LINUX Unplugged - Episode 232: The Secret to Future Linux Success | LUP 232

Episode Date: January 17, 2018

A big week of community updates, events & news, including great news for Plasma Desktop users, MATE users & Wayland fans.Then Barton George from Dell joins us to discuss the new XPS 13’s shipping Ubuntu, where Linux could see its next big success & more!

anybody in the mumble room having Wi-Fi issues? And do you have a Chromecast? Because it turns out that's all it takes. Have you heard about this? Really? Wait, what? Yeah, so router vendors are going to be pushing out firmware updates. Google's actually known about this for a little while.

There's an issue recently with Google's Chromecast. If you have it on your network and you launch the YouTube app on the phone or device, when the YouTube app wakes up, quote unquote, this is the documentation language, when it wakes up, it does a broadcast packet to see, actually anything that supports Chromecast does this. It's not just YouTube, but this is the most common one. It does a broadcast to say, hey, is there any Chromecast devices here? I'm awake and I would like to be able to broadcast to you. And these packets are normally sent in 20 second intervals, which in network timing is a pretty long time. But it turns out there's a bit of a bug and sometimes the devices will broadcast a large amount of packets at very high speeds in a very short amount of time.

And it's around 100,000 packets instead of a 20-second interval where it sends a packet. It's hundreds of thousands of packets as fast as your little device can cram it over your Wi-Fi network. Overwhelming routers. And it's pretty much all of the major ones. NECIR has acknowledged this. Linksys has acknowledged this. ASUS has acknowledged this. NECIR has acknowledged this. Linksys has acknowledged this. Asus has acknowledged this. TP-Link has acknowledged this.

And Google themselves has acknowledged this. Although Google says it impacts a small number of users, and they're committed to providing a fix in short order. Does it affect OpenWRT and LEAD? I would think it would be possible, but because it's like an overwhelming DDoS. It's not necessarily like a flaw in the software, I think. Right. Does it impact Google hardware? Yeah.

Specifically like Google Wi-Fi? No. I don't know about Google Wi-Fi, but if you have a Chromecast, and a lot of us do, and then you have an app on your mobile device that supports Chromecast, this is what you get. What about cast-supported devices? Thankfully, both of my Chromecasts are powered off the TV. So if the TV's off, the Chromecast's off. Same, yeah.

I wonder if Roku's can affect this. They accept some Chromecast. Well, it's on the Chromecast side. It's sending out the packets from the Chromecast, and it uses UDP. Right. There's no congestion control on UDP. Exactly. Okay, so my Chromecast is getting unplugged today.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 232 for January 16th, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's fending off the plague, talking brand new Linux hardware, and answering your questions. My name is Chris. And I'm the Beard. Hey, Beard. Beard's joining me this week, but not Wes. I poisoned him. Yeah, Wes got poisoned by Beard, so that way he could step up and actually be in the intro so we got that taken care of good job sir

now also coming up on this week's episode we will go through a whole bunch of community news this episode is really going to be like all about the community about stuff they're working on about upcoming events and then answering a lot of your questions. And Barton George from Dell will be joining us to talk about the new XPS 13 developer, you know, the Sputnik line of their sweet Infinity edge-to-edge display laptops. Well, they just shipped out a brand new one with the latest eighth generation Intel processors, a bunch of new features, Ubuntu 16.04 installed by default. So Barton will come on. I'll pick his brain about the new machines.

And then I'm going to ask him a couple of questions about, because he's in a large corporation, so he's maybe the perfect person to ask sitting at Dell in a large corporation, shipping Linux desktops. Barton, what's it going to take to get Linux on every machine at Dell? What would it take for corporate systems to be able to switch over and get out of that Windows trench? And we talk about that.

We talk about big trends that Dell's getting ready for that are coming down the pipe. And we talk about the transition to 1710, GNOME, a little meltdown in Spectre. It's all coming up later on in the show. So I think it's going to be, what are they, not a doorstopper. It's going to be, I need a good name. Mumble Room, what's a good name for what this week's about? And hello, Virtual Log. This is like a blowout episode, right?

It's Barnburner. It's Barnburner! That's exactly what I was looking for. Okay, hello, hello, Mumble Room, time-appropriate greetings. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Guys, boy, it's good to hear all your voices. I missed you guys. It's been a long week.

But the only thing that really got me through this long week has been the good news coming out of the Plasma project. So we got a couple of different things to cover for the Plasma desktop. I figured you Plasma desktop users have been yearning for some coverage. So there's a new LTS in the works. It's the second long-term support release from the plasma 5 team and they're working on fixing speed and stability it's a speed and stability release boot time for the desktop has been improved by reviewing code and getting rid of anything they found the blocked execution they've been triaging and fixing bugs in every aspect of the code base tidying up up artwork, removing corner cases, and ensuring cross-desktop integration.

Interesting. Specifically in regard to the performance, because that's what got my attention, they say, we have been concentrating on speed and memory improvements with the 5.12 LTS release. When Plasma is running, it now uses less CPU and less memory than previous versions. The time it takes to start Plasma Desktop has been reduced dramatically, and Plasma's support for running on Wayland is now more complete and more suitable for a wide range of testing. So they're ready to bake it into the LTS release, and they have got output resolution scaling working, screen rotation, enabling and disabling outputs through K-screen, automatic screen rotation based on orientation sensors, automatic touch calibration. X Wayland is no longer required to even run the Plasma desktop.

Big one right there. Yeah, and Wayland Windows can now run full screen. That's a big one for the beard. K-Winds has been integrated with their night color system, which is awesome. That's so cool. And kind of removes the need for people to even run Redshift anymore on the Plasma desktop. That's so cool and kind of removes the need for people to even run Redshift anymore on the Plasma desktop. And the compositor is now automatically kind of smart depending on the desktop and the input and responsiveness.

And if you're using Wayland, there's been a lot of work there. So this really is being positioned as the Plasma desktop to use. It's version 5.12. It's in development right now. And they seem pretty excited about it i'll defer to the mumble room for a moment if anybody wants to talk about plasma i do have a second part to this story though so going once hey you know it sounds great but um how i hope for their sake that they lose the reputation of being bloated you know just with this release you know what i'm saying yeah yeah yeah maybe i mean i i think that's sort of been well boy it's really what's your definition of bloated because um resources wise i feel like

it hasn't been that bloated for several releases now in fact i was shocked uh when i started running plasma for a while how little resources are used based on just what everybody said. So that's one version of bloat. But another version of bloat is the package mess. And I know this is a soft spot and they don't like people talking about it. But just two days ago, I was going through and updating my last remaining Arch system. my last remaining Arch system. And of course, there's a conflict between some standard accessibility feature

and a Plasma desktop accessibility feature. And I have to choose between one of them and either one of them breaks a series of dependencies. And just as a thought experiment, I went down the path of what would happen if I tried to uninstall the Plasma desktop accessibility version. And it unwinds 35 packages, which eventually ends up at uninstalling the entire Plasma Desktop accessibility version. And it unwinds 35 packages,

which eventually ends up at uninstalling the entire Plasma Desktop itself because I want to remove a singular component. I just wanted to uninstall the accessibility meta package and just remove the accessibility stuff altogether because it was hanging up my update and then I would reinstall it later if I wanted it. But to get there, I eventually got to the point

where I'd be uninstalling the entire, it's so intertangled with everything that that is another kind of bloat and that's a reputation i don't know if they're going to get away from for a while they might be able to conquer the reputation one but people will still be throwing that bloat term around i think because of that package mess unless somebody could snap all that up yeah that's something they were trying to get rid of when they went on to plasma 5 and k that's something they were trying to get rid of when they went on to Plasma 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. They were trying to get rid of all that dependency issue, and now I'm hearing... Well, there's been progress.

It's just, you know, when you're starting, when the needle's at 11, and now it's been dialed back to 7. So, right, there's still, in my opinion, there's more dialing back to go, I think. JJ, you had a question about the undestructible desktop. Are you talking about, like, the bulletproof project we had a while ago? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I was sort of trying to point that out. Also, in terms of your recent crashes with GNOME and comparing that to switching over to a new desktop, possibly. Yeah, you know, the unbreakable, like, bulletproof desktop project

sort of is what got me going down the path of Solus for a while. But then I ended up having some issues with Budgie, and so I moved off. And that's sort of when the project died. However, recently, as like a thought experiment, I've thought about how it might be fun to just poke at Fedora Atomic Workstation. So I'm going to try to have someone from that group on in a few weeks to talk more about that as a possibility. or if it's something that's for the entire way you deploy all software on the system, more like Atomic, there may be a solution somewhere in there. I just don't feel like we're there yet. But I do genuinely feel like we're on the right track to that,

in part because of Snaps and Flatpaks and Docker and all these other things that we love to hate, too. Yeah, and personally, I'm sort of on this similar boat with me switching back and forth between Ubuntu distributions, but I've been stable on Ubuntu Mate for a little while. Yeah, yeah, it is a nice landing spot, isn't it, Mr. Wimpy? Wimpy, I was just thinking of you because you and I have gone back and forth about the transition to Wayland and some of our different thoughts about what kind of transition that may actually end up being. And so, Wimpy, I wanted to know what you thought about this post on the KWIN development blog about KWIN is now considering X11 as indefinitely feature frozen, that their support for X11 is feature frozen. They'll still do maintenance, so security fixes and whatnot. But specifically, they won't be making specific improvements to X11.

KWIN, they write, KWIN won't be adjusted to any new requirements in the X server, MESA, or the input stack, or proprietary drivers. If something breaks, it's the fault of those components which broke it. And they're going to be focusing their effort, their development efforts, on Wayland after Pl plasma desktop 512 ships what do you think about this movie about going just all in on wayland and saying that x11 is done it's it's it's done well kde are in the fortunate position where they've invested a huge amount of effort over the years to keep pace with wayland as it's evolved and you know the only two desktops right now,

or rather the only two desktops that we've had for a long time, Gnome and KDE, have arrived with, you know, Wayland support. So it makes sense for them to invest in the future. And that's their project decision. I mean, if they feel it's ready for prime time, that's pretty, it's pretty political. I'll admit, I got to say, cause to me, I feel like, uh, a lot of users are going to have a super rocky transition to Twit, to Wayland. Uh, I, I wonder if it's not going to be 10 times harder than the community expects it

to be. I don't know about this because what I haven't done is I haven't run a Wayland composited desktop or window manager other than GNOME 3. So some of the rough edges that I've seen on GNOME 3, I don't know how that translates to things like Sway or Leary or KDE. Yeah, point well made. You could be absolutely correct there. And Martin points out in the blog post that they've sort of architected essentially their Wayland system, the KWIN. They've architected it in such a way

that they don't really need to implement a lot of stuff at that level. If you read through the blog post, he says that there will be new features that will come along, but most functionality in KWIN is independent of the windowing system. Any improvements to the areas that benefit Wayland and X11? So if they make some new feature, and he gives examples like tool tips on decoration buttons, improved blur effects, or a rework of side desktop effects, they're making those improvements to KWIN. They're not necessarily X11 or Wayland specific. Both X11 and Wayland users will get that stuff because of the way they've architected KWIN. And so with that in mind, I think it does make a lot of sense. I think that's actually a pretty

good move. And it does kind of make me want to try out plasma 512 probably eventually 513 because that's really when all this stuff lands is plasma 513 does kind of really kind of make me want to try because you make a fair point wimpy i think the bulk of my experience with a few exceptions has been gnome 3 on weyland and i may have i may have made some assumptions based on that experience that aren't fair so i'm i think when when right, I got to spend some time on KWIN and Wayland and just see how that compares. That's a good point. All right. It's a really, really good news this week.

We talked about it pretty in-depth on Linux Action News, but I'd be derelict in my duties if I didn't tell you guys about this here on the Unplugged program. The city of Barcelona is switching to Linux and open source software in a pretty smart way, and they're doing it in a pretty smooth timeline. So first of all, the first thing they're really doing, before they've even switched out a single desktop, is they're going to invest 70% of their software budget into open source software development. Then they're creating a transition period that lasts until the spring of 2019. And they're going to replace Microsoft Office with LibreOffice. They're going to replace Internet Explorer with Firefox.

They're going to do that type of transition. And then once everybody's up and running on these applications and they've developed the new backend applications they need and probably like web versions of them. That's an assumption on my part. They're going to move people over to Ubuntu. They're going to just ship the Ubuntu desktop instead of trying to build their own desktop, which is really where Munich went off in the weeds. desktop, which is really where Munich went off in the weeds. And they're already running a thousand Ubuntu-based desktops right now as a pilot project. This is how you do this.

They're doing essentially all the things right here. I was joking with Joe on Linux Action News, but I kind of want to know what you think, Beard. Is this the silver lining of Munich blowing up in the Linux community's face and the fact that it was a public thing that Microsoft fans like Paul Thrott today is making a Munich joke on Twitter today? But maybe the silver lining is cities company or i'm sorry cities like barcelona can watch that and go oh shit don't do that yeah learn from their mistakes i think that's exactly uh exactly right i mean you just do a stage migration that way if you have problems you can roll back that one specific step instead of the whole thing yeah i hope i hope this works jj you have you have thought about government and funding of open source software? Well, sort of the usage of software and government.

Like a lot of these systems are Windows-based, and a lot of them are using older versions of Windows. And hopefully this Barcelona example, it seems to be doing all the right stuff, like you mentioned before. And maybe it'll bring a spur to some certain universities that are reluctant to support Linux or certain companies, certain support companies. Currently, I'm in a university where their IT department is sort of looked at, looks down upon Linux at this moment. Yeah, I've been there. Boy, that seems like an attitude of 10 years ago, though. That's sort of

unfortunate to hear that in 2018. Well, I mean, thankfully, some of the professors are somewhat like one of the professors that just transferred over to my university. He's sort of been a pro Linux advocate, sort of been, even though he doesn't say, like, he uses Linux for his code examples and all that, but he's like an advocate, but he's not outright wears it on his sleeve, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I can understand that. Well, so, Popey's drawn my attention to it, so hashtag blowing Popey. Thank you so much, Popey. Breaking news right here on the Unplugged program. This is CNN Breaking News. Crypto is ruined. Everything is ruined. This

is why we can't have nice things. Bitcoin has gone bust. Popey, you're our Bitcoin reporter on the scene. What are your thoughts, sir? What's your analysis of the current Bitcoin crypto market? All crypto coins are down your analysis sir uh those red colors they're not good are they i don't think so yeah it seems like those are bad right and they're way over on the far side you see how far over there that seems bad too right yeah they got minus signs and everything that doesn't look good to me oh you um you got a prediction if this thing's gonna go uh go down to 5 000 what do you think i know you're a big follower uh yeah i i think everyone should switch to monero there you go yeah okay okay i um i had a prediction on the

ubuntu podcast um for the end of year predictions that said that in december 2018 the price of bitcoin would be give or take a couple of thousand dollars, the same as it was in December 2017, and cited a massive crash, but a recovery that we've not seen in Bitcoin before. As soon as I heard that prediction, I said to myself, shit, that's way better than my prediction. He's absolutely right. And I knew it. In fact, after I thought to myself, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next month we see this thing get down to 10,000. And now here we are at 11,000. I hate making predictions about it. I totally blame Joe for that.

Just kidding, Joe. I don't. It was the meme-y thing to make predictions about at the end of the year. Yeah, it was huge. And now it's going down like crazy. You know, I still maintain that open source currency for fun internet money or for clandestine worldwide transactions still has a value. It's still, I think, I don't think, I don't know if it's Bitcoin. See, the problem, I think what happened was is people started realizing that, at least in my opinion, that these transaction costs were getting to the point where essentially you had unusable Bitcoin.

If you had like, you know, some Bitcoin Satoshis hanging around, they were unusable. You couldn't, you would have to spend more than they were worth to get them to even move across the network at any reliable speed for any kind of like online transaction. And I think once that really sunk in with people, this is what happened. blockchain, the block size issue months and months and months and months ago when it was a hot topic at the beginning of 2017, we might not be here right now. But they punted on a solution, several forks emerged as a result. And this is, this is, this is, I think that playing out right now, because the network became unsustainable. Just too slow, too expensive. It is probably going to come back up eventually, though. so i'm sure people will call it a fire sale there was an article i don't know if you saw it wimpy going around that um it was it was pretty popular so you may have going around that uh just several just a couple of key bitcoin players were moving the market as much as 40 some days down the back in the mount gox days just a couple of imagine yeah i can imagine in the Mt. Gox days that was fairly easy.

Those were dark days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems to be getting – it's interesting though that story is getting a lot of attention today. So it's back from the Mt. Gox day, but today is the day that it's getting passed around a lot online. And who knows? By the time this episode actually is available for download it could be down another five thousand dollars i don't mean to laugh i'm sorry i know some people are dying um geez uh i i've always i've always kind of figured this could happen all right well uh i want to give i want to

give an overview of a like a bunch of really cool community events that are coming up in in just the next couple of months um including uh oh you know what I don't have a link for is that there, Flosstalk. You guys – so you guys in the mumble room, if you have any, like, upcoming events in the community that you want to spread the word about, I'll give you a few moments to think about it. So prepare your links. Get them ready for Discord, and then we can mention them here on the show if you have any. And I'll take a moment and I'll thank ting for sponsoring the show while you guys prepare yourselves linux.ting.com is where you go to get 25 off a device or 25 in service credits this is pretty sweet because they have a cdma and gsm network so you can probably bring a phone and get 25 in service credits and the way ting works is you only pay

for what you use your minutes your messages and your megabytes no contracts you just pay for what you use your minutes your messages and your megabytes no contracts you just pay for what you use it's six dollars for the line and your usage average ting bill is going to be around 23 per month per phone that's amazing think about that i went from before even all the taxes were done and the final bill was higher than this, but like a right around a base bill of $120 a month for my three phones. And I think that some, I don't know how it goes from $120 to like $165 after all the crazy taxes and weird fees. It just, it seems unsustainable, but yet they make billions in revenue. And if somebody could get in like a Starship Enterprise and go around the sun and turn back time and then relaunch wireless networks, they'd all have to do it this way. It's pay for what you use.

You just pay for however much you talk, text, and data you use. They give you really good tools to control all of it. I've been a Ting customer now for three years and called them twice. One was because I was doing something crazy with a MiFi, and the other was because I didn't know you could actually activate a phone on their website at first. It's like, what company lets you do that? But they do. And it's great. Which means now I turn MiFis on and off like crazy.

It's perfect for me because I take advantage of both network CDMA and GSM. They always have a very active blog. They're talking about right now a referral giveaway. You can check that out at their blog. Just start by going to linux.ting.com. That'll take some money off a device or give you service credit. And then you can get started with pay for what you use, mobile wireless. linux.ting.com, linux.ting.com. And thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay, guys. So does anybody have a community event that they want to pass along?

I'll give a plug for one that's coming up in just a couple of days to warm us up. devconf.cz is a 10th annual free Red Hat-sponsored community conference for developers, admins, and DevOps engineers and many more. And it's in the Czech Republic. So I'll have a link to that in the show notes

if you're going to be there. It's the city of Brno, B-R-N-O. So I'm probably butchering that. And it's at the Faculty of Information Technology. I have all that information in the show notes. January 26th, I believe, is, yes, the 26th through the 28th. Online registration is already open

if you go to devconf.cz. Give them a little mention because that is coming up right around the corner the other one that's just not too far at least in my world is linux fest northwest 2018 april 28th through the 29th you know jupiter broadcasting is going to be there we're gonna probably do something different than we've ever done before i don't quite have it all worked out but we're thinking about potentially attempting to record uh one of each show that we can there so it'll be a so instead of um instead of just sitting there on the live stream and just sort of like djing and just like just sort of like shooting the s we'll actually

be doing shows live there like all maybe all of the shows if we can as many as we can live at linux fest um maybe pulling different appropriate guests for different types of shows alan will be there with us and uh we'll it's always a great time. So April 28th through the 29th, Linux Fest or LFNW.org. They have a call for, you know, if you want to talk. They still have an open presentation. You can submit it now for like a couple of more days. So get that in if you want to do that.

LFNW.org. And then Flosstalk Live, which i was uh gonna get more from joe and i forgot because um i'm a bad person but um or no it was a good job i'm here now then oh well then there look at cheese cheese you just say his name and he shows up that's so was it floss talk we were gonna i know now i'm actually thinking it wasn't floss talk i'm thinking it was fosd him actually now that i'm now that you're here so joe what the hell's going on tell people about it I'm thinking it was Fosdam, actually, now that you're here. So, Joe, what the hell's going on?

Tell people about it. So, Foss Talk Live, not Floss Talk Live. Ah, that's what I knew. I was mixing something up. Yeah, yeah. So, it's a live event that's happening in June. Okay. And it's, well, we've done it for the last couple of years in the summer.

It's in a small pub in Kings Cross in London. And it's traditionally been Linux Voice, Ubuntu Podcast, Linux Luddites, or Late Night Linux. And then a mashup show featuring Stuart Langridge and Dave from Geek News Radio. And it's just been an excuse to get together, drink, and watch some live podcasts. Nice. When is it? Do you guys have a... I know the site's... Is the site updated yet? I don't think so, right?

No, I haven't updated the site. I've updated the Twitter, but not the website. Alright, so it will be at Fostalk.com eventually for details, and then go check it out on Twitter right now. I'll put a link to the Twitter in the show nizzles. There you go. So maybe we'll... We've got our hotel room already.

Yeah? Oh, jeez. Now I'm getting FOMO. God dang it, guys. Come on my own show and give me FOMO. It's the 9th of June, by the way. So everyone put that in your calendar if you're around London. The 9th of June this year.

Very good. The 9th of June, 2018, for a drunken mashup of a bunch of different Linux podcasters. And go say hi to Mr. Popey. He smells great. And so it's always a pleasure to bump into him. Joe, thanks for popping on real quick and setting me straight, because I was going to blow that. Yeah, no worries. I am out and about. That's why I sound a bit different. Yeah. No, I still appreciate it. All right. Well, so then, of course, there's the next event event, the granddaddy event that is always gets a lot of attention.

And this is the last one I'm going to mention this week before we get to Barton. And that is Scale 16 X March 8th through the 11th at the Pasadena Convention Center in California, which has a new vibe this year. They're kind of really trying to push a new vibe. They wanted to make sure I knew about it. They wanted to make sure that Late Night Linux knew about it. So they sent us information about like a Libre photo workshop that's coming up and even like a photography walk around Pasadena, which actually would be kind of legit if you're going to Pasadena. Why not go out for a photography walk?

That actually sounds kind of worth it because you could always use a walk in this kind of a beautiful area. photography walk that actually sounds kind of worth it because you could always use a walk and it's kind of a beautiful area uh and so they're they're focusing in for at least one of the tracks on like libre libre free tools to work in with graphics and they're going to bring a collection of artists projects developers and just you know users that just want to make the best possible looking art on a free desktop so libre graphics at scale is going to present talks design for general audience of users and developers they is going to present talks designed for a general audience of users and developers. They're going to vary

in subject matter from tutorials and workflows to project announcements and packaging. Specifically, that'll be Friday the 9th of March from 10 a.m. to 1700. The 16th Annual Southern California Linux Expo. Anybody in the Mumba Room

planning to go? Really? Just me? That's so sad. I don't know what I was thinking about going. Well, you know, I don't know exactly. I haven't fully figured it out, but I think I'm going. I have trouble getting vacation time, so yeah.

My boss makes me go. So we'll be at a company thing in Budapest, so it'll be difficult for us to go. Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. Okay, I'll be lonely there. But, you know, I'll just hang out with all my other Linux friends.

That's fine. You guys just make it a good party. That's cool. We ought to just sync up our schedules, you know, ahead of time. We just get a Google Calendar, so that way I can make sure I'm always wherever you are, Bobi. That's really what I want to go for. So you can find out more at sociallinuxexpo.org.

That is for scale 16. And I'm going to be there in some capacity there with Noah doing our thing, trying to pull him constantly away from all the ham guys. That's what Noah does. Noah goes there. He gets a feel for the layout. And then he just goes and hangs out with the ham guys all the time because they've got the cool toys.

They really do. And they're proud of it. actually it's actually kind of a blast let's uh let's get barton on the xps 13 is um it's it's kind of this strange beast because if you just go out on the web and google search xps 13 you get well you get something that runs windows 10 it's probably not what you're looking for if you're listening to this show but you've heard that there is there is specifically a version of it that runs Ubuntu. We've talked about it many times. I've done reviews in the past. Went down there to Dell last year, got kind of my eyes on all of the products, including things outside the XPS line. And so there's this sort of skunkworks project

called the Sputnik project that we've covered on and off that's been brewing in the background and it's been getting more and more prominence at dell.com too like now today if you go to dell.com slash developers or dell.com slash Sputnik you find it right away there was a period of time where it was kind of like buried on the Dell website it was like wasn't clear is this something they're really into? But we are now seventh release, seven releases. The seventh generation were seven releases into this product line. Over five years now into this product line. And they've been iterating on it over and over and over again. And so last week, middle of last week, I think, they announced the new XPS 13 with eighth generation Intel processors and all of those goodies.

So I wanted to bring Barton on to talk about it because I honestly I expected Dell to blow it by now. I just thought, you know, nothing nothing good lasts forever. And they've been doing it for like five years. I just I just kind of thought it's going to it's going to slip. It's going to slip. But they've been doing it for like five years. I just kind of thought it's going to slip. It's going to slip. But they've proven me wrong. So when I saw the new release, I immediately fired off an email to Barton and said, come on the show. So before we go to Barton, let's stop right here and thank DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

DigitalOcean.com. You go over there. You create your account and then use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. It's one word. And you get a $10 credit. And they've just recently adjusted their pricing to make it even more competitive. And they got a new website, too, that is gorgeous. DigitalOcean.com. Create the account, use the promo code D-O-U-N-P-L-U-G-D, and then go dig around. They got the best dashboard. other, every other vendor in this area is attempting to rip them off and they can't even compete because DigitalOcean doesn't stand still. When they're not making their features better, when they're not adding things like monitoring or spaces, or when they're not monitoring, when they're not doing those things, they're revving their website and they're revving their API or they're publishing amazing documentation.

They just do not stand still. It's such a great service that anytime I want to try out a new open source project these days anything that's server based at all I don't even bother with a VM I just go spin up a droplet in seconds I've been talking about it this last couple weeks

it just blows me away for Linux action news just over the weekend you know I'm going to try out Nextcloud 13 for the weekend let's see how that goes I'm just going to try out Nextcloud 13

with the new NextCloud talk. I had that up and running in five minutes. Between a combination of 50... I think it would deploy in, I say, usually like 40 seconds. They say 55 seconds. I mean, it just spins up so damn fast it almost doesn't matter. You get a system up and running. You pick the data center. They have data centers all over the world.

I chose Ubuntu 16.04. I SSH'd into that sucker. I then immediately did a sudo snap install nextcloud dash dash edge, I think it was, to get the nextcloud 13. So that was within, I don't know, two minutes of creating the create machine button. I was installing nextcloud 13.

And then by minute three, I was pulling up my nextcloud, you know, the final configuration wizard in my web browser on my desktop off of a DigitalOcean droplet. And then I could do calls. And with DigitalOcean's incredible network speed, 40 gigabits come into those hypervisors. So I'm sitting there doing the... It just... It blew me away that I just... Back in the day, I used to take... It took me two to three, sometimes a

month to get a new server. And now I can do it in five minutes. I have the whole damn thing set up. It's really incredible. They have clustered deployments. They have different kind of optimizations for different compute types. Pre-build applications or you build the whole thing from the ground up. It's really awesome. It's a really good service. DigitalOcean.com

Try it out and use our promo code D-O Unplugged. So we've got this new fancy XPS 13. There's only one thing to do. So joining me to talk about the new XPS 13 is the horse's mouth, essentially. It's Mr. Barton George. Barton, welcome back to the show. Well, thank you. Yes, horse's mouth. You don't mind if I call you a horse's mouth. I love that one. I'm going to put that on my business card. You know, it's not a comment on your physical appearance, just a comment on your authority on the topic.

Oh, authoritarianism. Yes, I like that. Well, there is one source I go to when there's a new developer edition, and it's your blog. And I don't know how you guys did it. I mean, you're supposed to be screwing this up by now, but it looks like the new – what is this, the 7th gen XPS 13? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, 7th gen. Knocking it out of the park.

Which is – Impressed. XPS 13 is knocking it out of the park. I'm impressed. Which is a bit confusing because we're one behind the Intel generations. I wasn't going to say it. Featuring the eighth generation. Yeah, and so people, I got that on Twitter or something. People say, wait, shouldn't that be the eighth generation? Now, you know what?

I have a feeling with all the Meltdown and Spectre news, you may actually catch up eventually. Or they'll catch you or something. And pass them, man. I think that's, you know. I I have a feeling with all the Meltdown Inspector news, you may actually catch up eventually. Or they'll catch you or something. And pass them, man. I think that's, you know. I think that's very likely. This will just set our sights low. Well, so the XPS 13, it's like the laptop in the Linux world that really needs no introduction anymore, which is a pretty remarkable achievement if you think about it. And it's been around for how many years years now is this the fifth or seventh year with it you know the fifth anniversary was uh end of november last year so that and by fifth i mean

anniversary i mean the the first one came out then we we had about six or seven months before that that we uh we we really flew to market with that as far as going from PowerPoint to product. So, but yeah, we do the counting from the first product ship. Well, so still what seems like the best screen on any laptop in the market, I'm surprised that it's still just like, I mean, nobody really seems to be touching it. And it's not me that's even saying that anymore. You probably saw this, but Linus Torvalds posted on Google Plus that when he tried out all the different laptops in this category, the XPS 13, not only was it the one he went with, the developer edition, but he liked it so much that he also bought a second one for his daughter. So that's pretty high praise.

I think he actually, I think it went, yeah, yeah, no, exactly, you're right. I do remember that. Yeah. That kind of thing didn't go unnoticed by us, believe it or not. I would imagine. So it really is the laptop that needs no introduction. But I'll be honest. You're supposed to screw it up eventually, but it just seems to be getting better.

It's got an i7, a 7500U i7, all the way up to that, 16 gigs of RAM, 512 gig SSD, 4K screen, under $2,000. Oh, and it's got a 1 terabyte option as well. Oh, okay. Okay, well, that probably puts it over the $2,000. We actually have a one terabyte option as well. Oh, okay. Okay, well, that probably puts it over the $2,000 mark. But it starts around, what, $900? So that's the entry price? Exactly, yeah. And I should also say we're keeping the previous one.

So if you give them numbers, so one's the 9370, the other one is the 9360. And we don't use those numbers usually for marketing, but I use that. You can search on Google on those terms and the right ones will come up. Yes. Also, if you go to dell.com and check on, I think you can look on developer edition or XPS 13. It'll show both of those. Oh, okay. And why are you guys- In other words, we're keeping- Why? As opposed to in the past where one has replaced the other. And you're asking, why is that? And

that's because they're at two different price points. They're not that far apart, but there are folks who are going to say, hey, quad core, I don't really need that. I'd rather save the money and get something that is more appropriate for what I'm doing. Yeah. And I mean, I have a fifth generation XPS 13 developer edition. Oh, well, there you go. And it's still a great machine. So I could imagine the sixth generations would make a lot of people pretty happy. You also have a non-4K version with a 1080 screen. How well do

those do? Do the 4Ks sell a lot better, or are you selling more of the 1080s? Do you know? Can you say? You know, I don't have the actual split, but we get people who want, you know, who don't want to drive a monitor that, you know, that kind of resolution. You know, the other thing is, just tangentially, whatever we offer config-wise, there's always folks who say, dang, I would have bought it if it just had this config. And so that's one thing we're compiling is, what are the configs that people are saying that they would want? What combination? want? You know, what, what combination, and then we'll go with see if we can, we can add it. Cause we get a time or two during the life cycle where we look at, well, does it make sense to drop or add a what you call it? That config. And that's the point where we go and we look at the house,

how well is this selling versus that one? And so if you get one, that's only selling 5%, you drop that and you think okay what else might be something that people would uh would would enjoy so along those lines i've noticed something that's actually the absence of something that you guys are doing and it has to be intentional so i want to pick your brain about it because it's something that I think other OEMs need to take a lesson from. And when I get a Dell XPS 13 and I boot it up, it's not Dell Ubuntu. It's not like a custom version of the Mate desktop that's been themed for Dell and has Chrome pre-installed and Eclipse IDE ready to develop and push applications to the cloud. It's just Ubuntu.

It's about as vanilla with a few changes here and there that are probably just for driver support or whatnot. I mean, it's obvious at this point that this is a very intentional decision. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I think in the beginning, although people did say when we're collecting initial feedback, we did get a lot of people before we launched it, a lot of people saying, hey, I just want vanilla Ubuntu. But we thought, hey, we can really add some value here by doing a couple things. We're going to pick the utilities and tools that people want most, and we'll load those. we'll load those and we'll also go and we're going to create this thing called the cloud launcher, which allows you to tell,

take LXC and, um, create what you take, what you create on the laptop as a micro cloud, and then push that app to the cloud. And we're going to do this thing called the platform launcher, which is going to allow you to take software stacks that are pre-created and load them up with dependencies

and everything, get them good to go. I'm seeing other manufacturers do that currently. This is something they're embarking on. Yeah. And so we went down that path. What we found though was the utilities and tools people really wanted to pick their own. That wasn't much value add, so we stopped that. The profile tool turned out to be a heck of a lot harder than we thought. And so that, on top of the fact that we didn't have people clamoring for it, we put that aside. And then the case of the cloud launcher, serendipitously, this company docker came along right and did what we were trying to do right is get a way to write an application that you have on your laptop and then get it to the cloud so we started out with these grand ideas of value add that the customers

would love and in the end we're we're at that vanilla point that, uh, that you just mentioned. Interesting that the, um, developer community seems to be, um, seems to be of the mindset of if we want it, we'll just load it ourselves, which is, is less work for you. That's like, that's like the best, that's the best of, right? Oh yeah. No, exactly. That's interesting. You know, you know, I think just, you know, in general, just sort of zooming back, targeting this at the developer community has been great in that they offer lots of feedback. They also can, certain issues they can or that they're willing to give as well. I review an XPS product, it's about the coil wine, which is not unique to the developer

edition of the XPS 13. It's something that can happen because of just, I would assume, the compact electronics, but maybe you can talk about that more. But it wasn't until I started reviewing it for Linux users that I started hearing about it all the time. Yeah. So how is that in the new release? And were the Linux customer base or the developer customer base, as you put it, were they particularly demanding in that kind of issue in a way that the Windows users weren't?

Where does that all stand today? Well, so I can't go into too much detail cause it involves third parties, et cetera. Um, and you know, anything we say, Oh, it's perfect now. And then somebody has an issue with it. That's, that's not gonna look good. And somebody, no matter how perfect anything is, something's going to come up. All right. So we've got a big couch here, but I follow you.

Yeah. Yeah. No. Um, I think it was a small subset of folks. That being said, if you were one of those lucky subsets, that wasn't a good thing. And I think, too, there's also a tolerance level for people. So there are certain people whose parameters were more acute than what we set. Maybe you or I or somebody else would hear that same thing and say,

oh, well, that just sort of sounds like what things normally sound like. And then there's other ones that were outside the normal boundary, and you'd say, oh, yeah, that makes sense. So, yes, we have taken steps to ameliorate that. And, you know, that's basically what I'll say at this point. the 6th gen and never had the problem myself. But I have worked extensively with small compact machines in audio production, and I know that it is an issue that can crop up. I, for example, had three or four, three Intel NUCs actually hooked up to my mixer at one point, and two of them exhibited coil wines, and one of them didn't, same exact model. But it does sound like it's gotten worked on. I've been following some of the threads and i've been seeing people talking about it does

seem like things have gotten better from what i can observe i wonder though uh down the road is it does it is it am i am i being over cautious when i worry that maybe linux users are persnickety but they're too demanding like it seems like maybe we're high maintenance, or is it a good thing? You know, I think in general, and getting back to what I said a little while ago, as long as you treat developers fairly, they're okay with a certain amount of slack here and there. And I also find that oftentimes people have, you know, Linux users will joke themselves as, hey, we're willing to, I'm not saying this in, of course, this isn't in regards to anything we do, no, but they feel that, you know, things have been so tough for so

long when things do get better, even if they're not 100% perfect, they're very happy about it. If things tend to be trending in the right direction and there seems to be steady progress, then yeah, I think you're absolutely correct. Yeah, and so I would say it's the opposite. Not that you're not going to get somebody who is persnickety, but I think in general, the developer crowd seems to be much more understanding and willing to work with you as long as you're working in good faith, you're being honest about what's going on, et cetera. Well, let's see then. Let's shift gears.

And I think, and I'm just going to say one thing, too. Sometimes it's tricky, you know, with regards to honesty in that, or I shouldn't say honesty, but you always are honest, but as far as how much you reveal in that, it involves other partners as well and players. And so you can't, even if you wanted to come out and say, this is what's going on, it would involve other folks as well. Yeah. I think everybody gets that.

Yeah, I think it's pretty understandable. Now, so let's shift gears and see if we can make things uncomfortable with a different partner, Canonical. Oh, please do. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. Now, you and I were sitting in a room together the moment it was announced. In fact, I was the person that delivered the news to you that Canonical was dropping Unity 7 and switching to the GNOME desktop.

How has that… Switching back, back, back. Right, right. How has that been brewing inside internally? Because 1710's been out. I know that you're shipping 1604 currently still. Probably won't be shipping 1710 ever because why would you? Especially with 1804 right around. Is 1804 looking like it's going to ship on Dell products?

Is GNOME desktop going to ship on Dell products? What's your answer for that? I'll say that what we usually do is when we launch a new system, it comes with the LTS that is current at the time. So we don't, like you said, we won't do a 1710. We won't do an 1810 or 1904 or something like that. We do best efforts, and we try to support people with issues they have in the interim releases, but the one that we're going to guarantee is the LTS that ships with it. I mean, you don't even have to, not even talking about Dell,

but just like your personal opinion, work, you know, shipping a Linux desktop now for a while, working on this. How's Bart and George feeling about the transition to GNOME? Well, so without knowing all the intricacies,

because I'm sure there's all sorts of things. Oh, you didn't think about this and realize how it affects that. But it does seem like a big switch. It really does affect the product you're shipping. It does. I think one thing is, as a company,

you need to know when to hold them and when to fold them. Because one thing happens, and I've been in other companies that just keep pouring money into things long after it became obvious that it wasn't great benefit to the customer at that time, and it really wouldn't be going forward. And yet there is this desire sometimes to keep working at something long after it's been obvious that it's not the right move. So I think it's, and it's always tough. I mean, I say it as if that's an easy thing to do, but I do have a lot of respect for companies that early on say, you know what, this isn't going to happen.

We're going to stop it. And so that's sort of the bigger picture. And so within that, put that lens on it, I think it made sense to realize they had an awesome vision. They'd done quite a bit of work. And it just, it was, they weren't going to get there to the end. There seems to me, Barton, to be a similarity between what Canonical has done with their desktop. They went to Hacker News and other places and they said, what do you want out of Ubuntu?

And people said, just ship stock GNOME, just give me my basic applications. Sort of reminds me what people said to Dell when they said, just ship stock Ubuntu, just give me vanilla Ubuntu. I just want to load my own applications. Do you see a similarity there? Yeah, and I think it's, you know, once again, it's does it add value or not? Are you just putting bells and whistles that nobody cares about? And it, you know, comes across as bloatware.

So, yeah, I would see that, that there are certain things that are going to be value-add. Yeah, I would see that, that there are certain things that are going to be value add, but oftentimes in the Linux world, it's stuff that you're going to pull down yourself, right? As opposed to if you're buying a Windows PC, having certain applications bundled with it really increases the value of the system. Now, before I let you go, I have to ask you something that you're not going to have an to just open up GNOME software and get microcode updates for Meltdown? I know you might not know the intricacies of how it's going to get patched, but the firmware delivery mechanism through GNOME software is something that Dell has gotten uniquely good at. And I wonder if what I'm trying to get at is

how much awareness does it have at the Barton George level, this functionality? Like how much of a topic of a conversation is this particular feature? Because it seems hyper-important right now. The firmware updating through GNOME software, that working with FWUpd – sorry to be vague, but that's a specific question. How much is that at your level? Hardly any at all, right? So we have folks that are, you know, knee-deep in everything Ubuntu and working on all this, and yes, they would be, you know, we have folks like that on the team, but my role as chief plate spinner doesn't doesn't go that far so does it come up though the

the feature as a topic of conversation or is it essentially is it just an assumed baked in thing now so i can't answer that specifically and not meaning that um i'm not allowed to but i just i just don't know and i know because there is is a separate team, as you can imagine, technical meetings internally about, you know, how are we – what are we doing with Ubuntu as far as from a technical point of view. Because it also involves your server products and not just the XPS 13. So I totally get it. The reason I wanted to ask is because the one thing the audience is going to say after this interview is how come you didn't ask about Meltdown or Spectre? And so I had to try to get as close to something I thought you'd be able to answer in that regard, unless you want to talk about...

Yeah, we put it in bite-sized chunks, but the answer is, yeah, I don't know. I mean, if you want to get into x86 architecture nuances with me, I mean, we could do it, but it doesn't seem like that'd probably be either one of our power areas. I was hoping we'd get into the Spark chip, really, I think. Yeah. That's, or the old RISC chips. Right. That's chips.

Right. Right. Absolutely. Cheers is coming into my eye right now as I as I think back. So what trends is Barton George watching in the Linux world that he thinks will be something that Dell needs to respond to in the nearish term future? Oh, gosh. Putting me on the spot. Yeah. You know, it's sort of like, you know, put your strategy hat on. Well, I think for us, it's much more, you go back to that,

what is the customer looking for? And we just take what's out there and make sure it runs without a hitch on our system. So where Dell is looking at is, okay, how do we make, from a hardware point of view, how do we make systems that are continuously better for our customers? And then given that, how do we work, take what's out there in Linux and make it work on the laptops? So I think we are much closer focused in also because, as I said, that's a lot of the stuff that the customers in particular will do and will decide on their own. Do you have any sense of what Linux could do better to be more successful in large corporations as an actual viable desktop OS? Is it just, is it an application issue? Take

Dell, for example. Even if you're, you know, Dell, you have to, even if you have a Linux machine, you still at some point, you functionally need a Windows machine to fully participate on the network. Is that an entrenched, irretractable position that Windows has etched out? Or, you know, sitting at your desk at Dell, could you foresee a day when even corporations as large as Dell could be shipping Linux on all of their desktops? Well, I think, you know, I'll answer it that some of the key things that are missing is you've got internal apps, right, whether they're name tools or your expense reports, et cetera, that need to be – Rewritten if they're going to be used.

Yeah. Right, exactly. And so there's all that as well as, as you say, we many large companies, run on Windows, and we need to have all those applications. And so, you know, for right now, they're great developer boxes within ourselves, as you say, within a large corporation, but they aren't general purpose machines. So that, you know, I think that's going to be tough, that you're going to need to sort of, I think that's going to be tough that you're going to need to sort of, at least to begin with, figure out what use cases you can pick. And you don't want to overestimate the power of Linux to supplant everything else. So don't overshoot, maybe?

Overshoot maybe? Because here's what I'm kind of angling to is, is perhaps the strategy or whatever you want to call it, or perhaps should the goal be, maybe the goalpost should now beops like GNOME to super serve a more sophisticated developer type audience? And maybe it's worth stop chasing that total new computer user, that fantasy Linux user. Because it does seem like if we double down, if the Linux community could pull a Sputnik project and sort of just say, what would we build just for developers? We might have a lot of success there. What do you think? Yeah, no, I think that's what it's all about is sticking to your knitting, as they say. It's not the, it's iterative, right? You start small, you're agile, you see what works and what doesn't work. you, uh, you're agile, you see what works and what doesn't work as opposed to, you know, by the year 20, what are we in now? 2022, we're going to be all a hundred percent Linux on the desktop in,

in, in our enterprise. Um, and it's, it's looking to expand beyond that, but as you say that the obvious targets to begin with, or how can we do a, a developer machine that keeps meeting more of the developer needs, developers needs, or scientists, engineering scientists. Might we make a machine learning AI developer box that would have all those goodies, you know, whatever those might be. Or do you find out, you know, once again, that it's, hey, whatever I want, I'll pull down myself. So I don't need anything tailored to machine learning. What I feel like what I'm learning, what we're kind of getting is these users are generally

capable enough of customizing their own system for their particular edge case, if you give them the right base, like, so take machine learning and AI. That's a different machine than an XPS 13. But it's a type of machine that Dell certainly does sell. And if you could tune that right, give them the platform or the tool, and then they take care of the software side of it. And so maybe you get really good at doing that for a couple of markets. And then once you've really nailed that, you move on to another market, and then you nail that one. Yeah, no, exactly. And you look at, well, what is value add in that area? Just like we said, when we originally went out with this and asked And then you nail that one. But yeah, to find out, say, once again, machine learning or people in the music industry or whatever it might be, what would you see as something that would make your life easier or better if we could provide it?

Now, my last question is crystalline silica material? Wow. Oh, good gracious. wow good gracious now you're like this isn't like this isn't this isn't no this is the quote you would know because all all retweets are you fully rep you fully support them you retweeted a quote right here not painted white the new dell xps don't get this wrong everybody it is not white it is made of crystalline silica material that literally weaves the white color in like fabric in nine composite layers. Yeah, no, I tell you, you know, you must be watching my tweets very carefully. I tweeted that. Well, I'm on there right now. I'm on there right now. Yeah. Okay. There you go.

At Barton 808. I go there every day at Barton 808 and all of our audience should too. Because if I were a betting man, dear audience, I would bet that there may be an update along the precision line soon. And that's one of my favorite lines. So keep an eye out at Barton 808. I can never I can neither confirm nor deny. Wink, wink. Of course not. Of course not. Yes. And of course, you saw when I retweeted that, I also put in the shameless plug for the developer edition. Yes, of course. Good man. good man. Yeah, we'll have links to... It wasn't so much about what they said, it was just, hey. A chance to plug your stuff.

As you should. As you should. The XPS 13 is, so like Barton said, available now in the 6th Gen and 7th Gen model. The 7th Gen is hot. It's the 930 70, not hot literally, but hot like in the, you know.

No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With lots of different configs. I will link to bartongeorge.io in the show notes where you guys can read about it as well as the other product pages. Barton, is there anything else we want to mention before we roll out of here? No, I think that the one thing that I would say is I was completely blown away by the amount of interest generated by this release. Oh, yeah. Because, as you know, it's number seven, and I thought it would be incrementally, you know, or same sort of level of interest.

And I got more hits on my blog that first day than I have in the 10 years that I've been doing that blog. So it was just, it was not what I expected. As I said, I expected people to be interested because we have folks who are interested in it. Well, it doesn't surprise me. You know, I'm glad to hear that. It doesn't surprise me a single bit, Barton, because, you know, the reason I drove my RV down to your office was because I could tell there was momentum building around this product line, which snapped my attention around. And so I am not surprised to see it's continuing to build because I could smell it coming, Barton. Like an Austin barbecue.

What was it? Your bunions were tweeting or something like that? You knew it was going to rain? I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Right now, I'm just thinking about Austin barbecue now that I said that. But, Barton, thank you very much for coming on.

No, a pleasure as always. I really appreciate the opportunity, Chris. Maybe one of these short weeks here, I can get my hands on one of these and tell the folks what I think. But in the meantime, they can go read up about it. And I'll retweet your reviews for the developer edition I see coming along, too, so people can keep an eye out for that. All right, Barton. And then, as we were talking about before, easiest way to get there is either – well, easiest to remember is dell.com slash developers or dell.com slash Sputnik. They'll take you to the same place and that's where it has the line and you can click through for the new one or the other ones.

You know, I never even got to ask Barton about his dogs. I was going to ask him about his dogs because somehow I go down to Dell, I hang out with Barton for a week, and I didn't even know he was a dog owner. And now these days that's all I care about is a new dog owner. But I digress. Let's move on. We still have some great emails to get to. I want to recap something that we've covered back in 2016 on this show

and things have changed. I've been doing a head-to-head comparison recently, so I want to cover that. We've also got some quote-unquote breaking news from the Ubuntu Mate project all to come. So let's take a moment and thank Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. What, what, what? You don't know what Linux Academy is? Friends, let me tell you this. Well, actually, how about a highly paid voice actor will tell you? Whether you're an experienced sysadmin or new to the world of Linux, Azure, and AWS, OpenStack, and DevOps, a sharp skill set is an absolute necessity to succeed. Meet Linux Academy, an online Linux and cloud training platform that uses self-paced video courses and hands-on labs to give you real-world experience for a wide range of skills. Train for your certification, learn the latest DevOps tools,

and grow your skill set to do better work. Linux Academy is not just a video library. Our scenario-based server labs and quiz system allow you to learn hands-on. We also have full-time human instructors who answer questions and help you earn that certification or promotion at work. We add new training every week, so you'll always be up to date on the latest tech. Sysadmins of every experience level use Linux Academy to stay on the bleeding edge of the Linux ecosystem. You should too. One thing the voiceover guy doesn't mention that's my favorite feature of Linux Academy

is they have full-time human beings that are available to help you if you get stuck, like instructors that really know the content material. And they have a course scheduler system specifically for us busy folk. Just the more you know, guys. The more you know. So go check it out, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Learn how to build a secure system so that way when the hackers are dropping malware on your system, you're on top of it. While you're laughing, the hackers are dropping malware into your system. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux

Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So Wimpy, I heard a little birdie tell me that there could be something interesting over at the Mate Project this week. Ubuntu Mate, I should say. Not the Mate Project, but Ubuntu Mate. Actually, the opposite. Oh, really? I got it right the first time.

Oh, good for me. Yeah, you did. Hey, look at that accident. And then I messed it up by correcting myself. That's a life lesson. I can also throw some news in about Ubuntu Mate if you like as well. Well, then that would be just right all along. So that would be great. So let's start. Let's start life lesson. I can also throw some news in about Ubuntu Mate if you like as well. Well, then that would be just right all along.

So that would be great. So let's start. Let's start with Mate. Okay. So Mate 1.18 was released about one year ago, and that's been a long-lived version. We've been supporting that, and we've had three point releases. So it's very robust and stable now. But we have just closed the feature branches on the Marte desktop and we'll be releasing Marte 1.20 in the next week or so.

So expect that to hit your distributions soon. That is really exciting. So, okay, so it's 1.20 right 1.20 yeah i wanted this one to be a 2.0 but um i've gone with consensus of the team we're going with 1.20 i thought the next one would have been 119 though so you did skip one rev oh one 119 was the development wow so what's the headlining features? Are there headlining features? Well, there's some boring things that are important in that there's thousands of bug fixes. And a lot of those we've been cherry picking back into the 1.18 stuff for the important things, which is why, you know, people have seen that Ubuntu ubuntu mate 1710 and 1804 daily are really very

robust at the moment um but there's been a lot of work in the window manager for example so that's now got um hardware acceleration oh i love it and yeah and is um uh what's the word um screen tear free and now supports um you know quadrant and upper and lower panel tiling uh within the standard window manager and a whole heap of key bindings as well that actually sounds pretty big yeah that's quite a quite a bit of work um and this really came about because we were looking at where we needed to go with things uh as a team we don't see that right now is the time for us to invest in any serious wayland development and there were things that we could do to improve our desktop on top of x11 so we've taken steps to do that and this is work that won't arrive in time but we've also started the work to really finesse the high dpi support so high dpi support is much improved

it's still got the experimental tag in that it is not a seamless it just auto magically enables but if you um twiddle the right knobs you actually get a fairly decent high dpi uh experience with mate now and a blog is forthcoming i've actually got it drafted had it drafted for weeks i need to get on and post that how to turn that stuff on oh boy oh boy i mean just that's uh i could see why you wanted to do a 2.0, especially with the hardware installer. Is it Marco? Yeah, Marco is the window manager, yeah. All right. That's pretty great thing about Marte 1.20. As a rule, we don't like to remove features, but we've actually had to remove a feature.

So if you've used the desktop, one of the panel applets is a stock ticker, and we've had to drop that because Yahoo have ended api that we were hooked up to in order to get that data like many other services around the internet we're all using this yahoo api that's gone away it's not coming back and there is no drop-in replacement so unfortunately we've had to drop that applet because it's defunct i I'm sure many... If you replace it with a crypto coin monitor instead. Absolutely. They already exist. We don't need to carry that in the core project.

Yeah. I'm sure many serious stock traders were using that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So building on top of the features that exist in Marte, in fact, as we've been talking, I've been working on the global menu so the global

menu implementation in ubuntu mate 1804 will be such that that is permanently available not necessarily enabled but permanently available um in all um of the various layouts and what that means specifically is that the hud will now work in any of the layouts in ubuntu mate rather than just the few that had the global menu enabled so that's a an improvement i'm hopefully going to land this evening after we've finished chatting um and then the other thing we're looking at doing in ubuntu mate is we're working on our next generation of the Ubuntu Mate Welcome and the software boutique. And at the Debian conference last year,

the Debian Mate team were asked to more closely align with Ubuntu Mate in terms of default settings and setup and things like welcome and the software boutique so we're going to be delivering Ubuntu Mate welcome and the software boutique as snaps so that Debian can take advantage of that. And a little bit longer term, we'll be adding some support so it can be white labeled. So when it's running on Debian, it can present a different look and feel and content. That is fantastic. And it's fascinating to me that Snap applications can be contained in a Snap, but still have the ability to manipulate

the package management on the host system so it's like well these these snaps would very specifically be classic so these would be uh snaps that are effectively like a deb installed on your host system they're effectively uncontained because they need to do exactly as you've just described they need to add and remove software and you know welcome does other things you know to configure peripherals and what have you so yeah very much unconfined applications but by delivering them as snaps that the welcome and boutique are our usp it's what broadly defines ubuntu mate's identity. We haven't been moving very quickly recently, but the development's ramping up now. And what I want to be able to do is continually deliver

improvements to the Ubuntu Mate users through Welcome and the Boutique without having to use PPAs that people don't know about and all sorts of other complicated systems. By having a snap, we can just keep delivering new and improved versions rapidly. That sounds great. That sounds really great. I am obviously a big fan of sort of eliminating some of those PPAs as much as possible and probably more and more as time goes on. So I'm clear. Is that kind of that's the is that the 1804 release of ubuntu mate that's where some of that will land yeah ah yeah okay wow how um how big of a risk is it to switch over to that's a pretty big fundamental switch for the lts i guess

i guess you have time to to iterate on it if needed but that seems like a pretty big switch for the lts ubuntu mate shipped a snap in 1710 so we have we have some experience in what's involved in doing that and um our friends in the ubuntu desktop team and the foundations team have been improving the um hooks that exist in the build infrastructure so that it's easier to ship snaps on the image so other at the moment they are simply installed on the image and you only get them if you install an iso that had that snap on it whereas the changes they're making are if you installed say a beta and in the final release an additional snap was added it seeded like other packages so you get that package added to your system as part of the um the upgrade as i recall it was a pulse audio mixer right a command line pulse audio mixer yeah

yeah it's pulse mixer has that gotten much testing or and has and and i know one of the other things i was going to be curious is, has it been updated? It has been updated, yes. In fact, we did it a couple of few weeks ago. Yeah. So, yes, it's been tested by thousands and thousands of people. Great. And now it's been tested to have a Snap desktop application shipped on the distro that gets updated after the distro's release with active users.

Yeah. That's a pretty good milestone. Yeah, so JJ, you had a question about the beta. Go ahead. Yeah, so is there any way for me to test out any of the new features of the new version of Mate? Possibly, I'm sort of interested since i am a user of a bunch of mate so you can test any of the daily images for any of the flavors the url is cdimage.ubuntu.com and in there you'll find directories for each of the flavors and inside there you'll find the release name so it's bionic at the moment and in there you'll find a directory daily

live and whatever architectures the flavors support you'll find iso images for in there and you can download those and install them on you know spare laptops or vms or what have you to test them and then um they're also scheduled um alpha and beta. So when those come around, there's a more organized test schedule for a week around those where each of the flavor teams are looking for feedback and looking for the bugs that get reported in order to fix and improve. So it's like all or nothing. What do you mean? Sorry? So it's like all or nothing. What do you mean? Sorry? So it's like all or nothing with the image.

Like you can't really upgrade the actual individual Mate environment possibly? Oh, you're asking like a current install and go to a new version of Mate? Yes, you can. You could run through the same process to do a distribution upgrade, and you could upgrade from 1710 to 1804 um to be honest with you it's we none of the flavors did an alpha one that was scheduled to happen january the 4th for obvious reasons that didn't happen um the next alpha will be alpha 2 which will be the beginning of february i think you'd be best to wait until the alphas are out the way because there's a lot of a lot of things moving at the moment if you need your machine to be reliable

um just avoid 1804 for the moment now you tell me i started the upgrade before we were you're fine you've got i've got a hotline to you yeah exactly understood yeah um that's that's a lot of great stuff wimpy thank you for the update that's Understood. then loaded up uh zubuntu and looked at gnome software in both of the latest zubuntu and he saw a different highlighted selection of applications in linspire than he did in the machine he was looking at the same time in zubuntu and so he wondered does that mean is linspire injecting like their own suggestions into that list or is it more of like a random rotation with the way gnome software displays like those featured ones that you guys are curating yeah there's um there's a list of say 16 and like

six are picked from that to be displayed ah so does gnome software just do like a random selection yeah yeah and it rotates i think every 24 hours So it's not particularly rapid in the way that it represents them. Ah, it's confusing. That is actually, I kind of, yeah, okay. And so any Ubuntu flavor or derivative that is shipping GNOME software is likely just using that same list because it's coming from the upstream GNOME software that they're repackaging. So which Lenspy would be doing? And so if they were injecting their own list, would they have to be modifying GNOME software?

Would it be a fork? Or is there just some sources file that they could go? If they were modifying that, they would have to have forked it and made their own version. So that's hard-coded in. Interesting. Well, the source of the data is in one of the plugins yeah interesting i'm learning they can certainly choose to ship their own plugin which points to their own

data sources and they can promote their own applications that they prefer for their target users that's for sure or remove the plugins they ship by default onto that's another option so they can certainly affect i see the list um that's for sure but it's but it's not likely because it takes it takes in the list you have to maintain right and is that an xml file up somewhere or rss feed what is that it's a rest api aha i'm learning over the last week that gnome software is um deceptively complicated it looks very simple on the front, but some of this stuff is more complicated than I thought it was. I envision this stuff as sources lists and a simple text file that somebody could just

throw an RSS feed in. I mean, no. No, of course not. Of course, in this day and age, you've got to support flat packs and snaps and firmware updates and all kinds of things and software channels and plug-ins. It's all above my pay grade, apparently. I'm just glad it works when it does. So I wanted to take a moment on the show

and talk about MB and Plex again. Oh, God, I know I've talked about it too much. But I got to be honest, we actually haven't covered it since 2016 on the show and things have really changed. In fact, not always for the better either. We'll get to that. Maybe I should start with that so I'm not ending on a super pissed off note, but Chris is a little upset about something. So let's see, when was the last time we covered this here topic here? Yeah, let's see. It was Linux Unplugged. I think it was like 156. So if you dig around in that range, you will get a more comprehensive coverage of what we're about to talk about, including things like Tiny Media Manager and integrating more with Kodi and whatnot. But just really briefly off the top, I've been head-to-head comparing MB and Plex, which are two different

streaming options that allow you to collect a mass of media on a file server or on a desktop. I actually have been running these for testing, one just on a workstation and one on a server, a couple different servers, actually. Anyways, it is a server-side software that has a client-side piece, and the client-side can run on a Roku, an Android TV, an Apple TV, a web browser, a mobile device, and it allows you to throw a bunch of media up on a server.

It scans all of it, figures out the metadata, downloads the information from the internet and artwork and descriptions and organizes all the seasons for your TV shows and your movies. It's quite handy and it makes you feel like you're living in the future. It's great. And there's two main competitors in this field these days. There's MB and Plex. And Kodi does fit in here. Like I said, check our past episode for more. Plex. And Kodi does fit in here. Like I said, check our past episode for more. But just really briefly, if you're running Kodi today and you're wondering why the hell would you want MB or Plex,

just a quick versus like the Kodi. Plex and MB are not nearly as fast as Kodi. If you're pointing Kodi at some local files on a disk, Kodi is going to whoop its butt in load times and fast forward every single time. And these both require fairly reliable networking, a reliable LAN or Wi-Fi, and a pretty solid internet connection if you're doing streaming. So those are their main detractions from coding. But they're also better than coding at certain things. Like on my testing, they are better at media detection, getting the right metadata information about esoteric shows that are named something kind of off, identifying a series that maybe isn't quite right. It's much better at that.

And obviously, as I started with, it's very easy to use for streaming for your friends and family. In fact, Plex has a feature called Plex Sharing, which allows you to share with friends and family. You just add them as a buddy. And so let's take my buddy Chase from Unfilter. He and I are friends on Plex and we share each other's libraries. He happens to have episodes of Voyager that I don't have. So if I'm in a mood to go watch Catherine Janeway make out with some Irish guy in Fairhaven on the holodeck, I will just switch over to his Plex server and I will stream Voyager

from his server for a bit. And MB has something similar to this. And so what I wanted to know for purposes of this show, which one might be better for the audience and which one's more open source as if this is some sort of measuring stick, but which one's more open source. And so I looked at both the Plex project and I looked at the MB project and this full credit goes to a discussion that really got kicked off in our Telegram group where people were asking questions about this and getting clarifications, trying to figure out what parts of Plex are open source,

what parts are closed source. I'll say this, for Plex, I was pretty surprised. I was pretty surprised. It's amazing, actually. They have a whole page that goes over all their licensing, And it's amazing, actually. They have a whole page that goes over all their licensing, but they have everything except for the back-end server part up on their GitHub page. And it's all kinds of crazy. You realize what a project this must be when you just go through their GitHub page and look at all of the freaking projects that they're contributing to or have forked for Plex. And one of the ones that's on here that I was really happy to see, and I didn't know this before I really did the digging, even though I use this, I guess I'm not that observant. The Plex for Kodi add-on is developed by the Plex project. Plex folks are actually creating that add-on for Kodi. So if you prefer to use Kodi for playback, but wanted to connect to your Plex database, Kodi's actually writing that plugin, or I mean, the Plex people are actually writing that plugin. So it's about as official as it gets. But how did it compare to MBIE? Which essentially has a similar feature set to Plex. A couple of differences in how they're implemented

for sure. Plex is simpler, maybe slightly more user-friendly, but MBIE is more flexible. It's completely open source. And it feels more like a self-contained application that's not often the weeds connected to like online news streaming and it just feels like something that just is simple i i actually prefer it for my land streaming and i use plex for my internet streaming everything everything regarding mb is open source the front end the the back end. I believe perhaps the Android apps might not be, but the server, the web client, some of the secret sauce it uses to stream all of that is open source. And both of these projects have a revenue model. Plex sells the Plex Pass, and MB sells MB Premium. In MB's case, it's a little more of a,

hey, thanks for being awesome. Here's five bucks. You get a couple other things like some nice file syncing features with MB if you become a premium member. Plex Pass has been getting more and more appealing. You can buy a monthly or a one-time, and you get nicer features. You can be in the beta channel. You can use their Plex Cloud streaming service. It's nice. It's kind of worth it. They had a sale two years ago or something, and I bought a lifetime subscription. Just done.

Done. And these are obviously vital avenues for these two different projects, whichever one you might like or not like, to stay afloat. But one of them is being attacked by the very open source community it serves. And I feel like this is a warning sign that is going to stop other projects from ever doing a fully open source project. It's going to lock in this model, potentially, of a closed source proprietary server component and only open sourcing bits and pieces here. which the least of which which is going to happen is the plex group will be able to look at this incident and point at this incident and say this is why we will never 100 open source everything we will never do it we never have to this is why this is now the ultimate justification and you got to look at this and you got to wonder maybe this isn't a fundamental flaw of open source. So one user of MBIE got really pissed off, kind of for legitimate reasons, but where he goes with it fundamentally is going to undermine MBIE's revenue source. And I don't recommend anybody install this because these projects need to be funded or else they're going to go away.

And somebody created an MBIE unlocked project, which just gives you all of the premium features for free. Because why not? It's just open source, right? So at some point, the MB developers added an egg screen before playback that reminded you that you could get MB premium. I've never seen that because pretty quickly, like my first couple of days into MB testing a long time ago, I bought MB premium because I thought this is a good project. It offers good competition to Plex. I like seeing that. I want to keep them going. So I paid for it. I'd never seen this NAG screen. And I admit, if I saw a NAG screen, I wouldn't like that. And the community did ask them to stop. And they basically said no.

And this guy, this is a quote, says this is bullshit. For the GPL2, it's a GPL2 licensed product. This is bullshit that they're doing this. And his justification is because it For the GPL2, it's a GPL2 licensed product. This is bullshit that they're doing this. And his justification is, because it's a GPL2 project, how dare they? And so I decided that I would just go remove the neg screen. But in the process of removing the neg screen, I discovered that unlocking all of the premium features was just the simplest way. So here you go. And there's a AUR. Of course, you can just get a Docker image of an entire MB server that's been pre-activated for premium, ready to go, just a Docker install away,

which is actually a pretty common way for people to try out these projects. So that actually really sucks because that gets same billing as the actual MB project in Docker Hub. And if more people start downloading this, it'll actually show up higher in the ranks. And what would prevent

any other, what prevents anybody doing this to any other project that's completely open source that has some sort of revenue system where you can unlock additional features? It feels like this fundamentally validates the fear of a lot of developers who've been looking at coming over to Linux and can't

quite figure out how they get the licensing right? Well, we just validated their fears with this. I don't know. Maybe I'm just to me, this is just so, so upsetting to see this because if we make it impossible for people to make money at open source, all we're going to have left is commercial stuff and electron apps and proprietary back ends. And this problem is never going to get any better. It's pretty disappointing.

So don't install it. Don't use it. Or if you do, also send them a few bucks. It's one patch. This guy just applies one patch and it unlocks all of the features. Maybe the MB project could obfuscate their code.

I don't know. Mumble, what do you think? Is this something that is addressable? This is not the first time this has happened. Other projects have suffered with this in the past. I mean, I remember this happening in the subsonic community. Right. For much the same reasons.

And there was another one as well recently. It may have been MB. I think Mark talked about this on the Ubuntu podcast, the whole nag screen thing. Yeah, subsonic's a great example of that. That's a great example. Yeah, it feels bad. It feels really bad. It feels like it feels like it just takes one pissed off open source user that knows how to fix this thing. And then you've just undermined an entire business that has multiple employees, many employees. Go ahead. Sorry. So it sort of reminds me a little bit about the email clients as well, having this sort of similar sort of conflict, I guess, with regards to supporting certain email protocols such as Exchange and all that.

Does that make any sense? Yeah, I do follow what you mean there. You know, where there's sort of like premium features and whatnot and additional add-ons that they sometimes have to pay licenses for and whatnot. You know, just to wrap up, so head-to-head here, my takeaway is if streaming to smart devices and streaming between friends or streaming to family members that maybe kind of just have like a typical network setup, they're not really doing port forwarding, Plex is the way, if you need those things, Plex is the way to go. If you don't need those things, I would really give a hearty endorsement these days for MB. It's got a couple of things I'm not a huge fan of over remote connections.

I've even had problems where I've punched a hole through my firewall, we got port forwarding going to the right box, and yet, for some reason, my remote MB system still can't connect. Whereas with Plex, it'll do a relay if it has to, to make that work. But if I'm using the two different products on my LAN, I find MB to be faster on the same exact hardware doing a head to head, same hardware, same server. I find MB to be faster. I prefer the way it displays some information. Uh, Plex has been abstracting away your, your individual episodes more and more and trying to boost things into new arrivals and trending and all these different things that make it feel like YouTube that I just hate, whereas MB feels more like here's your stuff, here's your season, just go. And then the creme de la creme mode for me, the perfect setup here has been now, and this is since 2016, so it's really kind of bared out, is if I can, Android TV TV running Kodi with the MB or Plex plugin,

depending on which particular media pool I'm pulling from, connected to wired storage. So in my case, it's a QNAP that has hardware accelerated decoding. I've reviewed the QNAP in the past. You can install Codex from its app store. You get hardware accelerated decoding. I can be streaming to multiple boxes, no problem. My NAS is still fully responsive. There's no big, huge, loud server anywhere. It's an Android TV and a QNAP, and it's glorious. And both MB and Plex can run on it just fine,

and so it's really great to do head-to-head comparison on. And what I walk away with, at the end of the day, I'm going to go with the gpl2 product if everything's if everything else is coming up equal and i'm watching on the land uh i i'm going with envy and so i i have this setup now where when i'm at when i'm when i'm just watching something off my hard drive i'm watching something here at the studio we do the same thing here at the studio land it's watched over envy and then when we watch something remotely we watch over plex and i know that sounds crazy but they just point at the same files anyways.

You know, it's not like I have two sets of all my movies or TV shows. So it works out pretty well. I really have come to love this setup in a way that I've never quite achieved with my media setups in the past. And I spent money on all kinds of things. I even took a weird dark turn down the Windows Media Center lane where they had these Media Center front-end boxes from like Linksys and whatnot that were trying to get to that hardware appliance style and it wasn't there. It just wasn't there. It was horrible and also Windows. And this has finally been it. Anyways, I have links to all of the MB stuff including the open source projects, the Kodi plugins, and that goodness in the

show notes. Before we get off the topic of MB or Plex Beer, are you setting up a new Plex server? What's your plans there? What are you doing? I need hardware first. See, that's the thing. Why not just run it on your workstation if you have it on all the time? It's not like you're watching TV while you're gaming.

First of all, I don't have a TV. Well, okay, but you know what I mean. It's not like you're watching TV while you're gaming. First of all, I don't have a TV. Well, okay, but you know what I mean. It's not like your machine's going to be decoding video files while you're playing a video game and streaming, because you're going to be playing video games and streaming. So I recently tried it out on Workstation for different testing of versions, and I realized

it's great. Having it right there on my desktop is great, because I can hook up a USB disk and I can add that, and I can download something immediately and have it scan my downloads so for like a full week I'm like I'm just running it off my workstation well you say that but while I'm streaming the girlfriend

could be watching videos alright Popey, Popey says he's caught me in a hypocrisy loop, what have I done wrong Popey, set me straight here so the argument is we should not patch out um and make it easy for people to use content as in mb or whatever piece of software that somebody else has developed and is trying to make some money out of and that's a bad thing but the chances are

what people are using mb4 is downloaded tv programs that they probably didn't have the rights to i see to watch so right yeah how is that how is that rationalized in your mind well in in my view because the product itself mb was still fully functional right it's just that nag screen um which does sound super annoying. But it wasn't as if it couldn't say, like, playback MKVs without the Premiere feature. It just would say, hey, did you know we have a Premiere feature? And then you click play. So it – when it's –

No, it wasn't that part. It was more the part that, hey, you guys out there, you should pay for this thing that someone has worked hard for in order to watch this thing that you've stolen in inverted commas that somebody else has worked hard for TV programs and films, right? Yeah, no, I follow what your question was. I just I was just trying to say, like, if MB had if MB had disabled the product and made it like. So in my case, take Star Trek Discovery. I download Star Trek Discovery every single Sunday as fast as I possibly can and I watch it via MB or Plex depending on the setup. But I also am a CBS All Access subscriber. Same with House of Cards.

I'm a Netflix subscriber. I don't ever watch it on Netflix because it's ass. I just prefer to watch it on my TV. And I have a MiFi. So you're right. It is up to the individual what the morality is. And you're right. It's also not surprising that people that are comfortable stealing a lot of content would be comfortable stealing the product to watch the content. That does make sense. I feel like it's self-harm though. When you – if you download Game of Thrones, you're not putting Game of Thrones out of business. But if you fundamentally undermine the way for Envy to monetize Envy, they will go out of business and they will – they'll be gone. And then you'll have no way to watch your stolen TV shows. So it's sort of like pissing in your own well. But you do bring up a good point. And then you'll have no way to watch your stolen TV shows. So it's sort of like pissing in your own well. Right. But yet you do bring up a good point.

And I, you know, I wonder what the audience would say about that, too. Let us know. Tweet me at Chris Elias or leave a comment on the YouTubes so we can all read it or Linux unplugged dot Reddit dot com. Now, we've got to go because the Ask Noah program is just around the corner. Mr. Noah, what's coming up on the Ask Noah over there? Dude, we've got so many cool things we're going to be talking about. We're talking about high-resolution audio. Ooh.

And I know there's somebody out there, and they're going to be like, that's Snake Oil. And then there's the other half of your audience that's like, no, no, no, he finally caught on. Yeah. And so you're going to find out which one it is. High-resolution audio under Linux. Is it possible or is it Snake Oil? Hmm. Interesting.

Now, rumor has it that there may be a topic expert coming on the show to discuss it with you as well. There is. You know, anytime we dive into the topic, we go find the person in the industry that knows more than anyone else. And in that case, when it comes to hi-fi audio, as I was telling you last night, there is nobody else other than Bob Carver. I mean, he's just the guy when it comes to hi-fi audio. That's sort of a pretty good get. You did – nobody networks like Noah. Nobody does.

I got to say it. It really comes – it plays to your advantage sometimes. Well done, sir. I have friends in high places. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. And so now we're doing the Ask Noah program and the Unplugged program back-to-back. So you come over to jblive.tv on a Tuesday. You can hang out with our virtual lug and all these wonderful gentlemen, and we'd love to have

some wonderful ladies in there. And then you stick around and watch some content and hear the extra live stuff that doesn't make it in the published version. And then you keep watching and get Ask Noah. It's like a whole week, or I mean like a whole afternoon, evening, depending on morning, your time zone, block of Linux live with your participation, because we've got the mumble room on the unplugged program, and then we've got your live calls on Ask Noah, and from time to time, rumor has it there will even be some Mumble participation in Ask Noah, which is probably difficult every time you have a guest. So every time I say that, you've got a guest, but...

Yeah, actually, so Bob doesn't... Bob is not computer-technically savvy, so he'll be joining us over phone, so we can have Mumble today, yeah. But yeah, we call it the Limit Sandwich. Is that what we call it? Oh limit sandwich that's not what we call it oh good to know good good uh go get uh go get yourself a patreon account and go over to patreon.com slash ubuntu underscore mate to support some of the fine work that mr wimpress is doing with the ubuntu mate project and a lot of times the uh that stuff funds uh stuff that just goes upstream to mate as well so So Ubuntu underscore Mate at Patreon.com.

Of course, we're Jupiter Signal. And they're off right now. They may never return, they say. But if you'd like to catch the backlog, go check out the Ubuntu podcast. There's some great episodes posted over there. They're on season break right now. Has curry and beer been scheduled, gentlemen? Is that –

Not yet. We've had a pre-curry, but we haven't had curry. I understand. I understand. had a pre-curry, but we haven't had a curry. I understand. I understand. OK, the pre-curry. You got to have a post-curry too? Is there going to be a post-curry? You need to, you know,

flex your stomach muscles before you go for the proper curry. So that way, when you're ready to have a real serious discussion, you're warmed up. You've trained up. It's like a marathon. I understand.

All right, guys. Well, thanks for being here. And thank you, audience, for being here. And hopefully Mr. West will be back to health next week. In the meantime, go get him at Wes Payne on the Twitter and get more of him at the TechSnap program, techsnap.systems. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm at Chris LAS. The network is at Jupyter Signal.

Our subreddit is linuxunplugged.reddit.com. And you can email the show, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact. Thank you, Robert, for emailing us this week. And everybody else. I had more emails queued up, but they were for Wes. So maybe we'll get those when he comes back next week. And again, those live times, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Thanks so much for being here.

We'll see you right back here next week on the Unplugged program. See you next Tuesday. I've never installed GNU slash Linux get it out of here get the hell out of here. What you laughing? The hackers are dropping malware into your system. All right, let's see if we can title this thing

before Noah takes over the airwaves. UABtitles.com. You can still submit. You can also submit in the Discord, discord.me slash jupitercolony. I'll be searching that. Let's go pick a title and then we'll get out of here and Noah will take us away to Ask Noah Land. Bang suggest. Thank you, gentlemen.

I am so hooked, JJ, on Indian food. I'm actually taking a break right now so that way when Noah comes in here, I'm not burned out because otherwise. Attaboy. Yeah, I'm doing that for you, Brown Bear. Oh, that's good. That's good. That makes me happy. Yep, and I've already warned Angela that there will be a business expense of butter chicken and stuff.

Noah refuses to come unless you buy him Indian food. That's the reason why I'm sort of trying to explain a little bit yeah it's uh i would imagine it's delicious but uh man i don't know there's something about like just something about that butter chicken and you're gonna have to tell me no what you think but there's something about it that's just it's healing i had it uh on friday me and wimpy met up with uh one of our guys from the community and spent the day co-working in a library near where Wimpy lives, and then we went out for curry in the evening and it was so good.

So good. I have a funny story relating to Indian food, but you can finish first. I was just going to say, Popey, sometime when you're out here, it would take a long time because it's like an hour, well, it's like 50 minutes, well, no, it's like 50 minutes. Well, an hour, depending on traffic.

Dude, I'm going to be in Seattle in like a week. I know, I know. But do you think you could break away for like three hours or so? Because we'd have to come all the way up north to go to this place. Then there's the time to eat and then the time to get back.

That's the problem. But it is, I've traveled around some places and I've never had Indian food better than, at least here in the it is i've traveled around some places and i've never had indian food better than at least here in the states that i've traveled to than than this place it's just so i just bought six of them i bought i went in and bought six butter chickens at once last week and ate it for four days or something like that it's good the best the best um curry i've ever had is in Japan Oh yeah really Yeah they make some awesome Indian curry

In Japan I imagine there's something that surpasses it What about Indian curry in Japan Yeah the best he said The best curry ever Is in Japan I don't know if I agree with the best curry ever But they do have some really really motivated Indian people

In Japan I'm not kidding, really motivated Indian people in Japan. I'm not kidding. I mean, they mix motivated Indian people. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. You have to understand something about cuisine. Right. So think about this in the US.

It's easy to make even the worst Indian food passes is amazing here because Americans are more or less bland. They're just bland. I mean, because every American food is just bland. But when you go to Japan and you have, they're competing on a different culinary level. Now you have to have a really motivated Indian person if you're going to make it there.