LINUX Unplugged - Episode 214: Hacking Devices with Kali Linux | LUP 214

Episode Date: September 13, 2017

Audit your network with a couple of easy commands on Kali Linux. Chris decides to blow off a little steam by attacking his IoT devices, Wes has the scope on Equifax blaming open source & the Beard just saved the show. It’s a really packed episode!

I know a little something you guys don't know. Wes told me before the show started that he managed to pull off a heroic measure with one of his Arch Linux systems. And I got to give respect because both Beer and I have been there. You got an Arch box. Something falls off your radar. You don't update it for weeks, maybe even months. And then it comes due, and you got to fix that box. Maybe even years.

Yeah, maybe. What happened was... Not quite a year. It was probably like nine months. I moved this laptop, perfectly serviceable laptop, but right now it doesn't have a working battery, so it's like a desktop laptop, let's call it. Hadn't updated, right?

So I finally set it up, set it up on a desk, started looking around. Oh, yeah, right. I was running... I had Awesome set up and some other things. Couldn't install anything. But it really wasn't... I had to update a bunch of GPG keys. I had to purge all the caches, get rid of all the key stores that I had.

Then work my way back through the Arch homepage, resolving each and every one of the little, you know, user intervention required examples. But, I mean mean i've done those before i would have had to do them anyway so it was really just paying my dues worked just fine now i'm up to date no problems it's the gpg keys that uh that you really gotta that was the that was the trickiest bit so what does this box do it's like a home server no it's just a it was a another laptop that i have oh okay i was about to give you a hard time for on your home server on arch because i have been there i for running your home server on Arch.

Because I have been there. I do have a home server on Arch. You do? My router runs Arch. You maniac. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 214 for September 12, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's loading snaps, installing soundboards, and playing clips. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And of course, the Beards here. Hello, Beard. Hey. Hello, sir. Beard's fresh off rebuilding our Mumble PC. Ah, thank God. So we could do the show today, like legitimately four minutes before the show started. I told you I timed it right. We've got a good show today, so I'm really glad you got it fixed because, holy smokes, you've been hearing about this Equifax breach.

There is a small open source story we'll tell you about that aspect of it. Linus has got some good ideas we'll tell you about those. After we get through some community updates, including some potentially new Manjaro hardware, GNOME 3.26 goodness and benchmarks, a replacement for Nalaus, and an update from Ubuntu, we're going to get into Kali Linux for a bit. I revisited Kali Linux. I'll tell you about my adventures and why I decided to hack my IoT devices. I decided to blow off some steam and try to break all my IoT devices. You've never been

very trusting anyway. So I'll tell you the tools that I used and the way you could audit your own network with Kali Linux. It's been a little while. We'll give you a little history on Kali as well. And then at the end of the show by popular demand

you've been waiting for it. We all switch to macOS. Pretty close to that. We'll cover the new iPhone event. No, no, no, no, no. It's the Gentoo Challenge. Finally, finally, after a month of waiting, after absences and travel, we're going to get to the Gentoo Challenge. We've been building software for weeks, and we're here to tell you how it all went. Our bills through the roof. But before we get to all of that, we've got to tell you how it all went. Power bills through the roof.

But before we get to all of that, we've got to bring in that mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings. El mumble. Hello. Hello. Hello, everybody. Good to have you here today. So there's not a lot that I feel like we could add to this Equifax story.

In fact, our friends over there at the TechSnap program just covered it today, so that would probably be where I would point you. But at this point in time, everybody's heard about the credit bureau here in the States getting hacked. Nearly 200 million identity, really personal identification information has been stolen. And

it turns out it's all open source's fault. It's all... Not again. It's not Equifax's fault. It's not shoddy network hygiene. It's not Equifax's fault. It's not Shoddy network hygiene. It's not poor update practices. It's not bad security auditing. It's open source's fault. I know you know about this story because you were talking about it on TechSnap.

We sure did. So it comes down to they're simply blaming Apache Struts. And Apache Struts is like a – obviously it's from the Apache project. It's an open source software programming model view controller, like an MVC framework for Java. And it's, it is at the core a lot of these old business applications. they, Equifax, hired an auditor to come in. And this auditor discovered that they were using a version of Struts that has a vulnerability that's just recently been disclosed as of a couple of days ago, September 5th. But of course, the hack happened earlier in the year, somewhere between mid-May through July. So we're not actually sure if it was this vulnerability or maybe a different one that came out in March that they just never patched against.

And those two stories are very different. It is totally possible that at the core of it, Struts was the issue. But I'd like your take on this, Wes, because in my opinion, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just too much of an open source defender. But to me, it seems pretty obvious. You can have vulnerable software, be it proprietary or open software, and it's about like an onion-layered approach to security. You build your network assuming there's going to be compromises. Yeah, I think so.

I mean, you're definitely right about that. And while there may be cases where, you know, some software, open source or proprietary, does lead to information disclosures despite best practices being followed. But before that, and obviously we want to get this patched and upgraded, you do have to understand some of the, like, what is the update hygiene patch policy, etc. that Equifax is using. And if that's not up to speed, that is really the problem, not whatever vulnerabilities

may exist in the, I'm sure, myriad of different open source software that they're using. Yeah, at the end of the day, there is a flaw in struts. There is a problem there. And no one is disputing that. Well, plus, you of the day, there is a flaw in struts. Yeah, right. There is a problem there. And no one is disputing that. Well, plus, you know, Chris, the code's open, so they can just look at that code and find all the vulnerabilities.

Yeah, that's how it works. You just read it like you would a nice book. Yeah. Oh, I need something else to make me feel better. I need something nice. Like, Wimpy, you got a new piece of hardware I see you talking about there in the Discord, like the smallest little portable phone I think I've seen in a long time.

Do you have it with you? I've put it down and I can't see it because it's so small. Hang on. What is this little thing? Is this an Android device you've got here? It is an Android device. The Jelly Pro. Yep.

And you have it next here to a Pi Zero to give us some scale in this picture. Wow. Yeah. So it's about the next to a Pi Zero to give us some scale in this picture. Wow. Yeah. So it's about the size of a Pi Zero. So if you imagine a business card, it's about the form factor of a business card, but a bit narrower. Nice. And is it a performant device? It works very well.

It's a quad-core Cortex-A53. It's got two gigs of RAM. It's got 16 gigs of internal storage two sim cards uh micro sd card wi-fi with 2.4 and 5 gigahertz and bluetooth front and rear facing cameras a torch and fm radio how did you get this is this is not even shipping yet i backed it oh wow so they're so they're really on top of it they're that's great this looks so cool it's uh it's a a really nifty device um i'm very impressed with it i have to say and i got mine with a few accessories and the accessories are extremely well made as well what kind of accessories uh well the reason i got this is because when i go out and do my walking and exercising what have you strapping a bloody great big you know five and a half inch phone to your

arm is a bit much this is why we and i were just talking about watches like this is almost a reason to get a watch these days so um yeah i got this with a an armband a case with an armband and i'm going to use this as my effectively my fitness tracker so i've got my fitness tracker and spotify installed on it and this is what i'll go out and use for exercising so this thing is small enough to fit in a jeans watch pocket yes it's really small and it has two sim and an sd slot yep Holy smokes. What's this thing called? My one's the Jelly Pro, and then there's the

smaller, well, it's not physically smaller, but there's a lower specced version just called the Jelly. Is it USB-C? No, it's micro USB. Okay. So almost perfect. It does have a headphone jack, though. It does have a headphone jack. There's something for that. Luxury. This thing looks so perfect. It does have a headphone jack, though. It does have a headphone jack. There's something for that.

Luxury. This thing looks so neat. It's actually very good. I mean, I'm genuinely surprised at how good it is. What about reading on that screen, like the Twitter feed or a news article? Is it just painfully small? No, it's perfectly usable. I mean, you can imagine how big you know

watch screens are and this is about three times the size of a watch screen um it's quite low resolution but it's it's remarkably good i mean as a small device obviously you know you're not going to be typing long messages into it but you can overcome that using the you know the voice input so um i'm not very good at using voice but on this device you kind of use it by default for everything um surprise it's just it's very very good it's a really nifty little device i'm not sure how long i'm going to hold on to it because my daughter's seen it and she quickly worked out this this is sort of exactly the right size for her yeah my son would love this too yeah it's and also they're not expensive

either i think i uh they're about 120 bucks yeah yeah they have some early birds that are still available for under a hundred dollars even yeah so you know for a phone for a child that you just want them to you know be able to make calls and get in touch and not worry, you know, if the phone gets ruined. It's quite a nice device. Yeah, that is, hmm. And with the dual SIM, when you come over to the States into New York, you could, in theory, put a Ting SIM in there and just pay for what you use while you're here. Ooh.

Yeah. I feel like that, you know, this is totally spontaneous, but I'm going to mention, go to linux.ting.com. Just go there. Just do it right now. You know, seriously, when you come to the States, and anybody else that's coming to the States that wants to be able to use their phone and doesn't want to get totally just, unless you have some amazing plan, go to linux.ting.com when you're coming. I hear from the audience that they do this because one of the things people always give us feedback on is, well, Ting is a U.S.-only opportunity. So I can't get it outside the U.S.

his feedback on is, well, Ting is a US-only opportunity, so I can't get it outside the US. But when you travel here, Alan has done this. This is something that I really think, I wish I could do the opposite of this when I leave the States. Linux.ting.com. It's a really great, simple way to get easy,

pay-for-what-you-use wireless. You just pay for the minutes you use and the megabytes you use while you're here, and there's no contract nor the termination fee. You can log into the website and turn off the line. It's really nice. Pay for what you use, nationwide coverage, CDMA and GSM with a great dashboard. I'm going to do like a quicker one because I didn't plan to do the Ting Read there.

But then when I see that device, it's so perfect because you can buy this thing for $100, $140. You can put a TingSim in there. I wonder if you could switch between CDMA and GSM Live, too. Oh, that would be slick. Hmm. Well, that's really, really cool, Wimpy, and I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on it later. Have you tried, like, the built-in speaker?

How's the sound on it, like, for podcasts? It's good enough. I mean, it's just, for what it it cost and its size it's a pretty remarkable little gadget i am i am very very happy with it nice um yeah i'm i'm surprised surprised and impressed by just how good it is i was just reading an email on here um just to answer your question yeah perfectly readable i assume you put telegram on there telegram performs okay i haven't put telegram i've kept it just to the things because there's only two gigs of RAM. I've just decided to keep it to the minimal things that I need for exercising.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. I did put a 32 gig micro SD card in it and used the option to merge that with the internal storage. So it's now got about 40 gigs of internal storage available, you know, as it reports as a single file system. So it's pretty great, really. Yeah, I say good on you, too, to keep the distractions off the exercise device. That's pretty neat. And it's, you know, cheaper than a Fitbit, a decent Fitbit.

So that's pretty cool. The Jelly, the Jelly smartphone. The Jelly Pro. The smallest. Everybody's going big, and this is the smallest. And then, you know, again, just free plug-in here, but you put it on the Ting network. That's two things.

I like this. I like small indie stuff. That's cool. If you break it, it's not the end of the world. It makes me a bit jelly. Boom. I see what you did there. I see what you did there. I see what you did there.

So Linus has an idea. How about instead of hacking Linux, okay, stay with me, instead of hacking Linux, you join and participate. Huh? You mean hack on Linux? Yeah. Whoa. Actually, you know, I joke, but this is legitimately an advantage that open source software has. So Linus says you may not be able to reach absolute security, but people that deploy default models are so much better off today.

We're making obvious improvements. He's talking, by the way, about the kernel. Torvalds also noted that technical persons that have impressed him have been people who go after the Linux code. There are smart people doing bad things. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wish they were on our side and they could help us, Torvald said. Where I want us to go is to get as many smart people as we can

before they turn to the dark side. We would improve security that way and get those who are interested in security to come to us before they attack us. That's all it would take, Wes. I mean, you're right that that is an advantage of open source is that, like, yeah, come join us. Come make it better. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe, I mean, you can still exploit it on the side to make money. He's not saying that you can't do that. Just also fix it upstream afterwards. We'll save that part for the Kali Linux segment. Yes, that's right. Woo! You can't do that. Just also fix it upstream afterwards. We'll save that part for the Kali Linux segment. That's right. Woo! So, GNOME 3.2.6 lands tomorrow, I think.

Is it this Wednesday? This coming Wednesday? It's coming up, yeah. It does. It's tomorrow, yeah. Yeah. So if all goes well, which I believe it will, by the time most people are here in this show, it'll be old news, I guess. Think about that, guys.

That's frightening. Right now, we're living in the pre-Gnome 326 world, but the people listening, they got the edge up on us. They're already in a Gnome 326 world. It's just remarkable. If I just Pac-Man a little harder, will I get it now? Can I do that? No, you've got to wait about a minute.

Ugh. Yeah. And there's some interesting benchmarks over at Veronix. Michael Larbel has posted benchmarks of GNOME 3.26 on Wayland versus your X11. And notes that the Wayland desktop loads slightly faster. I like that. There's no real significant difference in memory and battery consumption between Wayland and X at this time. battery consumption between Wayland and X at this time.

On the benchmarks that use Wayland directly, there's no significant difference between Mutter and using Mutter and Wayland or Mutter and X.org. And on benchmarks that were forced to use X.Wayland, there's about a five frame per second loss using X.Wayland versus straight X.org. But what struck me about this, this is my summation of-org. But what struck me about this, this is my summation of reading his article, what struck me about this is

that it wasn't a huge penalty to use weyland, that it wasn't a dramatic issue to use weyland, like that weyland is essentially at competitiveness with x-org right now. Don't you think that's kind of, I don't know, beer with you there. To me, that seems pretty remarkable, actually. I would have figured it would have either been way behind or way ahead yeah right it isn't in is in performance this is what these benchmarks are talking about like it doesn't talk

about the fact that it's missing a ton of features right it's just frame rate low desktop time yeah i guess i expected wayland i thought we'd be paling a Wayland price. Or should we be disappointed that it's not a lot faster? Well, that's what the internet's taken away from this. The average internet comment reads like, See, I told you! Xorg's fine! Xorg's fine. We don't need anything else. There's this guy who's flying

around in an airplane outside the studio right now. He's running Xorg. He has a big banner that says Xorg is fine. That is what's happening right now. And I take from this at least that part of the transition. This singular isolated part of the transition to Wayland hopefully won't suck too bad. That's what I took from it. GNOME 3.26.

Going to be in that there Ubuntu too, I believe. Going to be there in that 17.10. Going to be on... And even though there's a negative side to 326, though, the removal of the API for the system icons. Yes. We talked about it a little bit. And it's worth touching on because I don't really understand what I'm going to do other than load the top icons extension.

It's like they've forced my hand. There's actually, like, a weird situation where the top icons extension currently works now and will not work in the future. What? So they pointed out that in the post they were like, well, if you want to continue using Top Icons stuff, that'll be available. But they didn't point out

in the comments, in the blog post, that GTK4 removes the support for what Top Icons uses. Oh. So that it's not even going to be possible to use top icons. It's going to be deprecated automatically. So I'm switching to Unity. Well, there's actually a...

Ubuntu noticed that and saw that that's going to be going away. There is a different extension called K-Status Notifier App Indicator or something like that. It's really long. It's hot. Yeah, they forked that and are using that because it doesn't depend on the same API

that Top Icons uses. That's why the new Ubuntu version has that. So in theory, in the future, you could use that extension instead of Top Icons. Okay. I'm looking at mine right now and I see Spotify, I see Dropbox, and I see

Skype, and I see Mumble. And I think out of all of those, the only one that has any chance of updating it with any reasonable amount of time is Mumble. Dropbox isn't going to give two shits, are they? Do you know anything about that, Rotten? Is this a... I don't think Mumble's going to carry that. I don't honestly a... I don't think Mum was going to care either. I don't honestly either, but if any of them was going to, right?

Yeah, they're the best likelihood, yes. I think that it's... Because Gnome is looking at it as if because they don't like something, they think something is antiquated, that means everybody else should just follow suit. Whereas the platform people switch from have this incredibly you know long in standpoint yeah they're expecting this type of thing to exist and then you just remove it regardless of what people think like uh yeah that's problematic at best this is this is my Now, that is tempered by the fact that GNOME 326 also has the new settings pane.

Oh, yeah. The new redesign. I've been excited for that. More like Mac OS 6. I don't know if you guys remember Mac OS 6 from the 80s, but it's more like that control panel. And it's way better. What is old is new again. Yeah, it really is.

That is how computers work. It's way easier for my brain to process a list on the side, and then I click it, and then the UI. So it's going to be more like GNOME Tweak, but it looks way better. And that's in 326. So 326 is like a mixed bag for me, because it's a good release.

It's got updates to Epiphany. It's got updates to GNOME Photos, which I just like for just basic photo viewing. But it's got this, like Producer Michael was just talking about, this removal of the system tray icon support, which every time we go through this is a huge pain in my arse.

And it's a constant source of questions. And it's probably like one of the top five extensions people use in the first place. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I got all worked up, I think, was it last week, about the GNOME project recommending people install an extension? Yeah, GNOME, I think, yeah, that's just kind of... They also recommend other things, too, for extensions

because they don't really want... I see. So little things they want to do as default, it's problematic. But if they were managing the extensions, that'd be one thing. But they just, you know, letting the community do it. What if someone, what if they remove some API like they're doing for this? What if they just annoy

someone enough where they just give up and stop maintaining them? You're setting it up to fail. Do you, when you hear stuff like this, do you think, boy, if I wasn't already using Plasma as my main desktop, I'd switch? Because it makes me think, I gotta be honest, Ron, it makes me think, just screw this I wasn't already using Plasma as my main desktop, I'd switch?

Because it makes me think, I got to be honest, Ron, it makes me think, just screw this. I'm just going to go use the Plasma desktop and make it work. I was a known maintainer for extensions at one point. And I quit because the example I gave of people abandoning it is because I was one of them. I maintained 10 extensions and every single time there was a new update, all of them broke. And there was nothing wrong with my extensions. They all worked. I even adopted other extensions from other people

and fixed them. And most of the time, the audio input switcher, there was nothing wrong with it. It worked perfectly fine. The only thing it needed was to have a version update so like the fact that that's like you know not only you're not going to make a system where when it updates it's going to like check to see if it works and then say if it works or not and give you like a flag where you have to update it or

something it's just we're going to assume it's automatically broken and just break it so like at that point where i had to update 10 and then i started getting requests from people updating stuff and then i was like you know i after about i think i ted like the most i ever had was like 16 at one release and i was like i'm i'm done i don't i'm not trying to fix this right yep and so here's where i'm at right now and um i i'm of waiting to see, but I feel like maybe as GNOME grows and as they move the platform forward and as they make decisions that they feel are the best decisions to make for them, going to use the GNOME desktop, you need a high-level curator like Canonical to come along or like Fedora to come along and really sort of think about this stuff. Think about how to do the doc extension. Think about the system tray icon notification problem. Think about the theming issues. Think about all of the things around that and implement it correctly. And that's really the

only way to have a usable workhorse GNOME desktop, perhaps. And rolling it yourself on a Gen 2 or an Arch, which we'll get to here in a moment, you know, it's too hacked together unless you really follow this stuff. Like, if you listen to every episode of this show, you could probably make it work. Yeah, I would agree with that,

except I would point out that Fedora is on the same side as GNOME as far as, like, the top icons and stuff like that. They made a blog post about it. It was hilarious because they made a blog post about it, and developers are not updating their applications. What's wrong with all these developers? They're not following the whims of the GNOME team. What's wrong with them? And I mean, I do feel the alternative, like they want to be able to update.

But when you are shipping things that people use in a stable way, you have to do that in a non-breaking way or at least try very hard not to. Like Producer Michael was saying, especially when it's something that is like a paradigm of how you interact with your desktop. The question then becomes for me is do I really want to be using a desktop where the developers can't do that work themselves and you have to have an additional maintainer to make the desktop good well at least it can be done you know at least you can have somebody create their quote-unquote same defaults yeah i mean there's a there's another issue of what about you know how like for a long time gnome has been like i don't know like the powerhouse as far as like what de's are based on but if if you look at like Budgie where it was, they announced that they're going to switch to Qt

and other things that are switching to Qt already as well. Like LXQ. LXQ, yeah. But like if you look at the code of Budgie, there is some weirdness in there, like where they actually have to pretend to be gnome in certain cases. Right, yep. So like when you said that they were making decisions

that worked best for them, I think that's the detriment to them. Yeah, maybe. They're trying to have a vision and they're trying to have a philosophy. And so part of this notification tray icons thing is that philosophy. In their world, the user never had any control. You installed that son of a bitch application and that sucker put that tray icon down there. You never asked for that. You never asked for that stupid notification or that spinning sync icon. And you, you know, you really have no other way to interact with the application other than, guess what, that tray icon. And so no one wants to give the power back to the user.

It's a philosophy. And it's one that I can understand and appreciate. But there is a practical aspect to this. And it feels like they're kind of far away, separated from the day-to-day support concerns of someone using that, right? Great point. Whereas Ubuntu knows how to do that. That's a great point. So let's pause right there because that's – damn, you just nailed it.

Because I want to talk about what they're doing. And specifically, there's a new post about Gnome Shell in Ubuntu 17.10. I'm trying to be cautious about what I say because I don't want to give too much away because I really want us to roll into it. So let me start by saying thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring this here show. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Thanks to you guys for going there and letting Linux Academy know, hey, on the Unplugged program, I heard about you. I came here. You have that in your log now.

You know that they sent me. And as a thank you, they'll give you a seven-day free trial. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So why am I sending you there? Well, it's in the name, Linux Academy. It's a platform to teach you everything about Linux, created by Linux enthusiasts, Linux professionals, people that really love Linux and want to spread it. People that honestly, I think, have the intention of getting more users

to Linux. And I really could connect with that because Anthony, the guy that founded Linux Academy, I talked with him for ages before he was an advertiser, before he launched the platform, just talking about how to get Linux out into the hands of more people. So when they launched, I was so excited to be one of their launch partners, to have a sponsorship here. I remember talking to Anthony while they were building the virtualization system. They'll spin up servers on demand that match the courseware you've chosen for Debian or Red Hat or Ubuntu.

They'll also do AWS, Azure, OpenStack courseware, the really high-level stuff. They'll help you focus on certifications if you need to go that route. Offline study is no problem at all. Again, it's a real platform for this kind of stuff. It's the Linux Academy, an online Linux and cloud training platform that uses self-paced video courses and hands-on labs to give you real-world experience for a wide range of skills. And their community is full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. They're always adding new features, so that way you get the most out of your subscription. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Go there and try it out. Seven days for free. And thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

So we have another post from DidRocks, and we've been linking to these for quite a while in the show notes, and I love this. It's like a blog journey to 1710 and the decisions that they're making. And this week we talk about GDM, collaboration, and theming. Now, I'm covering this for many reasons, because it's historical to watch Canonical make the switch here on the show. Can't believe we're documenting this.

Think about that for a second. Wow. Wow, it's really hitting me. Like, right now, as I'm talking to you guys, it's really hitting me that I watched, I have been podcasting. I have been podcasting since Ubuntu was created. I podcasted the announcement of Unity. Wow. Brian Lunduk and I covered it at Linux Fest because it was news then.

I remember the episode that we covered the announcement of Unity. I remember the episode that we covered the announcement of Unity. I remember watching the netbook edition of Ubuntu. I remember watching that be born and Unity inspired from that. Gnome 3, all of it. I've watched all of it. And now I'm watching them transition back to Ubuntu Gnome. And the weight of that is really hitting me as we record this episode right now. I have really watched the transition here, and I got to tell you,

watching them re-land back into GNOME, if you had asked me to make the most optimistic prediction of how they would handle this, I wouldn't have gotten it this close. I couldn't have asked for a better re-landing into the GNOME world. So this week we're talking about GDM. It turns out GDM, the gnome display manager, that login screen, that ugly login screen that runs in the background and takes up a ton of memory and is really a son of a bitch, it's also hard to theme. And it's one of the areas where the gnome developers have been particularly protective of because if you're having any kind of problem in your gnome session, they don't want GDM to be affected because you've got to get back to your login screen right so you can choose like a

safe it keeps everything running in that sense so one of the ways that they have accomplished that the gnome team is they have hard-coded the theme for gdm so that way it just uses something simple and it always works and it's rock solid Regardless of whatever crazy lunatic theme you've loaded in your GNOME shell, your GDM session, rock solid. Ad Wadia, buddy. Unless you don't want that, which pretty much no distro maker wants.

They want to re-theme GDM to make it match the login session. Of course. And they want the login, I mean the desktop session. The login session matches the desktop session. It's a big kumbaya. And it's something that I've noticed some people are commenting in the early betas of Ubuntu about already.

The GDM theme here and there. And it's something that the PopOS folks have been working on. This is where we end up today. This little problem. The guys and gals over at System76, they want to solve the problem of an ugly GDM. And Canonical also has a problem they want to solve. They want to be able to apply their Ubuntu style without stepping all over the toes of anybody that might be deriving off of Ubuntu. And they'd like to do it in a way that is maintainable and upstreamable. And I believe these two things are not 100% aligned, but they're pretty close.

and I believe these two things are not 100% aligned, but they're pretty close. So it sounds like over the last couple of weeks, Canonical worked with System76, worked with Jeremy over at System76, and together they came up with a way to sort of fix this problem, to sort of apply a patch to GDM that would work upstream

so that people could change the theming. Now, I don't really know. I don't really, you know, I start to gloss over when you start talking about applying CSS themes to GDM. But I do see that this is a wider problem that we've been running into for a while. And it's nice to see a proposed solution.

Nothing's really been accepted upstream yet. But I feel like there might be there might be a larger ramification larger impact here which i'll get to in a moment but uh wimpy if your ears are burning because i've missed or i've gotten something wrong if you want to jump in with any corrections at this point probably a good chance before i keep going well you have me a disadvantage actually because i've i've been away oh yeah for a while i want to talk so um i haven't had the chance to catch up with my colleagues.

So let me wrap this real quick and then let's talk about that. So the short version of this is that Diddler and Jeremy are working together to come up with an upstreamable version where patches can be applied, where people won't be stepping on each other's toes. I will save my commentary for now on how this could be our first example of Pop! OS development colliding with the wider Ubuntu development. I'll save that for future commentary because I'd love to hear about Wimpy's trip to Perry.

Oh, yeah. I saw some once-in-a-lifetime selfies come across Wimpy's Twitter feed over the last week. I've got to go find those because you know whenever you can get the eiffel tower in your selfie that's uh that is a rather good selfie so where were you wimpy uh well we were in paris so and we were at uh ubu con europe uh which was being hosted by the french loco at a massive museum uh in paris that is too cool that sounds awesome ubu con ubu con boy all these conferences you got new york coming up soon you got paris you are a world traveler wimpy yeah so ubu con's an entirely community um created event and they

happen all over the world and different um locos and lugs and what have you organize these events around the world so when the ubu con happens in california it's usually coinciding with scale and happening at the same venue um you know a day or so beforehand yeah uh but this one's just a standalone this was um yeah it was um it was a four day four day event um so it started well it was a three-day event for the ubu con but there was um a sort of a get together the day before it started with sort of the um the core organizers um to come together uh and sort of you know make sure they were all set and ready to go uh and we were fortunate enough to be there and catch up with them that evening and some of the early arrivers uh some of you know our friends

from the Ubuntu community from around Europe and it's you know great to catch up and socialize so you know during the day it's um tracks of talks and workshops and um uh there's even a gaming room set up you know with pcs with games running and all the rest of it um and rooms with all the audio equipment so um the various podcasters can go and record you know live podcasts and what have you so there's you did right yeah so poppy and i participated in two podcasts whilst we were there we um we both appeared on the on the spanish podcast and then we were part of a podcasting panel so we had um uh the guys from the buntu podcast in france popey and i from a buntu podcast i don't know the name but the i think it's um a buntu podcast portugal and then a buntu fun so there were six or seven of us and sort of um

scripted by the german guys you know we had some show notes and then very much ad hoc uh in front of um a live audience that sounds like a lot of fun it's always good fun yeah lots of fun i uh so i was inspired by a slide that uh was from a talk that i think dustin kirkland was giving at ubicon where he listed the top 10 features or the top 10 new features for Ubuntu 17.10. And I wanted to take that list. I want to put it in text somewhere. So I actually kind of like to get your take on it. But I expanded on the list.

And I actually think I already have more features to add to it. But let me know if I'm missing anything. So 17.10. And I want to preface before i say this i'm i don't have any skin in the game uh right now i run solace the machine to my left runs arch the machine the next machine to my left runs arch uh what are you running right there to my right this is running arch okay so we have and then we have two arch systems upstairs we have an arch server here and a proxmox server.

The only Ubuntu system in the Jupyter Broadcasting Studio is the one running the mumble machine that Noah installed. So I don't have, like, an agenda here. I don't have any... There's nobody paying me to say this. Would you say Noah agenda? But I'm going to say... I will say this. I would ask both of you and anyone in the mumble room

to tell me what distribution release has ever had a feature list like this. And I haven't even added all of them yet. This is what I have right now. The top 14 new features for Ubuntu 17.10. GNOME replaces Unity, number one, obviously. Tons of Bluetooth improvements, a thousand bug

fixes, a new BlueZ stack. Number three, switch to lib input. Number four, improved 4K multi-monitor and scaling technology support. We've talked about that, high DPI improvements. Number three, switch to lib input. Number four, improve 4K multi-monitor and scaling technology support. We've talked about that, high DPI improvements. Number five, upgraded to network manager 1.8, much improvement. Big improvement there. Number six, new sub-equity, equity, whatever.

It's the new server installer. Number seven is the minimal images, 36 megabyte, 20% smaller images. Huge. That's a huge savings. Number eight, finally, for fuck's sake, auto-remove of old kernels from slash boot. Number nine, extended for encryption with FS encrypt. Number 10, improved CUDA and CPU acceleration support.

And this one I'm feeling like could almost be two, but I'm including hardware accelerated codecs in that one. Hardware accelerated codecs. I'm going to say it one more time. Hardware Accelerated Codex. Just going to mention that. New dock that we've talked about with the upstream collaboration, the G schema support for elegantly handling settings changes

and disappearing when you turn on dash to dock, and now with the status icon support, which is great. Net plan by default switching from ifconfig is number 12. Number 13 is gcc7 out of the box. And number 14 is Wayland by default. And number 15, which I don't have on the list yet because it hasn't happened yet,

because all of these have happened. All of these have happened. What is about to happen, potentially, is kernel 4.13 as well, which will be feature 15. And I'll have a top 15 list for Ubuntu 17.10. Now, I haven't seen anybody put a list together quite consecutively like Dustin

did, and I've built off of Dustin's list here, but I challenge you to tell me one other release of any Linux distro, ever, since you've been following Linux, that has been this packed full of features, and this big of a change? Chris, I can't think of one, dude.

I can't either. Like, this is big. This is really big. And this is in the middle of a company restructuring, reorganizing of the company. Like, there are some companies where that would put them on their back heels for a year just to sort that shit out.

Well, I got to be honest, Chris. I have been through distro after distro, LFS, as you know, Gen 2, Arch, the whole nine yards. And I got to say, I'm more impressed with this new Ubuntu spin than all of that. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I haven't even finished the list yet. No, you haven't. You know?

I can think of things with individual components, like maybe system D switch or other things that were of similar scale, but it's a far-ranging set of changes. This isn't even the LTS. Like, if all this stuff is decent in 1710, all this stuff just has to be even decent in 1804 for the LTS to be great. Yeah, but that's exactly the fact. I have to test it for the LTS. I mean, you can't introduce these to the LTS.

You have to test them first. It's the way to do it, though. It's a classic Ubuntu-style development approach. It's a tried-and-true method. So if I can just add to to that list yeah the um dustin gave a couple of presentations whilst he was at ubu.com um and the slide that you've used there was from he was doing the closing keynote so he did the the keynote that that that that wrapped up the event. And what he was presenting was all of the feedback that had been captured from those various user surveys that he's been running through Hacker News and Reddit

and Slashdot and OMG Ubuntu. And all of those things that were on um dustin's slide were the top thing so they he did a whole load of natural language processing to actually figure out what people were asking for and basically everything that was in dustin's slide were the top things that people were asking for and therefore they got addressed in this cycle so that was the crux of his presentation in that your feedback is important and matters to us and here's us actioning the things that are most important to you i i'm not going to name names of other distros there has been distro releases recently where legitimately the new wallpaper is part of the release notes because that's like the minimal amount of change.

I just I really am impressed. I am really impressed. Like when when when Mark made his initial initial announcement, I just was having a conversation with somebody about this yesterday. That's somebody being Michael Dominic. yesterday. That's somebody being Michael Dominick. When Mark made his announcement that Canonical was done with Unity and that Ubuntu would be shipping GNOME, I think a lot of people walked away with the impression that it was sort of like a wiping the hands. We're just going to give you stock GNOME. We're not going to bother with it and have at it. The desktop wasn't being focused anymore, right? Hope you enjoy your stock gnome. We're done. And I just

I have a loose appreciation from the outside of the amount of work that must have gone into this, which means it must have been ten times the amount of work that I'm picturing. So it was anything but that. It was the opposite of what a lot of people were pontificating was the end

of the Ubuntu desktop. And that's top 14 new features that like are worth like talking about how many of those are like server features right there's a lot of stuff here that shows like they they're they still care they are innovating on these things right and seeing this kind of feedback cycle and work that's exciting too and one of the reasons I'm excited for kernel 4.13, which is on target, you know, it's not locked in yet, but it's on target for 17.10, is it's got the baked in mainlined AppArmor support. So it's like,

it's sort of like a coming of age in a way for AppArmor, which Snap confinement's based on, which is the mandatory access control horse that both SUSE and Ubuntu have bet on. And it's my preferred between SELinux and AppArmor. Having worked with both of them in production, I clearly understand AppArmor and SELinux.

I just sort of funnel my way through. And so if I had to implement one, I would prefer to use AppArmor. So talking about the kernel, as of yesterday, 4.13 is in the proposed pocket. That's awesome. Yeah, that is13 is in the proposed pocket. That's awesome. Yeah, that is. I will update that list. I can't. I'm holding that as my 15th feature to add to the list because that's.

Okay, well, the one to add alongside Network Manager is in addition to Network Manager 1.8, the captive portal stuff is enabled and fully working now. And lots of people were making good use of that um at ubu con because everything was behind a captive portal and it was kind of fun to see them all sort of blinking and then grinning at the captive portal screen just popping up when they joined the wi-fi networks i have no idea what to expect network wise while i'm in new york uh we're trying to decide if if we should try to do user air from the hotel room while we're in New York. That would be fun. We're going to be there. You should. I think so. But we just don't have, we have no

idea what the connectivity is going to be. You know, I wish there was a way. Like, we need, like, a database. Has a CAPTCHA, has, you know, requires you use their DNS, like, all these, like, little qualifiers. You know Google has this database, they just don't share it with us. So getting that built in into Network Manager, or is it part of Network Manager, Wimpy, or is it a component alongside of Network Manager? I wasn't clear.

Yeah, so there's two pieces to it. There's a component in Network Manager that needs to be enabled that actually does the detection of your connectivity state and whether you're behind a captive portal or not. of your connectivity state and whether you're behind a captive portal or not. And that emits over Dbus. And then there's a component that's hardwired to the GNOME shell that then looks at that to determine what the network status is. And when it picks up the signal that you're behind a captive portal, it fires open a web view and takes you to that captive portal.

Brilliant. I really will appreciate that. That's become very important recently in my life. Now, I got. Oh, go ahead. I will just say, because let's just get this out of the way, because there are people that care about this stuff. In order for that to work, it has to ping some known host in order to look for various status codes.

Oh, sure. Yep, yep. Okay, and that's connectivitycheck.ubuntu.com. In the privacy settings for Ubuntu 17.10 is the option to disable that connectivity check. So if you don't want it to leak, you know, stuff, then you can just disable that and you will have no captive portal automatic detection and if you want to run like that an interesting feature i noticed in firefox which i i don't know when it cropped up but i'm told fairly recently

if you open firefox and it's behind a captive portal firefox detects that now and prompts you accordingly as well that's nice that is really nice that has been something that has kind of been wonky on some setups in the past and really hurts inexperienced users i think so i have two more items now that you're here wimpy just that i would love to chat with you about um i'd love to sort of back our way into 1710 mate edition of ubuntu here because um i know that there is a big feature for me that I loved when I was on the Unity desktop that has made its way into Ubuntu Mate 1710.

And I don't know if you saw the feedback. I imagine you must get all kinds of different feedback for this stuff. But one thing that I saw people talking about which seemed really misinformed was, well, now I have to drop Mate because it's just adding all of the bulk and cruft that modern desktops have. And what I'm alluding to is pretty much full-on, and correct me if I'm wrong, full-fledged HUD support like we had in Unity 7

in Ubuntu Mate. If you go with the Mutiny theme, you turn on HUD support, you turn on Compiz, you're getting really close to where you were with Unity 7, and it's got certain people, certain neckbeards upset. And so I got this email from this guy who says that he's switching now to XFCE because Matei is getting too bloated. So I thought maybe if you explained a little bit of how HUD works, about what talks to HUD and how that all happens, and maybe help people understand how it's not a bunch of bloat and tell people what the feature is? Well, the feature is the ability to search the menus.

So, you know, your file edit view tools, help menus that you see in all of your applications, it's the ability to search through those. So you hit the Alt key, an overlay appears, and you start typing to filter down what features of the menus you want to access. So you could type print, for example. Instead of having to go grab your mouse, go to file, go down to print, you could just keep your hands on the keyboard

and type in print, and that would come up. Yeah, and it's particularly useful for applications that have lots of filters. So audio editors, and you know, the office suites and Inkscape and GIMP. Yeah. You know, when there are no convenient key bindings to complex filters, it's a great way to find them very quickly. Now, behind the scenes, the way this all works is through GTK models, model menu and some dbus services um and what's providing that dbus registrar is the new global menu so the global menu provides that dbus registrar and

then we also load a gtk module which is called unity gtk module um which is kind of a misnomer. What it's actually doing is providing the app menu model stuff. It's got very little to do with Unity itself. And so to just sort of clarify your point there a bit, what's happening is these menu options are being exposed via Dbus. So it's not like there's some global scraper running in the background that's reading all of the menus of every application. The applications are advertising these features to Dbus. Dbus then enumerates that to the HUD and that's already happening in the background regardless. It's not

a big bulk out of processing, correct? Yeah. And if you run one of the themes that doesn't use the global menu, then none of that stuff is there anyway. So none of that stuff is resident in memory. Okay. Now, what I would say is if you really feel that that is an unacceptable additional amount of memory, and it's not much, by the way, then fine. Run Lubuntu, run Zubuntu, go elsewhere. That's absolutely fine. From the very first day that we created Ubuntu Mate,

I have an objective in the objectives of the project that application choices would uh feature feature rich applications and wouldn't um chase after lightness or whimsy um and ubuntu mate still runs on a raspberry pi with one gig of ram if you've got less than one gig of ram and you're upset that ubuntu mate doesn't run well in one gig of RAM, then fine, go elsewhere. That's absolutely fine by me. I think it's a perfect balance. I think the project is constantly evaluating this question and striking such a good balance between modern day desktop features and a traditional computing paradigm.

features and a traditional computing paradigm it's it's with as much as i talk about 1710 right now i'm not necessarily sold on running straight ubuntu 1710 um i'm also heavily considering giving the ubuntu mate spin a try simply for all these little added extra perks here how is the how's the new alpha been received by the community uh very very well it's beta one now right it's it's beta one yeah um i did a presentation about it at ubu con it was very well received um yeah uh and we're i was also um when i was at ubu con the etienne is our new qa lead he's been involved in the project for some considerable time but has recently taken on the role of qa lead oh congrats and he lives in france so he made the trek up from the south of france to paris and we met for the first time over the weekend oh very good and spent some time together planning so that was really great you know to to meet people on a project who you know you've not

met in person um i absolutely love that that's one of the reasons i'm looking forward to going to new york yeah and this thing about you know'm going to rage quit a particular distro. Fine. But the thing is, is you're talking about leaving a distribution where all of these options are options and you could just use a different, you know, we've preserved that traditional layout. The as granddad remembers it to panel layout that has been there forever with gnome 2 is still the default layout yeah and it doesn't use indicators and it doesn't use the hud and it doesn't use compis or any of this stuff so i don't understand the rationale for right i'm rage quitting because it's got all of this stuff that i have to go and turn on that is not default.

It's crazy talk. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. All right. So the second item I have before you can stop talking so much is this is your fault. Just as I was coming to closure on Nalaeus N1. Oh, yeah. Just as I was getting to some sort of peace with that, you teased me with MailSpring, which isn't actually available for download yet.

No. But it is a fork of Nalaeus Mail. Now, Wes, I know you, myself, Wimpy, we've been big. We're a little community here. We've been big Nalaeus users in the past. And then they announced that they were shutting that ass down. Turns out their API makes them a bunch more dough, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

So Wimpy found MailSpring at getmailspring.com. Say hello. Kind of looking forward to this. Looks nice, though. Yeah. It has essentially all the same features that you came to love and expect from Nileus. It has the really creepy but yet advanced and surprisingly useful open tracking features. I don't know about self-hosted or any of that, but I'm thinking about signing up for it.

None of that self-hosting is required. So Nylas Mail or Nylas N1 was the original mail client. That used all of the cloud services to do all of the mail syncing. Right. The Nylas Mail, which was the open source version, had that sync engine integrated locally. So you didn't have to go elsewhere. Now, what's interesting about GetMailSpring is that Ben Gotto, who was one of the original members of the Nihilus mail team,

his company is now stewarding this fork, and he was the principal developer of nihilist mail that is interesting isn't it yeah and what they're already doing is they're like reworking that sync engine so the sync engine was written in javascript i imagine node and they've already replaced it with a new sync engine which is implemented in c++ and they they're claiming that it uses 50% less RAM and it's considerably faster and improves battery endurance. So it looks like they're trying to get all that new, that refactored sync engine integrated

before they make it available for download. But I've already signed up to this to stay informed of developments, and I'm very, very interested to see how this pans out. I'm thinking about doing the same. I really liked Nalaeus Mail, specifically N1, but Nalaeus Mail too. So I'm thinking about doing the same.

What do you think, Wes? You think it's possible? Maybe like a new hope. Maybe it's a new hope, Wes. Yeah, well, I mean, I appreciate a lot of what they had done, and having a bunch of this all be open source anyway yeah right like why not this is this is what we continually talk about as being an advantage yep so if there's even a shot that it works out for us i'm i'm on board i'm i wouldn't uh i'm not always in favor of c++ strictly better than Node or not, but if it's actually faster and more performant, it seems like they are, like, what I got out of those summaries is, like, a, you know, a craftsmanship and a care and a loving tuning that I would love to see. And I think it's a good sign that it's one of the original authors.

Thanks for pointing that yeah yeah i can't wait to see how this develops um because uh nihilist was the great white hope for the you know the the new generation of male clients pretty male clients and that got dashed and well and i i i was only saying uh to poppy a few days ago you know when when these projects die somebody you know there's usually like you know five or six rage forks immediately afterwards and there was none of that with nihilist probably because it's complex code base and then i saw this and i was like yes this is this is what we wanted i know what you're saying it sounds kind of silly but i i i really got my head around email for a few months there like I haven't for years

and after they announced they were killing it off I switched back to my traditional like webmail thunderbird kmail combo which is horrible and I don't think I've opened my inbox this week because I've just been when I get busy like that without the ability to

see the thing that Nelius gave me was two things that were so great was the, I snooze for later so I could set a reminder and I could come back to it so I could, I could clear them out of my inbox, but, but get back to them. And the other thing that I found super useful was it's surprising the, the creepiness and, and well done implementation of tracking they had, where they had some sort of server-side component with embedded code that was really good at detecting when you opened the email, which is an incredible indicator for when you're about to get an email, it turns out.

And this is what I learned after using N1, was that almost everyone who emails me on a reoccurring basis opens the last email that they got from me and just hits reply and changes the subject, deletes the body and sends me an email. Like everybody does that. I thought that was just something I did. Everybody does that. And so what happens is when they open up the old email, I get a notification and I know in about five minutes I'm going to get an email from a sponsor. And so I know this sounds dumb, but i can mentally prepare myself for that communication i can i can like clear psychologically clear my schedule okay i'm gonna respond to this i'm gonna think about this and i

actually was getting email done it was a couple of just be the snoozing and really good notifications um i i really loved it so I'd love to see a fork. I'm going to be watching that with some interest. We'll have a link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out. I have a quick mention before we move on. Jeez. We still have, oh my gosh, we still have Backtrack and the Gen 2 Challenge to get to. Wow.

Oh my gosh. Jay Impact with Gen 2. This is a lot going on. This is a lot going on. So just a quick mention. Be quick now. I wish we could spend more time on this. The Mangero Project is happy, I'm sure, I would assume, to announce that they got an OEM to ship a laptop pre-installed with Mangero XFCE Edition.

So there you go, Joe. That's good for you. And it's the Spitfire Manjaro Special Edition. It's powered with a 7th generation Intel processor, 32 gigabytes of them RAMs, dual drive bays, and it can pretty much probably take whatever you throw at it. It's got a 1080p IPS display. We don't talk much about Manjaro. I mean, I haven't used it for a while.

Yeah, well, you know, growing up, my grandma always told me, if you ain't got nothing nice to say, don't say it. I can't even. Yeah, I'm not a big Manjaro advocate. We don't review Manjaro very often. I don't talk about Manjaro. But I know there's a portion of our audience that definitely has had success with it. And, I mean, they seem like they have a fair amount of momentum they've got

their own community going which is great this is why i thought we could have made a segment out of this because to be honest with you it feels like a trend distributions more and more are starting to ink deals i think probably the most prominent and successful one is the enterware of a two-bit marketing one because to me that's sort of like the best of both worlds. Great hardware, great company, great distro. And you're starting to see elementary OS with different trying and Solus rumors and all these things that seem to be brewing. And it seems that all of them sort of have one common denominator, and it's Clevo. And I think that's the enabling technology here because Clevo is providing the base platform of the laptop.

The OEMs can then focus on the software implementations a bit more. And so what you are getting, and it's going to take a little while for the consumers to catch up, I would think, except for our audience, is you're going to get different levels of implementation. So you're going to have some Clevo resellers that have a really solid implementation. They really have nailed the firmware issues. They've nailed the compatibility issues. They've worked back and have some Clevo resellers that have a really solid implementation. They really have nailed the firmware issues. They've nailed the compatibility issues. They've worked back and forth with Clevo. Maybe they even have some leverage. I wonder if at some point we'll see like a Clevo competitor so that.

So, yeah, I was going to say it's not always Clevo. Undoubtedly, Clevo features. Could you give me an example of one that's not clevo uh the first couple of generations of the intro where apollo were top star yeah top star uh but this one is clevo uh the current generation is yes no no no i mean yeah sorry no i mean the station x the the manjaro spitfire is um i'm not familiar with what what's being shipped there but it could be it looks i'm just saying that yes okay these linux oems are not absolutely always clevo okay quite often they are but there are other odms that get used as well yeah okay

that's a fair point i think that's a fair point. I think this one is. This one, I can't remember. I got the Clevo make at one point, but I'm pretty sure I tracked it down to a particular Clevo make, which is similar to probably the Palo Galago line of machines. To me, I feel like that only

matters in so much as how good is the OEM at doing the implementation. Yes. What kind of constraints does that put on the whole process that you can't get around? Obviously, do you like the Clevo hardware? Like, that's a component. Some people do, some people don't. That's fine. But I do feel like these

ODMs, Topstar or Clevo or whoever are making it possible for distributions to offer an out-of-the-box distribution experience. So instead of buying a box of CDs now, you can buy a laptop. And how long did we talk about how that was important for the Linux desktop, right? Even if it's not the hardware we want or even the distribution we want, it's certainly a different category than I have to buy and hope that this

will work. Yeah. And if you think about it in terms of selling a box set of dvds i used to buy the susa box set it was like six discs um you know i used to get the free cd from uh ubuntu um manjaro and mandrake was mini discs this is kind of like that same thing don't you think well then what's important about this is that you know we've we've said for years and years and years the reason why linux is more widespread is because you can't go into brick and mortar stores and buy it yeah now the next best thing to that is having online retailers that make it available um and you know we've seen a number of these uh linux vendors popping up recently, particularly in the UK. Obviously, Entroware have been around for some years now, but we've had StationX, Star Labs,

and I think there's one called Nimboo or something like that. So there's been three pop up in the UK in quite quick succession. And then another one that I've known about in Spain, but had the good fortune to meet at UbuCon this weekend is Slimbook. And they have some very, very nice gear that they had on show. And there were lots of oohs and aahs and lots of people saying, I'm going to struggle not to buy one of these. They had some really terrific kit and chassis that I've not seen before. So I don't know where they're coming

from but they're really impressive that's exciting and and they're the company that are providing that kde neon book oh yeah very good huh okay so this the more we talk about it um i i not only doesn't talk could i see this taking off more and more, but I can also kind of understand why System76 feels compelled to ship Pop! OS. Imagine if they had an inside track or they saw the way this thing was blowing. This wind was blowing this direction where you're going to start having super specialized. You're going to have Solus laptops and elementary OS laptops and Ubuntu Mate laptops and Manjaro laptops. laptops and mangero laptops and then you're going to have the large vendors like hp and lenovo and of course dell shipping stock ubuntu so they don't have that extra value add area there's a gap there i can see the logic path however um my my counter argument to that would

have been there's still a market for somebody to do a really rock solid vanilla Ubuntu implementation. Because at the end of the day, that's going to sell way more than any of these things do, probably combined. Especially with what we were just talking about, like customer feedback. I have no problems with Dell, but close customer feedback about software design is not something that they have a ton of experience with compared to say let's like system 76 is a little bit closer with their customer base i would say yeah and i could you so you can see that that path yeah you look skeptical beard no i was just gonna say it's still really interesting to me that it's manjaro that's coming out with a laptop like if i made a list they'd be pretty far down on who i would have expected to come up with a laptop.

I guess it's who you know, right? Yeah, I guess. Because you could see certain distributions. I guess, yeah, are you implying that maybe it's implying more growth to Manjaro than we realize? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, maybe. Maybe there's more going on than we realize?

I feel like they must think that they have a fairly large user base if they're coming out with hardware now. Yeah, I mean, they've got to figure out their money. Well, not just Manjaro, but whoever's shipping the laptops must think they have enough of a user base as well. Yeah, it is that statement, isn't it? Somebody did the business math here. So it's now time for the Manjaro challenge.

So where's my entergos laptop yeah well but that's the thing i mean the thing is is that you know there are lots of people using arch linux or so the internet would have you believe yes it would i i would suggest that most of those people that say they're running arch linux have either installed entergos or manjaro there are probably very few actually installing Arch. Do you think that's true? I mean, really though, Wimpy, because once you install Arch, you don't really

have to install it again. Like, it's just installed and it can be installed for a very... So, you can install it once six years ago and then claim... Have you ever installed Arch Linux? Yes, yeah. I have, and I would say it's... You have, have you? Yeah. You've always just installed Anturgos. And Gentoo, and Gentoo, but's you have have you yeah you've not always just installed and gen 2 and gen 2 but i always i will i will grant you that if i were if i were in the last two years

going to install arch i would absolutely go integrals and not even consider going stock arch it's just why waste the time my point exactly it's all about time yeah yeah okay fair enough fair enough that's funny i always just boot into an antegros live cd and then install stock arch really yeah because then you have a gui you have chrome or whatever and but otherwise i can install everything in antegros and like two pac-man commands i suppose if i was gonna do it today if i for some reason wanted to install stock arch today that's probably maybe how i would do it if I was going to think about it. Huh. Yeah. It's just, I think you're right, Wimpy.

It really is, it really is like, it's a badge of honor, in a sense, on the internet to run Arch, and so everybody proclaims they run Arch, but maybe the most, maybe you're right. Maybe the majority of them are really Manjaro users. Maybe they're all Manjaro users. That's not Arch. I mean, I hate to be that guy mean i hate to be that guy i hate to be that guy because i hate that guy i hate that guy when

you're like looking for a problem he's like oh you're using manjaro sorry can't help but it's not arch i can't believe that manjaro has more users than entergos though it's been around longer not by much yeah but you remember people used to really buy into that manjaro is tested arch thing for like years yeah like they have the delayed release yeah people that always push me away from it though well yeah because if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds of course it would but people that didn't think about it that that sounds like yeah arch but tested like debian does well shit i'll put that on my rig i mean you know if you hear it like that, that sounds good.

It's like Arch, but all the, yeah. But then when you, you're like, oh yeah, of course, if they only have maybe 3,000 people running the testing version, it doesn't really do anything other than just slow down the updates. That seems like a bad idea. But that takes 30 seconds.

I feel like we're suddenly crapping on Manjaro and I feel bad. Yeah, I mean, mean you know you're right if you have nothing to say we should be celebrating we should their glorious success of getting an oem behind yeah because that's a big deal for any disc it is a serious validation and it and it's a big deal for linux because it means you know we've we saw those uh net, is it, Netdata statistics, 3-point-something percent Linux users, a growing trend there. There is obviously a growing market for these OEMs

to sell Linux devices and Linux laptops, and we should be applauding that and encouraging it because it doesn't actually matter what distro is being sold. That's one more laptop, one more person joining us, and one less of them. And more resources spent like getting firmware, getting polish ironed out, things that are in theory somewhat portable to whatever you want to run. You think about, too, the other net effect this is having is it's another reseller who is pulling on clevo to support linux better so there could be a come because of this because of this market now there could become a point where clevo is one of the best supported out there because they got all these people selling

clevo machines and i know that some of these oems that are using you know the likes of um clevo are starting to talk to the firmware update guys to actually get these you know the firmware and bios for these devices supported by gnome software and firmware update so you know if this trend grows there'll be more people putting more pressure on these odms to release their bios and and firmware under licenses or agreements that enable these things to go into these public repositories so they can benefit from automatic updates and we don't have to be like barbarians booting off floppy disks.

This is a serious tip of the hat to the Manjaro project because, like we said earlier, somebody did the business math here and decided it was worth their time, which is a real validation to the project. And this is the kind of like real supply chain. Like you were just saying, like the supply chain stuff that will make longer term change that is very different than just some software. I want to know your thoughts, Wimpy, though, on them choosing to do a customized XFCE spin that's been, quote unquote, tailored for the hardware. I don't know anything about X xfce so you're asking the wrong i'm sorry what do you think i mean really what do you think it means to say why why xfce

what's that about is that is that a manjaro thing i thought that was the default desktop for manjaro maybe i thought only masochists use xfce i can't i can't i can't you do you do know one i can't you know you spot you thought can't. Well, you do know one. I can't. You know, you thought of, speaking of Joe, the market research, I did a little digging for Linux Action News one episode ago and got some of the information behind where that market share number came from and why we hear about it from time to time and how many sites are involved in that information.

So I would recommend you check out recent episodes of Linux Action News. I think it was 16, but that's off the top of my head, where I kind of did a little deep dive into where that 3% number is coming from. It's actually... Of course I'm saying this, but I actually think that 3% number is low.

And I only... Oh, I say that i say that after i researched how they're getting to the number and once i realized how they're getting to the number i'm pretty confident but i don't know of course but i'm pretty confident saying that it's low and you you think so too wimpy well porn hub tells us so so yeah well yeah oh my god okay so it's true they publish the stats every year we've got significantly more perverts than three percent well let's be honest i mean it's a great platform for porn we've said that before it truly is it's the best platform for porn as far as i'm concerned because and i think uh you know porn shops have been good to linux running linux servers on the back end serving serving tons of video. Absolutely.

The server side, the infrastructure side, and the fact that we don't launch executables has been really great for Linux. Yes. Oh, man. Well, there's that. Be safe, everybody. This is the more you know on the Unplugged program. Okay, so we have many things still to get to. I don't know if this is going to work, but I spent some time blowing off some steam this week. I got a lot going on.

I got a lot in my head. I got a lot I'm trying to figure out, and I thought, what better way to focus all of this random energy than to try to break my TP-Link and Belkin smart devices. Turns out my TP-Links run a 2.6 kernel, Linux 2.6 kernel. Ouch. Yeah, yeah. So I had some fun. What is this, 2005?

I know. Kali Linux. We're finally going to talk about it. We really should have led with this. We just kind of meandered this whole episode. But we're going to talk about Kali Linux here in a moment. But first, let's take a moment and get real. Let's get real about DigitalOcean. Go to DigitalOcean.com

and use our promo code DOunplugged. It's one word after you create your account. This will give you a $10 credit. You can spin up a server. It could be Ubuntu. It could be Fedora. It can even be FreeBSD or CentOS or Debian. I mean, do you have any FreeBSD droplets, Beard?

Why would anybody do that? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Wes, would you have any reason for a free BSD droplet? Well, maybe you want to run some jails. That'd be a great way to run like a thousand different websites in one. I guess if you want end-to-end ZFS. I just prefer the industry standard Docker on my industry standard Ubuntu. I mean, it's just me, Wes.

I don't know why. I'm still needling the BSD Now guys, and I don't know why. It's like, it's just something I just... It's in your blood now. This is my moment in the show to needle the BSD Now guys, and I take it almost every week. I take it almost every week. But anyways...

We're going to catch you with a net BSD droplet someday, and you are going to have so much shame. You know, Chris, it's probably because on BSD now, they need less. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true. Why would anybody install Linux? I was just going to say, DigitalOcean has been saving my bacon recently. I spun it up by Droplet to run OpenVPN, and that's been very, very, very handy. But I'll save that for another story, because I believe Mr. Wimpy has one from the UbuCon.

UbuCon. UbuCon. I do. What is it, sir? believe uh mr wimpy has one from the ubu ubu con ubu con i do so um poppy and i did a couple of snapcraft workshops at ubu con as one does one on the saturday one on the sunday and we went into a classroom and it wasn't set up the way we needed. So we span up a bunch of DO droplets and configured all of the course material on it. And we did it all with DOCTL and a simple script to go and zap all of the machines with what we needed. And we ran our classrooms off DO droplets. Very good. That's nice. And then afterwards, do you destroy them or do you still have them around?

Just destroyed them. Yeah. And it cost us a few pennies to run, you then when we were done, we destroyed it. And it's, I don't know, there's something about that that feels ultimately powerful. It's really a lot of incredible compute power on demand. And you can spin it up, and you can use it, and you can run your Linux that you like to use, and there's great documentation, and a simple dashboard, and an elegant API, and they got data centers everywhere, and it's just available to you when you need it. It makes you feel a little bit like Tony Stark, and I just love it. If you use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED, one word, you get the $10 credit, and then you can play around.

Run like the three cents an hour machine with our $10 credit. It's great. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED after you have created your account over at DigitalOcean.com. And by the way, in their community documentation section, they have a new tutorial on, or I guess it's really an introduction to load testing your box. So if you want to test network latency, CPU, memory, disk IO, all that kind of stuff, they got a really great tutorial on it. And it's applicable to anybody running Linux, but it's just an example of the value that they add

to DigitalOcean users too, because obviously it's applicable to DigitalOcean droplets. I want to give a challenge to the community, Chris. Oh yeah? I want them to come up with things to do with the DigitalOcean API that nobody's ever thought of. Ooh, that would be

good. I want to see ridiculous things, like stuff they never planned for. Yeah, yeah. DigitalOcean.com, create the account, then use a promo code, DOUnplugged, one word. Now, finally, let's talk about Kali Linux, and I feel like the only way to appropriately talk about Kali Linux would be to talk about Backtrack Linux,

because the last time you and I spoke about this, audience, we were really talking about Backtrack Linux. And it was a solid distribution. People came together and they created something that was kind of unique. It was kind of the smashing together of Slacks and Nopics. And then they would sort of smash it together and do these big releases with all these kind of features. And I really loved it. Full disclosure, I used it professionally to make a living for a while. So obviously I'm a little biased about Backtrack, but loved it. Backtrack really was a great tool.

But things move on. People move on. Projects change. And they later on down the road decided to essentially change things up and rebase. And they rebased on Debian. And around this time they launched and they called it Kali Linux. And Kali Linux is a penetration testing distribution that's targeted towards ethical hackers. So let's crack open a beer here and talk a little bit about Kali Linux.

Because this week I was having some fun. And I want to say there's a few different ways you can use Kali Linux. You surprisingly could legitimately use it as your desktop distribution. GNOME 3, they've got a couple of extensions installed like the applications menu. In fact, Wes, if you want, this thing right here, I was running it this week on the – I'm going to turn on – let's see if the studio cam is working because I don't know if it is or not. We'll find out. I want people to see this thing here.

So I've got it here on the Dell Precision 7720 laptop. Massive. Which is just a monster. And the thing about this laptop is it reminds me a lot of the Bonobo that I had back in the day when I was doing penetration testing. And so here, Wes, I've got this is Kali Linux running off of the live thumb drive there. And take a look at the application menu stuff and whatnot. You could just use that as your daily driver. I'm running GNOME here.

It's not bad. Yeah, GNOME 3. And they also have support for VMware. They have, in fact, VMware. Kernel 4.9. Yeah. They've got VMware Fusion boot images and all kinds of different ways to get access to Kali. Well, what is this traditional style menu plugin they've got installed?

And one of the nice things they support is persistent mode, so you can still boot off a live media but save your data on a GPG encrypted persistent state. That's excellent. Yes, it is. It is excellent. It's very nice when you're doing different kinds of work, when you're doing a multi-day project. That is a very nice feature. Oh, they've got OpenVoS in here. That's one thing I was going to mention.

Well, let's talk about that. So OpenVoS is where I wanted to start. So I want to walk people down breaking their own network. And you've got to start by discovering your own network. And there's a lot of different ways you can do this. Nmap is a great tool as well. But I want to point you to NetDiscover. It's installed by default on Kali Linux.

And it's a network address discovering tool, and it will really quickly, it'll, if you pull the, I've got some screenshots, anyways, it'll quickly, it'll identify all the machines on your network and the vendors who make the hardware. So I could very quickly see all of the TP Link and the Belkin and

the three Amazon Echo devices that are on our network, because it gave me vendor, and what I assume it's doing, although I don't know this for sure, but what I assume it is doing, is in the background, it's looking up the MAC addresses of these devices with a vendor database, and it's matching MAC address to vendor, and then it's saying, okay, well, it has these ports open, it's on this network IP address, and this is the hardware.

So within about 30 seconds, using net discover, and the command is the hardware. So within about 30 seconds, using net discover, and the command is really simple. In my case, it was net discover space 192.168.0.0 slash 24. And that told it to scan my entire network, 192.168.0.0.24. Now my network is a 192 network. If you had a 172 or a 10.1 network, you would need to adjust your command. But net discover space 192.168.0.0 slash 24. You execute that command. And within seconds, net discover will find every device on your network. It'll give you the manufacturer information about it.

See, this seems super helpful because there's a lot of tools I've used where I've been very frustrated with like an NMS that does auto discovery but does a bunch of other stuff too. So if I could just have one tool that would keep me apprised of changes to my network but without having a bunch of nonsense I don't need. Great for that too. Great for that too. It's really great. Yeah. So then you get your list of machines you want to go after, the machines you want to attack or audit. And for me, it was the TP-Link devices.

And this is where OpenVOS comes in. So how did you know about OpenVOS? I looked at using it at various employers before. Yeah, so there's several different assessment tools. These are tools that will scan a host IP and just bang on every single port, try executing different commands. If it gets a Telnet connection, it'll try to log in. Like, it just does everything to abuse a box. And you can have it abuse an entire network, or you can have it just hammer a machine.

And it's not necessarily going to execute a payload, but it's going to tell you what doesn't work, what is vulnerable. If it leaks a certain timestamp that could be used to decrypt data, it tells you all these things about a host, which I was curious about with these TP-Link devices, which didn't really give me much information, unfortunately. But OpenVAS, or OpenVAS, the reason why I went with it, it stands, OpenVAS, by the way, stands for the Open Vulnerability Assessment System. That's what the VAS is, is the Vulnerability Assessment System. And I started using it because it reminds me a lot of a tool that I used back in the day called Nessus. Oh, yeah. I've heard of that. The Nessus vulnerability scanner. Yeah. So this is along that same line. It's an open source vulnerability scanner that subscribes to a database. Guys, this is key. It subscribes to a database and it pulls down all of the latest

vulnerabilities and exploits constantly. So you have the latest fresh stuff. That's where the real automation stuff that you don't have to do anymore. Or weren't ever doing. And all of the OpenVAS packages are in Kali, by the way. So it's real easy. There's a meta package. You can apt install OpenVAS, and it pulls down the common and the core. And there's a first-time setup wizard you can run under Kali Linux.

And it will go down. It will set up the database, which I believe might be Postgres by default on Kali. Excellent. It pulls down all of the vulnerability assessment updates, which on our 100 megabit connection here at the studio took 45 minutes to download. So it will take a long time and do it where you have a fast connection. But once it's done, you can throw the weight of the security community's entire knowledge set at a system, and you can just punish it to see what it is vulnerable to. And one of the things that's a lot of fun is once you get results in OpenVAS, and there's other ways to do this under Kali.

OpenVAS is the way I like to do it, but there's other ways. But what I do is I take the data set I get from OpenVAS, and I run it through something called Metasploit. Metasploit is more like a list of known exploits, and it's like macros to execute them. Metasploit is like, imagine a whole bunch of shell scripts that do bad shit on your system, only it's everything. It's like remote RPC connections, it's SQL database connections, it's HTTP stuff, and you tell Metasploit, this is the host, this is the vulnerability it has, which I got using OpenVAS, you tell Metasploit, now, okay, here's the IP, here's the port, it's running Apache, go execute a shell on that system.

So you say, here's Apache, here's the IP, now go give me shell. That's what Metasploit does. And it's so much fun, because you can look at a system with OpenVAS and go, oh, they have a vulnerability in MySQL. And then you go tell Metasploit, go talk to MySQL at this IP, and now you own the box. Yep. And it can be a great way to go verify that. Did your patch sets actually apply? Go Metasploit it. If you get in, then no, they didn't. Yeah, exactly. And I've linked in the show notes an article on the Kali Linux docs page about using Metasploit. And it's something you could load to your machine and have it dedicated to a hard drive

or something like I'm doing we can have on a thumb drive. And from time to time, you fire it up and just do an audit of your network. A little Kali and Docker? Yeah. I like to think of Metasploit as like unit tests for vulnerabilities. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. and Docker. Yeah. I like to think of Metasploit as like unit tests for vulnerabilities. Yeah. And it's kind of complicated to set up. It's not hard. I won't say hard, but I'll say it's complicated to set up. But once you get it set up, it's pretty easy. And Metasploit is pretty much set up out of the box on Kali, which is really cool.

So what I decided to do was just sort of bang on these TP-Links. Now, they don't really return much. So what I noticed is TP-Link is they've changed all of the return codes. The version identifiers doesn't return any of that stuff. So I think when people say they have a hardened Linux, they have Linux that doesn't respond to any ports except for the ones they need. And the services that respond don't give you any identifying information. So if you somehow knew the version of some software that was on there via another leak of the companies, like if there was a TP-Link leak about the version of Linux or the version of Node or the version of Nginx that they have on that little tiny little plug,

then you can attack it with Metasploit. But because when you do a vulnerability scan, they're not revealing any version information. They're not, except for the kernel version, which is exactly what you would want. That's what you, you don't want somebody to be able to come into your network and scan your network and get all the version information for the embedded Apache server and the embedded database server.

You don't want that. So based on my just really quick scans of both the Belkin Wemo devices and the TP-Link smart switches, while they're running old versions of Linux, these little smart plugs, they're running old versions of Linux. They're $65 computers running Linux or $35 if you buy them on sale. Right. Yeah. They're $65 computers running Linux, or $35 if you buy them on sale.

Right, yeah. But they're like bastardized versions of all of the software that have been modified and gimped to not fully be functional or report themselves correctly. Which I guess at the end of the day, I'm happy about. I wouldn't necessarily want them to. But it was sort of like revealing, in a sense to just even get like the kernel version and the ports and all of the IPs and all of the MAC address. Like I felt like I had a better understanding of my network. Even though I didn't really crack a TP link. I didn't crack one of these Belkins and I didn't, I kind of didn't really try too hard.

I did walk away with the sense that now I have like a complete picture and I took screenshots too. So like now I have like all the IPs of all my network devices, what their Mac addresses are, what the vendors are. So I know how many, you know, it's that it gives you a nice baseline, right? So that you add future stuff and it looks way different or you see a bunch more activity like you can now benchmark against that. Yeah, I really, I really just would say just for fun, go spend an afternoon banging around for it or you see a bunch more activity like you can now benchmark against yeah yeah i i really i

i really just would say just just for fun go spend an afternoon banging around with cali linux i highly highly recommend it and uh if you're uh if you're looking for different implementations go check out their download page they have several i've linked to a couple different ones that i used but they have uh cali hunter or net hunter they They have the VM version. They have 64-bit and 32-bits. They have KDE, Mate, Enlightenment 17. They just have like 100 different spins. And I just went for the stock 64-bit Kali ISO, which is GNOME 3 based. And you can find it at kali.org slash downloads for that.

And if you got an extra one, pour one out for Backtrack. That was a real tool back in the day. I downloads for that. And if you got an extra one, pour one out for backtrack. That was a real tool back in the day. I really liked that. Guys, we are plum overtime. We're not just out of time. We are overtime right now. And I wanted to mention before we go.

So let's, you know what? Okay, all right. So let's do this. I hate to do it. I can't believe it. I see the pain in your eyes. Let's punt the Gen 2 Challenge to next week because before we go,

I just want to give everybody a heads up about... I know I'm sorry, guys. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But before we go... It's okay, Chris. I'm still compiling anyway. There's a community announcement I want to make.

Our friends over at the Ubuntu podcast have something special in the works. Wimpy, are you still here? Can you tell us about what's going on in regards to a giveaway over at the Ubuntu podcast have something special in the works. Wimpy, are you still here? Can you tell us about what's going on in regards to a giveaway over at the Ubuntu podcast? Well, it's not a giveaway. It's a hard-earned competition. Okay, fair enough.

It is, isn't it? It is. You're right. We ran a competition in partnership with Entroware. We reviewed the Entroware Apollo, the current generation, and they allowed us to use that as the prize in a competition, which we've been running for many weeks. And the winners of that competition will be announced this Thursday. We've been tweeting all of the entries via the Ubuntu podcast Twitter channel over the

last three days. And on our subreddit, all of the entries are there. So you can go and upvote those entries. We've already picked our winners. We're interested in seeing what the audience thinks compared to what we've picked as the winners. So you can go and have a look at people that have composed music, written stories, written poems, created applications, drawings. There's just a wide range. And the theme was 20. So create something in 20 colors or 20 shapes or 20 lines of code

or in 20 minutes. And people have really run with it, and we've got a really interesting selection we gotta i gotta you and i have to consult next time because we just gave away the xps 13 we just gave it away and you got you got real stuff you're like comics and music yeah yeah that is great it's so interesting because every time you do a contest like this of course i can say this for you because i don't know if you guys want to. You really discover how awesome your audience is. Absolutely.

I mean, we loved looking over these entries and they're all fabulous. And we opened it up because we didn't just want a load of people giving us a bunch of code we deliberately opened it up so that our listeners you know who are authors or artists or musicians and not coders could also you know compete on a on a level playing ground and it was absolutely brilliant i think that's great so check out the ubuntu podcast and i look forward to hearing that episode now unfortunately that means the gen 2 challenge will be punted. Whoa. Who saw that coming? I didn't see that coming.

Couldn't have happened. Couldn't have been predicted. Couldn't have been. All those times, hours spent compiling for nothing. Darn it, this time I'm going with dash O3. You know what? I'm going to wipe the whole thing and do it all over again.

Come back next week. Oh, God. Come back next week. Come back next week. Beardsley, where should people find you throughout the week? Twitter.com slash your Kyle P or rec.net. Rec.net. Mr. Wes? At Wes Payne.

And you can follow me at Chris Elias at Jupiter Signal and LinuxUnplugged.reddit.com. See you back here next week. Thank you. Okay. Oh, yeah. Well, since we didn't do the Gen 2 challenge, I got a different idea for my title. Suggestion is changing. I feel like maybe we should go with the Kali Linux segment instead since that's what we ended up with.

I guess so. Chris, the sad part is I was just about to install GNOME on Gen 2. You should still do it. You can report back next week about how installing GNOME went. And I'm doing it without SystemD from a third-party repo as well. Oh, you crazy, girl. You crazy. That is...

We'll save it for the future. We'll definitely talk about it. Yeah, I'll save it for next week,'ll definitely talk about it yeah i'll save it for next week man don't worry okay okay uh speaking of the ubuntu podcast contest that you know as you know he opened it for designers and things and as a designer and a writer i uh submitted some python code hey oh i also installed ubuntu 17 just now by the way the 1710 beta i know the way, the 17.10 beta. I know. It's ironic that we're trying to do the Gen 2 challenge because all I really want to do is just load all the different versions of Ubuntu right now. That's all I – all the flavors.

Yeah. Good for them, though. Good for them. By the way, I put it on my MacBook that I got for my birthday. Really? A new one or a used one? It was one off of eBay because my dad didn't want it what's the year what's the year what's the year 2013 late version 15 inch with nvidia graphics that's what i have

that's that is the sweet spot right now i i mean and you know what it's still a good system it's still super fast and i tell you what the high dpi display on it looks crisp as hell. Yeah, I know. Because I had had... You know what really sucks, though? The only thing is, the only good desktop that looks on it with the Nome 3. Nome 3. Yep, you're in my mind. Yeah, I know. Oh, I know.

That really bites, because you can't do XFCE, you can't do KDE, you can't do none of that with... But it looks amazing. It looks like you could lick the screen good. But please don't. Don't lick the screen. Yeah. I've had high DPI on a 13-inch screen, but when we put Linux on the MacBook Pro with a 15-inch high DPI,

whole other level. It's a whole other level. It's so good. The only thing that I've had troubles with is getting the graphics switching to work properly. Oh, I don't even bother. I just run the NVIDIA all the time. Yeah, I get you. I tried Gen 2 on it. Ugh, talk about a nightmare.