LINUX Unplugged - Episode 216: Open Source Is Hard | LUP 216

Episode Date: September 27, 2017

It’s Wes & the Beard this week as we cover tons of stories. TopIcons is officially unmaintained, KDE launches the XFree kwin project in an attempt to rid themselves of XWayland, Synergy goes closed source, Microsoft & Canonical build a custom linux kernel & more!

I present to you over at GitHub, the fastest website ever. Ultra fast, single TCP packet audio visual experience. Yeah, that's right. It's a web server and website that just sends you one packet. You can try it at http packet dot city. All right. Apparently, it's an actual audio visual experience. Yeah, well, they did say.

Yeah, they even have room for 120 bytes of ad space. In a single packet. That's pretty impressive. That's some high quality music. Yeah. I'm just going to mute that right now because we do not need that. Let's look at the source, though. Well, to be fair, that music is probably copyrighted and will get us pulled down.

That will probably get us pulled down. Yeah. Not again. Not again. Not again, beard. Yeah, okay. This is pretty small. Yeah. That's a tiny amount of source code.

With no formatting. With no formatting whatsoever, yeah. So you can go check it out. They've got a client here, index.html. It's just a tiny little thing, and I think they just have a tiny little C web server that sends this to you so if uh you know your clients don't want a bloated website who does these days just send them to the fastest website ever see what they should do is they should figure out how to also send you a copy of the thing to run it yourself in that same packet oh yeah yeah

that would be like a quine type thing but uh for a single packet web server yep getting all meta up in here i like that beard this is linux unplugged episode 216 for september 26th 2017 Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's definitely not jealous of Chris's awesome New York City adventure. My name is Wes. And I have a beard. You sure do have a beard. We have a great show coming up today.

We spent some time with our friends over at Microsoft. We catch up with some of our favorite projects, discuss some of the hard details of being a free and open source software maintainer, and get a little quantum with the latest Firefox Quantum Beta. But before we do all that,

I think we have at least one friend to join us. We should say hello to and time-appropriate greetings to our wonderful Mumble Room and time-appropriate greeting to our wonderful mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings. Wonderful to have you, Mr. Mech. How are you doing, Beard? Thanks for joining me. Chris is away.

He's out in NYC. I am stuffed full of five guys. Oh, yes, you are. I am a fan of five guys in my mouth. Five guys all up in that mouth yep with a side of fries yeah excellent well we can't be having as much as fun as chris but we sure can make a show happen so i guess we pop over here talk about our first story today which is okay so on the previous episode we had quite the kerfuffle we We were talking about Mr. Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation

and his choice of computing hardware device. That was a little contentious, right? Because he was caught not using Linux. How could that be? How could that be? So I just thought, and maybe it's a little fun, we poked some fun at the other side. Bill Gates now uses an Android phone, at least according to the verge i mean to

be fair to him he has more of an excuse because nobody makes windows phones anymore yeah really yeah it starts out but you know windows phone has been dead for a good year now and microsoft co-founder bill gates has decided it's also time to move on in the interview with fox news sunday gates reveals he's now using an android phone well Well, Gates doesn't reveal the exact model. He does note that it has a lot of Microsoft software on it, which could suggest it's the special Microsoft edition Samsung Galaxy S8, but who knows? I guess he's still not interested in iPhone, though. He famously banned iPhones and iPods at home in the past. That's kind of funny. I wonder, too, like, is it just because, do you think you'd use Android just because there's probably,

is it easier to get Microsoft software on there versus iOS? Yeah, probably. But it would, you know, I don't know. Who's a bigger competitor to Microsoft these days, Apple or Google? I mean, Google's going after their cloud business a lot more. Yeah. But, of course, Apple has been there a long time. I mean, Rival almost feels wrong.

Clearly, they're beating them in the mobile world, but for a long time, Apple was the underdog. Does Bill Gates even care anymore? No, I don't think he does.

Right? That's a lot of it, too. It's like, it just doesn't matter, and that's really what I was trying to get at. He's just the dude now that happens to also

be a billionaire that people write articles about. Yeah, you know, still owns a bunch of Microsoft, but, hey hey that's just what happens okay so moving on then to our next story today which is a an update to lineage os change lock number 14 brings burn-in protection and changes to privacy guard audio effects and

more so lineage is this something you would ever be interested in mr beard not really yeah what do you run on your phone? Is it just stock? Yeah, it's whatever Samsung sends me. Yeah. Just trust into the old Samsung. Well, that's fine. Well, I mean, with the Samsung phones,

if you root them, it breaks the Knox protection. Yeah, right. Yeah. So that's no good. Anyway, the Lineage OS team has just released a new changelog summarizing the most important changes made to the popular third-party custom ROM in recent weeks.

Originally made every two weeks, changelogs now being, you know, only when the team deems necessary. So I thought, hey, this might mean something interesting has changed. So there's now the Lineage Updater app has been rewritten from the ground up to fix some long-standing issues. Doesn't seem very exciting, but I think that's one thing that like if you're gonna have a successful long-running rom you actually need to be able to get updates because i can't like the number of times i've had to install something and then like a few months later been like am i just gonna

like reflash this phone i don't want to lose everything what what is the procedure here so if you have like a really official good non-bug-buggy, simple to use updating tool, I think that goes a long way. So is the updater like a utility that you're on your PC or is it an app on the phone? You know, I'm not actually sure. I imagine it's something you run on your computer, but let's see. Let's find out. I'm not actually sure. Because if we're on the phone that'd be that would be

yeah that would be here we go at your change devices yeah okay it looks like it's a flask app here so that would suggest to me that you run it on your on your device and then interact with it and then you know it will then flash your phone or provide the update interesting yeah you're right if it was right on the phone that would be like first party level of yep just boom this is official just open the app it's like you got an update and it downloads it and you reboot and flashes it that'd be great so uh also they now have burn-in protection so if you have an amoled screen uh that you know a fancy amoled screen that you would prefer not to get ruined they now have burn-in protection. So if you have an AMOLED screen, you know, a fancy AMOLED screen that you would prefer not to get ruined, they now have burn-in protection, which shifts the position of the status bar and navigation bar icons every few minutes.

You may think you're going crazy if you haven't read about this. You know, you just be like, is my phone changing on me? I didn't do that. But hopefully that prevents burn-in in those areas. So I guess they actually move it 3DP horizontally, 1DP vertically. Subtle little change. And really what was highlighted here is September security patches have been included and fixes that Blue Born vulnerability we were talking about last week as well.

So that's another good point. If you do have one of these ROMs, boom, update yourself. You've got these patches. You don't have to wait for Google to roll them up into some update that takes however long or Samsung to do so, which will clearly take forever. Yeah. That's really, I mean, it's getting to a point where I don't, I'm not that interested.

I have not even unlocked my Pixel, so, which is weird for me. I only got Android 7 a month or two ago. Which is like many months behind. Yeah. So you're not going to get oreo until uh till 2019 yeah 2019 yikes ouch well then maybe for your next phone consider something that can run lineage maybe yeah i don't somehow i don't see that happening

uh but you can think about it okay so if you aren't going to do that you are probably still concerned about security. Turns out Google is concerned along with you. Google has extending security support for Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X devices until November 2018. This has been one of the more maligned things about Google's devices. I was seeing a, you know, comparison thread that the iPhone 5S is still supported and how long that's been compared to the support that Google generally has for their devices. So it's nice to see that maybe you're getting a little more than you expected or a little more than they've actually promised. So since Android is the most used operating system in the world, it also stands to reason that it's also the most attacked. The only way to prevent security problems on mobile devices is to keep them updated. Amen.

See the text map program. And this is exactly what Google is doing. Up until now, the support for both the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X was until September 2018, but has been extended until November 2018, adding two more months. This can only be a good thing for Nexus users who can hold on to their devices a little bit longer. Fancy scrolling there. That's my mistake. Don't mistake, but you should not mistake security support with software support. It's important to keep in mind that security support only refers to patches and nothing else. Software support ended in September 2017, so it's ending right now, which means that no new version of the OS will be provided after this date. That definitely limits the usability, but there's a lot of people, I think of like my

mom as an example, where she doesn't need the latest and greatest, you know, like software updates necessarily. She just needs a phone that will just keep working, run the same apps that she's had for the past however many months. But I would worry if she was on a phone that was no longer getting updates. So that's nice to see. Yeah. on a phone that was no longer getting updates.

So that's nice to see. Yeah. It doesn't really change the, like, haphazard pace of change, hardware change, deprecation, ending lifespans of phones after, like, two years. But maybe there's a happy medium somewhere in here. Well, isn't that one project that they announced supposed to help with a lot of that? Yes, it is. Wow, man, I'm blanking on that. Come on, to help with a lot of that? Yes, it is.

Man, I'm blanking on that. Come on, Beard. What's it called? Hey, I covered the project part. You get the other part. Yeah, you remember that it's a project. Yeah, that's true, though. It does sound like there are some upstream changes

going on in Android that will help refine some of that, make it easier for people to have those, have all the weirdness of the actual system on a chip confined at one software layer and then be able to build on top of that so hopefully this will not be a problem that we see indefinitely in the future still though i was a little i'm glad to see this i know a lot of people who still have the 6p several people who've gotten the pixel and kind of missed their 6p we'll see pixel 2 i guess will be coming out before too long but it's nice to see google at least uh kind of missed their 6P. We'll see. Pixel 2, I guess, will be coming out before too long. But it's nice to see Google at least going forward.

Kind of makes you wonder if they're extending it because of that new stuff. Maybe it's made it easier for them to extend it. Oh, that's an interesting idea, yeah. Maybe now it provides less lack of momentum, less breaking to their build systems. Yeah, because you can update the OS without also having to update the

baseband and the firmwares and all that. Yeah. As they end here, also we have to remember that Google launched the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X back in September 2015. Wow, that seems like that ain't a long time ago. This means that support for them will end three years later. That's not too bad at all.

I've done the math, Wes. That is two years ago. Yeah. I suppose that's not too bad at all. I've done the math, Wes. That is two years ago. Yeah. I suppose that's not that long, but... That's a long time. In the phone world. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so speaking of phones,

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Is it? Yeah. Oh, yeah, you know what? It's mine, too. I don't blame it. It's true. And my parents' mobile service provider, and just about anyone I can convince to switch.

It's a little weird, right? Because you're like, hey, can I talk to you about your cell phone plan? I don't work for a phone company, but this can save you money. But yeah, exactly. It's like to that point where it's like, I'm not trying to pressure you. I'm just letting you know that there is a company that does things differently. It really is smarter. Because, okay, so it just starts at $6 a month, right?

So each line, $6 a month. One line, two lines. What, the studio has like three or four lines, something like that? Yeah, even if you have another phone plan, just pick up a SIM and screw around with it on the side for a bit to see if you like it. Yeah, right. That's like one hamburger a month less. And then you have a phone line.

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Okay, so moving on. More Linux to talk about. Always more Linux. Can we just skip the Linux? Yeah, okay. What are you uh i don't know i guess we're going back i guess we're okay we're just going to fall back to linux if anyone else doesn't want to talk about linux then uh i guess i'll be outnumbered i don't have chris here to back me up today yeah that's okay though okay so here's something we've talked about more than a

few times on this show and that is is the Top Icons Plus extension. You mean the one that the GNOME project recently recommended that people use if they want that stuff? Yes, that is the one. Looks like, according to an issue over on their GitHub page, development might be pausing or stopping. So, hey, y'all, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take some distance with the development of this extension. It's motivated by a couple things. One, I have not used the extension myself recently. I use less and less extensions that use it, and among them, none of them breaks or loses functionality without this. Two, the GNOME project does not give a shit about it and make it public. They don't even point to this extension, but to an outdated, unmaintained one. Besides,

Ubuntu, after making a survey, also moves on with its own extension. All right, we're getting dramatic here. Anyway, the API is dying. It will be dropped in future GTK updates. Documentation is sparse, and the development requires considerable effort. Also, the API is buggy and incomplete, so it's impossible to make a reliable extension or really enhance it. Of course, it will never be fixed. 4. Top Icons Plus then became a magnet for claims that it would be better to be addressed by the GNOME project. People fail to understand that the extension depends on an API and is not capable slash intended to fix the GNOME shell service. It's extremely exhausting.

And 5. The GNOME extension website is awful, as there is almost no maintainer there, and validation takes sometimes weeks. Meanwhile, I get issues from disgruntled users. So I came to the conclusion, being also very busy with my job and my life, that the hassle is no longer worth it, especially when it requires considerable effort

because of the sparse documentation. Status icons are dead with gnome shell move on and enjoy gnome shell or switch your desktop environment okay those are some strong words over there oh i kind of agree with them though like that's kind of what gnome said that is kind of what gnome said yeah you're right i mean it is and that's just one of those you know like love it or hate it that's kind of the way gnome has been going these days right like they stick to their guns they have a set of principles and philosophy whether or not you agree with it or not or even think it's consistent they that's that's the way it's a benevolent or not so

benevolent dictator project yes dictator framework i don't i don't know what to call it but uh so uh do you use no much uh i usually use made okay yeah so this was not an extension that you yourself was uh we're availing of no chris uses it though i think yeah definitely so i wonder what he's going to think about this i don't know well right now he's on budgie so it doesn't matter yeah right now he's on budgie the budgie doesn't matter. Yeah, right now he's on Budgie. The Budgie craze is sweeping the studio and, I think, the world? Probably. Yeah, probably. That's what seems to happen when those Solus guys get a hold of something. Well, enough that Ike went full-time.

Yeah, full-time, which is incredible. It's nice to see that, having listened to some of that coverage, too, it does seem like it could be pain. If your development has diverged from what GTK intends... It becomes increasingly difficult. It becomes increasingly and increasingly difficult. So I definitely have sympathy with that line of reasoning. And especially in the open source world, you just got to do what you can do.

Don't stress out too much about it. And if he's not using it, it'd be really hard to maintain something that much work if you were not actually using it yourself any longer. Yeah, and the fact that he said that the API is buggy and incomplete kind of probably speaks to how much GNOME cares about things that aren't things they care about. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Okay, well, I don't know if anyone in the Mumble room wants to chime in, but now is the time before we move on to our next story, unless you have something else to add, Mr. Beard?

Nope. Well, is Budgie considered to be a lightweight desktop? Because I have a Raspberry Pi line here around, and I would like to try some different desktops. Budgie is more lightweight than GNOME, as far as I can tell, at least. Well, that seems to be easy. Well, true. But I'm not sure where it fits in relevance to the other ones.

I'd say probably somewhere on the level of Mate. Yeah. Okay. So it would be worth a try. And is it fully compatible with Waylander, guys? I think so. Yeah, I believe so. I don't think I've actually run it under Wayland

yet on any of my systems, but if not, I'm sure that Anki guy will come yell at us about it. That's the fastest way to find out. Or everybody else will go yelling at him. Oh, yeah, you're right. Oh, even better. Okay, that's just fine then. By the way, I would have a last comment on the

lineage discussion you had. Sailfish has taken the first steps to have a base on lineage OS. Until now, they had Cyanogen OS for the community ports. And so they started to have the first steps to port it to lineage, which would be a great improvement, because right now the newest Android base for Selfish Always is XeonogenMods 13. Oh, interesting. I see. So probably there is a way to go further now and take Lineage as a base.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like there's a lot of momentum there, so that seems like it might be a good choice as something to base yourself on. Well, it seems to be the only option now. It does kind of seem to be the only option now, yeah. Very true. Excellent. Okay, so moving on,

talking about only options in a way. That's not the button. Here we go. Announcing the XFree KWin project. No, it's not XFree 86 we go announcing the x free k win project no it's not x free 86 as you might be thinking but it is k win running without x support so martin writes over the last few weeks i've concentrated my work on k win on what i call the x free k win project the idea is to be able to start k win slash Wayland without X-Wayland support. While most of the changes required for it are already in Plasma 5.11, not everything got ready in time, but now everything is under review on Fabricator,

so it's a good point in time to talk about the project. So why an X-Free KWIN, you might ask? You might wonder why we would spend time on this. After all, we need to provide support for XWIN anyway to be able to support legacy applications which are not yet on Wayland. Yeah, I'm sure a ton of us who are using Wayland are using a lot of XWIN under the hood. So what's the advantage of a normal session one needs to start XWIN anyway? Well, one aspect is that it shows that our porting efforts to Wayland are finished. Over the last few years, I've tried to start KWIN without-Wayland support for a few times just to find areas which are not yet ported. By being able to run K1 without X11 support,

we know that everything's ported or at least does not hard depend on X11 anymore. Hey, okay, that kind of makes sense. We can actually run it all without this stuff running, so hey guys, it's good. Another aspect is obviously Plasma Mobile does not really need X-Wayland, and so it doesn't make much sense to have a build that includes it. And especially, like, LibHybrid systems, they won't have OpenGL there,

so it just doesn't make sense. So by not requiring X-Wayland, we can reduce our runtime and memory costs. Speaking of runtime costs, not requiring X11 means that we don't have to wait for X-Wayland during K-Win startup. Instead, X-Wayland can be started in parallel. This means K-Win and the complete Plasma session starts just a little bit faster. And most important, this is an important prerequisite to be able to handle a crashing X-whalen so far when x-whalen crashed k-win terminated gracefully as k-win depends on x11 the hope is that when x-whalen crashes we can just restart it and keep the session running yeah okay that seems like a totally legit reason

to do that i don't want x buggy old x-whalen uh bringing down my beautiful pristine new whalen session makes sense yeah definitely so uh how it was done the general idea behind pristine new Wayland session. Makes sense. Yeah, definitely. So how it was done, the general idea behind getting here is that the code that isn't loaded can't interfere. KWIN uses platform plugins for the various platforms KWIN can run on. There's also a platform plugin

for KWIN slash X11. So code which is only required in that case can be moved into the platform plugin. As KWIN slash Wayland does not load this plugin, we are certain that the code will not be loaded and thus cannot interfere. Interesting. But how do you find all that code? After all, KWIN's code base is about 150,000 lines of code.

Yeah, I would just control F and search for X. Just search for X. Yeah, that'll do it. X and then separately search for just 11. That will help too. Or org. Org, yeah. Definitely won't find that.

X11 is the really, really old code. Really old code. X12, that's where it's at. Yeah. A good help is I guess they have a pretty good CI system which performs code coverage. So KWIN's tests mostly are based on KWIN slash Wayland. So an area which just does not have any test coverage is a good candidate for being x11 specific boy doesn't that say a

lot right there uh that's why they want to protect it from the bugginess because it's not tested i mean i'm sure that that's that's totally possible uh so anyway they kind of looked at those things by looking at these areas it was possible to find patterns which also helped to find more usages so you know kind of profile oh here's where we have to keep adding x11 support that's probably refactored in the same way in other parts of the code base there's also kwin's internal x11 api um so they're able to find a bunch of those patterns root those out and then excise it so now they're able to you know control it excise i like that yeah right i mean it's all about it's all about violence mostly that's that's how it works when you work with these old cold bases just gut them got them

got them right out put them back together we have the technology beard like we just totally do okay so being able to start and run x k win slash wayland without x11 support is of course only the start more changes will be required. For example, the delay loading XWayland until an app relation tries to connect to it. Another area is to try to get XWin compiled without X11 support and to move everything required for XWayland into a plugin. This will be a larger project,

as it will require much more code movement and add further abstractions to some areas of KWin. But this could be a nice Google Summer of Code project. As a fast step for specially-plasma mobile and the Purism Librem phone, which we've talked about, there's an if-def now around the X11 code, so that might be another path forward. But Martin's real motivation here is handling a crashing X-Wayland,

so I think that makes sense, and it's cool to see. I really appreciate these blog posts just because, while I don't always run KWIN, like I don't have a plasma system going at the moment, it really is a heck of a, well, I mean, compositor, everything that it is now, right? I mean, a Wayland desktop. So it's cool to get to see this sort of stuff.

That's one of the things that's so wonderful about open source is like, sure, I remember the old days, like Microsoft would have like a tech post about something they were doing, but you didn't get to go look at it. Whereas we can go like look at the commits that have changed this i'm probably not going to on this one because it's a crap it sounds like it's kind of gross

but the fact that we can that we can learn from it and we get to see the motivation i think that's pretty awesome what about you are you a plasma plasma fan uh i actually prefer plasma over any other desktop. I just don't run it because I still find the settings to be too overcomplicated. Yeah. You know, I've had that problem myself. Actually, I like it a lot, but a couple years ago I had it tuned really nicely. It was just perfect.

I loved it, but at that time I did not do a great job of remembering what those settings were. So the last couple of times I've used it for a week or two here and there, but I've been in the same boat where it's like, I just don't have the time right now to sit down and make this perfect. When you have to go to three completely separate sections of your settings to theme your

stuff, then I think it's a little overcomplicated. Yeah, what is this, Windows 10? Especially since some of them like to override other ones, so you end up going in circles. You'll never win. Yeah, circular dependencies. That's what we need here.

Well, okay, so maybe that makes you pretty frustrated, Beard. Maybe you're frustrated enough to just leave this whole planet behind and join a new Spaceborne Linux supercomputer supercomputer it's now started running in space achieves one teraflop i'm sure it's pretty warm i can just like lay on it yeah you can just snuggle up with the supercomputer out there and you won't die at all yeah it'll be fine okay so we'd heard about this a little bit before uh you were mentioning that that uh Yeah, I think this is the same HP supercomputer that was launched on a SpaceX rocket that we covered a couple weeks ago.

Yes, about one month ago, the HPE, their new name, of course. Come on, it's HPE. Now they split, Rikai. HP Enterprise. Yeah, it's serious stuff. Anyway, their space-borne computer was launched into space using the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. This beast was launched as a result of a partnership between HPE and NASA

to find out how high-performance computers perform in space. Now, the supercomputer is fully installed and operational on the International Space Station. The performance experiment will be carried out for about a year, which is roughly the time it will take for a spacecraft to travel to Mars. At the moment, lots of calculations for space research projects are carried out on Earth, but this brings in an unavoidable factor of latency. Yeah, I imagine your SSH sessions aren't great

when you're going from space to the Earth and back, huh? Yeah. We've got some photos here. I'm sure it's better than the SSH session to the satellites that go way out far out looking at planets. Enter keystroke, wait six minutes, and then check back. That's when you use MOSH.

That's when you use MOSH. Yeah, okay, finally a situation that makes sense. That's great. Actually, I do kind of like MOSH. So here's a cool picture. It looks like it's getting installed here. The hardware, which is being talked about here, is an Apollo 40 server with a high-speed HPC interconnect running.

You guessed it. Windows ME. No, it's Linux. It's Linux, Beard. Come on now. It has a water-cooled enclosure and additional software to take care of the environmental constraints. Yeah. Sounds like this is also a closet gaming box for the astronauts on board. That's what I'm picking up here.

They must have upgraded from their Solaris supercomputer. Now that Solaris is dead. That's great.'m picking up here. They must have upgraded from their Solaris supercomputer. They must have. Now that Solaris is dead. Yeah. That's great. Can you imagine putting together a computer in space, though? It's hard enough, aren't it?

It's hard enough. Yeah, your screws are floating all over the place. Oh, that could be good in some ways. Yeah, you're just going to set it there. Hover the screw in the sky. Yeah. Maybe you have to. I guess magnets would be even more helpful.

But be careful. Don't let the magnet float too close to the computer now. The magnetic screw trays is pretty good, too, on Earth. That's true, yeah. So I guess it's not so different. I will take that challenge, though. So if anyone wants to pay for a new computer and send me to space to assemble it, it sounds like it would make great content.

Just leaving that there. You should pitch to, what's his name, Richard Branson? Yeah, okay. Ask if you can build a computer on the first Virgin Galactic flight. I'm going to just write this down right now. Just following up on that after the show. Anyway, this device is the first high-performance commercial off-the-shelf computer to run one teraflop at the ISS. For those who don't know, one teraflop is one trillion calculations per second, which is 30 times faster than a laptop.

Okay, that really doesn't sound that impressive. Now that, I mean, like, they could have just taken 30 laptops up there. They probably already have, like, 10 laptops. It's really hard to do, like, Beowulf Cluster. Yeah, that's true. And then what if one person is playing Steam and it's really tying up the whole cluster?

All them Ethernet cables in space. Oh, yeah, that's true. You'll get caught up in them. That makes sense. Okay, so according to their technology officer engineers are ready to launch the multi-node high performance linback benchmark test this test will determine the number of multiplication system can produce per second so now that it's all been doing over the coming months the engineers will study this installation and its performance so that's kind of cool um not that often you get to hear

about linux in space like we all know it's there obviously um but it's just like do you remember seeing all those pictures from years ago of uh you know when we still had the space shuttle and seeing astronauts on there when they got like their x windows xp think pads running on the space station yeah so hopefully now they'll have some it does seem like it would be pretty handy if you're doing it you know they do so much science up there that just to have your own little supercomputer that you have right there to go do your workloads on so i guess the supercomputer is inside the uh the pressurized area of the place that's what it looked like yeah or at least the front panel of it the way they talked about i thought they were going to do something crazy like just have it sit in the

vacuum of space to keep it cool yeah i thought I thought that too. It would just be floating maybe alongside or in a similar orbit. I guess they didn't have a way to deal with potential any amounts of condensation at all. Oh, yeah, okay. Interesting. And then I guess you have to devise the right kind of...

Would you use a laser beam or infrared or other type of line of sight communication to it? No, you just poke a hole for an Ethernet cable. Oh, yeah, right. And then you tether it onto that, yeah. Maybe, like, and then a couple extra ones just for security's sake and then one that's actually the data line.

Yep. Hmm, now that is an interesting idea there, Beardsley. How'd you get so smart? Who knows? Okay, so I know I've heard that you like video games. Fact or fiction? Well, the video games are fiction.

True. That I like them is fact. Okay. How do you feel about Atari? And how do you feel about a new gaming system from Atari called, you've guessed it, the Atari Box. So it's an Atari- branded pc i'm guessing yeah take a look that seems completely pointless yeah doesn't it uh but guess what it's linux based

so it will use an amd customized processor with the radion graphics technology this means a proper cpu uh so not like an arm chip that's nice it will run linux uh but the they will be providing a customized interface as it's mainly aimed at using it like a console on a tv even so they say it will give a full pc experience for the tv so uh we're back to like whatever web web tv is that what it was what i'm hearing is that atari couldn't make a deal with steam to make another steam that's exactly what it sounds like. But you will apparently get full access to the underlying Linux system,

so it might be possible to buy this and then put your favorite OS on it. Why you would do that, I don't really know. Maybe it'll be subsidized somehow, so it'll be cheap like Xboxes of old. I'm not sure. I wonder if the modules for the the custom pc chip are uh publicly available i wonder that too yeah it sounds like it's going to remain quite open as they say you will be able

to access game purchased from other content platforms as long as it's linux compatible so it sounds like installing steam might just be possible so this really is like a weird side loaded steam you're gonna get it it's going to be like Ubuntu with an Atari wallpaper. Yeah, Ubuntu, Atari wallpaper. And Steam pre-installed. And then Steam pre-installed, yes. And then maybe a couple other game platforms. Oh, it will come pre-loaded with classic Atari games

and even some current titles from a range of different studios. It will be interesting to see if these current titles are games already on Linux or are they going to have some actually ported games especially for this? I'm going to guess they're already on Linux. I would bet so. I don't know how much they're actually going to try to outlay on this. So it will launch on Indiegogo soon, they say, this fall. It might seem strange for a bigger company to go with crowdfunding.

Yeah, it is kind of strange. I didn't even realize that. Atari is broke. Yeah. But they say this because they want the community to be part of the launch, Rekai. Not because they're broke. Yeah, they want this because they want the community to be part of the launch reek hide not because they're broke yeah they want part of the community's money to be part of the launch oh yeah you're probably right though honestly though it's mainly so there's less risk involved for them but because atari is broke because atari is broke but maybe it's a good way for them to gauge real interest i don't know as for the proper launch it'll be late spring 2018

with a price aimed between 250 and, depending on the edition and configuration. Atari is still reeling from the whole ET cartridge fiasco back in the 80s. Yeah, you're right about that. Okay, but what do you think about it? This is apparently not a render. It's a real unit with real wood involved. The wood edition. It just seems like another Steam machine with less everything. Yeah. And I haven't heard, like, this hasn't talked much about, like, what is the controller going to look like?

Will there be a controller? Are people putting keyboard and mouse hooking up to this? Is it just USB ports on the back? Like, it doesn't really excite me because it's a it's just a slightly more proprietary PC that happens to support Linux. But, so don't, uh,

non-proprietary PCs. Yeah, okay, that's fair. That's fair, yeah. No, that's about where I'm at. Now, if they announce that it's some absurdly cheap price and it has good performance, maybe I'll change my mind. But I doubt it. Yeah, I'm with you. Okay, no, that's about where I'm at. Now, if they announce that it's some absurdly cheap price and it has good performance, maybe I'll change my mind. But I doubt it. Yeah, I'm with you.

Okay, well, I guess I do have something that you might get excited about. And that's our next sponsor today, which is our friends over at DigitalOcean. It's hard not to get excited about DigitalOcean. Yeah, exactly. Have you heard about their new Spaces, a beautifully simple and scalable object storage service yeah so if you listen to if you listen to tech stamp you hear about all kinds of people always getting hacked because they leave their s3 buckets open to the public don't make that mistake just hop on over to digital ocean um they've just launched spaces you can get in on it i think

you'll find the price is very competitive and kick... Kick your bucket, get a space. Get a space. Yeah, exactly. And, I mean, DigitalOcean makes it so simple. You don't have to fight through the always confusing AWS APIs. You can use DigitalOcean's amazing, super simple API. Well, not to mention the web interface for AWS is so confusing and convoluted, especially compared to DigitalOcean where you just click, click, and you're done.

Or have you ever tried to find out what you might expect to pay for your AWS bills? Oh, no, no. You find out what you expect to pay when you get the bill for what you pay. Yeah, so head on over to DigitalOcean's pricing page, and you'll see the difference. Because look at this.

Oh, look. Oh, yeah, it's just the prices. Per month or per hour, whatever you want. And you can switch between them. You can switch between them, yeah, which is also, like, a huge feature. So I like this $10 a month one because you get one gig of memory, one CPU, 30 gigs of SSD disk, and it's all SSD disks over DigitalOcean,

and two terabytes of transfer. And this transfer is not your grandma's transfer. This is not 56k. It's not some single baud modem. This is like 40 gigabit E straight to that KVM hypervisor. Go run like a couple apt-get updates. Go pull down some files. You will see that this is real transfer. I use it all the time when I'm like trying to connect to a server in Europe and my ISP just doesn't seem to have great peering across the Atlantic, but DigitalOcean sure does. That's because they have data centers all over places like London and Frankfurt. And then a bunch here, NYC, San Fran, and they keep expanding. So there's almost certainly one near you. If you

have two droplets in the same data center, you can get private networking between them. You can use our promo code DOunplugged. That will get you a $10 credit. So that will pay for your first month or, you know, you probably don't really need that WAPN droplet. So just downsize, just downsize $5 a month or seven tenths of a cent per hour. Isn't that insane? It's insane. So it's so cheap. You run an IRC bouncer, run a server of any kind, start hosting your own website. You can use their attachable block storage, so if you need to do some backups up there. Plus, they've got stuff like monitoring, load balancing, cloud firewalls,

all the bells and whistles you've come to expect from those big-name competitors for way better prices, way simpler interface, and way better API. Go to digitalocean.com, our promo code DOunplugged. Go get yourself a droplet and join the cool kids club. So easy to remember that we forgot it. That is exactly how easy. D-O-Unplugged.

Okay, so talking about D-O, and therefore we had to talk about AWS because they're just... They're AWS-some? Yeah, they're just... Yeah, exactly. You're just trying to get them to sponsor you aren't your beard um right so they're a big competitor another big competitor in that space is our friends over at microsoft i don't know if this is relevant or not but microsoft and facebook have just teamed up and laid 160 terabit per second cable 4,100 miles across the Atlantic.

I love that The Verge feels it's necessary to tell you how many videos you can stream on that, but that's 71 million HD videos at the same time. So that's HD, that's only 1080p. Yeah, 1080p, man. I mean, yeah. Might even be 720 if they're like skimping on you. Why aren't they telling us like 4K Netflix streaming? I don't know. Yeah, that's what's relevant for the future. Anyway, Microsoft, Facebook, and the telecoms infrastructure company Telxius have announced the completion of the highest capacity subsea cable

to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean. The cable is capable of transmitting 160 terabits of data per second. That's terabits. That's an important point there. And is 16 million times faster than an average home internet connection. Ouch, you're just trying to make us feel bad now, Microsoft. We all get it. You have gigabit.

Or terabit. Terabit. Apparently the cable will be operational by early 2018. Called the Maria, which is Spanish for tide, the 4,000-mile-long subsea cable lies 17,000 feet below the ocean's surface and extends between Virginia Beach, Virginia, and the city of Bilbao in Spain. It also stretches a route south of most existing transatlantic cables. Because of this, Microsoft says the cable will provide resiliency

for those living in the U.S. and Europe by safeguarding against natural disasters or other major events that might cause disruptions. That's nice, but where's our Pacific cable? Yeah, where is that Pacific cable? I want to have high-speed transfers to Singapore. I'm trying to download some sushi right direct from Japan, and it just doesn't fit over these low bandwidth pipes we've got. I like my sushi okay.

Don't judge me. I guess it comes at a pretty critical time. Submarine cables in the Atlantic already carry 55% more data than trans-Pacific routes. Ouch, gosh. Well, maybe that's because you're not putting down the cables. Yeah, we need more cables. And 40% more data than between the U.S. and Latin America.

There is no question that the demand for data flows across the Atlantic will continue to decrease. I suppose there's probably a lot of financial transactions and others. Only I wonder why it's so different in the Pacific. For most of the route, the cable, made up of eight pairs of fiber optic cables enclosed by copper, lays on the ocean floor. Some parts are buried to protect from shipping traffic, usually in areas closer to the shore. In a blog post, Microsoft said the project was completed nearly three times faster than usual in under two years. Maybe it was even under budget. Who knows?

They are an open design, which allow it to evolve as technology does and as the population of Internet users around the world continues to increase. So anyway, I don't know what their exact, like, why they, Facebook and them, had to be involved. Are they going to get some sort of, are they going to get a bunch of this lease here? Are they immediately buying transit across this cable? Or they have ownership in it now? Or maybe they just are getting data collection rights. Or they're just getting, yeah.

So if your connection goes across this cable, it instantly has ads. So just watch out for that. But it is just really cool that this is something that we can do. You know, we don't really get to talk much about these undersea cables, but it turns out a lot of the internet and backbone of it needs them. And it boggles my mind, like 17,000 feet. of it needs them. And it boggles my mind, like 17,000 feet.

And somehow from the surface, we can just like lay giant cable on the, on the bottom of the ocean. I couldn't do that. It's probably like titanium reinforced or something. You're right. Probably, probably titanium reinforced. Ah, Pierre, you just know everything. Well, that way the, the lobsters can't cut the cable. I can't even with you. I can't even with you.

I can't even with you. We're moving on, and I know this won't make you upset, so... Microsoft Ignite SQL Server 2017 for Linux goes live. You know, or Windows, if you want. And then get this. The preview Docker image has already been fetched 2 million times. Microsoft's just like full-on hipster DevOps up in here. I didn't realize

that not only is SQL Server popular but it's popular under Linux? Not yet popular under Linux and despite everyone who likes to say you should never run a database in a container, then you can have the Docker container. Obviously that's not for production, I'm just kidding. But it's interesting. I mean, I know Microsoft's done like a ton of work with Docker to make

Docker on Windows work. Clearly they embrace it on the Linux side too. So I mean, I know Microsoft's done like a ton of work with Docker to make Docker on Windows work. Clearly, they embrace it on the Linux side too. So I guess, yeah, SQL Server 2017 is now generally available. Today's release is a remarkable step in SQL Server's history because it's not just a release for Windows. Today makes the general availability of SQL Server for Linux. There's also a containerized version for deployment using Docker. It was announced March of last year to widespread surprise. Yeah, amen. SQL Server, as they say here at Ars Technica, SQL Server is the kind of software that shifts Windows licenses. People buy Windows Server for the express purpose of

running SQL Server. So porting it to the Linux world is really forfeiting a huge amount of Windows Server potential revenue. Scott Gut guthrie executive vice president for cloud enterprise acknowledged that risk but felt that it was offset by the opportunity sequel server for linux presented sequel server has a rich feature set and potential customers were telling microsoft that they'd love to use it but they were linux shops or were dependent on docker and containerization as such being windows only prevented sales to these customers so it really does kind of to me it feels like the organization of Microsoft is like really realizing that they have to, like, they can't just compete at this OS level

anymore. They can't let the OS drag back their other products. So they have to, they just have to make it available. And, you know, SQL Server is great. I haven't used it a ton, but I know a lot of people who really like it and find it sometimes the only acceptable alternative to Oracle database. Postgres obviously has come a long way, but SQL Server has been like a dominant force in the industry for a long time. And I'm sure there's a lot of people are like, yes, I can run it on Linux now. And you wonder too,

is it just good for them to have more people familiar with it so that, you know, there's more devs who can use it. There's more devs trained to use it. Well, it might not mean that they have to buy Windows. It might make it easier if they're already into the SQL Server Enterprise, if Microsoft can be like, hey, here's your cheap Windows license, or here's why it runs better under Windows. I don't know that it does. In fact, in the early builds, we'd seen some articles stating that it was running better under Linux

than it did under Windows. But maybe that's part of their play here. Bringing the Windows-dependent software to Linux made use of a Microsoft research project named Drawbridge that investigated new approaches to virtualization and software isolation. It happened that this research work already aligned neatly with the way SQL Server itself was engineered, so they were able to just kind of stack those two technologies together, abstract away the host OS levels, and make this work on Linux. It's kind of wild. Like, Microsoft, they might be better at Linux than Linux is now. I don't know how you feel about that. Well, aren't they one of the top kernel contributors?

They're not. I don't think they are in the current cycles. They were for a while. I think that was at a time when they were doing a lot of work to get, like, better Hyper-V support and stuff for Azure. But they certainly have, you know, they've certainly contributed to it. So we'll see. I'm not going to use it, but it does seem like it further cements Linux dominance in the server world.

Okay, so one more little Microsoft update here. Just our little Microsoft check-in in today's show because, you know, Microsoft loves Linux. They love it so much. Canonical and Microsoft have now teamed up to make an Azure-tailored Linux kernel. Yeah, that's right. Custom kernel, customized by Microsoft. Actually, this isn't too surprising.

Microsoft runs Gen 2. Microsoft runs Gen 2. Yeah, baby. Emerge world. It kind of makes sense. Like, there's already extensions you can do for better virtualization support,

para-virtualization stuff on AWS. So this basically adds a bunch of those options to the Azure world. Canonical has announced that it is joining forces with the Microsoft Azure team to build an Azure-tailored Linux kernel for Ubuntu Cloud Images of Ubuntu 16.04. The new kernel will receive the same level of

support and security maintenance offered to supported kernels, but is not yet compatible with the Canonical live patch service. If that doesn't matter to you, then you'll be able to enjoy the improvements right along. The kernel is provided by the Linux Azure kernel package, and here are the highlights right from Canonical. Infinite band and RDMA capability, so you'll have more high-performance networking options available to you. Full support for accelerated networking in Azure. This is a huge one. Direct access to the PCI device provides gains in overall network performance, offering the highest throughput and lowest latency for guests in Azure.

Basically, it's all of these sorts of things, right? To make your virtualization less expensive. 18% reduction in kernel size, Hyper-V socket capability, and the very latest Hyper-V socket capability, and the very latest Hyper-V device drivers and feature support available. So it will now be used by default if you spit up any Ubuntu 16.04 LTS images on Azure. But if you can check just uname-r, that'll show that it has a dash Azure in the name. If you don't want to use it, you can install the regular stock kernel just fine. You just won't get those performance increases um so you can also still get support from canonical so really just a business as usual

but a little bit more better tailored for azure so that makes sense too you got to be competitive it is interesting though like canonical's done they've been working a lot with microsoft between running on azure the windows subsystem for linux all that i'm sure they're not doing out of the kindness of their heart. No. A little bit of money. A little bit of money on the sides here, yeah. I know I see some speculation that maybe Ubuntu wants to get bought by Microsoft.

I don't know if that's the case or not. Is there a reason Microsoft wouldn't buy Canonical? I don't know. All their stuff is Linux-focused so yeah unless microsoft really really loves hey microsoft loves linux and i think the real thing is microsoft loves developers and ubuntu has a lot of developers how many of those tutorials um you know you see by default that are just boom right here right now yeah okay so that's it for our uh microsoft coverage today but so we do have a little update just in the world of like microsoft loves linux linux is open source

open source can be difficult so uh reek are you familiar with caddy no okay so caddy every site on https caddy is the http slash 2 which is the new version of http it's a http http slash 2 web server with automatic https so it's like a modern uh modern open source web server lightweight recommended by experts it has secure defaults so unlike a lot of you know you can install nginx even or like old apache and have to do a lot of work to get from like web 1.0 open everywhere port 80 to i'm running a secure modern patched uh web server caddy aims to make that just like you start it up it'll serve your files it can integrate with let's encrypt to automatically get it https enabled it has secure ciphers enabled by default, all that stuff. And so it's been, you know, it's been praised by experts at Usenix, NYU Lug, ACM, all kinds of stuff. It's free for

personal use, there's commercial licenses available, and there's open source. So you can go to their site caddy server.com if you want to find out more about actually using it, but we are here to talk about a recent blog post by Matt. So this is titled the realities of being a FOSS maintainer. Author's note here, this is a more intimate look into what it's like to be a maintainer of a popular open source software. It's written by me personally, and not as a representative of the company. I'm going down a limb here so try to be nice okay we'll try matt don't worry so over the past few days i've been inundated with well over 1 000 comments tweets emails messages and even phone calls about wednesday's announcement so what he's hearing is that they've announced caddy commercial licenses uh so they were pleased to unveil that we've been working digitally on the past few months

on Caddy commercial licenses. The change is designed to accommodate the needs of the growing Caddy community and user base. With commercial licenses, we're able to offer exclusive features

and services, that part's key, to our business users that we couldn't do before while sustaining Caddy's open source development. We're even starting today with one new service

for our customers and more planned. So, you can read more about that if you want. They have some like, you know, if you use caddy for personal, academic, or nonprofit purposes, not much is different,

just a new response header that gives tribute to our sponsors. That's one part that was contentious. If you use or distribute official caddy binaries at work or as part of a product slash service, you will need a commercial license based on how many instances you want to run concurrently. Official binaries are produced by our build server, i.e. this website

and getcaddy.com. With a commercial license, you can use this website to seamlessly download official caddy builds, blah, blah, blah. If you automate installations or use direct download links, the URL syntax is changing slightly. So that's like it, right? They are now trying to paywall, basically. There'll be a commercial license

for some features and services and there are limitations for how you can use the official binaries. Freemium. Freemium, yeah, totally. So that's one, you know, that's a model we've seen before. So anyway, lots of feedback.

Interestingly, most of the positive reactions came from individuals who have met me in person who are at least somewhat acquainted with me online. Whereas every one of the negative reactions stem from someone who has never met me or interacted with me. In somewhat acquainted with me online whereas every one of the negative reactions stem from someone who has never met me or interacted with me in other words there was not a single person who responded negatively or unreasonably whom i knew or who could recall prior interactions with so if you ever find yourself in a similar situation look at this statistic it might give you some relief not everyone you know hates you aka um so right

after right after this announcement he went on a research lab to retreat in the mountains had no internet connections so got some nice time away from the internet which is always nice matt's back now i want to take a few minutes to respond personally and candidly about everything that's going on what he's learned what the reactions have been like and just kind of a reflection so uh announcement day he posted it on Hacker News within nine minutes after someone had, oh, he posted it on Twitter after it was tweeted. It was right on Hacker News, right at the top.

Yeah, that kind of makes sense. Right, so it became very popular. He talks about forks here, too. So, forking is a normal part of open source. It's allowed by the Apache license, which is the license, as long as you give attribution and state all changes. When OneFork started a spinoff project on Wednesday, my co-founder Corey reminded me, reminded them to remove the caddy name and logo from the repo to avoid confusion with the caddy brand. That's also an important part of that. Spinoff was quick to

change the name and leave attribution, and within minutes, the issue was resolved and closed. Unfortunately, the response to this by spectators has largely been less than professional, and I think is, along with some other reactions I discussed below, exposes a glaring community flaw in our open source community. There was no hostility in Corey's comments, nor in those of the project's maintainer. Both Corey and the maintainer did the right things. As has been seen so many times before, toxicity festers in open source because it's all too common for forks to ground their motivation and enmity towards other projects.

This obviously isn't healthy, and we hope that the open source because it's all too common for forks to ground their motivation and enmity towards other projects. This obviously isn't healthy, and we hope that the open source community will figure out a better way to deal with negative sentiment than by creating new communities rooted in it. So they also removed the header. Basically, they had a header that would send back thanking the sponsors of the server. A lot of people just were like, I don't want these weird headers on every response that I send out of my web server. They say that although they did ask their sponsors about it before this was implemented, they didn't get any response. So add this to the list of things we're learning. We'll do better over communicating with our sponsors in the future. Sorry, I don't know what else to say about this.

I guess there was a lot of confusion as well around the EULA and the CADDI binaries. So really what at the end is the open source code of the software is licensed under apache 2 and not under the end user agreement so caddy is still open source we go to extra effort to provide you with convenient binaries customized just for you so the official binaries are licensed either for personal or commercial use under this eula um so you get like the commercial ones have like private plugin hosting and in the future maybe some other features. This is really something we've

seen before. The build server is also not going to be open source because it's just, it only works for Caddy and that's what they're using to produce these binaries. So, some reflections. One phone call I received was from a friendly company it had associations with, offering their support and

congratulations for the bold move. It was much appreciated. I also have received dozens of tweets and DMs, mostly from friends. To those who took a side and were supportive, thank you. You didn't have to, and it helped us weather the storm. From one human being struggling with the daily realities of life to another, thank you. Yeah, I can, I can, that's a nice sentiment there. A few had criticisms of the change. All of those were reasonable, but none of them could quite bend down what it was that made the changes wrong. To quote one,

but the whole affair has made me extremely uneasy for a variety of reasons that are really hard to put a finger on. The crux of the opposition, even according to the most well-reasoned arguments, was missing. The best we could find was that a commercial license

is out of reach of small startups that are bootstrapping or don't have revenue yet. We agree. Corey and I are looking to a good way to handle this. So for now, we encourage sub-startups to simply contact us with their needs and ask about special pricing. Okay, that's somewhat reasonable. Now we get to the bad. Some feedback, read, opinions, and advice we received had good intentions but wasn't very well thought out

or didn't have the necessary perspective of project owner or maintainer to hold any water. Here I address some of them candidly. So why not offer a comprehensive support package instead? We tried this, nobody bought it. Why not offer an enterprise solution or consulting service? We're too resource constrained. We could probably do it, but that would stifle almost all caddy development as well as my graduate schooling and research. So I have to pay to remove ads from my web server? No. Your company is required to pay for commercial use of official pre-compiled caddy binaries, not for the removal of the caddy sponsor's header. You could do that on your own anyway because the source is still Apache licensed. Further, our sponsors don't pay us for advertising. They pay us for its ongoing development to make

the web better, to support our customers who benefit from good web servers, and to keep caddy free for you to use. The license, frankly, had nothing to do with the header. Limit the free features instead. And things like, but then I have to build from source to get what I want. And yes, that's the point. Welcome to open source. I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want. So he kind of just goes through, talks about a bunch of the, you know,

a bunch of the problems know a bunch of the problems just take donations then um it really comes back to how do we support how do we want to support open source um so he touches on this a little bit with the ugly i really don't want to focus on this but now it must be talked about i've been following these things up for years i think the worst thing i saw this week was twofold. The overwhelming illusion of entitlement and subtle emotional manipulation based on a misconception. So there's a lot more here. It's a pretty long article. It really is just Matt being very candid.

They kind of talk about more of the pain here, the emotional manipulation, the entitlement that we're talking about. But they end with one final note here. I just want to emphasize how great so many people have been. Several dozen individuals reached out over many mediums to express their appreciation and even congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for showing me the human side of an industry that is often dehumanized by long distances, screens, and texting.

We expected some pushback as usual, but the extreme controversy this created was unforeseen. Sorry about that. Thank you to all who responded critically, but at least reasoned out their comments before writing them. Here's looking forward to what's next, and we hope you'll be a part of it with me. So that was heartfelt. Whether you agree or disagree, whether you think that it's a good business model or not, I think we should talk about that. But it's interesting to see such a candid response.

We could talk about that a little bit. Before I do, I just wanted to pop on over to the Linux subreddit where there's also a discussion going along that sounds like Synergy 2.0 is going closed source. Synergy was one of those projects. Maybe you've used it, Beard. I don't know. Yeah, a lot of people have, especially if you have a Windows or a Mac

and you also have Linux, you want to share your mouse and keyboard between those systems. It really works pretty great. Or even just multiple Linux boxes. Or just multiple Linux boxes, yeah. I think for a long time now, not forever,

but for the past couple years, Synergy kind of had the same thing where you could pay and they would give you pre-compiled binaries. But if you didn't, you know, you had to build it from source yourself. Some distributions still have it.

I think Arch has it. There's a couple other ones, Debian maybe. But, you know, and I've build it from source yourself. Some distributions still have it. I think Arch has it. There's a couple other ones, Debian maybe. But, you know, and I don't, I've actually built it as well. Not a big deal. I think where it was harder is like, I don't know how to build that for Windows.

So it's a little more difficult. I don't have a Windows build chain installed, that sort of thing. It sounds like now for Synergy 2.0, they're removing some things from the open source and the GUI will no longer be open source so if you want to pay and support synergy which if you use it i mean you definitely should consider doing um it sounds like the core will remain open source so you can still use it it would probably be command line only you'll have to like write your synergy configuration file yourself um i don't know i imagine this will still be the same setup where you're going to

have to compile it yourself get synergy core check it out from GitHub, build it, and then run it. So there's definitely, I mean, you can go check that out on Reddit as well, or the Hacker News discussion thread. I'm sure we'll see some of the same elements that we just talked about in the caddy post about entitlement, about changes. There's one little note, though, that there is a program called X2X, which is apparently a pretty decent alternative for X sessions. knows about wayland though so i don't know what are your what are your thoughts on this how do you stand are you the type of person that doesn't want to ever pay for software do you do you know i think currently pay for software i think if software is good it's worth paying for yeah that's about it that's nice and simple yeah no i mean and it's like i can feel that too because

i think a lot of times things start open source like i'm scratching my own itch or an itch i see in the community you start doing it things take off like crazy like that's kind of what happened to cabbie um and then just like it makes so much sense to me that you'll want to go like i want to go make that my life like if you get so into this project you're spending so much sense to me that you'll want to go like i want to go make that my life like if you get so into this project you're spending so much time on it you really want that to be the thing that you can work on day in and day out or at least a part of that time you end up needing to have some sort of revenue model um and it's great when you can make that in a way that people seem to like like support packages donations patreons it seems like are

pretty popular in the open source community but at the end of the day if you like use and value the software it has to be whatever whatever is going to work both for you the users you the potential population that's going to be buying it and for the actual maintainers and developers of it because if they're gonna have to spend all their time doing support and not be able to just you know make the project better that might not be what's in everyone's best interest. And it depends on, you know, it's not everyone's red hat. So may I jump in? Absolutely.

So if I had a project that needs some of these premium features of Caddy, I would probably jump on the Caddy Redden. As you said, I'm ready to pay for software if it's good. Otherwise, if I have a basic project and all of a sudden my project grows and I'm confronted to the situation that I have to pay for per instance and so on, maybe I would try to avoid this kind of software and would start with a software I know. Because you're working, as you said, you're working for a long time with a web server, for example, and if all of a

sudden you come to a point where you have to pay for instances if you launch your server, then maybe it's not a good choice for me. Yeah, no, that's fair. But I appreciate that attitude of, you know,

you're happy to pay for what you use if you can, but it may depend on what the distribution model, what the use of it, how that looks in terms of, like, your actual application workflows. So that makes a lot of sense. Anything else you'd like to chime in there, Mr. Minimac? Thank you for joining us today. We certainly appreciate you

thanks okay so if you are now super thrilled by all the possibilities of open source software and not so open source but you know between Microsoft support between all the great projects that exist for Linux Linux is a better platform than Ether

to use so if you want to become a part of it our last sponsor tonight is probably the best possible way. That is our friends over at Linux Academy. Head on over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. There, oh man, you will find just about the best resource possible on the web to learn about Linux. So you can just, you'll go there, just sign up. What are you going to get when you sign up? Well, you're going to find, this is not one of those sites that will teach you just about anything, right? That's crazy.

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great option. Managers can sign up for it, sign up whole teams, makes it really easy to track people, you know, make sure that people are doing their courses, see how far they've gone, verify that they are learning the skills that you're paying for that to be used. So whether you're big or small, Linux Academy is a great option. Check out their courses because they have like a ton of stuff. AWS, Google Cloud, they've got a ton of the Red Hat tests, Linux Professional Institute exams on here. Maybe you want to learn OpenStack. Turns out it's super complicated. Maybe you want to learn about Azure because you've just been so hyped up about our awesome Microsoft coverage here on the Linux Unplugged show. Or you just want to learn all about DevOps. So you can become a certified Jenkins engineer, a Nagio certified professional,

or take Puppet 204 system administration using Puppet. It really has become one of the go-to trusted places on the internet. Something you can put on your resume. They even have an easy way for you to have a personal page that will show your accomplishments. So if you are looking for a job, Linux Academy can be one of your best partners. So head on over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And there you can get started. Join us over in the awesome Linux Academy community. It sure is a lot of fun. And you can learn a lot of things about Linux. I know Chris talks about a lot, but when you teach yourself Linux, sometimes you miss random

commands. There's just so many in CoreUtils and others that it's nice to sometimes go through a really structured course and you're like, oh! Yeah, nice refresher. That's how I do that. Yeah, exactly. So, talking about oldies and goodies here. Introducing Firefox Quantum. It's now two times faster on the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark.

I don't know what that benchmark is, but that sounds really freaking fast. I don't know about you, Beard. Sounds like a JavaScript benchmark, maybe. Yeah, it does. So start your engines. Firefox Quantum lands in beta, developer edition. Engines are important both in cars and in browsers. I don't know if you know about that,

but that's why we're so revved up, Mozilla writes, because we're releasing the beta of a whole new Firefox. The version number, 57, can't really convey the magnitude of the changes we've made, not since they copied Chrome's crazy version in any way, and how much faster this new Firefox is. That's why we're calling it Firefox Quantum. Last October, they announced

Project Quantum, an effort to create a next-generation engine for modern computers by leveraging technology from the Servo Research Project, which is the project that partially helped create Rust. It uses Rust and is their next-generation browser. So now we're finally seeing some developments of that. The R&D

arm pays off. Since then, The R&D arm pays off. Since then, the engineering team has been relentless in their focus on making Firefox incredibly fast. So there's already been a ton of, you know, Firefox improvements. We've talked about that a little bit. Things like those containers, speed improvements. I remember Chris and I both installing Firefox 55 and being pretty impressed with how much faster it was. So, you know, they're trying to run, for example, we've transformed Firefox to run using multiple processes, trying to strike just the right balance between speed and memory usage. Plus, they've got new things like WebVR and WebAssembly, trying to make, you know, games, other heavy, what should be desktop apps, but now

run in the web browser, which I can only assume is good for Linux in the long run. Firefox Quantum is also a big leap forward in that it's much faster on many top websites. So just like browsing your favorites, I can think probably like heavy websites like Facebook and other things is a way that you can notice that. And it turns out you can measure

Firefox Quantum's speed too. So they're kind of obsessed with this data-driven approach. Maybe you've heard of it, but you can go check out Speedometer 2.0, which is a still-in-development benchmark Maybe you've heard of it. But you can go check out Speedometer 2.0, which is a still-in-development benchmark that simulates modern web application. Results vary based on the computer

and the apps that you're actively using. But one thing that's relatively consistent is that Firefox Quantum is about two times faster than Firefox of a year ago. Wow. All right, that's actually, that's pretty actually significant, I think. So take your own,

you can make your own comparisons. Go try it out. This is just the beta release, but if you care about this, if you want Firefox to be better or you just are a big Firefox user, you can go check it out. They even have a little video here. Oh, come on, Chrome, that's so slow. Oh, come on, Chrome, that's so slow. Oh.

Ooh. Happy Firefox Quantum Music. to music. Yeah, alright, so it's not like a, it's not a blowout, but I would say it certainly seems pretty competitive with Chrome these days. Yep. I would say it certainly seems pretty competitive with Chrome these days.

Yep. So, there you go. Firefox Quantum. I don't know about that name. I mean, Quantum's a fun word and all. I don't know that... I mean, Quantum doesn't really mean fast. I don't really know... Well, when they speed it up enough,

they can call it a Firefox Quantum Leap. Oh, that's definitely where they're going. And I think Scott Bakula will be there up on stage to help announce that when it happens. So we can look forward to that. Anyway, we have a couple more links about Firefox. I figured we'd round out the show today with Firefox coverage. Honestly, I've been using a lot of Firefox at work. Chrome has all of my personal stuff.

And I didn't really feel like making a separate profile just for work stuff. So I was like, I'll just have a separate browser. For a long time, you know, it was just like stock Firefox from Ubuntu 16. That wasn't really cutting it. I was used to a lot of niceties from Chrome, but once I installed, it's actually really easy. I just downloaded the tar from Firefox, extracted it under slash opt. Now it's self updates, super easy to sideload. It's kind of, it's kind of awesome. I just downloaded the tar from Firefox, extracted it under slash opt. Now it self-updates. Super easy to sideload. It's kind of awesome. There's a lot of nice features.

I've definitely noticed the process, the multiple process improvement. There's still some like UX changes between Chrome and Firefox that get me. Like I really like that Chrome has the duplicate tab functionality. That comes up helpful way more often than I would have ever thought. There's probably a Firefox add-on that gives you that. I don't know. I haven't have ever thought uh there's probably a firefox

add-on that gives you that i don't know i haven't looked at um anyway we have a few more links uh just to round it out so like they do a deep dive here uh over at uh iram.org eric ram's blog uh firefox memory usage in the quantum era uh so as a continuation of the are they slim yet series uh firefox release 57 has a huge focus on performance as we've just heard so we've quantum all the things but we haven't really talked about memory usage which is something that often falls by the wayside in the pursuit of performance but honestly like especially these days like when i'm on not that nice of a laptop or frequently on smaller devices memory usage is one of the things i actually care about a lot and i know you were kind of like me beard and we have quite a few tabs open at one time do we not true

yeah so firefox actually does a pretty good job of suspending them i use the great suspender in chrome to do that too um so it's but it's like i would almost i would almost rather have better memory usage sometimes than speed because half the time I load one page and then I'm going to be on that page for a couple minutes or something. So I appreciate speed, but I would definitely take memory usage first. So it's interesting to see them talking about it. So it's like a little bit technical blog post. They've got some nice styling here to show you what's going on.

So I'm really excited to see these changes in Firefox. I mean, if you see the last changes you see in 54, 55, really exciting, and they continue to do that. It's really cool. I'm an all-time Firefox user. I mean, my first Firefox release was called Firebird, if you remember. Yes, I do. If I remember, it was a one-man development at the start,

and then they took over, and then Firefox has become the browser. And I really love it, and I won't change. I have Chromium aside, but my all-time browser is Firefox. Oh, yeah, nice. Yeah, it's nice to see that. I remember back in the day convincing people that Firefox was something they should check out. Hey, get away from that evil Internet Explorer. And it definitely felt like Chrome's a great browser.

They've done a lot of great things. I was recently reading about some fuzzing of the DOM. Chrome, with their new web kit for Blink, has added a lot of security. But Firefox, you know, there was a time where it really felt pretty stagnant. And that kind of upset me. And I had really sort of started preparing for a time where Firefox wasn't going to be brought up that much. Yeah, it's true. It became heavy at the time.

And now they have made some changes. And the last month, you see the development, and it's going in a good direction. Yeah, exactly. I couldn't say that better. So now I see some hope, some momentum. And hey, I don't have to be ashamed to be a Firefox user. I mean, I'm also a Chrome user, right?

You don't have to limit yourself to one browser these days. It's just nice to have competition. So it looks like they're doing some good work here. They've got some stats you can check out on various platforms, memory usage tests, but boy, it looks pretty great, especially on Linux. Apparently Edge has the highest memory usage on Windows, which is a little bit strange because you think that would be exclusively what they could optimize for. And Safari also doesn't look like it's doing so great in memory usage on Mac either. That kind of surprises me. Chrome is a hog. We kind of all know that. But it looks like on Firefox on Ubuntu 16 is doing pretty great. So overall, they're pretty happy with where they're at. But now our big performance push is over. They'd like to spend some more time focusing on dropping memory usage

so we can start pushing up the number of content processes. They'd also like to see, like, macOS was kind of a big regression for them in this. So they're going to spend some time investigating that as well, which is always nice. While I'm not a Mac user, it's nice to see the true multi-OS first-class kind of support for this open-source project.

One more, I guess two more, and then we'll get out of here today. Looks like there's a little sneak peek here. for this open source project. One more, I guess two more, and then we'll get out of here today. Looks like there's a little sneak peek here. Client-side decorations will be coming to Firefox. Yeah, so I don't know how you feel about client-side decorations, but maybe Firefox is getting hip now. Meh.

Yeah, meh. Okay, fine, Beard. I was trying to get you all r meh. Okay, fine beard. I was trying to get you all riled up. Okay, well then this last one, this one's just for you. Oh,

there's two more things. What am I doing? There's just too much news today. Anyway, Mozilla adds tracking protection to Firefox for iOS

and Focus gets multitasking. Focus is that new browser of theirs that's supposed to be lean and trim, fast and just simple for focused reading while you're on your your device um so yeah firefox for ios version 9.0 now available iphone ipad etc um they'll also have automatic ad and content blocking with private browsing mode as well as tracking protection uh in regular so that's great

and the feature uses the same ad blockingblocking technology as Firefox Focus for Android and iOS, Firefox Desktop, and Firefox for Android. So it's nice to see that they've really, like, kind of pulled out the stops here. There's also better sync functionality and a bunch of other fixes. And maybe the bigger thing, Firefox Focus now has multitask. So multitasking capabilities that allow users to browse multiple websites simultaneously using tabs it seems silly that this is how we're now at and uh i think focus is one of big focuses big thing was like didn't really have that you were

focused on it i don't know if that like does this break kind of what they were doing or is it just a simple and pragmatic change that keeps things light and minimal but gives power users like a little bit more of what they're used to um i'm not sure but uh it should not interfere with your private browsing experience nothing else should really change uh you just get tabs now so hey yo uh one thing i was i don't actually use it right now because i just use chrome but uh when i was on my nexus 5 still i was using Firefox. I was really pleased. Like the Firefox for Android is pretty snappy. It was a lot faster than Chrome at the time. I liked the way it did tabs.

I was kind of surprised because I hadn't really, I never really considered it as a real option for a mobile browser before. What about you? Are you just Chrome through and through? I'm Chrome everywhere. All the Chrome. Desktop, mobile, everywhere. Yeah. Well, so

what you're telling me is that you're not even going to consider our final story for the day, which is a new release of Pale Moon. This is a major update furthering general development of the Pale Moon browser. You can head on over to palemoon.org slash release notes dot s

html. Go check those out for yourself. Maybe you're not familiar with Pale Moon. Pale Moon is an open source Goanna-based web browser available for Microsoft Windows and Linux with other operating systems in development, focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Pale Moon offers you a browsing experience in a browser completely built from its own independently developed source that has been forked off from Mozilla Firefox code a number of years ago, with carefully selected features and optimizations

to improve the browser's stability and user experience, while offering full customization and a growing collection of extensions and themes to make the browser truly your own. So I wonder if that means they probably won't be getting those EME extensions we're all so worried about. I guess not. Yeah. Have you ever used pale

moon nope yeah so you're probably not going to be uh you're not going to be checking out this new new release probably not i don't know 2750 it almost feels like old-style firefox versions there's got a nice stuff improved mpe mp3 metadata parsing change window stuff bunch of user interface fixes a a bunch of DOM improvements. So I don't use it either, but it's kind of nice to see that their development is proceeding according to plans. It sounds like it's a big release.

I'm not going to use it, but it's just a testament. I think today's theme might be, hey, open source is hard. We all need encouragement. So here's to you, Pale Moon. I think with that, that's it's it for linux unplugged today beard thank you so much for joining me of course i've had like a ton of fun today and thank you to all of our viewers our wonderful mumble room come join us there you can uh head on over to jupiterbroadcasting.com you can find find a whole bunch more of Linux Unplugged. You can find a whole bunch of other shows.

There's also linuxunplugged.reddit.com. That's the wonderful subreddit. Beard, if they want to see more of you, where should they go? They can go to twitter.com slash rekylp or rek.net if they want to see my stream. Rek.net, and I am at Wes Payne, or you can check me out on the TechSnap program. Thank you very much for joining us. And we'll see you next week. Thank you. all right west time for the post show post show all right where's all my screens up in here you gotta have some titles yeah we gotta us some titles? Yeah, we got to find some titles.

JBTitles.com, everybody. Nice solid 30 titles. That's awesome. I would hope that you can disable these client-side decorations in the browser because in my desktop manager, I can roll on the browser window. And with client-side decorations, I can't do that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that seems like a lot of people were hoping that it would be set by a preference. Yeah, yeah.

Just the preference settings and I'm good. Oh, yeah. Okay, here. It looks like you need to set widget.allow-client-side-decoration to true in about config. We'll have the tweet linked about that. so in the show notes you can find that. This is perfect. It's very sad. We had three people who wanted to join the show, but there was no one who was capable

to push them in, unfortunately. We can't stage people while we're in the show, so catch-22 today. I see the problem. I see the problem. so today was a problem. Yep. Well, we certainly appreciate you, Mr. MiniMac, for joining us. That was good fun.

No, it was my pleasure. I try to give some comments if I have some. That is awesome. Okay, so everyone else, we can go vote at jbtitles.com and we can pick ourselves a title for today's Linux Unplugged program. I kind of like open sources hard. Yeah, I do too.

That's not bad. I'm just going to give that a vote here. A little votey vote. Voting all the votes. I say we just go with open sources hard. Right at the top. Right at the top. Okay. Thank you. A kick. Much appreciated. we just go with open sources hard it's right at the top right at the top okay thank you a kick much appreciated and thank you for everyone for joining us here on the linux unprojected program

chris was away but he'll be back in time for next week's show i do believe so we'll have uh the hair master back in here regaling us of stories of ubuntu the east coast and uh i'm sure how scary and confusing new york city is. We actually recorded an episode of User Error today. Oh, cool. At the end of the week, we'll cover some of that as well. Awesome. Man, there's just so much good JB content coming out. And I'm sure Chris will also talk about it on next Linux Action News.

I think anywhere that will give him... If he's back in time. If he's not, I might host. Oh, cool. So everyone stay tuned. Linux Action News 21 will be exciting no matter what happens. Indeed. Here's Poland for Beard.

Thank you all very much for joining us and sticking around for today's fun day of broadcasting. We'll see you next week. And JB reruns coming right up. I think the next live show should be BSD Now. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. And there might be a whole crap load of Coder at the end of the week. Whole crap

load of Coder. So get ready for that. Apparently I just didn't do our post show here, but whatever. That's fine. Chromium will let you browse the web in VR with the Daydream View headset. So that's something. I don't even know what that means really, but I guess it just means that you can take your Daydream headset,

hook it up to Chromium, and then... And just have a big wall of a browser. A big browser wall, yeah. I think there was a new 3D file system, a relatively new, actively developed, like that old Unix-y one from Jurassic Park. So that just feels like that. I find it really amusing that they hype this stuff

when it's trying to put something that's inherently 2D in a 3D space. Oh, man, I can see the corners of your website, bro. Your website is basically a poster in a virtual world. Yeah, right, exactly.