LINUX Unplugged - Episode 222: A Community Divided | LUP 222

Episode Date: November 8, 2017

Community news & app picks this week before we get into a bizarre story that could rip up parts of the open source community.Plus Elementary OS’s secret weapon to get more native apps, our tips for great High-DPI under Linux & some Enlightenment love.

What was that really easy clustering that was originally just on LiveCD? What was that called? There was a super dead simple clustering software for Linux for a while. It was only like in the 2 kernel, 2 dot something kernel maybe. And you boot it off of Debian LiveCD. You have a master controller. And then you'd boot up all the other ones and say that they should look for the master. And then you could distribute up all the other ones and say that they should look for the master and then you could

distribute tasks between all of them. Like they had a floating process table. I can't remember. I wonder what it was called. It was the coolest way to do clustered stuff and it was so straightforward. It wouldn't be called heartbeat, would it? No. It's not around anymore so it's going to be

hard to find because it relied on stuff that was, I think, sunsetted a long time ago in the kernel. So it's probably impossible to find it now. I'm so old. That's the problem. Well, the reason I said yes at Heartbeat is because that article is from 2002.

That's almost old enough. It's not a Beowulf cluster. Nice tech map. Yeah yeah that would play rust that would play rust tech map that would definitely play was it mozix was it open mozix was that it i think i just i think i just found it open mozix yeah and cluster nopics that That's the live CD thing I was talking about. So this was originally for Mozix in 2002. OpenMozix was stable on Linux kernel 2.4.x for the x86 architecture, but porting it to the 2.6 kernel remained in the alpha stage, and support for 64-bit architecture only stayed in the 2.6 version. On July 15, 2007, it was announced the OpenMozix project would

reach end of life due to decreasing need for SSI clustering and low-cost multi-core processors becoming more available. So this was particularly useful for running parallel applications. So this was another great way to build or what actually worked really well is if I had

centralized storage, I had a couple of users that would just slam a Samba server, and I could actually move that process around to a system that wasn't as busy. It was really cool. And you could just, when you needed a system, you would just add it to the cluster by booting off of ClusterNopics. It would detect the cluster, and it would just get added as resources,

and when you were done, you would reboot it. So at night, I could go reboot a whole bunch of systems into this. Gosh, this is so cool. Oh man, it was cluster Nopics. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well it is a Gen 2 derivative. I really had fun with that stuff. It'd be really cool to set that up again sometime.

Yeah, that does sound fun. Kernel 2.6? No. And 2.4? Yeah, before my time. 2.4 if you want the good stuff. That's what Nopix and this is what the KDE desktop looked like back in the day. Look at that.

That KDE 1 or 2. I don't know. I don't remember, but I do remember that digital clock. I had all of my KDE desktops set to use that digital clock. You know, this... Clock digital. The one thing I'll say about this version of KDE is this panel was rock solid. I have my panel crash on Plasma

sometimes now. And this panel never crashed like that. It's probably all just one process or something. But, uh... Boy, that was a totally different time. Yeah, right? That's funny to think about. Last version was September 1st, 2004. It is possible that you might be able

to do it on modern kernels because apparently OpenMozix was forked into Linux PMI and is currently developed. Hmm. OpenMozix auto-discovery. New nodes automatically join the cluster. Cluster management tools. OpenMozix userland and OpenMozix every node has root access to every other node

via SSH. Yeah, that was the other thing I loved about it. They just talked to SSH. MFS, DFS aid to support. Every node can have a full-blown X or console only for more memory. So what would you say is still in development? Linux PMI, I think. Linux PMI, huh?

That sounds like something else. The website might. Yeah, KDE 2. Yeah, I think so. A project with a lot of potential from 2009. Yeah. A lot of potential. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 222 for November 7th, 2017.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that survived Chris's new Rust obsession. And I'm that Chris. Hello. My name is Wes. You know, Beard, I kind of blame you because you kind of got me into Rust. So the Beard's here too, but if I'm not here next week, you can blame him. Oh, I will. You've got to fill in for me. It's okay, I'll be here anyway.

Yeah. All right. I think he's playing Rust over there right now in the corner. Despite that, we still managed to put together a pretty good show this week. It's going to be packed with a lot of community news and a story too. We've got a little anecdote that I think resulted in a pretty good app pick this week.

Desktop environment we don't often talk about very much. And then StarCraft II for Linux? Well, we'll explain what's going on there. Dan's here from Elementary OS to tell us what's going on with Granite, which I think is one of the coolest things about Elementary OS, and maybe you'll find out why. And then there's a spat herd around the community right now, and there's a lot of crazy speculation.

Everybody's got conspiracy theories. I'm going to give you a breakdown of what's going on between the Software Freedom Law Center and the Software Freedom Conservancy, a hype-free, conspiracy-free, concise breakdown of what's going on, and the projects that will be impacted by this dispute. Why we actually care. The actual open source projects, the code that you and I all use on our day to day adventures.

What's actually getting screwed over by all this shenanigans. We'll get into that. feel better. We're going to wrap it up with one badass looking command line utility that helps you stress the heck out of your Linux box and then visualizes the whole thing for you on the terminal. I really like this tool, so we'll talk about that to kind of pick up the mood before we get out of here. But you know, if

there was ever morale officers to be had, it's those in our virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. We will do our best to be guiding you through those morals. had. It's those in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. We will do our best to be guiding you through those morals. Thanks. Morales, not morals. Morale, okay.

I thought you said moral. We'll take both, actually. We have no morals. You know what? That's true. That's very true. I'll take that. I'll take it. You guys can help us with both. That's probably very useful. So let's get into some interesting news, just to sort of loosen us up a little bit, because there could be ups and downs in this episode, dramatic moments, things that no one saw coming. But in the meantime, let's talk about Gladys, a Raspberry Pi powered, intelligent, open source home assistant.

open-source home assistant. Yeah. Okay. So Gladys is new. It's designed from the ground up to act as a central hub that interacts with a variety of smart IoT. That's Internet of Things. You're triggering me over here. I know.

I'm sorry. Smart speakers, other devices, light bulbs. But it has a couple other tricks that a lot of your average assistants don't. tricks that a lot of your average assistants don't. GLADS or GLADIS can communicate with low-cost 433 megahertz door magnetic contacts and wireless motion sensors through RF 433 megahertz transmitters and receivers, which I was just thinking, I believe that's the stuff that Noah really likes to... Oh, right. Yeah, that's the stuff he likes to install.

And of course, it has all the other kind of fancy things. And they have a demo video where someone has a Bluetooth low-energy switch, and they're able to activate a light and music scene by pressing that switch, and then it talks to the Raspberry Pi 3, and it implements their commands. And you can see they do have a GUI that's nice. It's definitely for geeks because you put in your, for your home, for your parameters, your home, your address, your city, your postcode, your longitude, your latitude,

you know, those kinds of things that all average home users setting up today's IoT devices have off the top of their head. I keep them just on my tattoo right here. Yeah, of course you do. Of course you do. And they've got bots. That's the one thing I do like about Gladys. Interesting, yeah. If you don't want to do anything else, you can just text it, like a

text message, and Gladys bot will respond to it. I know you're pretty hyped about this, right, Rika? You're probably going to be deploying this Oh yeah, totally. 100%, definitely. Okay, alright. Well, I wanted to start with something weird, but apparently nobody gives a shit about it. It's fine. You tried. Well, I mean, you didn't bring Noah on the show. He'd

love it. Yeah, maybe, because it. Well, I mean, you didn't bring Noah on the show. He'd love it. Yeah, maybe, because it's talking his 433 megahertz RF. Well, and it's self-hosted. Yeah. Dan, you play with any of these? Like, I got a couple of Echos. You play with any of these kinds of things? Any, like, smart switches and stuff?

You know, not really, just because I'm in an apartment, so there's not much modding that I feel comfortable doing here. Yeah, I think the smart switches are a good way to sort of dip your toe in there. It's useful for me in the winter when it's cold. I know I'm an old man, but I have my heaters on it. It's nice. It is nice. I think for this we just really have to see, you know, is there any adoption? Are there people doing novel things with it that are passionate

about it until then? Meh. One of the interesting things about this is you can expand it to add additional protocols by adding like the Z-Wave USB dongle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is – I sort of put this actually in here, a secret.

I secretly put it in here to just sort of test to see what the interest was because I'm thinking people are burning out pretty bad on these is what my sense is. And so I wanted to see how that would play out. I think it is kind of the case. I think it is kind of the case. I think it's – but what's interesting is I think it does have some mainstream broader appeal. Yeah, I think it is kind of the case. I think it is kind of the case. I think it's – but what's interesting is I think it does have some mainstream, broader appeal. Yeah, I think so. But also it probably comes and goes and waves to you. People buy a bunch of it.

They have it. They get used to it and then it's like – You're done spending your money for a bit. You're done spending your money and like only so many new types of interactions come online at a certain rate. So at some point you're like, well, I turn all my lights and my heaters off and now – The other thing is maybe the people that are buying this are doing it to make stuff easier and so you go with the tools like your echoes and your home assistants and your hues and stuff like that that are all really easy to use because that's why you got it in the

first place right and geeks are like we want full-fledged solutions, and so it's not a real appealing market to us. That said, I find it to be a nice—I find it to be—and it is actually—how did I say that? One of the reasons I've stuck with it more than more of the automation is because it's had a high degree of family appeal. Spousal approvals and children, like my kids. That's important. They all get it. They all know how to use it, and it works well for them. It's one of the reasons why it's stuck. So, okay, maybe something more to our niche then. What do you think about this, guys?

Signal is now available as a standalone desktop app. It's an Electron app, but you can get it on your Linux or your Macs or your Windows now. All of them. Yeah, and the setup process is kind of interesting. So you download it. They're shipping as a dev right now. And you can't do jack with it until you have it set up on your mobile device too. And then once you have Signal configured on your mobile device,

there's a process in Signal where you add a new device and you scan a QR code, and you just tell this app, okay, I've set it up on my mobile device. I'm ready now. It displays the QR code. You scan that with your phone, and it links them up. It's pretty similar to Telegram then well no no so well i mean in that it's useless until you set it up in your mobile device yes yeah uh but what's different than telegram is it syncs all of your messages and your contacts from the other device not from the server

so once it's once you've paired them it then does this moment where it says, all right, hold on there, boss. I've got to pull down all your contacts and all your messages and sync these two things up here. Let me ping your device. And so instead of having all this stuff sitting on Telegram servers that just blast down to a new Telegram install, this stuff has to sync between your own encrypted device

and before they do that, they each set up a key, they have a little chit-chat back and forth to negotiate, and then they do the sync they each set up a key. They have a little chit-chat back and forth to negotiate. And then they do the sync. So that was interesting. But, you know, you're not going to have your – ironically, I'd say it's not even nearly as – it doesn't feel nearly as integrated even as Telegram does, which is like some QT app that uses their own thing, their own black magic.

I'm disappointed that they don't have a Snap. It only supports distros that use Apt. That's what they say, yeah. Linux distribution supporting Apt, like Ubuntu or Debian. I'm disappointed that they don't have a snap. It only supports distros that use apt. That's what they say, yeah. Linux distribution supporting apt, like Ubuntu or Debian. Yeah, I bet you it's in the AUR already, actually. I bet so. What are you guys thinking? Just don't bother them about it when you install it on Arch.

Anybody in the mobile room a Signal user? Are we all just a bunch of Telegram bitches now? Everybody just all Telegram? Yeah, we are, aren't we? Look at that. Telegram. I use Signal. You do! Yeah, I use it occasionally too. You do too!

Because you can import your MMS messages into it and actually have it as your default texting app on your phone so you can use it as your messenger. You can only you know, you can enable extra features for Signal protocol to work its magic.

But yeah, it's just a texting app. I just checked. There are six different signal AUR. Wow. So that's why do you use Signal Say over Telegram? Is it different contacts? Are you separating them out? Is it different features?

You know, I don't use it a ton. I have way more people on Telegram. So I do use Telegram as my day-to-day. But I have a couple people on Signal. And, you know, I do have more trust for it and its security architecture, so when I do have conversations I'd like to keep private, that's my

choice. Now, Heavens, do you also have any other ones that you could compare it to, or are you just a Signal user? I've used Telegram too, but not as much. Telegram is more of an app, and Signal is more of a replacement text messenger okay fair enough that's how i would compare it really they both have the same encryption features where you can

enable you know one-to-one communication but signal actually replaces the mms app which or where telegram is just a third-party program. Just another app on the phone, yeah. Yeah, it really is. So in that context, Signal would be more equivalent to Hangouts, which can do the same thing. I bet you don't get that integration on the Apple iOS. Hangouts isn't even that comparable either

because Hangouts doesn't exactly replace your MMS app, even though it can, but it doesn't have integrated encryption into it, at least with a protocol which is vetted. It looks like a pretty nice app, and they're steadily adding features. They just recently, at the beginning of October, started beta testing read receipts, which is something that can be nice for some folks. And then at the end of October, we got the desktop app. And now they're working on expanding things like doing GIF searches to include in text, you know, the GIF-y kind of stuff that people love, all that kind of stuff. So they're slowly just checking off features that a lot of other systems have. But what did impress me about it was I really felt it felt more secure more secure than telegram it felt like it didn't feel like vladimir putin was

reading my messages yeah right when tell every time i'm using telegram i go yeah yeah putin could read this one and this doesn't seem that exciting but the you know the chrome app version of it i think that was off-putting to a lot of people and so having like real first class as long as you're willing to consider Electron real. But regardless, having first class desktop support, I think, makes it a lot easier for me to make the case to others that, hey, you should jump on here. So, man, speaking of Crossover and Chrome, I mean, speaking of Chrome, Crossover has a Chrome OS version. Now, Crossover Office, folks are always hacking away at wine. Yeah.

Now, Crossover Office, folks are always hacking away at Wine, and they make their commercial version that I've almost bought every single version of now, because I just think it's a nice way to manage your Wine installs, if nothing else. And there's been other things that come along, like gaming on Linux and other things, but nothing's nearly as good as Crossover. And now they're talking about a version for Chromebooks. This is going to be huge, potentially. If it even half works, they have a video. Should we risk it? You want to do a little... Oh.

How to install... Oh, this is just how you install Crossover. I do like the music. Yeah, right? Yeah, buddy. See, if Gen 2 Stage 1 had this music, we would be there. Oh, yeah, we got to...

We'll figure that out. Do you think we could figure that out by the end of the show? No. No, not if we're going to do the whole VM thing. Yeah. Okay. But next time. Yeah. So anyways, stay tuned for news on that, that out. Do you think we could figure that out by the end of the show? No. No, not if we're going to do the whole VM thing. But next time. So anyways, stay tuned for news on that because it's been announced. They have a beta

right now. So does that change things for you? No. Does it make a Chromebook any more appealing? No, but it does probably make it more appealing for a lot of people. You know how we used to speculate, is the Windows subsystem for Linux going to keep some people on Windows? I know for a fact now it has.

I've heard from several Windows users who were considering switching. Yeah. And they were considering switching to Linux and they're like, I don't need to know. I mean, it does make sense, right? If you're just a casual,

you don't really care. You haven't bought into the whole open source free software thing. You don't use it. You haven't realized that the pain you won't have. What if this is that move? What if this is that move on Chrome OS?

Yeah. Maybe that means only the pain you've gone through. What if this is that move on Chrome OS? Yeah. Maybe that means only the true Linux users will remain. You kind of see the writing on the wall for that, like a mile away. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, it's probably only going to – I bet you it only works on certain Chromebooks. So you've got to – okay, here you go. Here's the requirements.

It has to be a Chromebook with an Intel processor. Oh, you have to have Google Play services available and enabled for it. So that probably means a Chromebook that can run Android apps, right? That might be how they're doing this. Oh. And then 200 megabytes of free disk space and 2 gigs of RAM. And if your Chromebook meets those requirements, then you could potentially run Windows applications on your Chromebook.

So speaking of messaging applications, does anybody care that Skype has made that Skype for Linux version, that new crazy Skype desktop version? That's now officially the main Skype desktop version. Oh. Yeah. For Mac, for Windows 10. Real official. Windows 8, Windows 7, and Linux are all now switching over to that Electron version of

Skype, the one that we've been beta testing in the studio. And sorry to report, guys, that the feature that I know you all wanted really badly in your Skype, it's been delayed on the desktop version. I hate to break it to you, but Snapchat-style stories didn't make it to the desktop version of Skype. I know. I know. I know you wanted to have Snapchat-like stories in your Skype chat.

I really did. They managed to port ads. I think they did. I think they did manage. What about reliability? Because I hate that. Yeah. Microsoft declined to say how many total active Skype users they have today.

So TechCrunch speculates that means it's probably still around 300 million. But the company did give some details. Microsoft said that Skype now has surpassed a billion downloads on Android. Geez. Generated two trillion minutes of video calls since 2006. I think half of those are tech snaps. And today's users make up to three billion minutes of calls per day. 3 billion. You can multiply anything by the number of users you have. It sounds pretty good.

It's funny how much more this new version looks like and has the features of Discord. And Slack. Yeah. And Slack. And they're doing bots. They're doing bots too. They're really trying to – everybody's trying. And Slack. And they're doing bots. They're doing bots too. They're really trying to, everybody's trying to be Slack.

They've got their reactions. Everybody's trying to be Slack and it's so annoying. Can't Slack just be Slack? Like at least when Matrix did it, they did something unique there. You know, but like Skype,

if you go look at this, we'll have a link in the show notes. You go look at the screenshot in that article, it's what, you would almost think it's Slack at first. Maybe someone wrote

how to write an electron app that's like slack and then there's everyone else is just like all right this is easy everybody's just looking at the source code to the slack app and going you know this is great about electron apps it's all just right here let's just take it because i don't like the problem is that a lot of times people look at and they go oh you know this is the leading solution let's compete with that instead of looking at this is the problem that they tried to solve. And that's how they came up with a new competitive product. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you know what I'd like, here's how I'd like the Skype folks to think about it. Why do people want to use Skype over Slack for video and audio calls? And whatever reasons those are, let's get really even better at those. Get even better. Because Slack is adding pretty decent WebRTC video calling.

And if I wanted to just use Slack that had video calling, I would just use Slack. And so Skype needs to ask the questions to themselves. Why would somebody still choose to use Skype over Slack now that it has those features? And double down on that stuff. They're just watering down their feature set. And unfortunately, and I hate to be this guy, so typical of me, really just so disappointed in myself even, but. We all are, don't worry. And you have to back me up on this because you witnessed it firsthand.

We have legitimately had considerably better audio and video performance under the old Windows version than we have with the new Skype beta version. Yeah, that's true. It pains me to say it, but you are right. Like we tried for weeks to get video working properly in a way that didn't suck on TechSnap. And then we eventually just, on a whim, like, well, let's reboot into Windows 7 and use the old version of Skype.

See what happens. And it was bulletproof ever since. And it sounds better too. And that's really the, that just pisses me off, man. I wonder now, I don't, I wonder which version Dan was using.

Like, I wonder if it's any better if it's the modern Electron on both ends. Yeah. Probably not. I do find it to be better. So on Coder Radio, if both Mike and I

are on the Electron version, it's better. And if he's on like a non-Electron version, I have to reboot into an OS that has the non-Electron version. Interesting.

And then it sounds better. It works better. The two do not still, I don't think, an OS that has the non-electron version. Interesting. And then it sounds better, it works better. The two do not still, I don't think, work as well together. And I'm just, you know, just listening with my ears recording these shows.

Maybe other people are getting different results, but for my work... Is the broadcaster bad ears of yours? Well, my kids scream in them a lot, so they're not as good as they used to be.

All right, let's talk about a desktop environment that doesn't get, as somebody put it, enough love on this show recently, and that's Enlightenment. Enlightenment has a brand new release 22 how about that did you even know did you even know after one year and 1500 patches 200 tickets on their issue tracker and a whole bunch of new features we get enlightenment 22 and one of the headline features is greatly improved Wayland support.

Adding support for all kinds of stuff, including some of the pointer stuff that was really broken, and improved support for X-Wayland as well. Enlightenment was one of the first desktops to actually implement Wayland protocol support because of their compositor design. I imagine that they had to have as, well, update their Wayland protocol support in order to get up to date. But they were one of the first. Yep.

Yep, they definitely were. And they just had to get caught up, essentially. They've made some improvements to how their Windows tile, and they have per window now pulse audio. I saw that. That looks pretty nice nice right there in the so you have your title bar where you have your application icon you have in the middle of the window you have the the name of the app and then you have your window controls like your maximize

your minimizing your close on the far right but on the far left next to like the icon they put volume control for that specific application if that's. If that's not the most brilliant thing I've ever seen, it brings a tear to my eye. So you're saying Enlightenment 22, that's what's going on in the studio machine. Reloading all these systems. Reloading all these systems. It does actually make me want to try it in X2Go. I don't know if it would work in X2Go, but if it did, that would be pretty great. They've also worked...

I remember their gadgets were really cool. They've improved the gadget infrastructure, as they put it, and they've also created an improved GUI for, like, pseudo prompts and SSH password prompts and things like that. Little things, little usability things. Obviously, I'm not a daily user, so I can't speak authoritatively on it, but I'm going to admit I'm a little Enlightenment curious. Yeah, I am as well. Maybe I can install it on Gentoo later.

Yeah, if you ever get that Gentoo working, Wes. I'm sorry. Just one job. Just one. You know what, Wes? Just... You had one job! Noah couldn't have said it better myself.

It's okay. The EFL is way faster to compile than the GNOME or KDE libraries. Yeah, no kidding. That would actually be a shortcut when you get to that stage. You should do that. Yeah, right on. Why not? Yeah. All right. Well, let's keep going here.

I got an app pick, as it were, based off of a little support call I wound up in before the show. So I thought, why not share it with the whole class? You're so generous. Speaking of class, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there and sign up for a free seven-day trial. It's a platform to learn all about Linux, really any DevOps topic, and then any of those huge platforms around Linux, like OpenStack or AWS or Azure. There's just a big OpenStack summit.

And lots of news. I almost put some of it in the show, but I figure if people are OpenStack curious, they could just go to Linux Academy. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. You support the show. You sign up for a free seven-day trial. They have a great system

with hands-on scenario-based labs. They have instructors, real humans that can help you. They have a course scheduler when you're busy, learning paths, which are a series of courses and content planned by instructors. And then they have a community that's full of your fellow Jupyter Broadcasting listeners because they've been a sponsor for quite a

while. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplug. It's a great platform that's always getting better. They're always adding new value, adding new content, fixing up and improving and going back and rephrasing based on feedback or addending things based on new commands. It's a great system.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, sign up, free seven-day trial. You'll get a sense of the system. Also, enjoy the offline content. You can download and take some study guides with you. They have Android and iOS apps to listen and study on the go. An audio that you can kind of take in like an audio book. It's a pretty nice system.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. You might say they paint a great picture in your mind. They do. And speaking of painting a great picture, the lady, my lady, my lady friend came to me last night and said, I tasked one of my employees, her name's Christina, with setting up an image editor on our front uh front workstation okay now christina is a lifelong windows user and the front workstation is an ubuntu 1604 system with unity 7 on it and i immediately my heart sunk because i'm like oh god how could

this have possibly gone because what is she going to do first she's going to go to google and best case scenario and no disrespect to the game project but best case what is she going to do? First, she's going to go to Google, and best case scenario, and no disrespect to the GIMP project, but best case scenario, is she somehow, after all of her research online, because this guy loves to research, she's very diligent,

she winds up at GIMP, somehow figures out how to get GIMP installed on the Ubuntu box, and then they go to just, they want to create some signage, because they have a marketing thing coming up, and they need some digital billboards, they just need to mock together some signs for it to show the

artists what they want that's all they're looking for and so i'm thinking i'm thinking paint would do the job right and of course as luck would have it they wound up at gimp and they got gimp installed to their credit which good work i wish i could have had like a camera on that to see how all that went down um they have like a linux badge they can give them just like a good job you've installed gimp that's a right of passage i actually was very impressed so they got that installed and then they opened it and that's where it didn't work out and like whoa and it's funny you know what their first reaction was and it was so classic it couldn't have been more classic because i had no influence on the conversation. Well, this is nothing like Photoshop.

Boom. I'm like, oh, damn it. Damn it. I'm like, come on. Come on. Okay. Well. And have you heard of Gimp Shop?

So, yeah. Just the skin. Yeah. Yeah. I thought about it. I did. But, you know, there's another app. I've mentioned it once before on the air.

And I think it was years ago on Linux Action Show. And it's just such a great another app. I've mentioned it once before on the air, and I think it was years ago on Linux Action Show. And it's just such a great basic app. And it's Pinta, P-I-N-T-A. And it's painting made simple. And they have a PPA available for Ubuntu. So at first I had to try to install it through the software center, but it wasn't working for. So you know what is always the easiest? It's just give people commands.

Have them open the terminal. It's binary. They type it in, and it either works or it doesn't work. And there's no, like, what are you seeing on your screen? Where is that button at? Like, it's just... Trying to describe where the menu is. Right.

Did the prompt come back, or did the prompt not come back? That's all I have to know. And so I was able, with three commands, she got the PPA set up, we got a repos update and then she got it installed and they're up and working with Pinta. P-I-N-T-A. It's a free open source program for drawing and image editing. And it's just

powerful enough. It's more powerful. It's more like Paint.net. Have you ever used Paint.net on Windows? I used to use that. And it's more like Paint.net. It's got layer support. It's got histories. It's got tabs. It's got lots of basic image editing. And it's more like Paint.net. It's got layer support. It's got histories. It's got tabs. It's got lots of basic image editing. And it's just really simple.

Does it come with the cute dog picture? Because I don't think so. If you're looking for something simple as well, I'd also give a shout out to MyPaint. Yeah. Yes. MyPaint is also really good. Right. That was the other one that I had.

I knew there was another one I was forgetting. MyPaint is also really good. Right. That was the other one that I had. I knew there was another one I was forgetting. MyPaint is also one I like. So MyPaint.org is where you can find that one. And then, yeah, Gimp Shop, as Heaven mentioned, is if you just want to use Gimp but just have it arranged in a way that makes it look more like Photoshop, which is something I've enjoyed because I had used Photoshop previously because my mom was a graphic artist. And so she's been using Photoshop literally since version one one and so it was always in our household yeah so i grew up with from version one and then i stopped using photoshop heavily around seven but i still use it on and off frequently uh with our jb has a creative cloud subscription and i still find it to be a better layout than gimp i probably

you know i'm probably equal in my usage there, and so if I could just make GIMP look more like Photoshop, I think I'm going to do it again. I think I'm going to try to GIMP shop it up again. I used to do it. I think I'm going to do it again. I'm on Unity. I'm going to GIMP shop it up. I'm going all in, guys. Oh, yeah, because a lot of people that know Photoshop know that Photoshop has plenty of obscure features that

they would probably never know of for years unless they were an expert. So they expect new features to pop up, and GIMP Shop does give them that experience of discovery. And if you want something else that's advanced that's not the GIMP, then there's also Krita. Yeah, which I think is maybe more for drawing, but yeah. I know that Albert likes Krita. Yeah, which I think is maybe more for drawing, but yeah. I know that Albert likes Krita a lot.

So there's a lot of hubbub today about this StarCraft that came out for Linux. StarCraft 2. StarCraft 2 came out for Linux. I mean, get me started on it. Yeah, it's just a headless thing. It's a headless thing. But it might be a cool way to run the StarCraft server remotely on a Linux box somewhere. Is that what I'm getting here?

Well, as I'm aware of, it's the protocols. So as long as the protocols are network capable and not just local network capable, then you should be able to run a StarCraft client on a remote server and have it relay all of the commands back and just play locally. People seem pretty excited about it. Digital motion droplets of StarCraft. Now we just need somebody to write an open source front end to talk to that.

I know. Yeah. Can you play StarCraft 2 on Linux? I've never tried. I don't know. And underline you. Oh, you can? You can.

Hashtag Rust Life. I don't know. All I know is Rust. I've been, every free minute I log into Rust. There's a StarCraft 2 Arch wiki entry, so that says something. I'll save it for user error. We're going to have to talk about Rust on user error this week because I had such a hoot with Wimpy and Popey last week.

They got me. They sucked me in. And I came in at the right time, and it's been a blast. So check out user Air later this week. I got a story. Also, Popey, if you're listening to this, I think you might be a psychopath. Sorry. All right, moving on.

We got a question that came in. You're right on air. Don't focus on that. Can we go back for just a second? Sure, sure. I'm looking at the downloads for the StarCraft II stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's in a password-protected file,

and the password is I agree to the EULA. Yeah. Nice. Wow. Boy. Yeah. I looked around, too, for licensing stuff, and it was pretty...

I don't know. People are pretty jacked up about it. I looked at it, and I'm going, okay. Looks like under Wine, it's Platinum, though. That's pretty good. Oh, the game is? Yeah. Oh.

It is apparently under the AI and Machine Learning license. learning license well i know where all my hard work hard earned money is going which is a blizzard specific license i tell you okay i'll tell you if you boy if you want to if you want to try out a few life theories like should i have been a member of the collective should i've gone out on my own could i live after the collapse you? You should play Rust, Eric. It's just a good mental exercise. You can just try out a few different life scenarios. Alright, so we've got a question that came into the show, and maybe Dan might help us with this one, because I bet he has

thoughts. I bet so. He says, guys, what distro should I be using to get high DPI support on my laptop? I recently bought a Dell XPS 15, and I've been having a hard time finding a distribution that doesn't look like crap on my high DPI display. Anything running XFCE. Not that.

True. What do you think, though, Dan? Because I know high DPI is something that the elementary project has some opinions on, and I recall one of my first out of the box high DPI just working by default distros was elementary OS. So I'm going to put that down for you as a recommendation. But high DPI thoughts in general, is there things to look out for or things he can look for? Yeah, I mean, high DPI is pretty complicated right now, actually. And I think the first big question to ask is, are you going to be using this with an external display? Because if you are, then you definitely want a distro that's running Wayland.

Because mixing DPIs is not something that X does well. Definitely. That is, you'll get the weakest link in the chain basically on that external monitor and it's a bummer. Yeah. Then the next question after that is

what scaling does your display attempt to do normally? Because Windows does non-integer scaling. And so a lot of these manufacturers are putting out displays that are built for non-integer scaling. Whereas most high DPI ready desktop environments in the Linux space right now only handle integer scaling. Wow. I barely even understand. Linux space right now only handle integer scaling.

Wow. I barely even understand. Is that right? The fractional scaling? Yeah. So if your display is looking for like a 1.25 or 1.5 scale, like you're going to have a pretty bad time. Unless like Unity has some stuff for that, like the latest GNOME added some stuff for that, but that's still like, you still probably want to be on Way stuff for that like the latest gnome added some stuff for that but that's still like you still probably want to be on wayland for that and you're talking like the really latest version of gnome yeah yeah so if you get past those two things and you're like oh i'm only going to do integer scaling on my laptop and i'm not going to attach to an external display then you can pretty much go with anything that's gtk3 yeah uh i will say i have pretty good success with

elementary os and i have great success with unity 7 you have to go manually do it in unity 7 like an animal i have to squint at my screen and i that's where you have the magnifying glass in your in your desk drawer just for that but the nice thing is you just hit the super key you type in display enter and then it's the only slider on that window is the one you need to move and you just slide it up to like a two in my case and looking good uh and i bet that's the case for the xps 15 too i bet it just be a two um remember for them they have to remember that it's the desktop environment that does the dpi scaling not the distro right right yeah that's important yes yes yeah the question what did say distro didn't it so you could yeah you yeah you really need to focus more on the desktop environment so

the latest gnomes plasma can do this too uh and elementary and and you know i'm gonna be that guy i'm gonna say unity 7 too yeah definitely unity 7 you got to kind of stick to that stuff right now and if anybody has any other tips, please leave a comment. Let us know. So, Dan. The really tough stuff about that, though, is you're going to run into apps like Steam that don't scale. Oh, it's horrible, too. Or like OBS or like a lot of the really important apps that you're going to want don't support high DPI yet.

Yeah. You know, surprisingly, my daily driver at home, I've wound up on a high DPI display. And didn't even really – just that's the laptop I ended up taking home for a bit. And that's really where it stands out the most is Steam. Otherwise, it's pretty good. Like my day-to-day apps that I use, Chrome and Firefox and the Terminal and my editors, they all look really good now. So it's those things like Steam or it's old X applications that are like an old Java app or something that

just look like real hell. Or sometimes like some proprietary stuff like the Dropbox UI doesn't look quite right, but it essentially looks right. And Telegram has support. You can go in there and you can tell Telegram to zoom its UI up a little bit and then it looks then Telegram looks fine too.

So good luck. So Dan, while we're chatting, why don't we talk a little bit about the new release of Granite and what's new there? And maybe, I know we've talked before, maybe even on this show about it, maybe not, but kind of like a quick recap of what the heck Granite even is. Yeah, so if you're not familiar with what Granite is, basically we had this problem when we started out where we're making a lot of apps with not a lot of people and realizing that we had a lot of common design patterns that we were spending a lot of time rewriting

over and over and over again. So we made this library on Granite and it's a companion library for GTtk plus and glive and granite basically is just a way for us to not repeat ourselves it contains like common utilities and widgets and design patterns that we've used all in our different apps that you can use in your apps too and it makes it really easy to write nice elementary HIG compliant apps very quickly. And so this has got to, I got to imagine, helped with the App Store adoption that we talked, App Center adoption we talked about last week. Over 50 native applications.

I mean, a lot of them, or maybe all of them, using Granite to get set up? I don't know if all of them are, but I'm sure like a fair number of them are. I don't have that stat actually handy. But I can tell you that we're over 60 apps now. Hey, congrats. That's awesome. Thanks. I think the reason why I've always praised this is because it's A, it's the easy button for developers.

It does a lot of the hard work that they don't really want to do anyways. I'm like, okay, maybe I could learn how to do this. Right. And the thing is, it takes care of UI elements that they don't really want to do anyways. I'm like, okay, maybe I could learn how to do this. Right. And the thing is, it takes care of UI elements that you don't have to worry about. And by using these, it looks consistent and well integrated with the rest of the entire operating system. And so it looks like it's part of an ecosystem. So I really think that every distribution should have this. I think Canonical would have had this with Unity 8 once they were done. I think GNOME started to go in this direction with GNOME Builder.

They started down this path, but there's so much work to be done here. And now we have another IT of release. It's the 0.5 release of Granite. What's new? What lessons have you guys learned recently that's been sort of integrated into this release? So there's a couple big things in this release. One of them was not only what's new, but what we got rid of. There's a ton of stuff that we built out in Granite that is now available in GTK or has become features of GTK. So we're able to pull out a bunch of stuff and make it way leaner code-based. But we also went in and we redid the whole demo app. So it's way easier to find out like,

hey, what utilities and widgets are actually supplied by Granite. And then with some new utilities for a date time, so we have a new relative date time utility. So you can give this utility a time and then it'll say, oh, that time it'll give you a natural language string back like, oh, that's in five minutes. That's in three hours. That was yesterday. That was last week. You know, it'll give you like a natural language response you can use in like your messaging app or scheduling or things like that.

Nice. I'm going through the post right now, and it just looks so clean. I really like this demo app because as somebody who's maybe not familiar with what All Grandit does bring, you can just sit down here and basically tab through this application and see all the different stuff that it brings. And the range is pretty big, actually. It's quite a lot of stuff. I guess, so this is 0.5, and I'm sure you're not going to want to speculate about the future, but am I going to someday see things on here

like maybe some sort of cloud-related service on this tab or some kind of something that's unique to elementary OS? Like what other things do you think down the road could be added to the sidebar of options that Granite lets you integrate with your application um i mean i guess the scope of granite is pretty big um because it is just like whatever common widgets and utilities are in there uh one of the one of the next widgets that i want to get in there is um we built this uh sharing menu for um app center so you can share links to apps and app center and so i really want to build that

into a proper granite widget with great api so that you can just say like hey i've got a string that's this many characters and it has a link and it's an image and then the popover will figure out like oh like these are the social networks that accept all those parameters and then you know like that's one widget i really want to get in there. Very cool. I like that, yeah. This is a nice write-up with great pretty pictures too. And I have it linked in the show notes if you guys want to check it out. And I would think it's got to help lead to the success of those 60 apps, the fact that they're actually there. I mean, if you stop and think about the hard work, a lot of times on Linux is getting the UI right for developers. A lot of times we have a lot of really great applications

and the UI is just a little rough. Well, and like, it seems like that's kind of sometimes the barrier too. Like, okay, well, I know how to make all the backend work, but to make it usable to you, I need to have like, it doesn't even have to be beautiful, but I just need a usable UI. So if this can make that trivial, that's awesome. Yeah, and it's not, it's not electron. Right. See, that's the thing. Like that's the, that would mean that that would mean like okay well if i can just integrate this whatever else i was doing i don't have to jump to the electron bandwagon yeah at the end

of the day these are i mean correct down at the end of days are essentially gtk applications that are being produced yeah it's all it's all gtk3 and and yeah granite uses gtk behind the scenes so it's they're all just gtK widgets that are kind of prefab. And one of the things that's super awesome, I think, is that we've been able to get a developer ecosystem that's excited about GTK CSS and providing easy style classes for them to use. You'll see a ton of the apps in App Center have nice brand colors,

and they do interesting things with GTK CSS to look really nice. Mm-hmm. Well, great work. And nice post, too. Good job on the writeup. It was a good read. So thank you very much. I appreciate you coming on and explaining that. It's nice to pick your brain on that. Go ahead. Oh, Granite is built upon Vala, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. Okay. And Vala is built upon GTK. So it might be an indirect, but that's why it's built upon GTK. But Vala really gives you a lot of power when it comes to scripting and its ease of use, doesn't it? Yeah, it's built, it's built, purpose-built 4G object. So it feels really native to write GTK with Vala. That's what I've heard. I mean, I have looked into it before, but I haven't bothered

with it. You should give it another chance. If you're familiar with C Sharp, then you'll be able to jump into it super easy. The syntax is buttery smooth. It's way easier than trying to write GTK with C. Oh yes, raw G object makes

my eyes bleed. Every time we talk Vala, there's always some hater that comes along and talks bad about it. But every time I hear about it, it sounds like a great way to go. It is a good intermediary. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the proof seems to be in the pudding more and more. There's some great apps. And we've been talking about apps in the App Center.

But, of course, elementary OS ships just with a bunch of great apps that are built around this and Vala already installed out of the ISO. It's not just the things in the App Center. It's also the apps that have been getting shipped on and revved on now for years. Yeah, and the whole DE too.

Our desktop environment is all GTK 3 and Vala. I think we use more GTK in our desktop environment than GN gtk3 and and vala i think i think we use more gtk in our desktop environment than gnome does these days i uh now that i'm back on the 1604 bandwagon like never before i should uh i should give it another go dan i should really take another look because damn if it doesn't all just look super appealing all the time i like it and i'm liking 1604 a lot it can am i allowed to talk about that? Is that okay? You're not allowed to talk about it.

Well, so last week I admitted that after the whole 17.10 excitement was over, I ended up going back to Ubuntu 16.04 and then realizing that Unity 7 was actually pretty great for my particular use case. And then, like a madman, proceeded to just wipe all my systems and put ubuntu and unity 7 with the exception of the obs machine just because the capture cards uh and i'm all in and it's um uh i'm loving it and i i think it's the new xfce and um i thought i would get a truckload of shit for saying that last week i was really expecting people to harp on me. And I got a ton of people saying they were doing the same thing and that they agreed. Yeah.

Way more than I expected. Wow. Yeah. On all the feedback mechanisms. It was really surprising to me. It was like when I admitted that I like Nano more than Vim. I know Vim and I keep my Vim skills active. But if I'm choosing, I just prefer Nano.

I like the bottom area of Nano where it just lays out the commands for me. I hate them. Not that it prints it, just that I don't know how to use it. Oh, Nano. Yeah, and then, of course, I'm a NanoTacW. I'm a NanoTacW guy, and I've been rocking that now for, you know, everybody always says, here's the bullshit Emacs Vim propaganda that you get fed as a sysadmin is every server you log into is always going to have VI, so you just learn VI. sure every server has vim first of all second of all second of all it i i have yet to meet a system that doesn't have like nano or pico or or joe or some other non-vim editor i just i don't i don't work on those systems i know there's systems out there i understand that i don't work on those

systems sure and so i've always had nano i've always enjoyed it i've always thought it's been pretty great and so one day on the, I finally came out and I said, I like Nano, and I'm a Nano user. I got a ton of people that said, I also like Nano. I'm not saying Vim's bad, or Emacs. Now I'm saying this with Unity. I like Unity, and I think it's pretty good.

I'm going to use it for a while. I thought it would be the same thing. I'd get flamed. A ton of people came back. A ton of people came back. Joe Collins made a YouTube video about it on his YouTube channel about how he's going to Unity. He's sticking with 16.04 in Unity. There's something about the LTS releases is when you

become an LTS user, Wes, you realize that all the other releases are just beta tests for the LTS and they can call it 17.10 but it really should be called 1804 beta. Where's that ding soundboard effect? Boom! Oh, man, I don't know what's happened to me.

I feel like I've had some sort of psychedelic Linux experience and I've come out on the other side of it as a changed man, is what happened to me. You'll be back on the ArchDragon six months. know maybe nano is just a vim clone unity there's one gripe that i cannot accept that a lot of its desktop functionality is implemented in python and that's against my morals yeah i can you know i can see it i can see switching for moral reasons and i tell you what if if if i felt like that ever caused it to be slow or pokey or crashy, I'd probably bail. But so far...

Yeah, you wouldn't care what was making it slow or crashy. You'd just get out of there. Oh, yeah. The old XFCE menu. It was based on Python. No, it wasn't the XFCE menu. It was that desktop that was recently implemented in C. But it wasn't Python before.

Goodness gracious. Does anyone remember? No. Oh, God. Okay. Anyway. Are you talking about Budgie? It might have been the Budgie menu.

Yeah, it used to be the Mint menu. The Mint menu was based on Python. They re-implemented it in C, and it was way faster. Sure. I think Budgie's been written in every language. Yeah. That's the same. Well, Bungie's been written in every language. Yeah. That's the same. Well, that's the same thing with Unity for me.

You got to find the local minimum and then you... I can only hope Unity goes down in flames. But I like Nano. You know, as long as it's all small batch, organically sourced, 100% locally produced code, I'm okay with that. I would like to try Unity and the new GNOME with the Ubuntu shell on the same system. I haven't done that yet. Do a little A, B skis? Yes.

Because that's – I use Unity at work all the time. I'm kind of thinking like, okay, maybe I should try the new version out, see what that looks like. I feel like Unity is faster having ran it on some of the same systems. But then again, what do I know? What do you – What the hell do I know? I don't know. There's something about the fact that my dock isn't some extension.

QML, JavaScript. It's quick. Like that dock here in Unity, I don't know, it just feels really solid. It doesn't ever flicker, it doesn't ever... You're saying you want to flicker in Unity plugin? So I've just been on the GNOME desktop long enough where my dock's just totally taken a shit and it's gone away. And then I'm like, oh, so, right so right okay so i don't have that anymore and then

oh then what it was is of course it was well gnome updated and the doc i had installed was from the repo but the repo package for the doc extension hadn't been updated yet so i updated the gnome desktop the extension so then i had to uninstall the distros version of that extension, then go to the GNOME extensions website and install the extension separately. See, if you just don't install the dock extension, then that's probably all right. But I take your point. I find it particularly useful just to have my sets of icons right there. I'm not a big dock guy.

I can be a bar. I don't have to be a dock. I don't care what you call it. Just call it whatever you want. The icons don't have to get bigger when you hover on them. Microsoft got it right in Windows 7 when they added the quick launch down there at the bottom.

They got it right. And ever since that, I essentially try to get that. And I just want my launcher and my searcher and I want my quick launch icons. And that's what I go for. And Unity 7 does a pretty good job with that in a way that doesn't make me feel like I'm using Windows at all, but still gives me that same kind of functionality. So it doesn't really make me think about it.

That's what I like, because that's the problem with Mate and both with XFCE. I'm like, I'm using Windows over here. I'm using Windows again. DigitalOcean.com. Go over there and create an account, and then use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. You get a $10 credit. And with that $10 credit, you could try their object storage for two months for free so you can stack them. And I don't know what, maybe build some sort of media empire in like two months.

Because with DigitalOcean, you got their fast connection. You got their dashboard for days. You can deploy in seconds. Everything's SSDs. And you can choose the distro that best suits you or even Alan Jude's free BSD. And for me, besides the object storage, the block storage is just great. It's been around for a while. And what I love about it is it shows up to the operating system as if it was just a block device. So you can look in dmessage, you'll see it show up there, and then you can go into fstab,

and you can actually just mount it to a folder on your file system, and it's just like dev slash... So can we install Gentoo on that thing? Is that our solution? Boom, boom! You know, I'm thinking maybe you're not up for this challenge anymore. We'll see. Maybe. You're the one that's supposed to be looking into that right now.

That's true. Google that for us. Okay, back to DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean's also got monitoring and alerting, and they have team support, which is really great. And then they've got private networking, which is fantastic because it doesn't count against your transfer when you use that private network. And that's great for, like, proxies or if you've got a database or a backup server, which I should probably do that. I should probably do that. I've got a new DigitalOcean droplet

that has some pretty important data on there, so I even put that out on the public net. Just put it on the private one and then just let my droplets talk to each other. DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Create the account. Apply that.

Get the $10 credit. And then you're off to the races. DigitalOcean.com. Promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Boop-a-loop-a-loop. Boop-a-loop races digitalocean.com promo code D-O-1 plug boop boop boop boop yeah I wonder if you could do you think you could you think you'd get that gen 2 working on a droplet

I'll give it a shot that's for sure that would be pretty interesting I would say it'd be interesting to try it I was thinking a VM but a droplet would be pretty dang cool okay so there is a story that we're going to go to. And I want to be really careful because this thing is going to have big ramifications, and it's one of these stories that is very easily turned into clickbait.

And it's very easily going to be simple to set the tone of the conversation in the wrong direction on this particular story and i think it's too important of a story for that but i also i don't want to ignore important things that are going on just because i'm afraid of screwing up the discussion so we're going to start with what's going on between the software freedom law center and the software freedom conservancy, two separate projects. I'm going to refer to them as Law Center and Conservancy just to try to – Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah.

The background between these two organizations is they – well, by all public appearances, seem to be two cooperative organizations. In fact, the Law Center helped establish the Conservancy early on, was involved with that process and provided counsel. So they've been working. They had publicly appeared to be working in tandem for quite some time. I don't know exactly about the people running the two different organizations if they were working in tandem necessarily, but we'll get to that perhaps. But we'll get to that perhaps. On September 21st, 2017, Eben Moglen on the Software Freedom Law Center's blog posted a rather long post provide services for open source projects. And in this, they say this is game changing for them, and that they've been waiting for these developments, and that it gives them and their clients the best of both worlds, that essentially there's a new market that's going

to be opening up for the Freedom Law Center. They don't really kind of give any more detail than that. But shortly after that, I think it was on the 27th of September, we have more details, concise and accurate details in this week's Linux Action News. The Law Center sent a trademark notice to not to the conservancy, but to like the patent office saying or whatever, the trademark office saying, we're concerned that there's confusion between the Software Freedom Law Center and the Software Freedom Conservancy. And I agree there is some confusion between the names. It is hard to keep them straight. That's why I'm trying to say Law Center and Conservancy. And it appeared that perhaps the Law Center was sort of gearing itself up to become more competitive.

Then on Friday, November 3rd, fast forward to Friday, November 3rd, the Software Freedom Conservancy, which I believe is probably Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn, I think is his last name, probably co-wrote this. I'm not sure, but it's the staff. They have assigned the staff. which I believe is probably Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn, I think is his last name, probably co-wrote this. I'm not sure, but it's the staff. They have assigned the staff. And they write, a month ago, the Software Freedom Law Center, the not-for-profit law firm, which launched the conservancy in 2006, took the step of filing a legal action in the United States Patent and Trademark Office seeking cancellation of the conservancy's trademark for our name, the Software Freedom Conservancy. And they say in here that this is really weird because, you know, we're all – the community has recently all come together and decided that we're all about taking every other approach first before legal action. That's what the Linux kernel enforcement statement was recently about. what the Linux kernel enforcement statement was recently about. And they say, yes, we sometimes disagree publicly about policy issues,

but we're both sort of working for the same interests. So they were disappointed that essentially public resources or community resources were being wasted on this action. And it didn't really sound like there was any attempt to work with them. It sounded like on September 22nd that when the petition was filed that the process just started. There was no communication before that is what the impression you would get by reading this. They say yesterday we provided an answer that defends the list of defenses that we plan to use. Now the element of this that's really something is this post was

made during an event that was being held by the law center, the people that are filing the petition. That's when this post went live, was during this event. And my understanding is Karen was at that event. She was there when this went public. she was there when this went public. Now, the Conservancy is home to about 46 member projects. And you have to understand that this isn't just membership. This is sort of like a governance,

a financial governance, and copyright governance. Copyright can be transferred in some cases, and maybe all cases, to the conservancy. So this is an umbrella organization that is essentially home to some of the intellectual assets for these open source projects. And there's a bunch on their list.

Coreboot's on the list. Debian Copyright Aggression Project, Etherpad is on the list. That's where a bunch of Clojure projects are hosted. Git is on the list. The GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers is on the list. Homebrew, Inkscape. There's a lot on this list. PHP My Admin is on here.

Outreachy, QMU, Samba. Some pretty important projects that this is essentially the home for. This is the legal structure for the copyright holder. Wine is also on that list. And so it's surprising that even Moglen's organization, who used to be part of the Free Software Foundation, that ended about a year ago, rather quietly, Free Software Foundation. That ended about a year ago, rather quietly, that his organization, who's funded by the Linux Foundation, would be aggressively going after the conservancy for trademark violation when they helped them set up the organization in the first place. The Law Center helped launch the conservancy in 2006,

helped launch the Conservancy in 2006. And they served as the Conservancy's law firm until 2011 and never had any trademark issue during this time. That seems pretty bizarre. That seems pretty bizarre, doesn't it? And people are raising all kinds of conspiracy theories because the law centers, one of the law centers funders is the Linux Foundation. And one of the Linux Foundation's biggest members is VMware. And one of the companies that the conservancy is actively going after for GPL violation is VMware.

So some people have drawn conspiracies there, although I wouldn't necessarily put any stock in any of that. conspiracies there, although I wouldn't necessarily put any stock in any of that. And I would say we should all definitely wait until way more information comes out, because this really could come down to personality nuances between the people that run these different organizations. Because on Monday, a rather bizarre post was made by the Software Freedom Law Center, by Eben Moglen's organization. And it's hostile. It's aggressive. And it feels like unnecessary, like they would have been better saying nothing. I'll read a few highlights. So the Law Center responds to the blog post made by the Conservancy on Friday. And they write, who now manage the Conservancy, which was originally established and wholly funded by the Law Center,

and still bears our name. We were busy with our conference when this happened, which seems to have been the point. We were glad to have the chance now, after a little much-needed rest, to help everyone avoid unnecessary hyperventilation. And then they go into several different things. They claim that they attempted to make some contact. They say, we've asked intermediaries, friends, business associates, comrades in the free software movement, other alumni of the law center to stress to Bradley and Karen the importance of opening negotiations. One would think that this one would think this was unnecessary with people who talk so frequently about the importance of communication and opening connections with respect to compliance and enforcement.

But there, when the shoe is on the other foot, no efforts on our part have gotten us the slightest progress in bringing about discussions to resolve these differences. Friday's response to the Conservancy's management is grossly disproportionate, and in view of their long-maintained refusal to communicate with us, irresponsible. The entire piece, and all of the outrage, hangs on one thing, and that is supposedly Karen and Bradley always said they were too busy, or always too busy, these are direct quotes, to have time to talk. too busy, these are direct quotes, to have time to talk. Sometimes we have not even been offered so much as the courtesy of refusal. But wouldn't a law center know that they should probably be talking to the lawyers of the conservancy? Shouldn't it be lawyer to lawyer? Shouldn't they be reaching out to the representation of the conservancy, not to Karen and Bradley directly?

Well, I'm not so sure, because if they filed the trademark action, I imagine that would involve the lawyers, right? Like, you don't necessarily have to call the other law firm if you file a petition in court and the court delivers it. But if you're so hell-bent on establishing communication before this action, wouldn't you have tried to reach out to the representation? You would think so, yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

What do I know? It's really confusing. I anal, you know me. Yeah, right. But this is one of these messes that on the surface looks like the law center wants to be in a new market and essentially take over the conservancy's gig, which it felt like it wasn't capable of doing because of rules that, as they put, the Obama administration put into place that tied their hands. And so it was necessary for them to create these umbrella organizations like the Conservancy out of these restrictive IRS rules. And now that Trump's in and all these guys are out, new guys are in, these rules are gone. And so we don't need the Conservancy anymore.

We don't need them. So let's just have everybody come back over here to Law Center and we'll be your representation. We'll be your copyright holder. We'll be your umbrella organization. We'll be a one-stop shop. Everybody's happy. The only problem is people don't understand it because of the name differences. So let's just get them to change their name so we can compete. It's what it seems like on the surface to some people. And that is dirty because the reality is the conservancy, the software freedom conservancy should be something that is not subject to the political whims of the United States.

When the political – what do they call it? Pendulum? Yeah. Swings to the other side and different people come in running the IRS, then what are we going to do? Then the conservancy will matter. And when you have projects like Wine that have been around for decades, they don't want to be swung around by the different politics of the U.S. and moved around all the time. The Conservancy offers a stability and a home that is safe from that political turmoil. It's part of the whole spirit of the open source projects that we want to support in this thing.

And the thing is, the Conservancy, and I really don't have a dog in this hunt, but just going off of recent news, the Conservancy seems to have been working with kernel developers to come up with this enforcement statement that everybody seems to like. And the thrust of it was legal action as a last resort, which having talked to people who write kernel code, that's what they want. That's what the people who write the kernel want, is they want legal action as a last resort only to be initiated when other community efforts have failed that's what people making stuff want and if that and if that's what the conservancy is also agreeing to then they seem to be representing the wishes of the kernel developers and that seems to be a good thing in my estimation seems to be like the conservancy had recently just made a good move and then now this whole thing's breaking it's really it's really it's really interesting um and i i don't want to speculate much because i i think i feel like we've done

plenty i've tried to represent what everybody's different theories are on this while still giving you the base fundamentals of when these things all went down yeah i wouldn't i if i could give anybody advice on this story is don't participate in speculation online. Don't, don't stoke these conspiracy fires because this stuff is all going to be an, a long, so, so super boring legal process that will eventually all be played out for us. And it'll all be documented what exactly happened.

And we don't need to speculate if we're just patient, the information of it'll eventually just tell the story. The story will tell itself. And so I encourage all of us to try to tone down the speculation, tone down the rhetoric or the clickbait. What do you call it? People are going to be incentivized to tweet and blog post and make YouTube videos about this story. And I encourage people not to do it because it's a nothing story so far. It could literally come down to personality conflicts at the end of the day and it could represent tearing up tons of open source projects. So it would be-

There's a lot of better stuff to talk about. Yeah. But the thing is we can talk about it, but we can also just wait. It'll all play out in the courts and everything will be right there in public record for us to review. And we don't have to speculate if we're just patient. So that would be my advice. I said my piece.

I think it's a fascinating story. Yeah, right. I mean, it's certainly important, but there's going to be enough bad and maybe good coverage of it. There's going to be plenty of drama and other things that come out of it for better or worse, probably worse.

And so, yeah, we've paid attention, but we don't have to create a whole hype machine. Yeah, in the meantime, I just hope the open source projects that these different organizations represent aren't screwed up with this. I hope their money isn't taken from protecting or financing them or running them. I hope that those funds don't have to be redirected to fight this kind of thing. I hope nothing like that happens. That's what I hope for. And then we just sit back and wait.

I hope nothing like that happens. That's what I hope for. And then we just sit back and wait. But if anybody in the Mamba room wanted to chime in or has any questions, because I know that was a lot to kind of unpack. Again, I'll just make another plug for Linux Action News because we did a much better job just breaking it down concisely and accurately. But the development, the response post wasn't out when we recorded Linux Action News. The software, the law center, the Software Freedom Law Center's post wasn't posted until Monday.

Mm. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. You good?

You good? Yeah, I'm good. You good? I'm good. Mm-hmm. It's rough stuff. It's rough stuff. That's why I said we're going to have this really cool app pick

at the end of the episode, because this thing's not only does it look beautiful, it runs on the terminal, but it helps you kick your Linux boxes, but there, somewhere I can speak,

I swear. We're kicking butt, that's what matters. Butt is going to be kicked. It's a way to stress test your system. I know we have someone in our Discord room

who has a new Oryx on the way. And so, this will be a great pick for him because he can throw this on his new Oryx and kick the tires and see how it goes. I'll just show you. I'll show you.

Anyways, so let's take a moment and thank Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Go to linux.ting.com. linux.ting.com. $25 off a device. Or if you bring a device, they'll give you $25 in service credit. Nice.

CDMA and GSM networks. So you can probably bring a device. I'll give you $25 in service credit. Nice. CDMA and GSM networks. So you can probably bring a device. I'm a GSM guy myself. I have been for a long time now. But I started out on CDMA. I did too. And there's nothing wrong with that. See, people, when they listen, are like, CDMA, what does it matter with you?

Guys, guys, in the Pacific Northwest, we got a lot of trees. So many trees. CDMA can punch through those trees in a way that GSM just does not seem to. I can't explain it. I'm not Neil deGrasse Tyson. I can't explain it. But I can tell you this. You can play around.

You just go to linux.ting.com to try it out. You pay for what you use, $6 a month for the line, and then your usage and Uncle Sam's cut. Whenever that might be in your area. He's got to always get his piece, Wes. But that's why... He's got to pay his ting bill, so...

You know what I'm saying, though? That's why you got to start with the $6 a month line. Right. Because that's just like, that is at that price level where if I get that on a MiFi and I don't use it much one month, I'm not feeling too guilty about that.

And the fact that I don't have to worry about how many minutes I may or may not use, I love that. And they got a great dashboard to manage it all. Tons of nice devices you can buy that. And they've got a great dashboard to manage it all, tons of nice devices you can buy directly, and then the best customer service in the whole industry. Check it out, linux.ting.com.

Big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. All right, so it's Stress Terminal UI. It's kind of a complicated name. So just shorten that to S-T-U-I, S-T-U-I. And it's nice looking. Now, I don't want to trigger Heaven because it may be written in Python. I didn't double check before I put this in. I thought so. Yeah, I thought so.

You installed it via pip. I'm sorry, Heaven. I didn't mean to trigger you about that. I didn't realize that, but it is a Python app. But it's a command line Python app, not a GUI Python app. So is that are you cooler with that? Are we good? He's not talking to me now. You see that? That's how mad he is.

He's cursing in the background. It's fine. He's so mad he won't talk to me now. Unbelievable. So the stress terminal UI for your CPU is a great little way to not only do you get CPU information, but you get temperature and power usage information all visually graphed and represented for you. You display the performance dips that are caused by thermal monitoring.

You can actually see when thermal limits get hit, you can really see it on this graph, which is really cool for testing laptops. That's why I mentioned the Oryx. That's interesting. Yeah. That's not something a lot of other tools really highlight. cool for testing laptops. That's why I mentioned the Oryx. That's interesting, yeah. That's not something a lot of other tools really highlight. No, you might see it on something like the XPS 13 or maybe the Galago,

but I don't think you're going to see that on the Oryx at all. You may not see it on other systems too, but you can always try and find out. And then they have a stress operation mode for really just running the CPU into the ground for as long as possible, which I kind of like that too when I'm trying to get a laptop really hot to feel like, get a sense of what the fan

noise is like for a review. It's pretty cool. And you can also turn off different areas that you don't want to see. So if you just want a nice simple display. And you have, this is the thing that really I think makes it look the best. Is it has this fancy graph smoothing option. And I just, something about really smooth fancy graphs on the command line. You love a smooth graph.

On the command line, dude. You know what? I'm all about it. I just can't help it. You start putting pretty graphs like that on the command line. On the command line, dude. You know what? I'm all about it. I just can't help it. You start putting pretty graphs like that on a command line, all of a sudden it's like the future meets my childhood and I can't help but love it. So S-T-U-I and it's

available via PIP and it could be a fun way to kick tires on a VPS too. It doesn't have to be like a laptop. Super easy to get going. Here we go. Oh, dude, it looks really good on there. It does look really nice. With the window all maximized like that, it looks even easy to get going. Here we go. Oh, dude, it looks really good on there. It does look really nice. With the window all maximized like that, it looks even better. Purple bars.

I got to say, this is probably one of the slickest looking N-Curse's I've ever seen. I'm going to have to take a look at the source there. Yeah, they've done a really impressive job. That was actually what originally drew it to me. And then I was like, gosh, I always am looking for ways. I have a little toolbox now of ways that I abuse review systems that are just like torture chamber tools. Well, you want to know. You only have a short time with the system.

I do. And I should give a plug to the Open Benchmark site and the Pharonix test suite because isn't that just the funniest thing? You open that up and you go to the game section. And sure enough, if he's not keeping that thing pretty up-to-date to, like, most recent games, it has whole automated scripts where it'll download it from Steam and install it on your system and then play the game for a little bit and benchmark the whole damn thing. Like, geez louise, if there isn't just an incredible amount of work into that Foronix test suite. That's true.

That's another way to bang on your system a little bit. But this is just a nice quick way. You could just load this if you've got Python already on your system, and it'd be easy to do on a VPS, too. Which I like that. And it just looks so good. I should... Kind of a weird name. S2E? I should put it on my...

I should put it on my X2Go system and just keep it going for a while and see how that does. See how it performs. Oh boy, that does seem like a nice way to maybe benchmark some different VPSs and other things. Maybe it's just like a backwards Family Guy reference and it's just Stewie. Oh, weird.

Yeah, stress terminal user interface. Yeah, but I do like Stewie. That's a good way to think about it. Sounds like a user interface designed to stress the user. Yeah. Which we already have that perfected. So I think we're looking at the recording right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm. We're definitely, so we're trying to come up with a way to do the Gen 2 challenge. We're going to really try to get it in the show. We are going to get it in the show. We're going to try to get to this. We're going to try to get this in the show.

It's going to take forever, man. So, but we have an approach we're working on. I don't think we've totally nailed it down yet. We were discussing the pre-show. So if you joined us live, you kind of heard what our current thoughts are. And so after the show, Wes and I are going to compare notes and see which way we think would be the best to pull it off. And then we have, hopefully by next week's episode, we'll have our game plan for the Gen 2. I'm excited.

But I think what we should plan for for the focus of next week, so it's not going to be the Gen 2 review, but we're going to tell you our plan for the Gen 2 review next week. See what we're doing here. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You know what happened was. Listen, we'll call this a stage zero install. Yeah, that's right. Here's the thing is this like New York thing happened

and then like this Ubuntu 17.10 thing happened and then next Tuesday Fedora 27 lands. So I feel like we're going to have to talk about Fedora. Next week's episode, we've got to talk Fedora 27. So I'm going to be installing that to give that a go. Back on to GNOME for one week. I don't know what system I want to take off of Unity, though. I've got to go through that whole thing now.

It's going to be rough. It's going to be so rough. You're going to hate it. So if you get a chance, Wes, install Fedora 27 in the next few days. Yeah, all right. Kick the tires a little bit. We'll talk about it on next week's episode. I always love installing a new Fedora at least.

And that invite extends to the virtual lug and those of you listening on your own. If you want to check out Fedora 27 before episode 223, kick the tires with us, and then we'll all come back and compare notes and talk about it or listen along. It'll be like a co-review. You like that? I like that a lot. So we have a Discord room dedicated to this show now. You can go to discord.me slash jupitercolony for the main link to the server.

And then once you get in there, look for the Linux Unplugged channel. And I'm mentioning this because we're using this during our live shows. So even if you can't make it live, you can still go back after the show and see some of the stuff people talked about, some of the links people shared, and maybe meet new community members too that might still be there. It's like a live archive. Yeah, so it's kind of a cool way

if you see something go by the video that you want, or if you just want to check it in, if you listen to the audio version and you're like, I want to just go see what the Discord room was talking about, you can go over there. We do still have that Mumble room. We're still doing Mumble for the audio. That's where our virtual lug still at is on our Mumble server. So still totally looking

for people to join us there every single week. Alright, guys. Is there anything else we want to include in this week's episode? I don't think so. Well, very good. Where should people find you throughout the week, Mr. Weyes? At Westpain. You crazy SOB. Also check him out on the TechSnap program. What about you, Beardsley?

Wrecked.net. There you go. Nice and simple. Easy peasy. Find me tomorrow on the Unfilter Show. Going to be a huge show. Huge show. You better be preparing right now.

And then I'm going to share a little Rust shenanigans. A little Rust shenanigans in user error. So check out user error this week if you're curious about that. And it's a lot of fun. Otherwise, just grab our live time over on our calendar page and then join us next week if you can. Otherwise, grab the feed and we'll see you then. Thank you. I think it's wasted effort. Who's knocked him in there? Let's figure out this tile.

We've got to get this thing figured out. Oh, gosh, we do. Come on now. Let's get this thing printed out. Let's get out of here. It's going to be dark here in just any minute. Come on now. Come on now. Let've got to get this. Let's get this thing printed out. Let's get out of here. It's going to be dark here in just any minute. Come on now. Come on now.

Let's go. Let's go. JBtitles.com. JBtitles.com. Gentoo unplugged. Still compiling. Done. Winner.

Perfect. Fine. I'm going to get a heat of America compiling Gentoo. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Hmm. Ed is all you need. Nice.

Nice. Dude, where's my C? The division inside open source a community divided token ring's been killing it with the title he's getting deep is what he's doing he's reaching deep into his emotions and he's coming out with these uh real winners uh all right so do you want to do a windows unplugged i'm not gonna lie we could do it conserving rust i was hoping we could just bang. Conservant rust. I was hoping we could just bang this out real quick.

I thought this would be a quick one. I thought, okay, this is the week. We're just going to be... So I thought if we came in with a lot of energy, we'd get it. But that didn't work. That has already backfired, I can tell. I can already tell. Yeah, I'm burnt out. Yeah, yeah.

We're tapped out. Yep. We're tapped out. You and I need to go on a sabbatical uh for five years and then come back and do one episode don't just one really good episode and then retire right i'm in i'm in yeah done i don't think so i don't think it works maybe i'll buy my own lady jubes yeah there you go we'll go caravanning yeah caravan actually the dream would be to caravan and still podcast. That would be a lot of fun. We'll just do road shows the whole time.

That sounds good. Go around and do Linux meetups. Either great or entirely exhausting. Yeah, it'd be both of those things.