that almost certainly has to be classic for the same reasons. But then the trick here is the way that SnapD works is that snaps and everything to do with snaps sit under slash snap in the root of the file system and some distros have elected to not follow that requirement and relocate snaps elsewhere on the file system and at that point it breaks the opportunity to run classic snaps at all. Okay.

So this, to me, it seems like it's maybe just a little confusing because there's a lot of parts there. But it sounds like, simply put, if it's done properly a you can have a system that fully fully supports confined snaps but the snap if set up could not be confined yes okay i think i got it okay interesting so what was behind the scenes what was the work between say yourself and ikey to get this working on solace well i am i've really been a glorified cheerleader in this whole process um and a go-between so i think i heard ikey say on um late night linux a few weeks ago that he was open to um using snaps and my ears pricked up and i thought that's interesting so uh i immediately got on telegram hello how are you uh and we started to have a conversation and then uh i had a chat with uh some of the guys at work and we identified a few people who would have some time to assist and we waited for ikey to uh make his transition to working on solus as his full-time uh endeavor and then ikey got busy

doing his release business and then last week we made the introductions with ikey and the other guys in the team and uh i was basically just standing on the sidelines applauding and cheering enthusiastically at that point i i loved how it came out ikey you know uh it starts with uh it starts with a google plus post and i and i just sit there and i go this this son of a bitch you did it well i did drop hints to you on the last time i was here i sort of dropped hints that it yeah it was sort of in the back of my head but yeah well i have a habit of doing this so as an end user now uh is there really anything i do do i just snap snap installed on the you have snap installed already yeah okay well there you go so you can just do sudo snap install brave

dash dash beta oh brave, brave, really? Yeah. So we wasn't really looking forward to packaging brave for Sol. This is like, it's another thing. It's electronic. So the syntax is sudo snap install. Yeah, brave. Brave.

And then dash beta. Dash dash beta. Is it dash or dash dash? Yeah, that's right. Dash dash beta. I'm a noob. Me too. I've installed a couple of snaps, but many there we go it's downloading right now that's a good example because it's fully confined oh and it will also use the open gl interface as well which means that we've actually

got a couple of fixes going in at the moment we're going back and forth on the pull requests but some of the stuff like the way that we have the open gel libraries on solos is laid out basically the same as they would be on arch linux so the stuff that we're doing now because we have the full confinement we're finding bugs that arch linux will have by the time it gets full confinement so we're fixing their bugs before they happen which is kind of cool excellent yeah that is nice and this is another advantage of getting what is probably and i mean this with love i keep the most foreign linux distribution yeah running snaps because you're you are trailblazing in many ways but you are going opinionated linux yeah you're going to bump into things yeah will it will it show up now in my uh

so how does that show up in your menu does it now if i but i do brave i see nothing i see nothing i see nothing but if i can if budgie menu is being an idiot then you can use another feature of budgie alt and f2 oh alt f2 aha i see yes need to learn that. That's going to be my new favorite feature. I do need to learn that. That's great. Brian from the Solus team told me that I had to tell you that. Yeah, that is good. So I've been looking to slip that one in. That is really good. I really do like that. Alright, so I'm waiting.

I'm waiting. I'm not seeing. So it's Alt F2. Oh, there it goes. There we go. I'm just typing Brave and it should be there. It just popped up. Yeah, the first time you launch any Snap, it takes slightly longer because it's setting everything up in the backend. You know, like for the next time it runs,

it's got all these policies and everything. But the next time you run it, it should basically be instant. Yeah. And that first run latency is something that we're addressing as well. So that will go away in time. What a perfect way to play with something like Brave.

This is because you just, if you have Snap support, you can do that same command and you can be messing around with it. And it's, this is probably, you know, a browser is a perfect example of an application that should be confined. You can test the sandbox in there. So if you go on right click on something

and just to do like a save as to get the file dialogue to pop up, try navigating to one of the folders that you're not allowed to go to. So like your root folder or back into your real home folder. Sure. So we'll go, let's try going to other locations, computer. Oh, yeah. No, it's basically says screw you. You can't go there.

Interesting. Fully sandboxed. Interesting. In fact, yeah. yeah no it's basically to screw you you can't go there interesting interesting in fact yeah now this is this is an interesting uh notion this sandboxing of browsers because if you've ever run strace whilst um you have what if you've had you got um firefox installed and you start chrome for the first time and you have s trace on the chrome process you will see chrome going grubbing around all over firefox looking for stuff really and if they know if you've got these in each of them as sandboxed uh snaps then you can't have that happen so i know if you... That's interesting. Sorry to interrupt. I noticed, though, so what about theming support, guys?

What is the story there? Finish your thought if you're going to finish something, but just after you do finish it, I'd be curious to know what the story is with theming. No, no, I've made my point about, you know, stopping applications from, you know, snooping on one another. That is really nice, yeah. But in terms of theme support, that was something. So a few weeks ago we had a sprint in London, uh,

a snap sprint in London and there, a number of people from the community invited to that from, you know, KDE and elementary and, uh, gnome and all sorts. And of the um uh tracks we did there was how we're going to improve the theme support and that's currently being worked on so we did the design there and that's that's in progress that seems like a challenge that seems like a real challenge if it's supposed to be isolated and all of that i mean that seems yeah there's there's a number of cool new bits of tech coming uh to make all of this magic happen but we we fleshed out how to handle uh themes fonts and icons in a way that you can uh interconnect

them and what have you um and so something that ike and i've discussed and so what you need to know is ike knows things he can't talk about at the moment. And I heard him on another podcast a couple of days ago, and I could tell that Ike wasn't sure if this thing that he knew he could talk about or not. As it happens, he can. So Ike was interviewed on Ubuntu Fun podcast, which is a German language podcast. But fortunately, Ikey was interviewed in english which i can just about cope with uh yes and uh one of the things that ikey was alluding to he was just talking about how solace could add value to the snap ecosystem um and he wasn't able to

articulate what he meant exactly and i'll explain so at the moment when you install a snap for the first time, a core snap gets installed. And that core snap is a very thin Ubuntu runtime. So a very small shim of user space, which also has SnapD embedded inside it. So when you're running Brave at the moment, you actually have this very thin Ubuntu layer, and then the snap sits on top of that. So effectively, it's an Ubuntu runtime that you're using alongside Solus. But what we're doing is we're going to introduce this concept of base snaps. So the core snap will just become snapd and the bits that it needs that that will be the new core so very very small and then the base snap will be that thin

shim of runtime so the default will be the ubuntu uh runtime the default, yeah. But we're going to add a facility in the YAML to say base colon solace. And if Aiki creates a base snap based on the solace runtime, somebody could create a snap which is built on top of that solus runtime and when that snap is installed on ubuntu you would get that solus base underneath and then the application sitting on top and this will be something that you know any of the distros can do to create their own base snaps and ike can explain why he thinks this will be a useful feature optimized optimized libraries it's going to be awesome games and stuff it's going to be great yeah interesting i just wanted to get that out i mean it could mean you know it could also mean a lot of ubuntu users now can have better libraries thanks to solace in a way you know or yeah i mean like doing a reverse but now

i don't need to switch i don't need to switch to solace yeah it is a reverse team it's exactly a reverse team revenge is sweet yeah that's good i can see it i can see it and it could you could also see for the fedora project if there was something whatever it made the most sense to build on top of or you were there's a great angle for this as well i mean um so travis uh actually martin i'll let you talk about that well what what what do i know about travis well i'm just saying um travis like tools are say what's the other one coveralls and things like that uh invariably you end up with older stuff but say like at the moment i'm having to use docker to build some of my stuff in tree because i don't want to use some of the online services because they're using like a bunch of

maverick and stuff like that so instead of having like a heavyweight docker image which is going to take me about 10 to 15 minutes to build from a tarball of something, I would then be able to use my Solus Devel kind of snap locally to build Budgie. And then I could use like the Ubuntu one to build it. So I can do all of my local tests without then having to go through VMs and heavyweight Docker and stuff.

So yeah, that's something I'm very much looking forward to. Yeah. Especially for something like Budgie as well, where you're using like four or five different GTK versions. It's going to be a godsend. Yeah. And, you know, I've installed Solus on my Entroware Apollo,

and I'm able to do my day job on Solus now because I can snap install Docker, and I can snap install Snapcraft, because i can snap install docker and i can snap install snapcraft and i can snap install lex d and although i'm sitting on top of solus now i can use all of the tools that i need from the you know the ubuntu world on this solar system just fine yeah that's awesome we're converging Yeah, and I suppose in some ways, when I think about a lot of these applications, with some of the exceptions that Wimpy just put out there,

a lot of the things that I would be using these for are applications that never have any interest in being in anybody's repo. They're never going to be in OBS. It's just not what they're interested in. They develop in a paradigm that is Windows and Mac. And on Windows and Mac, you have your base OS, and then you just drop your application down on top of it.

If you need your own libraries, you just include them, screw with the OS ships, here's your library, link to it. You're good to go, it's all in a bundle, and you drop it on the file system. And then when you do a new update, you just drop new versions of all that crap right over the old crap on the file system. And this is how they've done it for going on almost 30 years now. And there's some applications that even though that's changing, that's the culture in which they are created. That's where they come from. And they're never going to work with the Solus maintainers to package it up.

You know, like, look at just all the applications out there that people are using these days. When you look at a desktop with Skype and Slack and all these different applications people use, this is just what happens when that kind of application starts coming to the Linux desktop. They're not going to just change their philosophy and start going to each distribution and say, please, sir, could you please distribute Slack for me? Could you please distribute this to your users, this new update? Could you please distribute it soon? Because it's a vulnerability and we need it fixed and we had to fix something on the server side. So if you don't get this client code out there, we can't flip the server side. So could you please work over the weekend and push that out to all of your users, Mr. Debbie and maintainer? That's never, ever going to happen.

So I... Yeah. So that's why, you know, I don't think it's... I agree with Ike. I don't think it's the biggest problem facing Linux right now. I really don't. it's... I agree with Ike. I don't think it's the biggest problem facing Linux right now. I really don't. But I do think it's... Where we are converging,

it's making it easier for people to use Linux as a platform to get their shit done. And I think that's really important. I think that's the important part. There is now an emergent platform, something that hasn't happened for a long time. Yeah. If you look at any of the other operating systems,

I mean, you look at the stack that's evolved on macOS,'s a very much an emergent platform there lennox hasn't had one you've had all these disconnected targets and toolkits and libraries and apis and standards and now all of a sudden this thing is just starting to bubble up to the surface it's like a common target a common set of run times a common set of expectations and you know like where does the kernel end and where does the distro begin? That's becoming very very clearly defined now, so it's getting to a point now where

we could say, okay, if we added more stuff to bring these developers across, the deployment issue is basically gone. We have something we can tell people, here's what you can target, here's the world that you can live in, you have reasonable expectations can tell people. Here's what you can target. Here's the world that you can live in. You have reasonable expectations or any expectations.

Yeah, I mean, now we can actually bend over for them, you know, bend over backwards for these software developers because before it's like, ooh, well, we can't have your application because then that means we've got to go patch Qt. But that version of Qt is needed by that thing. We couldn't possibly do that because our users use that. It's like now they can just say, well, I'm just going to do

what I do on Windows and ship this patch version to Qt with it. We're never going to stop these people from doing that. But now they've got a way of doing that. Yeah, well, and you know,

it sounds like these proposed changes to sort of separate out the snap processes versus the base runtime area means it's not even an Ubuntu solution anymore. It can just be a Linux solution, and if you're Linux Asus or you're Linux

Asusa, you're good. So that's pretty great, too. So before we go, before we wrap up, Ike, you know I gotta, because you've just released a new version, my favorite question to always ask is, well, now what's next?

Now that you've just spent all of that time and effort getting that out the door, give me what's next. What's next? Come on, give me what's next. So there's a few things. So there's an immediate work list to be done after. We call it the, it's the meta list, the post-release blues. One of the first things we got to do is slightly improve our basically our

pipeline to make us go more faster that's one of the primary goals going forward um dropping some standard stuff like the older web kits and rebasing systemd you know the the boring stuff sure um but it's now it's the sort of the time where for solos 4 we're going to be focusing on the oem enabling we're talking to be focusing on the OEM enabling. We were talking to people already, and the installer is going to get split up to support an OEM workflow, which will be very, very good. Linux driver manager is actually going back into active development,

which does mean the dynamic optimist GPU support will be coming this year. Hurrah. Oh, I'm supposed to drop a bombshell aren't i um we're all gonna put weight behind the kde plasma stack this year as well really so that's getting brought up um i am willing to permit an out of band release for kde yes that i'm looking forward to seeing that i really am i've been i'm getting loads of stuff coming this year not just yeah i saw too much you put you basically put a chart up online that says these are a lot of the things we're working on right now and there's a lot of core infrastructure stuff you're working on yeah i mean one of the things that's kind of been bugging me like as a distribution we say

these are the rules for things that can come into our repos you know and sometimes not everyone has agreed with our reasons for things going into the repos. But one of the things that's interested me is building the best-in-class pipeline. I am interested in building something that's effectively a source-to-deployment pipeline. So once that tarball or sources or that stuff goes into the distribution, we're scanning at that level first before it goes anywhere else. So we're going to be doing first before it goes anywhere else so we're going to be doing static analysis um we even like uh license calculations once it goes in and then

that's going to be tracking those build artifacts all the way through the repositories to the final image so that we can basically track the entire distribution we can say anywhere you know these are the problems these are the things that we have to target so that we can actually say to people use themselves you know well here's a bit of peace of mind you know so that's one of the things i personally want to be focusing on but yeah um 11 at some stage that's what everybody that's what's on everyone's mind but it sounds like there's a lot of good core stuff getting worked on right now i mean that's why i did budgie 10.4 but not i there was actually a load of us and a lot of it was uh stefan helping me there uh like the new workspaces stuff and the new animations

window that was all stefan 10.4 was kind of uh lts i would say because there was a lot of problems in the existing 10.3 release like if you had a bottom panel and you click the budgie menu sometimes it would appear down the bottom sometimes it would start at the top um so we rewrote that put new budgie popovers in so the idea was to give me more time so that we didn't have to worry about budgie 11 for a little bit longer you know so that people have a stable desktop to use day to day yeah and a budgie 11 can start that bit later. Yeah, I think that probably played. I think that's kind of what I was like thinking to myself. It's like, this is getting sort of refined now.

I could probably throw this on a production machine and be comfortable for a while. So that's what I did. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of our goal, you know, get to the point where we can say, you know, this is a world-class OS that we're shipping. And that's the point we're getting to. So it's a bit of a journey.

Lots of things are coming into place with the software center improvements. And I mean, some of the most important things we're doing right now is collaborating with other projects and working outside of Solus. And I think that's very, very important to us and the rest of the Linux community. Yeah, and it sounds like it's all been going pretty good

and you've been kicking some ass. Mr. Wimpy, speaking of some of that cross collab, speaking of cross collab, you're going to be at Odd Camp this coming weekend, correct? I am, yes. And you are doing a bit of a mashup show down there, aren't you? We are, yeah. I think so.

We're going to do a live show on, I think, the Saturday evening, and Joe Ressington is organizing that so it's a mash-up of some of the late night linux podcasters and some of the ubuntu podcasters uh we we're going to do a live podcast uh with a q a section awesome in fact i'll have a link in the show notes uh joe's just put a call out for questions for OggCamp. They have a Google form that you can fill out with your question, or you can go to their latenightlinux.com contact page and probably email it in.

Yeah, the URL is latenightlinux.com forward slash askogg. Or hashtag askogg. That's a good – I like that. We're using hashtag askerror right now for user error. But AskAug, that's good. We should have AskLup. Ooh. Right?

So yeah, there you go. With that, you can find links in the show notes to that stuff. Also, check out Wimpy on the Ubuntu podcast. I'm going to be looking forward to that episode. Are you guys going to put it out in both of your feeds? How does that work? In the past, we have done, I think. We don't do these sort of cross-podcast things very often.

But, yeah, I did one with the guys at Ubukon last year, and we put that out on the Ubuntu podcast feed. So probably yes. So long as we don't make a horlicks of it and it goes well, then yeah, we'll publish it. I hope it's fun. I hope it's fun. Well, guys, great work.

Thank you very much for chatting with us about that. I have just a little Slackware follow-up to do and the best bug I've ever seen submitted, Simon sent it into the show and we got to talk about it. Really quickly, I want to thank Ting though. Just full stop right here. This is one of these sponsors I've been using now for years, and it's made a real difference. It's so simple. I really don't have time to deal with complicated wireless stuff or really pay out the nose for stuff I don't use,

and that's why I like Ting. It's $6 a month for your wireless. And then whatever you use, you just pay for. So if you have minutes in your messages and your megabytes, that's just... I don't use minutes, really. In fact, there's been months where I've not used a minute. Not a minute. Now, there are months. There are months where I use minutes. And I may use many of those minutes.

But I got to tell you, it really averages out... I'm saving about $2,000 a year every two years. So about $1,000 a year. Wow. You know, average Ting bill is about $23 per phone. But the reason why it's such a huge savings for me is I had two lines, and I was paying probably after tax $140 a month for two phones. Now we have three phones, and I'm usually paying around $37, $40 a month.

That's crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. Linux.ting.com. I love it. You pay for what you use, nationwide coverage, GSM and CDMA, and a dashboard that, guess what, goes for days. They also have apps for your device and fantastic customer support. Linux.ting.com.

customer support. Linux.ting.com. You've got to go there to support the show and you get $25 in service credit if you bring a GSM or a CDMA phone. Both?

Yep, they've got a BYOD page to check. Or if you just want to buy a new one from them, they'll give you $25 off the phone. Linux.ting.com. Bam.

You know you're excited if you use the service. You're excited if you don't use the service. Linux.ting.com. So Slackware thoughts. You know, I didn don't use the service. Linux.ting.com. So, Slackware thoughts. You know, I didn't really expect

to use it much after the show, Wes, to be honest with you. No, me either. You know, I sat down and it was on the machine that I was going to load with Gen 2

and I thought, well, you know, I never really got all the way. Like, I never felt like I didn't, you know, I was, I just, I didn't get to that point where I'm just using it

to screw around. I was always in that mode where I'm just using it to screw around. I was always in that mode for reviewing it for the show. Yeah, yeah. And I thought about it a little bit. And I thought to myself, if you go into Slackware and you're not expecting it to be Ubuntu, you're not expecting it to be Solus. You go in with that kind of mindset. It was a lot of fun to get my nostalgia on, but after I got over the nostalgia aspect of it, which is kind of what I talked about the most last week,

I realized that it reminded me of a different time where Linux was simpler and a lot easier to just straight-up understand. Just like I can see it, how it's all laid out right here. It makes a lot of to just straight up understand. Just like I can see it, how it's all laid out right here. It makes a lot of sense to me. And there's something else about it. It's not that it's like raw Linux. It's for better or for worse. Like if you're comfortable with the versions of software

that Slackware has available, and there's like Slack scripts and stuff to get newer stuff, like newer versions of Firefox. But like say you wanted like Apache and a mail program like Postfix and maybe a database. And it just didn't need to be super, super current stuff. It's just something you wanted in your house to serve your favorite links up. And you wanted a MySQL database for the back end for your photo management program or whatever. Slackware is kind of perfect because it's an era of Linux where you could install it. It's so much

like Arch except for without nothing like Arch. I struggle to relate that. Because you can install it and then you can literally not come back to it for two years. And if in two years, after not even touching this box, you log in and all of a sudden you want to install a new package, it's fine.

It's totally fine. It's not a big deal. If you even, and there may be, maybe, maybe been some updates to Slackware, like maybe a point release, maybe an update to Slackware, but probably not. It's a kind of computing we no longer have access to because all of our devices either constantly are getting abandoned by the vendor or need to be updated. It's either or.

My Chromecast, I use it so rarely that I swear every damn time I turn it on, I have to wait 10 minutes while it updates every single time. You know, my set-top box on my TV updates every single month. It is, it's just this non-stop, let us improve that experience for you. And often the experience is not improved. And there really is something to be said for this time. And I remember it in Linux

where there was just so much time between releases. Software moved slower. It just moved slower. And you could install a Debian box and let it just sit in a closet and nothing had really changed on it. And that's what Slackware represents that time that we have lost access to in almost all aspects of our life. And I wouldn't necessarily want to live there. Right. But I could see like if I just had a utility box sitting in the corner hosting up some websites for my land and i it didn't need to be a big deal it's and you didn't want to make it a big old project or like you know like you set it up once you got involved with it

you understood how everything worked and yeah you come back to it there wasn't a whole lot of extra stuff that will suddenly show up or change or there's a real sense of ownership there yeah exactly so i could i could totally see the long-term appeal to Slackware. But you get the fun of like an arch system where you're piecing it together yourself, but where you don't have to constantly read a blog to make sure that you're not going to break your system. That is what it is. So this was sent into the show by Simon, and this is my favorite bug of the week.

It was submitted by Dimitri, and it's over on the Ubuntu mailing list as a bug. And he has a question. He says, the subject is Y2K100 bug. Is it reasonable to expect that the Ubuntu version numbers below will be accurate? In April 2100, it's going to be Ubuntu 100.04 LTS. But in April of the year 3000, it's going to be 1000.04.LTS, which obviously wouldn't make any sense since it's the year 3000. So you have, you know, obviously there's a numbering problem here.

Very important problem that Dimitri brings up. And so the Ubuntu development team took a long, hard look at this bug. And they came back with what I think is a pretty solid answer. And I'm imagining they're going to just go ahead and consider this one resolved. The answer from the Ubuntu team is, the world will have been obliterated by nuclear war and biochemical warfare by then. So no need to worry about it. Well, I feel way more assured. You know, sometimes there's just little things you don't have to worry about. It does make you wonder how they know about that ahead of time.

What are they planning? I wonder if it's like the Apple stuff where they don't, you know, at Apple they have like you can't use iTunes at a nuke base. Like I wonder if Ubuntu has that in the terms of service. Maybe they don't. Snap install Warhead? that in the terms of service. Maybe they don't. Snap, install Warhead? Anyways,

thank you, everybody, for coming in the Mumble Room, but specifically thank you to Wimpy and Ike for being there. Thank you to our regulars for making it this week, even though there wasn't a lot of time for everybody. I see you. I appreciate you guys making it to the Mumble Room, too. I hope you can join us next week. I may or may not be here, depending on how crazy that eclipse is. It could be

the lost episode for me. We'll see. If I do make it, why don't you join us? We'll do it live over at jblive.tv at 2pm Pacific. You can get that converted from JB time to your time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Linuxunplugged.reddit.com is the subreddit.

jupiterbroadcasting.com slash context, the way to get us. And the network's at Jupiter Signal. At Jupiter Signal. That's where you find it thanks for joining us okay let's unleash the hounds. JBTitles.com. Let's pick our title before we go. Did you want to toss anything else development-wise going on? We're thinking about having reoccurring development meetings. We should maybe mention that.

So discord.me slash JupyterColony. That'll be getting set up over there for more developer participation. But was there anything else we wanted to mention development-wise? Right. So what is it, Beardsley? We have a Jupyter dev channel on the Discord now. That's a thing, yeah. And I was talking with one of the developers

that's helped out on JBot in the past, and he's kind of thinking about leading a... We haven't decided how often, maybe weekly, maybe monthly, like a development meetup for the JB community. Really? To work on JB projects. In Discord? Yeah. So probably some mix of voice chat and text chat.

Sweet. And it was partially spurred on by the fact that we're kind of toying with the idea of maybe completely rewriting JBot. Ooh, that's exciting. Of course, every open source project eventually gets to this point. Yeah, well, there's a lot of inherited crap, and we kind of need to just dump all of that to be able to expand what we want JBot to do. So you're saying it's going to be rebuilt better than ever? Yep. You have the technology, I heard. We're going to rebuild it better, faster, stronger.

What are you going to build it with? Probably still going to be Ruby. If you would have said Rust, I think you would have had a lot of people excited. Maybe we'll go crazy. Maybe we'll do Elixir. I was going to say, yeah, Elixir. I think you should.

I hear great things about Phoenix. Yeah, there you go. I noticed that a new bug was opened. I think it was a new bug was opened up on the soundboard. We're trying to get a few more things fixed on the soundboard. Yeah, I want to get basically state saving per action for the soundboard. Oh, yes.

Yes, yes, yes. That way if it crashes, you don't lose all your sound. Or the machine. Yeah. Or the machine that's running on crashes, which has been the case.

Mobile Room, I love you guys. Thank you guys. Speaking of the soundboard, since you have Snap on Solus now, you can install the soundboard. Oh, yeah, that's right. I might.

Why is your soundboard not portable? It is in the AUR.