LINUX Unplugged - Episode 221: Ubuntu A-Team | LUP 221

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

Two of Ubuntu’s top contributors join us to chat a bit about the 17.10 release, working upstream with Gnome, the future of SNAPS in Ubuntu & goals for 18.04.Plus the public beating Kodi is taking for an open source problem, Flatpak gets mature & the Linux Foundation is working on open source AI.Then we share some recent distro reload anecdote & a bunch of community news.

I feel like we should probably warn everybody that next week is the daylight savings monster in the U.S. And it's going to mess with everybody's live time. It's already happening. That's one of the reasons why we don't have any folks here today is it's already happened across the pond. They're all screwed up. Yes, we are. I still blame George W. Bush for this. It was really Bush's fault.

And now it's totally, ever since he did that, it's screwed with my live shows around this time of year. So next Sunday, the 5th, at 2 a.m. in the U.S., we switch. So now it's going to mess with LAN. But since LAN isn't live. No big deal. Yeah. See, if we just had that one Linux-based world government. Yeah, right.

It could all just be Unix time. Would that be the Linux Foundation? Yeah, I guess so. They're going to have to change from a sort of foundation to government agency. But let's put a pin in that idea, Wes. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 221 for October 31st, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's still in a reinstall fugue state. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Beard! Mmm, burgers. Yeah, we all have some burger pleasantry going on right now, but that's not what we're here to talk about. We're not here to talk about burgers, at least not yet. No, we have a really great show lined up for you today. Very excited about today's program for a couple of reasons. We have two guests coming on. Didrox, who posted all of the Ubuntu GNOME journey posts for the 17.10 release cycle,

shares some insights, including an anecdote that occurred just before 17.10 went live that hasn't been posted anywhere because they're all too exhausted. And if you think that those final ISOs are final, maybe not. Maybe, maybe not. Yeah. So it's an interesting anecdote. We'll get to that. And then Will Cook, the Ubuntu desktop manager, joins us.

And I got a couple of hard questions for him. Specifically, I want to know if them dropping Unity sort of takes away some of their strategic advantage of controlling their own desktop. And I ask him if Canonical's goals with Snaps are going to impact their

relationship with GNOME, which obviously they are very dependent on now. And I'm just curious how he sees that relationship. So those, amongst other questions, we'll cook answers in just a little bit in the show. But of course, we have a whole bunch of community news to get into. And we have a, I'll say a humble virtual look today. Hello, Mumble Room. Thank you for joining us. Hello.

Hello. Good day. Hello, Robot Arms. So we have a couple of guys, which actually, the best guys. We have the best people, I'm told. People tell me. These are the best. So we have much to get into today, but I wanted to take a moment and share my fugue state of reinstalling computers with you just for a moment.

I've gone full maniac. I haven't been on a tear like this in years. And it's really morphed into something perverted that's going to give me, people are going to give me crap. I'm going to tell you guys something in just... Because it's content. Yeah, sit down if you need to. Be prepared.

Please go gentle on me when I tell you this. Please. But I have to be honest with you. I have been installing Ubuntu 16.04 like crazy. Did Noah make you do this? Like, what's happening here? He and I have almost swapped positions again. It's kind of funny.

It's kind of funny and totally unrelated. He and I just had a conversation about this. I had a, you know, I just had a, I had a kind of, I had a come to Linus moment where I was sitting here in the studio getting ready to reload the next machine. And you'll understand more after my interview with Will Cook, by the way.

This will give you some of the insights as to why I've made my decision. But I decided after evaluating GNOME, Plasma, Mate, and Unity 7 for the studio, where we have some high DPI requirements and on, we have some touchscreen requirements and don't, I evaluated those desktops to see who would be the best one. In fact, I didn't even intend to evaluate desktops to see if they could, who would be the best one. In fact, I didn't even intend to evaluate Unity.

It just sort of happened by mistake. I never even gave any considerations. Just one of the systems happened to have it on there. And after trying all these desktops for production, I know you guys get sick of hearing this, but I'm just, I decided that don't, don't give me shit, but it's actually Unity 7. It's ironically Unity 7. It's the most stable. It seems to perform the best under load.

And it has polish in areas that matter to me. I'm not saying it's better than GNOME, but I am saying that for areas that matter to me, it's better than GNOME. And so I'll give you a couple of examples. Multi-monitor support is still better in Unity. Guess what we use a lot here in the studio. I still prefer the way that they handle the launcher.

I still prefer that system, that super key system, and instead of the way that GNOME implements it. It's not a big difference, but I do prefer it. There's other things, though, that are like rough edges that have been rounded off by Unity where you can tell that a lot of thoughts... It's ironically, in some ways, a lot of thoughts, it's ironically in some ways a lot like when I use

elementary OS. You are struck with and maybe Dan can talk about this a bit, but you are struck with shit, somebody thought of that. Somebody actually thought of that and solved that problem for me. And when that hits you

a few times, you're like, oh man that there is something else going on here that i've missed uh and i don't know dan if you want to expand upon the point of where sometimes some projects are willing to spend i would assume you tell me if i'm wrong a hell of a lot of time on something a lot of other people might not even consider important yeah i mean i think it just comes from just dogfooding and obsessive perfectionism just hating yourself enough to to sit through it and you know it's a good way to put it and um i mean you're grinding your way through it and punishing yourself as you just keep working away at it yeah i mean i don't know if you remember the the first versions of unity were awful you know oh yeah yeah right and it the same thing for any software you remember the first versions of Unity were awful, you know? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right?

And the same thing for any software, I think. The first versions are like, this is what we assume is going to be good. And then they're terrible. And then it's, you know, you grind through it and you iterate on it and you go, okay, this is what we learned and changed. And, you know. And that's really, you know, that's been happening to the Plasma desktop and GNOME, too. Like, they've all been going through iterative releases where they've been getting better and better. the Plasma desktop and GNOME 2,

they've all been going through iterative releases where they've been getting better and better. I switched over full-time to GNOME 3 when 3.12 was sort of the main release. And I think every release since then has been getting progressively better. And I was very excited about GNOME 3 for a long time. And I never switched away from Unity because of GNOME 3.

I didn't switch away because of that. I switched away from Unity because of GNOME 3. I didn't switch away because of that. I switched away from Unity because I switched to Arch. And with that, I switched to GNOME. And I was excited by the idea of a polished desktop for all distributions. That's really what fired me up about GNOME. Coming back to it now, now I have a different mindset. In the studio, these are not machines that I use to enjoy.

I don't use these to play. I don't really play a lot of video games, but I do play with my computer a lot. And these are not machines that I use to enjoy. I don't use these to play. I don't really play a lot of video games, but I do play with my computer a lot. And these are not computers I play with. So it doesn't matter if they're appliances. And so when I sat down to load 1710 with the new GNOME 3 desktop, I said, well, okay, what is 1710 giving me that 1604 doesn't? Because we've already got a 1604 machine in production that has been rock solid. And Beard and I looked up the packages that we need and we didn't see any,

all the software we needed is available. Wow. Yeah. And it struck me, this is not the same path it was back when you, in 14.04 or 12.04. 12.04 especially. Yeah.

The LTS as your desktop now is much more doable. Every single package I wanted was available for 16.04 without – I used to come on air and say Ubuntu LTS desktops are the hardest distro to install software on because after about a year and a half, nobody makes software for it anymore and all your PPAs break. Everybody's making software for it now. Every single app that I've installed via a dev was all available for 16.04 or snaps. And including OBS and FFmpeg versions that we used to not be able to get. It's just a different landscape now. And so I just kind of made like this business decision that I was going to deploy 16.04 and just I got six months until the next LTS comes out if I want. And then once I made that decision, I made the part that I'm, that I've actually been building to, because I know

we've been talking a lot about Ubuntu. This is kind of the last big episode on it for a while. And I decided if I'm going to be practical and be all business-like with my machines and go 16.04, why not also experiment with deploying Ubuntu's product or Canonical's product called Landscape? with deploying Ubuntu's product or Canonical's product called Landscape. Now, Landscape is sort of a central management platform where you can also do inventory, package management, user management, script management, performance monitoring,

all of these things across all your machines from one central place. And you get like 100 credits for free for the first 60 days or something like that. And I think it works out, depending on which tier you get like 100 credits for free for the first 60 days or something like that. And I think it works out, depending on which tier you get, it works out to be about $5 a month. And if you're watching the video version right now, I have got my landscape account up on the screen. I've got five machines registered. This is the terror I've been on recently is these five.

And you can see just by a quick glance that I have two outstanding alerts over these five machines. One computer has upgrade packages available, and one computer has been upgraded but needs to be rebooted. Eh, that's not too bad. But there's some things that are actually really quite neat about it. One thing is the performance monitoring. So I can pull up graphs across all of our studio systems, and I can see if one system is under quite a bit more load than the other system. I can see at what times that is, like if it's show times or if it's non-show times,

memory usage, swap usage, temperatures for the storage and for the hardware. And any of this can be downloaded as a CSV. And I can zoom in and just look at one machine for any of this information, or I can get all of the machines, which is the screen we're looking at right now if you're watching the video version. Additionally, like I said, it also kind of has like an inventory management aspect to it. So I can click in and get the hardware information. So you can see here is the Precision 7720 that I'm using at the Lady Joop's office, quote unquote, which is a chair.

And it has Ubuntu 16.04.3 on it. It's got the Xeon E3-1535M6 processors in it, 64 gigabytes of RAM. It gives you the whole hardware spec, any kind of technician notes that are on it. You can change its power state or schedule a reboot, change which groups it is in. You can go in even further and get more detailed things like serial numbers and biostates and Mac addresses and all the things you would get from an inventory management system, as well as monitoring and alerting if there's an outage, which is great.

And of course, the thing that I really signed up for is, and this has just been really nice for me, is package management. And they break it out in a way that is easy to read. So like, here's the cracklib-runtime. And instead of some complicated CVE thing, it's just runtime support for password checker library. It gives me real English descriptions of what these vulnerabilities are. And then if I expand it, I get all the CVEs, I get everything. But I am able to make an educated decision if that's worth me interrupting one of our production systems.

And I've been using this. I don't know if I'm going to keep it once. I don't know. I don't know if I'll keep it once my 100 credits runs out. If I find it makes it easier for us to do IT in the studio, which is kind of always a time suck for either the beard or myself, I think I'd do it. You also get alerts. So you can see I've got one computer that has the packages, one computer that needs to be rebooted. And I could issue that reboot from here, of course. So I'll go ahead and I'll issue the reboot command to the precision that's...

Nice. Yeah, and I can just say restart as soon as possible. And machines that need to be restarted also get a little icon next to their name, a little, like, cycle icon. Yeah. And so that's what I've been playing with since our last episode.

I know it's sort of... I've explained it before. This show is sort of like the Deep Space Nine of Linux podcasts, where sometimes we have continuing story arcs that we keep going back on and this has been one of them. And I think my takeaway from it is, I forgot

how much I liked Unity. And I've never been a Unity hater, so it's not like I'm reversing some position I've taken, but I haven't been a Unity user. And I've been maybe a Unity denier, like I just pretend like it doesn't exist. Like when we were first evaluating desktops, I've been maybe a Unity denier. I just pretend like it doesn't exist. When we were first evaluating desktops, I didn't even consider Unity. Because it's that thing that

only Ubuntu has. Right, yeah. So you don't really think of it as the first class desktop environment. No. Then all of a sudden I'm like, well, but I'm going to install Ubuntu. Oh. And stay tuned for the interview with Will Cook, because you'll see why it may actually work out to be a really great long-term bet here in a little bit. Did you have anything? You looked like you had something you were pontificating on over there.

Are you just dreading us formatting the last of these machines? I'm dreading having to support Unity, Chris. Hopefully you won't have to. Well, you'll love that comp is window effects, let me tell you. Well, in the meantime, the media is continuing their freak out. Yes, I said the media is continuing their freak out about Kodi. I don't know why it's Cody. That's the thing they hate.

Well, I do have a theory, but I am really worried here because if you read this story, and this is unfortunate, Brian Barrett over at Wired, and I generally like Wired stuff, just did a real hit piece against Cody. But it's actually an indictment of open source, and that's what concerns me, is you could remove Cody and you could put a lot of other project names in the spaces and have the same damn problems. Even desktop distros. So here's its start. I mean, it starts with a vengeance.

The Kodi box pitch is hard to resist. A little black plastic square. Not much different than a Roku or an Apple TV, and similar in function as well. This streamer, though, offers something those others never will. Free access to practically any show or movie you can dream of. No rental fees, no subscriptions. Just type in the name of a blockbuster

and start watching in high-definition stream in seconds. What are we doing here? Let's just do that. We don't need to do this whole podcast thing. Damn, and of course, if I'm an industry executive reading that in Wired, I just poop myself a little bit. Oh, yeah. That or I'm the one writing this.

But I won't despair the author here. He goes on, he makes, he does write some interesting history about Kodi and the XBMC connection, if you're curious, and does mention a few things here and there, but gets a few stingers in that really is the part that i go oh god this could be any open source project like any open source ecosystem cody contains multitudes there are the cody media player itself there's the tv

add-ons and other developer communities and there are the plugins that scrape the internet for pirated material those are what transformed cody into the modern day pirate's favorite ship. It's a bit of a wild west. Cody's open source. Anyone can take that software and put any piece and put it on any hardware. And the industry has thrived too because it's managed to stay relatively underground, at least in the US. relatively underground, at least in the US. Which is funny, because if you look at statistics for torrent downloads, they've gone from like damn near 30% of internet traffic to like 5% of internet traffic. So torrent piracy is way down. And that's what these plugins do is they're torrent plugins

that are capable of ordering the torrent in a way that lets them stream in real time. That's what these plugins are doing. And if you have to do it that way, because if you just did HTTP streams, you'd get shut down immediately. And you could say that Ubuntu Mate is an enabler of terrorist activities, because maybe they used Ubuntu Mate to plan a terrorist attack. This is a really, really slippery slope. And the Kodi project has had, at least here in the U.S., has had to make a really interesting response to cover their own asses because they're becoming the poster child. The context here is this story I'm covering for you is damn near a weekly story, if not at least a twice a month story.

And I covered it a long time ago on the show. And I decided to cover it again to illustrate to you that it's a problem that is not going away. And I'm, I am a bit concerned about this to tell you the truth. And, um, the Cody project has had to respond in a way that I don't like, and I can't see how they could have handled this any other way. And the, the, the thing that sucks is I could see other open source projects having to do the same thing.

Well, first of all, they got to get all business. Like then they have to lawyer up and, they got to get all businesslike. Then they have to lawyer up. And then they have to go sue the shit at anybody that sells anything that says Kodi that isn't just straight vanilla build from the project's website. Because then they can tell the courts, but look, we're trying to fight this. We're trying to go after these guys because our pure Kodi project doesn't have these plug-ins. So we're going to go after these guys because our PureCody project doesn't have these plugins. So we're going after them. But of course, this is a short-term play because they just stopped putting Cody in the name. Here's a quote from

the Cody project, or I guess the Cody company. We're basically taking the stance that if you use the word Cody to mean something other than the vanilla software we release, if you pre-install add-ons or something like that, that means you're no longer shipping Kodi, and we consider it a trademark violation. That's, he goes on to comment,

that sort of worked. We've been able to get a bunch of sellers off eBay and Amazon that way. Oh, man. I mean, you could legitimately, WGIT could be put in this position. This is bad. And what it feels like to me when I read Brian's post here, and I'm sure Brian Barrett is not a tool of the copyright industrial complex. that are super worried about their fiefdoms being torn down by this internet thing. And so they've got to start casting shade as much as possible and delegitimizing these things and getting people to go into the grooves that are Roku, Apple TV,

and the things that are built to sell you content that is DRM'd and licensed. And this is part of the strategy. Oh, yeah. And the reason why it's in Wired is because it's appealing to the geek audience with this one. And that's also why you have the back history of XBMC it's appealing to the geeks you gotta get all the demos

you gotta get the executives, you gotta get the geeks you gotta get all the demos, make sure you really get this whole thing locked down and I worry about the Cody project so I have a link in the show notes if you want to read the whole thing because I did just give you some of the highlights I hate to see it happen to Cody and I hate to see you want to read the whole thing because I did just give you some of the highlights. I hate to see it happen to Cody.

And I hate to see them have to become super litigious because of it. Yeah, it creates a bad culture for everyone who's involved instead of just being like, hey, Cody's awesome and it's a great, useful, open source project. You want to talk about something positive? Oh, please. Do you have any? I don't have any. New flat pack. Oh, new flat pack.

Does it come itself in a Flatpak? How does that work? Well, the Flatpak may be getting a little flatter and easier for people to understand or stable. So this is, we got two things actually. It's kind of neat. You're going to have Flatpak 0.10, which is going to be like a, we won't call it LTS, but it's going to be the stable series of Flatpak, the 0.10. Okay. And then you're going to have the fancy 0.11,

which will get all the new features, all the new fancy stuff. Yeah, so 0.10, the first one, is going to be the first in a series of new releases that are stable. New features will all be added to the 0.11 branch, and bug fixes will be backported to the 0.10 branch, which seems like a great way to put something in production

but keep improving on it, and then maybe all those accumulate to like a 0.12 and you start having like a kernel versioning system. It's kind of impressive that they're already doing this sort of, like a lot of projects takes a long time for them to get like a real development release workflow, but they're still at the, you know, they're not even at like a real full release yet,

and yet they're doing this well. Yeah, yeah, and we saw recently that the mint project is going in with uh flat packs because they kind of like the more ppa run your own repo uh solution than the centralized store solution and you can see how there could be different advantages to both and meanwhile the folks over at elementary os have put published an update on the state of the App Center. So we had Dan on the show. Daniel, when did you – I mean, was it – how long ago did you come on the show to talk about the App Center? We did a special ages ago. Oh, I think it was maybe six months.

I can't remember. Yeah, six months. And now you guys have got over 50 apps, and they're looking good. So what's going on with the App Center? How are things? Yeah, it's going pretty well um like you said it's been about six months and we have over 50 apps now actually as of this morning we have 58 apps oh yeah in there so yeah i'm pretty excited about it there's there's all kinds of cool stuff in there i mean things that i never expected people to write. It's been really awesome to see an explosion of native apps.

They're not web apps or cross-platform ports or anything like that. They're all GTK, high DPI ready. It's pretty sweet. Looking good on the desktop too. So are you talking at all about any kind of the money that's been made or if it's profitable at all or anything like that? I mean, I could give you some little stats here and there. I want to be careful because there's people's privacy in question.

Yeah, and it's new. Everything's still new. I don't want to bust somebody out on how much money they make. But I can tell you that nobody's making a living living right now it's still in the realm of like beer money um one of the developers told me uh it's enough that i could take my wife out to dinner that's nice i mean that's a really great that's going from zero to that is really great yeah so you know it like you said it's going from zero to to something is you know it's an improvement but we you know we still have a long way to go Like our eventual goal is that we do want people to make a living.

So we've been talking to different people about, you know, the kind of the problems that they have or what would encourage them to pay more. I know a lot of people want a flow for them to be able to pay later. So they want to be able to download for free at first and then come back and pay. And the store isn't really good at handling that right now you'd have to like uninstall and re-download okay yeah that seems like it seems like sort of that seems like a sort of a problem that other app stores struggle with yeah definitely yeah so that's something that we can be better at you know i was wondering as an end user um what are my expectations for when like uh like uh changes come to the App Center? Is that a release-based thing, like new releases of elementary OS will have new App Center updates with features?

Or is it something that's updated separately of the main OS release? We're releasing updates all the time. We don't freeze application updates at all, even for all our apps even. We post a blog post every month where we talk about the updates we've made. And our average right now is that the average App Center app has received around five updates in the last six months. Gosh, you guys are doing great. Wow. These are some good stuff here.

So I also noticed that it seemed like there was some interest in the App Center by System76. Yeah. there was some interest in the App Center by System76. Yeah, so one of the things that we kind of set out to do when we built App Center is making sure that we were using all of open standards. And so that's awesome for System76 because since we use PackageKit and we use AppStream for our metadata,

they can use our client in Pop!OS and just do some branding work and they really like the way that it works. So they can really benefit as a downstream from this work. Cool. So they're essentially able to, I guess, white label it, in other words, and make it System 76 or Pop! OS branded. Yeah.

So they've got a couple of little tweaks in there. And we've been talking to them about how we can upstream some of their changes, maybe. Cool. But I guess the major difference between their, they're calling it PopShop. The major difference between PopShop and AppCenter is that they aren't using our AppCenter repository. So it's kind of just a front end

for the Ubuntu repositories instead of our AppCenter repository. I'm going to be really curious to see. I want to play with that because it's probably a better experience than GNOME software. I'll love to GNOME software. You guys are doing great uh but uh you know i've also played with app center and i found it to be a i don't know a better experience i would put it um good for them and i wonder if we might see other distributions take that on too i think that's a

great idea so i'm looking at the post i'll have a link in the show notes uh anything else you want to call out about the six month anniversary um Just definitely that if you have an idea for an app, you know, or you want to get involved with either the front end of App Center or the back end of the App Center dashboard, it's written in Node.js. It's all open source. Like we'd love for you to be part of this ecosystem. And there's, you know, tons of different ways that you could fit into it. be part of this ecosystem and and there's you know tons of different ways that you could fit into it definitely and um i'm glad to see progress in like the right directions on some several fronts on this uh you're right and just to reiterate you said it but it's awesome i mean it's not just like 50 more than 50 apps hitting an app center it's 50 apps written for linux gtk plus high dpi

ready fully native. Wow. Yeah. You know, I think one of my favorite things that they've done that a lot of the other app stores don't do is they have links directly to issue trackers. Oh, yeah. That's a great idea.

That's really handy. Wow. Yeah. You know, that's been a big one because I've definitely watched people having that direct link have been able to go file issues and developers are able to fix them really quickly and push out the updates like whenever they want. We have a super tight feedback loop between users reporting issues and developers taking out updates to fix them. Yeah, if you guys

are looking for an app to check out, I suggest Torrential, which is a torrent app that I checked out. Awesome, just nice, simple, clean, fast, good performance, really liked it, Torrential. And it fits right in on the desktop. It's a great experience. And you know what? When you guys launch it, I said it then and I'll say it now. I'm really glad somebody's doing this because I think if we can even just say there's a – even if elementary OS proves out that there is interest in a Linux consumer market, I think that's beneficial. So awesome, guys.

Well, Dan, and I'll also say to Cassidy because he was the one that wrote the, or at least made the post over at Medium, a great work, gentlemen, and great work to the whole team, and great work to all the software developers, too. Thanks. Yeah, that's really good stuff. Now, everybody knows that there's one threat to the human race that goes beyond nukes, goes beyond rocks from space. I mean, I'm not the one saying this. It's Elon Musk saying it. It's AI. AI is going to doom us all.

AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization. In a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs, or bad food were not. They were harmful to a set of individuals within society, of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole. AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization. Whoa, that is not mincing words at all. And so that is the context in which we view this next story. AT&T is working on an open-sourced AI project with the Linux Foundation.

Yeah. And it's going to be called the, ooh, this is the first time I realized I had to say it out loud, ACUMOS? ACUMOS? I don't know. A-C-U-M-O-S. ACUMOS. ACUMOS.

Yeah, the ACUMOS project, which aims to be a marketplace of artificial intelligent apps and services. So Linux Foundation today announced that it's working on an open source AI project. AT&T is one of the founding organizations. In my past experience, this usually means that AT&T is going to be the predominant contributor

and therefore the driving force. We'll see. Something like, uh hey we have this stuff we don't know how to shepherd or steward it but uh if you guys do we'll give you this big chunk of code well it's sort of that definitely yeah um also hey can you help us with a community aspect but it's it's even more than that it's we don't think we can make a buck off the core technology but we know we can make a buck off of ancillary services and services. So if we could get this thing to be a market winner, then we would make a ton of bank.

But we're not going to make bank actually selling it itself. So why don't we hand this over to Linux Foundation? Because then people are willing to take it as a standard because it's not coming from AT&T. And I would assume AT&T is probably a company that could cook something up like this. Might actually be able to give Google or Amazon a run for its money. I mean, they certainly have a lot of money, resources, that sort of thing. Yeah, but I think instead of like a core AI, its goal is more like a platform.

It's to enable a free exchange of ideas, as they say, and machine learning solutions, which is an interesting... That would be interesting, a marketplace and a platform for machine learning solutions using artificial intelligent frameworks. You guys got your buzz bingo? Yeah, right. They want like tools for casual users, not just data scientists. So maybe something that like we could actually go play with. Hey, you never know. You can stick in apps. And microservices. There we go. I had to make sure we got the whole bingo. Oh, yeah, that's important. Oh, that was an interesting development. Now, here's the reality of it, and they say this in the Engadget post that we'll have linked.

The project code will be available near to the platform's launch in early 2018. So maybe we might follow up on the story when that happens if there's some... Yeah, they got a real minimal landing page you can go check out at... Acumos.org. But the fact that they're even talking about this means that there's probably, I bet you, a pretty significant chunk of this thing developed. If I were to wager how these companies work, they generally have almost the whole damn thing lined up. And now it's really a matter of licensing partners, branding, marketing, the new logos for the new name. Because there might be a name change now that they're making it a public project.

And so they have all these old names in there. And all that has to be done before they can actually hand it over to Linux Foundation, and that's all the shit that's happening now. So the code's written, but all this other stupid bureaucratic crap is what's going to take until – Then it can finally make its way to GitHub or wherever it's going to live. Right. Yeah. And then either it will go nowhere or it may be successful. You know, I'm still watching the Edge X Foundry stuff that Dell contributed to the Linux Foundation for IoT,

and I actually think it's a great solution because, quick recap, it's like an IoT firewall, and it takes all your IoT devices and manages them locally on your LAN, and then, of course, can enable remote connections and stuff like that, but it's way more privacy-inclined. It's way more local.

It allows you to build your own custom IoT network using a set of APIs and frameworks that they created that can enable alerting and automatic response and all of this and none of it is connected to the internet or cloud. It absolutely can be and you can even use remote services including the Echo stuff but

you can all run on the land and that seems like that would be a thing but so far I haven't heard a lot of buzz. They've had an update, they've had a big but you can all run on the land. And that seems like that would be a thing. But so far, I haven't heard a lot of buzz. They've had an update. They've had a big software update. It also seems like these are the sorts of things that they kind of go without buzz, maybe because the people who end up getting adopted are...

Right, like, I mean, think about like... There's part of a solution. They are an implementation detail. They are not the product. Like, think about Open Daylight. We went and checked that out. Like, I hadn't heard a bunch about it, but then here's all these different people from different big companies using it.

Yep, yep. Because it's like it's how Linus sees Linux in a lot of ways. Linus says that Linux is often just in implementation detail. It reminds me of the anecdote that when Steve Jobs was still alive, he tried very aggressively to buy Dropbox years and years ago. tried very aggressively to buy Dropbox years and years ago. And his pitch to them was, you should come work for us because you are a feature, not a product, and you will get replaced by the platform eventually. And to some extent, he's right. You now have Google Drive, you have Microsoft OneDrive, you have Apple's iCloud thing. But Dropbox is competing but just like that Edge X Foundry and now this project

what was it Acumus project Acumus there we go Beard's saying that he's the official pronunciation

it may just be an implementation detail for a marketplace or something just like Linux is often an implementation detail for a mobile device for a phone

did they say anything about what license it's going to be no I don't know if you saw did you see anything on their holding page it's definitely's going to be? No, I don't know if you saw. Did you see anything on their holding page? It's definitely not in the news, no. No, and I don't know if, I don't, probably

may not know until they get it up on GitHub. I'm just saying, ANT is popular with the BSD licenses. I'm just wondering if we can connect the Mycroft project with this project and have some sort of like sped up collaboration here where maybe solutions and tricks

could be built over in one spot and they could be deployed to a mic. I'm just saying, Mycroft, please, for the love of God, Mycroft. I don't know if I want a Mycroft Overlord. I'd take it more than an Echo or a Google or any other one. That's for damn sure.

I want it on all the things. You know what else is good for all the things? Linux Academy. If you want something for your Linux box, if you want to learn about some of these cloud services, Cloud Service Eye, is that? Yep, that's it. When you're talking about multiple cloud services,

is it Cloud Service Eye? Is that a thing? Cloud Serve Eye? Hmm. Well, Linux Academy can help you sort it all out. Yeah, they got the right term, so sure. Cloud Servos. I like that.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. That's where you go to support this show and sign up for a free seven-day trial. And a seven-day trial is going to pretty much let you get a good sense of their self-paced in-depth video courses, their hands-on labs, their learning paths if you want to go for a set course in your career, their practice exams to get you ready for quizzes, their certification training if that's your goal. You'll get a sense for some of that. They've also got virtual servers.

They'll spin up on demand that matches your courseware. So say you chose Debian, right? Then the virtual machine's also Debian. I just love that feature. Not only do I love the feature, but when they were building that, that's when we were really talking a lot about them becoming a sponsor.

And oh man, they were so proud of that system because you've got real Linux geeks at the core of this company, real Linux geeks. And then they worked with some of the best educators and developers to create this platform. And now they've got full-time human instructors when you need help. They got a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members that are vibrant and active, and they can participate in the content to a degree too, like the flashcard system is forkable by the community. They have iOS and Android apps to let you study on the go. And speaking of studying on the go,

they also have lesson audio and notebooks and study guides you can download. And, you know, if you're doing that offline thing, it'll work just fine. Turns out Paper has a great battery life. Who knew? It's crazy. And it's got a pretty good contrast ratio. Last millennium's technology. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You go there, you get the seven-day free trial, and you support the show. Thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program, program, program. Let's talk about the Intel ME stuff just really quick. This is the management engine stuff that's actually like an Edison system. If you're not familiar with Edison, that's like a x86 system on a chip thing. It's actually fascinating

because it originates from the 486 and then they've modernized the 486 and this is what makes up the Edison. It's like the best things about the Intel 486 with some of the best things about modern processors for a crazy cheap price and even cheaper for Intel. So, of course, Intel has now built their management engine on more recent Intel boxes off this x86 system.

And this is a huge problem because that means your basic bitch hacker is now going to be able to poke at this thing i mean i'm i'm i'm being a little generous but it's it goes from this weird esoteric architecture where there aren't very many debugging tools to rip this thing apart and it requires these crazy hardware bridges to connect to it to now it's x86 code running on a pc and it just fundamentally changes the game and i think i'm speculating here but i think this is why google is now getting in the game of getting out of intel emmy we recently talked about purism doing it now google's going even further they've started the nerf project it's short for the non-extensible reduced firmware And it's their effort to replace most of the UEFI firmware with a small Linux kernel, an initRAMFS,

and a custom portion of code written in the Go programming language. That's right, everyone. You liked Linux, we're putting Linux in your Linux. So double Linux boot. Yeah, this is from Ron, one of Google's core boot developers. He was in Munich. I'm horrible. I'm the worst person ever. one of, from Ron, one of Google's core boot developers. He was in Munich, no, Munich. I'm horrible.

I'm the worst person ever. Talking about their NERV project at this week's Embedded European Linux Conference. And look that shit up. NERV delivers Linux performance and reliability in its firmware. Oh, don't show that to Alan Jude. Oh my God, don't show that to Alan. Anyways, as well, it also emulates

all post-boot activity of the UEFI and, more importantly, the management engine, rather than allowing it to run concurrently in the background, which that creepy son of a bitch is doing while your OS is running. It's really awful. I really hate it. Currently, the nerf effort is focused on Intel hardware, while the core boot developers acknowledge that the latest AMD chips are closed up too. And don't believe all you read about Ryzen, they say. Well, that's a bit of a bomb at the end.

What does that mean? I got to say, the slides for this, they're posted here. They're definitely worth checking out. There's no video yet, but it's really easy to read through. I'm very intrigued with this project. Yeah, Nerf also, great name. Great name. Fun to say. Yeah, it's really easy to read through. I'm very intrigued with this project. Yeah, Nerf also, great name. Great name, fun to say. Yeah, it's really great.

So he says that it also has a 32x speedup in boot time. Oh, because you can probably skip a whole bunch of shit. Because you can go from one Linux kernel to the next. And KExec is already a thing that they're using. I wonder. So all of the user lands written in Go. You eliminate all UEFI and all management engine post-boot activity. Yeah, they basically did a bunch of work,

and they kind of talk about it here to identify every piece of UEFI that they could do without, including UEFI has a TCP IP stack sometimes and a whole bunch of other stuff. And it's like, well, we already have this open source kernel that we are using all the time. Why not use this too? And they're looking at it from the attack vector and control vector and not so much from the freedom vector, which is interesting because they're still ending up with the same

results to a degree. So here's, they say, the core problem, according to the Google developer. Linux no longer controls the x86 platform. Between Linux and the hardware, there are at least two and a half kernels. I'm going to read that again, because just wrap your head around that for a second. Isn't this reminding you of the baseband problem with your cell phone? Between Linux and the hardware, there are at least two and a half kernels. They are completely proprietary

and exploit friendly. And the exploits can persist, i.e. be written to flash, and you can't fix them. That's the core problem that Google's trying to solve. They're really concerned about server security, because they're looking at this not for desktops and laptops. They're looking at this for servers.

Exactly. You're right. Jeez, Wes, this is a super awesome... I'm looking at this for servers exactly uh and then you're right geez west this is a super awesome uh i'm looking at this uh this presentation um we can you toss a link to that in this section of the show because that is that is worth reading okay so we have just a couple more community updates before we can get into the interviews and this story today's a breaking news story i should have gotten like some sort of soundboard clip. The appeals court is surprising us. Get ready for the story that has literally spun my entire podcasting career. This is unbelievable. SCO's back. SCO is back. SCO is back suing IBM in the appeals court. It's back on. The SCO versus IBM case lives it's it's just done so okay let's recap last year u.s district judge david nuffers god damn it chris this is not your i'm gonna stop

saying names for the rest of the episode has ruled against ruled against sco um in two summary judgment orders and the court refused to allow sco to amend its initial complaint about against ibm we all said okay story's done sco's done this story this is like a year ago where it said it's orders and the court refused to allow SCO to amend its initial complaint against IBM, we all said, okay, story's done. SCO's done. This story, this is like a year ago where it said it's all done. But then SCO soon appealed, which didn't surprise too many of us. Of course. But it happened.

And we've been kind of waiting around to see where this appeal is going to go. Well, on Monday, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that SCO's claim of misappropriation could go forward while also upholding the judge's previous other two orders. So this is, I'll get to it in a second, because it's kind of complicated, but if you haven't been following this story since March of 2003, I can understand. I don't know why I have, to be honest with you. So anyway, Sko, then named Caldera Systems, filed a suit against IBM in March of 2003

for allegedly contributing sections of commercial Unix code that they thought they owned from the Unix System 5, I think it was, which the scope group was pissed and said, you contributed that to the Linux code base, thereby sort of forcibly open sourcing it. They argued that IBM essentially stole or misappropriated its proprietary code, known as Unixware System Release 4. In the May 4, 2001 release of the Monterey operating system, a new version of Unix designed for IBM's power processors. It was incomplete, didn't have a compiler, it wasn't like a complete OS. And so SCO claims that it was IBM basically dumping to get the code out there. When IBM released that, that same day,

SCO argues that IBM released a sham version of the system in order to legitimize its own general distribution of the AIX power product, which contained SCO's code. They say that what IBM basically did was did a sham release of an OS that had their code in it. So that way, when they later then released another OS, they could say, but there's precedent. There's other operating systems out there. They're already shipping the code.

We're not the first ones to do this. And SCO's saying, yeah, but you did that on purpose just so you could make that claim. And that's why we're still coming after you after all of these years they're like okay well the judge can be right about all that stuff but you still did a double dog trick back in 2001 do we know if uh any of this code still exists in its uh original form in the kernel well no no there was like a serious like come to Jesus moment where they went through

and like cleaned out anything that might have been left. And who knows? Maybe that might have been some of the momentum behind systemd2. The whole thing though is like this zombie threat

against Linux that is just sort of like it's one of those zombies that comes up at you but doesn't have any teeth now. So it's just sort of gumming at your neck. It's not actually like, oh, come on. It's a new accessory you just have up at you but doesn't have any teeth now, so it's just sort of gumming at your neck. It's not actually –

It's a new accessory you just have to take with you everywhere. Just go. Just go, zombie. Go. You smell terrible. Yeah. It's the Zombiesco, and it's back. Zombiesco is back, and they're saying that IBM double-dog tricked them years ago by doing a sham release of an OS.

That way they could then do another release of another OS that had their code in it that then ended up in GNU slash Linux, which was the original SYN. Everybody follow that? Good. So I want to talk a little bit about our guests. Will Cook is the Ubuntu desktop manager, and Mr. Did Rocks is, I would say, probably most publicly famous for his um artful's transition to gnome post he did 16 blog posts which i will have a linked in the show notes i'll have at least the 16 and it was he was a buntu gnome shell in artful every single sort of major decision was documented and we covered some of these in the show probably a dozen not that half a i don't know five of them but so there were some big moments we covered in the show and we were currently going back to them and i really liked these posts

because uh there was something that microsoft did during i don't when's the last time i complimented microsoft everybody microsoft did something really smart during the release cycle of windows 7 i wonder if you guys remember remember sorry remember this there was this like uh insider windows development blog where they documented every major decision towards the development of windows 7 and including like some big changes that would impact enterprise deployments and end users and gamers and they did this long complicated technical series and even though i wasn't a windows user i loved reading it because i really got an insight in the development of Windows 7. And I think it really got the whole damn Windows community, for what it was, excited about this release. And I still, to this day, believe it was one of the things that contributed to its success, Windows 7, its success in the enterprise. We're reading that, and we knew what was coming group policy-wise.

We knew it was coming with the SMB signing. We knew what was changing with how the shares and actors, all this stuff really kind of was just explained to us, and it made it an easy adoption. And I feel like to a degree, that's what Did Rock's post did for Ubuntu 17.10 in this transition from Unity 7 to GNOME. And their idea to do with their reasoning for their dock and how they did it, the GNOME mode. So I talk with Did Rockx about some of this. And I think it's great. And we get a great anecdote for him. And then after that, I'll bring on Will.

He had to join us separately. They were going to come on together. But Will got stuck at the office. And so after I wrapped up with Didrox, Will was getting home. So then Will and I chatted for a bit. So we got two separate interviews that we're going to play. And Will and I chatted for a bit. So we got two separate interviews that we're going to play. And Will's is really great because as the Ubuntu desktop manager, he's in a position to answer some rather poignant questions.

And so I asked them. And so I'm really looking forward to playing that for you guys as well. So let's take a moment and let's thank DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is a sponsor right here on the Unplugged program. And they've rolled out so much great stuff. So I guess Hacktober has wrapped up now, as people are listening to this. Lots of good code went to open source. If you want to just go look at some of the projects

that DigitalOcean helped code roll into, go look at the Hacktoberfest page. They also provide a lot of back-end infrastructure for a lot of our favorite open source projects. They really do. They do it sort of quietly every now and then. Some of the projects might put a logo on the page or something. DigitalOcean is just a great way to spin up really fast, really powerful infrastructure

in less than 55 seconds. And the pricing is just phenomenal. And if you use our promo code, you'll get a $10 credit. So go to digitalocean.com, create the account, and then use our promo code D-O-unplugged. One word, put it all together, D-O-un O unplugged. And that'll give you a $10 credit. The, my favorite rig is the one I use for my remote desktop system is 3 cents an hour. So that's just amazing. And then I've attached a hundred gigabytes of block storage, which I use to hold what I call my work volume, which is all the big like clips and stuff I'm working on for

work. And, uh, I, I've, I've been really really really impressed with how well that's worked because obviously these things aren't like built to be desktop systems but hell if it's not super fast because everything's ssds oh yeah they got crazy great internet so i always have the that transit man i have the best doing like always when i wrote in i always know that the digital ocean droplet has the best possible connection and that really makes a difference for that. The object storage is great for generating links to download stuff. Of course, I could only scratch the surface there. And all of it really kind of comes together with a dashboard that's so great. I say it's a dashboard for days. You can choose from Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, Debian, CentOS. And they have CoreOS in there as well. You can choose data

centers all over the world, work with teams if you want. And if you've never, ever installed a server before, it's easy. And if you've installed servers for the last 15 years, you're going to love how they've managed to strike that balance. And it's still easy. Like, the thing that makes me smile every damn time I do it is the DNS management in DigitalOcean. It's just, or actually really what really is tops is the SSH key management. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Nobody does it like that. Nobody does it like that. And they're also

rolling out their new Spaces product. They're offering a couple of months for free right now, and they have a great write-up on what the hell object storage is, how it works, why you might want to use Spaces, and how it could probably make your website faster, too. DigitalOcean.com And then just use our promo code D-O, unplugged, one word, you get a $10 credit,

and you support the show. And we much, much appreciate it. So there was a post recently talking about the canonical goals for 1804, which I'll have linked in the show notes. But we're going to get into that a little bit. So let's start with Mr. Didrox. I assume, when I started talking to him, because he wrote all the blog posts, that, of course, he must be the man with the master plan.

There was no even master plan. Yeah, actually, in my conversation with him, it turns out that they weren't even really quite sure what they were going to do up until the point they went to Guadec. Like, how far in are we going to go? Like, how many changes are we going to make? They knew they had some data. They'd surveyed users, and everybody wanted a dock.

Everybody wanted Thunderbird and Firefox. So they had an idea of what the users expected. But there was a moment that we talked about on the show. It was one of the times we covered it with this blog post where things really clicked for them. And that was they go to Guadalquivir. They build up some contacts. But D-Rox ends up having a conversation with a friend of his. They just spitballing, and the guy goes, hey, you know, there's this gnome shell mode thing, and you guys could implement all your modifications in this mode, and then people could just choose between them.

And that was sort of like the pivotal moment where I think development for 1710 kicked up, and he shares a little insights here oh yeah yeah it's always like we didn't you know change anything in the core you know like gnome shell uh idea about theming or about you know adding extension like for the for the way we implement our session like adding the doc what you don't have by default on the gnome one it's using what we call a gnome shell uh mode and so as part of the mode, you can say, this is the CSS, so this is a theme, basically. Those are the default extensions that we want to enable. And basically, it was even, you know, like based on a conversation with some friends

in the GNOME community who told us, oh, you should do it that way. And that seems like a significant decision point for this entire project. Like, it seems like when the decision was made to implement a GNOME mode, a session, it sort of was a turning point in a way, like how this was all going to be done. Is that true? Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, so it was a little bit before even we decided, you know, what we are going to do.

It was in July, and I was just, you know, doing my daily exercise with a friend who is working on GNOME and Flatpak. So we can see that we don't hate each other. And basically, we just, you know, like discuss about how, well, in case, you know, we are going to ship a dock or, you know, what do you think? Because we are talking about tech, you know, every time. And say, oh, you know that there is this mode thing. And this is how GNome classic is implemented and maybe you can look at you know this and see if it works for you and yeah it did work it did work even you know way better than i was expecting we we only have two or three distro patch in gnome shell changing the behavior like the alt tab one that I explained on my blog, and two or three

things on the sound notifications. But we made that depending on the session. So it means that if you are in the Ubuntu session, it has this behavior. If you are on another session, it has a default upstream behavior. So the conversation meanders a bit

and I get to 18.04 with him and there's a clear message from both Will and DeadRx here, and it's that 1804, they really want it to be a rock, and so it's about polishing. So practically speaking, how do you go from that statement to actually making it happen? And so Didrox says, well, we're really going to have our QA focus on banging on GNOME 3 the way we used to bang on Unity 7. We're re-gearing our QA department now for GNOME 3. We want, as well, with our QA team, to bring back the kind of quality expertise that we have with Unity, in particular, like running a lot of integration tests

so that each new upload, you know, are very work solid and so that we don't have to stress, you know, as much as we did for 17.10. They have a lot of automated testing. It'll be interesting to see if they can apply that to GNOME, you know, because then GNOME could start seeing a bunch of great bug fixes.

I was looking on the community page where Will Cook's starting to post our weekly roundup. They're working already practically on quite a bit of stuff. This made me think, you know, we were talking earlier about elementary and Unity, that there's something, you know, not to say that like GNOME or Plasma don't have releases or anything like that, but there's something a little different when it's a distribution release.

You know, there's a certain amount of like they understand that this is going to be the gateway. It's not just that. It's to the whole experience and if they're going to get adopted or not. And so maybe there's a little bit different of an attitude and that's going to go up yeah interesting uh so i got this anecdote from dead rocks i really appreciate him sharing with us because i love this kind of stuff because it's nothing that's been posted on a blog or twitter and um it's kind of a significant development that came up 24 hours before the 1710 release but the day before the release,

we found, you know, for first one guy telling, oh, I don't have any more UI. Okay. And then we saw a second person, you know, complaining as well. They had ATI cards. A third one, a fourth one having NVIDIA cards. And we started, you know, like to say,

oh, there is really something. Like a lot of people complaining, no GN cards and we started you know like to say oh there is really something like a lot of people complaining no gnome shell crash you know like before they had a ui and on that day you know the update broke and thanks to the very awesome french community uh i'm looking a lot on you know the french forum being very involved with that community. And over the forum, we were debugging that. And I was asking, you know, one of the impacting persons to revert, you know, a lot of packages. And it was 24 hours before the release. So you can imagine, you know, the level of stress. Wow.

And we found that it was the GNOME Shell update from 3.26.1. So from 3.26.0 to 3.26.1, this issue started to appear. So looking at, you know, all the commits, and we saw that new features entered GNOME, and we saw that this, you know, oh, potentially those commits are going to break. So preparing special packages, you know, trying to revert some commits, and asking over the

forum to the guy, you know, to test it. And the guy even was working, and he went back home just to test this. So, it's really awesome, you know, dedication. Like, I can't thank him enough. That's a great community. And once we found, you know, the commits, we were able

at least, you know, to ping upstream, and they fixed it, you know, very, very, you know, quickly, seeing what the issue, you know, started to be. But basically, you know, it's a lot of stress. And we just had a respin, you know, on the day of the release. So people telling us, you know, the ISOs are ready for a week already and you can download that, this will be the final. No, it's not. Those are not final ISOs. So take this anecdote in for a moment. 24 hours before the 1710 release, GNOME 3.26.1 comes out. And GNOME 3.26.1, for some users,

starts breaking the graphical environment. And this is the... GNOME 3.26.1 didn't come out 24 hours release, but 24 hours before release, they realized this problem has developed. Right, they've already got it on their ISO, right? So they've already got GNOME 3.26.1 on the ISO, and they realized 24 hours before release,

shit, this is starting to happen. Wow. And it was thanks to a French community forum member that DidRox was chatting with via the forum, not a canonical employee, but this forum member who left his job

and went home to help debug the problem. Wow. That they managed to find the issue, get a fix written, get the patch upstream to GNOME, GNOME adopted the fix, and they got that fix, then repackaged up and pushed back down to 1710 in that day.

So not only was it fixed, but it was, like, fixed the right way. And upstream, yeah. Wow. I just couldn't even believe that when I heard that. That's, like, the best. Because that forum member was willing to go home for the day. This is, like, an open source success story on steroids. I feel like Canonical should, like, call that guy's office and give him a doctor's note or something.

I say thanks to whoever that individual was. No kidding. Yeah, I mean that really helps. And it really does also show you in a weird, weird, real way how much of a community effort it still is at the end of the day. You can talk about Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical and you can talk about the employees at canonical but at the end of the day thanks to a forum member in a french linux community i just can't even believe it it's just sort of but it's so great because it is having worked in project releases like that the exact kind of thing that happens it's those real human stories um so i also asked him if he's

going to continue to blog during the 1804 cycle, because like I said, I've really enjoyed them. And he says he is. He says that he'll be continuing to post updates. And he doesn't expect there'll be as many because there's really not going to be as many radical changes. It's going to be more like bug fixes and stuff. You know, they're trying to make 1804 solid, not totally new. But both, when I talk to Will and DidRocks, I got a sense that there is a willingness to implement new features in 18.04. So there could be new stuff that ends up showing up in 18.04, even though right now they're all talking bug fixes. Now, I want to talk, I want to chat with Will. These are a bit longer. And I will, you know what, let chat with Will. It's a we have these are a bit longer and I will.

You know what? Let's do this. Let's take a moment. We'll we'll we'll thank Ting and then we'll get to Will. Because Will was a great chat. And yeah, I just want to do the whole thing. So go go over to Linux.Ting.com. Yeah, that's right.

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linux.ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring. Linux Unplugged. Yeah, so Will is the Ubuntu desktop manager, and he just recently restarted the desktop weekly newsletter over at community.ubuntu.com, where they covered some of the upstream fixes that they've been working with. And he has all kinds of things to talk about. I've been wanting to chat with Will for a long time, and he and I had a good chance to sort of chat on and off at the Ubuntu rally. But I wanted to get him on the show because he's one of those guys where he has been around at Canonical and been following Ubuntu, well, since forever.

And I've been using Ubuntu for, oh, I don't know, well, since the beginning. Stuart Langridge, of all people, put me onto it. I was playing around with Debian and he said, oh, you should try this Ubuntu thing. It's a whole lot less bother. And yeah, he's got like an 11-year-old account over there, Launchpad account or something like that. And he's now the guy that sort of manages the whole damn Ubuntu desktop effort. And so I wanted to ask him sort of a question that's been kicking around in my mind. And that is, did they just sort of screw the pooch by dropping Unity because it was essentially theirs.

Nobody upstream could tell them no. They had a certain amount of difference that made them stand out because they had this unique product and gave them certain leverage to implement goals that the company might have. So if you want to integrate SnapPaks throughout the whole damn thing, nobody would stop them from doing it to Unity. So I asked Will, I said, Will, are you concerned that Ubuntu has lost some of its leverage by dropping Unity and switching to GNOME? I'm not concerned about it. I mean, there will need to be these discussions about, I don't know, some of the usability that we think is suboptimal, but Upstream have a very clear vision about the way that they want to do it. So, you know, we need to have those discussions in the open with Upstream. And, you know, we need evidence to back this up.

We do have a certain amount of research that was done in the Unity 7 days and indeed the Unity 8 days to say, you know, this works and this doesn't. So we can make all of that research available to GNOME designers designers and the gnome community and say we think this is a good idea and here's why we think it's a good idea let's talk about it um and you know we're coming with with evidence showing one way or the other if it is ultimately against the the wishes of upstream then you know that's that's the way we have to go because we are now working upstream he actually reiterated that point later on. He later on said, yeah, if they do something that we're not on board with, then we'll just defer to their wisdom, we believe, in this case. And that's a fascinating statement. Essentially,

they're planning not to fight the current. That's a big move, decision, direction for a company to go. That's a lot of trust in their upstream. And I also asked him, kind of related, I said, well, how have some of the hardware vendors responded to this? You know what I mean? And his answer was essentially, well, for the most case, they're shipping LTSs. But for the second thing, in a way, for them, it's less risk because now Canonical is not solely responsible for the desktop product

and so the OEMs in a way don't really have that worry that is Canonical going to get off the pot and ship something new or we've got to start now it's they're not solely responsible for it defers the risk a bit for the OEMs in the long run was sort of his argument

I had a question that sort of been percolating from our Discord chatroom discord.me slash jupiter colony we have a linux unplugged chat room over there linux unplugs chat room a reason why channel i guess they call it here's why i think this is a good idea you guys i'm mentioning this because if you're ever watching the video version and you see a link go by or if you're listening and you want to hear what the discord room's response was now that we're breaking linux we're going to break all the shows off into their own channels, there's not going to be a ton of activity between this episode and the next one. So if you're listening to this in playback, either in video or audio,

you can go into that Linux Unplugged channel and see what the Discord conversation was because there's not really going to be much else in there. Yeah. And including links if you see something go by. So discord.me slash Jupiter Colony and then Linux Unplugged is the channel for this show. And so one of the questions that's been coming through our Discord a lot has been, are they going to replace all the devs with snaps? Will said recently that they are considering replacing the leaf quote unquote applications with snaps in 1804.

So I asked him, you know, what is a leaf application? What is the deal with that? And what role are snaps going to play in 1804? So we have the dev archive, and that is not going to go away because there are flavors that are using it. A lot of the snaps are built from those devs and that source. So, you know, it's not going to go anywhere. But we do want to have the ability to push out new and updated applications much quicker to our end users.

We're not going to be a rolling release. That's not going to happen. So the snaps give us the freedom to push out updates quickly, and it gives us the whole ability to have various tracks and various channels so we can put something into testing and people can very easily switch over test it and then switch back again if it doesn't work so it gives us an element of freedom to to move more quickly on a very solid foundation of 1804 that the underlying os can can stay the same and all of the um you know the processes that we go through to make sure that only good quality packages get into that release so yeah the idea with snaps and the leaf applications these are the ones sort of the at the very tip of the tree if you like these are going to be user applications which are perhaps less entwined in the in OS. So the likes of the GNOME apps,

they depend on the GNOME libraries, but they don't necessarily need to sort of dig deep into the file system. Yeah, and so it seems like if it's a user space application that isn't necessarily overly integrated with the overall OS, it could be a candidate to be Snapified and then sort of like how Android delivers stuff

through the Play Store in a way this is a rough equivalent, Canonical could deliver updates to applications while not altering the LTS base. Seems like a, I mean it seems like a pretty good goal and that would be a good way to test it but I my comment back to Will was essentially

that's huge. I mean that's a huge objective for Canonical that obviously makes snaps pretty critical to the future of the desktop and to Canonical. Aren't you a bit worried that this is going to frustrate your upstream developers, GNOME, that are creating your desktop now? Like you are now in a very precarious situation where the Ubuntu distribution is pretty much married to GNOME and they're all in on Flatpak. And you guys are creating a competitor that could ruffle some feathers. is pretty much married to Gnome, and they're all in on Flatpak, and you guys are creating a competitor that could ruffle some feathers. Are you concerned about that?

Yeah, I mean, that is definitely a very real risk, and we do need to be careful the way that we navigate that. But ultimately, you know, we're not blocking Flatpak from being developed and distributing their apps in that way. You know, you can get all the GNOME apps as Flatpaks, and you can get them all as Snaps. So there shouldn't be a problem here. I thought that was a decent answer, really, because that's true. At the end of the day, they're both essentially first-class citizens on the Ubuntu desktop.

So if you want to Flatpak it, you can Flatpak it. And let the market decide is essentially their approach there. Fair enough. Fair enough. So there's been some rumors going afoot that Unity 7 is not quite dead yet. That, in fact, there may be a small but not insignificant effort to continue Unity 7 and to make it shippable for 18.04. Yeah.

And I want to know what the heck's going on here. Interesting. Is this a canonical driven effort? Is this a community driven effort? What is the story here? Definitely a community driven thing. I mean, we're obviously very welcome of people that want to step up and help maintain that. of people that want to step up and help maintain that.

During the 1710 cycle, we did take an interest in making sure that Unity 7 still worked and wasn't completely broken. And that is a statement that we will stand by in 18.04. We will make sure that it doesn't just break horrifically and then suddenly it is unusable. What we won't be able to do is any sort of significant feature development. It's on 16.04, so things like security updates and critical crashes, these sort of kind of things, we are still on the hook to make sure that those updates happen.

So if we're in there working on the code base anyway to fix up things, then that will benefit 18.04 users as well. If we upload, I don't know, let's say a new version of X.org and suddenly it breaks Unity 7, the more people that are out there testing it, the sooner we know, then the easier it will be to fix that, you know, rather than six months later try and find what commit it was that broke it in the first place.

So, yeah, I'm very keen to see people get involved in that. Yeah, there's a community organizing effort over on the community page, and I'll have a link to that in the show notes. It's not insane, actually, because they already have to support it, as you heard Will say, for 16.04. So the security backporting, bug fixing is not so much bug fixing unless it's something like a regression. It is still happening for 16.04 because they have to support that for years. So why not also then make it available for 18.04 if that work's being done? You know, like Microsoft makes security patches for XP, but then holds onto them unless you pay.

Yeah, it's essentially the opposite of that. And I kind of think it works great too because comp is itself we've had wimpy talking to us a little bit about how comp is itself is also still being maintained and in in quote unquote not active development but not also neglected it's like still being worked on it's still a product that gets tested and it's getting better still um so you have basically a vintage comp is compositor which has been pretty well worked out now over the years by a very intelligent, very talented developer who just blows me away. Some of the video acceleration stuff I think is due to the guy that also maintains Compiz and just incredibly talented individual. And so I really – I guess I have a lot of – now I know who he is and I've met him.

I have some faith in that product. And it seems like it's obvious that if Unity is going to be maintained for 16.04 that it's it's probably a safe bet for 18.04. And it's pretty damn reliable and it works pretty damn well. And so to me, it was that that conversation there after I walked in like, well, why the hell don't I just use that? Like I didn't switch away from Ubuntu because of Unity. i switched away because of arch and uh if i hadn't switched away i would have still been using unity so why not and it's going to be maintained for it for i mean the l that 1804 is going to be maintained for five years yeah totally that's a ton of a long time and i could switch back to gnome or plasma at any moment and i have a ton of runway to let

them work it out that is where it's nice to be on Ubuntu, right? Not only do you get Unity, but you can switch to GNOME just about any time you want. I know you can get Unity on Arch. I tried. I tried. It's just not the same. So there's sort of a bigger story here, and that is, if you're...

I hear this from the audience, too. You're like, I never really develop anything. I don't do any translations. I don't even submit bugs. But i feel like i should do something and uh maybe this is your time maybe this is your time 1710 is it's not bad to kick the tires even load it up in a vm as will says and uh help file bugs if everybody could spend you know an hour in a vm testing something in 1710 and just log a bug report for everything they find, then it means that 18.04 is going to be just an excellent,

high-quality, solid, reliable release. We can't do that on our own. We're a relatively small team. We can find the bug and fix the bugs that we know about. So if people can tell us about these things, then they will get fixed. Don't just hang out on comments on, on forum posts and you know, social media and that kind of thing, moaning that something's broken,

please help us to fix it. Yeah. And it's really not hard to file a bug for Ubuntu. And it is sort of an opportunity to sort of contribute towards the next LTS that could be more stable. Even if you're not a main daily Ubuntu user, it's a nice way to help out open source and the GNOME project and maybe Wayland. So check that out. We'll have links to ways to help out and the

community stuff in the page. It really seems to be, in the show notes, it really seems to be their focus is making 1804 great again. Oh, I did it. Oh, God. Sorry. I'm sorry. Anyways, I really appreciate both DidRocks and Will coming on the show. It was great to chat with them. Yeah, that's great. And it was nice to sort of mark a really, I mean, damn, what do you call it?

A Hercules effort? What is that? Herculean. Thank you. That really was what seemed like 1710 was, especially when you consider they started out. They didn't quite know going into it how far they were going to go. Like, where was the line? Where do we draw the line from?

This is unity now to stock GNOME 3. They didn't know where that line was. They didn't know what their dock solution was. They ended with a great anecdote where a community member saves the day by helping troubleshoot and then upstream kicks ass by cooperating in record speed.

Wow. Did you see this week that the Gnome Project had a little Gnome Loves Ubuntu on their front page? Yeah. I don't know if it's still up there, but they were welcoming 1710 users. That was pretty... I did not expect to see that.

I don't know if it's still up there or not, but oh, it is still up there. Look at that. Yeah. Ubuntu plus Gnome equals love. Aww. At gnome.org. How far we have come.

Well, what happened to the big red hat conspiracy? Anyways, it's great to see it. And now I'm some sort of Unity hipster. And I hate it. I hate it because I know people are going to give me shit. But I'm all in. And I'll link you if you are too. If you want to stay here.

You know what? Unity 7 is the new XFCE. I'm calling in. And I'll link you if you are too. If you want to stay here, you know what? Unity 7 is the new XFCE. I'm calling it right now. And I also am going to predict here on this show, episode 221, that there will be a Unity 7 respin of at least 1804,

if not 1710 eventually. That if this takes off and you even get a few people contributing and the fact that canonical employees are going to be contributing as part of their maintenance of 16.04, why wouldn't you create a respin? Everybody loves making a respin.

Yeah, totally. And maybe even we'll have first-class art support someday. Maybe you could call it Pop OS. No, I'm kidding. Oh, ouch. But I really think somebody could come up with something like this, like a respin, and it might have some love. Yeah.

Maybe Unity 7 refugees will end up on Unity. We should name it. That would be really, if anybody in the room, anybody in the room good coming up with names? Because that would be a really good one. Hello, Mr. Wimper. It's nice to see you pop in. Hello. I'm good at names. What do you think? If somebody, I'm calling a prediction

that somebody, at least with 18.04, maybe during 17.10 cycle, but I think with 18.04, is going to release a Unity respin of Ubuntu. A Unity 7. Let's call it Unity 8. Like A-T-E or like what? No, Unity 10.

Unity 10, dude, you got to go. What do you think, Wimpy? What are they going to call that distro? It's a Unity 7 Ubuntu. Well, I mean, it's funny you should mention this because i've just sort of pitched in on their thread on the ubuntu community hub to say if they're seeking to make a there are a group of people that are gearing up to do this you know if they're seeking to make an official flavor i will help guide them through that process

and i've been thinking about names I've not mentioned this to anybody, but they could go for the Ubuntu Unity remix whilst they're, you know, working through that process and then it would become Ubuntu Unity. But I thought to myself, I quite like Ubuntu United. That's good too. I think,

well, I think it's going to be Ubuntu Unity probably just for clarity. I bet. I bet you. Yeah. So the new naming scheme is sort of Ubuntu Unity, probably just for clarity, I bet. I bet you. Yeah, so the new naming scheme is sort of Ubuntu and desktop environment or application. So my prediction is pretty on point then, it would seem. Wow. I would really like it if they took you up on that offer.

You have the bandwidth for that because – That's very generous. I don't know. Just not to repeat myself on the show, but I'm going all in on Unity 7 on the studio machines. And so I'm really I'm really glad to hear that. We just played a clip from Will where he said that they're going to there's be some level of support into 1804, which really kind of sealed the deal for me. Yeah. And, you know, I contacted Will earlier and said, you know, I was going to offer my assistance.

I contacted Will earlier and said, you know, I was going to offer my assistance. And I found out that other people at Canonical are already also offering their assistance to sort of coach and guide this group of would-be distro maintainers to get them orientated. So I think there's a good chance that this could happen because all the right people seem to be prepared to you know lend extend a hand to to help them get started so it'd be great to see it's a genuinely good product just it's it's a good product um it's in the sense that you can appreciate that it's well thought out it performs well it does its job and it stays the hell out of your way and then it does other things that i appreciate as somebody who gets impatient as it the there seems to be uh and i have not confirmed this but noah has told me a subtle transition in the animation speeds as you continue to use the desktop the animation speeds at a certain point speed up once they figure okay

you've gotten the idea that is some brilliance right there that is some damn brilliance there's a lot of thought and design that's gone into unity. And the other thing is that it is still current. So, you know, high DPI and all of those good things are all taken account for. And when I wrote my email, my post on the community hub, I introduced myself for those who weren't familiar and sort of basically said, you know, I have some experience in preserving a desktop for the users that love it. And I did want to go on a bit further and, you know, talk about that, but I decided to keep things brief. But, you know, I wanted to say, you know, Unity 7 is a great project to preserve because it's up to date right now. There's only one thing I can think of that they might want to consider doing to um you know bring unity 7 up to date with sort of contemporary stuff and that's to use lib input as

opposed to the synaptic struggle and other than that you know it's pretty much there um so yeah it's a great project to to build a new flavor around or continue a flavor around. I think it's going to happen. And I hope it does because... I hope so too. Have you seen that there's some nice ISO spins from a couple of projects on SourceForge? No, I didn't know that's a thing already.

It's all... Yeah, so there's a 1710 Ubuntu Unity ISO and it's a proper job. It's been really well done. So I believe... Would you be able to toss a link to that in the unplugged discord channel a bit later i will i'll have to go hunting and find it sure i would love to see that that's fascinating that's happening fast wow yeah

we should dig out the old um the old docs that the design team did because they did some they had a whole lot of extra features that were planned for Unity but never got done for various reasons, like resourcing mostly. But there were some really nice stuff that they came up with that we just never got around to doing. Maybe they could use inspiration.

Yeah. Will was talking too about maybe sharing some of the Unity 7 usability research with the GNOME group too. I'm really glad you guys are here because this is going to be the episode where I get flamed some of the Unity 7 usability research with the GNOME group, too. Cool. I'm really glad you guys are here because this is going to be the episode where I get flamed for being a Unity 7 hipster

for, like, I'm going to get labeled after this. So I'm glad you guys are here as a support group for me because... It's good that you're in at the ground level, Chris. Yeah, I am, apparently. Dude, I'm using it right now. It's my main desktop. Me, too.

Me, too. I've reloaded five systems since last week's episode with Ubuntu 16.04 and Unity 7. And I've put them all in landscape. It's been going great. I really like it.

It's so far. I'm obviously only one week into it. I don't know if Unity gets to be called hipster anymore. I think you're a Unity oldster, Chris. Yeah. I'm a know if Unity gets to be called hipster anymore. I think you're a Unity oldster, Chris. Yeah. You know, I'm a big proponent of Cockpit as well.

I think that's a great product for Fedora. But the landscape product is nice because you've got a couple of tiered options here. You get yourself hosted, which costs a little more,

but then you run the server yourself. Or you can go with the service version, which is like $5 a month or whatever, and it does everything I need. You know, I just go to landscape page, I log in, which is like $5 a month or whatever, and it does everything I need.

I just go to landscape page, I log in, I get a quick overview of all the systems. I mean, it basically takes it from kind of a mishmash, everything sort of, before we had Solus, we had Ubuntu, we had two Arches, we had a couple of Ubuntu 17.10s, just kind of a rash. Boy, that sounds like madness. Even, even though like Linux is the whole thing that we're doing, right?

Like what show is this? But like, just that's, that's a lot of administrative overhead. Yeah. For one studio. For no real reason. Yeah. It's just sort of all over the place. And, um, you know, mostly it was driven by application availability.

Right. Like a year ago. Um, which is just not the same issue today. And it's so nice um and so yeah it was a great time to purge it takes time going through and resetting up all these systems there's so many little fiddly things you got to do and you have to be able to like it's not like you can leave it off at any one stage you need to get far enough that you can like still do the next show that you have to do yeah i'm gonna also say since i'm just since i'm already all in i think

the unity launcher is still superior to any other dock implementation that I've used. First of all, it doesn't take a shit, which is nice. A lot of Linux docks out there do. But it has good progress indication. But I really like the wiggle bounce thing because that really is a nice subtle, but then it stops. It's just a solid... And then you hold down the super key

and you get the number execution. Oh, yeah, that is nice. There's just a solid, and then you hold down the super key, and you get the number execution. Oh, yeah, that is nice. There's just a crap ton of keyboard navigation possible in Unity 7, which makes it really quick for me to do it on air. So if I wanted to launch Spotify to play music, like during the post show, I hold down Super 8, and Spotify launches, and then I hit Fn Play, and it just starts playing. And then I get playback control and a drop-down menu that I can use from the other virtual desktop that I'm on. Super 8, that's great. It is. There is many things about it that I really like.

I really appreciate the, like, Control-Alt-Num pad to kind of quick-tile Windows. I use that all the time at work. And also, I do feel like, speaking of that, I do feel like the desktop, the virtual desktop, whatever you want to call this, this expose out or whatever you want to call it and then move windows around is butter smooth. It's the smoothest, the zoom in, zoom out, move around. The way it works is butter smooth. that Gnome 3 has just gotten with the new 3.26 release that Unity 7 had the entire time. Like the fact that you can snap a window to the edge but then resize and drag it.

Oh, yes, yes. And I don't know what they're doing differently than other desktops, but my windows, just, I don't know. It's like things are fitting better. Like I snap something and there's like still space for Telegram to fit on the screen and Telegram fits proportionally. And it's just it's just like it just it just works and I don't have to screw with it.

And it's all done beautifully and smooth. And I should really stop now because I'm probably driving people crazy. But I I haven't used unity regularly as my main driver for what? How long ago did I switch to arch? Three years now. Yeah. Three, four years yeah and so i have not used i mean i've used it as an appliance we have a machine over here i poke

at it i set software up but i don't sit down for a six hour work period and just use it right and that's where i had started having these holy shit moments where i'm like oh yeah i and you know what i started members like oh yeah i used to i used to do a lot of work under unity 7 like this was the desktop i took to my clients on my system, and I sat down and I used this one. This is the one I got all my work done. This is the one where I'd work on dozens of servers at once. Like, oh, yeah, that's right. This is a super kick-ass productive desktop environment, and it's smooth as hell.

So, to be fair, it's smooth and tell in 2017 with 2017 hardware. When it first came out in like 2010, it was, it was, it was built for netbooks. So it was like really not, not a competitive product, but it got, it really, it really got there. And you know, I took three years off from using it. When I kind of stopped using it was when the search stuff was all kind of like getting everybody all worked up about the ads and the results and all the Amazon results and all that and how it was proxied or if it was HTTPS. And that whole thing was around the time I just sort of switched to GNOME anyways. And I haven't really gone back since then for any significant amount of time.

And that stuff's all gone now. It's off by default. It's clean. It's not a problem. It feels like you could have played a Richard Stallman sample at that point. You know what? If my soundboard machine hadn't crashed earlier today, I would have that. I think he's finishing our burgers from earlier.

We did have a little Five Guys earlier today. He does love those fries. Richard Stallman loves those Cajun fries. I won't speak for him otherwise, though. Yeah, anyways, so I guess I've waxed poetically enough about a desktop that's eventually going to die and that nobody really wants to use anymore. It has caused much political grief

in the Linux ecosystem. It sounds like something that people really love listening to, so I should probably stop. But I would love to have you join us. Come over to jblive.tv next week. This is the week that next week, the next episode, 2.22, is the one where we here in the States make the daylight savings

transition. We're slow now. Yeah, so we're a week behind Wimpy and Popey, and we will catch up to them next week. So check jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar if you're a live attendee. Remember now we have that Linux unplugged channel? Yeah, yeah. In Discord, so if there's a link

that gets tossed in there during the show or somebody says something, you can go back after the fact and look at it, but we'll generally try to put everything in the show notes too so you don't even have to worry about it. Go to jupyterbroadcasting.com and look for episode 222. Something else I haven't mentioned in a little while is we have a Telegram group for the community. I think you can just go

to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram. Can you double check that for me? You go there and it'll forward you to our Telegram group. the community. I think you can just go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. Can you double check that for me? You go there and it'll forward you to our telegram group. So I've been mentioning Discord a lot recently. I should give a plug for that. And then last but not least, we have good old classic Reddit,

linuxunplugged.reddit.com. Yep, that works just perfectly. jupyterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Check out more of Wimpy and Popy over on the

ubuntu podcast uh they have always a great release at about around 30 minutes which is great i love that's my new favorite podcast length these days because i get a few in there and they always have something good going on i think you know some command line love or uh they did their ubuntu 1710 review recently so you can catch all that that over at Ubuntu Podcast. Halloween special coming up in two days. Really? Ooh, spooky. You can get more Wes Payne over at the TechSnap program. Yeah, please do.

Check out him and Dan breaking it down every single week on TechSnap. And you can get more Beard at what, rec.net? Yep. I love that. Me too. Is it R-E-K-D? Yep. Damn, dude.

That feels like... That's impressive. That's almost as good as StarTrek.sexy, which is the domain I own and I'm the most proud of. StarTrek. Wow. If I ever launch a Star Trek show, it'll be an Easter egg. Does it just forward to JB for now? I don't...

Damn, it really should. I don't think... I am an idiot. I should do that. Maybe I'm just too busy podcasting. I hope you join us for the next one. After that, maybe I'll get to that Star Trek show one day. In the meantime, I'm just going to watch some Star Trek.

I've been enjoying that. I've been enjoying that Star Trek, you know. We'd love to see you live next week, but if you can't, we have RSS feeds where you can subscribe to every single damn episode. You can find all of that in the show notes. Also, check out me on the Twitters. I'm at ChrisLAS. You can check out my vlog where we got a new solution for our power. Oh yeah.

YouTube.com slash Chris Fisher. And the network at Jupiter Signal on the Twitters, where you get announcements, news updates, and things like that. Thank you very much for joining us. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. Get it out of here. All right, let's see if we can't title this son of a gun. Let's see if we can't title this. Mr. gun. Let's see if we can't title this. Mr. Chris.

Yes, sir. That Gentoo compiling you were doing? Oh, shoot, I forgot all about that. We ran out of time. Well, it also scrolled up your Discord chat, so you're behind. Oh, you're right, it did. You're right. That Gentoo.

That's what I get. You can't ever tell what's happening. That's what happened. Damn, so the whole chat didn't move for the whole show. Look at that, because I was busy building Gentoo. I'm beginning to come to I was busy building Gentoo. I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that the Gentoo challenge is still on. But eight weeks later, you're still compiling the software.

That is. So you've got something to talk about. This week, it was. We're never done compiling that software. Legitimately, that is true for this week. Every time we finish compiling, there's updates to things. Yeah, new version of Chromium comes out. Back at it. Damn it.

It's been hard to fit it in you know uh uh i i feel bad about the chat room because uh i had tabbed off uh you know that's what should we interrupt you in case because you usually only know no it's not really great to have because it sort of breaks the flow of the show for me to do that so there's not a really great answer other than me just staying on top of it better. Really, the best answer is to take advantage of OBS and Discord that can do some sort of API magic, a little shake a day. So I can bring it up and do it? Yeah.

Well, yeah. So we don't need to be window capturing, really. We could do it other means. It's just, you know, that's our old system and we just quickly switched. So what do you think, guys? How do we name this bish? You can do BangSuggest in either, and I will check BangSuggest in the IRC. We'll put it up on the titles page.

Otherwise, I'll just search for BangSuggest in the Discord. We're going to have to get that fixed. Yeah, we're just kind of waiting. Searching for BangSuggest in the chat room works, too, because the search is pretty damn good in Discord. That's a good point. I installed it in Discord maybe a few days ago. It's interesting so far. I've never used it before other than this oh yeah you can also use the web app if you don't

want to install an app and it's just basically about as functional yeah that's what i'm using right now yeah oh yeah as i right click i definitely see it's html5 ish yeah i'm using a fancy snap pack mutiny os oh yeah yeah well There's also a snap of it, if you just want to keep it all put away. So is it going to be an IRC replacement? As I saw the stream, I was trying to find where the hell is the stream chat? I don't know if it's a replacement.

I'd say it's an alternative, which seems to be better suited for live production. So we still have the IRC room too, because, you know, you can still hang out there and chat with people. The discord though is kind of great because we can break it out into particular shows and categories. We can do voice and chat. It supports like images and previews,

which is give some people something to look at when they're watching the video version. That is really nice. The fonts are easier and clearer. That is nice. Patreon integration. Patreon integration, all that shit. So it's nice for,

from a live production. but if, you know, you just want a basic chat, IRC still works. Mutiny OS. The times, man. Is there a way to put the fact that we have two great guests in the title? I mean, that seems like what we should lead with, because we have two. Oh, yeah, that's true.

Ubuntu doubleheader. Double fisting Ubuntu known. Will was great. Will was great because uh i could ask him did you have will on yeah because we we weren't around because we were recording ours because of time zones yeah yeah yeah will came on and um i think i got some really good questions that i think there's a pre-record with will and did there wasn't it yep yep and uh it was and i did that um what two i don't remember i did that actually fr. I don't remember when I did that actually. Friday?

I can't remember now. And so I asked Will about Snap stuff and pissing off Upstream Gnome and things like that. And he had great answers. Yeah. And he just really did a great job and did rocks, had some great stories and shared an anecdote that's really great. It was just really fun to talk to those guys because they're hard workers. What about Ubuntu Inside? Ubuntu Inside? Ubuntu Inside?

Ubuntu A team. Ubuntu A team. Oh, I like that. That's not bad. That's not bad. Ubuntu A team. Does that also apply to Unity? Can we derive two meanings from that?

Maybe. I'm really going to get some shit for this episode, especially from all the people that are running Arch. And they're really going to hate this, aren't they? It's all switched to Ubuntu now. It's fine really going to hate this, aren't they? It's still cool. They're all switched to Ubuntu now. It's fine. I won't be using Ubuntu. The Didier team? Didier team?

That's how you say his name, Didier. Yeah. I just stuck with Didrock, so I didn't fuck that up, because I'm sick of that. I had enough of that this episode. Everyone calls him Didrock to his face anyway. Yeah, I was cursed. This was the episode from hell for me.