LINUX Unplugged - Episode 240: Why This Theme Won’t Work | LUP 240

Episode Date: March 14, 2018

This week Noah fills in for Chris while he's on his return journey from SCaLE! The guys get down deep on a variety of topics from screen sharing in Plasma under Wayland to the status of the GTK 'CommuniTheme' for ubuntu 18.04 and more!

Is anyone using LibreOffice 6.1? I haven't installed, but I haven't used it that much. Have you noticed the native GTK message dialogues? Yep. And what do you think? Does it enhance your experience to have that? Not really, I don't use it that much. It's the kind of stuff that I... There's a couple of blog posts and there's some people talking about it,

but honestly, it's like, how many dialogue boxes do you get in libra office and why is that such a concern and like even on this article there's there's even there's people commenting even on the article itself and it's i'm just is that a thing is that what we're worried about these days in the linux community is the uh pop-ups of gtk dialogues the things that ask me to save or not save we're really glad that those use the native gtk theming is that a thing that we care about now i'm just asking at least enough people did or at least one person did to make it happen yeah apparently uh i suppose that's always one of those things right it's not quite a fallacy but like always one of those things in open source where you can argue like well is that the best use of time does anyone really care would this have been voted on for something to actually

try you know putting energy to fix but at the of the day, people are going to fix whatever they do. And if we have nominally even better software at the end, that's probably a win. Yeah, I guess that's a good point, Wes. So I guess that is what keeps Linux kind of on the cutting edge, right? When we go to lay out a file system, we have the guy that knows more about file systems than anyone under the sun and that's the guy who makes our file system and apple doesn't put a lot of money or stock into file systems because it's not a sexy product that they can put a bullet point before right so to a certain degree that's our i guess that's our competitive advantage i guess yeah it definitely can be and i agree like i'm not so ireOffice, not that it's not great, just thankfully don't have to use Office software that much.

But I could see a future, perhaps, Chris review where, you know, where we're lamenting the state of consistency on the Linux desktop. And this little change would maybe prevent a future rant. Right. Yeah. Definitely in the case of protecting user data, dialogues like this are super important as well because users aren't typically very good at interacting with dialogues. And so removing any inconsistencies, giving them a clear path, things they can expect, like helps them get through the information.

Okay. So elaborate on that a little bit. So you mean like are you saying if yes is always on the right and all of a sudden once it's on the left, then all of a sudden they inadvertently click? What exactly do you mean? Well, like in elementary, we have like some rules about dialogues as far as like never, ever use yes and no labels. Then there can be like really bad logic conflicts between the messaging in your dialogue and what your action buttons do. You should have an affirmative action that describes exactly what it does, and it should always be in the same position. And then directly to the left of that should always be cancel, which is your do nothing,

so that users always have a safe way to back out of this and go, Oh, no, I don't know what this dialogue even means. I don't want to do anything. this and go, oh, no, like, I don't know what this dialogue even means. I don't want to do anything. Okay, interesting. So you're saying if I say, erase disk, if that's all I'm asking, and I have a yes and a no, yes, I want to erase the disk, or yes, I want to leave the disk alone, and no, I don't want to touch the disk, or no, I want to erase, is that what, am I picking up what you're saying? Right, depending on the messaging in your dialogue, you could unintentionally be unclear to a user about what you're actually asking them to take a decision on. And then we even go further with using style classes that are available in GTK dialogues for where a destructive action button is going to be styled red. Oh, yeah.

Right? Okay. Yeah, yeah. Right? Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So I like that. And you've laid all of this out in some sort of a specification format so anyone that is working on the elementary project knows, hey, this is the way we do it. Right. And I believe GNOME has the same human interface guidelines set up for how they expect alerts to work as well. human interface guidelines set up for how they expect alerts to work as well.

Well, it's interesting you say that because I suppose to a certain degree, that is what this whole GTK dialogue thing wraps around, I guess, is that the fact that GNOME has set out, here are the dialogues, and this is the way we want to present it to the users. And then LibreOffice, up until now, I guess, is not calling those. And so the user is presented with a different experience. Yeah, and this is a big problem, I think, for cross-platform applications in general because they have to cater to the different platform conventions of all the different platforms they're trying to ship on. And it makes it difficult for the end users to have a clear and consistent experience. So in your opinion, do you think that we should always let the operating system deal with

the window decorations? Yeah, absolutely. I'm a huge proponent of totally native apps. Oh, okay, cool. So are you not on the Electron boat then? Oh, no. Really? No, not at all.

Not for a second. I think Electron's like the worst thing to happen to desktop development. Really? It's like the antithesis of good design on the desktop. Now, if the only way to get more users on Linux was to offer them the software they want, and the only way that those manufacturers are going to bring them the software they want is through a common, you know, I guess, application frameworks like Electron, does that change your perspective at all? I don't know. I think that's kind of like a fallacious assumption

because, you know, we hear from people that, oh, you know, users will only switch if we have the same apps as Windows, but that's not a compelling reason to switch. Like, why would anybody switch if they can just get the exact same stuff they already had? But what makes Linux a killer, superior thing than just like an alternative is the things you can do on desktop Linux, the apps you can get, the tools you can get that you can't get on Windows.

So the experience is actually, in your opinion, is better on Linux than it is on Windows because the applications we have are better than they are on Windows or macOS. Not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, yeah, and it's getting closer there. And in order to switch Windows and macOS users, we need to get to the point where our consumer and productivity applications are much better

and not just the same as. So what if we attacked what Wendell Wilson calls the Lotus 1-2-3 problem? And the Lotus 1-2-3 problem was back in the late 80s and early 90s, Microsoft wanted to get more people on Microsoft Office and using Microsoft Excel. But in order to do that, everyone was at the moment using Lotus 1-2-3. And so what they decided to do was it wasn't just good enough that they could open those files because they had to be able to save them back out and send them back to the original users. So Microsoft Office made a calculated decision to be able to actually not only read but also write to

Lotus 1-2-3 format. And in doing that, they almost overnight switched users from Lotus 1-2-3 over to Excel. So using that model where Electron, maybe it's not that, maybe Electron isn't the end-all be-all goal. Maybe Electron is the transition layer, the necessary compromise that we make long enough to get our users over to our infrastructure. And then we say, if the application is great, go ahead, let's make native development. If the application isn't great, here is the better open source alternative. Yeah, I think to push the Lotus 123 analogy further, like it's a big problem that users data is caught up in these single companies that control how that data is stored in these

silos, it's a huge problem for us to switch people because we can't really build a client that's compatible with such and such service. I think Spotify is a bad example. I think they do actually have an API, so we could potentially build a Spotify app as long as you have their pro version or whatever. Right. But then you still have to keep up with it and you're responsible for all. Yeah. And like, I don't know if you could build like a Slack client. I don't know if that API is there for you to even be able to do that.

Right. So there's some problems we have like that or like YouTube, you know, that has these certain restrictions and things. Right. With the way that you can't really interact with their API on the same level that Google does. So it's really difficult, I think, for us when we live in a world where now things are so siloed that you really can't technically be compatible with these other applications. Right. Users just have this expectation.

They're using these proprietary services. They expect that they'll provide everything they need. They'll tie it in. And yeah, the operating system integration levels are in some cases non-existent. Yeah. So it's kind of a big mess. Yeah. I do think, I think Daniel makes some great points there. Just in like, I sort of see it as like, yeah, Electron may be able to bridge the gap. It may be able to solve some of those just like, I need this to be able to work.

I would like to use Linux. This lets me do it. But that's not a reason that we shouldn't continue pursuing and making desktop development on Linux as good as it can be. This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's tracking its usual host as he heads back from scale. My name is Noah. My name is Wes. Hey, Wes. Happy to be hosting with you again. Oh, yeah.

We have an exciting show lined up. We're going to talk to you and give you some audio from what happened at scale. And of course, we have the latest in Linux news. And we're going to start with a great story about how you can access your desktop remotely, even if you're on Plasma. Before we get to any of that though, Wes, you know what we have to do? I sure do. We have to welcome our Mumbo Room. We got to say hello.

Hello, Mumbo Room. Hello. Good day to welcome our mumbo room. It's that mumbo room. We got to say hello. Hello, mumbo room. Hello. Good day to you. Welcome, welcome, welcome. How y'all doing? Doing good. Very good. That's awesome.

So this first story is about screen sharing in Plasma in a Wayland session. sharing in Plasma in a Wayland session. And basically, what the article says is that Plasma using a Wayland session now has the ability to share your screen or record your screen. However, as most of you, everyone in this room is probably aware, in order to do that under Wayland, you have to have some help with the compositor, the thing that like draws all of the pictures. And then you have to deliver all of that information to the client application. So in a perfect world, we would do that in such a way

that all desktops talk in the same manner, which lessens the- That would make sense. Well, it just lessens the work for the developers, right? And luckily, GNOME is on the precipice of this with Pipewire. And basically, Pipewire, together with the support from Flatpak, means that they've created this API that applications can use to access screen content on Wayland sessions

or in case they're running inside of a sandbox. And with the various implementation like xdg-desktop-portal-kde or xdg-desktop-portal.gtk, they just need to support one API and they can target both of those desktops, all desktops, really. Wow. Yeah. So the client needs to create between them this portal backend, and then the user will get a dialogue on which screen they would like to share. Now, I did some more research on this aside from this article, and one of the revolutionary things that people are really, really excited about

is at the moment, OBS screen capture does not work under Wayland. I've been bitten by that myself. Have you? Yeah, absolutely. Especially when we were doing the Gen 2 challenge right here on the show. I was going to use that, but we had to come up with some alternative setups. Okay, well, no more, Wes. No more.

It's going to be solved because now it's going to allow you to actually screen scrape and use OBS. Secondly, it is going to support solved because now yeah it's going to allow you to uh to actually screen scrape and use obs secondly it is going to support multiple monitors so that was my next question is okay fine they have this this pipeware thing going it's going to talk to all this back end stuff but is it robust enough because i have six monitors in my computer downstairs and i'm running wayland and i've run into some issues so is is it going to support it? Yes, it supports multi-monitors. So you're not going to have any of those issues. Is anyone in the mumble room using multi-monitor support under Wayland? Is anyone using Wayland and tried to do any sort of screen capturing

or run into problems? No, huh? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine Linux users in this room and nobody's using come on guys i don't have a second monitor to go multi-monitor on so there's that okay single monitor though yeah single monitor on a laptop okay cool anybody using zero monitors Hmm. At work, I am in several places.

Strictly yes, at work. Well, so interestingly enough, I have machines that I actually do have zero monitors on. In fact, the machine that I use for this very program is using zero monitors, and I remote into it. But guess what? If that machine was running Wayland, it would actually cost me another hundred and some dollars because I'd actually have to physically plug a monitor in because I wouldn't be able to remote into it. At least the machines I use at work have no monitors. You can hook a monitor to them, but really it's made to be used within a web interface anyway.

So there's that. Sure. I like this idea of, and I'm interested to get your take on this, Wes. I like this idea of using a common API for them to access the screen content. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, that just seems like a big win for everyone.

I'm also really impressed that I feel like the first time we even talked about Pipewire wasn't that long ago. Looking at the commit history, it's making great progress, and it's to the point where, you know, a diverse set of projects are looking at integrating with it and using it to provide these features.

Yeah. It seems like that's, it's not, you know, none of this is quite there yet, but this is like a huge one of the, like, can Wayland really even work in practice? Right. Roadblocks that seems like it's going to get knocked down pretty soon.

Yeah, I think that the development of Weyland alone has easily surpassed my expectations of how fast I thought it would gain adoption. And they rolled it out in, I guess it would be 1710, and ran into some issues. And so they're going to fall back to XOR by default in 1804. But having used 1710, it was way more pleasurable than I thought it was going to be. I mean, I really hit a lot less roadblocks than I thought. And so now to see them start to stack some of these newer, cooler things on top is really cool. And when we were at the Ubuntu Sprint in New York, I had a chance to interview one of the gentlemen that works on the Wayland Project.

New York, I had a chance to interview one of the gentlemen that works on the Wayland project. And one of the things that he was saying was how they are re-pivoting MIR to be that interconnection part where you have a common thing for developers to target, and then that does all the heavy lifting and talking to Weyland. And I think that's a really interesting way to not throw a bunch of work away, right? I think that's a really interesting way for Canonical to take a lot of the work that they're doing and saying, OK, the community doesn't accept this as a whole. So let's pivot on it and let's make this available. Because when you actually have the technical discussions between Mir and Weyland, Mir was a better choice from a technical perspective because it was less work for people to speak to it because it was end-to-end. Whereas in Weyland, you have this middle compositor thing that's sitting there that you have to,

like K-Win or Mutter, that has to sit in the middle, in between. So when I start to see things like this and it supports Flatpak, I'd be interested. Does anyone know if this could be done with snaps instead of Flatpaks? Nobody knows. That's a good question. That's a good question, yeah. I'm just wondering because it seems like that would be, you know, if you're trying to find these common things for everything to talk to, it seems like in a large way, snaps have much more market penetration than flat packs do. At least that's my perception of it.

I see Canonical knocking doors down right and left saying, hey, Skype, would you package for snaps? Hey, this, would you package for snaps? And when I take all of those and I try to use them on distros that snaps were never necessarily designed to be used on, like Fedora, like Arch, they work fine. And not to say that flat packs don't work, but I find them to be much more cumbersome. Wes, have you played with both of them? And where do you fall down on this? I don't think I've ever asked. You know, I'm still trying to watch a little bit.

I definitely have used snaps, you know, quite i'm i'm still trying to watch a little bit i definitely have used snaps uh you know quite a bit more and it seems like so far there's been more momentum on the the third party side the vendored software side on snaps of oh yeah here's your application it doesn't really fit into the distro model snap it up we'll ship it out it'll just by and large work and it seems like the flat pack project has been a lot more involved in a lot of the underpinnings of some of the OS essentials or components, or at least the scaffolding right above that. And it kind of seems like that's where this fits in. I don't know, I can't comment as much on the story of, you know, will that be used in the same way as snaps? And I know snaps have some features that could be similar or could be mapped to these, but that doesn't seem like it's

really been as much the focus. Okay. You know, I think part of it, obviously, I think a large part of it comes into the fact that Red Hat GNOME team are really heavy into flat packs. And so if they're going to, if they're, you know, leading the development or working heavily with the folks that are developing Pipewire, then obviously, you know obviously the natural choice of a

quote-unquote universal package manager that is now getting segmented into multiple... If you're a universal installer, it is Flatpak. I think there's an obvious reason that we have landed on that. But as long, I suppose, as long as both systems can be supported on

a large number of operating systems, then it may be good enough to work. It's certainly not ideal, but we rarely get to ideal here in the open source world. Yeah. You know, the other thing, Wes, I'd be interested in digging in a little bit is why certain things work and certain things don't. So I'll give you an example. X2Go obviously doesn't work, and I think that's pretty obvious. X to go requires some sort of implementation of X. So if you don't have X to go, X to go doesn't work.

But there are other things that don't work. I have had trouble with VNC in Wayland Sessions. I have had trouble with TeamViewer in Wayland Sessions. I haven't tried the latest version of TeamViewer, but the last version of TeamViewer, when I tried it on a Wayland Session, it would just show a black screen. I could see the mouse moving around, but I couldn't actually see anything. Oh, well, that's almost what you want. Almost very close. I couldn't click on anything either, which was even further away. You just get to watch the mouse. Right. But the, but the nice thing is, at least so far at the moment, every distribution that has Wayland, you can pretty

easily fall back to X. And then that allows me to fix it, which is how I know that those specific issues were related to Wayland. So though and then like we spoke about OBS has a problem. You know what doesn't have that problem? Simple help. Really? And I don't know exactly what they're doing. I know it's a I know it's a Java thing, but it works on both X.org and it works on Wayland.

I wonder if they've updated it for Wayland explicitly? I'm not sure, but either they have and they're one of the most forward-thinking companies ever or the way that they have implemented it, the way that they're grabbing the screen doesn't rely on the traditional display model because it's worked longer than things have been making noise about Wayland shipping by default. I want to say it was even working before Fedora shipped Wayland by default, but I can't quite remember back that far, so I'm not sure which one came first. All I know is I've never had a box that I couldn't connect to. That's awesome. I mean, that's probably all you care about from your perspective. Yeah, well, for the most part. Anyway, Mumble Room, we all think this is a pretty cool thing.

I think it is. I think the API thing is my favorite part of all because I think the API thing sends a message to everyone that we as a Linux community are working together for once and working towards a common goal. Because if there's one thing I get frustrated with Linux users about, it seems like every time there is a way for us to fragment on something or there's a way for us to take different camps, we do that. And so the fact that we're targeting this comedy API and we have XDG desktop portal KDE and XDG desktop portal GTK, I think that's really cool. Yeah, right. If we can do this right. And there's been so much promise. We have this new technology. We're finally at a point where it's almost ready to be in our hands. And maybe it works for the like, all you do is just, you know, you sit on your laptop, you browse the web, you use a terminal. Wayland's pretty much already there. And so now we're like

reaching the points of, you know, you have a little more, you need more complicated use cases. You're trying to do content creation. So as that bubble grows and grows, it's great to see this actually being picked up everywhere. So it's interesting you bring up content creation because last week, obviously, we're at scale. Yeah. And so we're sitting there and we were I was doing the Ask Noah show live from the show floor. And the process to actually put us on the air requires me to be simultaneously 2,700 miles apart. I have to first I have to be in the JB1 studio outside of Seattle, and I need to be able to stop the streaming there. And then I have to magically teleport myself over to Grand Forks and start my streaming there.

On top of all that, after I've actually streamed out, then I have to establish a connection to myself from the show floor back to my studio. And so to do that, I was using a remote, a remote software, a simple help, I was using a simple help to connect back and turn these off and on. And one of the things that was absolutely invaluable was the fact that I had my Ting hotspot. And if you go to ting.com and use the promo code Linux,

you too could have a Ting hotspot. And what's great about the Ting hotspot, it's a dedicated device for using the internet. Now, why is that important? Because there's people out there and they'll say, well, no, I have my cell phone. I just toggle the cell phone, Wi-Fi or toggle the hotspot on. There we go. I have it, right? There were numerous times where I had to get up and I was running to the bathroom or I had to run, grab a piece of equipment or I had to run grab a bag. And I couldn't afford to not be with without my communication device, particularly because that particular dad forgot my badge. And so I was using Chris. I was saying, hey, Chris, you know, can you come let me in? Can you come get me in? Whatever. Right.

So I wanted to have two separate devices. Well, if I had gone to, you know, whatever big box carrier and said, I want two devices, they're going to say, well, it's a $25 plan to add on and then you got to pay the device fee and then we don't sell you the device. We rent it to you at some insane cost. And so it's probably by the time you get done with the thing, it's probably $55. With Ting, you only pay for what you use. So it's just $6 a month and you pay for your usage on top of that. for what you use. So it's just six bucks a month and you pay for your usage on top of that. What gets better is once you buy that particular bucket and I start filling up minutes and I've used 51 minutes, if I have four phones, I'm only paying that $6 per line for those four phones. And if

all four phones stand under 100 minutes, we're great. And if we go over 101, that's fine. We can share that next bucket with everyone. But I'm never paying for more than what I use. And that meant that days like scale, yeah. Yeah, I did. I used a little bit more data. I needed a little bit more data because I needed to be able to stream. But you know what? Months like this month, where I'm going to be in Grand Forks the majority of the month, I'll barely use any. And next month, when we do Linux Fest Northwest, which is the last weekend in April,

so if any of you can make it, you should, you'll see me there with my Ting hotspot, with my Ting phone, and I carry spare Ting cards inside of my briefcase. So if anyone wants to try Ting, I'll even give you a Ting SIM, so you don't have to buy the Ting SIM. You can just put it in your phone. Now, Noah, how can you afford to do that? Because it doesn't cost that much.

The Ting SIMs, you can buy them on sale. I think they're like four or five bucks. I activate Ting SIMs and give them to people. I say use it for a month. I don't even care. That's how cheap it is. much the ting sims you can buy them on sale i think they're like four or five bucks i activate ting sims and give them to people i say use it for a month i don't even care that's how cheap it is in fact i i i was i was redoing my password manager and i didn't have my ting account and i'm like i'll just wait till the end of the month and then i'll then i'll turn it off why because it doesn't matter because it's cheap it's cheap great service really, really well. And we can use it to do broadcast level recording and production right off of your T-Mobile network or the CDMA Sprint network.

They're MVNOs of both. So head over to ting.com and use the promo code Linux and get $25 off your first month of service or your first device. And a huge thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. All right, guys. I want to talk about Ubuntu Mate. Ubuntu Mate 1804 Beta 1 has been released. What do you want to say? Oh, boy.

I haven't even gotten to the story yet. Ubuntu Mate 1804 Beta. I'm testing it right now. Okay. Beta 1 has been released. They are preparing for the distribution on April 26th. I'm sorry, it hasn't been released. April 26th.

With this beta pre-release, you can see what they're trying out in preparation for the next stable release. Now, the website gives a little bit of details on the kind of user that might want to try the beta release, and they give some examples of the kind of people who might not want to try the beta release. But some of the things that stand out right off the bat, DPI, auto detection, and auto scaling. Oh. That is huge. Yeah. And let me tell you, as a person who had to sit next to another guy that was setting up his laptop on a 4k display

that did not have that particular feature it's real frustrating because what happens is you can't read anything and the windows take up some annoyingly weird proportion amount of the screen so you get this window that takes up like 15 pixels by 15 pixels and it's like i have 4 000 pixels for you to choose from and you're you're you're cornering yourself to the fact that i can see three of my available 15 options so the fact that it auto detects high dpi is great and every display that we are buying here at altispeed for for uh in office use is high dpi we're not buying 1080p displays anymore now i think those are going to stick around for a while in the production world.

But as far as like day-to-day people, I think more and more laptops are going to become high DPI. Certainly more and more desktops are going to be going with high DPI. And I'll tell you another little secret, Wes. I didn't tell you about my new toy. I got a new toy. I got a new- Yeah, I got a Dell Ultra Wide Monitor.

I don't remember exactly how big it is, like 32 inches or something. It's absurd. Awesome. Yeah, and I put it on a stand-up desk and plugged my laptop into it, and it's fantastic. But guess what? High DPI. You know what my laptop isn't? High DPI.

So you know what's really great? When you have a distro that automatically recognizes the difference between a high DPI monitor and a non-high DPI monitor. It's really fantastic. It seems like a great win, too, for new, inexperienced users because you start it up, you plug it in, you can't read anything, you have to go try to find maybe where the setting is if you even have a setting for it.

So if it can just work, it goes so far to getting us to Apple-level polish. It definitely eliminates the need to use binoculars while using your computer. Exactly. Yeah, and you guys aren't just Whistle and Dixie. I had the Chromebook Pixel, and that's not even a 4K display. That's just a 2K display.

And that sucker, when I would install Ubuntu proper, I think the last version I had on it was like 14.04, maybe 16.04, and it didn't automatically scale. Trying to read the numbers was so miserable that I actually resorted to changing the resolution down, then scaling up, then setting my resolution back. Because otherwise I just couldn't read what I was doing. It was that bad. So it can be a show-stopping problem for New Year's, especially if you're not expecting it. And all of a sudden things are teeny, teeny, tiny all over the screen.

But that's not all that the next beta of Ubuntu Mate has. It also supports hardware acceleration for compositing. That dramatically improves 3D rendering, particularly in games, if you have the support for DRI in your hardware and in your drivers. And they have improved global menus. So I think Ubuntu... Wimpy, is he here? Wimpy is not here. But Wimpy and his team continue to do a really fantastic job at making a really fundamentally useful desktop.

And I talk to people all the time. A good friend of the program, Chris DeLuca, swears by Ubuntu Mate, puts it on everything. And he uses it as his daily driver. And I know that Chris has toyed around with using it as his daily driver. My wife played with it for a while using her daily driver. It's such a great operating system if you just want your computer to work. And I think these new features,

the fact that they are looking at hardware acceleration, the fact that they are looking at global menus, the fact that they are looking at high DPI, I think all of these things lend itself to being really, really comforting and welcoming to new users. So the person I go to, Wes, I don't know how closely you follow Chris Chris's fiancee Hadiyah oh yeah so she owns a like she works so hard that's that's one of the things I really like about her she works really really hard and she has a really deep passion for what you're for what she does so if you happen to be in the Seattle Pacific Northwest area and you're looking for somebody who does acupuncture. And really, she can help you with a variety of things. I never thought of myself as a person who would need acupuncture for anything,

and I don't really like needles, but she's got all sorts of other little remedies for things. And so I think I had a stuffy nose or something like that. And she gave me this little stuff in this bottle that I don't even leave home without it anymore. It's always in my travel bag because it works so well. I mean, that's neither here nor there. But the great thing about her office is if you go to her and use our services, you are supporting a Linux running business because all of her machines are running Linux. Now, one of them I know is running Ubuntu

Mate. The other one is running Ubuntu proper, and that machine is getting a little long in the tooth. And so they are looking at updating it. And so Chris and I were going back and forth. We're like, well, maybe KDE, maybe this, maybe that. And one of the things I think is really worth considering is Ubuntu Mate, because Wimpy has designed this operating system from the ground up to be the kind of operating system that anyone can use, regardless of their experience with Linux. system that anyone can use, regardless of their experience with Linux. And the fact that he is concentrating on where the next hardware is going to be, if she walks into Best Buy and buys a very nice computer, the chances of that thing having a 2K monitor or a 4K monitor are high. So the fact that Ubuntu Mate is going to work out of the box, I think, is great. Yeah, and it's such a neat

combination to see the, you know, you have this combination of a somewhat traditional desktop model, but with all this, like, it's not only is it built on good foundations, but it has all this shininess they're able to add on top. So whether you're coming from Unity or you're coming from Windows, it doesn't really matter. You can craft it into a desktop that works for you and still enjoy the benefits of all these features. Yeah, I completely agree, especially with that panel layout, being able to switch between macOS and Windows or traditional Linux or Unity. All of those things, it brings it all home. And it's funny, when you go to some of these Ubuntu sprints and you look and you're like, how did that guy get macOS to run it? Oh, it's not macOS. Yeah, it's really something fantastic to see.

What do you think, MumbleGroom? You guys are being awfully quiet. Am I totally off here? No, I think you're right on, Noah. I mean, you know, you can make it look like whatever you want. And, you know, I'm installing it right now on my MacBook, actually. And I love the way the stock looks, actually. I have no complaints at all

yeah i think he does a really good job i think that if you try to go away from green that's been my one i mean i i do admit it looks a little too greenish but i'm going to change that once i get it set up because and actually i'm half tempted to try out the proper the stock nvidia driver versus nouveau and see because last time i did that it broke um the high dpi support but given this is a little bit more time to get proper and everything i'm actually gonna see if that works. If not, I'll go back to Niveau. But either way, you know, I'm half tempted to see how much their high DPI has improved.

And, you know, because I do have dual screens upstairs in my room, and I've got a Thunderbolt display. and I've got a Thunderbolt to display. No, I've got a display and I've got a Thunderbolt to display and a Thunderbolt to HDMI and a Thunderbolt to an HDMI connection on the computer. I have tended to see how well the dual displays work under that and all that. But like I said, I'm going to change the stock theme because I've got to tell you, that is way too much green on top of one of the rest. Yeah, I guess I don't necessarily agree that it's too much green.

I think he actually does a fantastic job making it look great right out of the box. I guess my point was when you change one thing from green, everything is kind of designed around the green background. But I tell you what, if you have an inclination, Ben, to give it a shot, I would suggest you head over to Ubuntu-mate.org and download the Bionic Beta 1. I actually already did. Oh, you did? Okay, great. Because I'm sure they would really appreciate feedback for that April 26th launch

where they actually sent it out. And that's going to be a big one for them because it's the next LTS, right? So anyone that has an inclination to help, especially if you're the kind of person that can spot problems and are willing to fill out bug reports, willing to file tickets and then follow up and give the developers the information they need to fix it, I'm sure they would really appreciate it.

Oh, I definitely love Ubuntu Mate and how they're doing with the high DPI support and all those different things. Well, I'll definitely let them know about my findings and what I've done with it. So, yeah. Outstanding. One of my, I guess. Also, I wanted to tell you that it just booted in and it looks freaking amazing, my friend. That's good to hear yeah i i always i always think that

uh i always think it looks really great especially with that welcome that software welcome boutique i've even used that on other machines that aren't definitely i think that definitely helps newbie users unlike a pro user like me but it definitely helps a new user to lin Linux or whatever to have that. Yeah, absolutely. I still, I guess where I always see Ubuntu Mate fitting in the best for me is like where really nothing else works as well as Ubuntu Mate inside of the cloud. So if you have, Wes, do you have a cloud workstation yet? You know, I don't. I've gotten Chris on this bus.

He has, he turned one of his workstations, one of his really powerful ones, into his cloud workstation. And in fact, he was extra going into it remotely from while we were on the road over at Team Connection, I might add. Awesome. Yeah. But that's where I think Ubuntu Mate really shines is in stuff like that. Because it is so low resource, because it works so well with older hardware, it means you can really drag out the life in some of your older systems. So we have a machine that sits out right by our back door as our technicians come in and

leave and they check in and out and check tickets and whatnot. That's running on a P4, on a Pentium 4. Really? Yeah, Lenovo on a P4. I'll send anyone a picture that doesn't believe me. And you put an SSD in that sucker and guess what for you for logging into os ticket and and closing out a ticket or opening one that works great there is no reason other than maybe some power consumption why we would ever change that out right and i have a raspberry pi here that runs the the studio clock and the on

air lights and all of that and that's running a bunch of mate as well i really like it you know overall the one place that i still will take Ubuntu Mate over every other desktop every single time is on cloud workstations. When I need a desktop environment that has to run in the cloud and I have to connect to it remotely over X2Go or whatever it is, I use Ubuntu Mate. And there's no place I'd rather store my cloud infrastructure than on DigitalOcean.

And if you go to DigitalOcean and use the code D-O-Unplug, they're going to give you $10 credit, which you can use to get one $10 rig or you can do what I do and get two $5 rigs for free for one month. Then that'll give you a chance to try it. Or I suppose you could even use the $10 credit and get one $5 rig and run it for two months. And the $5 rigs are enough to run a cloud-based workstation. So visit DigitalOcean.com and use the code DEOUNPLUGGED and get $10 credit towards your first Linux server. Or, if you're like me, use two of the $5 servers. And you can actually drag that promo code out. You can actually get more bang for your buck. And there's a number of... And it has some HA droplets up in the cloud,

and they have a ton of nice features like monitoring stuff to make that even better. They do. And you know what the other thing they have, Wes, that I really like is their API, the ability to tie those servers and the control of those servers into a number of other things. We talk a lot on this show, you and Chris do, and on the rest of the network, talk a lot about being able to tie that into the IRC. What we don't talk a lot about is the mobile apps, right? And again, this is where DigitalOcean sets itself apart from the competition. If you take, for example, Amazon or any of the competitors, right? There is an inherent advantage of being able to pull my phone out and restart my server right from my phone. And there's an inherent advantage of being able to deploy and destroy those servers right from my phone.

And if you listen to the Ask Noah show and you check out an interview that is coming up later, actually later today, with Yubico, we can show you how you can actually tie this hardware-based device into your DigitalOcean account. That is so exciting. So that when you install a new server, Wes, you never have to worry about getting these passwords emailed to you. You never have to worry about uploading your key. All of that stuff happens automagically. And you can do that, and you can try it for free. If you're like, yeah, I'm not sure if that's for me, try it. Do you unplug? Use that code you can try it for free. If you're like, yeah, I'm not sure if that's for me, try it.

Do you unplug? Use that code, digitalocean.com. And a huge thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. All right, so one of the things that seems to be getting a lot of discussion this week is the Ubuntu 18.04 GTK theme. Now, Ubuntu has looked roughly the same since, for years I think, since probably right around 1204. And they've had this traditional orange

theme that when you sit down to this Ubuntu box, you know it's an Ubuntu box over a Windows box or Windows box, right? And I've always kind of said, like, if it looks blue, it might be Windows. If it looks orange, it might be Ubuntu. And if it looks ugly, it's probably a Mac. You see it, you know, in a window in some building and someone, you're like, that's probably Ubuntu. Right.

So this is from OMG Ubuntu, and basically the article says, as many of you know, the community theme, as it's currently known, is shaping up to do something pretty special. A canning crop of community creators have carefully adapted the ditch designs of the Unity 8 desktop into an attractive, real, and pretty reliable working theme. But alas, their work will not be part of the 1804 LTS due to release on April 26th, 2018. Now, the article goes on to say that they believe that this is a sad decision, that it means that the Ambience GTK theme will continue to live on until 2023, even though that theme was, oh, here it is. So that theme was first introduced in 2010. Now, I guess my question,

my first question to you, Wes, is do you care? I mean, I can see how it's disappointing but I also have a strong appreciation for limiting the amount of changes or really getting that polished layer on an LTS and while this new theme might make

sense, I don't know if it makes sense to go through all those cycles when it can be something that will be able to be bolted on later for interested users and in the future if it works out really well then it will show up in later ltss oh yeah no that makes sense mumble room what do you think you guys that's my first question is does anyone care does anyone care what theme default theme a bunch of ships with honestly stability okay what about stability well lots of i mean um lots of the time i want i just

want to chuck the os up on running on some um clients machines and i just want it to work especially if they are not linux savvy if something slightly weird goes wrong i don't want a headache of well thing doesn't work again okay so if it works it's better so for you it's not an aesthetic thing it's a functional thing pretty much yeah i mean i would like to see a new theme and it does the new one does look really nice but um at the end of the day less calls for me is better there's there's reality went out there's a reason i'm there's a reason i'm pushing you on that and the reason is i agree with you implicitly. I agree with you that the priority should be in the user experience, not necessarily in what we

subjectively think is pretty. And we have to remember, us Linux users are going to have a predisposition to think that the current Unity theme isn't pretty because we've seen it for so long. Right. And so we're probably a little bit sick of it. But I would challenge you because the internet, there's, I went to, I think I was in three or four different telegram groups and this particular article came up and people are saying, why aren't we, why aren't we taking the reboot of Linux and as an opportunity to say this new GTK theme could be really great. We could come up with a new GTK theme that really shines, that really shows what GNOME's capable of. Maybe something that's a really nice dark theme,

something like that, right? And I agree with all of that. I think that eventually we should get there. However, I want to play a piece of audio that we captured while we were at scale. If I turn my volumes ladder up. shell we want it to be a gnome shell experience but we want to provide an easy transition so when people when someone has a 1604 and they do their upgrade in july they're not it's not surprised new interface okay so what he's saying there is that they have had concerns from users that they're going to have the rug pulled out from under them and he's saying that user after user

is walking up to this demo machine with GNOME installed, and they're looking at GNOME with the current Ubuntu theme that people are used to and saying, yeah, actually, you know what? That really doesn't look too bad. That actually looks a lot like to what I'm used to. I mean, I can see a couple little changes here and there, but roughly things are how I would expect them to be. What do you think, Wes?

Is that a logical reason? But roughly things are how I would expect them to be. What do you think, Wes? Is that a logical reason? Yeah, I mean, I think there is. I think there end up being kind of disparate communities too, you know. And here we talk a lot about news and exciting stuff of what's coming up. So it's really easy to get super excited and want all that latest shiny stuff.

And, of course, we want a bunch of awesome. They've done a bunch of great work here. We want it to look really good and appetizing to users. We to you know try to bring to our favorite platform but i do think there is a lot to be said about you know limiting that change and you know there's even some some consternation here about well couldn't you have shipped this theme you know just as an extra or somewhere you know somewhere as an option in the menu and yeah sure but even that feels like there's a certain amount of blessing, official blessing from the distribution maker. And if you really can't stand by it, versus,

you know, having that stability for users new or old, knowing that it just works, it's what you've been trained on. And that from there, once we get this, you know, it's a big transition going to GNOME. It's a big transition building this new infrastructure. So if we can do that in a way where change happens, but at a pace that is enough to keep it going, but not enough to drive people away, like maybe that first Unity transition, I think that's a good thing. I completely agree. I completely agree with basically everything you just said. And that is kind of where I think Nathan was going. That is where I think the Ubuntu design team was going. And that's what I would suggest if somebody were to ask me for my opinion.

Let's make GNOME all it can be. Let's make GNOME shine. Let's show off all of the shiny bells. Let's just do all of that after we have made this absolute hurdle of a transition where we are changing the desktop experience. Because I think as geeky Linux users, we underestimate this. And I have some unique insight because my company deals directly with this very issue where we're taking desktop Linux and putting it in front of users who they don't care what the desktop infrastructure, they don't care what the desktop environment is. They don't care what the operating system is.

They just want to get to work. And I think you start to lose perspective. For us, we don't care because we've tried KDE. We've tried GNOME. We've tried Unity. It doesn't matter to us, right? We know how to switch if we need to. Not a big deal.

I can't count the number of times, Wes, that I have heard a Linux user say to me, I don't really care what desktop's on top. What I really care about is what's underneath. Now, that can either be I want the bleeding edge of Arch or that can be I want the stable security mountain of the Ubuntu LTS. But I don't care what desktop is on top of it so much as I care is what's underneath. and I will tell you as a person who makes this who puts food on the table by catering to users the vast majority of computer users that aren't

geeks look at their computer working environment the exact opposite way they couldn't care less if Arch is underneath or Ubuntu is underneath or Fedora is underneath what they care about is that the close button is in the same

part of the screen every single time. What they care about is that the file menu is easily findable. What they care about is that the dock that was over on the left, and that's how they launched their applications for the last five years, that dock is still there. What they care about is when the computer boots up, that it has roughly the same look so they feel like they are at the same computer that's what the average linux user is is thinking and at least the average linux user that was not necessarily put there by choice because most of us choose our desktop right now i'm sorry mimic you had a comment about uh people using the just changing the wallpaper? Yeah. It is interesting. I switched a lot of people to Linux and everything, but what they do is they change their wallpaper

and nothing else after years because they like to use their desktop. As you said before, as always, as they used it before, they don't want to change. The only thing they change is the wallpaper. The rest has to stay as it was before. That's a good point so they can work like that

that's an excellent point I'm sorry Wes I cut you off what were you going to say? oh no I think you covered it I was just going to say Noah sorry I meant to say that I have to say the Ubuntu stock theme is fine, but in my experience it doesn't really play that well with other apps, and I've noticed this very well a lot.

And I think that maybe if they ship something like Numix or something like that, then like a different theme than maybe some normal users like non-average Linux users would probably be happy. That's just my opinion, but I don't know. Yeah, I guess I can kind of see that. I just keep coming back to it. It seems to be – I don't see a lot of dissenting opinion on the internet. I'm not seeing a lot of people saying, well, this isn't really a,

this isn't really a bad thing. Uh, this is fine. And I'm not seeing a lot of people saying it's a theme. I don't really care if I didn't like it, I'd change it. I am seeing a lot of disappointment. I guess that's the,

that's the word I see keep coming up, but we're disappointed. We're disappointed that we're disappointed about this theme. We're disappointed in canonicals decision. We're disappointed that they're not making gnome look like this theme. We're disappointed in Canonical's decision. We're disappointed that they're not making GNOME look like GNOME. They're trying to make it look like Unity. And you heard it in the clip. Nathan said himself, we are not trying to reinvent Unity on top of GNOME. We want GNOME to be GNOME.

We just want people that have been using Unity for the last 10 years to not feel totally lost on their computer when they click an update button and everything moves literally the entire interface that the user talks to is going to get ripped out from under them and replaced with a different one we need to make that transition as smooth as possible so i think canonical is absolutely on point i think it's a great way to go and um it's also it seems to me it also it speaks a little bit to like it's you know canonical's doing a lot especially if you're going to compare it with something a little bit to like, Canonical's doing a lot, especially if you're going to compare it with something like, with Mac OS X.

1804 is not just, there is this workstation desktop environment, but they're working on the backend and a lot of the core that still gets on the server as well, and their cloud distributions. There's a lot going on here. So if they can't commit, if there's not enough resources to polish this theme, especially with, it's really like a community thing, that ties into it too. And we're really,

we want it to shine on every platform that we're going to do it on. Sometimes that means things just take a little longer. Yeah. And I don't want to get too sidetracked, and I'd rather concentrate on what we're doing right instead of what they're doing wrong kind of a thing. However, I will say this, since you bring up macOS. You know, Apple users are perfectly okay with their desktop staying basically the same for 45 years. I mean, Apple has not really significantly changed the desktop layout. I mean, I've still got the little Apple. I still have the file menu up top.

I still have the, you know, I mean, little things have changed. There's less brushed metal now, but okay. Yeah, right, right. But yeah, no, I just I feel like there is something to be said about familiarity and stability. And you see this in all sorts of places, right? Like one of the reasons that I always stay at a particular hotel brand is because I know where the beds are. I'm used to the paintings on the wall. I know where the bathrooms are. Everything's kind of laid out in the same way. And anybody that travels a lot for a living,

and I became particularly aware of this because I was just in LA, and one of the things I enjoyed was we went to Target, and I kind of had a rough idea of the layout of the store. We were able to find the things, except for a towel, that we needed, because they're roughly laid out the same way that they're laid out in Grand Forks or Seattle or New York. And I think that kind of familiarity is sometimes taken for granted. So for all of those reasons and everything we just discussed, I think Canonical is making a great decision. Dan brought up a pretty good point in Discord, and I guess we could let him chime in on that if he's there sure hey dad yeah i think um something a lot of people don't realize is that like back in the old days when we

had like gtk2 we had themes and the thing was that themes were super limited you could change some colors you could change a little bit of style so you could change like some very surface things but it was super constrained and nowadays we don't really have thieves anymore we have style sheets and the difference is huge and style sheets are incredibly powerful and they can also be incredibly dangerous and if you went to any random website and you copied their css style sheet and tried to apply it to a different website, it just wouldn't work. You would think that was insane. Like you would never expect that to be a thing.

But for some reason, like Linux users still think that we have themes and it's easy, you know, but style sheets are really hard to get right. And it's absolutely a good thing that they said, hey, we need to test this. We need to look for corner cases. We don't know if this is actually going to physically work. It could really break things. So to that point, have you looked at some of the CSS style sheets in GNOME? Yeah, we reference AdWay to all the time just to see what they're doing, because in a lot of cases, we kind of have to chase um gtk when there's api changes okay if you were to rate it on a scale of one to ten ten being everything is perfectly documented all the way through and

i never have any questions of how what this style she does or what this thing references or if i change this color this is what's going to happen and one is i basically change it save reload the desktop and see what it looks like. How would you rate the documentation? Somewhere between one and I really use Inspector a lot. Yeah. And so anyone that has dug – I'm serious. Anyone can check this. I've heard this from a number of developers, that the style sheets inside of Gnome are horrendously documented.

The style sheets inside of Gnome are horrendously documented. And so one of the issues that we are going to run into if we start willy-nilly changing all of this stuff, what are we down to? The date is the, let's see, we are less than, okay, we have a little over a month. We have like a month and a week before the LTS ships. Yeah. month and a week before the LTS ships, an LTS that follows a somewhat less than perfect LTS that came out last time, right? We had wireless issues. We had a couple issues that came out. But this is the opportunity for Canonical to get the desktop right. And they have restructured the company. They're going back to this old desktop. They have pared down to just the A players. This is an opportunity for Canonical to shine.

And the worst possible thing they could do at the 11th hour is go in and say, well, we don't really know what these hex codes do. So we change them and we reload. And then hopefully we run into all of the places that it didn't change so that we can go and fix those two. That is a ridiculous model, I think. Yeah, it's like someone asking you to write the entirety of Bootstrap in a couple months. Right. Yeah, right. Exactly.

Yeah, and it's really it's a month and a week. So let's get through the transition. Let's go with the thing that works, the thing that we know. And then from there, let's move on to making it a totally different theme. That's kind of where I want to leave it. If you want to learn more about how to change themes, because there's going to be somebody out there and they're going to say, how does Noah learn that stuff? Because I'm an IT admin, right? I don't have time to be,

I don't develop desktops. That's not what I do. That's not what you do, Wes. Right. Neither one of us develop desktops for a living. But what I do is I go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug. That's what I do. And when I do that, a promo code is applied, and I am able to get a discount on my Linux education. Now, this is – you have to understand something. You have to understand that I approach Linux education

from the old school model. I have O'Reilly books. I don't use them anymore other than to set them up behind my desk so that clients are impressed. They're like, oh, you have O'Reilly books. You are well-educated. Well, that's essential, yeah. Right, exactly.

There's some people that still judge me on that. But I was the guy that spent five, $6,000 in tuition to go to a red hat training course. And then plus hotel expense, plus I'm away from work. Plus I'm paying for, you know, eating out every night,

which is really a lot of people don't understand. That is probably one of the most expensive things about traveling. Not anymore. Now I go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. My rep, my red hats. I let my red Hat certification expire. I'm not proud of that because I liked being Red Hat, but the truth is I am a small business owner, and I don't have to certify myself for myself to understand that myself understands what to do.

I just need to know the technology. And with Linux Academy, I'm able to do that. I was able to learn everything I needed to know to get my clients up to speed on RHEL 7. And again, this is coming from somebody who paid for the course in RHEL 6. And I don't feel like I got anything more out of the actual Red Hat course for the thousands and thousands of dollars I spent than the discounted course that I got from LinuxAcademy.com. And here's why. The people that work at Linux Academy, and I met them at scale. These are true dedicated Linux users. These are people that have passion for Linux, passion about the projects that they're presenting on. a true dedicated professional that understands and cares and has a passion about what they're doing is they are excited to answer your questions. They are excited to watch that light bulb go off

when you learn something. And that two-way communication, that two-way learning, that ability to say, yes, I get this and no, I don't get that. That's what leads ultimately to success. Right before I got on the air, I was having a discussion with another gentleman I met at scale and he was asking me, no, I want, I'm working at this particular job, no technical relation whatsoever. I don't have any sort of technical skills that I'm using at this job, but I like Linux, and I want to move into a Linux job. How do I do that? My first answer was Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and start your new career.

linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and start your new career. They're going to take care of all the hard stuff, spinning up the labs, spinning up the AWS instances, spinning up the servers, setting up the minutiae on top of it. You need, again, go back to a LAM stack. You need to set up a LAM stack. They're going to set all of that up for you. And even if you don't want to change career, maybe you're very happy. Maybe you're like me and you just want to learn something about something because knowledge is the one thing nobody can take away from you. So go to Linux Academy dot com slash unplugged and make sure to check out their Linux courses and find your passion and get started today. And a huge thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux unplugged program. So this I have two things that I want to get to.

This one, I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but I just want to talk about it briefly. Are any of you familiar with Simon from the KDE Project? Yes. Sorry, no. Okay, whoever said yes, tell me. Yeah. Okay, talk to me about Simon. Are you referring to Simon Quigley?

No. Okay, then I don't have any idea what you're talking about. This is almost as cool as Simon Quigley? No. Okay. No, okay. Then I don't have any idea what you're talking about. This is almost as cool as Simon Quigley. It's not quite as cool as Simon Quigley, but it's very close. Simon is an open source speech recognition program that replaces your mouse and keyboard. And the system is designed to work with any language or dialect. Now, here's why I was so excited when I first saw this. I get people all the time that write into the Ask Noah show,

and they'll say, I have a hearing impairment. I have a visual impairment. I have a speech impairment. I know for a fact I have one listener that has all three. And accessibility on Linux is usually not, is something that I would have not thought a lot of developers had a lot of time for. I would have thought we had bigger fish to fry, bigger fires to put out. But it turns out there's some really passionate people that are working on these accessibility options. And what this does is it legitimately enables us to switch people to Linux. So I'm over at KDE.org, and it's simon.kde.org, and you can click on for a short demo. I don't have any way to show that to you, but the screenshots look absolutely

fantastic, and I have reached out to one of the viewers of our shows, a listener of our shows, that I know for a fact would really benefit from this. And I'm hoping that he can get back to us with a more in-depth review from somebody who actually relies on tools like this to use his computer. Because I would feel a little weird trying to give you my opinion about an accessibility tool that I don't really have a use for, I don't really have a need for, and I wouldn't really notice if it was, I mean, if he can't, if these tools don't work for him, he can't use his computer. If they don't work for him he can't use his computer if they don't work for me i just go well i didn't quite get it but i just typed it anyway you know so simon.kde.org i'd check that out and see what you think and um

yeah i'm not ringing on simon quigley he's a great guy but uh as far as i know as far as i know having a simon quigley in your computer will not uh will not aid in your – It just doesn't scale the same way. He might be able to type some things for you for just you, but he can't help everything. Yeah, he's not replicatable. That's what it is. You can't r-sync him. It does seem really important for us to have this sort of technology, though, especially if we want to be the open source operating system for the masses.

We talk a lot about that with things like LibreOffice and others, but if we can't reach all kinds of people, it's just not as good. It goes back to what we were talking about in the pre-show, really. We have to have not only we can't just have the same apps that exist on Windows and Mac OS.

We have to have better apps. We have to have more accessibility. We need to be able to say to the person who's struggling with accessibility features, this is why you should use Linux Linux because it's so more flexible. It's so much more accommodating of your disability. Exactly. That's great. Go ahead.

I actually met the lead developer once in Berlin at the Desktop Summit three years ago. Oh, no kidding. It's from Austria. It's a project from an Austrian university. The problem is at the time it was very difficult to install because you have a lot of underlying technologies, open source technologies, so you have a lot of dependencies and everything. So I guess by now, the installation process is better, but at the time, it was very difficult. Yeah, it looks like it's pretty straightforward. Again, I haven't

played with it myself, mostly because I don't think I could do this justice as a review. But that's interesting that you spoke to the developer. So does he have a passion for helping people with disabilities? Or does he have a passion for making Linux more accessible, I would assume? Well, it started as a university project for him. And then they had a group around with a professor that was interested in that kind of technologies. And so they developed, they started, and they're also successful, it seems. Excellent. That is so encouraging to hear.

And I'm really happy that there are people out there that are working on projects like that. And I think that it really goes to speak to the Linux community as a whole and how we come together and work together. I think that's a really cool message. So we'll keep an eye on that. And again, if the gentleman is willing to share his experience, we'll have him participate in Linux Unplugged.

Otherwise, we'll play with it a little bit and let you know. So I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but just take a look at it and see what you think and be thankful that there are people that are working on things, even if they don't affect a large, proportionally speaking, a large number of users. Wes, you sent me one of the coolest articles I've read today, and this comes to us from Hackaday, and it is about ThinkPad culture. Now, I have to go in a little bit to ThinkPad culture before we can talk about this article.

Yes, there's some background and context. A little bit of background. So ThinkPad, back when it was owned by ibm was largely regarded as the best business laptop out there and then they sold to lenovo and most would argue that the quality of the laptop didn't go down but the quality of customer service would go down um i worked with a gentleman who literally had a semi truck come pick up a low, a entire office load of thinkpads. This is back when they were owned by IBM because they were having some small, minute little issue. And that's just not how IBM operated back in the day. They wanted to make sure that you had a class, a computer you were paying for, and they were going to make sure you got it. My first computer was a thinkpad and I've, I've used them, you know, really ever since. My first computer was a ThinkPad, and I've used them, you know, really ever since. But basically, a couple of years ago, they retooled the ThinkPad, and they made a number of changes.

Prior to the changes, the ThinkPad had – everything was built around functionality. So the keyboard was built around somebody who bangs on it, you know, for 15, 16 hours a day. All of the function buttons that you would need – when I say function buttons, I'm talking about, you know, insert, home, delete, all of those things were laid out in a way that basically resembled a regular desktop keyboard. And around three, four years ago, maybe five, Lenovo decided that they needed to imitate Apple. And so they went away from the functional, great keyboard that worked perfectly and went to

this chiclet style keyboard and they took away, they remapped the home insert and end keys. So that end and insert is a single key that you have to use function a lot, which is frustrating because you know what I use? You know what I use a lot? I use end to get to the end of something. You know what I almost, you know what the key I've never once used on a keyboard for anything intentionally? Insert. I've never wanted the insert. No one wants that. No one uses that.

It's like scroll lock back in the day. But yet they have – that's the kind of idiotic things they've done. There used to be a way I could seek tracks by hitting function and the arrow keys. They've taken all of that away. And because of that, ThinkPad users were understandably very upset because they made these changes. There's no improvement. The laptops haven't gotten smaller. There's not any more space. There's absolutely no reason that we couldn't have left the old keyboard. And in response to that, Lenovo created a retro ThinkPad that went back to the old keyboard, that went back to the old layout, basically.

Everything was kind of the same as it was in the quote-unquote good old days, except it had newer specs. But they weren't new enough. They weren't fast enough. They didn't put enough into it, and consequently, a lot of people didn't buy the retro ThinkPad. So this article from Hackaday talks about the ThinkPad culture that is literally taking these older ThinkPads that is literally taking these older ThinkPads that are designed basically perfectly, and they are replacing the motherboards, the

processors, and expanding these laptops and making them into laptops that can be used in 2018. So tell me about this, Wes. Oh, yeah. I mean, it seems like they've got a lot of – they have some of the modernization stuff right. The biggest one for me is just there's like way more USB 3 and 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3. And it seems like they're embracing that in a first-class way. Right. So they added the USB 3. They added Thunderbolt, they updated the RAM to DDR4. Now, if you're interested in doing this, the motherboard or the model that they recommend that makes it easy to swap these motherboards out, I believe, is the X60, X61, X62, X200, X201, X210, and T60. Now, if you're not familiar with Lenovo's product lineup, the X-Series is kind of the ultra-portable and light. The T-Series is kind of the hybrid in between portable desktop

and super light laptop. And the P-Series is the, I don't know what you want to call it, a mobile workstation, I guess. And so they have a couple different options for you to choose from. It's interesting that they have been able to get these newer motherboards into these older chassis and with the heat sinks and getting them to fit and getting the ports to stick out without looking terrible. Because if you look at some of these pictures on the Hackaday site, and we'll have it linked in the show notes for you, this laptop looks really good. This looks like it was actually produced at Lenovo, and yet it is produced by a community

of hackers, a community of hardware tinkerers, right? Yeah, it really does. And I think there's a strong contingent of Linux enthusiasts out there, or even just ThinkPad enthusiasts who have that love of the classic ThinkPad shape. But we're really getting, you know, for a long time, we've talked about, especially if you're, you know, fans of not using proprietary firmware or other things, you're probably already checking out some older ThinkPad models for that reason. But that hardware has really been showing its age, especially if you do stuff that isn't just, you know, a terminal and a web browser, but you want you want more high DPI stuff,

you want modern USB, you want PCI Express, all those good things that, you know, a lot of people these days depend on, especially if you're trying to give presentations, you're trying to create media, having that in this little, being able to have that in a classic passive package, it seems like maybe the best of both worlds is that possible no apps you're absolutely right mumble room is anyone else in here using the is using a thing pad oh i wish i have a 230 you have a 230 okay so the 230 i love that guy so the 230 if i'm not mistaken mistaken, is the last ThinkPad that was produced from the X-Series before they switched to the new layout. Is that correct?

Nope. It was the 220 was the last. The 230 is the first that has the new layout. Okay. All right. So you have the chicken. But I love that. The keyboard is not banned.

As I didn't know the layout before, for me it was no problem. Did you – well, yeah, that does explain a lot. So you never used the old ThinkPad layout? Nope, nope. I bought one X220 for my sister afterwards, and she's loving it. But I never used the page down, page up uh that you have on the old ibm line layout yeah and you know it's not so much that i i use the the you know the page up page down it's really not even one particular key that i used a lot i guess what bothered me was we didn't gain we didn't have any

meaningful gains by getting rid of that stuff well as i said as i didn't use the thing before i cannot really see the difference yeah sure but as far as your 230 though you're happy with it it's worked very well i assume you have linux on it this is a solid horse i use it every day and you have linux on it oh certainly yeah yeah i have a dual boot and i you have these uh slots you have an.2 slot in it, so you can add an SSD in it and still have a normal slot for another hard disk, so you can do whatever you want. And if you don't want it, you take out the M.2 SSD and you make a SIM card in it, and you can use it even with GSM.

Yeah, I had that on my X250, I want to say, or X260, whatever the one I had before this. Now I have the X270, and I'm actually in the process of perhaps upgrading to the X1 Carbon. And Lenovo has made some design decisions that I'm a little frustrated with. You can hear more about that in User Air and Ask Noah.

But suffice to say, this is a really neat article, and I'm glad to see that this is a really neat article, and I'm glad to see that there is a community popping up around ThinkPads. If you go to any of the grassroots Linux conferences like Self, you'll see a lot of ThinkPads. You'll see a lot of ThinkPads. In fact, at Self, for example, they actually require you to present on ThinkPads.

And so for a long time, ThinkPads have kind of been known as the I guess the computer that Linux enthusiasts kind of rally around. And that is where Red Hat has chosen to purchase all of their computers and now Google, I understand, is actually purchasing X1 Carbons for

their employees and putting Linux on them. So it's a really good choice. And that's not to demean Dell. Of course, Dell makes really excellent computers. If you want the XPS, it's a fantastic developer's machine. In fact, I think that's going to be my wife's next computer. My dad purchased one. He's been very happy with it.

That's not to demean System76. They make great machines too. It's just that Lenovo just, because of my roots, I guess, Lenovo has a special place in my heart. So to see a kind of community pop up around it, I think that's really cool. And the fact that we are – I have a passion for older hardware too. So the ability – the thought of being able to use a really old T60, that appeals to me. It does look like maybe there's a few complications here.

Some people who have reviewed them have not had the best battery life in the world and some issues with firmware updates and that sort of thing but for what you're getting it seems like a great deal yeah in fact i would argue uh i i think i still have a t60 around here we should maybe that'll be a project for linux fest wouldn't that be cool if we if we rehabbed a t60 and then and then i'd love to see that would you hell yes no i gotta tell you i mean i loved my t60 when i had it but unfortunately it died on me and i'm like oh my god so you know i've been craving to get my ass another thing pat i just i just can't you know afford one right now because i'm a broke college guy yeah i hear you i'm just like oh you gotta you gotta be kidding me yeah so you know i would love to see this thing in action at some point

actually when i finish my classes i'm thinking of coming up to Linux Fest Northwest, if my dad permits, and I might bring him along with me. And, you know, I got to tell you, IBM, the company he works for, is big supporters of Linux. And I was thinking of, you know, bringing him and I up there and checking this thing out. And, you know, he actually uses a ThinkPad T420, which is unfortunately still running Win 7. But, you know, I'm actually thinking of bringing my Mac, which is running Ubuntu Mate on it, and having that with me, actually.

Yeah, well, I'll tell you what I have. I'll tell you what I'm planning on doing. I'm going to pick up my X1 Carbon. I'm going to get Linux loaded on that. Then I'm going to talk Chris into using my old X270. And then we're going to rebuild maybe we'll build a T60. And Wes, are you up for doing that

with me? Heck yes. That'd be great. So maybe that's what you can look forward to. I don't know. We'll see what happens. But anyway, thanks so much, Mumble Room, for being here. We really appreciate having you. Wes, it's always fun to host with you. Heck yes. Absolutely. If you want to check out more of this great content, go to JupiterBroadcasting. yes. Absolutely. If you want to check out more of this great content,

go to jupiterbroadcasting.com. Follow Jupiter Broadcasting on Twitter at JBSignal. If you want to support the show, patreon.com slash JBSignal. Chris on Twitter at ChrisLES. At Wes Payne for you, Wes. I'm at Colonel Linux.

Anything else, Wes? Go check out the TechSnap program. We should have some exciting new episodes coming real soon. And of course, stay tuned for Ask Noah. And we'll see you next Tuesday. Thank you. I promise you, wherever Chris is, whether he's in his RV, wherever he is, he's sitting there and he's like, no, I just made, like, multiple times over the weekend,

he was making a point about coming in right at the right spot in the music and then uh and then that's the problem with this is the problem with guest hosting is um i don't know the music well enough to know right where that spot is perfect spot yeah i didn't quite i didn't quite milk the sweet spot but oh where's isaac chris you hit play, and he'll start jumping into it. It's funny, actually. He was just telling me about that. He was talking about when he was in the RV. He's like, there are times when somebody will be playing something, and I'm like, oh, show mode! And then he's

got to call him. He's like, no, no, no, it's not show mode. It's just if he hears Ronald Janky somewhere. That's amazing. Yeah, I know. I would do it too, actually. I just don't ever have my theme music anywhere. Right. Oh, sorry. Yeah, go ahead, Ben would do it too, actually. I just don't ever have my theme music anywhere. Right. Oh, sorry. Yeah, go ahead, Ben. I meant to tell you.

There is actually now in the Ubuntu Mate installer a minimal installation option where it only does the minimal GUI and then with a browser and a bunch of utilities. That's all it includes for you. That's awesome. Yes, I'm actually half tempted to check that box and see what it gives me. I will say that, like I said in the show just a few minutes ago, that this actually scaled my Mac screen right down to the proper setting. And I am really amazed at this. And it didn't pick up my Wi-Fi but it did pick up my uh thunderbolt to

ethernet jack almost instantly i was really impressed with that and all i did was plug it in right from the router boom done nice it worked just fine yes yeah the wired stuff tends to work you know actually pretty well yes and i am on and i am unfortunately gonna have to install the proprietary broadcom driver after the install or maybe it'll pick up during the updates but i don't know but i always download updates while installing a boon too because that way i'll have my wi-fi and all that other stuff working and i'm actually planning to stick around for the ask noah show because there are certain things that I need to talk to you about

during the show and maybe afterwards I don't know but yeah I'm planning to stick around for that and like I said I wish to God that I could afford a ThinkPad right now but unfortunately I just can't and it really sucks

Hey guys can we go to JB Live can we go to JBLive.com or can we go to JBTitles.com? Do we pick titles from JBTitles or do we pick them from Discord now? I have both up. I think normally we just do – we do both. We'll do a search in Discord to see what people throw there and then also look at what's on. I did put Discord on my laptop just to do this show today. Oh, look at you. What's up? What's up, J-Bone?

I did put Discord on my laptop just to do this show today. Oh, look at you. But Noah, another thing I meant to talk to you about was the thing that I'm on sprint right now with my family, and there's such a pain in the neck. So I've been thinking about maybe getting a Ting SIM card and just throwing it in in there and i don't even have five bucks to throw towards that and i'm like you gotta be shitting me so i'm thinking about you know waiting till friday this week and chucking out five bucks and getting one yeah for sure now now ben you're more try it yeah you're more than welcome to call into the Ask Noah show, but just make sure to keep it family friendly. I will, and I forgot to do that during,

which we'll call it on LUP. LUP doesn't matter. LUP, well, I mean, I suppose it should. I know Chris does that a lot. I suppose we should probably always try to be family friendly, but it doesn't. The thing is, LUP, the only thing you have to worry about is you just have to not offend Chris or the audience to the point that Chris gets upset. That's really all you have to do. My show, you say a bad word, I get a $10,000 fine.

So don't do that.