LINUX Unplugged - Episode 235: Atomic Neon Kool-Aid | LUP 235

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

We’re joined by two Project Atomic members from Red Hat to learn what it’s all about, how Fedora Atomic Workstation works & the problems it solves.Plus we launch the biggest desktop Linux challenge in the history of this show & it’s going to have long lasting ramifications.

It sounded like you inherited this fancy shaving kit from family. I got the handle. It was my grandmother's dad's. She was going to toss it out. She was going to goodwill it. And I was like, I'll take that. And then I bought the, there was a little brush and cup set at Target for like 20 bucks or something like that. It was like super cheap.

Awesome. Yeah, and then the stand I did get on Amazon. So it all started with the handle. That does look like a nice weighty handle. Like it's got a good feel to it, a good heft. And it's long too. Like a lot of the ones that I've seen online, because I've looked at different ones, they're really short.

And I like the longer handle. It feels better in my hand. There you go. Go get yourself a good wet shave before the show starts. That's making me want a nice stand like that. That's the piece I'm missing right now. You need the mug too. And then of course, is that, what animal hair is that?

Because you got to get, what is it? uh oh it's probably plastic oh it's not badger hair or something i thought like i thought you had to have like badger hair or something there's a bunch of different ones i didn't buy a good one what is it it's not badger hair i prefer the hair of my yeah they say badger is it oh okay horse there's like badger there's, there's like four different kinds. And then depending on whether you're using a soap or a cream, depends which one you're supposed to use. Right.

There's this whole crazy methodology behind it. Hmm. Well, maybe I should get in the badger industry. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 235 for February 6th, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that is prepared for the atomic revolution. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes.

Hello. We have quite the show coming up this week. So we're going to get into a couple of follow-up items from last week right off the top, but then we'll get into some community news. And then, not one, but two different individuals from Project Atomic and Fedora Atomic will be joining us to tell us what is the Atomic project, what is Fedora's role in all of this, and can I one day run this as the ultimate development workstation?

I really hope so, because it's pretty cool technology. We'll talk about that. Plus, somehow I got a wild bug up my butt again. Last week you heard about it here on the show, and I've, in the span of one week, reloaded all of my systems. It's affected everything. We've launched a new challenge. I've gotten Wes to reload his system.

I've gotten Popey to reload his system. And a whole crew of people are trying out KDE Neon as the new release of Plasma 5.12 releases today. It's a new LTS of the Plasma desktop, and it's better than ever. And a huge number of us have been trying it out, and we're kicking it off this week and inviting you to participate with us. We'll tell you the details, give you a little status update on how it's going, and all of that, that's coming up towards the end of the show. Plus, our friends over at Elementary OS are trying something big in their app center that we've talked a lot about, and Wimpy's here to tell us about something very exciting

coming to the 1804 version of Ubuntu Mate, which is going to be really good stuff. And Wes, on top of all of that, we have our standard community updates. Holy smokes. Huge show this week. So let's kick it off by bringing in the Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, virtual lug. It is good to have you guys.

There it is. Pit, pit. Hello. Oh, I love that sound. Back in the studio again. Popey Wimpy, how are you guys doing? You all right? You over the jet lag?

You doing okay? Yeah. Sounds about right. Yeah. Well, I guess sort of just to pick up really, just really quick off the top of the show here from last week's episode, episode 234, we were live from the canonical January snap sprint down at the Hilton in Seattle. And the big news kind of out of that event that came out just recently is Skype announced shortly after our show that they are packaging up the Skype application for Linux as a Snap, which is huge news. And that was part of the work that was conducted there.

And I think we're going to be hearing more coming from that whole channel too. So that's sort of big. It's good. It's good. You know, I went over, I reviewed my audio. I got a couple of secret things that I'll just release here and there. I'll link it to the media, you know, no, I'm just kidding. It was good. It was a good event. And man, you guys really work hard at those things. That felt like that was a real serious work session because here's something that you can tell when people are seriously working is when the end of the day is scheduled every day at 6 p.m. and people aren't walking out of the room until 615, 620 or even later.

You guys really, I mean, down to the every hour just working to the grindstone. So it was interesting to see you guys in your natural habitat. It was good to see you there. And I'm glad to hear you're making it. So stay around. It's a good reason for that, though, Chris. We enjoy doing it. That's why. Oh best and i you know what i enjoy getting an opportunity to hang out with you guys so i'm always happy heck yeah it was great pizza yeah

you know what i learned i didn't know this but uh our friends from across the pond taught me and you were there i didn't know did you know this before we had dinner with them that they don't have the greatest pizza over there i had no idea. So we took them to America's fastest growing pizza fest, Mod Pizza, which apparently was the first Mod Pizza. And I guess they said something crazy, like they're opening up 500 stores a month, which sounds impossible. And so we took Popey and Wimpy over there and had pizza with them. And Popey said, this is pretty good pizza.

And we all kind of look at each other like, this is fast food pizza. And my first thought is, oh, Popeypy i could show you a world of pizza i could just swoop you away from seattle and show you a world of pizza actually i went back in there and the girl behind the counter said hey are you english and i said yes i am and she said uh did you know we've got these restaurants in the uk and she listed all the cities where they have them so i I'm going to make it a mission to come find them in the UK as well. That's great news. That does make sense. I can show you the world. Yeah, exactly.

That was a lot of fun. And that's sometimes where the best conversations happen really is when you're just sitting around talking about stuff. just do a quick update on a project that I personally love to follow because as a longtime desktop Linux user, one of the projects that makes Linux feel like a first-class citizen is the Firmware Update Project, the LVFS project. And when I'm on my XPS 13 and I get microcode updates and firmware updates coming through GNOME software, I tell you what, it feels first class. It's beautiful. And so we actually have some really interesting data from the Linux vendor firmware project because they've recently been introducing telemetry,

which I'll tell you more about here in a moment. Don't freak out. It's not that bad. But we now have an interesting nugget of information. The Linux vendor firmware Project has shipped nearly 1.2 million firmware updates out to Linux users since they started the project. 1.2 million firmware updates that in the past you may have had to reboot into DOS, a free DOS or Windows to make that happen. Remarkable. This is a remarkable achievement. Just that right there deserves a moment of recognition. I want to talk about the telemetry just so you guys are aware of what's going on.

I have more information linked in the show notes. But here are some key points. They're not sharing your IP address with any vendors. It's not even saved in their database. They generate a machine ID. It's a salted hash of your actual Etsy machine dash ID. And so then they store it based on hash off of that. LVFS doesn't store reports for firmware that it didn't sign itself.

So if you've been locally building firmwares, you're trying to hack something, you're trying to mod something, it completely ignores that and does not ever report it up to the vendor. You can also disable all of the telemetry reporting functionality by editing the FWFD remotes.dcomp files. And they've documented all of this. It's all kind of in the early stages, but it seems pretty sane. It seems like a good mix of giving the vendors metrics that they need without compromising people's identities. And I really like the part where it ignores local stuff

that you've been building yourself. It seems like they put thought into that from the get-go, and that should make it a lot more successful. Yeah. I used this when I was in Seattle last week with my Dell XPS 15. Oh, really? Yeah. And it's a simple thing, but it is very satisfying when you just say FWMGR update, and it says, oh, there are these six firmware updates that need to be applied

to your machine and it says right queued and the next reboot you just watch your firmware update and off you go and this updated things in the past i've had to install windows and you know things in order to install these updates so this was just wonderful and you were doing that with the command line yeah yeah i just just uh i think it's f fw update manager or something and just it did it all for me it was brilliant nice that is really great the world of tomorrow don't even need i figured i knew there must have been a way to do it outside of gnome software but i'd never done it outside of gnome software because also the nice thing about gnome software is that it exposes the fact that they're even available. I don't even think to check.

Right. Unless I know about Meltdown and Spectre, then I think to check. All right, Wes, I want to play a game with you. Let's see if you can guess the release I'm talking about. I'm going to give you a few hints

and you try to name it, okay? Okay. All right, so your first hint is it's the latest update in their continuous innovation stream that delivers many new features and enhancements to secure data. Okay, that's hint number one.

That's pretty broad, though, so I'll give you another one. Is it Windows Server, maybe? Okay, here's your next hint, okay? It's engineered for security at the entry level, allowing you to spend time innovating while reducing risk. I do hate risk, so I'm intrigued. And you do love to innovate. Of course I do.

It has new sandboxing capabilities that allow you to control exactly what applications can see. It ships with the GNOME desktop as default. The GNOME desktop, you say? Am I narrowing this down at all enough for you? A little bit. Okay, it has support for ZFS. Not OpenZFS, but ZFS. That's your big hint right there.

This can't be. I thought it was dead. No, Wes, it's true. It's true. Solaris lives. Oracle Solaris 11.4 Open Beta has been released. Celebrate, everybody! Yeah, that's right. It's here. Solaris 11.4 is here. You can go grab it right now. It runs on Spark architectures as well, which

who doesn't want that, right? Everybody wants that. Yeah, check it out. Check it out. Dusty, you might want to check your Mumbled Talk key because it's triggering every now and then, like when you're typing or something. Heads up on that. Oh, it looks like they got Go now. They got Golang.

Yeah. That's exciting news. Anybody in the Mumbled Room have any interest in trying this out? Nobody does, right? Nobody does. It's adorable that Oracle's still shipping this, though. I really like it. And it's nice to know that some people that have had some jobs still have some jobs. That stuff's really nice. But to hear Oracle

pitch this, it's like, I don't know, engineered for security at every level because nothing else is? Allowing you to spend time innovating while reducing risk. Okay. I'm looking forward to that. I'll get right on top of that.

Anyways, I make fun, but it is sort of amazing to see, like Wes was saying, it's almost unbelievable that Solaris continues to chug on. Solaris Open Beta has been released and you can go get an ISO of it. You go try to download it.

The first thing, it's obviously just a cloud pitch, right? Streamline your journey to the cloud. No, let's try this. You're right. Oh, no. This is, okay, okay. So they're also offering you to spin it up on the Oracle Cloud.

Interesting. And then you can download the USB installer, which is 1.1 gigs. Oh, I have to first accept the license agreement for it. Well, come on. I mean, what website are you at here, Chris? Ah, which is 1.1 gigs. Oh, I have to first accept the license agreement for it. Well, come on. I mean, what website are you at here, Chris? There you go. Good old Oracle. That and unbreakable Linux. They're unstoppable these days. They're just unstoppable. So Red Hat actually is a bit unstoppable. We're going to talk a lot about Red Hat today. So let's kick it off with something that's kind of neat. I think it was Alex that pinged me about this. This is an initiative that Red Hat's taking to the community

to help design the next Red Hat logo. Yeah, they're essentially taking input from everybody. And it's funny to hear them talk about this. They say, we need your ideas. The more feedback we get, the more likely we are to make the best decision. And it's sort of, they talk about how their icon, how their logo sucks as an icon. It's one of the things they really don't like about it. They're like, yeah,

it's a 17 years is a long time for a logo. And when we made this logo, we weren't really thinking about what it was going to be used for. We were like sort of secret agents of change, but that's kind of different now. And it does suck as an icon. Anyways, I think they're early in the stages so I wanted to let you guys know about it right now. You know, I know we do have a few graphic artists in the audience that might actually care about this so you'll find a link in the show notes. Go to jupyterbroadcasting.com.

Look for Linux Unplugged 235 or just go to redhat.com and look around on the About Red Hat section of the site. That's where they have this going on. Neat idea. It is a neat idea. And it's a change of pace from Red Hat on this kind of stuff.

I don't think I've ever seen them do something like this before. Interesting community aspect. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. We do have much to get into. We have two gentlemen from Red Hat here today to talk to us about Project Atomic, which we've got into a little bit on the show before. But I recently had a change of framing for Project Atomic, and I went from thinking about it as a way to deploy Fedora on servers, and I went to thinking, well, what about a bulletproof workstation, which is actually a bigger project that I'm working on and a bigger topic that we're actually going to get into today is I'm still working towards the most reliable, bulletproof, as close to appliance, assuming the hardware is functional,

I would like the software to be as close to reliable, immutable infrastructure, as they say. I want an immutable workstation, Wes. And we'll pick Dusty and Ian's brain here in a moment and see if that's possible. But before we go any further, let's start right now by thanking Ting for making this here show possible. Now years into it, I've never been a happier Ting customer. Start by going to linux.ting.com. Ting is mobile that makes sense. Here's what's great about it. You only pay for what you use.

So if you don't use the phone a lot or you don't use a ton of data or you don't send text messages, you don't pay for that functionality. I do everything either over, well, almost everything over Telegram and a couple of other messaging services. The only thing I use text messages for is when I log into Twitter and they two-factor me over SMS. So like why pay for 300 text messages when I maybe use three a month? There's no reason. There's just no – except that you pretty much every other carrier, you would have to. You just have to. Ting is different.

It's a fair price for however much you talk, text, and data you use. With nationwide coverage, GSM and CDMA, no contracts, no quote-unquote agreements, nothing like that. And they have a beautiful control panel to let you control all of it. You check your usage, take complete control of your account, turn services on and off. They have great devices you can buy directly or bring your own. And it is Ting's birthday right now. So what else? They're doing a giveaway. The first 100 Ting customers are getting a shirt just automatically. But you still have a chance, even if you just recently become a Ting customer, or maybe you're not even one yet, to get in and get some free Ting swag. Start by going to linux.ting.com. That gives you the $25 discount on service or off a device. And it lets them know you heard about it here.

Then you can browse over the blog, check them out. There are some really incredible devices. They have the full range of Moto devices that are almost just vanilla Android with a couple of improvements. And then big batteries, expandable storage, multi-network chipsets. It's really great value for the Motorola devices. You can buy them directly from Ting. Buy any device from Ting or bring your own. Just get started by going to linux.ting.com.

They have a savings calculator. You can plug your information in there, see how much you would save, and see if it's a great fit. And something tells me it probably is. linux.ting.com. Big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the show. linux.ting.com.

Well, I want to say a big welcome to Dusty and Ian from the show. We've been planning this for a little while. You guys are pretty busy traveling the world. I would imagine preaching the good news about Project Atomic and whatnot. So, guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for making it. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having us.

Indeed. Thank you. I've roughly talked about Project Atomic on the show before, and I kind of feel like before we get into Fedora Atomic, it would be sort of great to just sort of establish what Project Atomic it is, what it is itself, because I think that's kind of like essential first bits of information. Dusty, do you want to take that to sort of the elevator pitch on Project Atomic and what problem it solves? Yeah, I can try to do that. So Project Atomic is essentially, it's like an umbrella project for a lot of different technologies related to next generation container technology. So for example, Atomic Host, which is, you know,

kind of what we're here to talk about today, was one of the first initiatives out of that. Some of the changes that we've made to Docker live in upstream repos under Project Atomic. Pretty much any discussion that we have related to things that we want to do in the container landscape go on under that umbrella upstream. Okay. And so the key phrase you said in there was the host aspect of Project Atomic. And that is essentially either Fedora or CentOS, or perhaps, correct me if I'm

wrong, but maybe even Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, there are atomic versions of those different Linux distributions? That's correct. Yeah, we have Fedora Atomic Hosts, which is something that we build continuously pretty much, but we only deliver every two weeks. We don't believe that people want an update every night. However, if they do want an update every night, they can access those if they want them. We also have Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Hosts, which is something that we build from RHEL bits and deliver every six weeks. And there's also the CentOS atomic host, which follows from that. Okay. All right. So that's all pretty understandable. And am I correct in my understanding that one of the core benefits of an atomic host is that the host itself, the core OS,

is updated via OS tree snapshots, which is essentially sort of disconnected from the data and the containers that might be running on the host. So you can update your host operating system via OS tree, and then it just reboots and then reconnects to the containers and the applications and the data move on like nothing changed, correct? That's right. Yeah. So for example, the user file system is read-only.

And there are two file systems that are read-write. One of them is the slash etc or slash etc directory. So that's read-write, and it's also tracked, which means that whenever you want to go back to the previous deployment, say you do an upgrade and you don't like it, it also means that all of your configuration data in Etsy gets reverted back to that state from before. Right. Nice. So the rollbacks are a big part of this. Is it an all-or-nothing type of rollback? So mostly, at least for the data that's delivered in the OS tree,

that gets rolled back. And then anything in Etsy gets rolled back, but slash var, that stays the same. Okay. And the other thing that sort of jumps out at me about this is you guys, in the slides that you sent me, you sort of go out of your way to say, this is not a disk image, this is a tree. What's the difference and what's the benefit between shipping your base image of your OS as an image versus a OS tree? So there are some tradeoffs, but more or less, OS tree is kind of like a file system layer technology. So it knows about all of the different files that are a part of the tree, which also means that it can dedupe any files that are common between, say, one update to the next.

And it also knows about all of the packages that are included in the tree. So it's kind of a little bit of a higher level. Is that using RPM to keep track of the packages? It does. It uses RPM to keep track of the packages? It does. It uses RPM to keep track of the packages. And we kind of decided to do that more or less because it was a natural flow from what we already do. It complements kind of what's going on in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We can just pick up what's going on there, all the hard work that's going in there, and just build it a different way. Okay, fair enough. And I would imagine in a Fedora Atomic Host or a CentOS Atomic Host, my base atomic system is probably pretty minimal. I'm not installing MySQL and Apache on the Atomic Host. I'm loading that into containers. So it's a simpler system in a sense to update and manage, correct?

sense to update and manage, correct? That's right. So typically we do want people to use containers for their application software. However, we have added some technology later from when we first came out with Atomic Host to enable people to package layer things, which essentially means they can install RPMs if they want to. But generally what we prefer people to do is only package layer things that are, you know, hard to contain containerize. Like for example, if you want like a system, uh, Damon running on your system, like for example, firewall D or, you know, any really low level thing that would be hard to containerize because you have, it would have to be like a really privileged container or access parts of the host operating system. We prefer that you probably package layer that. But like anything that's really easy to containerize, like an Apache daemon or a database or something like that, we would much

rather you pull that from a registry. Awesome. That makes actually, that just seems like the way of the future too. Ian, honestly, if I've glossed over anything that you think we should touch on, feel free to jump in. I'm kind of new to all of this, so I'm likely to miss something, and you are welcome to catch me. But I did have a kind of a clarification question. I'm not sure who might be the better person to ask, but just so I can conceptualize it, as an old host 26 to 27, what functionally do I do? What do I have to actually functionally do to bring a Fedora atomic 26 to 27? So I'll take that one. Essentially what we have right now is, I don't know if I actually mentioned this before,

but I like to pitch the technology behind Atomic Host and Atomic Host itself as like Git for your operating system. Okay. So essentially what you have whenever you create a new OS tree commit is you feed it a list of RPMs and maybe some scripts to run, and it basically creates a new repo for you. That's like a get repo, but with just all the files hashed and compressed and everything. Oh, okay.

Is that something that Fedora project does for each release? Yes. So every time like we get new package updates, we essentially make a new commit in the server repository, and that can be served over just plain HTTP slash HTTPS. But to answer your question, so right now for Fedora 26, we have one repo that's like a Git repo, and for Fedora 27, we have a different one. So essentially what you would do if you want to move from one to the other is you just run a rpm-ostree-rebase command that will rebase from one of the upstream repos to the

other one. It'll pull in all the new software, and you're off to the races. Ah, the rebase command. I see. Fascinating. And is there any discussion right now of how frequently Atomic users are expected to upgrade to the next release? So I know 27 came out for Atomic came out like November-ish, right? Which was after the official 27 release, the standard 27 release. Is there an expectation that users do an immediate upgrade or how does that work? How do you decide how long something like that gets supported? I'm sure it will be different for each project, but in regards of Fedora, how does that work? How long, how do you decide how long something like that gets supported? I'm sure it'll be different for each project, but in regards of Fedora, how does that work? So in Fedora, obviously we're trying to minimize the maintenance burden there.

So since we actually do a decent amount of testing on each one of the releases that we do, we've tried to automate that as much as possible and we're getting better about that. But we've tried to focus on just the latest release. So for example, because we're doing testing, um, we really recommend people to update as soon as possible. Um, and Fedora 27 Atomic Host did ship at the same time Fedora 27 did, which is good. Um, but you know, if somebody wanted to stay on Fedora 26, we essentially have something we call life support, which basically means all of the automated building and testing still happens. It's just not necessarily our priority to get it fixed. So Fedora 27 is our priority right now. And that seems like a much more manageable position for administrators to

be in when your data is isolated off, your applications are in containers, and the updates are transactional. So the risk of upgrading, it's a totally different set of risks than it used to be. It's a whole new beast. It's not the same. It's not your dad's Fedora upgrade. It's a whole new thing. So what's the downside? Because it can't all be rainbows, right? There has to be. It's a whole new beast. It's not the same. It's not your dad's fedora upgrade. It's a whole new thing. So what's the downside? Because it can't all be rainbows, right? There has to be things that are not as flexible or things that perhaps maybe might make it not as ideal for certain types of use cases. Right. So there are definitely corner cases that, you know, are tricky for us right now. We, we try to support pretty much install being able to package layer every RPM that exists. Um, but you know, obviously there

are corner cases where, for example, you know, an RPM might install something into slash opt. And by default, we kind of want that to be a writable file system so that, you know, people can put software there if they want to. So, and, you know, if we have a particular directory that's covered under the tree, we want to make sure that that's read-only. So there are small issues that we're tracking down and trying to make fully compatible. But, you know, it's one of those things that takes a little bit of getting used to, but as soon as you are in a world where you've got most things containerized, this type of operating system really makes sense. And to me, the most valuable thing is the fact that you can essentially look at the

status on Atomic Host, and you can see exactly what commit and corresponding version you're booted into and you can go and say hey i'm seeing this bug can you guys reproduce this and somebody can go deploy that exact commit and version that is great and see if they have the same problem it It also means that we essentially have like a, you know, base operating system that is a base test line for CI in the future. Okay. Boy, that is a great point about being able to go to that specific version. I was messing around with it a little bit, and I couldn't actually quite grok how it would work as a workstation,

but people have been suggesting this to me. I've been getting emails into the show where people have said it's early days, but have you considered an atomic Fedora workstation? Is this possible in this setup where applications are containerized and the base OS is supposed to be minimal? Is that even a possibility or is that somewhere where Fedora could go someday? I've seen the Fedora workstation. I think there's an atomic workstation testing image,

correct? Yeah. So it's actually, sorry, it's something that's been around for a while. But it's been something that's kind of been a real side project for a while. For a long time, it wasn't necessarily getting proper updates because, you know, something would break. But now with Fedora 27, we officially came out and said, Hey, we're going to ship updates every night. Um, and so it's something that people can try out as a daily driver if they want to. Um, it's still a little rough around the edges. For example, um, some of the integrations with gnome software for like, for example, package layering packages don't exist. However, uh, packs, Gnome software does have integration for that.

So anything that you want to install as a flat pack works great on Atomic Workstation. We also just put out a blog post today. I linked to it in the IRC channel about Atomic Workstation. And so if we want to link that to users that are listening today, they can check it out. You might be able to give it a spin and see what you think. So, yeah, we're interested in having more people use it. It uses the same underlying technology as Atomic Host,

which basically means the more people we get hammering on it and using it, the better it will be over time. Are the applications containerized? Are they part of the base OS tree? How does it work with the workstation? So with the workstation, it's essentially a different set of packages from Atomic Host. So, you know, it's basically like Atomic Host++, right? So it's got Firefox installed as an RPM by default in the base OS tree, right?

So that's delivered with the tree. It's got your full desktop environment that you might want. So it's basically Atomic Host, but with extra RPMs on top that somebody would want on their laptop. Okay. And the intention is, so far, when 28 comes out, to have a release of Atomic Workstation 28? That's right. And you should be able to rebase just the same. That's exciting.

Do you feel like that this maybe puts Fedora back into a different category that traditionally CentOS and Ubuntu LTSs and distributions that had multi-year support cycles tended to hold. Because I would tell you, when you combine what you guys are working on with Project Atomic and Cockpit and the server and cloud spins of Fedora that are super simple to spin up on a DigitalOcean droplet,

and then you load Cockpit on top of that, and in minutes, you've got a graphical management system to Docker images where you're loading up NextCloud and BitTorrent sync like nobody's business. I've done it. It's amazing. And the only thing that stops me is I know in about eight months or so I'm going to be upgrading that sucker to the next release of Fedora. And even though for the last three or four releases, it's been solid, it still gives me pause. I just want to set it and forget it like a toaster oven. Is that the intention with Atomic? Yeah, I believe so. I mean, people have always

approached upgrades with, you know, pause for good reason. Um, and this transactional based approach will obviously help us do that. Um, another thing is, you know, if you're not necessarily on the workstation, if you have maybe some servers that you don't want to keep down for very long, um, the way it works for the, uh, updates are, they kind of get pulled down in the background, right? So none of the software gets updated and is in a half-updated state at any point. And then on reboot, you're basically into the new system. That would maybe be the only downside, really, is that you have to do the reboot to switch over. Yep, that's true. It's something that we've actually considered how we could possibly work around that fact. There are parts, for example, now when you package layer, by default you need to reboot to get into the new tree.

But we have an experimental liveFS feature, which basically says if I've only installed new software, then there's no chance that any software that exists is in a half-upgraded state. So I'll just go ahead and apply that live to the tree, right? Oh, that's clever. Okay. Hmm. Kind of bridge the gap a little bit there. It's interesting trying to do that between the, you know, it seems like a lot of that would work super well on the server side of things, where you have maybe perhaps more automation and things, and then trying to bridge that to the desktop world. Right. Yeah. Needless to say, I work with some really smart people. I'm very lucky. Well, I've been really kind of pondering where this is going because it seems like a really solid solution. But what's next? What's next for Project Atomic? And maybe

specifically, what's next for Fedora users? So I think what's next for Project Atomic, obviously, we have a lot of those corner cases that I mentioned before. LiveFS is still experimental. There is actually a proposal by Colin, who wrote OS3 and RPMOS33 to offer a different method for distribution. So, for example, there are a decent number of people who mirror everything around in their infrastructures via, like, using RPMs, right? We've kind of got them in this model where all they need to do to deliver software is deliver RPMs everywhere and mirror those around. And then, obviously obviously now container images as well, right? So they've got RPMs to deal with. They've got container images to deal with. They don't need a third, you know, artifact to move around, which is OS trees, right? So there's a

new effort by Colin to try to basically ship or transport part of this OS tree in an RPM too as just an alternative way to get it around and mirror things. Like, for example, if you're in an environment that's not connected to the internet or something. That makes sense. I guess really, you know, I'm sure the Mumble Room may have some questions. So Mumble Room, if anybody has anything, just ping me in Discord if you want to ask. I guess sort of in the news, I would ask, what do you think the main contrast between CoreOS's implementation for transactional updates and Project Atomic? As somebody who's just sort of aware that they both have a solution, can you clarify what the differences are for me? differences are for me yeah so um i think on at the highest level uh what core os uses for container limit linux is the update engine technology from chrome os oh okay and that's right yeah that's

basically a um you know like a block device level approach whereas this is more of like a file system level approach. And there's benefits and negatives to each one. That's right. I forgot about that. In fact, I forgot about that whole connection. Well, guys, I know that we've been kicking this around for a while. So I really appreciate you making the time people also don't know, but Dusty went above and beyond. He joined me at what time was it local time where you were at last night, Dusty, when we were chatting? It was only 11. Not too late. Oh, yeah.

Okay, sure. Yeah. So he joined me at 11 o'clock last night to just do audio setup and all of that kind of stuff. So I really appreciate it. I may pick your guys' brains in the future. But is there any other knowledge or tidbits you want to impart on the audience before we move on? Yeah. before we move on?

Yeah, so I'm going to post a link to a lab that I did for a conference last year, which basically has fully encapsulated like a lab environment for you to run on your local laptop or desktop or whatever that will really let you go through and learn all the features of Atomic Host and what it's capable of. So I'll post that in the IRC channel. I'm not sure if you can grab that and put that in the show notes, but that would be really good. You bet. I'll definitely put that in the show notes.

I'll also put in the show notes a link to devconf.us, devconf.us 2018, the first annual free Red Hat sponsored technology conference. And it's in Boston. It's for projects, for project people, professional people, people that contribute to open source. They're in the Boston University area. It's going to be August 17th, which is a Saturday, and it'll run until the 19th.

Sounds like a good time. Yeah. Yeah, and this is a conference that we've had DevConf, but it's always been in the Czech Republic, close to one of our offices there. And it's been a really big success for us. A lot of people come from all over Europe to come and present on their open source project. So we decided to bring it over to the U.S. and see how it runs there.

It's not quite as big as something like FOSDEM, but it's definitely a significant conference. That's pretty nice. And I'd love to go to Boston. Boy, I have all these fantasies of just traveling around the world for a year and just visiting all these different events. And this would be one on my list. So it's in Boston if you're in that area, August 17th and the 19th of 2018. Check it out, DevConf. It's actually technically devconf.cz.us.

But I assume devconf.us will take you there, I think. Anyways, we have a link in the show notes. It doesn't really matter. I think it does redirect there, yeah. It sure does. And will take you there, I think. Anyways, we have a link in the show notes. It doesn't really matter. I think it does redirect there, yeah. It sure does. And it's not just for people to attend. There's a CFP. Anybody can submit a talk to get accepted.

So submit your talks. Very good. Very good. And Ian and Dusty, you guys are welcome to join us anytime you have an update on the project or anything you want to chat about here on the show. The mumble room is always open to you, so you're welcome to come back, and you're welcome to hang out just for the rest of the show, too. We'll keep

chugging along here, and you're free to chime in. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Ian, I'm sorry you didn't get a chance, but I'm glad you made it. I'm sure we'll chat more. If you stick around, I'm sure we'll get a chance. Dusty killed it. He did, didn't he? He sure did. You were good support, though. I knew you were there, like, nodding along, like, that's right, that's right. That's right.

That's what fits. It's a team effort. All right. Well, speaking of a team effort, I'll tell you what they placed as an incredible team behind them, and that's DigitalOcean. Go over to DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code DOUnplugged. One word, you get a $10 credit. This is really something. This is amazing at scale right here.

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don't i don't really do anything with it i don't even need it doesn't matter because it's so yeah so darn i just was like so the first right after they rolled out the upgrades, you go into your droplets. You turn them off and – because you can resize the disk and they will automatically and dynamically resize the file system too. Oh. Or you can just say just the memory or like you can choose. It's so cool. So what were we doing? Why did I have to do that?

You were doing some super secretive snap research. Oh, that's right. That's right. We were trying to – wow. I probably should not say what we we doing? Why did I have to do that? You were doing some super Zigguratemp Snap research. Oh, that's right. That's right. We were trying to – wow. I probably should not say what we were doing now that I think about that. But it's another great use case for DigitalOcean. And if you listen to TechSnap, you might know what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah.

That's right. So we needed to upgrade the rig. We did. Yes, we did. And that was great. It just – the timing worked out perfectly. It worked beautifully. Yeah.

They also have new flexible droplets. So for $15, you can just mix and match the resources that are just most appropriate for your setup. That's nice, too. So you can just more memory here, less disk there or vice versa, whatever. And now they have CPU optimized droplets. Yeah, CPU optimized droplets, which means basically you're just closer to the metal. You're right on there. They're great for highly active front end servers. If you're seeing like strong adoption for developers signing up for like an application you're working on, you want to spin up workplace projects and you want to have a great performance, it's perfect for that. They also have really, really large memory systems,

hundreds of gigs of RAM. It's a great setup. And again, just three cents an hour too, if you just want something that's pretty great. They have a beautiful interface, tons of different distributions, including Fedora and CoreOS, free BSD, Ubuntu, Debian, and more. And we even have a pretty fancy new URL you can go to where everything's just preloaded. You don't have to worry about promo codes or nothing. Just go to do.co slash unplugged. do.co slash unplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean.

do.co slash unplugged. Or use our promo code. Coder. Not coder. That's not the other show. No, it's do unplugged and a big thank you to digital ocean do dot co slash unplugged or use our promo code coder or not coder that's not the other show that was do unplugged that's uh pretty cool i gotta say those cpu optimized systems are pretty nuts um the thing is the mix and match is probably the way i'll go from now on it just seems so handy because it's slightly less than what i end up paying for the system that I, my most common system. And the mix and match is perfect because I don't need a lot of local disk. But I generally want either more RAM or more CPU. It was more

RAM that we needed during the TechSnap experiment. Yeah, exactly. So, that's just a really, it's really nice to have that flexibility. And plus, they just lowered their pricing on stuff. And they keep adding new features. It just gets better and better. There's always new stuff for me to talk about with DigitalOcean. I freaking love that. You guys will love it too.

DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. Or, I mean, go to their new fancy URL, do.co.unplugged. I mean, it's kind of fun to say. It is fun to say. I'm enjoying it. Do.co.unplugged. They also have a really cool command line.

All right. Let's talk about other cool things. really cool command line. All right, let's talk about other cool things. Mr. Martin Wimpress, you are really on my list of people that need a nice Christmas gift this year. I got to say, if 1804 turns out to be half as good, if the Ubuntu Mate 1804 release turns out to be half as good as I think it's going to be, I'm going to need to send you a Christmas card because this is looking fantastic. Now, there will be an official post tomorrow this is a little bit early we don't have all the details yet but rumor has it that uh when you decided to implement high dpi support in ubuntu mate you went all in that's the rumor yeah the rumors are true oh my so um i've i've not been

doing much of the uh coding on this um i did some of the groundwork and actually roped in people from the community. So this has been sort of a two-year journey. You know, first of all, there's the whole migration to GTK3. And then there's the upgrading all of the themes to support the latest versions of GTK3. And then there's going through every asset in all of those themes and making sure that there are scaled and non-scaled variants of all of the assets that are used throughout those themes, which is no insignificant amount of work. And we had help from...

Significant technical work, but I think also, just I wanted to say, significant political work. Like there is there is a certain amount of communication that you've had to do or other people have had to do there's greasing the wheels there's certain amounts of funding that's had to happen here to make all of this happen i mean you're rattling these off but each one of these was um a a huge amount of work in of themselves yeah each of these items is a multi-month effort and each of them has been funded through the ubuntu mate crowdfunding um and then more recently we've got to the actual meat and

potatoes of this which is to turn on the scaling you know within the mate desktop itself um and i've spoken about that i think this is the third time in five weeks we've spoken about this i promise this will be the last time for some some time now because i'm sure some of the listeners are bored of hearing about it but the the big change now is today we've we've landed the fixes that mean that the high dpi scaling is completely dynamic that's so in other words to say it automatically detects it and scales itself? Correct. See, I think we're not going to be talking about it

because we'll be playing with these fancy new features. That is great. That is a big win. So from the Greeter, that auto-scales, and then the desktop itself now detects if it's got a high DPI display, dynamically scales. That's the default. It will dynamically scale to fit for high DPI.

And then we've also been able to preserve. We've added, or rather Victor has added, a new prioritization system to the settings daemon so that we can push environment variables into the session really early on. And the environment variables that we're interested in here are the ones that provide the high DPI hints to Q applications. So the Marte desktop in GTK is detecting that this is a high DPI environment. It sets up GTK, but then it provides the hints to Qt.

And that means when you run things like VLC or Kdenlive or whatever your Qt application is under the Mate desktop, that gets the right font and toolkit scaling hints. All I can say is a round of applause to that. So Qt applications will feel like first class citizens on the Mate desktop that's as as best as we can yeah yeah that is that's great and and getting getting it at the greater level too is a very smooth experience that's top-notch stuff there i mean this is like the monte desktop is bringing full top-notch high dPI support. This is as good as it gets on the Linux desktop. Yeah, it's as good as we can do at this stage. We can refine it a little bit in the future. I mean, if you're one of these people that really values all of those millions of pixels that you've got on your high DPI laptop, suppose you're Linus Torvalds and you see this scaling happen and you don't want that

then you can toggle a setting to change it between auto scale a fixed one-to-one mapping or a fixed scale always and if you toggle those settings then the whole desktop will scale dynamically so you don't need to log out or log in you can actually flip those settings around in the session and it will just respond instantly. And this is all going upstream to Mate itself? This is all being done in Mate desktop. It's all an upstream project. It's all landed today and we've just tagged the Mate 120 release and that'll be coming out tomorrow. Hot dang. Wow. So what about the artwork? So once you get everything scaled up, then you also have the problem that all of your icons and your graphics also have to be higher resolution. Yeah, so this is what I was referring to with the work we've done on the theme assets, which we did about a year ago.

And Michael Tunnell helped with that. And Daniel Foray helped with that. Oh, you guys oh you guys are great i love it so it's the assets are already they're already high dpi ready all all of the assets that we need to be high dpi are high dpi there are a few instances in the code where we're using uh bitmaps rather than svgs so we haven't clobbered all of those yet but we'll we'll get to those in due course but by and large it's it's all done and and we've also been able to preserve the font dpi scaling which i've mentioned before and and this gives us a nice halfway house while while fractional scaling isn't a thing, being able to scale the fonts independently of the DPI scaling of the toolkit

means that if you've got, um, say an XPS 13, you can turn on double scaling, but scale down the font slightly. And it gives you a nice halfway house while we wait for fractional. Thank you. Scaling.

Thank you very much for that. Has an XPS owner thank you wow i am i am i am very excited about all of this and this should all be landing for the 1804 release of the ubuntu mate desktop uh yeah so for ubuntu mate 1804 all of this landed today as patch sets in our snapshot development packages and Marte 120 will come out tomorrow and some point over the weekend those packages should hit the Ubuntu 1804 archive hopefully in time for Ubuntu Marte 1804 alpha 2 which is next week dang great great great work by everybody that sounds like a that's that's so great that all of this is landing for the lts it's so good that you know because that's that's the distro that you're going to be strapped with for the next five years exactly so and this was this was something that i really really wanted to see happen for for this lts because as you know

they're long-lived and i felt that if we didn't get there with high dpi because we're playing catch up there's a number of the other desktops that have already got you know high dpi implementations and i felt if we didn't get there for this release then we run the risk of losing users to to other other development environments which in of itself is no big deal. But when you lose users, you lose developers. And that's the thing we really wanted to retain. Good insight. I completely agree with you. So let's talk about retaining developers. And speaking of Mr. Daniel Foray, Dan, you posted a update about App Center payments.

And if I understand it, the kicker here is that security updates, system updates, those are continuing to be distributed as they always have been in elementary OS. But now applications that people have deferred payment on, like they bought for free, they'll pend in the update section while users have the option to pay for it or put in $0 and get the update for free. It's a pretty big post. In fact, you even subtitled it hashtag clickbait. How are you doing today, Dan?

Are you doing OK? I'm doing great, man. I'm doing great. Glad to hear it. I mean, I've seen a wide range of reaction about this. I think understandably, when people hear that you're going to withhold updates and prompt people for payment, there is a visceral reaction that that's insane and you're money-grubbing. What's your response to that?

Yeah, I mean I got to follow Wimpy here, Santa Claus followed by the Grinch. So, okay, so here's the problem. Let me frame the problem to get – like this is where we're coming from. We set out to build out this App Center thing, right? And one of the goals that we wanted to do when we did that was we want to give third party developers, so developers that are not at elementary, developers that are just like regular people writing their little open source apps, we want to give them a path to be able to make a living writing open source software. Because right now, if you want to write open

source software for a living, you got to get lucky to be hired by like a handful of big corporations. And that sucks. Yeah. So we we're seeking to kind of shift the paradigm and allow anyone to make a living writing open source software. But we're not quite there yet and so we launched this store like a little over eight months ago i think and where we're at right now is that we have some developers who have made a few hundred dollars selling their apps which is more than zero but it's not enough for them to live and looking at um the data we have it's that about 1% of people that are downloading these apps are actually paying for them. That's a really small amount. And we wondered, like, why is that, right?

Like, why is it so small? Yeah. So we went and asked our users, and they said a couple of things. One of the things they said is that a lot of them will skip paying up front for an app because they've never used it or never heard of it before and they want to try it out first. And then they said that after they've downloaded the app and tried it out, if they did want to pay for it, now suddenly there wasn't really a way for them to go back. There wasn't a way for them to keep track of which apps they'd pay for or not. And there was no reminder. So even if they, yeah, they didn't think about it or they don't know which apps they paid for it's like the system wasn't catering for that workflow at all so why not build in

a limited five-day trial system versus withholding updates so we definitely wanted to stay away from things like trials or like time bombs or things that are going to get in your way. Nag you while you're working. Yeah, that's the one thing we don't want to do is get in your way while you're trying to work or play. We don't want to be intrusive. So we're trying to find a compromise between what's a great user experience

and what's going to help our developers make a living. Yeah, in fact, I think I really, really, really appreciate the respect you guys put in the decision process of what the cost is for interrupting the user's workflow. I know that was kind of a key thing that you guys thought about. And holy crap, do I really appreciate that. I really, really hate it when I'm in the middle of trying to do a thought dump into a note document and all of a sudden a pop-up comes up and interrupts what I'm doing or a new Chrome extension gets updated, it opens up a new tab and it steals the input. It is the worst experience. And so I would never, ever be in a mood to want to pay money towards something when I got nagged like that. I'm just not in the buying mood. On the update screen, that's more interesting, right? Because I'm already going into the App Center, I'm launching it and I'm clicking on the updates tab. I'm already kind of like dedicating myself to this task so how did you strike the balance here like is it um uh is it does it just default to like ten dollars for an app and i just

click update and it charges me like what's that process like once i've decided i'm gonna do updates so uh developers who publish their apps in app center get to choose how much their suggested price is. So for a given app, it could be $1, $3, $5, $10. It depends on what that developer sets. And what happens is you go into your updates view, and you see all your apps listed. And if you hit the update all button, all the apps that you've paid for or any free apps or any system updates will get installed. But the ones that you haven't paid for will get kind of skipped by that process,

and they'll hang out with the regular little button that you get on the install page where it shows the suggested price, and then it has the dropdown where you can choose either a different price or zero. Right. So to be clear, these aren't packages from the upstream repo like LibreOffice. So to be clear, these aren't packages from the upstream repo like LibreOffice. These are applications the developers have independently developed and published to the App Center themselves. And then when the updates come out, those are suggesting whatever the developer says that you pay. But as an end user, you could blank it out and put zero in and hit the update button.

Right. And you can put in zero indefinitely if you want. You can go in every time and never pay for the app. That's totally up to you. I like the implementation. It seems pretty clean. It just sort of fits in. And I'm curious on the back end, like at the code level, do you guys actually call this thing the humble button?

Is that what you call it internally? The humble button? Yeah, that's what the class name is. That's a good name for it because that's what it is. It reminds me of the humble bundle. It's sort of based around that idea is you pay name is. That's a good name for it because that's what it is. It reminds me of the Humble Bundle. It's sort of based around that idea. You pay what you think it's worth. Do you have any kind of early data on if people are actually doing this or is this even shipped yet?

So this hasn't shipped yet. We wanted to post and talk about it. We merged the code into master, so we're testing it. And we wanted to kind of start the conversation and say, hey, this is what we're planning to do in the upcoming release. You know, let's hear some feedback. Let's hear some concerns. Let's answer some questions. And we've got great feedback from people already that are wondering about things like security updates.

And so we've gone back in and we've made sure that security updates always are included when you hit update all. We don't ever withhold security updates. So that was one thing that like user feedback made us go, oh, yes, this is an important case to cover. Well, Dan, I did see the typical more people coming to the defense of elementary OS than I've ever seen and more people calling out people that just go with the standard narrative, that just go with the sort of pre-baked opinion on R Linux. And more and more people were saying, no, that's wrong. You need to realize what this project is doing. Like there is a change in public opinion. There's like a wave of change that i see happening for your project and i think the risks you're taking with the app center have

directly contributed to the momentum there and i i know this one's probably the riskiest change you've this is almost riskier than the app center itself in a weird way. But at the same time, I think it's you at the project doing this is the very thing that's starting to change the tide of momentum. I've seen just an incredible amount of people saying, I really need to try that elementary OS or you don't understand what they're doing. This is their thought process. In the past, say like last year, say a year ago, I just basically see a bunch of assholes tearing down the project.

Now I see a handful of assholes tearing down the project and way more people coming to the defense of the project and way more people saying, hmm, I ought to try that. So you guys are doing something right. And I really like that you're kind of collecting the feedback now before this ships. So what is the expectation here as an end user? When do I see this land? When do I expect my updates to start prompting me to pay? Is it the next release? Is it going to happen in the current version? Like, what should users expect? At the moment, the plan is that this update doesn't happen until our next major release, the codename Juno elementary OS release. We are kind of toying around with the idea of some users have brought up to us. Well,

if I do an upgrade or if I have multiple installs or things like that, like how is this going to keep track of applications that I've already paid for on my current Loki release. And so there's, there's some things to think through there about if we need to push out a release that includes some kind of online account or some kind of importer or exporter or something that we can do. Oh, right. Yeah.

Like there's some other concerns that our users have brought up to us. That's a challenging problem to solve, right? Because you don't really want to be in the business of storing user credentials, right? So like I don't – So there's a lot to talk about there. in user credentials, right? So, like, I don't... Yeah, so there's a lot to talk about there. And there's some secure ways that we think

that we can leverage, like, native features of Stripe that we'd be able to sort and encrypt it on their servers. Right, right, yep. Interesting. But there's definitely a lot of discussion happening there. And like I said, that's the reason we put this out early, is so we can get the user feedback and have them go, hey, well, what about this?

It's funny. So Wes and I before this episode of Linux Unplugged just recorded TechSnap episode 355. And in there we talk about things to think about when you're building a user-based system like this where you're going to authenticate users and have user identities. Sort of perfect timing because it is a very unique challenge. And I could kind of see why users would want that. You know, if I'm going to – and Dan will tell you this and I'm probably unique so it's not worth it. But if I knew that if I paid $30 that it would be saved forever wherever I went that I paid that $30, I'd be more inclined.

Whereas if I thought I'm going to have to redo it on every system, I'm going to pay $3 or $5. So there's something to it. Like if I knew it was a persistent payment that would benefit me across multiple elementary installs, I'd be more inclined to pay more. But I might be unique in that way. But that sounds interesting. I'm really glad you guys are talking about this right now. And are you feeling like the course is correct?

You're going to continue down this path? You haven't been scared away from it? No, I think the feedback that we've gotten is super awesome. You know, the people that are going to be upset were still upset, you know? But from the majority of the developers and the users that are using Elementor OS, the familiar faces that we've actively engaged with, it seems like people are excited about this change, and they think that it solves the problem in a fair way, and they're willing to try it out.

And I think that it should turn out good. And if it turns out that we did some wrong things, we'll take more feedback and adjust the system and roll out a new one. Producer Michael, you have a question slash suggestion, maybe like a user preference type setting? Yeah, I was just curious if it was going to be possible in the future. Like you said that you'd have to manually choose to do the $0 every single time. And I was wondering if you have any thoughts on maybe in the future setting it so that if you, I don't know, manually choose it for five times, that it would automatically give you an option to say, hey, would you like to set this permanent so it's you know continue to update it but in the free or would it be like a manual every time i think at the moment we want to try the manual every time because kind of the idea of it is that it's not as convenient you know we want to go hey like you're still using this the

developer is still giving you value like maybe you should consider throwing a dollar at him you know yeah that kind of makes sense to me yeah it seems and it seems sustainable i i hope that like you know this is this being risky and getting so much attention sure you might lose people but if the people who stay are are down to help build this uh linux paradise of you know a supportive a supportable linux ecosystem it could be great. Well, there's two different audiences, too. Go ahead. I can save my point. I'd still consider Rotten's suggestion on the basis of if it's a shareable organization

where they're using your system because it's convenient, it does help somebody, at that point, you know, that option is definitely something that does cut on their maintenance. So it makes that experience more smooth. I think there are other ways to get the updates outside of the App Center too. But I think the idea is sort of worth trying.

Like, hey, this is the third or fourth time you've skipped paying for this, but you're still choosing to update it. Maybe that means there is some value there. I see why you want to experiment with that uh i guess i guess moving after i well the thing that i was going to mention before just a second ago was there's two audiences here to this the one audience obviously is the users but the other audience is the developers and you're essentially dan messaging to the developers. And you're essentially, Dan, messaging to the developers, we're really trying to work something out for you that's going to make this profitable. In a way, it's sort of free advertising to developers about elementary OS. I know that's not the intention, but if I was a developer looking at monetizing my application on the Linux desktop, I'd be watching this going, these guys get it. These guys get that I need to actually eat food.

Yeah, we definitely want to be in the corner of our developers here and fighting for them. And we know, you know, objectively that there are developers of popular applications on other platforms that have said, hey, we're not going to write for Linux because we can't make a living there. And we want to remove that reason. We don't want anybody to be able to say that. to make an application and they tried to sell it on Linux and it just blew up in their face and it was nothing but criticism. And it really is, in a way, I can kind of understand where they went wrong and I can kind of see it from their perspective. But it's just not all the pieces are there yet when you compare it to other platforms.

And elementary OS is getting as close as I think anybody has to really just putting all of the pieces in there that make it easier for developers to ship and understand there'll be a sustainable revenue model. A cohesive experience, a target to develop for, and a place to get revenue. And here's what I would say to people that are like, this isn't for me. This isn't anything I'm ever interested in. because one of the things that I really have learned to appreciate recently about the open source world is that all of these different efforts that are happening in the open are free R&D for all of us. And we all get to sit back and watch elementary OS try this crazy ass experiment of trying to monetize applications and help people monetize their programs when people are upgrading and see how it goes.

And there's – it doesn't cost me a thing. You know, unless I buy an app, it doesn't cost me anything. And I get to watch them try this. And so I really appreciate that you guys are doing this because somebody needs to. And I can't think of a better project. So good luck, Dan, and I will definitely be trying it out when Juno ships. I'll 100% give it a go. I think it's worth giving it a go.

And I'm happy to throw a couple of bucks to developers that are making native Linux applications any day of the week. You know? And I'll pay for those upgrades because I want to see more of that. That's why I buy every damn release of Crossover Office for, like, the last decade. I don't even use the damn thing more than a couple times a year but i'm just so thankful that somebody's making native applications and contributing code upstream and like yeah just go for it dan so good on you and keep us updated won't you good luck thanks all right so there is the the one thing that i've been building towards all day is this perfect workstation that i'm trying to get to and And I've had this massive, massive awakening.

I should have listened. People tell me to stay woke. And they tell me to reclaim my time. And I finally woke up. Like Neo, I woke up from the Matrix and I realized everything I knew was wrong. You heard it a little bit last week. Like the beginning of the little bit last week, like the beginning of

the awakening happened last week. But so much more has developed in the week since last episode. We'll get to that in just a moment. But first, let's talk about skilling up. Let's talk about your mind. Let's talk about Linux Academy, a platform to learn more about Linux and everything around it. Linux Academy is a full-featured training library with everything you need to learn new skills and advance your career. It's all of the stuff that's core to Linux and the things bolted on top, like OpenStack and

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Because as an old man, I probably would have gotten street fights with hobos if I knew it could lead to Linux Academy. I'm just saying, I would have gotten my butt kicked every single time, and I still would have done it for Linux Academy. Are you saying those kids today just have it so easy? That's exactly what I'm saying, and they're on my lawn

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and give you advice when you get stuck. They'll spin up cloud servers on demand as you need to learn more. They have course schedulers to help you pick a time frame and actually stick to your goals. Somehow they do this with computers. Turns out they're good at these kinds of things. And if you just need a specific career track refresher or you're ready to go get a cert, they have learning paths, which are a series of courses and content planned by their instructors for specific career tracks. And of course, they've got training and preparation for certs.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged with comprehensive study tools and much, much more. You've got to check it out. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, support the show, and sign up for a free seven-day trial. Big thanks to Linux Academy. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Okay, so I know. Crazy Chris is switching desktops again.

All right. What's happening? Get your laughs out, everybody. Shake it out. Ha, ha, ha. It's so funny. Except for this is the real deal. I know.

This is the real deal. I feel like I've heard this before. I know. I know. I've had a – I kind of blame Wimpy too. Wimpy kind of started this whole thing with this, hey, you ought to try plasma on Waylon. You're welcome. What have you done?

I know. The reckoning. And since then, I've installed KDE Neon User Edition on all of my systems. I just went for it because I really, really wanted to put it to the test because I'm sick and tired of switching distros. I'm sick and tired of switching desktops. I just want one thing that works. And so I thought, I'm going all in on this to put it to stress test it as much as possible. And let's make things harder by doing it right in the middle of an upgrade from KDE 5.11 to 5.12, which, you know, it's always fun to just completely update the desktop

environment. And I did a lot of discussions with people online, and one of the most influential people that I talked to was producer Michael, who said, just try KDE Neon. And he described it in a way that perfectly suited my needs. And producer Michael, I don't want to steal your thunder, because you did such a good job describing the reason why KDE Neon has been the perfect Linux setup for you. And I'd love you to share it with us. Well, I don't remember exactly what I said, but

it was probably along some of my alongs of a... It's at a point where I was... You know how you're moving to the system and you're just frustrated with all the problems, and the updates constantly break things and stuff like that? Since moving to Neon, I've used the same

install for almost two years and it's while it does have quirks because every system has quirks i i can be i can be safe knowing that when i update my system it's not just going to crash everything it's like i'm gonna i'm gonna have all the settings that i wanted all the applications like loading and where I want them to load. All that stuff is exactly where I left it when I updated or prior to updating. And that reliability is just so nice. Yeah, and you like tailored it directly to me. Like you weaponized it. You said KDE Neon User Edition is the perfect blend of a stable LTS base with the rolling user land.

Because you know that gets me. You know that gets me. And so it is, right? That's my entire reason for wanting, like, I've been wanting this exact setup for, like, a decade of a system that has all the stuff I want, the applications and the DE and all that stuff to roll. But I don't really care if the kernel and the display server and all that stuff rolls with it. But for the entire time, it's always been you either have a stable base or you have a rolling base. And I'd rather have that little hybrid approach, and that's exactly what Neon does for me. Yeah, yeah.

it with flat packs and snaps and it's it's sort of it's sort of this perfect blend of modern user applications modern desktop environment but stable old reliable base so when i open up my bash terminal everything's like it's been for like the last couple of years yeah the stable unix workstation and the other other really, really great thing about Plasma is there is uniquely new stuff that GNOME isn't doing and Windows isn't doing and macOS isn't doing. Yeah, they really are pushing ahead in their own direction. And I've noticed direct benefits. And I don't know how much this is attributed to plasma desktop versus light DM and SD DM. But my machines with neon wake way faster. Like the screen is up and my desktop is up.

I turned off locking because I'm lazy. And I open up my screen and it's my home machine. It never leaves the RV. I open up the screen and my desktop is up on my screen before I have finished positioning my laptop screen. It's immediate. And then it takes another beat for the network to actually connect. But it's instantaneous. My screen wakes up now.

I feel like my boot is faster. It just – oh, oh. You sound like you're in love. And my battery life is better. Honestly, that's what this is. It's infatuation. Or is it real? This is always how it starts. It's the Church of Neon. It's infatuation. Or is it real? This is always how it starts.

It's the Church of Neon. It does start like this. But I am happy to report that I did go through a 5.11 to 5.12 upgrade. And if I didn't know that's what I was doing, I wouldn't have even known the upgrade took place. I've done it on several machines before the show and nothing. I just noticed nothing. It just was fine. Yeah, it was easy i've gone i'm on 512 now and i've i mean the first time i started was five six wow wow maybe it was five five i'm not sure but it was it was somewhere around there you've been

upgrading for a while um so i i've been looking for a desktop that has better technical fundamentals than Gnome Shell. And I've been looking for a desktop that is more prepared for Wayland. And I've been looking for something that feels like it takes advantage of my hardware. And I've been looking for something that doesn't slow down after four or five days of uptime because all of my systems are up for weeks at a time. I thought that was a feature we borrowed from Windows. Yeah. Well, that's really where I got to with GNOME Shell is I got to the point where I needed to load a certain set of extensions to make it usable. But that seems to bring a certain level of instability.

and I thought back to when I used to use macOS System 6 and I was installing extensions that would rip code out of memory and inject their own code and I thought about how things didn't properly have isolated processes and I started to get angry because that was 1987 and we knew those problems existed. And somehow, when Gnome Shell was invented, years later, when we knew about all of these mistakes, they repeated the same sins because they needed to punt on bigger issues that they didn't have answers to, certain security issues and IPC issues. certain security issues and ipc issues and it has led to a desktop that honestly like we have this supercomputer operating system underneath it and it is it is crashy as as windows

98 se and i'm not windows 98 se was a great release of windows and if you put the plus pack on there that shit was choice but it still would crash like a bitch. And GNOME crashes like a bitch all the time. Before this show started, we dumped our live stream because the GNOME shell crashed on us. It's just sad and true. It's too much. It's too much. It's too much. Like, what is the point of all of these years of open source innovation just to straddle ourselves to a technically incompetent desktop environment? And I just got angry as I thought about this. And I came to a realization that I could no longer come on the air and I could no longer recommend that people try out desktop environments based on Gnome Shell. I just couldn't honestly do it.

I would feel like a phony if I told you that's a desktop environment you should be using. And that's pretty fucking scary for me. Because 11 years into this, this is the first time i've ever felt this way i have to say chris i having used unity for um six seven years and then when we switched to gnome in ubuntu um i was kind of surprised at the instability of it i was impressed at how fast the ubuntu desktop team turned around yeah from unity by default to good by default and having something that was prettier than i expected it was going to be i agree but it's it i agree with you it is a bit crashy and i know that there is some work going on upstream to fix that in the

known project and in wayland and mutter and so on But it looks like that stuff is kind of some way out. Those fundamental architectural changes that are going to be required to make it rock solid seem a little bit further out than I'm happy with. So I decided to join you on your journey with 3D Neon. I'm really excited about that. You're welcome. So I saw a picture of you installing it i keep getting uh pings from wimpy saying hey so uh how are you liking that how are you liking it i'm curious how are you

liking it so do you want the full beans or do you just yeah well i want the full beans because i have a feeling both you and i are going to have a totally different perspective by next week that's my sense of it right now so i was a little – there's been a couple of frustrations, niggles, and one of them I filed a bug upstream in KDE to let them know there's a bug there. It was all jolly fun downloading the ISO at the gate at the airport in Seattle. We tried over the airport Wi-Fi, and it was just too slow. So I downloaded the ISO image over 3g roaming in on my phone and then wimpy dragged the iso off my phone and put it onto a usb stick and we we tried the install

at 30 000 feet there you go um i'm installing it on a thinkpad t450 that's had linux on it for ages so i know linux works perfectly fine on this. Unfortunately, we discovered a bug that you can't install KDE Neon offline. It refuses to install the Grub bootloader. Noah ran into that same problem, too. I think if you have an EFI system, if you have a legacy boot system, I think it'll work okay. Right, and I couldn't

do that. Yeah, I couldn't even get it to boot with legacy mode. I flipped. I don't know how many times we tried, but we tried a lot of different options in the BIOS in order to get it to boot in with legacy mode it just i had every i flipped i don't know how many times we tried um but we tried a lot of different options in the bios in order to get it to boot and when we got it to boot um it wouldn't install so wimpy after we sat there and ruminated over a glass of wine on the flight um you classy gentleman i know right uh he said i think i know what this is you need to be online uh for that to work because the message doesn't indicate that's the problem it just says i can't install this package

um and sure enough when i got home i put this same usb key and connected it to the LAN did exactly the same steps the install uh succeeded perfectly fine so that out the way i filed a bug and i'm sure they'll fix that and that's that's great yeah i know they know about that won't have that that won't affect everyone because most people are connected these days i'm not on a plane right um but that aside and one other niggle with the trackpad that's been irritating the hell out of me um i you can't turn the trackpad off um i was wondering about that i had not tried that yet you you kind of can there is an option uh where it tries to be smart and say turn the trackpad off when there's a mouse plugged in to say oh well he's got a mouse he doesn't need

the trackpad um but it's not smart enough and uh my thinkpad has a nipple obviously and it thinks that's a mouse so there's a set of exceptions where you can say um turn the trackpad off if there's a mouse connected, but not if there's a touch point or a nipple connected. So if I remove all of those exceptions, I can force it to disable the trackpad, which is what I want. I personally don't use trackpads. But then it wakes itself up every so often. I don't know whether it's waking up from suspend or on a reboot,

but sometimes the trackpad just turns itself back on again, and it is so infuriating because i i find i end up clicking buttons that i didn't intend to because i've got fat thumbs that rest on the trackpad right so those two issues aside and those are the only two issues i've had really to speak of the others are just tiny little niggles i've been really impressed with it it's really really nice it's quick like you say it wakes up nice and fast yep definitely um the battery life feels longer but i've only had it installed for a couple of days so i can't really say uh but you know i'm speaking to you from a snap of mumble on kde neon there you go it works how do you feel about the efficiency of it i mean in terms of how do you

mean i mean of kd resources if you have you? If you looked into the applications that you previously run on a different DE, then run it inside of Plasma and see that there's actually improvement on pretty much everything. Especially if you're a closet user. So I have switched to Firefox here because I'm using as many of the default apps as I can. But I also had to install some other things. So I installed the Telegram Snap, the Slack Snap, the Mumble Slap, VS Code Snap, and on top, I haven't really installed anything from the archive. I've only installed snaps on top of KDE Neon, and that's kind of where I am right now.

But it's working really well. If you go grab the user edition, there's two versions of the user edition, user edition and user edition LTS. That's the one I got. And, Producer Michael, do you know, when does the LTS version of Neon get the new LTS of Plasma Desktop, which just came out today? It's not as quick as the regular user version, but they haven't specified exactly an ETA yet. It eventually lands there, though. specified exactly an eta yet it eventually lands there though yeah the issue is that um this is the first time there's been a switch from an lts to an lts on the neon like existence okay and then

there's an 1804 switch coming up too so it's kind of interesting times uh but poppy you know that you know how you were having that dropbox menu issue i think the difference between that is that i'm on i'm on 511 and now12, whereas you're on 5.8. Yeah, I think I'm happy to test it, whatever version I've got. And when I come to upgrade, maybe we'll see. Well, you should get 5.12 pretty soon, I would think. So you and I will be in sync pretty soon. Yeah, I'm not going to force it.

I'm going to keep what's on here on here because that's the experience that I got through downloading the iso and installing it but i am i am quite happy with what i've got i've been able to customize it a little bit tweak the theme uh change the mouse cursors and stuff like that and um i'm i'm pretty happy with it it's it's a it's a nice setup me too i went i did breeze dark i went to breeze dark and here's the thing so i want i want to invite the audience to try this too go get kde neon and you and grab one of the user editions. I'm on the main user edition. They're still using the LTS base. So if you get user edition, it's the stable version of Plasma with an Ubuntu LTS base.

If you go get the Neon LTS, you're getting Ubuntu LTS as well as the Plasma LTS, which is what like Popy is on and Noah is using that as well. I'm on user edition, which is just today got Plasma 512, super smooth upgrade, really great desktop. It is, once you put on Breeze dark mode, and I invite you to also go into the GTK application settings and turn on dark mode stuff there. I tell you what, I've never in in i've been using kde since version two i have never had an experience where gtk applications and cute applications look so close to the same look and design it is it's better than when i have a gnome desktop or a

unity desktop and i pseudo an application like the NVIDIA Settings, and then the NVIDIA Settings launches and its theme doesn't... Yeah, uh-huh. That doesn't happen anymore under my Plasma desktop. It just works. My GTK applications are actually more consistent under my Plasma desktop than they were under my GNOME and Unity 7 desktops.

One of the things I used to be kind of resistant to KDE was the plethora of settings. And I know some people love to be able to twiddle and tweak everything. I don't do that so much. And I would find some of these like billion dialogues with loads of radio buttons and sliders and stuff. I would find that overwhelming and I didn't really like it. But the way that some of the things have been presented, like if I click on the battery, this laptop has two batteries.

And if I click on the battery icon, I see the gauges for both of them really easily and clearly. And if I click on the network thing, I can see the network I'm connected to and the up and down network traffic. It's, it's just, it's really classy. It's,

I really liked the exposing those details without it being overwhelming. Yeah, exactly. And there's a system tray. Yeah, that is nice. I really like exposing those details without it being overwhelming. Yeah, exactly. And there's a system tray. Yeah, that is nice. Just to have all of my icons in the system tray just work. That is really nice. Yeah.

There's actually a lot. You can customize the system tray, too, so that you can say, let's say an application shows up in the tray that you don't want it, maybe for whatever reason. You can just go in and individually hide any application you don't want to show. It'll still be accessible through the tray, but it won't be on the panel. I really appreciate the smoothness of KWIN. So the installation that I'm presenting right now on screen, this has been running now for about eight days, nine days without reboot. It's just been super solid. It's just because one of the things I was running into is about four days of uptime.

I was having just this grinding performance. I shared a video in the Jupyter Broadcasting Telegram group where even my – it's just everything ground to a halt. And so now – The system is just unusable. And now I've doubled that time so far and it hasn't run into that issue on the same hardware. Same example. For that same reference, I've done a month and a half without rebooting. Oh, OK.

Mr. Fanfic. Yeah, I'm not a fan of rebooting. Oh, okay. Mr. Fanfic. Yeah, I'm not a fan of rebooting. I like to leave my systems up a lot. And one thing I hadn't, are you using KDE with Wayland or are you on X11? Because I didn't make, there didn't seem to be an option. No, I don't know. I didn't choose anything.

But I know I'm on X11 because I've seen the environment set up. So I don't know why. The 5.8 version is mainly X. Okay. choose anything yeah but i i know i'm on x11 because i've seen the environment set up so i but i don't know why it's mainly x okay so if i upgrade maybe i'll get wayland right like you'll have ability to use wayland i wouldn't say that wayland is ready really to be as a primary anyway it's it's more more ready than than gnome's feature but uh it is already the worst kept secret in the world i was just saying like there there is some kind of like uh some mis like some misstatements about the wayland support in plasma it's very it's it's a lot better than pretty much anything else i've tried but you know it's it's still wayland so i'll look forward to trying it when i get the upgrade if i

get the upgrade well so I wanted to just say, I do feel like there's still quite a bit of defaults I change, but my perspective on it has changed a bit because I feel like I go through it once when I set up a system, and then I just set them all. Like I run Dolphin, I just go through console, I just run everything, and I set it once. And once I've set it, it sticks.

And that's been really nice. It won't lose it. Like after years of using, I've been using Plasma itself for since like five years now, and I have not lost any of my settings. As long as you save the files that they were put in, you're good to go.

Well, except for my touchpad setting, but we'll gloss over that one. Actually, I'll talk to you about the show. I think I might have a solution for that. Excellent. Good. I invite you guys to try it out and just give it a shot. Change the defaults as you need. Maybe put the dark theme on there. It's all pretty nice.

And play with it. To the point that you asked about resources, I actually noticed a pretty huge improvement, which directly translated to more battery life on a laptop that's three years old. And I went from getting an hour and a half battery life now to four hours of battery life on a laptop that's three years old. And I went from getting an hour and a half battery life now to four hours of battery life with a combination of switching to Plasma, but also I dropped Chrome and tried Vivaldi for a bit and then just settled on Firefox. Significant, significant performance impact difference on my machine. I get better battery.

I get significantly better battery life with Firefox. Is that right? Yeah, and the combination of Plasma percent lighter browser it's huge that's their benchmark well i mean i went i go from two hours to four hours with the combination of gnome and firefox to or chrome and plasma and firefox it's much better it's just a whole new you that's their that's their marketed percentage maybe that's maybe it's actually better depending on your infrastructure like your structure of how you set it up. But the other thing that's kind of nice is certain notifications from Firefox or whatnot integrate in with Plasma's native notification system. So like download notifications.

It really does feel like a consistent experience, and I'm impressed. Just so you know, in the future, that's actually getting better. Yeah, like download status, right? And media playback controls and whatnot? Yeah, the playback, you have a YouTube video playing, it'll be connected to the media player inside of the panel. So you can just like everything. The best thing about it is that you can have custom shortcuts to that media panel. So you can be a global like play and pause for YouTube anywhere.

Yeah, so just if you didn't catch that, what he's saying there is literally like you could have a youtube video playing and you could click on like the volume controller and hit pause it'll pause the youtube video in a tab somewhere and that's super nice when you have like a multi-monitor setup and you have youtube thrown up on one of the screens and and the other thing i'll just leave it with this then we'll move on because the ask noah show is just coming up but um i the thing that pushed me over to try this was and maybe you remember the details michael but i i i'll i forgot the names i think it was deal moto but i can't remember there was a semi-critical review it was basically a review of plasma 512 and it said here's all the rough edges that i perceive and these are the things that i would do differently um and if

you've watched the gnome project you you've witnessed how they handle that kind of feedback a few times. And so I kid you not, I popped my popcorn. I got myself my beverage. I sat down in front of my computer. I brought up the planet.kde.com page and I thought, OK, let's watch their responses to this. This should be a shit show. And what I saw was developers in the Plasma Project that took point by point the reviews, critiques of the Plasma desktop and either pointed them to existing bugs or converted them to new bugs and ideas and was completely receptive to the feedback, to the constructive criticism and turned it around into things that they're going to implement into the plasma project or things that they're already working on. And when I saw that, it really clicked with me that there's a different level of interaction with what the community wants. There's a different level of weight put on what the community wants. You can hear that's why the dogs are barking, because they believe it too. They're barking for plasma. You can hear that's why the dogs are barking because they believe it too. They're barking for plasma.

So if that sounds appealing to you, if you want to bark for plasma, I recommend going to neon.kde.org. Go get the user edition. Try it out. Become a plasma puppy. Yeah, become a plasma puppy. You're a plasma puppy. And just give it a go because there's interesting new things happening there. And I've really been enjoying it. Now, I'll come back next week and I'll tell you if something's gone wrong., and I've really been enjoying it.

Now, I'll come back next week, and I'll tell you if something's gone wrong. You know I'll tell you about it, but I don't know. I'm pretty impressed with it. I'm really enjoying it. I would like to make one statement. If you're new to the Plasma experience, you should know that Neon is kind of like a minimal approach to a distro. Yeah. So you're not going to get, like, LibreOffice is not included. You're not going to get any kind of like a minimal approach to a distro. Yeah. So like you're not going to get like LibreOffice is not included.

You're not going to get any kind of office suiter. You're going to get like the only media player you'll get is VLC, things like that. So like if you don't know what you want, it's not meant for like the base level beginner. But if you have like a rough idea of what applications you want, then it's great. Yeah, that's, you know, it's more a minimal approach, which is kind of how I prefer it.

It's kind of awesome, yeah. I prefer that. LTS base, install whatever I want. So you loaded on your rig before the show started. Yeah. And you've been sort of tweaking it a little bit as the show's gone on. What do you think? What are your initial impressions on it?

And how old is this machine? Give us a benchmark. It's like four years old? Yeah. Yeah, so it's not the beefiest, but it's been great. The install was super simple it got all of my you know efi things sorted out without any issues which was a surprisingly surprising delight and a delight you say a delight yes absolutely and that's been the kind of my weak spot is like not having a ton of plasma experience so not necessarily knowing where

all the settings were and i was really comfortable with like a default gnome i was not a huge gnome plugin user so i had somewhat less you know i mean a couple plugins sure but somewhat less issues with crashing or stability and i also tend to reboot my system so i have like basically none of your problems but i'm still having a fantastic time it's super consistent it is it's really fast and smooth and you know maybe maybe a couple of past times a couple years ago like when i was last doing a dedicated plasma try i did try to give it time but i just i didn't get it to a place where the default or where the time i had made it a system that i really liked compared to what i had in gnome but right now i mean i think i can just keep using this really i'm gonna try to convince the k18 to let me change the defaults yeah because it's not that i don't like i mean

i actually really appreciate the the ability to tweak things. I just don't always. I want to be able to fresh install and just work. The fact that there's so many silly defaults. Just a couple months ago was the first time they introduced the folder view by default. So you'd have desktop icons. You know, okay. It's been a decade.

And I know, I think there's been a decade you know this and i know i i think there's already a bug open about this but there's others there's like low-hanging fruit like when i'm on a high dpi display and i open up dolphin or i open up system settings and it's like taking 10 of my screen up in the corner and like i have to like resize everything for the first day i'm resizing all of the windows for the first day. And you know, the one thing I'll say is it remembers the size. God dang it if I don't love that about console. Console is the same place, the same size. I open it every single time. Man, oh man, do I appreciate that. So I only have to resize it once, but every single thing gets resized every time I open it for the first

time on the Plasma desktop. desktop here's one quick super cool tip about the window the k-win structure in plasma is the uh when you let's say for example you'd like to maximize windows but you don't want the title bar to take up space you can remove the decorations from any application at any point oh interesting so whether it's maximized or not you just go you just right click it choose more options to right click the title bar choose more options and then click no border. And it just removes the decoration so you can maximize and use as much screen as possible. I'm trying that out right now.

That's awesome. More actions. That's amazing. Wow. Nice tip. You can actually also script it so it automatically does it on individual applications and make them specific sizes and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I've been taking advantage of like window rules too. So that way Spotify, if I launch that always opens on desktop for,

cause I don't want that crap anywhere near me. So I always open that up on desktop for, um, so I invite you guys to try it out to give it a go and let us know. We'll, we'll give you our followup conclusions if we're sticking with it or not and next week's episode. But the conversation doesn't end here either. In fact, uh, ask Noah's coming up just a little bit after the show and Noahah's all in on the big plasma experiment too are you ready are you

ready no have you loaded your systems have you are you done the mass formatting the nuke and paves like i have yeah yeah i caught your infection we're all infected yeah well i got home and i i was like wow i give this a shot and i put, and I put it on the bench machine, right? The one that doesn't matter, the one that is powerful, I can play with it, but I tried it for a little bit, and then I moved back to what I know will work. Except I didn't. Went and did my work computer, and then I actually, so the machine downstairs, and I hate to admit this, but it's the truth. It's been running for Fedora for so long. this but it's the truth it you know it's been running for fedora for so long it's run every that that position not the same physical hardware but has run every single version of fedora since

fedora core one and uh after wow it took me it took me the entire week and took me three days to get everything moved off of there yeah uh and now that's running plasma as well really wow yeah i went to katie neon i have a sense this might be a topic in today's episode of the Ask Noah Show. We might talk about it just a little bit. I'm really enjoying it. I mean, so far. This is the funny thing. The first week or so, it's always like that new relationship. You're like, oh, this is great. This is so great. Like when you get a new car, it still smells like a new car.

You haven't figured out what you hate about it yet. Yeah, like the dog hasn't crapped in my new car yet. You know, once the dog craps in the car, the smell changes and that may happen over the next week. But I don't think we've ever tried anything like this where so many of us are giving it a go, because not only are several of us here in the Mumble Room giving it a go, and Noah's giving it a go, and this is transpiring across the Ask Noah show, but also there's a whole bunch of people in the Telegram group and on Twitter that are also giving this a go. So if you want to join in,

you still can. We have a week that we're trying it. Just give me a hashtag so that way I can filter all of this. And we are trying to solve the shit show that is the desktop. So give me your feedback either in Telegram, Discord, or on Twitter, whatever it is, and then append it with hashtag shitshow. One word.

That way we can find it. and we'll review everybody's thoughts. So this is going to be a meta review like we've never done on any of our shows before, crossing multiple shows, crossing multiple communities, and multiple different people that have tons of different preferences. Who will hold out? Who will be the final plasma user after all of this? And what will the reward be? Stay tuned and find out. who will hold out? Who will be the final plasma user after all of this? And what will the reward be?

Stay tuned and find out. But in the meantime, that does bring us to the end of this week's broadcast. Hope you enjoyed it. I encourage you to join us live. It's really like a Linux sandwich. Yeah, and probably if you do, you'll end up getting switched

to KDN Young. So just do it today. Yeah, go over to jblive.tv. It kicks off at 2 p.m. Pacific, really 1.30-ish. But just go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar because everybody knows that you've got your own unique time. You've got to solve that problem. It's weird.

Go get more of Popey and Wimpy. They have a podcast. Will it come back? Nobody knows. But in the meantime, you can check the back catalog, Ubuntu podcast. Go check out Daniel over at Elementary OS. And, of course, the Ask Noah show coming up right after this. And we'll see you right back here next week. Thank you. All right, Mr. Payne.

Man, you know what's great? KDE Neon? Yeah, that has been pretty great. But no, after this, you and I are going to go do a massive upgrade to the Jupiter Broadcasting Network. Will it all go up in flames? Who knows? Who knows? We'll report on the text net program

and we'll listen to Ask Noah while we do it. All right, guys. Thank you very much. JBTitles.com and you can bang suggest. Anybody in the mobile room have a title suggestion, feel free to throw it out too. We got to name this thing before the Ask Noah show. How about bang suggest?

The ending line is see you back here next Tuesday. Not next week. You know, a lot of people listen on Wednesdays now, I've realized. You know? Oh, really? Yeah. Because we put it out. Well, it's their fault.

Well, no, it's because we're on the West Coast. So, you know, I'm just, we're late. We're behind everyone. After you get done listening to the Ask Noah Show live, it's not like you're going to go download it. You're spent. There was something, there was plasma something. I'd like to suggest a title. This is like a running joke.

How about The Church of Neon? Yeah. Now, we did have the guys on from Red Hat. So maybe. Or I appreciated. How about The Linux Grinch? The Linux Grinch. That was good, too.

Worshiping at The Church of Neon. There was something about. That's good. The Church of Neon. There was something about – that's good. The Church of Neon. It's funny. Running the plasma wave. I'm no longer the guy telling people to try out plasma. Well, everybody has been.

You know, Beard was – you know, I've tried it. This isn't – actually, I will say I should have said this in the show too. The fact that I've tried it before made trying it this time a lot easier because I knew how to enable high DPI support. But yeah, you're right. You've been on there for a while now. The thing is the Gnome keeps having these big headlines like, oh, Canonical is shipping it. And then that translates into Dell and System76 shipping it and now and then and then that translates into dell and system 76 shipping it and all so it's just there's so much momentum there that if if you were to sit back that's a legacy problem i think if you look at about it like gnome has had the the people got attention

to gnome but it's it's always had similar issues yes that's the thing is what i'm realizing is there's certain people that have been hip to these technical issues. It's like it's been the biggest public dirty secret that we're only now talking about that we're this far into it. But there's certain, you realize, you look back and you go, oh, that's why company X did Y.

Oh, that's why this group did this. Hilariously, I recently just found out about Gnome's website. So, you know the Gnome tweak? You could install the extensions from the zip files? Yeah. There was a – I was talking to someone, and they said that Canonical had removed that ability in Ubuntu.

They were like, why do you want us to install things? And I was like, that seems weird. I don't think they would do that. So I looked into it. Gnome removed that feature from G gnome tweak tool in 326 didn't make a fuss about it no one really noticed it except for people started blaming canonical because that was the first version that was in 1710 and they just kind of made an assumption but what's funny is that if you go to the extensions.gnome website there for for a longest time there was no way to download extensions from that website i even

created a script that you could download and make that work because they make the downloads just to let you download them now you can download them and not use them that's perfect that's exactly what i want. Yeah. Oh, good. So I think the hardest thing for me in this transition is that it seems like Gnome just got the Windows 10 style, like when you have a split. Oh, snap. Yeah.

Well, the snap and then like the middle resize. Yeah. And I've been loving that. There's some good, there's like, it's got like multi-dimensional snapping. Like check this out. So here I grab, I grab the window here, right? Are there keyboard shortcuts for the snapping too? Oh, there's keyboard shortcuts. Check this out. I grab the window here. Are there keyboard shortcuts for the snapping too? Oh, there's keyboard shortcuts. I can do just this quadrant, or I can

do the full thing, or I can do the whole thing, or I can, again, just do this lower quadrant, this upper quadrant. That's pretty nice. You can have to do a 50-50 horizontal. Like so, right? Boom. And then if I had another window open, I could plug it right there that's

pretty good and see how it's sticking see i do like you see it's sticking right there it's sticking i just got so hooked on that like being able to drag and have them both resize at the same time yeah that is super nice that's something that windows 10 actually does pretty well yeah here's here's something that actually might make that even better you know how uh this is like a not i guess it's not really power thing, but you know how the alt left click where you can move a window? Yeah, I love that. You can alt right click and resize a window.

Oh, good to know. Oh yeah, look at this. Oh, thank you. That's nice. Thank you for telling me that. That's actually really handy. You can do it from as long as you're, if you're on anywhere remotely near a corner or a side, it works. Oh, that's hot. That's another producer Michael hot tip.