LINUX Unplugged - Episode 220: Remotely Useful | LUP 220

Episode Date: October 25, 2017

An easy solution to get high performance remote Linux desktop up and going, some tips on how to interact with an open source project or community & looking back at some of Fedora’s recent accomplishments.Plus Canonical is on the path to an IPO, pirates embrace Flatpack & more!

So Rikai has a story to share with the class that surprised me, that it impacted the release of User Air. And it's a significant trying times we live in, Wes, when a problem like this exists and no one steps up to solve it. One man must come to the people, must inform the people of the duty we must all take, the arsyncs that we must all pick up and the scripts that must be written. What happened, Beard? I want to know why Ubuntu still sucks. Oh! Darn! Say it!

To be fair, Debbie and two. I want to know why in 2017 we do not have the ability to automatically check and see if our mirrors are up to date because um i had to i i figured out this problem later i had to install team viewer and team viewer would not install because it was missing packages there's your first mistake that's your first problem oh i had to be that guy we all had to be that guy well you know give me another easy remote desktop solution that doesn't require forwarding ports i will today oh well that is what i will give you today but except for that last part you will have to forward port 22

but so i couldn't install team viewer It was telling me that packages were missing. I assumed it was just because packages had changed in 17.10. But no, it turns out, I found out completely unrelatedly later, that the mirror that had been chosen for my Ubuntu install... So, like, when I installed... Because that's the install I set up. Yeah. I didn't change the mirrors. I didn't change any of that stuff.

Whatever it defaulted to had out-of-date packages because later I switched to a different mirror for an unrelated reason and resolved everything. Everything was fine again. Now, do you think this is... Do you need graphical access to the machine or are you remotely controlling a Windows machine or is SSH enough without port forwarding?

No, it does. I need to grab a laptop. Do you need the desktop? Which I have a solution for in today's show, but except for his specific scenario, he needed the logged-in sessions desktop. Yep. Right. Which is definitely a little trickier. TeamViewer's not bad.

Black's 11. We've talked about Splashtop before. So today what we're going to talk about is if you just want a remote desktop session that you can connect to and disconnect from, and that session remains like running on the computer. Yeah. See, the thing about TeamViewer is I installed TeamViewer. I logged into my account. I clicked three boxes for unattended remote access, and then I left.

And I was able to connect on the other end. So I've got to go back. How did you discover that it was out of date packages like i'm not clear on that so so you came to the conclusion that the repo hadn't like synced after 1710 or something like they just didn't have the right version that supported ubuntu 1710 it was 1710 packages because clearly it was getting packages from somewhere but that's true some of the packages it was getting packages from somewhere, but some of the packages, it was saying are referenced, but don't exist on this mirror or whatever. Oh, really? Yeah, others, and

when I did AppKit upgrade, it updated a couple packages, but not as many as you would expect after a release. And then later, I switched to a different mirror, and I had a whole lot more updates, and I had a it solved the missing packages for team viewer because team viewer was like half installed because it was like you know it's

installed but we're missing dependencies see this is we have to rally the people because there's only one thing that can be done so i'm just wondering why like in the process of you know checking for new packages why aren't they checking the freshness of our mirror? This is your cause now. Mirror freshness is like your mission in life to make sure it stays fresh, I guess. Maybe it's just easier to blame Popeye. Yeah, sure. And I've just posted a link that tells you

how up-to-date each of the mirrors are. Yeah, but what I'm asking is why is this not part of the automatic process? I didn't realize this could be a thing, actually, to be honest with you. It usually isn't. It typically isn't because there isn't a gigantic churn like there is at release time when hundreds of machines around the world are all hitting the same machine, trying to update at the same time.

Okay, yeah, so I see here. You probably happened to hit the wrong time of the year for it that's all yeah so it looks like uh there's one one mirror that's a week behind one that's two days behind most are all up to date but yeah this does this is actually pretty good thing to know so that is launchpad.net slash ubuntu slash plus archive mirrors plus symbol archive mirrors cool thanks poppy i'll toss a link to that in the show notes sweet i had i literally had no idea that was an issue because i just assumed these things slowly are synced in the background but of course that's me being naive about the size of the data

that they're moving around they actually usually really quickly are synced in the background because they've all got like stupidly fat connections to the internet. Actually, I think I ran into that the other week as well. And then later it's like, oh yeah, everything's there now. Alright, that's fine. You see, this is why I prefer boutique distributions because their small user base means that they can just

download everything off a single mirror and I don't actually have anything. I'm just making that up. Actually, there's something to be said for simplicity. When you've got a giant complex arrangement of moving parts, things can go wrong. Well, that's why no one uses your software. It's really easy to maintain.

Or you take the Linux Mint approach and you just outsource that extremely complicated, massively expensive part of your infrastructure to somebody else. Even look at uh like what ike just went through with his upsizing you know he pretty much got banged offline with his ovh server and then he had to go hunting for a cdn like as quick as he could see i guess what i'm asking is why like why don't they have like when you do an app get update it checks something like a mirror freshness list

right and says hey your mirror may be out of date would you like to try another mirror yeah like like some sort of like one because vast majority of the time it's never a problem and the mirrors are up to date and it's not yeah but when it is a problem, it's a huge problem. Like some sort of like apt update mirror or something that would also ping mirrors and stuff. Well, there is. There's a software sources thing on the Ubuntu desktop where you press a button. Right, yeah. And it will choose the best mirror nearest to you and all that kind of stuff. I just mean like sort of, just sort of like.

Or you could just choose the central mirror and not use one local to you and choose the central one, which is always up to date. You could do that. But yeah, it's one of the problems of having stuff distributed all over the place. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 220 for October 24th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show. Linux Box is being held together with bubble gum, a little bit of duct tape, and some hope. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And Beard's here. Hello, Beard. Hey, I'm just over here taking out your sound server with SystemD. Someone's got to pre-chew all the gum. That's helpful, too. That is very helpful. I'm kind of like scraping a system together as we do this show. It took us about 20 minutes to get the soundboard working, but we've got that, so what else do we need other than a great lineup, which we have today.

We have some news we'll get into, some community stuff, a couple of follow-up stories. The Fedora Project has a post that they'd really like you to read, and we'll give you some highlights from that. And then I've gone and created myself not one, but two remote desktop solutions. I wanted to create myself a workstation in the cloud, completely independent and isolated from anything else that I could get access to anywhere in the world.

And then I wanted to create a separate remote desktop system that was on the LAN of the studio that could get access to our huge recording files that has a big, fat GPU and a monster 6-core i7 CPU, lots of local storage. So one system up in the cloud with incredible bandwidth,

unlimited storage that I could pay for if I want to attach, and one system local with lots of GPU compute power, both of them running Linux using X2Go. We've covered X2Go before on the network. Noah did a great how-to on it ages ago in Linux Action Show episode 374. And this is my take on it. I'm going to talk about it a little bit differently. I'm using Ubuntu 17.10, so we'll talk about using modern Linux distributions to do this. How I'm doing it, what I'm using it for, what some of the downsides are, and how unbelievably easy it is to get set up, and how it can just really change the game. And I'm using it even when I can just really change the game and i'm using it even when i'm here on my land and i'm connecting to systems over the land using this it's it's so

so great so i'll share my uh my project with you and give you a little demo of the entire thing too later on in the show so stay tuned for all that stuff but before we go any further we're going to bring in our virtual lug time appropriate greetings, discord channel. Hey, hello. Hello guys. Yeah. So episode two 20,

we're trying out discord for this week's episode and it's bumpy so far. You know, we're just, we're giving it a go though. We're giving it a go and we've got a good amount of people showing up. So thank you everybody for helping us do that. Helps really actually put it through its paces. So let's start with some community news.

Wes, what do you say, sir? What do you say, sir? What do you say? I noticed, by the way, before we go any further, you're still running 1710 on that monster. I sure am. So you stuck with it for the week, huh?

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And Beard, your rig over there, still running 1710. So all three of us have stuck with it for the week. How unusual. Against my better judgment. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the Libram 5, which has been an ongoing story,

spiked almost every single week by some new development, and it has come to a conclusion. The fundraiser is over with 142% funds raised. They raised $2.1 million. But they're doing something interesting, too. They're leaving the pre-orders open. So if you still want a Librem 5 you can pre-order one right now and still get it so while the fundraiser's over they'll still

take orders for it um Librem 5 it's um it's funded now now as we've said before the hard work begins but they've they've just recently announced a deal with, or I guess a partnership with NextCloud. So they're going to ship NextCloud's apps by default on the PureOS devices and on the Librem. They've obviously, they've talked with the Plasma Mobile folks, the GNOME desktop people, the Matrix. They've been creating this network of partnerships

with the big names in open source right now. Not the only, but big names in open source right now. NextCloud is a bit of an open source celebrity project. Matrix, again, a bit of an open source celebrity project. Gnome and Plasma, obviously huge heavyweights with large fan bases. And they're all kind of coming together on this Librem 5 thing. Why is this the first time we're seeing this? Why didn't we see this earlier?

I guess the time's just kind of right. Yeah, all the projects are in the right position. Yeah. And good enough places have had enough polished, let's say, releases where they feel like these kinds of things are things they can dedicate energy to. I don't know. They feel like these kinds of things are things they can dedicate energy to. I don't know.

Anyways, I'm surprised, to be honest with you, that they made it this far. I thought the goal of $1.5 million was achievable, but a long shot, and they surpassed it. And however this fundraiser went, now we actually see what the results are going to be when they ship the hardware. This will be the really interesting part. Okay, well, wow. Congratulations to them. I'm really surprised. I've also seen rumors coming out of them that they're going to be shipping tablets. They want to work on a NAS.

And, of course, they've also recently announced that they've disabled the Intel management engine stuff, which we talked about on Linux Action News, if you'd like to check that out. Anybody in the Discord room? Oh, that's weird. That's super weird. Anybody there in the Mumble Discord thing? Have a take on the Librem 5 funding, or maybe a hope, or a dream, or a wish? Wish upon a star for a Librem 5?

Oh, go ahead, JJ. I saw you light up. I don't hear you, though. It's all right. JJ, you're excused. I don't know that I'm's alright JJ you're excused I don't know that I'm ready to buy one but I would like to have friends and acquaintances who have them and you get to see them in real life

that would be exciting for me yeah they're starting to tempt me but I think I'm not particularly motivated to be an early adopter on my phone anymore maybe if I didn't own a business and have kids or if like carrying two

phones was a thing i don't want someone to do realistically yeah i'm not but i would be willing to do it if i started to see this thing ship and it looked like it was a viable if even in an early stage but a viable product yeah i'd be willing to i'd be willing to carry two phones for a while as i as i you know sort of try this thing out and then eventually switch over. I could do that. So I could be willing to get in that position eventually. The competition is tough these days, though.

I wonder if there's any angle to their focus on freedom and security, if there's any angle towards journalists or other people who are really conscious and really need to know what's going on with their phone. Maybe you don't use it when you're at home in the States, but you're traveling to Russia to do a story and you want something that you have more control over. And it really gives people in the open source community who have held really, really steady to this principle of I'm not going to use a mobile phone because it violates either my privacy or my freedoms or my personal views of,

you know, technology. You know, there's a lot of reasons why people have just chosen, I'm not going to get a smartphone. Right. And maybe this would be a phone that might appeal to some of them. It's not a huge market. It's not going to make a company millions of dollars, but there may be a loyal customer base there if you can make a product that actually serves them.

We'll wait and see. It's still a lot of the stuff up in the air. But I could see it. I could see it. I could see it. And now that they made their funding, I'm hoping they'll be able to ship a few. Let's talk a little bit about Fedora because we've been talking a lot about Ubuntu, and we still are going to talk about Ubuntu a bit more today. We have some news, too.

But I thought, well, then we should take a moment to talk about Fedora just to make sure we talk about some hard work that's happening over there. They felt that way, too. They took to their blog over there. This is Christian. He blogs quite a bit about the development of GNOME. And he took to his blog right around the release of Ubuntu 17.10 and said, well, let's take a look at where Fedora is coming from and where it's going.

And so he says, while we're putting the touches, the final finishing touches on Fedora 27, I'll try to look back at everything we've achieved since Fedora Workstation was launched with Fedora 21. So we're going back to about Fedora 21. This blog is about taking stock and taking some pride in what we've achieved so far and major hurdles that we've passed along our way to improve the Linux desktop experience. First one on his list, Wayland. We've been the biggest contributor since we joined the effort, he says. But libinput is another area we think we've made a big

difference. GLVND, which deals with multiple OpenGL devices. Porting Firefox to GTK3, Google Drive integration. Flatpak gets a mention. Could come back to that in a minute. The Linux firmware service, GNOME software, MP3 and AC3 support, and AAC support landing in Fedora.

And a few other things like working with some improved touch support, Nautilus improvements, the nightlight mode in GNOME that makes it a little easier on the eyes after the sun sets. And some other GNOME shell improvements. And of course, one of my favorites, GNOME Builder and Pipewire, have been projects they've worked on, including other ones that are important specifically to Fedora, like Fleet Commander and a few other things. It's actually a pretty impressive list. I have the entire thing linked in the show notes. And I thought, you know what, it is fair. It is fair to take a moment and say Ubuntu 17.10 was a really great release.

fair to take a moment and say Ubuntu 17.10 was a really great release and it's because they're able to stand on the shoulders of what the GNOME 3 community has been building now for years and years and years if 17.10 had launched when GNOME 3 was new and they were shipping GNOME 3 years and years ago it would have been a train wreck of a release definitely so uh yeah I thought okay fair enough I first I was giving him a hard time for kind of doing a Me Too post right around Ubuntu 17.10's release. I was like, oh, come on, Fedora. It's okay. We haven't forgotten about you guys.

But then I read that list, and I'm like, damn, that is a list. That is a really great list. Like the Linux Vendor Firmware Project. Yeah. You know that's a personal favorite of mine. Libinput has made a huge improvement for using trackpads under GNU slash Linux. And of course, it's really important for going to Wayland. Yeah, the list really cements the feeling I have like, well, I may not use Fedora desktop on a lot of workstations I actually have.

They just do a lot of really important backend work that you don't necessarily appreciate. Circling back to Flatpak, I've been trying to take stock. You know, Flatpak's had a couple of delays in Fedora for where they wanted to be at right now. So I'm like, where's the adoption? So we've had a lot of conversations about Snap, a lot of people talking about Snaps. So what metric do you measure success, right?

Well, I have a metric that perhaps we could use. The piracy metric. Porn and piracy. What are they using? Which universal Linux packaging format are the pirates using? And it appears to be, so far, Flatpak. Hey, yo. Yeah, pirates are now packaging Windows games with Flatpak

because they can bundle a little Wine or DOSBox runtime in there. They've got this whole way to distribute Windows games on Linux now using Flatpaks. So here's your Union. Open source for the win. And on the Juarez site because, you know, on these platforms where all your stuff is commercial and you've got to pay for everything, this is like something that's like a huge market, like stealing software.

The open source community, we don't even have to worry about this it's just in our repos but here you know they have to describe what you're getting so they say flat pack is a new package management system built for simple universal single-click installations games that just work neatly stuffed in a locked sandbox it's perfect for them so there you gopak, the choice of Windows software pirates for games on Linux around the world. If that's not a niche market, I don't know what is. Year of the pirate Linux desktop? I'm not sure. I mean, if you think about it, though, you download a Flatpak and you just have a full

wine setup all done for you. Right. I know. It could be the choice for Linux pirates. It's kind of like shades of what Ike's working on with the Linux Steam integration project, but for just one specific game. So when are actual game developers going to start releasing games in Flatpaks? Right. Or, you know, it seems like app images would make a lot of sense for game developers.

And I could see snaps, too, especially if you want to make it easy on people. But what about the maintainers? What about the distro maintainers? Let's talk about maintainers for a moment. Wes found this really interesting piece over on snowyman.com, Manipulating Maintainers. And he says the alternative title really could be how to get members of any open source community to be interested in helping you. But Manipulating Maintainers is a catchier title. It sure is.

And he makes a core point right here at the beginning of the piece that really smacked me in the face and it's, God, is this not true? It's so true in Linux podcasting, quote-unquote Linux media space too. He says, there's an old ha-ha, only but serious joke. If you go to a

Linux forum and you ask for help fixing your Wi-Fi driver, everyone will ignore you. If you instead say, Linux sucks, you can't even get Wi-Fi to work, then thousands of people will try to solve the problem for you. So if you just say Linux sucks, it can't get Wi-Fi, all of a sudden everybody wants to help. But if you say, I need help with Wi-Fi, nobody helps. This story is a great example of manipulating people, but it's obviously a negative take on it. I'd like to share some thoughts on this from a much more positive standpoint, which will help you get people to pay more attention, be more helpful, and perhaps most importantly, create a healthier open source community overall.

And he touches on core points to getting involved with open source communities, like don't waste people's time, Demonstrate that you've actually tried to solve your problem. That's a huge one, yeah. Help other people. Don't be rude. And he gives examples of what might come across rude and what you could maybe say instead. And I know some of this sounds like basic stuff, but it's a good read.

It's insightful. Say thank you. Admit if you're new. Offer to help. And maybe consider giving money. It's not a universal. And to be clear, don't necessarily think they're asking for it. But, you know, sometimes people just need a little cash to help make something a priority

i think that example at the top really just you know shows that here we're talking about like motivations i know for me like all right so you respond in anger someone's dissing your favorite os and you're like well i'm gonna show them yeah it's super easy like you're not you're just responding right and it's not the interaction any of us want it's not really the solution here but but you're not thinking about like i know i've certainly seen requests for help. And when they're vague, you're like, well, I just don't, you imagine all the work you're going to be in here trying to understand this person's problem and identifying and then you're, once you've started helping, you feel this obligation to continue helping. That's not really so when you're just

responding like, yeah, of course, Wi-Fi works, try this, right? And so all of these tips help show and make it more reasonable. So if someone has a very specific problem, you're like, oh, okay, I want to figure out what's going on too. I don't have to wade through the 10 steps of introductory debugging that this person may or may not have done. So if you can get any of those barriers lower, you have a much better time. Yeah, I think it's a lot about how you approach it too. If you come into it with a sort of a, more of a not humble, because that makes it sound like you have to tiptoe around, but if you come at it with maybe I don't have the

full context when you ask your question, and then realize that sometimes those strong reactions too are because you're not asking the right question and so people respond negatively. And so sometimes you have to come to the understanding maybe i'm getting this response because i've asked something in outside the context of where i'm supposed to ask it or something um what about you beard you are involved

in god knows how many irc communities discord chat rooms you must see people stumble into the rooms and and communities you hang out in all the time and just blow it from time to time. Yeah, I mean, basically just be nice and don't act like you know everything and you'll pretty much get all the help you need. Yeah, that's even true when you think you're an expert on something. I had a moment one time where I was troubleshooting a network problem. Table unplugged, yeah, I know. It was close where I was troubleshooting a network problem. Mm-hmm. And this- Table unplugged, yeah, I know.

It was close. It was really close. It was like a loop because I had a hub loop. I had like some sort of network loop. Oh, yeah. But I thought it was an ISP problem. And so I'm talking to the tech, and I'm like 45 minutes into it. And I'm generally a very nice person on the phone, maybe too nice.

But I got a show I got to do. Forty-five minutes into it, I start going, look, man, all right, I've done the router reboot thing. I've done all the little troubleshooting things you want. Here's what I can ping this. I can trace route this. I'm just giving them all this information. I've done this. I've fixed networks for a living.

Can we just skip all this stupid bullshit and just work on getting a trouble ticket established for a connection issue and the guy's like well could you just do me one more favor could you go down and just check to see if you have like any hubs plugged into each other or anything weird that could be causing some sort of network loop fine I think to myself and I go down

and I check the switch it's fine everything's fine like idiot this guy's such an idiot and I'm huffing and puffing my way back up to the stairs where I left the phone and it crosses my mind. Hey, dumbass. You have a little hub out where your NAS and your Wi-Fi access point is in the garage.

That could be where your problem is at, smart guy. And I go, oh, crap. I walk back down the stairs out into the garage and sure enough, I had a network loop and I had to go pick up the phone and be like, okay, I'm sorry. Yeah, that did resolve the problem. Thank you for your time. Just stuffed this whole crow right down my gullet.

That's why I heard that goddammit, Noah. Yes, actually, that did happen, didn't it? That was actually a separate time. From that lesson, I learned that it's usually just's fault, is actually what I learned from that. Yeah, all right. Well, that was good. If anybody in the OIC, Bashful, you had something you wanted to jump in with. I'd love to hear.

Go ahead. That was more so earlier when you were talking about the communities and stuff. For example, Rika, I was saying, you know, just ask, be nice, all that kind of stuff. But it's also the sense of entitlement that you have to, you know, things like have an answer immediately or that people are going to be online 24 by 7 or, you know, so on and so forth. They just expect you to be there nonstop. is hard because nobody wants to be told that they have a sense of entitlement. Nobody wants to hear that. So that's like a real off-putting thing.

And then the second problem is nobody realizes they have a self-entitlement problem because they just are coming in like their time of day. So they're up, and you sometimes don't stop and go, well, these people might be on the other end of the world. They might be asleep right now. Yeah, that's actually one of the things you see the most often in support channels is you see somebody come in, ask a question and leave. Yeah. Or come in, ask a question, complain that nobody's talking and leave.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And if they would just idle for a bit. And it's all within like two minutes. Yeah. Idle for a day. Yeah, it's just more of a perception thing on both sides of the fence. I don't mean it in sort of the point of view that people can't expect an answer or should or shouldn't.

It's just more so both sides of the fence need to be conscious of the fact that there are things like time zones, availability, families, all that other kind of stuff. Yeah, good points. Okay, so I would say we could make a little room in next week's episode if anybody in the audience has a couple that they feel like we've left out, especially anybody involved in some open source communities where there's something specifically on your list

that people do, you know, your shit list, let us know. Leave a comment or go to the subreddit, linuxunplugged.reddit.com, and leave it on this week's episode. And if we get a couple of good ones, I'll carve out some time in next week's episode to try to include those because I think it's kind of particularly important for an open source community

when, you know, a lot of people are constantly coming in that have never interacted with different communities and it's different cultures and different people use online platforms differently and have like people email me all the time thinking I'm going to respond maybe that day or maybe within a few

days and sometimes it's like four or five months before you get a response from me. And I don't mean for it to be like that, but that's just what happens sometimes. And it's a stressful thing for me to go in my inbox because I know I have a bunch of old emails where people expected me to respond faster because that's how they do email. And that's the same thing. You just have to understand that people have different expectations for these systems. Especially in the open source world. All right. Well, before we move on, let's mention Ting for just a moment, my mobile service

provider. Oh, it's Ting. You go over to linux.ting.com. That'll give you $25 off a Ting device, or maybe even better, because if you can bring a Ting device, they'll give you $25 in credit, which will probably pay for more than your first month. It's pay-for-what-you-use wireless. It's really great, because take Beardsley here. He's mine? Hey, you know, Chris, I actually have a new Ting sim. Ting-sponsored TwitchCon.

Oh, really? Yeah. So you just got an extra ready-to-go sim, like a standby sim? Just sitting in my room. Yeah, that's nice. But you know, for Beard, it's a great example. So JB has a Ting account with like three lines on there, I think maybe even four lines, and one of the lines

we give to Beard, so that way he has a phone where we can get a hold of him, and he has a little device that he can use to take over the world. And most of the time, Beard's somewhere that has Wi-Fi, almost all the time. But he traveled to TwitchCon. And during that time, it'll be like a little more for service. But if you take the fact that maybe this month, we're going to pay $15 more, maybe at most, for his usage.

But you average that out over the fact that we almost pay for nothing most of the time when he's on Wi-Fi. It's a great deal. There is definitely a data spike. Yeah. And I know of at least one phone call because I got one. But it's perfect for that kind of setup. It's great for me, too, because with a little bit of planning, I can preload my podcast for the day. I can pin the music to my device.

And when I'm driving, I can basically use no data. And then when I get to work, I can use Wi-Fi. Man, it's so great because it's nationwide. When I travel, I use it the entire time. They have CDMA and GSM. There's no contracts. There's no determination fees. So if Beard wants to throw that SIM card in like a tablet for a couple of months and then decides, I'm not really ever using it, there's no penalty to just turn it off.

You go into their dashboard. It's simple. And you can control it there. You can also monitor all your usage. They have so many different devices you can pick from or bring your own. Like I mentioned, they have a CDMA and a GSM network. So there's tons of options there. Check out their blog, too.

They have a blog right now about earning some side cash. It's a little bit of extra money. Whoa! Off of Google Opinion Rewards. So check that out too on the Ting blog. Start by going to linux.ting.com support the show and sign up over at ting linux.ting.com

Let's get into the Ubuntu corner. So we have some Ubuntu news to get to. As you would expect after a big major release. And ever since the announcement that they would be switching to the GNOME desktop, discontinuing active development on Unity and restructure the company a bit,

all of us armchair analysts like myself specifically, I'll just talk about me, all said, ah ha, ha ha ha, here we go. Mark Shuttleworth is refactoring the company, getting it ready perhaps for some funding here and there, and eventually to go public, do an IPO. And it seems that is exactly the case. He was interviewed over at eweek.com. We got a link in the show notes by Sean. And some interesting things were revealed by mark he said that as long as we stay a private company uh we have complete discretion as to whether we maybe i should read this in like a more epic voice for mark even though it doesn't sound like as long as we stay

purely a private company we have complete discretion as to whether we carry things that are not commercially sustainable shuttleworth said now that what he's really saying there is when we're a private company we can dump money into projects that don't make us any money. JB has that luxury, a luxury which we may sometimes maybe abuse. And as perhaps Canonical was potentially abusing. Because if you look at it from a perspective of maybe a company that needs to make money or a company that wants to go public, then things change. You can't necessarily really justify that. company that wants to go public, then things change. You can't necessarily really justify that. And then Mark goes on to say, what you'll see at some stage soon is that we have broken

even on all the pieces that we do commercially without Unity. As in, Ubuntu makes money, the server stuff makes, the cloud stuff makes money, the consulting stuff is making money, the OEM deals are making money. They're becoming self-sustainable if you go outside the Unity projects, Unity projects, Unity 8, stuff like that. At some stage after that, we will take a round

of investment, which will be a growth round that will be aimed at helping us become a public company in due course. So there you go.

Yeah. All right. Big stuff in the works. Yeah. That's what it means, basically. There's nothing too shocking, nothing too majorly revealed there. It's all kind of what we speculated, but the speculation in the works. Yeah. That's what it means, basically. There's nothing too shocking, nothing too majorly

revealed there. It's all kind of what we speculated, but the speculation in this case was correct. And, um... I mean, it kind of makes sense, too. I think it's going to result in a lean, mean, canonical machine, actually. Like, no hard feelings. They tried it. You know, they did the whole phone thing. They played with Unity and

Mirror and go in their own way and innovating on the Linux desktop. Turns out that's not really what the market wants or how things are going to go. And so, yeah, it's a smart pivot back to what their core is. He mentioned, you know, shutting down Unity being one of the toughest things he's ever had to do. I bet. I'm sure, right?

Like, I mean, there's obviously a ton of people there, engineers, developers, designers, everyone pouring their heart into it. So that's hard. And he went out specifically on a limb himself to try to say, let's do this as the future. And then nobody bit. And he's like, oh God, now I got to own up to that.

And he did it. JJ, you had something you wanted to say. Go ahead. We've had bad luck with people being muted or something today. Discord. I don't know if it's Discord. I think it might just be JJ.

Discord. I don't know if it's Discord. I think it might just be JJ. What do you got? You got some sort of switch flipped over there, JJ? You got some sort of NSA privacy screen up? What's going on up there? Must be using FreeBSD.

I think he's using the Librem 5. There is a video interview of Mark over on the e-week website if you want to see that beautiful thing about ubuntu is we created the possibility of a platform that's free of charge to its end users with commercial services in the sort of dream that that might define the future in all sorts of different ways and we really have seen that ubuntu has moved into the mainstream in a bunch of areas. You know, you think about it and you watch the full video on their site. It's really good timing still for them because the desktop thing is sort of sorting itself out. Wes and I were just having the conversation earlier that desktop Linux in a lot of ways has gotten really, really, really good recently.

Like we just read that list from the Fedora project. That's a solid list of really good stuff. It really is, yeah. Ubuntu 17.10, all three of us are still using it after that, you know, review. Like, we're actually still working pretty good for me, and I've put it on even more systems. And that was without, like, I've hardly configured a thing.

And we have some good stuff like Pipewire in the works soon that's going to solve some really long-standing issues that I've had. You might even be able to get audio on your, you know, the machine you use for the show. I don't know. That's the pipe dream. And so like that problem is sort of solving itself because you

then have OEMs that are then taking that product that's getting pretty good and then they're doing the marketing and targeting it developers and the niche market. Yeah, they're doing the polishing. And you have same system 76 trying to do the same thing to a greater extent with Pop! OS. And then they can focus on the cloud and IoT where there is a ton of traction to be gained. And they have a pretty good inroad already.

So it does seem like they have a pretty good chance of making this thing a money-making machine. I got to say, it some some big cojones to you know cut your losses rather than doubling down again yeah um chris yes sir i i don't want to reveal anything that's uh company confidential but back in april when Mark announced the end of life of some of these projects. And it was clearly a difficult thing for him to do with letting go a bunch of people in the Canonical family. I found it interesting that I saw a different side of Mark, very keen on the welfare of the people who were leaving the company you know he

knew that he couldn't continue to fund these things that they that that it wasn't possible for us to continue developing all these different projects that that were super interesting and cool and fun but at the end of the day they wouldn't make money in the in the real world um and i i think he felt really terrible having to let those people go um and you know i think some people see mark as a very hard-headed businessman um and when you look at how much he's financed not just ubuntu but he's used a lot of his money for other things as well, philanthropic stuff, but also other open source projects, you know, he's used some of that money to fund some other distributions, not just Ubuntu.

Um, I think it's, uh, I think it's interesting to see this news come out now that, um, yeah, think it's interesting to see this news come out now that um yeah that uh actually it's a little a little sad for him that things didn't work out yeah well who you know who in their right mind creates something like uh like a project like this no i mean nobody gets into this stuff to have to make these really really awfully awfully hard, sucky business decisions that only business owners or people in that position end up having to make, people in that top role. And it's got to be harder than we see. These are real people who've been brought into the whole Ubuntu ecosystem.

A lot of the people who work for Canonical then and now are ex-community people who were hired in because they were active in the community and they wanted to do cool things with Ubuntu. And there was this guy who came along and enabled them to sit at home in their office and work on stuff that's super cool. And there aren't many opportunities you get in your life to sit at home and work on something super cool uh with friends um and he enabled that and i think that's um it's a little sad and you know this this recent interview coming out is uh difficult for those of us looking back on you know the difficult times back in april but equally we've got a positive thing to look forward to, which is the company is streamlined and we're not spreading ourselves super thin across a large number of

projects that we used to. I mean, I think, you know, a common criticism that I used to have is too many, they have too many projects, they're too distracted, there's no chance they're going to get into mobile. And, you know, those were just common. Those were criticisms I might lob, but they were just common ones that would be parroted. Yeah, everyone said that. Yeah, and I don't know who's saying that now because none of those things are true anymore. Like the focus seems to make a lot of sense. The end results are pretty impressive so far.

results are pretty impressive so far. And we're not even privy to all of the ongoing back-end business deals that are profitable to Canonical that are also a result of this work. But they are happening. And they are... It was interesting to see Mark point out that there are areas of the business that are profitable. Obviously, as a privately held company, he doesn't have to reveal details about how profitable each part of the company is. But on the road to IPO, he's going to have to reveal some of this to potential investors in the future. But it was interesting to reveal that, you know, something a lot of us internally have known for a while that this is more profitable than people think. Well, Canonical has, from my experience, not, and this is something that was very apparent just at the rally too is they have a unique combo going in that they're making the software they're

selling the support and the ubuntu brand is carrying quite a bit of weight in enterprise now and so a lot of a lot of a lot of big companies that are scaling out very very fast you could think of large media companies online that you know of or just large web companies that you know of that are scaling very fast. Perhaps they're in a growth trajectory right now. And scaling out large data centers is a massive time commitment. They know that their system runs on Ubuntu. They know that they want Ubuntu-based data centers. But they want somebody who really knows their shit and somebody who will keep it up to date and running well and secure because damn isn't cybersecurity an issue now and man do we not want to have to

be the ones responsible for managing that well guess who we can call we call canonical because they're making the thing so now all of a sudden canonical's got a contract to build out a data center load the software and then maintain the software and canonical can either hand the keys over to them and say here here's your data center, or they can say, actually, you know what? Funny thing. We don't feel like hiring 15 people. Do you guys just want to, you know, take care of that for us? And there are multiple ways for Canonical to make revenue by Ubuntu being free.

And they all seem obvious because they seem like ones that corporate America would just totally click with. Like that is an arrangement that would make sense to a corporate IT people, especially people that are evaluating risk and time to get something spun up. It's a no-brainer for them. And that's going to be an obvious moneymaker. And then we know that they have an OEM program with companies like Dell and HP where there's some kind of arrangement where there's money made on machines that are sold that also is profitable. And so with that, we have now to look forward to 1804. And now we are almost out of the Ubuntu section

for those of you that are sick and tired of hearing about it. This is the... I know some of you couldn't care less. This is a great little title, though. I'm enjoying it. Immediately already. We're almost done. Yeah, I know.

And we just got... This is news. And it'll be like this probably for maybe half another episode I'm enjoying it immediately already we're almost done yeah I know and we just got this is news and it just it'll be like this probably for like maybe a half another episode because we have some we have in the works

an interview with some friends from Canonical that worked really hard specifically on the 1710 release and we're going to hopefully get them in next week's episode

as well as a couple follow up items but we now have, before we get out of the Ubuntu corner, a name. Beavering away at the brilliantly bionic 1804. Mark Shelterworth today posted on his blog

the name of 1804 Ubuntu and it is the bionic beaver. The bionic beaver. There are so many beavers in this post. It's pretty good. It's incredible. He has some fun. There are so many B-words in this post. It's pretty good. Yeah, he has some fun. There's a line in here that maybe I could poke Popey's brain about that I feel like maybe I should know more about, and this was sort of news to me. He says in one of his paragraphs here that there's an IRC channel people can join to work with those who are updating Unity 7 for the newest X and kernel graphics in 1804.

Oh, yeah. So is that a community project to keep Unity 7 going? So I think there's a number of people who have come out of the woodwork saying, you know what, I actually quite like Unity 7 and I would like it to carry on working the way I like it. Now, I appreciate it's like Marmite. actually quite like unity 7 and i would like it to carry on working the way i like it now i appreciate it's like marmite like not everyone likes unity a lot of people like i3 or gnome shell

or whatever else xfce yeah exactly but turns out we shipped a bunch of machines through hardware vendors that had unity by default and a lot of people actually quite like that. And we have noticed a lot of community people who've rallied around and said, we'd like to help keep that going. Now, it's great to have community people who are interested in keeping that going. But what we really need is developers. Because we need people to be able to review patches and understand bug reports triage them all the kind of usual stuff you do in the development cycle of a desktop and we would love to keep unity 7

well alive through 1804 and beyond it will be pretty much in maintenance mode it might be that there could be some new features landing but given that the fact that unity 7 is still active in 1604 like i'm running it right now i'm talking to you from my unity 7 uh laptop uh it it's it's not that we're just going to throw it over the wall into github and say there you go it's still hosted on launchpad we still have all the build system in place we still have the bug tracker in place and so on so if we've got people in the community who want to get involved in that then get in contact with us there's a thread going on on the ubuntu community hub if you go to community.ubuntu.com you'll find it easily it's the thread that says unity 7 in it and if you're a developer and you want to see

unity 7 continue jump on board and we'll get this thing continue rolling through 18.04 and beyond. I would love an echo effect there. Beyond, beyond, beyond, beyond. I'll be your backup guy. I am not surprised. Not going to say I'm surprised at all by this development. In fact, I now feel kind of stupid that we didn't have a betting pool going. development in fact i now feel kind of stupid that we didn't have a betting pool going but uh hard to me for some reason feels like this is the desktop environment to run on the obs system

i like unity 7 enough and uh i want something i really didn't have any major problems with it literally uh how long have we had this machine running now beard i mean it's been since since linux fest right yeah uh at least yeah and that's the thing it it just keeps rocking and keeps rolling along and along and it is literally the least trouble i've had right we're not making massive multi uh infrastructural changes to unity 7 there there's bug fixes sure there are bugs in unity 7 we all know that there are bugs in compas and nux and the other components that make up unity 7 experience and if people want to get involved we'd love to hear from you but you know we'd love it to stay alive but compass is still maintained right that is actually still being actively maintained so in a way that's sort of

the core part of unity 7 that really needs any TLC. And if there's even somebody just nudging that along to make sure it still works with X or whatever. I think a lot of it will be integrating with new stuff that comes along and making sure it still works on new versions of whatever components come along within the next six months. It's a short cycle between now and April next year. I know that the desktop team don't have a huge amount of time to dedicate to this because they're obviously working on the LTS, which is going to be GNOME shell-based.

But I'm sure there are people there who would mentor people in the community who want to get involved in this. And if you're interested, I'd love to hear from you. Huh, what a hell of a thing. I'm going to seriously give it a consideration for the obs for the obs rig because it's worked so damn well for the other skype machine when i say it's a skype machine it runs like a dozen other apps too yeah just for different tasks like one of them is it runs a digital version of our soundboard

i have it up right now on the screen i have isn't that great yeah Yeah, it's awesome. It is so great. I have, so I have a, our soundboard has a Linux client that connects over Ethernet, over IP, and it is exactly synced to my, by the millisecond. And if I move a slider on the digital soundboard, it physically moves the slider with a motor. That's so cool. On the physical soundboard, yeah. If I didn't have a Dan's face there during tech snap, that's going to be right there. Oh yeah.

It's a, it's a, it's a real winner, but you want your machine to be pretty rock solid that you're controlling your soundboard from. And it, this has been the one. And I,

I, I really, really like solace. I've really enjoyed budgie, but we had, we had about 25 minutes this morning of unbelievable. Yeah. Of like no MPv has died for

the third or fourth time and uh this time it's blaming ironically i think lib systemd.so.0 which is really great we don't talk about such things um and i'm in the process of trying to do like all the updates even the optional ones just trying to get the system working again and um i've had some weirdness in the software center where it said i had like 46 updates and then i hit apply and it's it's like 146 updates or it's like it was a big discrepancy um and then those kinds of things are they're they're not on they're not a big problem but it did delay the show by by a pretty good factor today and i don't know i feel like to just not have that problem not having a functioning video player and not having audio are pretty big problems yeah i feel like to just not have that problem not having a functioning video

player and not having audio are pretty big problems yeah i'm trying to be nice because i really like solace i really like and i don't i i might have got caught like mid update cycle or who knows so i can't you know i can't really say what the problem was but and that doesn't necessarily mean there's not a place for solace right like this this machine can dual boot you can play with multiple things we're a lot of this we end up talking about like the appliance machines where you just don't want to fuss. Now we're in a place with snaps and just using newer Ubuntus

where you have enough of the... You know what I mean? Like, okay, 1204, OBS wasn't really a thing. You couldn't expect an updated package, but in the 17 and 18 worlds, you get a recent build, let alone their snaps. It took them a few days, but now there is a new build. And Docker and other... It's kind of a different world.

That's true. Where an Ubuntu LTS can fit a lot more roles now. So not only are people in general updating their repos faster. So when 17.10 came out, there was no OBS package for 17.10. But you check three or four days later, now there's an OBS package. And snaps and flat packs also neutralize that particular problem, like you're saying. There is several— And app images.

Yeah. No, it's true. There are several solutions that are converging together to solve the software availability problem for all distributions. Depending on which particular methodology you subscribe to, there's multiple of them. There's multiple now. there's multiple of them there's multiple now and um that means like you're saying it would be conceivable to just to take a little time and have like that classic reason why a lot of us switch to linux because windows was so crashy and you wanted the most rock solid system possible right like i'm gonna get back to that like maybe I'll just use Unity 7 on 18.04 with just a few confined applications,

and I bet you that thing would run until the day that 18.04 was no longer supported. That sounds really appealing to me. That doesn't mean I'm going to do that on my laptop or my main workstation, but the three or four machines, one, two, three, four machines, five machines that we might reload in here,

yeah, I might do it to those. The other nice thing, one, two, three, four machines, five machines that we might reload in here. Yeah, we might do it to those. The other nice thing, which I'm still loving, is just you get the ZFS module, you don't have to do any wacky DKMS or precompiles, so we can also do that and then take snapshots of machines that are particularly important so we can have restores or easy backups. There's a lot of options going on here. What I'm hearing is Wes is upgrading the studio.

I think that's what's happening. Yep, I just signed up for it. So this discussion about reloading the machines in the studio, it's happening. This is something I've been working on slowly over last week after our episode last week. Hello. Hello. You know, I heard somebody told me this recently that they never hear the airplanes that we mentioned. So I'm going to stop mentioning if there's airplanes flying over here.

Yeah, if you guys can't hear them we'll just be our little secret yeah yeah we'll be the only ones that know anyways back on track this week i started loading like my lower priority systems to 1710 and i've been working my way up the chain to this to the studio and now i'm at the studio and so i wanted to take a moment and figure out another another solution while we're in this transition. And that's when it really struck me, this is a case for setting up a remote desktop environment. One on the land and one in the cloud. So that way, while we destroy the installations of these machines and then begin to reset them up with all the little teensy-tinesy things we need,

in a pinch, when I'm on air, I could remote into a system that is completely configured, has been for maybe a couple of weeks before the transition even started. So it's well used. It's been well set up. I can remote into that box, and it doesn't matter if the system here in the studio is a blank slate,

because inside that remote session, I'll have everything I need. But to make that work, it has to be extremely high performant because I want to be able to show visuals on the screen. I can't have crazy weird lag. It's got to meet your regular standards for a desktop usable system. Yeah. And if possible, I'd like to use it for work during the day. So I'd like it to be pretty responsive. So that's pretty responsive and maybe even support video playback. And so that is what led me down this path to where I'm at today. And I would say this is still somewhat in flux. Like one of the things I'm considering is instead of using the Mate desktop,

maybe try a system like a parallel system running XFCE. You know what, I'll explain why in a moment because Mate has been pretty good, but I have had a couple of hiccups. So if you're considering doing this, I want to pre-warn you. It might not be a big deal, but I just want to pre-warn you. So let's take a moment and let's thank DigitalOcean.

Go to DigitalOcean.com, create the account, and use our promo code Linux Unplugged. It's a way to get really fast systems up in their infrastructure, which is data centers all over the world, within seconds. SSDs for every system you deploy and a beautiful dashboard to manage all of it. And there's still a few days left to get in on this Hacktoberfest.

Are you hip to this Hacktober stuff? No, tell me more. Tell me more. Well, first of all, DigitalOcean is just pretty awesome because this, at the end of the day, is just supporting a bunch of open source projects. It's getting open source code written and then giving people some swag for doing it. Wait, I get a t-shirt if I do this, maybe? Yeah, you'd actually be good at this.

So Hacktoberfest is open to everyone in the world. Poll requests can be made on any GitHub hosted repository or project. And you sign up anytime between October 1st and October 31st. You make four pull requests between October 1st and 31st in any time zone. It can be to any public repo on GitHub, not just the ones that they've highlighted. The pull request must contain commits you've made yourself, pull requests reported by maintainers as spam, or they are automated or will be marked as invalid.

It won't count. But they have a couple of examples here, and they're all open source projects. And there's some open source projects we talk about all the time. Some of them are less known. Like here's one for Discord, discord.net. That's interesting. Thanks. They had a Rocket Chat on here earlier.

They have nw.js on here. They have Hugo, which is really interesting. It's a really cool, flexible, static site generator. They have nw.js on here. They have Hugo, which is really interesting. It's a really cool flexible static site generator. Written and go. Yeah, and so the idea is to give a little help and exposure to some of these open source projects and then also

give away some swag. So that's their Hacktoberfest. It goes to the end of the month and it's open to anybody in the whole dang world. DigitalOcean.com. Go there, try them out. I'm going to be talking about them in this coming segment because one of the two remote desktop sessions I've set up is running on DigitalOcean. And one of the things I did is I got the 3 cents an hour system

and then I attached 100 gigabytes of block storage, which I am dedicating just to my home directory. That's on spinning rust, right? That's like really slow. That's all SSDs, my friend. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. In fact, it's extremely fast. It's nuts, nuts fast. In fact, I invite you to play around with it.

It's really satisfying. And so I just dedicated from 100 gigs of DigitalOcean block storage to my droplet that runs remote desktop. So I have a big old home drive, which I really, really like. They have a new object storage system they call Spaces as well, and the network is blazing fast,

40 gigabit connections coming into their hypervisors. Go check them out. Go to digitalocean.com and use our promo code DOUnplugged. It's digitalocean.com. Use the promo code DOUnplugged, and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this year's Linux Unplugged program. So, yeah, I'm using X2Go, and I'm using it with Ubuntu Mate, and it's pretty good.

I'll give you guys a demo here in a minute. If you're watching, you'll see, but even if you're listening, I'll describe it to you. And to make this all hum, I'm using X2Go on top of Ubuntu Mate 17.10. 17.10 for both the systems. To do that on DigitalOcean at this point, I had to install a 17.04 image and then I did an upgrade to 17.10. Which went fine. Just totally fine. It was a pretty clean based system too.

I even realized I could have snapshotted it if anything had gone wrong. That's true. Use them features. And what I love, love, love about X2Go is that you can run it on a headless system that doesn't have a full X setup, doesn't have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Yeah, definitely. So it works on a system that's just up in a rack somewhere. And X2Go is a graphical remote desktop that works really well over low bandwidth connections.

It has a lot of scaling options. desktop that works really well over low bandwidth connections. It has a lot of scaling options. It has the ability to disconnect and then reconnect to a session. So I can be working, close it, come down into the studio and reconnect. Everything's right back where I left it off. It has sound redirection. It's a little wonky sometimes,

but it supports pulse audio. And it has support for shared folders, which I have not really tried. I did not know that. My understanding is it's using SFTP on the back end to do that. Though I guess you could set up, there's a lot of options for that. Yeah, all the traffic is tunneled over SSH. And so everything's going over SSH.

What makes X2Go cooler than just, say, like, straight old traditional X11 forwarding, because a lot of people would just say, well, we'll just use SSH with X11 forwarding and you don't need to install any extra packages. But X2Go uses the NX library, which was developed by NoMachine. And they stopped releasing it as open source a little while ago. But X2Go is based off the last released open source version. And it has been approved upon. Yeah. pressed updates between the two proxies. And so X is getting immediate response from these two proxies, and then they handle the transferring of all of that stuff in a much more efficient means. And by doing so, you only have to install a few extra X stuff to get X to go working.

You don't have to have a full X to go graphical environment. And I'll have the commands you need to run to install that in the show notes. And I'll tell you what, guys. It is pretty impressive. It is pretty impressive how fast you can get. Now, there's certain limitations I'll go into,

but just as a base start, if you start with a desktop environment that is not composited, so like your Mates or an XFCE, so GNOME 3 and Unity 7 and Plasma Desktop, the latest versions are all kind of out unless you use software rendering. And there is a way to get it working with GNOME fallback mode too, the classic mode, but I chose not to do that. So if you use like a 2D desktop basically,

you get essentially damn near local performance on the LAN and scaling performance on your remote connection. I went with Mate, and the main problem I've had so far is I will open up, I will resume a session on different computers at different resolutions. And sometimes the system tray area of Mate just is really gummed up. Like all of my notification icons will all be stacked on top of each other. Yeah, that seems like a tricky area. And here's what happened. So I set up Dropbox because I want to get all of my

unfilter clips on both systems so I can edit that stuff remotely. And I'll talk more about that in a second. So I set up my install Dropbox because I'm still using Dropbox for the unfilter show because we have like a terabyte of data in there. It's a hard thing to move around. It's actually more than a terabyte of data. And so I start it, installs, and now the way Dropbox for the Unfilter Show because we have like a terabyte of data in there. It's a hard thing to move around. It's actually more than a terabyte of data.

And so I start it, installs, and now the way Dropbox works on Linux is it starts syncing instantly. It starts syncing just immediately as soon as you connect it to your Dropbox account. And I go in there and I use selective syncs. That way I only pull down about like 10, 15 gigs of the over a terabyte of data. of the over a terabyte of data. But because all of these icons in the system tray all stacked all over each other in some weird crappy bug after the screen size had changed,

I kept right-clicking on the system tray and getting everything but the Dropbox icon. Well, this is on a DigitalOcean droplet. And this thing's pulling down my Dropbox at just maddening speeds. It's filling the disk at just an unbelievable rate. And I'm like... You're just load testing Dropbox for them. Yeah, I was like,

I got no option because I can't get to this icon to go into selective sync mode because of this. So I had to kill the entire desktop session and log back in so that way the system tray bar, little area, notification applet area would get redrawn. You're saying Dropbox needs a text-based config file?

Well, it needs some sort of like... No, I'm just drawn. It does have a command line actually, but it needs some way to talk to the GUI version from the command line. And then once I logged back in, redrew the system tray area, I was able to solve the problem. But quite a bit of gigabytes have been downloaded by then, where I feel like

maybe XFCE wouldn't have had that problem perhaps. You're probably right about that. So I'm just going to play with that, but I have Monte on both of them right now. Bashful, you wanted to jump in about compositing desktops. I would love to talk about that for a second, because that would, oh, I would love to get like a GNOME 3 remote desktop session if that's possible. Well, so just to give a little history, with my day job, we work in this exact space, except more on the performance side, like leveraging GPUs and such for a bunch of our clients like Pixar and all those guys.

So a lot of them, even with the performance stuff, they still traditionally go without compositing. So while you can get the performance for CAD and video editing and even like video streaming and so on and so forth, a lot of the desktop stuff people still tend to disable. like video streaming and so on and so forth, a lot of the desktop stuff people still tend to disable. Okay. You know, and that was sort of what I kind of come to, is in my rig that I have here on the land of the studio, where I can get to the OBS files and I can talk to all the other machines on the network,

that's the machine I have the GTX 960 in, where if I need to do some sort of GPU job, that would be the remote desktop. So here's my setup. Tell me what you guys think. I got the two rigs. I've got orbital and suborbital. Orbital is a system up at DigitalOcean,

and its key strengths are insane bandwidth, just incredible bandwidth performance, and essentially unlimited disk. I just got to throw money at the problem, and very, very, very fast disk, as well as snapshots, so it's a good system to take risks on. So that's my orbital

system probably like uh if you needed to you could destroy it and rebuild it let's say you were hanging out in singapore and you needed it you wanted it local there or you know or move it yeah um so that's orbital and then i have suborbital which is here in the studio and it's primary it's the same i'm trying to match the interfaces as much as possible. And Suborbital's main advantages are local GPU with 960 with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, a fair amount of local storage, but not too much. Not nearly what I have in the drive.

Just enough. Yeah. And then, of course, the gigabit local access to all the studio resources. And for me, it is sort of like... It's sort of great because if I have a network-intensive job, I log into one system and if I have a compute intensive job,

I can log into the other system and I'm kind of playing with the idea of trying to figure out all the ways I could sync more of the settings to make sure if I change something in one system,

it synchronizes to the other system. Right. I'd really like to start looking into that now. But again, I've really got to- We're just right back

to configuration management, aren't we, on this episode? Yeah, I guess so. Boy, it really is. But then I've really got to nail down that desktop environment. Yes. What do you think, Bashful?

You say Mate is the winner? Mate? Yeah, it is kind of by far, too. I was running it for quite a while at work here, and out of all the desktops, it was the only one that was decent if you wanted a full-blown desktop versus going with like a pilot manager did you try xfce uh at the let me think about this all right you know what i'm not gonna say yay or nay on that i'll have now you got me thinking i might go load one just to test on i'll be curious i'd be curious the the thing that really blows me

away about x to go if you're putting on ubuntu or that really blows me away about X2Go, if you're putting it on Ubuntu or Arch, actually it's in Solus too, but if you're doing it on Ubuntu, it's you add a PPA and you do all the dance you have to do to update your sources list. But then it's just really you just need two packages if you already have Monte installed or whatever desktop environment you want. You just have to apt-get install xt server and X to go server dash X session. Not all of X org, like it'll pull in its dependencies that it needs, but you don't have to pull, it is really simple to create a system on a VPS

like DigitalOcean or any other one and install these couple of packages and then you remote into it and you're the display. You don't need a display attached because the way X toGo works is it has, sort of like if you're familiar with Citrix and other remote desktop clients, it has a client manager, a session manager,

where you can have multiple servers listed there and you can set different settings and different compression settings for the different servers. You can set up your shared folders. It's all done with a graphical interface. It's all in the GUI. It's so straightforward. In fact, I'll give you a little demo because it's not perfect. It's definitely done with a graphical interface. It's all in the GUI. It's so straightforward.

In fact, I'll give you a little demo because it's not perfect. It's definitely not perfect, but it's pretty powerful. And I would definitely trade the power for perfection in this particular case. And all of this stuff is really sort of kind of basic. Like if you just leave the defaults, you're going to generally be okay. Let's take a moment to thank Linux Academy because, honestly, if any of this stuff sounds interesting to you,

you could dive in even deeper over at Linux Academy. So this would be a good moment to do this. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to sign up and get a free seven-day trial. They have self-paced, in-depth video courses, hands-on, scenario-based labs that really help it stick, and instructor mentoring by

real human beings when you get stuck and need some help. And course scouts are when you're busy. Comprehensive study guides you can download and take with you, and audio nuggets that are sparkly bits of wisdom that you can deep dive into, and a community that's full of clones of Wes Payne.

It's kind of weird, actually. Yeah, we get along great. It's awesome. LinuxAcademy.com. They also have iOS and Android apps and flashcards that get forked. It's a pretty great platform, really. If you think about it, it's something that would be like

if you could just take all of Linux Academy and go back in time and give it to yourself like 8, 10 years, you'd be like Biff bringing back the playbook. You could get so ahead of everybody. It's one of our precious resources. We should launch it up and

encapsulate it in a satellite for future humanity. That's how important it is. Or for aliens. They need it too. That's true. I mean Linux is going to be the kernel that takes over their world once they learn about it. The GPL is a viral license. Exactly. We all know. So go get hedged now. It's kind of wild.

Like, I have to say, you know, you're motivated, right? You want to learn Linux. You're listening to this show. Obviously, you're interested in these topics. But when you, like, have a job and a family and you have, like, the end of the day and you're tired, there's a million reasons that you can come up with not to learn something. Go, girl. But Linux Academy breaks down every single

possible barrier. They can't actually make you type things and do the learning, but everything else is set up right for you. So true. It's awesome. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Big thank you to them for sponsoring the Unplugged program. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged is where you get a free seven-day trial

and you support this here shenanigans. So I am in the process of reinstalling a bunch of packages on Solus. Oh, you know what? It launched just fine. Isn't that wonderful? So you have the X2Go Client Session Manager. Were you going to say something, Beard? I was just going to ask, have you tested out X2Go at all on a more flaky connection?

Well, on a MiFi, which is pretty crap. Pretty, pretty crap. What kind of bandwidth do you get on that thing? It ranges depending on the day. So it depends on which connection I'm on. So if I'm on a Ting connection or an AT&T connection or a public Wi-Fi connection,

because I sort of use all of them. Listen to user error back catalogs for more information. I outlined it all. And in there, I have a large variance. And I can get up to maybe seven megabits where I'm usually at. And I can get as low as easily as low as 400 kilobits a second. I mean, it can be a pretty dramatic range depending on how much bandwidth I've used, how loaded the network is, and all of those things. So I have tested this from everything from gigabit to probably around 500k a second.

And so maybe that's a good place to start. We could take a look at this. So in X2Go, you have the client session manager. And I have two connections up right now. And let's take a look here at the suborbital one. This is the one here on the LAN. So this could be an example of how you would maybe do this. So I can disconnect my session. I can pause it right here. So I'm suspending a session I already have open, which is always a lot of fun. And then I can go in and I can edit that session. And I have my

different options I can choose from. And in here, you can see the host, the username I wanted to use by default, and the port. So if you're maybe forwarding a random ass port to 22, you could override that and put in here. With the dropdown option, you can choose the desktop environment that you're going to be logging into. So they have Mate right here in the dropdown already. They also have Unity, Cinnamon, Trinity, XD, MCP, connecting to a local desktop, and notably support for connecting to an RDP server, a Windows terminal server. Oh, is that right?

Mm-hmm. But here's the really interesting stuff. So on the Connection tab, this is where you have your connection speed preferences. And because I'm on a LAN, I have a slider. Just match that baby. Yeah, it goes everywhere from modem to LAN. And this change

is not only compression, but how the size of the packets that get sent. And so when you're on a MiFi, you go to modem. And here on LAN, I can go to LAN. But then they have a million different compression options. This is something I spent some time playing with because they have, you can do no

compression, you can do adaptive compression, but you can also say lock it in at 16 meg JPEG or lock it in at 24k PNG. So you can choose different image compression depending on if your preference is speed or image quality. And I have found that the 16 meg JPEG has been pretty good for me. They also even have some RDP compression, which all works pretty well. And then they have your input and output for the size of it, the DPI, so if you're on a high DPI screen,

you can pass that along to X2Go, so it does support high DPI, but you have to manually enter that in here. Then you have your sound options, so I can have it redirect sound to my local pulse audio. You can use SSH port for it to tunnel the sound system connections through firewalls, so you do not have to open up Pulse audio. You can use SSH port for it to tunnel the sound system connections through firewalls.

You do not have to open up a separate port. And then on the Shared Media tab, in here is where you can add your local files, and it will use SFTP to actually transfer those files. So now here, I'll show you what it's like to log in. So I'm logging into the one here on my LAN. In the background, I have... Let me minimize that guy.

In the background here, this is the system up on DigitalOcean right here. And you can actually start to see the problem right here in the system tray with this double volume icon thing that's going on. I've seen that before. That's due to me changing the resolutions. But to Monte's credit, if I resize

this X2Go window here, Monte will snap pretty well to that. Boom. And it resizes pretty dynamically. So to its credit, I can't sit here and I can screw around with the window size proportions and Monte actually handles it pretty good.

It's just sometimes those notification icons lose their crap. Yeah. But before I log into the local LAN system, while I have it up on the screen, here is the system

that I have up on DigitalOcean. I call this one Orbital. I'll try to get it on the screen. And I just thought maybe if you're watching the video version, I'd show you what the performance is like. Yeah, walk us around a bit. So let's open up. Here's my file manager. And you can see when I maximize the window, you can see there's a –

That was smooth. It's pretty good. There's a real slight delay, but it's pretty usable. Here's me dragging the window around. Again, maybe not quite as smooth. If I was running locally, I'd also be using compass to them. Right. But in terms of like latency, like when I type in terminal, it's, it's right on the money for me. It's, there's no delay there, right? It's, it's, it pops up on the

window. I can start typing immediately. When I, when I hit enter on commands, like they'll show up instantaneously on screen. There's, there's's no delay here in which would prevent me from working. Let's try browsing the web. This is usually the most challenging, actually, is this browsing the web thing, because it involves redrawing. You've got it signed into your account. Oh, yeah.

Look at this. That's great. It's ready to go for me. Oh, yeah, it's ready to go at all the times. This is actually probably the best test. Scrolling a complicated web page. This web page is Twitter, it has video playing on it right now, and you can see

there's some sort of herky-jerky as it reloads, and there's a little bit of delay, like when I stop, it keeps going for just a brief moment. And the remote server, we have to keep in mind, doesn't have any sort of GPU even integrated to help with the fancy rendering. Right, exactly. Totally.

So now let's compare that to... Here, I'll log into my local system. Now, this is with my compression settings basically saying, let's have at it. You're on a LAN connection, so let's just go nuts. And so this will kind of be a good comparison if you have a pretty fast connection.

So that's a slower connection, what we just showed you. It's usable. It's very usable. There's just some herky-jerky when you're scrolling or dragging windows, but it's definitely usable. And if you're working in a terminal, you're working in a text editor, you're browsing web, you're chatting Telegram, all these things, Slack, all work just fine in that slower connection. But now let's take a look at the land speeds where I feel like it really shines. Let's go back. We'll

do the Twitter test here again. We'll make it nice and big so that way it's the same size. We start doing the scrolling much smoother. And it's right on point with me too. Like there's no latency. When I stop scrolling, it scrolls. This, you, if I didn't tell you this is a remote session, I don't think you would be able to tell on your own.

I think you could legitimately sit down at this computer and not— Yeah, that was, like, maximized and— Yeah, and not suspect this is a remote session. It is that performant over the LAN. This is key for me because that means I can sit down at any of these systems and have a really great, really well-performing experience. So much so that—check this out. We'll go into the Unfilter archive here, and we can play a little CyberNews,

and the video actually plays. Are we going to get full cyber here? This is their audio, too. This is from the remote session. ...is now putting nearly all of them at risk. Wow. A bug known as crack. No, not crack! It's a fundamental flaw in the technology. And that is live from my remote session,

video and audio, and they're synced up. It's playable. I mean, it's damn impressive. And this is a headless Ubuntu box out in the garage right now. Side note, it's really fun to watch mainstream media try to cover things like Wi-Fi. Yeah, they are the worst at that, aren't they?

So you can see there's a... So let's go just as a comparison note now. Let's go try to play that same video on the remote session. Because, again, I have these things pretty synced up. So I have sort of the same stuff on both systems. So we go play the same clip now on the remote session. Let's see how that works. Ooh, much herkier, jerkier.

Barely watchable. Not watchable. The audio is staying current, though. That's impressive. Audio is staying current, but. That's impressive. Audio is staying current, but it is a disastrous slideshow. That could be because there's, I doubt that's a GPU thing. I think that's just a compression thing. I'm pretty sure that's just compression. But it is such a game changer for me. That's awesome. Because it's still usable even over the Wi-Fi.

It's still completely usable, and I'm able to do bandwidth-intensive things in the remote session, and then when it's time for me to come into the studio, I close the window, and I sit back down at the system here, and I reopen the window, and if I'm working off of suborbital, it's just super fast, but if I'm working off the remote system, everything's the same, nothing's changed, and it performs great here on the connection for the studio. So X2Go is definitely worth a look. It's still very, very relevant. I don't know what its future is in a Wayland universe, but to be honest, I'm not as concerned about that yet. You'll get there.

I don't think the production systems are going to Wayland in the next year or so. So that's a problem for future Chris in about two years, maybe. Unless that gnome Wayland session doesn't crash so much. Or if Pipewire comes up with some really badass remote system. If anybody knows a way that's even more performed than

X2Go, I absolutely would try it. Because video editing is still a little herky-jerky for me. I know that's a very high bar, but boy, wouldn't that be a treat. In the past, I've used XPRA, or it's also part of the WinSwitch project. I know WinSwitch supports multiple operating systems. I don't know

how X2Go... If you look online, if you search for a comparison between the two you'll almost exclusively find hacker news posts reddit posts asking for a comparison and then no further comments so it's a little bit different and i haven't used both of them but maybe xpra is something you could try and just compare in the past i'd been running uh obs on a droplet and i've been using that to control the stream, and that was working pretty nicely. I did not do any intensive editing necessarily, so I can't speak to that. I'm not talking intensive editing. I'm talking like avid mucks, clip off the end, clip off the beginning, grab 30 seconds of a clip.

Very basic mark in, mark the in, mark the out, export. So it might be worth just throwing that on that same droplet and just connecting up and seeing what the experience is like. Will you toss a link to that in the show notes section? I sure will. I would love to take a look at that. And you were suggesting a couple other things, too. But go ahead. I know you want to say something, seriously.

Oh. You had suggested Splashtop. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which could work because it basically encapsulates the entire desktop. Yeah, it's basically just a video stream. It's an H.264 stream. Yeah. That then, you know, takes your inputs and outputs and

forwards them. Kind of sounds like a waterpark ride, but that's just a perk, I guess. Splashtop might also be a good solution, but the thing I really like about X2Go is there's no session running at the physical machine. These are sessions that run

headless that I can pop in and pop out of. And I could still go hook up a monitor, mouse, and keyboard to that machine and log in to the desktop, I suppose, if I wanted to. At least on the local one. Really cool. There are ways to connect to the local desktop, too. So there is ways to connect to the running session. I just don't.

That's not what I'm using it for. Does anybody have any input in the Discord there on this particular topic or how they do remote desktop for Linux? And I am specifically going for, like, remote desktop, not just SSH. Because this is using SSH, actually. I have that as an option, too, now, obviously. Right. But you need the graphical thing. You already have a solution for remote terminals.

We figured that out, like, 10 years ago. You know what works? If you do, by the way, in the Discord room, just toss a hand in the chat. You know what works super well for me is having a basic bitch terminal that I'm sitting at that has a couple of X terminals or something, like whatever, that I can SSH into these boxes that I'm X-ed to going into. So then I have a graphical interface, and in the background, I have an SSH terminal command line into that box. And if anything gets weird in my graphical environment, I am one second away, less than a second away,

from tabbing over to that terminal and killing a process or fixing the issue. It's like I have a backdoor into the main system I'm always working on in a way that gives me this really supreme confidence that I'm going to be able to handle anything that happens in that graphical session, because I've got this emergency persistent backdoor. And because both these systems, like the one on DigitalOcean, the one on the LAN are so rock solid. My SSH session has been running to both these systems now on one of my boxes for like six days without without being broken. So like the terminal is always there always connected in. It's it's always just a couple of commands away. That's great.

It is. It's just a cool way to work. I really like it. Bashful, you had a comment on GPU. Go for it. I'd love to hear about that. I'm just curious out of a bunch of the stuff that you've done research on, have you found anything that actually leverages the GPU? Well, I think Splashtop would because it might be when it's encoding. You know, for me, I don't actually, I don't need my desktop session to be composited. What I need the GPU for is encoding video or potentially maybe running OBS,

which maybe that's where I'd run into this problem because I do want to experiment with that as well. So those are some, I could see some workloads in the future where it'd be a problem. Yeah, I know a bunch of the, a couple of the big three are looking towards gpu workloads

with remote desktop um but i'm wondering on the pricing behind it like there's already things that can leverage it both for the desktop session and so on so forth but it's pretty damn pricey i could see for my orbital system the one that i call it orbital because it's out in the cloud uh i could see moving that to like uh to say if if, like, Amazon or somebody came around or your Rackspace or an Azure came around and said, we can do hosted Linux desktop, and it'll have a GPU, and you can connect to it from any operating system,

and it's $25 a month. I may give it a serious consideration because this is a legitimate work tool for me, but it's going to be impossible for any of them to compete with Suborbital, the system I have on the LAN, because that's got gigabit access to my OBS recording. That's got gigabit access to all the other machines. It's got physical hardware that I can come and I can plug into it and then get access

to. So maybe I want to one day plug in an SD card reader to it or something, you know, weird stuff like that, that I could never get in a hosted system. So it's, to me, having these two boxes is the invaluable part, because the orbital system is totally independent of the studio. If the studio goes offline, or I'm in some weird place, and it's way faster for me to connect to that, I've always got that. But I can't ever see replacing suborbital because that's, that's, that's unique, because it's here on the land. I think the GPU instances are probably,

at least not in the short term, never going to come in at like 25 bucks a pop. If you just look at what it costs to go and rent one on like Google computer, Amazon or whatever, like they're significantly more expensive and that's not even running them, you know, full time.

Well, I am grateful that Mate works as well as it does actually really, you know, when I look at how I can resize these windows and just sort of abuse it and it just sort of snaps back for the most part, I'm pretty grateful for that. And I'm really grateful that it has – I have put it – I took the Redmond layout and I've modified the Redmond layout, which puts essentially everything in one bar at the bottom. So you have your task switcher, your launchers, your system tray. I'm not doing any docs or anything like that. I just have like some quick launch icons.

And then I've got one of the Mate launchers here. I don't think it's Brisk, but maybe. Oh, yeah, it is Brisk. Yeah, in fact, I replaced the one it had for the Redmond and I added Brisk. And it's just so freaking functional. You know, it's just, it's unbelievable. Like I've got, I just, I could rave for two episodes about how there is really something to that just straightforward, practical, everything works as I expected. It's rock solid. I mean, these systems have been running for days now and I I'll have the commands you need to run if you're on Ubuntu to install it.

It's really just a few packages. It's also available on a lot of other distros. I really encourage you to play around with it, even if you're just playing around on your LAN. Or you just want to get more use out of one really powerful system in your house. Because you can have multiple people logged in at the same time. Or even, I mean, you can use it for more traditional things too you know like uh supporting family members or others if you have that installed you just if you have these instructions now just get it set up one time and then when you need to jump on their box there you

go but you could also you know if money's tight you could get one really nice family system and then just scrape together get a couple of dumb terminals that are i was immediately thinking about that yeah right like have one big beacon. Or Chromebook even. You know, get some Chromebooks. Then the Chromebooks run next to Go. They connect into it. And the one central box in your house has got the i7.

It's got the GPU. It's got the disk. You can also then like easily manage backups and all kinds of stuff that way. Well, start thinking about how it changes your media management too. You know, if I load MB on one of these things and I start just doing my downloads and my media management on one of these things, then all of a sudden life just gets a lot easier because the MB server is running locally on the box. The media files are all locally on the box. I can remote into it and have local access or I can stream it over MB. When you take a Linux server and you put a desktop on it,

is essentially what I've done, there's actually surprisingly nice uses for having a desktop on a server if it's not hosting web pages or performing traditional server roles. If it's doing more like syncing your media, maybe downloading files for you, things like that, all of a sudden it's very useful. I really like it. And it's a solution that's not new to me. I did something like this eight, nine years ago

when I worked at a school that had very restrictive web filtering. I would remote into a physical box that I had in a rack in a data center somewhere. And I used NoMachine back then, NoMachine NX, which is what this is based off of. And it worked back then. And it's sort of an old idea, and it just still really holds a lot of water, especially with 1710, Ubuntu Mate, I'm not making any kind of compromise in a modern desktop environment.

And you, I mean, as we all know, Chris, you're somewhat picky in terms of, you know, interactions, other things. So if this wasn't usable, you would be the first to say. Oh, that's true. I would, yeah. And I'm still like, you know, I may try XFCE, and if I could have a GPU-accelerated composited desktop, I might like that. Right. I'll have to have one. We'll get there. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll get there. In the meantime, it gives me the freedom to sort of wreck havoc in the studio and at least know I've got a couple of escape patches where all my stuff's already logged in, ready to go, telegrams right there, Slack's right there, all my AS, all my bookmarks, all my show notes. The shows can go on. Mm-hmm. And that's really what it's all about and it really you know gosh it's just it's just so low overhead i love i love that about open

source software yeah i didn't have to go spend hundreds of dollars to get some sort of remote desktop package i didn't i didn't have to hassle with any of that not to you know not to not to overstress that but that is just such a nice thing when you all of a sudden get a wild hair and you think oh my gosh i could solve this problem I'm about to have with free software. It really is empowering. It really is great. And that's the message right there we want to end on. But I'd love to hear what you do for remote desktop access,

especially if you've got one that performs super, super well. Please, please let us know. Comment wherever you watch this, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact, or linuxunplugged.reddit.com. That's subreddit. Definitely could use some love. Okay, Wes,

guess what? It's time to end the show today. Yeah. Yeah. Beardsley, how do you think the discord test went? Pretty, pretty good.

Pretty good. We're going to be back on mumble while we evaluate. So join us back on mumble next week. If you want to participate in the virtual lug, find out when the show is live over at Jupiter broadcasting.com slash calendar. And join us live at JBLive.tv where we've got the live stream there as well as links to watch it in other places. You've been commanded. No excuses now.

There is no excuse. Make it happen. Make it show, as Captain McCarr would say. Follow the network at Jupiter Signal. Thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode. And we'll see you back here next week for episode 221. Say goodbye, guys. Goodbye.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Goodbye. I don't know. I think I got a little post show in me. Yeah. I got a little post show in me. Yeah, I got a little post show. Some postings. Bashful's got some follow-up, some real-time follow-up here. And then before Popey goes, I have some FOMO stuff I want to talk to him about. But Bashful, I got to hear what you got to hear. There's such a tease over there.

There's a tease over here. Well, I got to be careful how much i say but um long and the short of it is is that where i'm working right now we actually have an agent a different that runs over the pcip protocol that can leverage the gpus natively oh for remote oh Oh, I want. Yep. So basically our entire company is... Yeah, well, it's kind of on its way. Like our whole company runs remotely. Everything in our office is just either a laptop or what's called a Xero client.

Interesting. That's pretty cool. And so there's basically no computers. So I'm preaching to the choir when it comes to you guys. You guys are already hip to this notion. Yeah, we've been, well, I mean, that's what the company I work for was founded on and stuff like that. And so, for example, Amazon Workspace is their Windows offering.

Like, that's our agent. Yeah, that's really how I got into iTunes, this kind of stuff, doing remote desktop, terminal services stuff. It's interesting. Now it's just getting hosted by larger companies. Well, it's that. And also, a lot of people tend to look at it for now.

I almost equate it to application streaming. So where a lot of our workloads are going is people bringing specific applications over the net. And it's a lot of CAD and video editing and stuff like that. Basically, everyone wants to leverage remote resources and hardware x i was gonna i should have mentioned x to go also has support for publishing just a just a single app but yeah um so popia i have to ask what's uh tell me you you are i believe you are preaching the church of rust to everybody and i i feel like i'm totally left out i know i know rust is a game i know there's something that's not just a programming language um but um

what kind of chase someone right now is it so it's like is it like an open world game yeah it's a bible just court outed you that you were playing yeah i'm playing at the moment. And it obviously works under Linux, I take it. Popey. Oh yeah, that's it. Can I ask how many penises you've seen in the past half hour? Penises? That's pretty personal.

Rust is notorious for having a lot of male genitalia swinging around. So is it like a co-op environment? Is it self-hosted servers? Is it multiplayer at all, Popey? Is it single player? Yeah, yeah, it's totally multiplayer.

So it's a big open world. Think Minecraft, but with decent graphics. No wonder it's so big. Exactly. It's hilarious. Sorry, I'm playing it right now while we're talking. And so the premise is you arrive naked on an island and you have to run around and gather resources

and fortify your base because other people will come along and kill you. Oh, no. And they will kill you. So how do you know, like, how do you know? So can you build your own server? Like, can you run your own system so you could just have your own world where people won't kill you? Yeah, yeah, you could totally do that. I play mostly on the gaming on Linux server.

So Liam, the guy who runs gaming on Linux. I saw him tweeting about it. Yeah, he has his own server and we play on there but there are other servers that are modded there are some that are stock and some that are tweaked to be you know better faster different in some way is it hostile is it fun like is it oh it's it's generally shoot on site so if you see some naked person running in front of you you shoot them first and then run up to their body and steal their stuff and if they turn out to be your friend then you revive them uh but it's generally shoot on sight it's survival just now yeah just now when

you were talking to be uh an airplane flew over and did an airdrop in airdrops you on you find automatic weapons and all kinds of other useful so if i have any so if i join do i have any shot of making it before getting murdered at this point or is there just too many people so the interesting thing is the servers reset every month because it's currently in alpha um any server you join pretty much any of the the stock servers will wipe and um so if you join soon after the wipe, you're in with a bit of a chance. If you joined now,

like a few days or a week before the server wipes, then chances are everyone else has automatic weapons and you arrive as a naked, and they'll just shoot you straight away. And the interesting thing about these kind of games, and I believe Rust is one of them is if you log off, your body stays in the world. So you can go and find somebody that's like laying around and just steal

their stuff. Yes. So this is why you fortify your, your place and you build a house in which you're protected. So when you exit the game, your body is left in a place where nobody can get you, but people could build C4 and explode the walls, bust through your wall, steal your stuff. So, yeah.

So, it must be like some sort of mad rush for resources and territory when the server resets. Very much so. Yeah, yeah. God, that sounds really stressful. And then just a constant war until the reset. I mean, it also sounds really fun if I was good at it. It would be fun, but until I was... Which is, it also sounds really fun if I was good at it. It would be fun. But until I was hilarious, you don't even have to be good.

I have I have shared some space with Wimpy. Me and him have a little compound. We have high, high walls around it with an automatic door and automatic turrets. So if anyone busted through the door, they get shot as soon as they come through the door. And all kinds of other ways in which to protect our stuff. It's the Wimpleby Alliance. It's all ephemeral anyway. Yeah, it sounds fun though because it's...

In a week or so, this is all going to be thrown away and we all start again as nakeds on the beach. So yeah, it's good fun. It's really kind of profound in a lot of ways, actually. Yeah. It's what it is. It's like kind of profound in a lot of ways, actually, is what it is. It's like society, what would happen if society completely collapsed? This is what we'd have.

That's the weird thing. We've built up knowing that the, so when you know that the server wipe is coming, when it gets close to the server wipe, nobody cares about anything because you know you're all going to get wiped out in a week a week so everyone just goes attacking everyone even people you had as friends with your friends attacking everyone oh what does this say about humanity what does this say you're so you start building up a stockpile of food and weapons and armor and clothes and you know, the resources you need to survive the apocalypse.

It's brilliant. That's pretty great. All right. I just bought it on Humble Bundle. I'm going to give it a go. I've got to try it. I've got to try it. What do you guys say?

Gen 2 challenge next week for Halloween?