LINUX Unplugged - Episode 213: Gnome Does it Again | LUP 213

Episode Date: September 6, 2017

The Gnome project is about to solve one of our audience's biggest Wayland’s concerns. But as the project takes on a new level of relevance, decisions for the next version of Gnome have us worried about the future.Plus we chat with Wimpy about the Ubuntu Rally in NYC, Microsoft’s sneaky move to turn Windows 10 into the “ULTIMATE LINUX RUNTIME”, community news & more!

uh as long as everybody keeps showing up we'll just keep using mumble for voice is what i figure because uh you know power to the people yeah uh i've um i've not reconfigured my new irc with um geek shed so if i can just fire up discord that is easier new irc huh i've switched over to irc cloud oh really and and this is a controversial move apparently because when i did this i got a whole bunch of crap for it. But I think it's actually kind of a practical use, too, for IRC. It just makes it simple, and you set it up in one place, and you log in when you need IRC. Yeah, so the way I've been doing it is I used to run ZNC on a droplet, which is an IRc bouncer and that effectively maintained a persistent connection to the

dozen or so servers and the thousands of blooming channels that i'm in and then i had to fire up hex chat which connected to that and that was fine if i was on my desktop but i didn't have a convenient way to do stuff on my mobile devices and irc cloud is brilliant and it even has irc cloud desktop app now yeah which lo and behold is electron yes and now i just fire that up log in log in to any browser on any machine and i'm just there and on my phone and when people ping me in the various channels i just get notifications on android it's just glorious i'm never going back it's great the mobile support is really top notch since it's it's server-based irc the server always remains in the irc room and then the way they're able to send it to your mobile device is pretty smart of course

they have full support for notification settings and granularity there it is it's nice uh i kind of every now and then still like to fire up a traditional IRC client that's just connected to like a single room. I've recently become enamored with Riot, actually. Oh, yeah? I haven't looked at it for quite a while. But Riot has inbuilt IRC bridging as well as some other services as well. Right, right. And the cool thing about it now is that when you create a room, you can add your own kind of widgets to the room, including things like, you know, G-Docs and everything else.

But what really blew me away was it allows you to add a Jitsi widget. So you can actually have a Jitsi conference room inside your Matrix room, and it looks exactly the same, okay, as a conference room. You know what? I love it. I'm really proud of us. We managed to start talking about IRC and we still brought it to Matrix. The Matrix hype is strong.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 213 for September 5th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's surrounded by smoke. My name is Chris. And this is a less hipster, more bearded Wes, also known as Rekai. All right. Well, he might take that. He might actually take that. Yeah, Wes is out today. More on that in just a moment. But let me tell you about what we have coming up on your Unplugged program. We have lots of community news. Linus passed a feature that all of you have been wondering about is coming to Wayland, finally.

And, um, Gnome's removing some more features, and they're pretty sure you don't need them. Hmm. Although I can't imagine life without it. We'll tell you about that. And then later on in the show, Ubuntu's got something cooking over in New York City. The guys over at Canonical have a big party planned. A rally, you might call it. We'll tell you about that. And then we're going to wrap it up with something that I think maybe when I say it's going to sound like, what? But stick with me. Stick with me here for a moment. There is a revolution,

a revolution in the works. And it's bots. And it's not robots. It's not like crazy AI. It's just simple bots that are going to replace our jobs. They're already in the works. We'll tell you about how Linux is missing out on this, why that matters a lot, and maybe how some of us here at JB are trying to make a difference about it. I know it sounds almost like talking about VR. I wish it were true. But if you stick with me, you make it all the way to the end, I'll try to explain to you why I think that it's going to come harder and faster than any of us expect. And unlike self-driving cars, unlike virtual reality, or even just AI and machine learning in general, which are actually now starting to finally pay off after decades.

You know, you and I just watched War Games. Back from 1983, they were talking about this stuff. But they're actually starting to pay off. Bots are not going to be like that. This isn't one of those hyped-up things. This is going to be something that scales of economy are going to ram down our throats, and Microsoft and Google are going to be the ones making all the money.

But we'll talk about that later. We got so much Linux community stuff to get into, a bunch of topics that I want to chat about. But before we bring in the mumber room, I'll just address, Wes couldn't make it today. He's on assignment. He's like on a mission. No, no, Chris, you're wrong. I've just been slowly killing off all of your co-hosts on all your shows.

Very good, sir. Smart move. Very Klingon of you. So he couldn't make it today but uh we had uh thankfully beard's been been stepping in so that worked out pretty well and i because of this totally blaming hashtag hashtag blame no hashtag blame wes uh we're gonna we're gonna uh we're gonna uh we're gonna punt on the Gen 2 challenge for one more week. I'm sorry, but look, I couldn't do it without Wes here.

It's okay if you're scared. It's not that. And the value of this is negative. It's just without Wes here, it's not a complete challenge. And I got a couple of notes from people in the audience who've been taking the challenge. Most of them are done, but not everybody. So I guess it's not my fault. You know, it just happens. So many excuses.

It just happens. Let's bring in that virtual lug time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. How about a day? Hello, everybody. Hello. Hello. It's good to see you.

It's good to see you. I crave ZFS. So let's talk about some news from Linus. I guess when you get famous, even passing a kidney stone is newsworthy, at least over at the register. Linus Torvalds has passed kidney stones and squeezes out Linux 4.13. There's a couple of interesting things of note in here. By the way, Linus is okay. He said it was seven hours of pure agony. But other than that, he's okay. Here's some changes in 4.13 that I think are noteworthy for all of us. he's okay. Here's some changes in 4.13 that I think are noteworthy

for all of us. Finally. Finally. It's almost laughable. It is laughable. It's embarrassing. They finally changed the SIFS behavior, the default SIFS, which is basically the protocol that Samba uses to communicate with SIFS servers. They've changed it from SMB 1.0 to SMB 3.0.

And Linus himself admits it's embarrassing that we hadn't done that sooner. Yeah, it only took a few major uh vulnerabilities to make that happen it's naive now the reason why it hasn't been a major issue is because windows server stopped refusing it around windows server 2013 depending on your group policies so the server would then have to automatically try to negotiate up but that takes time and then it negotiates to the lowest common denominator that it can get which isn't the best security approach here's what our friends at canonical are probably excited about this also is the main lining of the app armor code that will tie to snap confinement is this wimpy is not to

talk out of turn here is this am i right is this everything we need for app armor to be bolted in yeah oh boy that's a big deal there's been a an ongoing effort to make sure that all of that stuff got upstreamed for some time now and um there was a a tweet by dustin kirkland a few days ago who highlighted that two of the canonical kernel engineers are in the top committers at the moment because of all of the work that's going on in that space i saw that yeah that is really impressive um so this is a big deal this is this is 4.13 i think might also be the uh is this going to be what the future lts is based off of is that right i think it might even land in 1710 i'm not certain but it will certainly be at the start of 1804 i i i'm i'm not sure but the other interesting thing about 413 is this carries most i think all of the important patches for the gpd

pocket to run no kidding i missed that yeah that's great that now that makes me want one even more jeez that is one of those toys that i really regret I couldn't have got at the time because I really am excited by stuff like that. Yeah, I have one. It's really nice. I love it. You do. You have one, do you? Yeah, I have one. Would you be happening to bring it to New York?

I will be bringing it to New York. I have it on authority from the lead developer of Ubuntu Marti that there may be a GPD pocket spin in the works. Oh, boy. How about that? That is so cool. So do you, I mean, just quickly, I mean, are you satisfied with the purchase?

By and large, yes. The only thing that's a bit sketchy is the quality of the keyboard. Or rather, the only bit that's a bit sketchy from the perspective of an end user is the quality of the keyboard. Or rather, the only bit that's a bit sketchy from the perspective of an end user is the quality of the keyboard. And I haven't worked out yet if that is universally across all of them, or it just depends what manufacturing run you had. So, well, you and I, I think we'll talk much more about that. But I wanted to cover some news that was happening right now. August 31st posted over at techrepublic.com. right now. August 31st posted over at techrepublic.com

The Tech Republic reports that essentially the way I read this is Microsoft's trying to position themselves as the ultimate Linux runtime for people developing software on Linux and Windows. And this is insidious. As long as you don't need a GUI of

any kind. Right. Yeah. Good disclaimer. So Craig Lowen, I think is how you say his name. He's the program manager at Microsoft. He's showing off a new feature for the Windows subsystem for Linux. Yep, they're adding features, everybody. And what you can do, and it's fascinating, is you can chain commands together from different distros and call them from all inside of Windows. from all inside of Windows. So from the Windows command line, you could pipe data output from, say, Windows IP config into OpenSUSE, which then could parse it for a few things, and then pass it on to Ubuntu, which then could do some other work on it,

and then send it back to the Windows command line. And it all happens in under a second. You've run a Windows executable, you've fed that information into one of the Linux distributions, it's taken that output and feeds it into another Linux distribution. The chain of commands was relatively simple just in this example, but it even included

like taking out IP information, adding color coding. They also demoed the ability to run multiple Linux distros side-by-side in Windows, showing windowed versions of Ubuntu and OpenSUSE Elite 42 side-by-side, using different tools, just each in different command prompt windows. showing windowed versions of Ubuntu and OpenSUSE Elite 42 side by side, using different tools, just each in different command prompt windows.

So as well as allowing users to run Bash tools and commands inside Windows, the subsystem also allows Windows software and files now to be called from Bash. So, is it just me? I will admit I have a bias in this particular. I can't help but see this now as exactly what Microsoft did to NetWare, which was hugely dominant in the file server and print server space and authentication and directory services. Huge. And then Microsoft came in and implemented the NetWare-compatible tools inside of Windows.

So you could talk IPX. You could log into NetWare networks. You could use their network directories inside of Windows. So you could talk IPX, you could log into network networks, you could use their network directories for file permissions and provisioning of, you could use the groups and all of it. And they just, they gave it a grade A experience. And then they made it really easy to move over and then they just slowly degraded that grade A experience until you just ended up using Windows.

And I could see something similar where they do this, but with their real end goal is to get you to get everything on Azure, to get you on, Windows is the ultimate runtime. All right, well, if you're going to use Linux, if you got to use that free-tard crap, then you run it on your machine under Windows 10 in a window, and then you run the services on Azure. I can't help but see it this way. I can't help but see it as almost as a contempt for the Linux desktop. It feels to me like it's a...

It is a diminishing of the platform. I don't know. The more features they add... I really hope the subsystem for Linux would get implemented, it would be what it was, and it would just stay there. And it would just be a great, easy way to run Bash, which my co-host on Coder Radio has been trying. He says it's not perfect, but it would be a way to do it.

But now this is actually starting to bug me a little bit, because if you are not really very comfortable with the Linux landscape, one of the hardest choices is which distribution do I use, or how do I maintain compatibility across distributions, especially when I'm trying to develop software, and now they've solved that problem. And they've solved it with Windows. Am I misreading this? I mean, this feels bad to me. I mean, you could take the opposite tack and say that they're giving a good command line experience for these distros, which would ease the transition if people wanted to switch to a full-time Linux distro.

Yeah, okay, I like that. What do you think, Bobby? Well, are we interested to see how much more of the sort of polishing of the rough diamond Microsoft do? Because there are a number of things that don't work in WSL that I think for many serious Linux users would be a showstopper and also I still feel like this is going after Mac's audience you know you know macOS is audience and demonstrating that you can have a solid Linux user space on Windows

and provide all of those tools that front-end and back-end developers are using on Windows rather than leaving for macOS. Yeah, you're right. It probably is more of an assault against macOS or keeping people, stopping the bleeding, might be the other way to put it. Yeah, I think, yeah. I don't know that many people will come back but it might stop a few from leaving yeah um but if these features keep coming maybe it will attract some

people back i don't know i i don't know enough about the um the mentality of developers using mac and what's what's important to them to understand why they would choose Mac over Windows. Now, I'm quite curious, though, actually, because obviously Microsoft invested quite a bit again into the whole PowerShell experience. And the fact is, Carol, they're going to be dumping that in favor of Linux, which makes me wonder exactly what direction they think they're going to go in.

Are they dumping it? I don't think so. No, I've not heard that. I mean, certainly PowerShell's available for Linux as well now. And the thing is, there's a whole ecosystem of Windows admins that are using Microsoft tools all day long that have no

interest in Linux subsystems. So I don't think they could replace it. I mean, you could make the argument that they could maybe just integrate PowerShell into the Windows subsystem for Linux and just make it one nice big package. Mwahaha. Mwahaha. Well, there is one more step to this world domination that Windows is driving for.

It's on the tip of your mind, I know. It's the elephant in the room. And it's – dominance is impossible unless they implement this feature. Obviously, I'm talking about ButterFS support. So, posted on GitHub this week, WinButterFS version 1.0. I guess it probably wasn't posted, but the version, this update. WinButterFS, as you might guess, is a Windows driver for a next-generation Linux file system.

And by next generation, well, that's a very polite way. It's more like the Voyager of Linux file systems. It's a reimplementation from scratch, so what could go wrong? It contains no code from the Linux kernel. It should work on any version of Windows 7 onwards. And, of course, because we like our ButterFS beta file systems to go with alpha drivers, this is really the perfect combination. And this guy, of course, is taking donations

to support this work. WinButterFS version 1.0. It has read-write support. Apparently it has support for RAID 5 and RAID 10. And RAID 6. What could go wrong? What could go wrong? Have at it, everybody, if you want that.

Link is in the show notes for all of those thumb drives you formatted in ButterFS and can't get on Windows. I don't know how we missed this next story. August 11th, this happened, and it flew right over our heads. Hewlett-Packard sent a supercomputer into space on one of Elon's rockets, one of the SpaceX rockets, on a Jono shuttle. And it's kind of cool. It's more interesting than you might even think, because the thing about these computers they usually put up there is they have to make serious modifications. And they end up running, like, decade-old power PC processors, and, you know,

they have 16 megabytes of RAM, and they have these crazy old A-B failover ROMs and all this weird, like, ancient stuff, so they can't really fully take advantage of high-end computing. Well, we have a Mars to get to, and we're not going to get there with Emacs in our shuttles. Well, and, you know, not only that, but, you know, one of the hardest things to deal with with these supercomputers is cooling. That's true. Put it into Apple Zero? It's very cold.

Well, so check this out. So this is this HPE Apollo 40 that runs Linux, and it's using their new interconnect memory system. And they made no hardware modifications to the server. They created a unique water-cooled enclosure. I'll show you a picture here in a moment, for the hardware. And then they developed purpose-built software that runs on Linux that monitors the environmental constraints and reliability requirements of a supercomputer in space. And so normally, so normally you'd have to just totally lock this thing down. You'd have to ruggedize it. You'd have to harden it.

You'd clock everything down. You'd do this crazy cooling. And then you go through a NASA testing process where they test 146 different things about it, and then they certify it. And without making any modifications, by using this software, they could automatically change the load on the server and dial it up or dial it down, clock it up, clock it down, based on radiation levels and things like that. They were able to, without making any hardware modifications, just doing it in software,

levels and things like that, they were able to, without making any hardware modifications, just doing it in software, pass all 146 safety tests to put this freaking super server up into space. By the way, here's a picture of what it looks like. Does that mean that Linux officially has the most powerful supercomputer not on this planet? It would have to be, because we don't do this normally. This is like a big deal. And it's sort of a historical event for a supercomputer to be up in space. And for it to be running Linux is awesome.

And for the greater goal to be, well, when we go to Mars, we're going to need to be able to play Doom. This is how they're going to do it. I'm just waiting for the asteroid data centers. Yeah, that's going to be great. With like these just like they'll just go on there and glom on and they'll just orbit around. And they'll be their off-site backup. Connected via microwave. Yeah.

Yeah. That's where Backblaze's future expansion is going to go. Actual cloud storage, space cloud. You ever notice how every website wants to send you notifications? Is anybody turning those on? I can only imagine how awful that'd be if you actually said, as an experiment on a system, I'm going to nuke after like a week. I should just allow all notifications on websites and see what that's like. I think I have mine automatically set to deny all. Oh yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about one of our cousins. Solaris seems to be dead as well as the ZFS teams

and Spark teams that were employed by Oracle. This is a process that's been going on since December 2016, really, when they laid off 2,500 people from the Solaris division. 2,500 people. Holy crap. And then in January, another 450 were laid off. But then get this. This is so cold. But then get this. This is so cold.

This week, September 1st, Oracle employees started getting FedEx packages from Oracle America Incorporated that you had to sign for. And they were either sent to the home, some were sent to desks. And that was the notification they were getting laid off, is these fedex envelopes arrived that they had to sign for and there was no pre-warning so people around the office start getting these packages just random people around the office like but not everybody and so people start opening these up and they're like i just got fired and then the person sitting next to him didn't get a package and they don't know if they're getting if theirs is coming yet or not it's and you signed it, so they know that you saw it. Yeah.

So Simon Phipps tweeted, For those unaware, Oracle laid off all the Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent end-of-life product move. It's such a crappy way they're going about it, too. And so then people are able to see like... Isn't that their standard MO, though? I mean, Oracle are known for handling anything with tact and diplomacy. too and so then people are able to see like that's their standard mo though i mean oracle unknown for handling anything with anything with tact and diplomacy yeah it is true it is it is it is really true and um now you can wonder if some of these maybe we'll be able to join some of these

developers might be able to join the alumos project which is a you know an open source fork of open solaris and of, ZFS will continue on. There's different projects for that, but jeez louise. Just, I don't know. It seems like Solaris is... So here's how you know Solaris isn't obsolete, even though it seems like it might be to us Linux users. But Oracle knows there's some people

that still absolutely need it for their workload. So these cold bastards are going to run virtual Spark on x86 systems. And they're launching a migration. They haven't officially announced this new service yet, but on October 1st, they plan to launch this move your Oracle Solaris instance to the cloud. And they're going to emulate Spark on x86, which, you know, that's just going to rock. That's just going to rock.

And they'll label it as Virtual Spark on x86. Your legacy Solaris app survive on an x86 Spark emulator. And people are going to have to buy it because, you know, there's these mission-critical organizational apps that run on these legacy installations. I've seen it myself. I've, you know, I've worked at places that have used it for weird things like massive statement printing and batch processing jobs and all these weird things you'd think there'd be better systems and faster systems for. But they're just, they're totally dependent on it.

And so Oracle's going to try to get them to sign up for that virtual spark on cloud. Probably great performance. I think what people ought to do is if you're stuck in this spot, there is a developer we've talked about before, Brandon Gregg. He works at Netflix. And we've talked about how he's on performance tracing on Linux under really high streaming loads. I know the BSD Now guys like to tell you that they run all free BSD over there, but the dirty secret is they run quite a bit of Linux too. And he has done lots of great blog posts,

brendingregg.com, about Linux under crazy workloads, tracing processes, metrics on Linux CPU usage, and all that stuff. And he's written a massively comprehensive guide on Solaris Linux migration tips. This is current. He just posted this today. And he goes through all of it, moving to Lumos, moving to Linux. He talks about the future of ZFS, ZFS on Linux and open ZFS projects. He talks about observability, which is something that he has a unique perspective on. Like, these are the performance things you should expect.

This is how you're going to be able to, if you do these kind of performance tracing and metrics on Solaris, here's what you're going to be able to do or how you get that information under Linux. It's fascinating and maybe very, very useful. And it's coming from this guy who's got a lot of experience working at Netflix. And he does a piece here that may be more relevant than ever, Zones vs. Containers, which if you're interested about this, he's got a good space on it. Sort of a nice transition guide from a smart guy. Yeah, with a lot of experience.

But wow, that's so weird. Because, like, I don't know, you know, Solaris has literally been around since I've been in the industry, I think. I mean, I think. So I just, to me, it seems like one of those, like IBM's System 390s, like they're just never going to go AIX. It's just never going to go away.

But Solaris, or Oracle is ruthless, I suppose. Alright, guys, any Solaris stories or closing thoughts on saying goodbye to a cousin of ours before we move on? We do have many things to cover. Just very sad. I used to work at Sun. I used to work on Solaris.

1993. My first internet chatroom experiences were on Sun machines. Sniff sniff. Yeah, this is really the death of Sun as any kind of organizational structure that remained. Honestly, the way they let them go

just does not surprise me. mean larry ellison is a very famous jerk and it just trickles down throughout the company and he he set the culture yeah well you know hey at least we've got unbreakable linux so everybody go install unbreakable linux because that's the future obviously that's the way to go. Also known as Red Hat. Oh! Well, so whenever we talk about Wayland, the thing that everybody always writes in or comments on an episode is when we go to Wayland, how the heck

am I going to have remote desktop? Well, remember there's a technology we talked about a little while ago, Pipewire, I think it's called. It may be here to solve our problems. I'll tell you more about that in just a moment. First, I'm going to tell you about Ting. You go to linux.ting.com to get $25 off a device or $25 in a service credit if you bring a device and you support this here show.

You're still rocking the S6 over there on the Ting network. Yeah, until it dies. Are you feeling like it's time for an upgrade? Not quite yet. Yeah. Although some of that new Android O stuff is looking pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. that new uh android o stuff is looking pretty good yeah yeah yeah like the notification grouping and stuff is what i like the most i think i like the uh the fact that you can upgrade your your um os without having to upgrade

all the drivers all right because it's the first one to ship with treble yep yeah that's what's so great about ting is they're really just mobile the way it's meant to be they get out of your way so i have a nexus 6 on ting it's running the the day oh came out i got it ting doesn't get in the way they don't have to like skin it with the ting experience you know or the the ting video store the ting app store there's none of that if you whatever your device ships with that's fine they don't care if you want to get it from play and bring it over if you want to go grab a device from their store their honey badger about it just just check their BYOD page. And here's why it matters. You just pay for what you use. You got wifi where you're at, then you're not on the ting network. You're not paying for it. If you're on telegram or WhatsApp or I don't know, whatever messenger you like to use,

then you're not using SMS. So you don't pay for it. I never make phone calls unless I have to, like I was just talking about, I, I will call somebody through Slack, through Slack, before I will use the phone. So I really don't need to pay for minutes unless I have to make a phone call. So it's just your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. It's $6 for the line and then whatever Uncle Sam's cut is, and that's it. You're always in control. You can see your usage at any moment. You can take complete control and set usage alerts, and they have a CDMA and GSM network. Pretty good. Pretty, pretty good.

Here's my question, Chris. Pretty. When is Ting going to start making phones? I know, right? The Ting phone. That way I can just get my updates day one for non-Google devices. In the meantime, they are giving away a Moto E4 Plus. You can get in on that. Go to the Ting blog. Just start by going to linux.ting.com, linux.ting.com. And thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

I'm really excited about Pipewire. It's going to solve so many problems if they manage to pull it off. And I like where they're starting. Skunkworks project to potentially replace Pulse Audio and GStreamer with one rebuilt, from the ground up, media pipeline, like a proper media API for a desktop. But it's starting in different areas. And I think this is kind of genius. So remote desktop under Wayland, never been a thing. Wayland don't got time for that. Wayland is a protocol. It ain't Wayland's problem. So that's the thing. That's what's really been holding it up, is that it's not the job of the Wayland project to implement this. Then it comes down to your Mudders or your K-Wins of the world,

and they are going to have to implement something. And this is where Pipewire comes in. It's an API they're building for GNOME Remote Desktop. It's going to be a service that works with GNOME and it uses Dbus APIs to talk to LibMutter. Mutter is the GNOME window manager and the Wayland compositor. They're implementing two new APIs and one's like a screencast one

and one's a remote desktop. So screencasting is also a part of this. And the Pipewire stream containing the contents of the system stream will be sent to a system. The new APIs can create full screen streams, streams of just individual windows, which that sounds amazing, which we could totally use that in production. And the form has already been implemented in this code. The new API allows for services such as RDP or VNC servers to be piped through this, which really opens it up to the type of clients you can use.

There's all kinds of VNC stuff you can do with it. It's not really clear when this is going to hit mainline GNOME. It could be a way off. But the test code's out there. Have they said what language it's in? I don't think so. I wonder. You'd probably have to, whatever pipewire is written in. Yeah, I guess.

I would imagine. You know. I'm just wondering how gnome independent it is for other people to pick up. Well, it talks directly to mutter.

So you ain't got mutter, you ain't got any of this. And nobody but gnome is crazy enough to use mutter. Well, yeah, but you could maybe write bindings

for something else. Yeah, yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what do you think? As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, that the, you know, Wayland default composter system had it built into it.

So everyone's free to implement their own version of it. Oh, okay. But it has to be done to the actual composter itself. You're talking about Weston? So are you saying Weston has... Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, Weston had a patch for it a long time ago. Yeah, okay. It has to be done to the actual compositor itself. You're talking about Weston? So are you saying Weston has, is that what you're talking about? Yeah, Weston had a patch for it a long time ago.

Yeah, yeah. I don't remember us talking about that, but that's great. And so the problem is that people don't use Weston, of course, so they have to get that implementation in their own compositor. Mr. Wimpy, I'd love to kind of pick your brain about this from a Mate perspective and the fact that this is tied directly into a mutter you have any thoughts on that and whaling in general well it's it's not so much that's tied into matter but the more i look at whaling the more i realize if you are wanting to write a Wayland compositor and all of the other stuff, the Wayland compositors that exist at the moment extend the Wayland protocols.

That's the first thing. And the second thing is you have to implement much of what X does for you already in each of the compositor implementations. Absolutely. And it feels like a lot of heavy lifting and duplicated effort. And it feels like a lot of heavy lifting and duplicated effort. And in the smaller projects, there is not the breadth or depth of skills to do that. I also agree with that. So I have a concern that if we don't coalesce around some standards that are not tightly coupled to a particular desktop implementation, then some of the desktops that we have could become irrelevant in the next five to six years,

because I still reckon that's the time it's going to take for Wayland to really, you know, replace the functionality and serviceability of X for most people. I think that's 100% spot on, 100%. And when I see these kinds of things, like, well, this is great. This is going to be great for GNOME users. This is going to be really great. But if it is only useful for GNOME and desktops using Mutter, then it's always going to be a niche implementation. I agree with Wimpy. We need something that's common across, we really need something common across all the, well, I suppose if they're all talking RDP and VNC, it might not matter in the end, but if we have varying

implementations or varying levels of performance, it's the exact kind of shit show that Windows and Mac never have to deal with. It is almost the prime example of a Linux shitshow that causes hassle for system administrators and users and everybody to understand, and it causes a deference of development time. So on that point, imagine this, then I'll be devil's advocate. point imagine this then i'll be devil's advocate what if this move towards wayland and the technologies that are being developed with most momentum to support this new this new way of doing things are coming out of the gnome camp what if all we're left with at the end of this is gnome and also kde because they're able to to keep pace with this what if the linux desktop is gnome so just like mac os and windows there is only one desktop environment that you have to now focus on in order to target linux is that better or worse well here's where i begin to

get a little concerned this alarms me a bit because i You could see it going this way, even if it wasn't as black and white as that, Wimpy, but say all of the enterprise market, all of the business market ran GNOME. where it's such a huge percentage that it becomes the only relevant one in terms of industry, which we could already be sliding in that direction. Not in terms of community weight, but in terms of industry weight. I mean, given that, you know, we've been dropping Unity in favor of GNOME, hardly makes GNOME niche applications, does it? Well, that's true. See, the thing is, the more I hear about GNOME, the more it feels like a hacked-together desktop, and you will need somebody that really knows what they're doing to give you a good GNOME experience.

So there's an update on Alan Day's blog about status icons being removed from GNOME 3. Have you guys heard about this? In GNOME 3.26, status icons going away. You know, the ones like your Dropbox icon, your Skype icons, your Discord icons you might have right now as you're listening to this show. VLC. If you want to keep them,

the official recommendation of the project is to install Top Icons extension. I think that may be a Wayland limitation, actually, because I noticed when I switched to Wayland, my icons just disappeared. There's a few. They say this long term, the change will be good for end users.

They're going to provide a better experience. It goes into some detail. Here, I'll give you the rationale before we go too far. The main reasons relate to two things. They think it'll be a better experience for users, and it'll align with GNOME's wider design philosophies and goals, which is always a great one. So they're going to implement new APIs, notifications, MPRIS, which is media playback, search providers, and lib cloud providers

for the things like file sync. Here's their core rationale. The design of status icons goes against GNOME's principles. They know from observation that people often only care about a small fraction of their status icons that they are exposed to. But the rest that just get stuck in there don't reflect their interest or any of the activities they're doing. And it stems from an old status icon API and the ethos behind it. Users do not opt into status icons. How do they know? Well, observation, they say.

What usability studies have they conducted to back up that point? What usability studies have they conducted to remove all the other features that they've removed? So this is where I'm going with this. Shouldn't they be able to know from the GNOME extension at all? Because isn't that tying to your individual desktop? Can we pause for a moment, though? And can we have a discussion about the fact

that perhaps one of the most relevant Linux desktops, the official recommendation of the project, is if you want that basic functionality, install an extension.

And that, to me, doesn't feel like a sustainable, good route. Like, we can't have our most... Like, this stuff has to our most, like this stuff has to be, some of this stuff has to be, it can't be extensions. It has to be baked in.

Well, yeah, because if you think about like the knock-on effects from that, every time you update your known desktop, if the extension is not updated, you don't have status icons anymore. And talk about ultimate fragmentation. Just a support nightmare, a standardization nightmare, a developer targeting nightmare. You have no idea if a user is going to have a status icon. Again, I want to pick your brain, Wimpy, because I know you guys over there at Canonical have been churning out this 1710 desktop working with

GNOME. You guys have got to be coming across stuff like this, you know, with the dock to status icons to testing Wayland. Is GNOME 3 not it? Like, are we, are we going all in on something that's just, it's hacked together with extensions. Mutter is a performance hog. Like I'm JavaScript all over the place. I know I'm, I know I'm hitting typical gnome talking points, but we are really on the precipice of something here. And I'm curious what you think about it being right there on the front lines of implementing a modern gnome desktop right now. Well, I'm, I'm not on the front lines of implementing a modern gnome desktop right now well i'm i'm not on the front lines of implementing okay near the front lines you're much closer than the rest of us let's put it that way i have i have some sight yeah um i don't know what the

position on indicators are with regards to the ubuntu implementation i imagine that we will find out in fairly short order what with gnome 326 coming along next week i think and we're obviously releasing our first gnome based desktop uh a month after that so we it remains to be seen there are some rough edges that we're running into um you know we're seeing some some processes um are crashing way way more than than we would than we've seen in the past you know there are some gnome services that have a colossal number of duplicates that are crashing in the same way um and that's because we have a lot of users and there are a lot of users that are very interested in the 1710 release so there's lots of people that are banging on it even at this early stage but that gives us the opportunity to use those as data points and identify where the rough edges are

and where development effort needs to be focused and And as I understand it, there are good lines of communication upstream. So if we've got good data to support investigation into stabilizing particular pieces, then I'm sure they'll be open to us helping do that. We have a new update. Is it DidRox? Am I saying that right? Yep, that's his handle. Yeah, Didier. Yeah, DidRx.fr, he's been posting these basically Road to Gnome updates,

and Day 9 is talking about the theme. I like it. I could see it getting iterated on a bit for the LTS. I could see some areas for iteration, but it looks really good. It looks a lot like the unity theme but a little more modern a little more pro it has sort of that gnome 3 polish to it i'm i i really like how this is turning out and i really like getting these updates too so what do you think we started well we started i was fortunate in that i was at the Fit and Finish sprint in the Canonical offices in London a couple of weeks ago.

And Didier was there and other members of the desktop team. And we had some feedback from the community as well. So we saw and helped this sort of take shape over a couple of days there. And there's still some work to come to refine it a bit but it's looking like ubuntu now isn't it really yeah i already saw some people getting all worked up about the amazon button there yeah well it's inevitable isn't it but it's it's it's it gets we could actually dedicate a whole another show someday to it. Perhaps we will. Because to me, it's nothing like the old Surge.

It's a great way for Canonical to make revenue. It's just a launcher now. Yeah, if you're going to go shop on Amazon. A lot of people use Amazon. It's a clean-looking theme, and I think it's going to be a great implementation of GNOME. And I know you've been following Didier's posts about how we're using some new facilities to segregate the settings for the vanilla GNOME session and the Ubuntu session. Okay, so talk about that a little bit. Help me crystallize that in my head.

Right, so this is all happening in GL glib um it's a new feature there so when you um so most of the gtk desktops have this ability where you have default configuration and then you can override it with your distribution or desktop settings and at the moment for example there are certain things where ubuntu set things up in stock ubuntu unity a particular way amate might have the same keys but configure them differently and ubuntu budgie may also configure the same keys differently so when you install the three desktops beside one another they clatter and you don't necessarily get the Budgie experience on Budgie and the Marte experience on Marte because it will be whatever settings got inherited first. So not only are we using this ability to namespace settings.

So now each session has keys that are specific to the session it was launched under. And this is how you get that customization under the Ubuntu login versus the vanilla configuration under the GNOME login. But Word was put out to the Ubuntu Mate team and also to the Ubuntu Budgie team because we are using the same mechanics to configure our default experience. And now we're able to names space our configuration so the mate stuff

doesn't tread on budgie and doesn't tread on ubuntu and doesn't tread on the default gnome configurations wow so this this mechanism goes far wider than just segregating that happened yeah yeah yeah that's great so it's sort of a flavor-wide improvement people are going to use it. Yeah. And then all the flavors that are, all the flavors that are canned jumped on that. I mean, well, not all, but you know, the flavors that can jumped on. That's awesome.

And then. That's really great. The theming that you see of Gnome Shell is an extension. Well, not an extension, a GNOME extension, but it builds on that technique. So the Gnome Shell has its own CSS to style it. And when you log into the Ubuntu session, it looks for a different named CSS file. So we don't have to mess with the default styling of GNOME shell. We have our own separate styling,

and that's what's used to style the Ubuntu session. I would love to see more distributions. Take that on. I'm looking at you, Anteorgros. I would love to see you. I think it's going to happen because this is a new capability. So this is that we're using the final dev versions of GLib in order to do this at the moment,

but that's all about to get released alongside gnome 326 so this is stuff that will be available to everybody in a matter of days and other distributions are going to be able to take advantage of this and they almost certainly will so 1710 is going to have support for all known driverless printing standards i don't even really know i don't grog that fully gnome 3.26 and possibly maybe we'll see kernel 4.13 possibly i can so i know a little bit about the um the driverless printing stack okay so there's a specification uh that means that printers these days don't have to have all of their own bespoke drivers. They implement a common printing language. So printers that support this, you don't require a big, hefty lump of, you know,

cups, drivers and filters and what have you to make them work. So the guy that looks after all the printing stack in Ubuntu, who just so happens to be like the world authority on cups and printing in general he's like this amazing guy who's dedicated his life to just doing printers well um he's put the whole stack together so driverless printing just works so if you've got these modern printers they just magically appear and you can just print to them without any setup or faff you know they should they should give it a name like um the common unified printing standard yeah some of them some well that's that's the services that you know power it all but there's another spec for

actually in the printers to define how they operate very cool well that's actually sounds like it's going to make things you know one of those just works experiences when you have a modern printer that supports that, which is probably, every time you have a win like that, it really impresses people. Like, it really endears them. Like, you imagine, you sit down to use Linux, and you go, oh, crap, time to add the printer, and you go in there, and it just kind of shows up. Yeah, that sells Dells. That's what that does. That's great. Okay, well, so don't go anywhere, MP. Stand by. We have a rally to talk about, but let me get a moment in here with DigitalOcean, my friends over at DigitalOcean. I love it. I love DigitalOcean for all of the reasons that every single day here at Jupyter Broadcasting, we find them more and more valuable. You can get spun up in less than 55 seconds. They have all SSDs for all their machines. The virtualizer is a Linux box running KVM. Oh, Linux powered. You know, every software that we don't run locally, Chris, is on DigitalOcean. It is. I know it's just so solid.

People watching the live stream right now, DigitalOcean. We'll talk maybe more about this later, but when you have a service like this that you can integrate into your business, when they make an API an actual priority, it really is a game changer for us. Because not only is there just a ton of open source code to let us remotely control our DigitalOcean infrastructure, but we've been able to write our own around it. Our bot is DigitalOceanception because it runs on DigitalOcean and also starts DigitalOcean droplets. That's true.

That's awesome. It has lightning-fast networking, 40 gigabits into the hypervisors, highly available block storage. You can just add up to 16 terabytes as you need. It shows up as a block device. Load balancing is a service. Pre-built open source apps, ready to go, or build it from scratch. Don't forget about the crazy storage stuff, Chris.

Yeah. Their storage these days is such a cool way to play around with things like ZFS or even ButterFS or LVM, and then at the end of the day, just destroy it all. And you didn't have to go out and buy hundreds of hard drives because you could attach these things as individual block devices, and you could start messing around with the storage managers and do some cool stuff. If you're going to get into high-end CPU-intensive stuff, you need to do a batch of a bunch of image processing or video processing,

or I'm not going to judge what you're doing. They now offer really powerful CPUs with the Skylake Xeons and Broadwell Xeons with like hundreds of gigs of RAM, but they all start at like $5 a month. My favorite rig is $0.03 an hour, digitalocean.com. You go over there,

and of course, I got to tell you the most important part. You have to use our promo code, D-O-Unplugged. That'll give you a $10 credit. D-O-Unplugged, one word, and then you can spin up that $5 machine two months for free or run the $0.03 an hour one for a while. It's a great deal. DigitalOcean.com. Just create your account and then apply our promo code D-O-Unplugged. It's one word. It supports the show, and thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Hey-o! So the Ubuntu Rally is an event taking place in New York City September 25th through the 29th. It's like a five-day

hackathon, and I'm really excited, because I think it's going to be like the timing of the event is with the new Ubuntu 17.10, and Mark's back as the CEO. it's going to be the timing of the event is with the new Ubuntu 17.10. And Mark's back as the CEO. He's going to be there. I think it's going to be a pretty big event. But Wimpy's going to be going.

Wimpy's going to be there. What do you think, Wimpy? Is this something that I should definitely try to make it out to? Yes. I was hoping you should definitely make it out to. Good, because I'm planning to. Now, is that because of the contents of the rally or you just want to see the hair i know i just want to see wimpy i

just know i'm talking to him um so yeah chris is in a unique position where he can uh you know look at this with observer's eyes and also see you know how the sausage is made. So the event itself is very much developer-focused, and it's a sprint, a five-day hackathon sprint, composed of major software vendors, Ubuntu engineering, people from every level of the stack, and contributors as well and it's a doing sprint so there is going to be a lot of furious energy and activity this week so we've got a number a lot of people from canonical going we've invited some people from around the community to attend and we have because space is limited we have some slots remaining for non-sponsored places which basically means

if you're local to new york or you can arrange your own travel and accommodation then let us know if there's something you really want to work on and we'll review those proposals. And if we can accommodate you, we'll extend you an invitation to, to join us. Um, that's not a funded invitation.

That's a, you can, you know, get in the room because we have a limited space and we can't just have people walking in off the street and filling the, filling the place up because we, we have got a tight schedule of stuff that we can and it's uh it's meant to get work done yeah exactly yeah i'm gonna be a fly on the wall when the work happens because i don't want to interrupt that i just want to observe and i'm i'm i'm paying my way i'll haul my way there

and uh uh and i think that's uh gonna be a i'm hoping a good chance to like wimpy said not just see how the sausage is made but uh uhkindle connections that I haven't met. I haven't seen some of these people in person or met them in person, but only talked to them online. So many great opportunities around that. I watched your short little vlog, Chris. You were super excited about it. I was, yeah. Well, you know, it's fun.

I love to travel. So any chance I get to travel, I'm down for it. There's a lot of buzz around this at the moment. And, you know, there's some interesting people coming along who are from outside the company as well. So it will be a rare opportunity to sort of see those interactions. Anybody you want to name or do you want to just leave it vague? Well, there are some large companies coming who I don't want to name at the moment because I don't want to steal their thunder. And then there's also people that we do know in the community.

So the likes of Aikidoity from Solus is going to be there. The Elementary Guys are going to be there. KDE Representation is going to be there um kde representation is going to be there so you know a lot of those those people in the community that we're working alongside some gnome developers are going to be there i hear there's going to be some more work on wayland and high dpi taking place and then you know iot manufacturers and pc oems you know, IoT manufacturers and PC OEMs, you know, getting their input on the direction of the desktop, active community contributors and people working on snaps and, you know, language and ecosystem developers, you know, people that are working on the new generation of languages and stuff like that. You know, this sounds like it might be a good way or a good place to talk about some of that Wayland standardization stuff. You know, it could be something that gets discussed.

So I was wondering, so does Canonical have offices in that area? Was New York picked because it's a high profile location that people can get to? Like, what's the story there? Do you know? a high-profile location that people can get to. Like, what's the story there? Do you know? My understanding is that New York was chosen because it's a hotbed of technology companies in the area.

And companies can make it. I think that was the main reason. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I will. That'll be my first experience of New York. I've never been.

So I've always wanted to go. Never thought I would sleep in the truck when i went to new york it's pretty intense chris so if anybody's got some new york tips uh for uh truck camping i've got i've got a tip for you chris yeah don't sleep in the truck yeah i know i know i think before i go i'm considering maybe i should get my front windows tinted my back windows are tinted but you know i gotta think about these things. Be prepared for complicated driving. That's all I can say. But, you know, I am –

Well, you've got to remember, this is a city that's only a couple miles across, and it's got a higher population than some states. I've been – yeah, I've been through some bad traffic, so I'm not too worried about it because I can be a monster. This is next level. Watch out for Chris. New York needs to worry about me. So I'm not too worried about it because I can be a monster. You know, I can. This is next level. Watch out for Chris. New York. New York needs to worry about me. That's what I'm saying. I can't wait to see that city crush you.

That's going to be a vlog right there. Yeah, that is going to be a vlog. The whole thing is going to be a vlog, actually. I think it's going to be. I know I'll try to vlog the trip there. And as much as they'll let me run the camera, I'll sneak around and try to get as much vlogging done as I can. Don't tell Wimpy that, though, because he might... I heard nothing.

Good, good. Well, I'm really looking forward to it. I think that's going to be a good event, and I'll report back, and I'll go for the audience and let them know what it was like. I've always wanted to kind of see how you guys do that, too. And it's a good way to sort of show some of the community involvement, I think, that's sometimes overlooked. All right, I want to talk about something that I think is a potential missed opportunity for Linux. We've talked a lot about a lot of things, though. So if there's something we talked about that you want more experience with, something that you think might be an area of interest, especially what we're about to get into,

I want you to consider going to Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. You sign up for a free seven-day trial. And you support the show. Now, it's a platform that's built by Linux enthusiasts to teach people more about Linux. And they've done some really smart things. They have probably the most sophisticated courseware, virtual machine infrastructure that I've seen on any online site. It's particularly built for Linux users. You choose your distribution, the courseware and the virtual server match that. You can SSH into the box. It gives you an address to connect into. You can use

whatever you want to interact with that, so it's nice and smooth. They have hands-on scenario-based labs that give you real experience. And course planning. Yeah, that is really nice for busy schedules or if you've got a particular thing you want to learn. And instructor mentoring, so if you do get stuck and you need that human touch, they've got it. Practice exams before you go take the big test. Flashcards that are forked by the community, which is stacked full of Jupyter broadcasts. You remember? Stacked!

See, it's flashcards and they're stacked. Oh, I did that. I did that. I did that. They also have Android and iOS apps that you can study on the go. And speaking of studying on the go, they also have offline content that you can listen to when you're not connected to the internet. Or maybe while you're driving or doing the dishes. It's great. And you can go in there and just really wrap your head around anything you want to learn because they break it all down for you in easy-to-process chunks of time. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Big thank you, Linux Academy, for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. So the bots are coming, and they really are. I mean, they're coming. And it's not for, like, the stuff that we think, like customer support and all these external-facing things where you chat with a bot to get help. Yeah, that's coming too, but that's not what I'm worried about.

That's old school bots. Yeah, that's basic B bots right there. That's basic bot. That's what that is. It really is, actually. I think the future are bots like our friend Michael Dominick has created over at themadbotter.com. And he's made a bot called Alice. Here's a free plug for you, Mike.

It's a PMO. It replaces the PMO. You know, maybe not for like a large, large, large company, but definitely for like a small team or remote team. You never know. It could scale. Yeah. And it does all of the project follow-up and all of that. It even does the client follow-up when they haven't paid bills.

Like it replaces the PMO role. it replaces the PMO role. And it's so obvious when you think about it because you have these huge backend infrastructure where you can, like Microsoft will give companies like the Mad Botter free credits to run on their serverless architecture where it just fires off batch processing and then gives you the results.

Amazon has something similar. So does Google. All of these are proprietary back-end infrastructures but these bots that are actually useful like we have a few we've talked about here on the show and we're building more it's going to start replacing the compute jobs jobs where you're taking data from one field and translating and entering a different field where you're working with spreadsheets or approving documents. A lot of the back-end work

is going to be handled by bots. Stuff that we attributed to human jobs, stuff that we think is more like, you know, the blue-collar work that isn't going to get replaced by automation too soon will be replaced sooner because these bots can be controlled and built and innovated and it's all the buzzwords, all the buzzwords, way faster than any of these actual physical robots that we're building, or AIs. Because AIs are supposed to be these all-purpose, intelligent machines. But bots are very task-driven. They have a set of things they have to do, and they can do them really well.

We had a great email that came into Coda Radio weeks and weeks ago, and this guy was really stuck in a hard spot. He was in a total moral problem because he essentially botified his work. He created a bot, a basic bot that automated 90% of his job. And he was basically only working 10% of the time. And the error rates had gone down so far that this guy had to introduce a little, he modified the bot after a certain point to start reintroducing error rates so it

looked like human work. And he's like, guys, what do I do? Because if I tell them this, I'm basically out of a job. Yeah. And he is a sysadmin. He's an IT worker. And they're all built on these Microsoft and Google frameworks. Linux is out. There's Mycroft out there,

but that's not really happening. This would have been great if Mycroft could have gone in this back-end direction. Mycroft is more generalized, more like Alexa as well. Yeah. Wow, you didn't trigger it. That's amazing. Cancel. Just in case somebody else, right? What do you think?

I'm worried that Linux is missing out on what is obviously going to be a huge moneymaker for developers, for people running the backend services. It's going to need a lot of deployment. I should probably round this out because I get so excited about this that I miss out major pieces. I want to round this out. I think the type of bots that are going to be successful will be the internal company bots, ones that maybe have slight rough edges but do their job. And they're built internally, they're hosted internally, or they're hosted using like these Microsoft services. They're not customer interfacing. They don't have to have perfect understanding of human English. If you just go through the right steps, you get it to do what you need.

Yeah, you just need a purpose-built bot that can connect into all these rich APIs. So I think it's these internal bots. They're going to go pervasive throughout companies and replace a lot of data processing and input and these kinds of jobs just like a virus. And the problem is right now, I believe the best, like, built, ready to go, here's an API, it all runs on Windows. And

we've been following the story on Coder Radio, and it seems like they're getting a lot of traction with it. Like, it's becoming to be a part of Microsoft's business now. I think it's only going to be a problem if we let it become a problem, though, because it's not particularly difficult to write these bots.

It's just nobody's doing it. Right, well, I think it's going to be like the app gold rush. This is like the next app rush. Yep. All right, anybody in the mumble room want to take another side or want to contribute a bit

and have any thoughts on if linux is missing out sort of like you know we've missed out on some other trends some of which like vr have sort of fizzled others which seem to be holding more and more getting more traction no i don't think linux is going to miss out because i i do agree that bots are a new wave of technology and services are going to be deployed on top of bots, but they'll be available through Discourse and Slack and Telegram and WhatsApp and all the rest of it. So I don't know that we're going to be excluded from that.

I was thinking more from an infrastructure standpoint. I'm more worried about Amazon and Microsoft. They're already there, super serving, giving away credits. If you're a small business, they have like these, they have these programs you sign up for and they just, they give you hours and hours of free runtime. Yeah, locking the developers into their platforms. And I'm really, yeah, that's where I'm worried we're missing out.

It's not so much getting access to interfacing with the bots, but being the backend infrastructure, sort of like, you know how Apache and that whole LAMP stack was such a boom for Linux? And in a big way, the app economy has, too. Like a lot of these apps that are on people's Android devices and phones, they're connecting to Linux boxes on the backend. But in this case, as these bots, they're connecting to Amazon. They're connecting to Microsoft. And in Microsoft's case, they're running on Windows.

And if you want on-premises, you also have to run Windows. That I'm worried about. You're supposed to make me feel better about that. No, I'm thinking about it, and I don't have any soothing words for you right now. Yeah. It could be one of those things where there's going to be something

that really kind of comes together. You could actually see Matrix playing a role. Speaking of Matrix, you could see Matrix playing a role in this even, and that being run on Linux. Yeah. I'm officially making a call out to awesome Linux developers to make awesome bots on Linux.

Yeah. Well, let's get started. We're working on some. Our bots run on Linux. We're rewriting our bots to be more task-oriented, I guess. Breaking it out? Yeah, to be more task-oriented, I guess. Yeah, breaking it out. Yeah, to be more focused on individual tasks

and spread across more platforms so we can replace a lot of the manual things that we do. Yeah. I think for a lot of us, we won't even know. Like, it'll be an internal thing that happens. Like, the audience never knows what we use bots for to automate. Like, it's just a transparent thing, so it's going to be a very silent revolution. One day Jbot will just show up on Discord and you can do all the things there.

Yeah. You know, this is great when we do projects like this because it's a great way for people to get in and work with us. There is a novelty for a community to rally around and work together on, and it's a great way to get involved in open source projects. I know it's very self-serving for me to say that, but if you do want to check it out, discord.me slash JupyterColony and look for the Jupyter Dev Channel. And on top of that, for anybody interested, tomorrow at 6 o'clock we'll be having an audio and text-based developer meeting for this stuff specifically. That would be Wednesday, September 6th at 6 p.m. Pacific time. Correct.

We could put it on the calendar if you remind me. All right. And then people could just get it converted. Yeah, and I'll stop plugging, but the thing that is appealing to developers with these bots is you get to work against a set of documented APIs and integrations. So it's sort of like the breadcrumbs are laid out for you,

and the companies have a lot of momentum behind these areas. So it's sort of a fun area to get into. And it's sort of like also you have, what do you call it, a bumper, when you have those bumpers in the bowling alley? What is that called? Is it just called bumpers? Yeah, it's sort of like, yeah, it's like bowling with bumpers. Because everything's there. It's documented of like also you have, what do you call it, bumper, when you have those bumpers in the bowling alley. What is that called? Is it just called bumpers? Yeah, it's sort of like, yeah, it's like bowling with bumpers. Because everything's there.

It's documented for you. You have a community that's already structured together. They're rallying around a common cause. Yeah, and all you need to do is write a plug-in on top to interface with whatever you want to use rather than write the whole stack. I think back to that IT guy who, he replaced himself with a bot that did so good it did better than he did i think and he was worried about getting caught so he had to i think that he actually shouldn't worry because even if it replaces him there needs to be somebody to maintain that bot yeah that was i think part of my advice on coda radio if i recall because

you're right yeah somebody and i actually i, maybe the bot could fix other problems too. What he should pitch is he should go and show them his bot and tell them that it can replace all these other people. Well, that was part of his conundrum is there was, I think, three other people involved in verifying the data. And when the data was perfect, they didn't have anything to do. And so he was essentially working them out of a job, too. And he felt bad about that. That was another reason he introduced errors. So he had the sysadmin. They got the systems talking to each other and did the data exports and tried to then move that into like an Excel file. And he would do that by hand. And then hand it off to these three ladies, I think it was what he said in his email. I can't remember now. That would then go through and air check it and fix it against the master date or whatever. I don't know. I barely understand the process. And he replaced all that.

Yeah, I think in a couple of years, I think jobs are going to be a very different concept. There's going to be less doing the work and more maintaining the things that are doing the work. Well, that could be good. You know, yeah, but that also means there's probably going to be less jobs. I suppose. If you think about it in a weird way, it has enabled us to do more in the studio with less people. Yep.

There's less things for me to worry about when I'm setting up a live show because with one command, I execute like four different things in the background. That's pretty handy. It's only a matter of time until I figure out how to automate video editing, Chris. Well, we just need some sort of sonic marker.

Every time there's a... Every time you hear the bell, you just make an automatic edit, you know? If you could do it with Myth TV and commercials back in the day, we should be able

to do it with JB shows. Yeah, but who's going to be able to figure out the most embarrassing clips to put at the beginning of the shows? That's true, that's true. Well, we need machine learning

for that part, you see. All right, Beardsley, where should people find you throughout the week? Over at twitch.tv slash RekylP or twitter.com slash RekylP. Well, a big thank you to Wimpy for making it. I know he had recording and he was recording his show. Check him out at Ubuntu Podcast.

Anywhere else you want to send people, Wimpy? No, just to Ubuntu Podcast. We've recorded the sessions where the winner of the Entraware Apollo laptop is announced and all of the entries that people created. It's fantastic. Cool. And also if you're an interested developer to New York.

Yeah, let me know. If there's any New York stuff, any New York tips for me. Alright, we'll see you back next week. Wes will be here for another episode. This was Lucky 213. We got through it so far. Thanks for joining us. See you next week! Oh, shout out to Castor Soundboard playing under Solus using a snap, taking us in and out of the show. Officially, the first time we've had a snapped version of Castor Soundboard playing under Solus using a snap, taking us in and out of the show.

Officially, the first time we've had a snapped version of Castor Soundboard on Solus. That worked really well. By the skin of our teeth. Yeah, by the skin of our teeth, but we got it. We did actually get it. That was fun. All right, so what do we get for titles? What do we get?

Well, you guys, I wish I had a way to capture what it's like here today. So I woke up, and it was ominously yellow outside. It was very yellow. And we have essentially all of eastern Washington's on fire in parts of Oregon. It is brutal. If Harvey wasn't going on, this would probably be a national story. It's less yellow now. It's more of like a jaundiced yellow.

Yeah, now it's turned jaundiced as the day has gone on. But when the sun is lower, higher in the sky, it's this weird, eerie, and there's smoke everywhere, and it's snowing ashes. Well, even when the sun got high in the sky, like up until like noon, it felt like it was like dawn or dusk. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But it's also, it's 90 degrees today.

So it's extremely hot. And humid. Yeah. And very humid. It's wet in here. I think we're near 50% humidity. And so Angela said she's having chest pains today from the smoke because it's so thick. And when I'm driving around, I'm driving through ash like there's been a volcano.

It's really something. Like when my car sits, the truck sits, it gets covered in ash. The bots are coming. Pipewire, Pipe Dream. That's pretty good, Stoenick. That's pretty good. Buttersmooth. Veritundus, Lone Lep.

Solara, Sunset. Aw. Sun was here. Wow. You know the worst part, Chris, is because of you, we are under a wasp attack. And I have to have my room window closed. No, no, the screens. Don't you have a screen? I do, but somehow the wasp attack, and I have to have my room window closed. No, no, the screens. Don't you have a screen?

I do, but somehow the wasp still got in. Oh, well, the other screen's been working. All right, anybody else have an off-the-cuff recommendation for a title? The Bots Are Coming is the top one. But was that really the thrust of our conversation? I don't know if people are going to be into that. If you saw that, would that entice you to listen? I would have a comment about the status icon SysTray thing you mentioned.

Oh, yeah. We never had that with Enlightenment because the reason was the developers said that there was never a clean implementation following the free desktop standard. So they never really implemented it. What about GNOME 2.0? Which I find... Sorry? No, you're right. Go ahead. Sorry, I thought you were done.

Finish your thought. No, I found that very interesting because for years people were asking for a SysTray in the Enlightenment desktop. The developers always say there was never a clean implementation, so we don't do it. It is funny how SysTray icons have been this ongoing, non-stop problem, really since Unity. Well, it's because everybody creates their own version of it, and there's no standardized implementation.

It's maddening. Well, no, there is. So KDE came up with the Status Notifier. I've forgotten what the I stands for. Status notifier indications or something. And that's what the Ubuntu indicators are based on. It's the same specification. So why isn't Enlightenment using that then? Or GNOME. Don't know. They just refused so i guess this is the part i meant to put in the show

because here's what i but i was i was distracted by the other things about gnome i wanted to say but here's the problem with their new approach i think their new approach is solid if everyone that writes a gnome application starts using their new apis the new four apis they've made to replace tray icons the issue is gnome doesn't have that kind of weight. We've seen this over and over again now with GNOME 3. They make these changes that are great if the entire world is writing applications only for GNOME, which is happening more and more, but it's not the state of the Linux desktop. And so that's why this is a problem. And so they're essentially forcing the hands of the majority of GNOME users to use top icons,

at least for the foreseeable future, until developers update their GTK applications. And let's be honest, the developers that are going to update their GTK applications are the most passionate GTK apps, and they're also the ones that are the most feature... What's a polite way to say this? I don't want to say that... Rich. Well, I would say your apps that are most feature-rich

get updated the slowest on GNOME. Here's another way to put it. Your apps that are newer and still missing features. How about that? Thin and light. Yeah. Okay. I'm trying to be nice about it because they're going to get there eventually.

But look at Polari or look at the new GNOME Photos or look at GNOME Games, GNOME Calendar. These are all early days applications. And these are the applications that will update to support the new standard, the ones that have the minimal amount of use, and classic applications like Thunderbird and Lightning, the Calendar, and Firefox aren't going to support the new APIs, and users will suffer. From the way they phrased it, it kind of sounded like maybe they don't want a lot of these apps to update because they think that the tray icons are too cluttered.

So maybe they just are expecting a lot of these to not update and not have tray icons. So I submitted as a title something about GNOME. I can't remember what I suggested. What was it? You know, Chris, your name is listed on the side. GNOME takes over. That was my title suggestion.

GNOME takes over. How about GNOME does it again? No? We don't have to be incendiary, but it seems like people would listen to that. You know, I'll be honest. Ever since we talked about New York, all I can think about is bacon pancakes. Bacon, bacon pancakes. I'm sweating bad, so we've got to come up with a title because we are dripping.

It is so wet here and hot. That's the best thing about Washington. It's just so humid. It's so great. People talk about Florida. Is Florida worse than this? Because geez, geez, geez, I'm sorry, guys. That's rough.