LINUX Unplugged - Episode 218: The Purism Redemption | LUP 218

Episode Date: October 11, 2017

We review Purism’s Librem 15, the high performance 15.6″ laptop built for Linux with physical radio kill switches.Plus the snap coming to a desktop near you, we report back from SeaGL & discuss some future changes to your humble weekly Linux talk show.

so uh dan how's it working now uh i i think it's working good you sound awesome good job well done sir well done are you using that new fangled elementary os i've heard so much about okay so i was on um the experimental artful build that is super unstable and so every time i open mumble it would just destroy my session it would just crash oh man oh dear yeah so i came back to stable and everything works yeah yeah so is that a yes you are glad we sorted that uh i just i'd just like to point out one week away from release and i'm using buntu mate 1710 it's fine this is linux unplugged episode 218 for Tuesday, October 10th, 2017. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's been carrying around

multiple laptops for weeks. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And hello, Beardsley. Hey, how's it going? So guys, we have a pretty great show today. Finally going to get to sit down and review the Librem 15, the latest and greatest from Purism, which kind of the timing sort of perfect because also there's some big news around

the funding for Librem 5. So we'll be taking a look at one of their products that initially was a crowdfunder at just the moment that the Librem 5 hit its crowdfunding goal. Very interesting to see where something like this they've worked on a couple of years, where are they at? How far did they get if they had a couple of years to work on something? Also, really, really big community news that I want to cover this week, and we're going to roll out an experimental new segment

as part of that community news. Controversial, the beard tells me. Prepare to be flamed, the beard warns me. Didn't you? He did. I did. So we will roll out a new corner of the show this week to talk about something that's here, it's real, and we're all dealing with it.

And it's spelt with a lowercase d. That'll be coming up in a little bit. And then after all of that, if time permits, this show is in a special moment right now. It is 32 episodes away from 250. And why do you say that matters? Why does that matter? Is that what you might be wondering? Why does that matter, right?

Isn't that just a number? Yeah, well, it is. And I couldn't wait until 300. That's why it mattered. So 250 is just 32 episodes away. And it is time for some changes. We're switching

to haiku. Boom! So if you're a fan of this show, following the show for a while, I encourage you to stick around towards the end of the show. We'll talk a little bit about some of the changes that could be coming down the road around 250, around episode 250. So we'll give you a long time

to digest it all. But never fear. I think it's all for the better. Before we go any further, we've got to cover some community news and there is one order of business that we must take care of before we go there.

And that's bringing in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings. Mamba room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Jeez. Hi.

Well, I'm like William Shatner getting thrown across his bridge right now with that one. We got some excited people. They're fired up and ready to go. There you go. I'll tell you what I'm fired up about. One of the projects that has one of the worst names in recent history but is so damn useful, FW Update. Firmware Update.

FW Update. Just hit version 1.0. Now this is that special little bit of magic. That's a lot of good software, but also a lot of really great partnerships and relationships that have resulted in Linux users getting firmware updates to critical pieces of hardware in their machine via software updates, like any modern desktop system does in 2017. And they just hit version 1.0. Since they've started the project, they've basically re-architected the way the entire Daemon works.

They've reimagined how the metadata is downloaded and managed. They've changed core ways of the way things themselves are done with the upgrades. They now support 72 different kinds of hardware with support for another dozen or so currently being worked on. And lots of vendors are now using the LVFS project to distribute firmware. Now, LVFS project stands for the Linux Vendor Firmware Project. Every month, 165,000 plus devices get updated. Nice. Using FW Update.

Now that is... Some good progress. Yeah. Dell, as you might know if you've followed some of our coverage here on this network has been a huge supporter, they write, since the early days.

Now smaller companies like Logitech are also supporting the project and he also gives a shout out to his employer Red Hat who's given him the resources and infrastructure and some of the political handshaking that has been needed that he said literally no one else would have given him. And he's extremely grateful. So this is huge. This is one of those little bits of software that

doesn't have a really flashy name. You know, this was something that like Macs didn't have. And then all of a sudden, they got this feature, they would give it some sort of great name, like active firmware updates or something like it give it some sort of great name like Active Firmware Updates or something. Like it would have some sort of publicity name, and it would be a feature in the OS that this version of the OS finally supports. But in Linux land, it just slowly gets rolled out. And one day when you're on a Linux machine and you're on GNOME Software Center, and you go to updates, you see there's a firmware update. And you click it, and you just installed your firmware update. And you don't think about the fact that you didn't have to go download an EXE

from their horrible driver's website. You didn't have to go find some weird version of FreeDOS or something like that. Oh, man. Like, it just worked. And that's why this project's so great. And it's really great to see them hit version 1.0. And there's a lot of devices on that list. You should go check tons of Dell things, the ColorHug,

the Logitech Unifying Receiver, which a lot of people probably use. That's awesome. I'm hopeful that Dell gets support for this on some of their servers at some point, because I think that would be handy. Sure, there's usually IPMI or other ways to do it, but it'd be awesome to be able to do it just from your regular old operating system. Yeah, absolutely.

So I have a segment that I want to roll out. A corner, if you will. It's for people who like to mess with computers. Now, I'm going to call this the SystemD corner. And the value of this is negative. I apologize if you're not a SystemD fan. I understand. It is a bit of a complex beast.

But it is the reality in which we find ourselves today. And there have been some interesting developments in SystemD land. And I thought since most of us are going to be running a version of Linux that uses it, maybe we should know what those things are. So we now dive into the complex and inspired world of systemd. And there's some new features, Wes. There's some really nice new features. I highlighted a few.

Like one I thought that was particularly neat was dynamic users, which is coming to systemd 235, and you can now configure systemd to dynamically allocate Unix user IDs for service processes when they start, and then they release the user ID when it stops them. It's pretty secure, and it mixes well with transient services. It works with socket-activated services and with service templating.

So instead of having to have user accounts sitting around that could be exploited, user accounts created, the UID that is necessary is created. When the service is done, it's destroyed. The other part I like about this is not necessarily just the dynamic users thing, but they talk a lot about the methods that you have available with SystemD, like, all right, it runs as a dynamic user, and then you can pick and choose either temporary

or permanent places on the file system to give it write access to, and it won't be able to write outside of that, which there's a ton of things I can think like, you know, much like snaps do in some ways where you're just like, you need to save your data in your spot. I will go fetch it when I need it. Don't touch anything else in my home dir. Now, there's something else that they've added that I didn't really think about until I saw it as a feature. And I'm like, oh, geez, I can't believe we didn't have this. So systemd analyzes gain new verbs like get log level and get log target, which will print the logging level and the target of the system manager, which is, if you think about what they're saying here is now you can ask the system what level in which are you logging at? And you could not ask the system that before this necessarily, but more so

than that, they're going to be able to expose this to like GNOME logs up in the GUI level. So you'll be able to open up your local desktop log manager and see your system is currently logging at this level right now. Which that is kind of like one of those, I'm surprised we didn't have those features. And then here's another one in that category. For each service unit, for each time a service is restarted, there'll be a counter that is now kept. So you can keep track of how often a service restarts. It's increased each time the service is restarted. And you'll be able to query it like systemctl show-p number of restarts for service X.

And you can see if your Nginx daemon is restarting constantly, and you get an idea of how many times that's happened, which I think is just going to be really great information. And last but not least, before we get out of the corner, you notice a little something about kind of a clever way that system D murders people's system processes. Murders them good. It really does because it does it in a way where they don't make a big fuss, and then it can just go and clean house after that. And so, I don't mean, I don't want to steal your thunder because you found this one, but I thought this was pretty great. I guess they use SigStop. Before it gets any other signals, the process gets any other signals that would prevent it from closing. So before it can lock up because it got another signal, send it a sig stop the process suspends and then you can go in

and you can just tell it all to die right there on the spot and the ones that don't die they'll come back they'll get woken up and then you can generally go back and clean them up in a loop and kill them again uh it seems like it was just a really simple kind of way to sort of kill processes and i thought okay well that was – you put it in the slack. So I don't – I didn't mean to steal it. No, no, no, no. I think just – it's just good to see the implementation of what's going on. Something simple for a common problem.

Like – I'm sorry. I'm doing it again. But that's what it was is it was something simple for – where otherwise we attribute systemd as this huge monster. And this was just a really clean, plain, simple way to do something. Right. Like there's plenty of things systemd does wrong. I will not try to say that it's this perfect piece of software or anything like that.

But when they do things right or if there's something interesting, it's interesting to see. And I have not dived that deep into the internals. So it's cool to see like a filtered version, a look inside. Yeah. Yeah. So something that I've noticed that you guys didn't mention, there's also systemd run, gain support for a new pipe command, which allows you to invoke arbitrary processes as systemd services.

So you get all the benefits of systemd like the systemd logging while still allowing them to be integrated into the classic Unix shell pipeline. Fascinating. That is a good catch. Yeah, right? Yeah, so you can like spin up a pipeline, give it like a temporary working dir to store all of its stuff, logs to the journal,

and then have it all disappear as a user that no longer exists. There you go. There you go. So, okay. Everybody okay? Did everybody make it? Did you survive? I'm in a cold sweat now, but let's just carry on.

All right, and that concludes our System D corner. We're going to need a theme for this or some music. I'm just hacking it together as we go right now. But I thought somebody screaming about doing only one job sort of was appropriate for System D because it's sort of a, you know. Womp womp. Okay, so. Almost too appropriate. Yeah, well, it's kind of ironically appropriate.

So before we run, Mr. Westpain and I had a chance to go to Segal this week, last week, actually. And Wes even had a talk there, which I attended. And this was my first time going to Segal. It's in Seattle at the Seattle Central College. And it ran this last weekend. And a lot of our friends are there. Oh, yeah. Valerie from the Ubuntu WA in Oregon and Katie.

I think she actually probably with Katie. She was there. Ian from System76 was there as well. And he gave a talk as well as he sat at a booth. And, yeah, it was not a huge event. In fact, it sort of hit that sweet spot. If you want something that's not a very, very large production but still has really interesting, informative talks, it sort of nails that. I'll give you an example. So while Wes was giving a talk on Clojure, there was also a talk on how to set up like a key pass set up with your own private sync and encrypted backup.

And in another room, there was a talk about how to wire an automated chicken door using a Raspberry Pi. And like those were the talks that were all going on at once. And it gives you sort of a, it is like that all day. And almost every talk, there was something like, I would really like to go to that. And so you gave one. What did you think?

What was that process like for you? Was that your first talk at a Linux event? At a Linux event, yes. I've given other talks, but at a Linux event, yes. It was a lot of fun. It was super easy when I was submitting and preparing and saying like, oh, do I want to try to give one here? All the people in their IRC room,

the people volunteers, people running it, super nice, super helpful. Really, it's just a great conference. I'm glad to have been a part. I'm glad to have gone to GON this year. And I hope you're right. It wasn't super huge, but I thought they got a good array. There's a lot of speakers from not in this area. Microsoft was represented. IBM had several people there. As you said, System76. So I think it's an up and comer, hopefully something to watch. And it feels like Seattle is a big enough tech hub with enough tech people and companies there that it makes sense for a Linux-type event like this to exist. So it sounds like this year went great.

I hope that keeps going. Yeah. I found it to be a little smaller scale than a Linux Fest. It was more like a, more like a, probably a crowd of four or five hundred. Yeah, probably. Yeah. And it was at the venue was a school, Seattle Central College, and it was in session. So at certain times you were walking around the hallways with college students going between

rooms, which not quite my thing, but not bad either. A little chaotic, but not bad. I guess they had to do some rescheduling too. There was like an HVAC problem, so they had to change some of the rooms that they were using near the last minute. I don't know if that played a role. There's always complications like that. But either way, a nice group of people, nice group of talks, definitely worth the travel

if you're in the area. So yeah, I'll probably go back for a bit next year too. I got to meet up with a few Jupiter Broadcasting listeners, so that was cool. I like that. And then... Yeah, the year I went, the fire alarm went off, so you guys lucked out. Really? Ouch. And then after it was all done,

Wes and I went to Angela's family diner. Oh, that was a ton of fun. Yeah. So we went down to Planet Java diner and we got chicken strips. Wes and I were adorable and got chicken strips together. Twinsies. We totally went twinsies on lunch.

And then, you know what? We went and got cookies. So it was actually all around a pretty good time. Did you guys share a milkshake? No. No. But those cookies are worth getting.

They were super, super good. So yeah, Seagull was a good event. The Seattle area is good. If you can make it out, maybe go next year. Maybe, maybe. And now we look forward, my friends. Now we look forward.

So there's many things to chat about. So let's take a moment and thank Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Go to linux.ting.com to sign up and that's where you'll get $25 off a device or $25 in service credit if you bring a device.

Check their BYOD page because over there, they'll list all the devices that are compatible and you'll be impressed with the list because they have a CDMA network and a GSM network. They have a really well-designed dashboard where it gives you a quick access to your minutes, your messages, or your megabytes, whatever you've used. Or you could turn a line off or you could turn a line on and just use only text or only use data or only use phone. Like you have all these really different granular levels of control. You can say usage alerts, you can name the line so you don't have to go by the numbers, but you can go by like a easy to know alias. And then that shows up across like the

mobile apps too. It's really sophisticated. Now, here's the nice thing about a $25 service credit. You see, your average Ting line is going to be around $23, $24 a month. And that's after your minutes and your messages and your megabytes are added up in the $6 for the line. You're still going to be around this pretty low price point. So if you get a $25 service credit, it's going to pay for more than your first month. I really, really like that because that's what happened to me. And that experience, that made me a Ting customer for life. And of course, they've got devices you can buy directly. Like I said, you can bring your own. And if you're watching their Twitter page, and you can find that at Ting FTW on Twitter, you'll see that

they're giving away two gigabytes of data right now. If you add a line to your Ting account, you'll get two gigs of free data. So if you're already a Ting customer, check that out. If you're not, go to linux.ting.com. linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. linux.ting.com. Nationwide coverage with no contracts and no

early termination fees. Whoa. linux.ting.com. So you found this really great. I think you found this really great. Unless the beard found it, I'm sorry if I'm misattributing, but this really great app called Tor Proxy, which uses net filter hooks in the Linux kernel to route all of your network traffic to the Tor network. It uses net filter hooks, and then it just makes sure that all of your outbound traffic that, of course, the kernel would be responsible for anyways, gets routed to the Tor network. Now, here's a major limitation. It only supports IP4 traffic, and it's TCP IP4, so no UDP fancy shenanigans, no IPv6, and no pings. No ICMP pings. Get those out of here. Yeah, get those out of here. But this is

a pretty neat thing. Could you give me a use case for this west give me your best uh spy use case for this like what do you got like an always secure linux box as soon as you turn it on the kernel routes all your traffic to tor like what's what's going on yeah i mean that or uh yeah maybe you're using a you have a virtual machine or you have like a you know a laptop with no no os that you boot this up you load the module you make sure that you know at no time that you boot this up, you load the module, you make sure that at no time are you going to be able to send packets out there except through Tor. Yeah.

Or you want to run an application over Tor that doesn't support proxies inside of the application. Sure. Yeah, that's good. I bet you that'd be a big use case. Yeah, Tor proxy, and it's a kernel module, which who doesn't love loading a good kernel module? I like how simple it is.

It only has four arguments. Oh, really? Good. Good. I was going to say I like that they tested against kernel 3.16, so I'm like, oh, okay. But what are the arguments? Well, you have dash S, which is to insert the module and start the proxy. You have dash I, which is just to insert the module.

You have dash R, which is to remove the module. And you have dash T, which is to refresh the relay tables. That's pretty simple. That's it. I can get behind that. That's how you build your ultimate secure box. Somebody make a live CD that does that. The downside is the proxy must be run as root and Tor must be running.

So you are putting something network-enabled on root. Yeah. Yeah, that is a downside. I also noticed, like, if you want to get to any hidden services, you're still going to have to use a Tor browser to do that. Yeah. But I guess that's kind of expected. So I saw a question on RLinux.

And I know I've had offline conversations with Wimpy about this, but I figured it might be on the minds of a lot of listeners out there. And I did see it show up on R-Linux, so I thought, well, let's talk about this for a moment. And maybe, Wimpy, you could chime in and share as much as you'd like. I just want to find a game, I think, or a name, I think, is the person's handle on Reddit. Why did comp is die? I don't understand people like people act like comp is archaic or maybe it's gimmicky and buggy. That hasn't been my experience at all. I don't really understand why it's gone away. I liked Gnome Shell, but I like comp is much, much more. I'm actually going to jump to XFCE and load comp is and I don't understand why more people and more distros haven't done this. So Wimpy, how did Compiz and why is Compiz dead? And is it dead? Well, no, Compiz isn't dead. There's effectively two strands of Compiz that are being actively maintained right now. There is Compiz 0.9, which is the Compiz you'll find in Ubuntu, for example.

which is the comp is you'll find in Ubuntu, for example. And that's the C++ re-implementation. So it was forked from the 0.8 branch. A whole load of stuff was reworked, and all of the plugins that are available there were also made to work with EGL. So they work on things like ARM devices and what have you. And then you have Compiz Reloaded which is based on the 0.8 branch so pre the C++ re-implementation and has a wider selection of plugins available but not all of those are available for EGL and both of those projects

are alive and well. Ubuntu Mate ships comp is 0.9 by default obviously ubuntu 16.04 is shipping comp is because that's where a lot of the unity functionality is um um exposed uh and i i think i'm right in saying that the fedora mate spin comes with comp is reloaded oh so you know it's funny because veritunda makes the the obvious joke in the room and you're right veritunda everybody when you say comp is you think of things like cubes or oh yeah or the aquarium my windows don't wiggle anymore wiggly windows wobbly windows uh yeah i mean if you've if you've got no taste, then those things are turned on by default. Then Linux is the place to be.

If you're actually using Compiz for feature enhancement, then maybe Compiz is used a little bit more sensibly and tastefully. Yeah, that's always why I've liked it, is because it always gave my system this feeling like it was keeping up with me. this feeling like it was keeping up with me. Like the smoothness to the window draws and movements to the windows and the fact that maybe my disc might be busy but the windows would still render rather cleanly and smoothly. To me, that was always the draw to Compiz. I think my favorite Compiz feature was actually,

it was my first experience with live previews in your old tab menu. Oh, yeah. Good point, Beard. And also hover over the icon it was my first experience with uh live previews in your old tab menu oh yeah good boy beard yeah and also like hover over the icon and see like a preview of your minimized window window peeking yeah yeah there is some genuinely useful functionality in comp is and you know if you're using a desktop environment which is using um x then it's a great way to get in most cases a tear-free experience and also in in my experience i've been working on compass for just over two and a half years now i don't find it to be buggy or crashy you often see throwaway comments you know in the various or it steals a lot of

frames per second or memory oh it's you know it's crashy and it's buggy well i don't see that i i use it all day all the live long day for for years and i don't think i've ever seen comp is actually crash on me it's usually something else yeah that causes you know a disastrous failure it's not comp is i'm inclined to agree my my um main machine is a 1604 machine, so it's Unity 7 Compiz-based. But Compiz, I don't even think about Compiz on a daily basis. I don't really think about Unity 7 on a daily basis. It's just the thing that puts Windows on my screen, and I tend to leave my machine on all the time,

and I get quite decent uptime without my desktop dying in any way, shape, or form. So, yeah, that might have been the case some time ago and there may have been some instability when comp is 8.0.8 transitioned over to c++ in the 0.9 and the early days of unity plugin but these days i don't i don't see it being anywhere near as um crashy as as people say in fact i before i joined this hangout i was playing a 3d accelerated game via steam on one display while displaying other stuff on two other displays and everything just worked perfectly and i didn't get any rendering issues or crashing at all right it it's just expected that it just works and it does does. In 2017, it does. Yeah, I've really had no problem with it.

We have a machine here in the studio running Unity 7 on the last LTS release, and I never think about Compiz. I never give it two thoughts. The only thing I ever think about is the interface always seems fairly responsive, and I appreciate that aspect of the computer. Yeah, definitely. You know, it gives me some pause, though, now that I think about this, because you've all just made really great points. Compiz is still maintained. Yeah, definitely. you specifically for me and how I use Linux just you know for me personally I I like using a desktop with compass and I wish you and millions of other people I wish there was a way to have

that with gnome 3 because I that's what I'm going to miss I think the most about the transition for for the Ubuntu desktop is that was always one of the things I liked the most is when I would load up a unity 7 Ubuntu desktop which I didn't use very often but when I loaded it that was always one of the things I liked the most is when I would load up a Unity 7 Ubuntu desktop, which I didn't use very often. But when I loaded it, I was always like, gosh, this thing is smooth and polished. You know, and I think comp has played that role. And, and I admit, I'm a little biased at the moment, because just before we went on air, gnome three crashed, and we lost audio on our live stream again. And we're back to having gnome three crashes after weeks of things working great. And we've made no software changes at all and yet we're now back to having gnome 3 crashes so i do admit i'm i'm a little right but let's not get roast into spectacles when when ubuntu

switched to unity it was pretty fraught and yeah unity in the early days and comp is in the early days was was was pretty unstable. Yeah, I guess I feel like I've gone through that, though. I don't really feel like doing that again. Right, well, you don't have to because the 17.10 release is an interim release. There's no reason why you as a normal user, I don't mean you, Chris, as a podcaster and a tech journalist. I mean a normal user would have to upgrade to 17.10.

They might do it out of curiosity and they might run it in a VM or on a spare laptop, but there's no obligation to run it other than curiosity. So wait for the 1804 release when things are a bit more stable and the upstream GNOME developers have had a ton of bugs filed by quite a few Ubuntu users who are enthusiastic and do want to try this stuff early. But I think when you get to 1804 i think you know given that unity 7 has stabilized over the last like three years four years or so

you picture where we'll be with gnome shell in i don't know the 20 2020 uh lts release just think how rock solid that 2020 release. I know that's quite a hard picture for some people to grasp, but think how stable that's going to be. And that's effectively where we are with Unity 7. That's a good point. And that is the nice aspect about LTSs and the fact that there's many other desktops out there that we do have. There are other islands we can hop to, and time does seem to heal these wounds.

So while we're talking about the march towards 1804, I noticed that the Ubuntu Mate project has a very interesting announcement. In fact, some of my friends on Twitter seem to be rather excited about this too. Ubuntu Mate will be pioneering a Snap pre-installed. So when you install Ubuntu Mate 17.10, there will be a Snap pre-installed. And it looks like it's going to be the Pulse Audio Mixer. Wimpy, can you tell me a bit about this? Yeah, I can. So as of yesterday, I believe, that landed.

So you were at the Ubuntu Rally, and this was one of the outcomes of the Ubuntu rally, which was how do we put the last pieces in place so that it's possible to ship a snap pre-installed by default in the ISO images. And I was approached as Ubuntu Mate to sort of sound me out to see if we'd be able to do this and work on this so that we could uh learn some lessons and feed that back to the ubuntu desktop team proper um so they've got sight of you know what how things have gone and what we've learned uh in readiness for 1804 so we've chosen to ship the pulse mixer application by default which is a console based mixer for pulse and in fact when i was fumbling with my audio earlier it was actually that that i used to

sort my volume levels out because it's um it's quite fine grained in what it can do so that's now pre-installed by default on the daily images. So we've got a post over at community.ubuntu.com, which is a call for testing for anyone who's interested in Ubuntu, not necessarily Ubuntu Mate, to come and grab the daily images and test it and make sure that that Pulse Mixer application is working correctly. So there's a lot to what you just said, and this is remarkable. So there's a lot a listener could infer based on this conversation. So I think we should be pretty clear. You say you're shipping a snap in Ubuntu Mate in preparation for 1804. Now, if I were an alarmist, I'd say that means that 1804, everything's going to be snapped. That's not what's happening here, right? everything's going to be Snap. That's not what's happening here, right? No, there's no plans for everything to be a Snap in 1804. Although, you know, if there was a new flavor to crop up where everything being a Snap made sense, then that would be possible. You know, there could be some interesting use cases for this sort of thing. Like Ubuntu Kodi, for example, you know, you could have an Ubuntu kodi distribution where kodi is provided

as a snap and is permanently upgraded to the latest stable release even though that you're you're on an lts that's you know running for five years you know unchanging but the core application i would run moves on top that would be quite a nice way to to do this yeah or um or an ubuntu kiosk that has just like the base install and a browser and and that's it and the networking stack and everything is nicely confined so someone coming up to use that kiosk knows that nothing else is gonna like infringe upon the data that they're saving at that time so why why pulse audio mixer or Pulse Mixer? And what does having it installed by default, what kind of value does that have? Right, well, the particular reason that this application has been chosen

is because until it was a snap, there was no easy way to install this on Debian and Ubuntu because this application has never been in the Debian or Ubuntu archives before. And in fact, it was Popey spotted what's called an ITP on the Debian mailing lists. An ITP is an intent to package. And that was a request by somebody to say, package this software for Debian and Ubuntu.

So in the two weeks that have elapsed since that ITP post, a Snap has been created. It's in the Snap store for the appropriate archives, and the necessary support to embed Snaps in ISO images has been added to the build infrastructure, and now we're shipping a Snap by default, which is an interesting story when you think about what we've heard about projects like NextCloud and software that's frozen in archives and how that causes maintenance issues for developers and all the rest of it, and that the time that they have to wait before the next version

gets into the archive. So there's a very interesting story here about a fast-moving piece of software that is now being deployed by default in an ISO image and the speed at which that's being done. And this implementation isn't complete at the moment. So at the moment, it's kind of tightly coupled with the live build system. And what we're going to be doing is exposing this in the usual way the people that make Ubuntu flavors are used to for what's called seeding packages that go in their live image. And I see on the Ubuntu community hub, the Ubuntu budgie team have replied and said, you know, they were interested in doing this and they wanted some

more details about how this was done because they have a number of snaps that they would be interested in shipping by default in Ubuntu Budgie. And what do you learn by having something like this installed? Because it's not just a matter of making it available to install, which I could do now, but there is got to be value in a certain amount of user base having this installed by default. Yeah. So there's a couple of things there. Oh, goodness. The first is that, you know, the build infrastructure has to be able to install this snap into the ISO as it's being constructed. And it's not just the snap, of course, because the snap sits on top of the core snap as well. So the core snap is being shipped by default in Ubuntu Mate 17.10 now which normally what happens is the first time you install a snap the core snap gets installed as well so the core snap and this snap are shipped by default and what we'll do is sometime after the

release we'll push out an update to Pulse Mixer, and we'll be able to make sure that all of the backend infrastructure is geared up appropriately to cope with that demand for updating all of those systems. So there's some backend soak testing being conducted as well. That makes a lot of sense. It was super critical that we choose something nice and small that doesn't have a super big impact on the size of the ISO image,

but also is a useful utility. We don't want to just throw shovelware on the ISO. We wanted to put something on there that's actually quite useful. And Pulse Mixer is actually a kind of useful thing to open a terminal-type Pulse Mixer and have a nice little thing that you can use to adjust the levels on your microphone and your speakers and your headset and all that kind of stuff it's actually a cool tool so it you know it fulfills like all of the requirements for uh putting something on the cd think think pavu

control but for the console i was just wanting that yep i think i'll be snap installing this later today we're making an official pick of the show today go check it out it's pulse mixer and you can get as a snap too which which i guess would be what? Snap Search Pulse Mixer, if you want to see the entry? Snap Install Pulse Mixer, Snap Info Pulse Mixer, both of those work. There you go. And then if you look at the screenshot here on the Ubuntu community page, you can see that you can individually control the volume of particular Chrome tabs too, which that's pretty cool. And then Mumble and individual applications. Also, you'll see that Wimpy has a Scarlett USB analog, which I approve. I like that. Good audio interface.

Yeah, I love that. It's a great audio interface. That's what we're talking on right now, actually. We are talking on one of those. It's not the only one we have, but that's the one on this machine. Well, fascinating. So I suppose this is really early days but my last question might be what are your thoughts on sharing what what's discovered um well i think

that that will be some months from now before you know before we see enough users installing Ubuntu Marte and having this snap pre-registered on people's machines. And then we'll push an update out. And what's interesting is the plan for the update is to push out a version of the snap that's actually smaller than the snap that's being deployed on the ISO image. You know, I don't know if we, do we talk much about that? Do we talk much about that on the show? That was another thing that kind of came up at the Ubuntu rally that was a rather impressive piece of work. I don't want to steal the thunder, but it sounds like there could be kind of a big change coming to the size of Snaps. Yeah, I mean, this was, I think, actually, if Daniel's here, it was actually one of the elementary applications that saw the biggest reduction in that whole exercise. Oh, snap!

Yeah. Tell me. applications that saw the biggest reduction in in that whole exercise yeah yeah tell me it was uh well it was really interesting you know because we're um digging into the idea of the platform snap right and trying to um make sure that the the size of the snaps were comparable um to their deb package equivalents right and and because we're kind of sticklers about that kind of stuff and we kept poking and going can it get smaller can't it get just a little bit smaller and and ken was just furiously typing you know okay maybe if we did this and and do that and we finally poked him enough that he he found a um a hidden off by default option that just drastically reduces the size of snaps really the really cool thing was Ken found it via the KDE developers who were also there at the rally.

It was actually one of the KDE developers, Scarlett, who's been going like a machine, snapping all the KDE apps. There's loads of them being pushed in the store. And she said, oh, yeah, you want this option, and this will make your snaps much smaller. She passed that on to Ken, and then that little word of mouth thing made all the snaps much smaller not just the elementary ones but all the known ones as well it was great yeah significantly smaller which is yeah i think in the case of um was it vocal that was being snapped at the time

daniel uh no we were actually just doing the calculator we were trying oh that was it yeah and the calculator i think i think it something like 9 meg, and then this change was made, and it was 136K. Yeah. Oh! That's quite the diet. That is really. Good work. That is.

That's something like, that should just make it across Mark's desk at some point. Like, if nothing else, you can say, well, we can take that away from the Ubuntu rally, Mark. We got that. Because you could make, you know, that's a good bullet point. Well, good work, gentlemen. Curious to see where this goes. And of course, the timeline's rather obvious, I suppose, because this is all an effort to collect data for 1804, in a sense, to determine how far you go. So I guess, in a sense, like, you're going to have to kind of turn this thing around in a few months, really. Yeah, I mean, if you, I don't know what the plans of the desktop team are but you will have seen

that um ken as we as we've just discussed ken has been snapping a number of the gnome desktop applications and other members of the desktop team have been doing the same it may well be that some of those applications ship as snaps in 1804 and you have an LTS with rolling applications sitting on top. And you know, the thing, the thing that's interesting here is there's this popular meme in the community that snaps are only for IOT and server and don't work for desktop

apps. And Ken is totally proving that wrong in multiple ways. Like the Snapdaemon that runs on 1804 next year is the same Snapdaemon that runs on 1604 that was released a year ago. And that's the same Snapdaemon that was available for.04 that was three years ago so he can put one gnome application 3.26 gnome application in the store and that same snap works on 18.04 16.04 and 14.04 the exact same application package once runs on multiple lts's non-Ubuntu systems as well. That is an epic win.

There you go. I guess we should probably move forward. But I guess this is all really, you know, I'm going to say this. What the bigger picture is, is that 17.10 is now days away. And a lot of this stuff is falling into place. And that's really the meta story around all of this. And I'm going to give a plug to the last two episodes of Ask Noah. You've got to check those out if you are not a routine listener of his show.

First of all, he's been killing it recently. And second of all, he has two interviews that are split across to episode 29 and episode 28. And start with 28. And it's an interview. I may be Martin or probably if you know the implement it correctly, where Mirror could still have a very real role, especially for smaller desktop projects. And what the hell happens if 1710 ships Wayland by default and it blows up in everybody's face? What happens then? All of that is in episode 28 and then in episode 29 of the Ask Noah show. And so good additional background information as we get really close to the 1710 release um but i i can yeah go ahead i can hear you wanting to wrap up this event yeah but i know there's one i know there's one more thing we want to get to so go ahead there is yes yeah it's all yours you have the floor well um pop, you've been doing a lot of the legwork on this. Oh, I hope you have the floor.

You have the floor, Popey. So as you mentioned, Chris, it's a few days away from the 1710 release, and it turns out that the Ubuntu project kicks out a ton of ISO images. It's not just Ubuntu with GNOME. There's all the flavors as well. There's that little known one called Ubuntu Mate, and then there's all the other really big ones as well as ubuntu labuntu kubuntu ubuntu studio there's just tons and uh we need some help from our community to help us test those and we would really love it if people could join us on monday we're having a hangout on monday

1500 utc i think it is uh where myself and martin are going to go through all you need to do to download the iso images get these things booted up on a machine and a usb stick test that stuff out report bugs let us know what's busted so that we can get that stuff fixed now we're not saying it'll get fixed for release which is next thursday the 19th of october that we can get that stuff fixed. Now, we're not saying it will get fixed for release, which is next Thursday, the 19th of October, but we'll certainly get stuff queued up for immediately after release if it's super critical. So yeah, join me and Martin. If you go to Ubuntu On Air, there's a nice little YouTube video you can watch next Monday

on the 16th of October at 1500 UTC. So that's the URL to go to is UbuntuOnAir.com next Monday on the 16th of October at 1500 UTC. So that's the URL to go to is UbuntuOnAir.com next Monday? Yep. All right. You can go to our community site, community.ubuntu.com, and there's a pinned post there as well, and you'll find a post about this. It's all about just the easy way to get a smooth transition into the Ubuntu community, helping people out and

getting stuff tested. If you've got a little bit of spare time, it'd be super appreciated. Yeah. You know what? I'll put a link in the show notes because you might not out. I don't always get a chance to file a bug for every little thing. I don't get to test every little bit, but I can download an ISO and give it a go. And that's something we can all do. And that's part of the problem is, you know, people find it difficult to do that. The process of filing bugs is a little bit abrasive. We want to make that easier.

And if it's difficult, you just tell us what the bug is. We'll reproduce it. We'll file the bug, right? You know, we'll help you through that process. We want to make it easy. But what we need is lots of different people to test this stuff on diverse platforms, lots of different systems, not just the same ThinkPad that everyone in the company has. How about I'll bring my MacBook that I use for video editing?

How would you like that? No, no, no. Don't do that. Nobody wants that. Although I do have a Librem 15 I could bring to the party, which it's – I'll bring my System76 Lemur, guys. There you go. That's good

gotta make sure that works because uh there we go that's three people yeah yeah he's done yeah yeah and because now we got this leap in 15 here in studio that we got to talk about i get to that and uh i've been using it now for about three weeks and i wasn't really quite sure how to really do this review um until i went to the Ubuntu rally and I brought this as my daily driver for the rally. And then it all just sort of clicked together. And now the timing's worked out really well with them nailing their crowd funders. So we're going to talk about all of that.

We've got to get to this thing. We've got to discuss this because I still, although we're running a little tight, I'm hoping we'll still have time to also talk about episode 250 and beyond, beyond, beyond. But first, DigitalOcean, digitalocean.com. Go over there and create your account and use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. It's one word and you get a $10 credit. Now you can do a lot with this $10 credit. Traditionally, I would say, go spin up a droplet. Go like the $5 a month rig, run it for two months for free. Go like a maniac. Lots of distros, great dashboard, data centers all over the world. But now, now there's a whole new thing you could use that $10 credit for.

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So, yeah, let's start this, guys. And Mumble Room, please feel free to jump in if you have any questions as we go along. Now, I want to start this review by talking about the obvious elephant in the room. And that is the fact that Purism reached their crowdfunding goal for the Librem 5, which is really kind of remarkable because it's a $1.5 million target. Yeah, that's impressive. Yeah, yeah. And as you recall, we've talked about this. This is the 5-inch privacy-focused smartphone that they're building from the ground up to use Matrix for encrypted communications.

They'll have a separate CPU from the baseband. They're going to have kill switches for the camera. Well, hello. Oh. We have somebody at the door. We have separate kill switches for Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity and things like that. And then, of course, they're also going to

not necessarily prevent the possibility of connecting to an external display or keyboard and mouse because the thing's running basically Debian. It's pure OS or whatever. With about three gigs of RAM, if I recall. Yeah, 32 gigs of storage and a courage jack, a.k.a. the headphone port. And it's reached its initial goal.

And now they're shooting for the milestones, I guess. Or not the milestones, but the, what do you call it? What are they called? Stretch goals. Stretch goals, yeah. Congratulations to them, I suppose them i suppose that's good and so if anybody in the mobile room has anything they want to comment on that aspect of the story before we continue uh feel free i i say congrats to them and i hope this thing's a success just as a comparison like the libram 15 they had a 250 000 goal they made twice that so almost six six hundred thousand but this is a whole new scale of wow it really is yeah can you explain to me what a multi-function port is though

no well do you ever wonder if one of your ports just didn't do enough you know it only did the one thing i guess i guess that just means usbc that's what i was thinking i think the implication is it's a mobile device so it's only going to have a limited number of ports. You're not going to have tons of ports all around the edges of the device. You'll have one, and everything will connect to that, maybe with a dongle or USB-C, like you say. Yeah. I've been following this with some interest because what seems to have really pushed it over the edge in the final last couple of days here was some people got in at really significantly high levels like i believe perhaps the highest levels which is quite remarkable because it it caused uh it caused quite the trajectory and um i think it was a bit weird actually there a little while ago a few days

ago there were two people who went in at the 1999 level and two people who went in at the $19,999 level and two people who went in at the $17,999 level within the same hour. And then again this morning or earlier on today, the same thing happened. Two more at $19,999 and two more at $17,999. Makes me think that when you add those numbers up, it's probably just one person investing. But the only way that they can invest that significant chunk of money is to split it between those two. And that totals up to the amount that they want to invest. There's someone who wants to invest in this thing and they're giving that amount of money. That's the only way it makes sense to me. There's no way you'd get four people within one hour giving that amount of money.

Yeah, and you've been following the chart rather closely, so I think you've got actually a little. You've got literally a good visualization of it, and that seems possible, and I suppose good for them. I think they're running the crowdfunding site themselves, so I don't know if they actually have to disclose who these people are, but I sure would be interested. I don't know. As a privacy-focused privacy focus i can see them not doing it i can see them not not not wanting to do that and people who donate not wanting people to know who

they are and that's perfectly reasonable yep and i and yeah and uh i think it's sort of with this as the background that i'm i'm looking now at the Librem 15, which is their rather high-end laptop. It's fairly competitive. This one, it's black. It's all metal. It's 15.6-inch screen. It has a high-end i7 processor in it. It has very fast SSD drives.

It has six- SSD drives. It has 6th generation or 7th? Beard, if you get a chance over there, give me a read on the graphics because I think it's actually Intel 600. But this was something that I didn't actually order. I didn't actually buy this.

This was something that Purism thought would be appropriate to replace for me. It's 520. OK, thank you. OK, so I have the very first Libra 15 that they ever shipped that was slightly below what they had hoped to originally ship, I think. And I know that they kind of hummed and hawed about it and they decided it was worth trying to make good on that. And I respect that. That's really nice of them.

And so I wasn't expecting this when it arrived. I just thought, okay, well, this is really – so I came at it with this sort of like, well, where does this fit? Right. Where does this fit in my life? And so I used it. I did the standard things like tried to push it to see how loud it could get and tried to push the battery and loaded Solus. Now it's undergoing the beard test right now. Yeah.

Loaded Ubuntu. And yeah, now it's undergoing the beard test. And it wasn't until the trip to New York came up. Is that right? That I went, ah, okay. Because the physical kill switches all of a sudden became a much more practical option. Because I'm going into an area that I don't normally go into. And why not just turn off the Wi-Fi?

Like, why not have that extra level of security? Now, ironically, iPhone 7 users did experience issues with Wi-Fi in New York. So that Wi-Fi attacks were actually a problem in that very hotel. Now, it wasn't one for this, but I actually kind of found a practical purpose. And I will say this, too. They are implemented in a cleaner, less obvious way than the old Librem 15. Is that right? So it's interesting.

So we have it right here, the old Librem 15. And they're like basically there's holes in the aluminum casing, and then there is a old-school electronic black toggle switch that sticks out of the aluminum casing. Plastic little. Yeah. Now with this one, it's like a nice etched plastic switch, and the hole is sort of cut to the size that it needs to be for that switch. Beard, you have it right now.

Do you agree with that? Yeah. And they put it in... Weren't they on the side before? Yeah, well, they stood out more because they were in a more obvious spot. Yeah, now they've put it more close to the screen. And it has a matte display.

I'm not blown away by the display, to be honest with you. The viewing angles are a little rough from time. But if you're looking right at it, it's a pretty great display. And the fact that it's non-reflective is a nice change of pace. I'd say it's at least comparable or better than lenovo displays really you like it so you like it yeah i well i don't like lenovo displays so

now the one thing so there's there's one thing that they're doing differently with the trackpad that i'm having a hard time adding a a description to it's a decently sized trackpad um and it's it doesn't have like an obvious right or left side it's just one big trackpad and it has some multi-touch support including like two fingers scrolling and things like that but it's it's texturized it's texturized in a way that i like though in a in a in sort of like, though, in a way that gives me sort of tactile feedback of where I'm at on the trackpad, like how much distance my finger has traveled, but not in a way that feels like I'm going against gunk on the trackpad. It doesn't cause friction. I disagree. Yeah, I thought you might.

Because to me, it does feel very frictiony, and I don't like it at all. Yeah, I thought you might. Because to me, it does feel very frictiony, and I don't like it at all. Yeah, I thought you might. I'm a little more, I'm coming more from the MacBook trackpad, which is like slippery glass, and I'm just like, that's the other extreme, and I'm like, I think I like a little more traction right now. Yeah, I've definitely had, like, I don't mind the amount of friction on this one. It was pleasant enough. It's still smooth.

I could move as fast as I wanted to. I've definitely encountered some trackpads where you're like, it feels like you're just dragging your finger across, I don't know, sandpaper. Another thing that I've noticed with the trackpad is if you drag your finger from the bottom, like where the invisible buttons are, it won't move the mouse. And I haven't run into that with other trackpads. So that's a button only area yeah one of the things i like is it does have a hardware physical toggle right there you can do fn and

toggle the mouse button off so you don't have to worry about like accidental oh yeah you're doing a lot of typing speaking of typing i'm all over the map on this keyboard um i think i when i when i put the laptop down and pick it back up i'd like it a lot because I've been experiencing RSI recently. And so this is one of those laptops where my fingers aren't being slammed into like a shallow keyboard hole. There's, there's travel and there's some good give to it. Um, and I like that aspect of it, but my hands don't seem to quite line up. Yeah. I think this keyboard would be perfect if they didn't include the number pad. It's funny you say that, though, because I've been really enjoying having that number pad. Yeah, I feel like you could, if you really wanted a number pad, you could just get an external one and plug it in. Yeah, I suppose so.

The way the keyboard is, it feels cramped and too off-center, so my fingers are always on the wrong keys. Yeah, I notice it the most when I'm typing a complicated password. Or when you're going through the Google Doc for the show. Ah, yeah. But what do you think of the feel of the keyboard if you're sitting down there? Because that particular problem, if I'm typing a lot in a day, I can generally reset, and I can adapt. I like the feel of the keyboard.

I feel like, I guess, the bass that's underneath it tends to send vibrations a bit too much. It makes the whole laptop vibrate, and it bugs me a little bit. So those are sort of the unique things that I feel like they've brought. And the reason why I wanted to talk about these things is because all of this feels different than a Clevo. This must not be a Clevo because it doesn't feel like a Clevo at all. It feels like a custom built laptop. And that's something I generally only get an impression of when I'm holding like an XPX or a ThinkPad in my hands. This feels like it was built for this purpose, and it feels like it's a unique piece of equipment.

It actually feels a lot like the Razer Blade laptops, which I like. Yeah, it does. And they have a Purism key on the Super Key there. So that's the aesthetics. And I've mentioned it's like an aluminum all black. And the performance has been pretty great. I've been trying to get fan issues to crop up because that's what I had original problems with.

And I've been quite happy with it. Really? Yeah. The acoustics have been quite good. I mean, I guess if you took it to New York, you used it in various situations. And, you know, in almost all cases, I'd say battery life was pretty average. Were you using any, like, power top or TLP? No, I wasn't.

I was just sort of going with, can I get my work done in the day? Yeah. And I was probably doing three and a half, four hours worth of work, and I just plugged it in every single night, and the battery lasted every day for me just fine. I'm going to run a GPU benchmark and see if it kicks on the fans. Yeah, do it. Yeah, go ahead, because that is an interesting area to play with.

So you have something that is notably better than the first model that I got in every single way. Obvious ways like the better CPUs, the better graphics, the faster SSDs, the superior screen, all of those ways. But in some of the ways that are truly purism too, like the way the toggle switches are implemented or the obvious care that went into the keyboard that feels uniquely purism. And that actually does give me a lot of hope for the Librem 5. If anybody has ever owned a TiVo, you know that the engineers of the TiVo must have spent the majority of their time developing the TiVo remote

because that's truly the most innovative aspect of the TiVo, was the perfect peanut remote. And nobody's ever beat the TiVo was the perfect peanut remote. And nobody's ever beat the TiVo remote. Nobody has ever created a better remote than the TiVo remote. And it feels like that's where Purism is going with the keyboard. They're not there yet, but when you sit down and use it, it feels like something unique to them. It doesn't feel like a ThinkPad or a MacBook. And I don't think they're quite there yet, but you can tell a lot of thought and care went into that. And when you're looking at a lot of vendors out there, a lot of whom I respect, who are selling repackaged Clevos in a way that some of those things are sort of standard across all of the models, it's really nice to see some

differentiation here. I don't know where they're sourcing it from exactly, so don't quote me on all of that, but it genuinely, yeah, somebody who has played with a lot of laptops, it's nice to see some differentiation here. I don't know where they're sourcing it from exactly, so don't quote me on all of that, but it genuinely somebody who has played with a lot of laptops, it's nice to see a unique trackpad implementation and a unique keyboard implementation with what feels like their own hinge, too, on the laptop screen, and then

the performance is, as you would expect with any of this generation of Intel and SSDs. It's like, yeah, it may not be perfect. It may not be where we want it to end up, but it feels like there's been care and concern and design choices made. I opted not to use pure OS. Um,

so they shipped it to me with no OS installed. And, uh, I've, I've tried a solace. I've tried Gentoo and I've tried Ubuntu 1710, um, proper,

which is what's on there right now. And, Beard, I kind of wanted to get your thoughts about that, too, because it's like a really great Ubuntu machine, isn't it? Like, it's just the new release and the black casing and the nice screen and the colors with the all-black system, it all just goes really

well together, don't you think? And it says something about, like, I didn't even realize that this was GNOME or Ubuntu 17.10 until you told me, because it looked just like a Unity desktop. Yeah, it does look a lot like Unity 7.2. Yeah, that as well. So the Librem 15 is actually a contender. I really think it is. I don't know for myself if I would buy one today because what I need from a

system like this today is a Thunderbolt three support in that USB-C port. And I'd like charging and I'd like external GPU because what I want to start doing is I want to start switching over to laptops that have Intel graphics built in with external GPU support. So I can buy one GPU maybe once a year, and then I can switch it between my systems. I was not able to get this to work with my external Thunderbolt 3 dock at all for power or for any devices, external display or anything like that.

That would be something for me that I would really, really want. Now, however, because now that I have this, obviously I'm going to be using it for things. So I'm now going to just make this my Ubuntu 17.10 system for a while. And it'll be my daily driver at home running Ubuntu 17.10. Nice.

And yeah, I think it's going to make a great home workstation for me. See, for me, I think long-term, I probably would not like this. Mostly because it doesn't have a dedicated GPU built in. Yeah, if you could... See, that's why I was thinking, like, here at work I'm going to want a dedicated GPU.

So if you could hook up an external eGPU... Yeah, but for someone like me, I don't want to spend an extra $500 or $600 on an external GPU enclosure that I'm only going to use with one system. Oh, yeah, no, I would use it across a couple systems, yeah. Wimpy's sold me on that pretty heavily.

Yeah, definitely. But yeah, good build. I would not be ashamed to take it into a coffee shop or conference. No,

it looks good and it's clean and there's no obvious branding on the top. Yeah, kind of like that. On the bottom,

there's like a Purism logo but it's just white on black. It's nice and clean. I feel like this is actually a laptop. If you took it to like a coffee shop or something, people would ask you what it is. It's that good polish-wise. Yeah, and I've got, I picked up at Seagull, I picked up an all-white circular gnome logo. And it would look really good in the center of that laptop.

But of course, I may not end up running gnome. No one has to know. You just have to have it installed. I feel like we need to do a hardware hack where we just put a glowing gnome foot on the back of the laptop. The next things I would... Yeah, that'd be cool. The next things I'd really like to see from laptops

like this is no power dongle needed, no separate power brick and dongle. I'd like to see everything being able to be powered off USB-C. That's an important one for me. It really simplifies things so we can get there. I got to say, man, when I was editing off of a car charger, a cigarette adapter in a car off of USB-C, I was like, this is really useful. And this laptop couldn't do that. And it made it not as usable in the car. And that's just a small thing. It's only really applicable to me. Hashtag Chris problems uh and then the other thing i'd really really really really love to start

seeing is i'd love to see some other manufacturer besides lenovo integrate lte modems or some sort of cellular connectivity into these sons of bitches right but not like not in a you can add it if you open it up and add but you know it up, but I can check it on the website. I add a SIM card when I get it, and I can get connectivity. I would love that. I would pick it all the time. Having always-on connectivity is such an important aspect to anybody that would be getting a machine like this,

that we're all either jumping on insecure Wi-Fi, or we're tethering our devices in some cockamamie fashion or we're stopping by Starbucks constantly and getting on the free Google Wi-Fi and they monitor everything we do. There's no great option. And one of the things that drives me crazy about Noah is him and his fancy ass Lenovo where the son of a gun has two batteries and an LTE modem and it all works under Linux. I'm like, I want to buy from a vendor who only builds Linux systems, but has those things.

So they're working on the keyboard, they're working on the trackpad, they're working on the matte display, and they've really nailed the 15.6-inch system here. If the next generation could have USB-C charging and Thunderbolt 3, and some sort of cellular connectivity with another hardware switch, which is something they're great at, I would be all over that. Me too.

Yeah. Oh, boy. You're making me drool, Chris. That would be a great system. By the meantime, if you don't need those things, this system nails it. I was really impressed. And what's your battery at right now? Because we've been off battery, I don't know, for

at least two hours. We still have another four hours of battery left. Yeah, okay, there you go. Is that 67%? Okay, so that's after about two hours of, and you messing around on the system, checking it out, not probably doing anything. Running benchmarks. Oh, you are running some benchmarks. Well, it's not bad. And no fans yet.

Nope. Yeah, that's really a thing about this one. When I was running the GPU benchmark, I very slightly heard the fan. Yeah, every now and then just a little bit, but I'm pretty particular about that. And I had it on my desk, which is a glass desk, so it just amplifies the laptop fan noise. And really no complaints. And, in fact, you know what? I had some benchmarks running on it when the room was way hotter than it should have been because I didn't leave my window open. I left my door closed and I got in there.

It was like 85 degrees in American imperial degrees. And I got in there and it was it was ridiculously, ridiculously hot. And that laptop was chugging away. And the fan noise was still pretty respectable. It was just like a little just a little background noise. Damn. Wow. Just just past the hot box.

Yes. So I'm impressed. And so I'm going to be packaging up noise. Damn. Wow. Just past the hotbox test. So I'm impressed. So I'm going to be packaging up my old one, my old Liebrem 15, and they're going to take it and probably put it under some sort of quarantine or something, I would imagine. Maybe an honorary sacrifice.

Yeah. Viking funeral. Yeah, and melt it down and use its parts for the Liebrem 5. Yep, yep. There we go. From the ashes. Recycling. All right. Well, my melt it down and use its parts for the Librem 5. Yep, yep. There we go. From the ashes. Recycling.

All right. Well, Mabaroum, you guys have been pretty quiet during our review. Do you have any questions about this here hardware and about the Librem 15 before we move on? Or any thoughts, too, if you have about the Librem 5, feel free. Yes, I do. Go ahead. So I was wondering about, I'm sorry, about the kill switches. So if you really have the laptop by your side, are the kill switches soft or hard?

And what can we expect if they just maybe break or stop working? Well, I guess that would have to be a warranty problem. So they are hard plastic slide switches that come shipped in the on position and you just pop them over to the off position, sort of like similar to a mute switch on a smartphone. It's basically a physical disconnect, I believe. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, that's how they do it. So it just disappears to the operating system. Oh, that's okay. Thank believe. Yeah, it is. Yeah. That's how they do it. So it just disappears to the operating system. Oh, that's okay. Thank you. Yeah. I think that's kind of nice, actually. And that's why I think they'd be one of the best vendors to ship an LTE modem, because boy, isn't that something I'd love to just leave switched off completely. Yes, exactly. No doubts

about it. No doubts about spying, no doubts about accidental data usage, no doubts about it. Just flip that switch off, and then when I need mobile internet, I flip it on. I think they'd nail it. Of course, they'd probably say, buy a Liebman 5. Oh, no. Alright, anybody else?

I'm good, Chris. I don't really have anything on the top of my head. Yeah, and, yeah, well, there you go. Beardsy, you have any closing thoughts, Beardsy, on that before we move on? I just saw something amusing. The USB hubs that are inside the laptop, apparently the vendor is listed as the Linux Foundation. Really? Yeah.

I don't know why. I bet you we could find out. I bet you there's a good story behind that. Yeah, maybe. All right. So do you think we could take a little time to talk maybe um all right so do you think we could take a little time to talk about the show or do you think we should wrap it up anything we can talk about it yeah i mean all right so this is a wild west plus we started a little late so i'm just

excited that dan's here from elementary i know that's really cool it's great to have you here dan it's great to be here, Chris. And there's changes in the works in JB already that you don't know about. And so I wasn't really going to make any big changes here on this show because I felt like, you know, we'll just stay here. We'll be the stable rock of the network. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But in such, then I began to worry, worry, worry, worry about perhaps some stagnation. And so I thought, OK, well, well, let's make changes by episode 300. And I thought about it and thought, you know, these things are actually pretty good.

In fact, none of them are really a bad thing, so we should make these changes sooner. And so I think we're going to slowly start working towards some stuff with episode 250. So you're going to take a moment and talk about the show, which we don't do very often. And all of this is subject to change as well. Yeah, because things change, right? Preliminary and meta and, you know. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of things changing, maybe it's time for you to change. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to learn more about Linux and all of the critical technology and the stacks of technology around it. You got to call it a stack. That's

what we get to call it a stack. That's what we get to call it a stack now. Out of all of the terms we use, stack is one of them we're going to take. Linux Academy is a full-featured training library with everything you need to know to learn new skills and advance your career in Linux. They have hands-on scenario-based labs that give you experience on real servers. And they have self-paced in-depth video courses, which means when you have time, you can get the work done. They have course schedulers so you can pick a time frame and stick to it with certain learning goals. And they have human beings that can help you when you get stuck.

And they have learning passes, which are a series of courses and contents planned by instructors for specific career tasks. And they have practice exams, which you can take before you actually go take the big test, which probably would have been maybe one of the number one features I was probably, I mean, maybe that, maybe that and maybe the hands-on labs for me would have been the two features when I was trying to get my certs that I could have used a lot more of. I couldn't imagine having Linux Academy back in the day when I was working in IT. Yeah, right. I mean, I use it now just to dabble. And one of the things I love about it is you get like hour estimations of how long learning

something is going to take. And you get course where you can download with you and listen to offline. Like those are things that today I can appreciate. But oh man, when I was playing that race of making sure I can get the certification so that way I can either get improvements on the review or I can get that client, I always got to taking the test and would sort of jam up there. And if I could have taken more practice exams or I could have taken courses that were created specifically to prepare you for the certification exams, that would have been a fundamental enabler for me. Well, and they like, you know, you don't have to bootstrap yourself. So especially if you're new to this can be pretty hard. Like, OK, well, go set up your own test server at home.

Figure out how to do that with Linux Academy. Like, no, just they'll get you right in the environment you need to learn whatever it is that you're actually working on. And then after, like, once you've figured it out, you can just play with it. So you can, you know, keep doing it, do it again, go advanced on it. It's true. It's all right there. And if you get stuck, human beings are there to help. And they're always adding new content and retroactively adding and improving the old content as well.

So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So it is time for us to take bold action, Wes. Bold action is required upon us here for the Unplugged program. Turns out change is a way of life.

We're making it into a show about hot sauce. Well, we are pivoting to a cooking show. No. Although, sometimes we joke. One day we may just launch a cooking show just to get out of our system. It feels like it's inevitable. It's going to happen. The beard and I joke about it

all the time. I consider them upgrades. Let's talk about why the changes them upgrades. So let's talk about why the changes. So right now, Linux Unplugged is Jupyter Broadcasting's largest podcast, which is funny because I don't think of it as that because I'm so used to having Last be the largest podcast. It's true though. So that means it's probably up there in terms of largest Linux podcast. I don't know if it, I can't claim it's the largest. Although I think if you count video downloads, it's got to be up there, but who knows anymore? Last was was so huge that it just seemed

easy to say, yeah, that's obvious. Now with love, it's like I'm slugging it out. And we don't want to stand still, basically. And like I said, I was gonna wait till 300. But I can't hold back. Yeah, that's what it's ways. So what are the changes? Here's what I'm thinking. Now, none of this is set in stone. All of this is subject to change, and it's going to depend on if we can make it happen, obviously. But I think to keep Unplugged competitive and to keep people enjoying the show,

we're going to go to a full video show that's better produced than last ever was. And we're going to do that by making Unplugged an audio-only show. Are you following me? We're going to become a video show that was better produced than Linux Action Show ever was. And we're going to do that by becoming an audio show. An audio-only show that's more edited, it's closer to Linux Action News' polish,

but with a chill vibe of Linux unplugged and still live. While being a full video show. Right. So that's what we're going to do. Is this before or after we've invented that time travel? So what we're going to do is we're going to buy about $1,000 or more in camera equipment if we can get the support.

So we'll have a camera for me, a camera for you, a camera for a guest. Eventually, if the beard ever goes on camera, we'll have a camera for him. And my intention is, what I'm thinking is, we'll release a full unedited video version behind the scenes, sort of like. Like if you're going to watch like the Howard Stern show behind. I don't know. That's probably a bad example. But I'm trying to think of some radio hosts. What are you setting us up for here? Well, you and I will be on camera and we'll make that feed available to the patrons

because we have the whole pipeline to do that. We just have to add a couple of camera pieces of equipment and boom, boom, boom, done. And we've got, we've got the switcher, we've got the production pipeline, we've got the publishing platform, we've got the download CDM, everything we need to do that is in place. But the thing I always hated about the Linux Action Show was we had a camera straight on, and it was two people sitting in front of a table and not facing each other, looking at a camera with studio lights on, and it just creates a phony environment. And the green screen didn't help. And this would be you and I still sitting here across the table looking at each other in the eye doing this show, lights off, relaxed. But people could just be here with us.

And when you're talking, the camera would be on you. When I'm talking, camera on me, et cetera. Are we going to have to put pants on for this? No. Okay. This is for patrons. Oh, right. So then what we'll do with the wider audience, we'll get a better sounding, more polished product.

So we'll do multi-track recording of some capacity. I'm not there yet. Oh, right. weird erroneous loud noise or a click or a clack or too much talking over each other. We'll clean some of that up and publish that as the standard show with well produced audio levels slightly tighter and cleaner production but not dramatically changed which would be

the main show. And then if you want the behind the scenes version we'll have that completely unedited version that we have now. It'll be like you're just right here in the studio with us. And I think, and so don't jump to conclusions about, did feel the show change or anything like that, because I think if all of this is implemented right,

all the things we like about the show will just be better. And it won't be like this radical change to the show. In fact, I could have gotten away without saying anything, potentially. But the wider audience should get a better sounding, more polished product that. In fact, I could have gotten away without saying anything, potentially. But the wider audience should get a better sounding, more polished product that's more competitive, I think, and is easier to listen to.

And the video version will have better production than the Linux Action Show ever had for those that really want it, that still miss LAS. And the hardware investment would be our initial upfront cost, but then after that, we'd be just utilizing

our existing production pipeline we're already plumbed for. So it's a pretty straightforward process for JB to implement, and I think it would make for a good show all around because those that want a really great audio show

will get it, and the people that want a laid-back sort of low-key video show will get that too. A lot of flexibility. And we'll make some changes in how we record the individual microphones

and mumble to make this all happen, but all of it will be for the better. So we're working towards that, towards 250. Now, I think what we're going to do, and we haven't made the official changes yet, but I think what we're going to do is we're going to set a milestone on our Patreon page at patreon.com slash jupiter signal for $4,500. So we have to change some of the milestone stuff right now. $500. So we have to change some of the milestone stuff right now. And we're going to work towards that because we're going to make the initial purchase for the cameras. But then also,

we're going to either hire somebody or I'm going to or some somebody is going to be editing the audio version of the show. So that way, it's a fully fledged, well produced, supported product. And so we're also going to be trying to raise funds to make that happen. And so that's why we're hoping that if people like this idea or just want to help us improve the production quality of the show, they'd consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash jupiter signal. And then once you become one later on, once the video version is published, you would get access to that. Right. Which is really not too far away. It just takes time and cameras.

Yeah. All of which we can figure out, but just going to take some financing. And I know that all sounds like a lot, but if you think about all the pieces we have in place, it's actually all quite doable because the video can be produced on OBS. Yeah, we have that.

And that's running all the time. The audio can be recorded on a separate machine on a multi-track recorder that spits out FLAC files or WAV files or whatever that goes off to Rekai or a dedicated audio editor or myself that then runs the production on that and publishes that as an MP3, an AUG, or WebM

or whatever crazy-ass format people want. And nothing really changes there. And the video version is already done that as an mp3 and og or webm or whatever crazy ass format people want right and that's that nothing really changes there and uh the video version is already done because it's unedited yeah it's just a live obs creates the file and then we we upload that to scale engine we publish to the patrons and we're done and uh we don't walk this weird awkward line anymore it just takes us changing some hardware or actually adding some hardware and adding some staffing. Yeah.

Contract staffing likely. So it seems doable. So we're just we're going to we're going to we're going to try to get to a new milestone on Patreon to get there. And I'm going to say I'm hoping we get there by 250. We'll see. What do you guys think? Am I crazy?

Everybody good to me. No, I like that idea. I mean, sounds good. Video video can be fun Am I crazy? It's good to me. No, I like that idea. Sounds good. Video can be fun. I like the live unplugged aspect. I mean, we're hanging out here. It's a lot of fun. I think it would be fun to kind of share that more. And also, I've been loving LAN. There's certainly times I would like to be able to see it.

And you've been on the other end of the actual production aspect of LAN, which that means there's other things there that we gain that are sort of like inside baseball, but great from a production standpoint. Which would be nice. Yeah. So here's my question, Chris. You're going to be doing a nice audio-focused show. When are you going to upgrade me to an RE20?

I know. Maybe we'll do that when we get to the milestone as well, right? Yeah, that's true. Upgrade that microphone, get you off the old stuff. Yeah. See, people don't know because we don't have cameras in here, but Rikai's on this weird old mic that we used to use that we no longer use, but then when we set up two more additional chairs in the studio, we had to pull out the old stuff.

I miss the sexy bassiness of my voice. Yeah, when you do use it or you sit on a different mic, so it sounds like a different Rikai. Yep. Well, yeah, then we'll work on that too. We'll work on that. All right, so if you have any thoughts, I'd like to hear them. So go to the usual places like jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact,

or you can go to linuxunplugged.reddit.com. Or if you're a patron, I'd really like to hear your thoughts at patreon.com slash jupiter signal. And before we go, I want to give a plug to Mr. Popey's Ubuntu podcast. Go check that out. Always a great listen. See, what am I give a plug to Mr. Popey's Ubuntu podcast. Go check that out. Always a great listen. See, what am I listening to? Hold on. Let me promote my player right now.

I'm listening to Season 10, Episode 31 right now. So I love the show. And you know what? After seeing those guys in New York, I realized I missed hanging out with them when I got back to Washington. That's so sweet. So you want to hear my solution? It's not bulletproof, but it's there. It's getting there.

You ready? Hey, Siri. What are beans? Bean is a common name for large seeds of several genera of the flowering plant family Fabaceae, also known as leguminousy, which are used for human or animal food. I've changed my Siri voice to be, quote unquote, British. And now it's now I think you guys when Siri talks to me, which is weird in a lot of ways when I think about it. Yep. I think about it.

Yeah. So check out the Ubuntu podcast and, of course, Ubuntu on air dot com on Monday. Fifteen hundred UTC for the ISO testing. Seems like a good cause. Seems like a very good cause. All right, gentlemen. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for being here.

I think that's going to bring us to the end of this week's show. Is there anything else we want to cover? I was going to try to fit in the Gen 2 review this week, but I think we've kind of run out of time. So I guess we should probably punt that to next week. And, you know, who saw that coming? I didn't. I don't know. We don't want to distract people who should be thinking about the show, the know, who saw that coming? I didn't. I don't know. We don't want to distract people who should be thinking about the show, the future, getting excited for it.

So that's a perfect note to end. Well, and, you know, the Libram 15 review is really the meat of the show. That was the focus this week. So I hate to talk about Gen 2 when it hasn't been the primary focus. So I guess for this week we're going to punt it. I didn't see it coming. Didn't see it. I apologize.

I'm sure we'll get to it soon, though. I'm sure that's coming up very soon. Maybe 219. In the meantime, thank you very much for being here. If you'd like to join us, go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We have all of our live times there. And then we've got a mumble room you can participate in. A mumble room.

A mumble room. Go to mumble.jupitercalling.com for the setup guide. As long as we're still using that. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. You can also subscribe to get the show weekly. And, of course, we appreciate any content on the subreddit

that I mentioned just a bit ago. Follow the network at JupiterSignal on Twitters, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. All right, and it is officially post-show. Good job, everybody. It was great having you all here. Now let's go pick a title. Let's go see if we can't name this thing. JB Titles, see if the chatroom came up with anything.

If you're in the Discord room, feel free to drop a few in there right now. Windows Unplugged, Foggy Transport Protocol, Punting Gen 2. Who saw that one coming? Punting Gen 2 again. Jeez, jeez, jeez. He came. There you go. I'm back.

I'm back. I'm back. I thought I could make it for the tail end. There you go. I'm back. I'm back. I'm back. So. I can make it for the tail end. That was cool. Well, Chris, I just finished setting up Gnome. Nice. Gnome 2.

Gnome 2. Yes, exactly. Are you crazy? Are you going to load Compass or, I mean, maybe. I'm getting Compass on the center again. Compass Fusion. Oh, yeah. There we go.

Yeah, I'm going to have the fusion icon, baby. Yeah. I got to get the control center icon thingy so you can right click and restart. Exactly, man.