LINUX Unplugged - Episode 219: Ubuntu’s New Era | LUP 219

Episode Date: October 18, 2017

We review Ubuntu 17.10 & discuss some of the major achievements this release represents. Plus we break down an important Linux kernel news story, get updates from the community & more!

So, you know, you got your, this is, we got, we'll do a moment in RV here on the live stream. And Emily's, Emily's considering getting herself a fifth wheel RV. Now the fifth wheel RVs are big. They're like apartments because they don't have an engine and they don't have like the steering area so they can make extra living space out of it. They're, they're a pretty sweet way to go. It's essentially like living in an apartment. So obviously, Emily, I'm going to say, yeah, go for it. I like it a lot. Today was kind of an interesting day from an RV full-timer perspective because I'm about two hours out from the studio. Not even that far, but it's a long ways out from the studio and there's a big storm today. Lots of wind, the

power's out. And it's funny when that happens in an RV, it's not like when the power goes out normally. Because at first it's, did the power just go out? Yeah, I think so. Because nothing really in the RV changes. Because you've got house batteries, and some units even have generators. So pretty quickly, it's just another day. And today in particular, that is really, really handy. Now the flip side is that I got outside, and I smelled something a little funny.

A little stinky, kind of like rotten eggs. I know immediately it was propane. And I start going home, some dumb son of a bitch around here. They got their propane Lincoln out of their, out of their RV. And by they're about to blow up their whole damn house. That was, wait a minute. Is that me? Is that me? Couldn't be me. Could it? I better to go double check. So I, I walk over to my rig. This is my truck's already started. I'm about to leave to come into the studio, but I, you it? I better go double check. So I walk over to my rig. My truck's already started. I'm about to leave to come into the studio. But I'm like, I better double check this.

And I think it's just because it was so windy. It just sort of had been waffling it around because we, sure enough, had a leak. I opened up the bay where our propane tank was, and I heard this little sssssssss. And I was like, oh, no. And so I quickly turned off the propane valve to, you know, just solve the problem immediately. And what must have happened is we have an adapter on there that I think got a little loose when we drove. And we just didn't really catch it because the wind hadn't really been blowing much. And so we, you know, possibly could have been blowing up our home.

So there's always that line. Just a slight danger. Nothing terrible. At the same time, though, it's pretty great to be out somewhere where we are. It's like stereotypical Hollywood fall time road driving. Like if they were going to show a car driving down a fall road with all the beautiful colors, that's where we're at. So it's neat to be able to go there for a few weeks, spend some time there, and then come back and get a little bit closer to work when we're done. So I say go for it, Emily.

I think more and more people are going to be doing it. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 219 for October 17th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's reformatted and reinstalling every spare machine it's got. My name is Chris. My name is Wes, or so I think because I've lost all my documents. Oh no! Well, hello Wes, and over there is Beard. Hello, Beard. So guys, this is an episode you could say I'm a bit pumped up about. Bit pumped up.

This is one of those episodes that reminds me why I got into podcasting. I am very much looking forward to today's episode. We're going to review Ubuntu 17.10 in just a little bit in the show. And we're also going to cover some rather important community news this week. We're going to break it down, as they say. Break it down? We're going're going to break it down, as they say. That's what we say. Break it down? We're going to analyze and break it down. Yeah, we'll get through some of the community news and events that we want to talk about,

including some projects we just recently covered that need some help. And then 1710's here. Now, even if you're not an Ubuntu user, I encourage you to stick around for the review coming up in the show. In fact, you more than, maybe more than anybody else, I challenge you. You're a long time anti- Ubuntuite. Is that a thing? It is now. Anti-Ubuntu-er?

I don't know. But if you're one of them. Anti-Ubuntu? I don't know. It's a hard one. I ask for you to stick around for a bit. And if you're considering the upgrade, debating it, I also encourage you to stick around. Obviously I had a lot of hands-on with 1710 at the Ubuntu

rally. We've been running it here for days. I've been running it for weeks and weeks. And so, this is one of those reviews that we get to do rarely. And I'm really looking forward to doing that. But we've got to get to some of this news. This is big, big news stuff. Big news stuff. So, let's holla at our virtual lug, time-appropriate greetings

mumble room. Hello. Hello. Hello let's holla at our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. That was nice and concise. Wow. That was tight. On top of it. Yeah.

They got in a queue and they took turns. Now, I want to say right here at the top of the show, next week, as an experiment, I think we're going to try doing Discord just so we can do an A-B and let the audience decide what they thought worked better. So if you'd like to help us participate in that test, go to discord.me slash jupitercolony to join our Discord. You can use the web browser discord.app, or you can

download their Electron app. I guess there's a snap of it, and there's probably other ways you can get about it. Anyways, we're going to do a little A-B, and we'll let the audience, and the audience being both the participators and the listeners decide which worked better. So join us for 2.20 in Discord next week, Virtual Log. We're not switching.

We're just testing for one episode. Starting with 2.21, we'll be back in Mumble until we make a decision. So we're not switching. We're just trying for 2.20 in Discord. I'm installing the Snap right now. Are you? That's right. So, yeah, give it a go on that. And I'm going to, you know, and the other thing

I have to consider, too, is, like, guests, because we bring guests in via Mumble and all that stuff. I'll say my bias is to stick with Mumble. Right off the top, that's my bias, because it's worked for us, it's free, it's open source, and it's part of the show. That's my bias. But we're going to give it a good A-B. See how it goes. Okay,

so let's start with a news story that's kind of a big one that is complicated. And it's this new enforcement statement around the Linux kernel. Greg KH, Chris Masson, Rick Van Rael, I want to say, and Sean Kahn all got together and wrote up a big old post about this new signing statement, essentially, that's going to be attached to the Linux kernel. But I wanted to start with a little bit of information that's kind of interesting. Greg has talked about this every single year, that the kernel continues to change faster than it did the year before, which is nuts since it's 26 years old now.

So this year, this year, they're running around 8.5 changes an hour, 10,000 lines of code added, 2,000 modified, 2,500 lines removed every hour of every day. Wow. Those numbers are just insane. Yeah. And so there's been a problem going on in the background. You're familiar with NetFilter. I am. And there's been some shenanigans as a result of the developer of a developer from NetFilter, Patrick McCarty, and it's caused the kernel developers to rethink aspects of the kernel license.

Now, we're not going GPL3 here, but stick with me for a second. BSD? MIT? Apache? What's happening, Chris? So Greg and others write, the same processes that we use to assure fulfillment, quote unquote, of license obligations, you know, to make sure that companies that are violating the GPL come into compliance. Mm-hmm. The same obligations and availability of source code, all of those can be used in unjustly trolling activities to extract personal monetary rewards from GPL software. The kernel team appears to call it monetization, for short. They're trying to monetize their code. In particular, issues have arisen as a developer from the NetFilter community, Patrick McCarty, has sought to enforce his copyright claims in secret and for large sums of money by threatening or engaging in litigation. and for large sums of money by threatening or engaging in litigation.

Some of his compliance claims are issues that could easily be resolved. However, he has also made claims based around ambiguities in the GPL-2 that no one in our community had ever considered part of compliance to begin with. So here's an example. This is really something. Examples of these claims have been distributing over-the-air firmware, requiring a cell phone maker to deliver a paper copy of the source code offered letter, claiming that the source code server must be set up with a download speed as fast as the binary server based on the equivalent access language of Section 3, i.e., he's trying to take Section 3 language of the GPL that talks about equivalent access and apply that to download speeds.

And if you don't, if you're in violation of that, then he's going after you. He's also saying that it mandates that paper copies of the GPL be distributed, that it gets translated to other languages. And if you fail to do any of these things, you're out of compliance.

And because of the way the GPL2 is structured, he demands immediate action. And if you fail to take immediate action, then he gets to claim damages at some insane amount. And for the amount of time that you don't make these corrections, he gets to claim damages. Then he goes after you for those damages. Because of this, and to help clarify what the majority of the Linux community members feel is a correct way to enforce their license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux

Foundation has worked together with lawyers in the community and individual developers and many companies to participate in the development and now rely on the draft of the kernel enforcement statement to help address both the specific issue they're facing today and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again. Now, it adopts some termination provisions that are from the GPL-3 and essentially layers it down on top. It isn't relicensing because what it essentially is, is it's an agreement and it's a statement that says the copyright holders of this kernel code interpret this clause this way. This is our collective understanding of this line of the GPL-2. This is our collective understanding of this line of the GPL-2.

And as a result, we also now assume these additional new things. And these new things are the additional permissions given to companies that have confidence of the copyright holder to reach compliance. So you're essentially allowing people time to reach compliance. And they hope this will reestablish user slash business confidence and help direct enforcement activity back to the original purpose, which is actual compliance, and not screwing people for failing to get the right download speed and then suing them for damages when they haven't corrected immediately by bastardizing language from the GPL2 to use as a hammer. So they're lacquering on top of agreements that the stakeholders of the Linux community, or kernel, have agreed upon.

It's really complicated, but because essentially the top developers hold the bulk of the kernel code copyright, as long as you get this top tier group of developers to agree to this new layer, this enforcement statement, then essentially you have something that is law in a way. Because by making it very clear how the project interprets that legalese, that means you are accepting their interpretation when you now use the project. And so you can't come after them afterwards pretending like you didn't know. That's my rough non-lawyer understanding of this. It's very complicated.

Well, it's the law. It is. If you want to know more or think I got something wrong, please feel free to let me know. And also, linked in the show notes, I have a fact that Greg KH has posted. I have more information about Patrick McCarty and his copyright profiteering that many developers in the Linux community have been worried about. This is something that's been brewing in the background for ages now. And apparently Software Conservancy is all in with this statement. They have a press release that says they applaud the Linux community's promotion of principled copier left enforcement.

And they say the statement includes additional permissions under the Linux license, which is GPL2. So they agree this does not change the kernel from GPL2 to GPL3, and they applaud this new statement. So there you go. Apparently, Greg says at some point

more than like 200 kernel developers discussed the complexities of this problem to come to this kind of decision. Well, it seems like it was a good decision. I can certainly see why the Linux Foundation would be concerned and why people would be concerned about the lack of assurity that businesses would have when trying to use it.

Obviously, that's a big goal to keep businesses invested in Linux. Yeah, now let's talk about the other really kind of big story this week. So that's probably the biggest. And it's hard to really break it all down, and it's, for desktop users, it really has no big impact either way. Not really, no.

But this one has more of an impact on desktop users. You guys probably all know about Crack at this point. K-R-A-C-K. Crack is whack. WPA2 is broken now. And you guys just got done covering this on TechSnap. So that'd probably be a good spot to point people. TechSnap and also AskNoah this week both have really good coverage on this problem.

So it's not really our domain necessarily. The Linux distributions are good at putting out the patches, man. But boy, they sure are talking about Android and Linux a lot in the reviews, even though there's a lot of other systems and OSs that are vulnerable. I noticed that too. A lot of that. And maybe some of that is for good reason about like, well, you know, Windows already has a patch, for instance, but some of our Android phones will not see those patches. But if you're not explicit about it, it's just kind of confusing.

Mm-hmm. Dan's here from elementary. Dan, I'm curious if you have any insights to share from the... Whoa, there. Whoa, that's some timing. Whoops. On the distribution side of pushing the patch out, is that pretty smooth for you guys? Is it something where somebody sits up in the elementary team and says,

okay, let's make sure this one goes out? Or how does that process work for you guys? Actually, for us, it's completely transparent because we're based on Ubuntu. We just get it directly from canonical security team like everybody else. Yeah, I figured that'd probably be the case, Dan, and then they got it out pretty quick. A lot of the distributions did. Linux really kicked butt on this particular one.

People noticed, too, which is really cool. This is a lot of times we're right on top of the patches, but people just take it for granted. But because this one got so much publicity and it affects desktop users, too, people noticed this update coming down. And you saw some real hustle. That was cool.

All right, well, thanks for the insight there, Dan. I got to say, we have been fighting some problems here in the studio for weeks again. We have these frequent now GNOME 3 crashes and what seems to happen is GNOME takes a crash and then when GNOME crashes, it seems to crash our audio server, which then we lose about

25 seconds 30 seconds of audio on our live stream and in our episode recordings no this is not deja vu yes we have talked about this before we actually had it resolved for a while for weeks and weeks and weeks we resolved it with with really no uh no complaints like beard fixed a few things did a couple updates and put a new NVIDIA driver on there. I can't remember. What was it, Beard? It wasn't anything that complicated. It was basics.

I basically just updated the drivers and installed the new NVIDIA driver, and it went away. Yeah. And so we thought, okay, we're good. We can proceed on. Sanity. And we have the LTS kernel. So yes, it's Arch, but we have the LTS kernel. Yeah, right.

So we thought, okay, we're good. We're good. Without changing, we haven't done any updates because it's working and it's only been a few weeks. Without changing anything, and only just a handful of reboots, now all of a sudden, GNOME 3's begun crashing again on us. There's not really anything of any detail

in the log. It's one of those things where I think by the end of next week, I'm going to reload this machine. It's just got to happen. And I've been waiting to see which way am I going to go? Where is it going to break? What am I going to do? Do I go Solus?

Do I go Fedora? Do I go Ubuntu? Do I go Arch again with the LTS kernel and the LTS drivers? So that's going to be part of what we talk about today because it's in the background. It is a brood, as they say. But first, I want to thank Linux Academy before we Because it's in the background. It is a brood! As they say. But first, I want to thank Linux Academy before we go much further in the show. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug.

That's where you go to sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show. It's a platform to learn more about Linux. And they have really nice hands-on scenario-based labs to give you experience on real servers. They have self-paced in-depth video courses

on every Linux and cloud and DevOps topic. And if you get stuck anywhere, they have real humans, instructors, full-time humans that can help you. One of the things that's really nice about Linux Academy is their course scheduler. If you're busy, you got kids, you got a job, you got a lot going on.

Maybe you're like Wes, you live in downtown Seattle, so you're always busy. That's true, right? That's right, yeah. But I still got to learn things. Course scheduler, Wes. You pick a course, you live in downtown Seattle, so you're always busy. That's true, right? That's right, yeah. But I still got to learn things. Course scheduler, Wes. You pick a course, you set a time frame, and it just helps you stick to it. It gives you friendly reminders if you want them about your goals.

I was looking in here just yesterday for getting started on Android development. Six hours and 40 minutes or something like that. And you get started on Android development. It breaks it all down. I like to think I'm pretty good at unstructured learning, figuring stuff out for myself. But I don't know how long that's going to take. Even if you have a good note sheet to use, like Linux Academy makes it so easy to be like, OK, I have two hours right now because my plans fell through.

I'm going to learn something concrete. Yeah. And they have offline stuff you can take with you to learn on the go, including iOS and Android apps and those video courses. Check it out. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. It's a platform to learn more about Linux. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, and a big thank you to Linux Academy

for sponsoring the Unplugged program. I want to do a quick little mention for the Linux Vendor Firmware Project. We talked about FW Update last week. What a fantastic project that is. It's got to version 1.0. It lets you update your firmwares on your Linuxes. Now, here's the problem.

They're looking a little low on funds right now. And you would think that like Dell and HP and these companies would pay them. But no, that's not how these things work, unfortunately. And so there's some hosting costs here. And I really feel like these guys are an undersold asset to the community, and they are asking for humble things. They say, at the moment, the secure part of the Linux vendor firmware project is hosted on a dedicated Scaleway instance. So any additional donations would be spent on paying this small bill and perhaps more importantly, buying some secondhand hardware to include as part of our release QA checks. to include as part of our release QA checks.

Now, if this was a business that delivered, if Linux was a business that delivered firmware updates to its customers, they wouldn't be scrapping together a couple of thousand dollars and buying secondhand hardware. And this is one of the unsung hero aspects of open sources. Often, this stuff is being done on budgets that are inconceivable to multinational companies. And I would be wonderful if this was not a project that was hurting for

time and resources and money. If they could pay for developers, if they could pay for hosting, I really think that would be a good use of people's time and money. If you want to donate, they accept payments via LibraPay or PayPal. They have details on their website, which we have linked in the show notes. Just such a great project, you know, getting your firmware updates out there, like your microcode updates and all the other stuff out there.

Previously, you had to boot into some crazy free DOS or load up your Windows system just in hope that you don't brick everything. And it's still early days, too. So we have more that needs to be done. We have more work that needs to be done still. So help them get there.

Ike's got some work on his hands. I struggle to understand this completely, but it is essentially a compatibility layer for Steam that could work across all distributions using snaps and a new feature of Snap 2.28 called Bases, which allow you to create a soulless bass snap. Whoa, take that in for a second. A soulless bass snap. So he can create an environment based on the soulless bass snap that you could put on an Ubuntu box, and a Fedora box, and an Urge box. You know what I'm saying? I want that right now.

Yeah, it's kind of a neat feature, and I guess technically everything right now is just sort of based on like a core snap. Everything's dependent on a core snap, which is like base Ubuntu system. But it could be Fedora or Solus. Right, it doesn't matter. So Ikea is using this newfangled base technology to create this Linux Steam integration layer that is basically a replacement for the runtime stuff that's done now with Steam, in theory. So we could all get access to all the hard work they've done over in the Solus world of having that top-notch Steam runtime.

The core thing you're, you know, I know we won't talk about this much, but the core thing you're trying to get out of this is you have a lot of good hard work that's gone into libraries and drivers and all this stuff that Ubuntu 12.04 simply does not have because it's from 2012. Think about that. That's a long time. Oh, great year that it was.

Right. Be it in the past. But that is what the Steam runtime is based on. And that's why early on, Ike was trying to solve this problem with the little menu. I forgot what it's called. Damn it. But it's a little menu that comes up and it asks you to choose native libraries

or Steam libraries. Yeah, yeah. It's like the Steam integration chooser or whatever. And that's the first attempt at this. This is like the final attempt at solving this problem and it solves it for all distributions too. They talk about it more in the most recent late night Linux if you want to hear Ike talk about it

because he could explain it better than I could. But I would love to see it as somebody who jumps distros. That's really why I find this to be interesting is it would allow me to distro hop but still have the same consistent Steam experience. Right. And this is how they're going to do it. They're going to have to target these bases like this.

But it's really also nice to see that Snap functionality really coming along because Snap has come a long way as a format and as just like the tooling is available that now that seems totally reasonable. And maybe in the future it'll be, you know, once we have Snap on more distributions or at least more like in the defaults, telling people how to start gaming on Linux should be really easy and we can be confident that it'll just work. So Dan, I've seen a recent Insight post over at Canonical about Elementary working with Snap packages, but I've also seen the Elementary Twitter account say you guys are also excited about Flatpak. So what's going on over at Elementary with Snaps and Flatpaks and future integration of Snaps? Where's all that at, at least right now? your integration of snaps?

Where's all that at, at least right now? I mean, I think overall the consensus is that it's early days on kind of both of these projects. And there's a lot of people doing really interesting things to kind of push it forward and get ready to start shipping it. I know that Martin's working on distributing snaps in Ubuntu Mate. But for us, when we're looking to adopt a new technology or change kind of the way that we do things, like we subscribe to this idea

of having a one true development path. And so we want to make sure that if we pick a technology and say, hey, we like this and we're going to go with this, that we've tested it really thoroughly and that it works for like everything across the board and that it's something that we can tell our third party developer community that it works right now for them to use so we're still trying to like explore and um we're totally happy to like attend events and work with the upstream feel like there's some political waters though you have to navigate a bit like you don't want to upset different camps basically yeah i mean there's some politics to it but there's also

some like brand management to it as as well like um you know i had uh third-party developers uh messaging me after the canonical blog post asking like hey you know do i need to start getting my apps ready for snaps you know so they're expecting more communication from from us on that and you know it's kind of be like hey you know no not yet we're still looking into it yeah yeah it's of course you know like we it's like a big topic right now but it feels like it's got another nine months at least before like it really like we're giving it the it's good that we're talking about it, but I think it gets probably more discussion than it totally warrants. But it's one of those things, this is what's here, it's happening now, so I guess that's what we're talking about.

Right. And this thing that IKI's doing, this Linux Steam integration project, this looks like it could solve real problems for distributions, Dan. this looks like it could solve real problems for distributions, Dan. I mean, I know it's using a Solus base, but if this really worked and it became sort of a ubiquitous way to get Steam working across distributions, would it be something you guys would take a look at? I mean, I definitely think that for certain third-party packages that being able to do these kind of things are super important.

Like you said, Steam targets, you know, 1204, right? And they're never going to build a version of Steam for elementary OS. So there's always going to have to be like a side loading story. And it seems like container formats like snap are the best side loading story that that we could have going forward. Yeah. And it, it also solves that, that, well, there's no applications available problem. Well, that's not really true. You know, once you start getting a couple of these things in container formats and you start making targets like this Linux Steam integration target, it starts changing because then you start targeting these, you can start targeting these base snaps instead of targeting

distributions. Right. And that could have big ramifications on the availability of applications. And look at Ike here. You know, he's not holding, I give him credit here. He's not holding this in just for Solus. Yeah, right. I mean, that's kind of a big selling point for Solus, but now you can get it anywhere.

So anyways, we'll follow it with some interest. I'll probably kick the tires. Do you have thoughts, Beard? I just find it interesting that everybody's talking about snaps and flat packs and app images just like being pushed off to the side. find it interesting that uh everybody's talking about uh snaps and flat packs and app image is just like being pushed off to the side i mean you know what the thing about app images is that it only kind of solves cross-platform but it like what's really important is all the security and privacy features that come with like containerized formats yeah yeah the sandboxing is kind of a nice

feature yeah definitely uh and it's it's like when i when i first thought, the sandboxing is kind of a nice feature. Yeah, definitely. And it's like, when I first thought of application sandboxing, I thought about how Apple did it on the Mac, and it's not like that. It's much better,

and it makes sense. It keeps, especially if in business environments where you can have business applications that can take decades between updates, I just really like it.

It's going to make deploying applications that would sometimes be harder to deploy on newer versions of Linux possible in business environments. I've run into that myself personally, where you had to load a really old version of Linux to get an application

to work. I think that's going to start changing finally. So I guess it is relevant to be talking about it. Especially with all the security-minded support and other ways to secure snaps. I can already think of multiple ways where like, okay, well, I really need to run this Ubuntu 10 software. I don't trust it. It's really old.

I can't change it. But a snap is just like that would – and then I can secure the 16 workstation or 17 with my standard tooling. Yeah. Yeah, we're using them too. We have a snap for the soundboard. There's a snap for Discord. Yeah. It's happening. It too. You know, we have a snap for the soundboard. There's a snap for Discord. Yeah. It's happening.

It's happening. Oh my gosh. You know, I think what it is, is I'm just really pumped to talk about Ubuntu 17.10. So I'm like, let's get through all the news. Let's get through the news so we can talk about 17.10. Because that's what I'm here to do today. That's right. Yeah. You're so giddy over there. It's literally why I came into work today. I was like, I get to talk about 17.10. First thing out of your mouth, bum too. Yeah. So let's clear the way.

Let's see, what else do we have? We have a couple other things, but I'm going to bump them. What? What? We're going to bump them. I can't hold my breath much longer. DigitalOcean.com. Go over there, create an account, and then apply our promo code D-O-Unplugged. It's one word, D-O-1-plugged.

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Tell me about spaces. Oh, Beardsley, the spaces. I wasn't sure what it was going to be like. I've been impressed with a lot of the features that Digital Ocean has rolled out over the years. But you were a little skeptical. I just didn't think it was going to be funny. You were like, what am I going to do with these objects? I didn't think it was going to be for me. I really didn't. I thought, okay, great for you developers.

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and then it will download wherever they're at as fast as their freaking connection can take it. It is so great. I was pulling down files at 10 megabytes a second, and I'm like, all right, I know that's the max. This connection I'm on is going to be able to pull that down. They're ideal for storing static or unstructured data like audio and video. So if you're working on podcasts and you want to send the files around to your co-host, it's perfect for that.

Images, also text, all that, it's really well done. And, of course, it's all programmable, like magical. What's the term for that? It's Dev-o-matical, you know, with that API. It's Dev-o-matical. You don't even have to go use the dashboard. I think it's just good. Oh, but I want to make a new word.

DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Then you can spin up, like, their $5 a month rig, run it two months for free, and just try it out. If you want to try out Linux on a server, free BSD, or play around with spaces. DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code DEOunplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. How's it going over there, Wes? Pretty good.

So before we started the show, Wes had to recover his bootloader. Yeah. It's actually, I haven't bothered to fix it yet. I just K-exec'd from my other installation because that's just the easiest way for me to do things now. I don't know what the state of my life is like. I love it. So you nuked your bootloader trying out ubuntu 17 i did and um are you in 1710 yeah of course it's 1710 episode day chris come on i know and you use gnome right you're using no i sure am yeah actually it uh it crashed on me while you were doing that ad read so that's the theme of the day oh no oh no no no no oh no

oh no i know i appreciate your support the hug here it's great oh i just well i mean i actually feel bad for me but uh so let's uh so let's talk about ubuntu 1710 because this is a pretty remarkable release even if you're not an ubuntu user and as you're listening to this it's within hours of download if well if you're listening to this when this episode's released, it's within hours of release and download, Ubuntu 17.10. The ISOs are final. They're done. They're baked. And it's a notable release for the obvious reason, which is this is Canonical's first release back on GNOME.

canonical's first release back on gnome but i think it's also a notable release for another major reason that we aren't talking about as much and that's the meta story around this release and that is the fact that this is the first release after a significantly dramatic restructuring at canonical that saw the layoff of hundreds of employees and saw a complete refocusing of the company. And during the midst of all of that, this was being created. Software kept going. And I think that's a particularly remarkable achievement because I have seen that type of restructuring and thinning of the herd completely derail a company for years, even into oblivion. So some companies never even make it through that.

So it's kind of remarkable that they also are shipping on time with a product that, well, we have, we're very excited to talk about. So that's the meta story, I think, around this release. And then the other big meta story about this release was when Mark announced all of these changes and the grandfathering of, or the sun setting, I guess, of Unity 7, the screenshots that got passed around and the general sentiment that got passed around

was it was going to be a basic bitch gnome implementation. It was going to be stock gnome and there was no Ubuntu soul. There was no heart. They were getting out of that game. They weren't making a desktop anymore. I'm sure you'll have one, but... Everybody knows the screenshot I'm thinking of

with the green gnome background and the Adwadia gray theme. Yep. Default. That was the image that went around on the stories everywhere. And the character of Ubuntu was gone. And, of course, the alternative would have been

or they really muck this thing up and they make it like some crazy gnome fork to make it like Unity 7. So we don't want that either. So it seemed like there was two routes in front of us and neither one of them were any good. And people assumed that Ubuntu was out of the desktop game. Now here we are six months later,

and this thing definitely has the soul of Ubuntu. If you just look at the screenshots, you'd know this is an Ubuntu system. And I've heard multiple different users now who sat down for the first time, both of them that I'm thinking of actually, were Plasma users and Beardly over here. So when they said like, oh, this is Unity. This is Unity. It feels like it from the, yeah. It's pretty remarkable that they got here and they did it in a way that didn't piss off Upstream, that listened to the feedback of the community,

and has resulted in a project that is significantly different than any release we've seen from Ubuntu in ages. Significantly. We've never seen an Ubuntu release like this in modern Ubuntu releases. It's a new era, is what it feels like. It is definitely a new era. And it's also right before their next major LTS.

Yeah. So it is the release to work this stuff out because the next LTS has got to be pretty rock solid. So it's a hell of a release to review. And sure enough, if it's not the kind of thing that legitimately gets me up in the morning and makes me want to podcast, because even if you're not an Ubuntu user,

there's a lot here to take in and to appreciate. And so I wanted to start with you guys to just start talking about our impressions of Ubuntu 17.10. I'm coming at it from somebody who's been watching the development very closely from day one. And so in such, I have lost a little bit of the, wow, look at this in its totality, because I've sort of been there as each step has come along. Well, you've also literally traveled across the country to witness some of that development. Yeah, there's that too.

So I'll tell you, I guess what I would start with, just to sort of kick it off, is the doc that they have decided to implement in this is where we need to start. Because this was the necessary piece. If you remove this from this gnome setup this doesn't really feel much like an ubuntu setup if you take especially if you change the background and they did it in a very sort of a polite upstream way that seems to be working well

and having gone to the ubuntu rally i watched firsthand why it's sort of important that they own this piece of the desktop for themselves. And in the last post, Ubuntu Gnome Shell and Artful, day 15, Didrock talks a little bit about the quick fix that they had in the rally around their dock. This simple sort of mild fork, I think, is going to be an area they can continue to work on and really kind of just be a small thing they add to their desktop that makes it stand out without having to really own this huge, complex code base. And I think it's such a critical thing that they actually do own this piece themselves. And they have. They've done that part right. The other thing I like as a GNOME desktop user is I like that I'm finally able to install a version of Ubuntu and I get

the most recent version of GNOME. GNOME 3.26.1 is shipping in 17.10. And this is not a luxury that Ubuntu users have had very often. Generally, you got to go to your Fedora's or your Arch's, your Seuss's for that. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Or you were installing, like, something yourself from maybe some other PPA or weird repo, but it wasn't just there for you.

Yeah, yeah. And these things, for me, are, like, really ticking boxes for me. I like that. I like their nice minimal dock implementation. It's really unobtrusive. It's not in the way. So what are your thoughts? I've talked a lot now, Wes.

I've got more to say, but I want to give you a chance to jump in. What are your thoughts? I'm enjoying it a lot, honestly. More than you expected? Yeah, kind of. I mean, okay, so way back when Unity was first introduced, I guess you could say I was one of the fleeing masses that was like, eh, I don't know about this. I'm going to'm gonna go it wasn't out of any like hatred or whatever i'm i use unity

at work i have no problems with it it turned out to be a pretty good you know window manager display whatever desktop there we go that's the one um but still it's so it's been a long time since i felt you know that that the ubuntu desktop was the desktop for me, that, like, I was going to put it on systems and use it and that it would be a workable day-to-day system. Like, work has different constraints, right? But, like, on my personal machines, this feels like, I'm not saying that I'm going to, but this feels very close to, like, I could be excited about it. The combination of, like, really good SnapSupport, a modern kernel, modern modern gnome a lot of this like features and things systemd has really all that all those changes have really shaken out in ubuntu and sure there's like differences um we were talking before the show about like you know i'm used to

arch where everything's under user bin and that's not quite so on in ubuntu so there are differences but it's gotten so small that it's just super it's just a super usable setup for me. I will be curious. At work, I have three monitors connected all by DisplayPort, and Unity handles it pretty darn well. Not perfect, not perfect, but I'll be really curious to see. Unity did pretty well with multi-monitor setup, so how does GNOME cope with that?

I'm not sure. Speaking of using it in the work environment, one of the things I use a lot when i'm working on my laptop during the day is uh bluetooth because i have a i have a bose sound link or whatever it's called and oh yeah pretty good sound and i i before ubuntu 1710 before ubuntu 1710 every day every morning i would have to delete the pairing and repair with my bose what for audio to work. It would show up, it would connect, but pulse would never send sound to my Bluetooth audio device. But if I delete and repair, which is a fairly painless process, then I could.

So I just made that part of my morning routine when I was getting down to work. But now with 1710, I have not had to do that. Wow. So I know that they claim a thousand upstream fixes to Bluetooth or Bluezy. If one of those thousands fix my problem, I'm very grateful for it. I will have to do some testing with that because that's a nice thing to have. More and more things are Bluetooth. I've also had some anecdotal notes about better mouse pairing and things like that, like accessory pairings.

I've only been testing speakers myself, because I have another speaker. I have the same problem. It's called the 808 Thump. Same exact problem I was having with the Bose. So I know it wasn't unique to the Bose because I had the same issue with another Bluetooth speaker. Both of those work.

Very, very, very happy about that because it's just so nice that I just turn it on and now that becomes my default sound device. And that's the way it feels like it's supposed to work. Along that same line, while I talking about my my work laptop i have a very sort of mixed results with battery life and one of the things that they've done in this release of 1710 is they've spent time on actually getting gpu accelerated video playback to actually be gpu accelerated what there's a lot of stuff that claim to be GPU accelerated playback on Linux.

Chrome. And, um, totem, totem. I have some, I have a totem in my, sorry.

Uh, and other, there's some, anyways, there's some others that claim to maybe be hardware accelerated, but weren't actually hardware accelerated. And so we're sucking a lot of extra CPU, which was using up a lot of extra battery.

And so I'm hoping to start seeing battery life results. I don't really have a good base because the main machine I've been trying, I went to on is the first OS I've ever ran on that machine. It's the Librem. But I'm hoping when I try it on my other systems to see an improvement there. Just going to work. Yeah. That stuff I'm looking forward to.

What about you, Beard? What's been sort of your takeaways with 1710 so far? It just feels like Unity to me. Yeah? That's pretty much it. It's just, it hasn't really changed at all in terms of, you know, how I'd use it. So, good? Is that good or bad?

Good. I didn't mind Unity. Yeah? Yeah. Now, I'll tell you, to me, it's the small stuff that's going to make this really stand out, that I think is going to make this stand out above and beyond the other Ubuntu flavors. As much respect, and we're going to talk about the flavors in a moment, as I have for the other flavors. There's some stuff in my opinion, in Ubuntu knownome proper or i guess now it's just ubuntu proper

that um are the kind of refinements that i deeply deeply appreciate and didrox points out a couple of them here they said with our trans he says with our transition to gnome shell we're following more closely to gnome upstreams philosophies and we've dropped our header bar patches and they did some of these patches to optimize vertical space in the past. But the downside was is it created a different class of issues. Action buttons are generally now on the top, and they're pretty much not noticeable with the ambience and radiance themes that Ubuntu ships with. Now, I'm stopping here for a moment because this is the type of problem that I see in just about every damn distribution out there with their default themes, with maybe the exception of like elementary OS. It's this attention to detail where it doesn't really, you know, people don't really care that the buttons don't stand out.

And if you're watching the video version, I have a screenshot up where the save and cancel buttons are there, but your eyes aren't really drawn to them. If like where Wes is at, can you even tell where they're at from across the room? It's a little hard. Oh, that's, that's the problem I ran into earlier where I couldn't find the unlock. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

That's exactly that exact one. Uh, so they are introducing some, some fixes. They've introduced some styling for the suggested action and the story behind where they got the green from is actually kind of worth going to read his blog for. Um,

and they're, they're, they apply these subtleties. So here is, they've applied a subtle change to the disabled button, so it's obviously disabled, and a bold change to the suggested default action button. It draws your eyes immediately to that button. It makes it clear and easy to see. It's something that if I put this in front of a non-computer user, they'd still understand where to click. And this is done a hundred times over and over again throughout this theme. Another example is they've just made small changes to the way the header bar looks when you maximize it. So that way the gradients don't

conflict with the shell gradient. Thank you. I mean, it's minor stuff, but it flows better and it eases my brain. It simmers my brain the F down and I stop thinking about my desktop environment and I think more about the work I'm doing. I was having a conversation with Wes over lunch and I said, Wes, one of my problems I have with both Plasma and Mate is I end up thinking a lot about the desktop environment.

I think about the fact that this icon is slightly smaller than the icon next to it and I think about the fact that maybe the click targets are a little too small for close and maximize and minimize. I think about the fact that the font's wrapping in the menu, which makes the whole menu offset and all weird. And none of it really matters except for it steals about 10 to 20 percent of my brain. Just the micro distractions that you're just going to keep seeing. Constant micro abrasions. And these have been polished away in this theme that they have for Gnome Shell at a level that feels really professional.

And that's something I'm really excited to sit down and just use such a solid implementation of Gnome. And the best part is if you want to bail on any of this, you can install, I think it's just Gnome Session. You install Gnome Session and you just log out and log into Gnome can install, I think it's just Gnome Session. You install Gnome Session and you just log out and log into Gnome Session and it's just a stock Gnome install with no canonical tweaks at all. Okay, that's super simple. And then theme it, do whatever you want. Exactly. Just start from there and

load up Gnome Tweak. That's easy. Yeah, I think it's a good way to go. And then, last but not least, long-term, one of the features I'm also looking forward to, and this is what I think is going to, this is what's going to change my mind about where we use it. They're integrating LivePatch now into the GUI. So you can use for free the LivePatch

service at the GUI level. And I think that's going to spur a lot of adoption and it makes me want to use it here on our studio equipment. just for the gooey level you can i'm kind of i'm kind of liking the live patch service i've been sitting back and watching it and for a production system that i don't reboot often but i want to stay secure because it's connected broadcasting to the internet all the time yeah it's great it's great for that and uh we've been having we've been having we had a crash today in the middle of the show we've actually had to cut the show and restart the show because GNOME crashed on us today. And I'm hoping that the 1710 implementation, and I'm hoping that 3.26.1 will be more reliable. And I'm hoping that with a reliable, well-manicured GNOME shell that's been really well thought out and really well implemented by Canonical

plus live patch so I can keep it secure and I am hoping that that will make a decent production environment that will be easily updatable to 18.04 and then I can just stay at 18.04 for a couple of years while I let this stuff work itself out. That's kind of my plan right now. You can actually have like, this is an LTS

that works on the desktop, I can install it once and for the next couple of years, just small changes. I don't have to reinstall. I might not even reboot. Yeah. That would be amazing. So, Beard, when you get back from TwitchCon, that week when you get back, I think you and I, because I'm going to wait, because I don't want to break it before you go. We should reload both these systems with Ubuntu 17.10.

And just we'll report back in the show how that's gone. to 1710 and just we'll report back in the show how that's gone and we'll just give you guys an update on on how putting a production went what we ran into what it was like to get obs working and how the performances compared to arch and all that stuff i'm i'm sold in a big way on on some of the work they've done and i really am curious to see where this goes for 1804 because if they just keep what they've got and don't screw it up, 1804 is going to be great. Because this is really great. And I was looking at, don't you think? Yeah, I definitely think so. Don't you think this is, yeah, you and I were talking at lunch, like this is one of the releases that's really actually got us both genuinely interested in years, and actually maybe using Ubuntu on the desktop again. and I was looking at some results that Joey got over at OMG Ubuntu.

Almost 11,000 votes on this poll, which is pretty good. And still 24% of people said they're not going to upgrade. Huh. No plans to upgrade. Now 61% say they do have plans. And these are OMG Ubuntu users,

so these are like hardcore Ubuntu. Yeah, these are Ubuntu people. Yeah, and only, I was surprised, 24%. Because it's a good release. I guess maybe if you're worried about Unity. That's why we're going to talk about the flavors here in a moment. But anybody in the MoMA room want to jump in with their thoughts so far on the 17.10 release or upgrading to 17.10? Or anybody been trying it?

I'd love to get, if anybody's been trying to get your thoughts too. I have been trying it get your thoughts, too. I have been trying it, and it seems rock solid. I even installed pretty much all of the desktop environments at once, and it's still no problems. No problems whatsoever. Look at you. Yeah, I know. I just decided, well, hey, let's go all out. Let's just go ahead and try it.

And yeah, it works perfectly fine. Nothing's crashing on me. I haven't. I actually have, you know, every now and then you get that crash bug popping up to report a bug. I haven't had that happen once the entire time I've been using it. Nice. Yeah, it has felt really solid to me, too. I have been really even impressed with the betas being solid early on.

I sort of waited a little bit and then then I jumped in, and I really had. I was pretty impressed. Okay. So I also tried out Mate. I've been trying out Ubuntu Budgie Edition. And in the past, although not recently, I had tried out KDE Neon. So I got some flavor discussion in me, too, if you will indulge me. Oh, please.

I'm sorry I don't have any yeah i i know i'm sorry i don't have any kabuntu stuff i'm sorry i have not tried out kabuntu stuff that's on you audience you guys go go try that out come back next week we'll talk about it i can talk about that have you okay yeah kabuntu been been anything noteworthy uh nothing extremely noteworthy they are kind of a release of plasma behind they're on 5.10 as opposed to 5.11, which just came out. However, 5.11 will be in the Backports repository, the PPA that they have.

So you can just go down and get that. But other than that, man, rock solid. Like I said, I've been saying about everything else. Good. This is going to be a bunch of new people coming to GNOME, I bet. I bet a lot of new people. And then there's going to be a bunch of new people coming to GNOME. I bet. I bet a lot of new people. And then there's going to be some people that are mutinying.

We'll talk about that in a moment. But first let's talk about Linux.ting.com. Go to Linux.ting.com to support the show and get $25 in Ting credit or $25 in purchasing power. How about that? Off a device. You can buy devices from Ting directly. If you bring one, they'll give you a service credit.

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linux.ting.com. It's pay for what you use wireless. Your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. Whatever you use, that's all you gotta pay.

We don't have to pay for what you use? Nope. You don't gotta pay. You don't. And you don't have to pay for what you might use,. You don't got to pay. You don't, you know, and you don't have to pay for what you might use, which is how they actually get you, which is really incredible.

Imagine if you had to pay for things like in all the things, like how much gas you might use. That's crazy. That's crazy. You're doing a lot of things. So like, yeah, oh,

for sure. Like TV, like health coverage. Yep. Yep. Yep. Insurance. Yeah.

There's, I know. And we hate all those things. I do. I really do. Yeah, Ting is doing the way the mobile is. Like, if they had to, like, everybody had to start over, like, right now. Like, everybody had to hit the reset button, and everybody had to compete fairly.

This is how the entire industry would work. Where's our Ting insurance? Well, I think, you know what? They should come up with some sort of plan like that. Like, Ting plan. Pay for what you use, healthcare? Oh, my gosh. So we need more people to go sign up for Ting, try them out.

Yeah. We'll get critical mass. Yeah. They'll be forced to insure us. It'll be perfect. It would take Canadians to save us. They are already expanding into internet. There you go.

There you go. Anyways, get them now while they're in phones. Linux.ting.com. Go there, try them out. No contracts, no determination fees. They got a great blog, too. Lots of good stuff on the blog recently. Lots of good stuff.

Chris, I want that Ting fiber so bad. Mm, man. That would be a life changer. Life changer. We'd be launching the Jupyter Broadcasting data centers. I tell you what. Oh, man. JBDC.

Yeah, cooled in oil. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the JB. Real pain to service. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Makes a real good fryer.

Coconut oil cooled servers that's right fiber connected anyways get started by going to linux.ting.com and a big thanks to ting for sponsoring the unplugged linux.ting.com linux.ting.com put that in your history bar and support the show remember how history bars used to be a big thing oh man all, so let's start with the Internet's favorite. That would be Ubuntu Mate. Mate. 17.10. And this is, I would say, is the release for Unity refugees. People that aren't ready to go to GNOME.

They like the HUD. They like Compiz. They miss what Ubuntu used to be a bit. Man, did Wimpy and team nail it. So the thing is, most of us know, but if you don't, that they have going for them is they have this Mate tweak tool. And you go in there and you choose the Mutiny layout and, you know, snap your fingers. And next thing you know, you've got essentially the Unity desktop. People really like that.

Like all the people I put Mate in, I showed them all the options. Almost universally people have picked Mutiny. Yep. Yep. Same. Same. Same. But you see what you can see right there. You see how that button is smaller than the Firefox button? Oh yeah. Huh. Oh man. And you see how this is a circle but then that is two shirts that aren't a circle and then that's a square

and then that one has like this extra thing that goes above the square and then these are different shaped squares. Yeah. Not gonna have that you know what you're saying is uh can't do that wouldn't be should have gotten a chris last consult i don't know maybe he will uh so i also want to give a tip of the hat to brisk my favorite part of using mate was the brisk menu really good i know it's it seems like a small thing but having a super fast launcher that gets my searches every time i type them and then i hit enter and it launches the app i expected every damn time that makes me happy i like that a lot that really so the the mate layout oh and then and then you guys know i just professed recently again my love for comp is and the way it makes my windows look. All this you get with Ubuntu Mate. Right now,

I feel like Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Mate are the number one landing spots for Unity refugees. Ubuntu Budgie gives you sort of the advantages of the nice clean Budgie desktop that's also GTK,

but you get that Ubuntu base. So I think those are two very competitive alternative flavors for the 17.10 release. And then you're going to have your folks that are willing to go to XFCE or willing to go to Plasma if they're going to take an extra leap. But I think I would predict Ubuntu Bungie and Ubuntu Mate, this release cycle, will pick up the most converts from core Ubuntu. But I think core Ubuntu is going to benefit from a lot of new people coming in to check out what they're doing on GNOME. I'm coming back.

I'm coming back to Ubuntu. I have been distro hopping for six, seven months now, and it's been awful. I've just hated it. I just don't like it anymore. Constantly installing things. No solid foundation. Okay, is this the system that has all of my stuff synced, or is that the other system?

Does this one have Dropbox installed? Does that one? Does this one have LastPass? You know, all this crap software that I have to drag around with me now that is just awful to set up constantly over and over again. It'd be nice to be past that. Yeah. I wanted it to be mod tech.

I really did. You can install it if you ever need to. I really wanted it to be because I've been having gnome issues recently, as we just talked about. So I was ready to just be like, screw you guys. Ditch the whole thing. Middle fingers up in the air. I'm out of here.

Peace out. Thanks for all the fish. So long. But then after going through the whole round of them, the one that compels me the most and actually fires me up to use is this new Ubuntu proper. It's just such a solid release. It's such a good implementation of it. Even if I don't stick with it, I've got to use it for a little while because I've just got to kick the tires on this.

This kind of thing, it doesn't happen a lot in Linux anymore. No, not really. We've had very slow and steady progress releases for years now. Not that that's a bad thing. No, it really. We've had very slow and steady progress releases for years now. Not that that's a bad thing. No, it isn't. I just, in fact, have figured, okay, it's good. It's actually time for that. We're just slowly going to iterate and fix things.

We could use a little more of that sometimes. So I didn't think of it badly, but I think we've forgotten sort of what this feels like, again, to have a company come along and make something where they ask us what we want and then they actually listened when we said what we wanted and then when they went and made their own changes to it they went and they talked to the developers upstream it's just weird right that's crazy it doesn't happen very often unheard of so i i really enjoyed using it are you going to stick with it on any of your machines and what would it take to get you to switch away from Arch now? Because you've got pretty good

software availability. I sure do, yeah. I mean, yeah, I very well might. I'm doing more and more things with Ubuntu on other systems, especially like cloud servers, etc. I've got to say, it is real nice to have just the one operating system going. And it's gotten a lot easier, too.

One, software availability is better. And it's pretty easy to run these days with all the tooling ubuntu has like to run an arch user land or an arch container for other things that i might need um or an arch vm so there's a good possibility it'll be on some of my systems at least for a while for me if it's my work system the number one feature that they're really competing with when it comes to arch it's's not the AUR, which I think is what everybody assumes it is. It's the fact that if I play my cards right, I never have to reload that system. That install of Arch will last as long as that physical hardware lasts.

And that is so nice because when you move into a distro like that, when you can get like a five or six year install going and it works good and it's still good performance. Especially on a machine where you don't like, you know what you do with it. You just, you get in, you update it. Yeah. Mostly doesn't break. get like a five or six year install going and it works good and it's still good performance especially on a machine where you don't like you know what you do with it you just you get in you update it yeah mostly doesn't break yeah that's why i think if i was really gonna use ubuntu i might actually ironically be an lts guy yeah and i don't really because i haven't run ubuntu on as my daily driver for so long i don't really know what the upgrade success rate is like. If I have a semi-customized system with a few snaps, maybe a couple of PPAs, and a few theme modifications or whatever, and then I upgrade that to an 1804, what breaks? Yeah, something tells me you're going to find that out.

And it'll be the first time that you're doing it with GNOME 3 on Ubuntu. Yep. So there's no guarantees. So I can't sit here and say, I'm going to have a smooth upgrade to 18.04. I can hope for one. I can expect for one, but I can't say it's going to happen. But I'm going to roll that dice,

and I'm going to load my current systems with 17.10, assuming that I can get to 18.04 one way or another. Right. And if this is any sign 18.04 will be that thing that you've wanted, where you're like, okay, well, I'm just going to sit here for a while. Yeah. See you in four years. Bluetooth fixes alone, GPU video accelerated fixes, and GNOME 3, 2, 6, 1 almost make it worth kicking the tires right there.

Then if you would like to get into like their live patch stuff and if you want to play with snap packages and this is a really competitive distribution but even if you're not into that stuff there's a few things i'm gonna so this is the first review we're going to talk about this next week i'm going to i don't know if this will work out i meant to try to lock this down before the show i'm going to invite will cook and some of his team to come on the show next week awesome post release to talk about it that's great hopefully it'll work out we talked about it at a buntu, but I'm sure this is a busy time for him. And I did mean to try to confirm with him

before the show, but we've been so giddy about the Ubuntu review. We've just been playing. We really were. I forgot to. So that's my fault. But I want to follow up

next week, talk about putting in production a little bit. I want to talk about using the live patch service a little bit next week. Some of those things, do some follow-up stuff.

I bet by then, two more people will have pulled it down after the actual release and tried it out. So if you'd like to join us in the Discord, because we're trying out Discord next week, you can do that. Come into Discord and let us know your take on it. I'm hoping Will and team will be in there with us. Discord Ubuntu 17.10 release party next Tuesday.

I'm sure it's a little late, but better late than never. Mm-hmm. I can't believe I'm going to be installing Ubuntu. That's awesome. I have one Ubuntu machine here in the studio running Mumble right now, and that's it. I've been meaning to reinstall. It was going to be Arch on one of my main work

non-portable machine at home. I think tonight it's going to be paved with Ubuntu. Oh! Mumble Room, I'll give you guys last words on 17.10 or on any of the flavors if anybody else has any thoughts but otherwise I'll leave it there What about you, Beard?

Any other closing thoughts on this release? I'm a bit trepidatious over the fact that you're going to be loading these machines with Ubuntu considering Wes has already had a gnome crash Yeah, that is the thing, isn't it? Although it can't crash more probably, but maybe it could I'm thinking these will be the last machines so we'll do these next week Yeah, that is the thing, isn't it? Although it can't crash more, probably, but maybe it could.

I'm thinking these will be the last machines, so we'll do these next week. And then before then, I'll do Air Master, and I will reload. Oh, you're reloading everything. Yeah, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm going all in. I thought you'd keep, like, one machine anchored somewhere. Yeah, but I'm so hodgepodge right now. I've got Solus and I've got Arch and I've got Ubuntu. I've got all

the mixes. And I've even got a pop machine in the mix. It's hard to keep that all in your head sometimes. I mean, it's fine when you're on one system, but when you rapidly switch, you really kind of start feeling the cost. And I just kind of want to settle down. Just want to get settled. So I'm motivated to start wiping. Motivated

to format, Wes. It's just so much fun, too. I'll be here to comfort you when you come to cry on my shoulder. And I actually like the Ubuntu installer. Like, I'm just not an Anaconda fan. So this one, and I don't use, I mean, most of my installs are Arch, right? So, like, I don't usually use a GUI installer. But Ubuntu one, like, it's really not too bad. I know it.

It's easy. So it's just quick to get through. Yeah, it really's it's non-offensive it's not like the most powerful right uh and uh but i usually just do all my partitioning beforehand and then i just bid basic stuff too yeah i didn't really i you did have a bootloader problem i did and what was that about well i'm not 100 sure i might actually try it again and see if that same issue crops up. But I have multiple machines on here, and it's UEFI. Yeah, so is mine, though. My systems are all UEFI now, I think.

Yeah. For some reason, it did not. It might have been a discrepancy between where Arch mounted versus where Ubuntu mounts. So you created Slash Boot, and you created it using Extended Fork, XFS, Butterfest. I reused my existing slash boot which was already in UEFI and FAT and setup which had my existing bootloader on it.

I'm tracking now. That could have been what it was. In the past it's worked fine. So to Anaconda's credit, Fedora installs just fine and just replaces my Arch bootloader with the EFI executable that gets picked is that one instead. I assume this will work too so I'll give it another shot because normally it works pretty well is my Arch bootloader with the EFI executable that gets picked, is that one instead? I assume this will work too, so I'll give it another shot because normally it works pretty well, but this time it didn't.

So that'll be something I'll fix after the show. Yeah, I had one system where I almost accidentally installed my bootloader on the thumb drive because, you know, with NVMe drives, I'm so used to watching for Dev SDA as my first drive. Oh, yeah, right. But in this case, the thumb drive was Dev SDA. And I, for a moment, almost clicked the wrong drive in the installer and then took a moment and go, no, Chris, don't do that. That would be a very embarrassing mistake.

Don't make that mistake. And so I almost did it, but I caught the right thing. The good thing about installing it on a thumb drive is you make that mistake. You just take the drive and throw it away. That's true. Nobody ever knows. That's true, yeah, except for I almost would have just outed myself here on this podcast. So that would have been good enough.

All right, well, I would love to hear your experience with the new release. I'm pretty excited about it. As I said, I think it represents just an incredible amount of work and, in a way, better than I expected it to be too. Yeah, and it just feels I don't know, I feel like we've had a hard time explaining it. It just feels good to be this excited about an Ubuntu release again. Yeah, I think that is part of it.

It's like a coming home kind of feeling. I think it's just nice they didn't blow it. I think it's really nice that they figured out how to work upstream in the right way. It's a bit too soon to say they didn't blow. Give them time. Yeah, maybe. Unless something sneaks its way in, I haven't really had

any show-stopping issues yet. I haven't had any gnome crashes either with it. But then again, I've only been primarily using it on Intel. Are you on Intel hardware too, though? I sure am. I do have an Optimus system at home, graphics i'll be trying that yeah this is going to be when we load it on the production systems here this will be

nvidia this will be yeah maybe maybe that'll be a different ball of wax i guess i i guess that also means i guess that also means i've been using wayland now for weeks and i didn't even really you two get you two bastards are using Wayland right now, too. Yeah. Shh, don't let our secrets out. Holy crap, you guys are Wayland users. We don't get this pixel-perfect frame rate just by accident, Chris. We're all a bunch of Wayland users now. Oh, my goodness. That I didn't see coming.

There is your big development right there. Wow. Well, I'm looking forward to kicking the tires some more. Reformatting my machines, losing a bit more data. I kid. Do your backups, kids. Do your backups. Go put it all up on the cloud somewhere where somebody can index it real good for you.

You know what we didn't even mention? What? ZFS support still continues to be rocking on Ubuntu. Yeah, I thought about it. So it's just an app to install ZFS away. I want more. Do your backups there. Give me more.

Okay. Give me more ZFS integration. Where's my ZFS GUI? Right. Yeah want more. Give me more. Okay. Give me more ZFS integration. Where's my ZFS GUI? Right. Yeah, okay. Right? I want a ZFS paperclip wizard. All right.

Thank you for being here, guys. Join us live next week. Go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for our live time. JBLive.tv is where you watch it. And go to linuxunplugged.reddit.com too. Thanks for being here. You know, the more I think about it, it seems obvious. Like, on our production system, I'm going to use X. I'm not going to use Wayland on the OBS system.

That's probably why you crashed. Maybe. That might be what's up. That might be it. I guess I should go look at some logs. JBTitles.com. Thank you, Mumble Room. Yeah, nice one.

Good to have you guys here. Yeah, see you later. I've got to go get my son from school. All righty. How did an episode I've been looking forward to doing for six months end up being short and low energy? How did that combination happen? It's because we didn't start the caffeine till late, Chris.

You think? Maybe. I don't think so. I'm surprised you didn't have Martin or Alan here. I had a sense they weren't going to be here today, although I don't remember why. I forget. I'm going to have to get finished readying up for this release, today although I don't remember why I forget get finished, ready and up for this release man no I have no idea but it's kind of good

this is our take, unbiased no influence