LINUX Unplugged - Episode 242: Debian on the Fly

Episode Date: March 28, 2018

A new version of Slax is out this week, and they might just be onto something really unique. We take this Debian powered, Fluxbox running, net bootin distro for a test drive. Plus Google moves to block GApps on “uncertified devices”, Red Hat turns 25, a new Wayland contender, a few app picks, and much more.

so this is the xfce perspective and this is why even though i give joe a hard time i get it because i worked at a place uh when i was in high school and um uh i came back and i'm not i'm almost positive it may have been nine years but i think it was almost 10 years on the nose i came back and i shit you not one of the same Dell workstations that we set up with Debian and XFCE to administer the servers was still in the IT department.

It had been just upgraded a couple of times. It was still running XFCE. It was still that original install on that same original hardware. It had just been upgraded. It was the identical xfce desktop it was when i left the terminal like the everything was exactly the same stable as a rock and you look at that and you go holy shit that is something that is 10 years of consistency

i doubt it would hold up anymore but like at that time when i saw that this was many years ago now uh i just was i was blown away by that. I was like, damn, that's not something we get on modern computers anymore. That's just not how computers work anymore. They don't build them like they used to. Chris, if I tell you that I have probably the same configuration for my E17 desktop I had about 10 years

ago, no change. Really? And it works no problem. Hmm. Do you attribute that to... What do you attribute that to... What do you attribute that to? Desktop environment, hardware choices at the time, distro. What do you attribute that to? The E17 manager came with the composite manager years ago.

Yeah, early. It was early. Before all the others, very early. And once you had your configuration, and that configuration stayed stable. So it's E17, now it's E22. It's just an involvement. In the background, they changed a lot, but the configuration stays the same. Ah. So we can use the same configuration as before.

That is nice. I do really thank you, because I don't really have a lot of experience with E17, so that's a good perspective. But Wes, we must get this show on the road. There's Linux to discuss. There is much to talk about. So with that, let's get going. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 242. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show.

It's got so much to discuss, from birthdays to new features and new distros, that we've got to get right into it. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. I'd say it's super good to be with you and all that stuff, but I've actually been hanging out with you all day. That is true. So it's just been nice hanging out with you today. We had some Chinese food.

We got the dogs in the studio. Now we're in the perfect mood for today's Unplugged. Totally, totally. In fact, we've got something dogs in the studio. Now we're in the perfect mood for today's Unplugged. Totally, totally. In fact, we've got something really fun coming up. We're going to take a look at the new Slacks 9.4. You know about Slacks. It used to be based on Slackware. Now it's based on Debian, and they've got some really cool features.

And, well, maybe might just be the perfect distro for you secret agents. I'll tell you about that coming up. Then we're going to get into some new, brand new spanking features. We're rolling out here on the Unplugged program. Podcast updates, everybody. And then not one, not two, but three updates to this story about Google blocking G-apps on uncertified devices. Is your custom ROM doomed?

Stay tuned and find out. Microsoft has some new open source, and after you hear about what it is, it'll be like, how come they didn't do that sooner? Yeah, I thought they were all about the open source. Then, a new Wayland contender enters the field. We'll tell you about that,

how people are creating their own open source Tesla wall replacement. You know those Tesla batteries? Yeah. Yeah. Fancy. Yeah. In fact, I'm going to propose we could combine two different open source initiatives, one that Joe and I talked about, and this initiative to really make something special.

Then we got a couple of app picks. And then, yeah, like I said, we'll get to Slacks, which is super cool. I got it running on my machine right here, right now. I love it. But before we go any further, we've got to bring in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumbaroo. What's up? Hello.

Hello. Get it out of here. A rare Joe Rez appearance in the virtual lug this week. That's great. It's good to see you, everybody. Thank you for being here. Did you guys notice? You probably did, but I thought it's worth mentioning here

on the show, Red Hat turned 25 yesterday. So that means 1993. And Red Hat points out that that was pre-.com boom, pre-mobile, pre-cloud computing, pre-big data, pre-DevOps and containers. And Red Hat has been through it the whole time. And at first I was like, oh, that's cute. But then you think about it, like, shit, that's a lot of stuff to have to respond to. Those are a lot of big trends. The dot-com boom is alone like a make it or break it.

Huge. Right? Like a lot of companies died. And then cloud computing and mobile and all of that, instead of it making Red Hat irrelevant, they managed each time to sort of turn and meet the new challenge. And now on their frickin 25th birthday, they're damn near worth two billion dollars. Wow. because the market has been has been sort of flushing out for so long and establishing it's like the next few years are going to be some of the most critical i think because there's a lot of um really valuable real estate and red hat isn't necessarily the best position to take advantage of it i'm thinking about aws and i'm thinking about

azure and i'm thinking about rackspace ubuntu isuntu is about 70%. And if I'm Red Hat, I'm looking at that going, we've got to get some of that market. We've got to get some of that market. And so I wouldn't be surprised if 2018 isn't going to be a really aggressive year for Red Hat, especially 2019. 25 years. That's a lot of stuff. It is. That's a lot of stuff. And is. That's a lot of stuff. And you know, they got the Red Hat Summit coming up in San Fran. Tempted to go.

Tempted to email them and say, hey, what do you think about me going to Red Hat Summit? It's in San Fran. I've decided after scale that pretty much anything south of San Francisco is no good. I don't know. You've been to California before? Yes, I have. No, I think you're about. Have you ever noticed it just gets really brown and smoggy after San Francisco?

I mean, I'm going to go to Pasadena and scale. I love it down there. You guys are great. But really, everything after San Francisco is just no good. Shh, don't tell them. They'll come up to Washington. That's what they're doing. I know.

You joke. But that's actually like a local controversy is that all these damn Californians keep coming up to our Washington. Not that we don't love you, dear California listeners. Yeah, no, we love the listeners. Yeah, we love the listeners. It's just their damn roads that we hate. Anyways, the Red Hat Summit is in San Francisco on May 8th to the 10th.

I mean, I'm certainly glad Red Hat's around. It would be more boring otherwise. Go ahead. Yeah, it would. Yeah, go ahead, Joe. Yeah, I was going to say say you talked about like aws and stuff and how ubuntu is massive on those platforms but how much revenue is that actually bringing into them if you've ever got rel running on them then red hat are making money whereas most people

running ubuntu on aws or wherever aren't necessarily paying for support. So it doesn't really matter how much market penetration Ubuntu has got. It all boils down to dollars and cents, doesn't it? That's a fair point. Yeah, not every AWS or Azure installation is necessarily translating to a support contract with Canonical. And there's a lot of T2 micros out there on Ubuntu and probably some rel machines in the gov cloud doing real work there's lots of dot-com heroes who can swoop in and help you with your ubuntu box too so you don't have to go get that contract

but i would submit you joe there's still headwinds for red hat too because uh take aws again and and um just after i after i've begun to under and I think you know what I'm talking about, Wes, after I've begun to understand the scale of AWS recently, it almost like doesn't matter what all the other guys are doing. Like AWS in itself is so large that if only they do something, it, it moves the whole industry. Like the scale is, is in terms of numbers. It is hard for us to understand, but Wes and I recently got a better understanding of it. It is hard for us to understand, but Wes and I recently got a better understanding of it. And the thing you got to consider with Red Hat is not only are they kind of behind already in that space, but then you've got Amazon Linux, which we've talked about before. And Amazon Linux is based on Red Hat and it's supported by Amazon directly. And it's part of their image gallery and it's one click deployment for Amazon Linux, which is essentially kind of like CentOS.

Don't call it Red Hat. and it's one-click deployment for Amazon Linux, which is essentially kind of like CentOS. Don't call it Red Hat. And if I'm on AWS, maybe that's what I deploy instead of Red Hat. So now Red Hat not only has to compete against Canonical, but they've got to compete against AWS's own home-brewed Linux,

which is really just RHEL. Isn't that just the startups?'t that just the the people who can't afford rel proper who are going to go for amazon linux but then the big companies who can actually afford to pay for the support contracts are going to keep paying for rel and i think so that's why rel have continued you know red hat have continued to be this huge company who are now pushing, you talked about 2 billion, they're pushing 3 billion at this point. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're probably right that if, you know, anybody that's going to have serious infrastructure, that's going to be making a lot of money, you know, like think about your Facebooks

and your YouTubes and your, anybody that's going to be rolling serious infrastructure is going to have a support contract and they're going to go with Red hat yeah yeah red hats uh red hats doing good their stock's up today um it's been a little all over the place but 25 years is pretty respectable yeah i mean they're obviously thinking about these new things too with their you know acquisition of core os and yes similar we'll see if it bears fruit speaking of that the whole and uh so yeah they're big quote-unquote kubernetes play right that's all about the future that's all about orchestration of that, the whole, and so yeah, their big, quote unquote, Kubernetes play, right? That's all about the future. That's all about orchestration of lots and lots

and lots of systems, which is boy, that's going to be fascinating to watch. All right, Wes, well, we're not the only ones. Red Hat, you got out there. You got us out there. We're making changes. Everybody's making big improvements. It's spring. It's the time for that. It's the season of change, and we have some nice improvements coming to the Unplugged

program that I want to tell you guys about, and a little bit of a heads up. So last week I said you're going to see some changes, you're going to see some feed changes, all that kind of stuff. Well, here we are this week. It's arrived. LinuxUnplugged.com, which is a nice companion to LinuxActionNews.com. So we've got LinuxActionNews.com and LinuxUnplugged.com, dedicated site and a resource for this show. And it will be sort of the canonical destination, I guess I'd say, if you will. Can we say that? Is that fair? You're allowed.

Okay. This time. Yeah, yeah. All right, good. And so, for example, like say you wanted to get the links for something we talked about, you go to LinuxUnplugged.com slash 242 or 241, for example, and you get all the links for the something we talked about. You go to linuxunplugged.com slash 242 or 241, for example, and you get all the links for the stuff we talked about. You want the RSS feed? We got that, too. You go to linuxunplugged.com

slash RSS, or if you want links to your favorite podcast catcher, it's linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. Are you getting it? Yeah, it's clean. It's simple. It looks easy, yeah. Yeah, new dedicated feeds, new dedicated site, and we're rolling out chapter markers to the MP3 feed started last week, so you'll see them if you have like a Pocket Cast or Overcast or any of them.

One of the fancy clients. Yeah, or a desktop player. I believe that VLC can do it. I believe it's possible to accomplish that in VLC, Wes. Beautiful. I believe, Wes, I believe. You can check that out, though. LinuxUnplugged.com. You go there, then go grab the RSS feed. Make sure you've got the right feed,

LinuxUnplugged.com slash RSS. New stuff. Chapter markers, I think, are going to be pretty popular. People love them across all the other shows. I soft launched them last week and already got a bunch of people saying they liked them. So check out LinuxUnplugged.com. Check out the new podcast feed. Now, that's it. There's going to be other changes coming now some of these changes none of you're going to care about you're going to be like chris i don't even know why you're spending time on this and some of you are going to want to come to the studio and punch me in the face so it's a difficult position i find myself in you know what i'm saying difficult i sure do reek eyes last week was basically last week. He's still technically here

but we're trying to transition everything and get it all done and do everything before he's gone, right? Like, trying to be proactive. He gave his notice at the beginning of the month and his we now have all the equipment, we're doing the editing, I'm editing

the shows, and as part of that, I am making some damn changes because i'll tell you what i don't got uh another full-time job in me and i can't be editing the video for this show i just can't i can't be doing and we can't have you just falling over in exhaustion because then then everything shuts down so we're gonna make some changes but i actually think people might like them um so i'm going to be publishing a couple of different things for a little bit just to experiment to see what the audience likes, because none of this stuff is hard set. But if you watch the video version of the Unplugged program,

there will probably be two versions initially is what I'm thinking. We're going to have the live version that will go on a new YouTube channel. And then we'll have an edited version, which will go on the main Jupyter Broadcasting channel, the podcast version. The primary release will be the MP3 feed at linuxunplugged.com.

We'll generate a video for that at the Jupyter Broadcasting YouTube channel. And then we have a JB Live YouTube channel that we'll be setting up that will be the complete live stream, unedited, full video

version of the show. I don't know if that's going to be how it is for, say, the next six months. I don't know if it's going to be how it is for a month. That's just how we're trying it right now as I'm trying out different stuff. Yeah, so that's kind of in the works. So you'll see us experimenting with the video version if you watch

that. I got to be honest with you, thousands of more, I mean mean tens of thousands of more people download the audio version than watch the video version so that's where my attention has to go because i've got to do this show i've got to do all the other shows i've got to edit all the other shows well except for lan joe's editing lan um thank God. Yeah, I was going to say. Jeez. Thank God. Especially considering how bad those two guys mess up all the time. Am I right?

And then when Kat's like happy jump in, somebody's got to edit that out. That was actually a funny moment that happened during LAN last week. A little behind the scenes is we're sitting there recording and a cat on Joe's side of the recording jumps up on his keyboard. Oh, yikes. And it's like I almost want to just leave that in the show. I almost thought that was worth leaving in there. It is in the Telegram group. If you want to go hear that outtake, Joe did actually pop it in our Jupiter Broadcasting Telegram group at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram.

Anyways, so these changes are coming down the pipe. I am using this as an opportunity to convert the show to a multi-track recording so that Wes is on his own track. I'm on my own track. The mumble room is on their own track. Richard Stallman's on his own track. Get it out of here. And then they all get processed individually, and it makes the audio sound much better. Everybody at the same level.

That stuff's finally happening because it's like, well, if i'm going to be sitting down and taking over the edit for a bit um might as well do it the way i would want to do it now now taking everything i've learned at some point i'm going to hand this stuff off things will be changing all of that is going to change in the future but for right now i'm kind of circling the wagons i'm taking it in-house i'm doing the work not to sound braggado, but I'm going to try to move the bar up a little bit. Get it to the next level. That's always my thing is try to move the quality up on all of our shows a little bit. And optimize for the audio experience.

Yes. And still provide the complete unadulterated video version is my thought for those who want it. Capture that live experience. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll be experimenting with that. Things will come and go as we implement new stuff.

But if you just want no fuss, get the show every single week and get the best version possibly available, LinuxUnplugged.com slash subscribe. Just grab the feed. If you have that, you don't have to worry about any of this. of this. But for those of you who follow us on the live stream or follow us on YouTube or download the MP4 from the feeds or whatever, you will see some experimentation happening there. We love you. We will work with you. Just give us time. I think that's fair. That was a lot. It's for people who like to mess with computers. Speaking of people who like to mess with computers, people who like to run unofficial Android ROMs sort of got the slap down this week. It looks like Google has been tweaking how they, well, authenticate, I guess you could say,

uncertified devices, quote-unquote. This is a story over at xdadevelopers.com with several updates. So let's get through some of this. A device maker must follow the CDD, which is a compatibility test suite from Google, before they're allowed to preload Google apps and services on their device. You're familiar with this if you've ever loaded an unofficial ROM, and then you've had to go out and

get the G apps yourself. Well, earlier this week, XDA Forums received an anonymous tip from a person claiming to be within, quote-unquote, the industry. This person, who said they worked for an OEM, notified them that Google was going to start entirely locking out newly built firmware from accessing G apps. And this change apparently

went into effect March 16th, 2018. And it affects all software builds made after that date. Now, yesterday, a member on the XDA forums, a senior member at that, came across the exact problem on his own device, which kind of goes down the lines of you get a full screen error message that comes up. It says in big red font device is not certified by Google. And then it's got helpful instructions for users who purchase this device, unlicensed manufacturers, licensed manufacturers, and custom ROM users. Actually, the custom ROM users is worth reading because there is a way for you to personally authorize up to 100 devices. So you can actually get around this problem. So it's not the end of the world for custom ROM users. It doesn't appear to be affecting custom ROMs that are pretty popular, though. It's more like

OEMs who have their own open source build of Android who have tried to cram GApps on there. Like Google's sort of being selective in how they apply this. Yeah, that makes sense. I can see that being a problem for them as well and trying to have some level of quality control so that they can have Android be a decent platform. Yeah, although Mini brings up a good question. Go ahead, Mini, or a good point. This could be an issue for Ubuntu Touch, huh? Well, this is really bad news for Ubuntu Touch or Salesforce. There is this sandbox solution called Nbox. I think it is Ubuntu initiative. And this starts to work quite well on devices that have at least

a 3.10 kernel. So with this announcement, lots of applications will not run on these devices because you can't install the Google services. That's the thing. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. There's this joke going in the Selfish OS community about Google acting like someone who's slowly boiling some frogs.

I mean, they started this open source project with Android and now they're closing it down more and more. Yes, that is a point that I have made on this show before. And it really bothered me when this now feels like ancient history, but when they moved photos to a Play Store app from the open source photo management app that was on Android. That really, for me, and that and Chrome. Remember when they switched from the open source browser to Chrome? Yeah, you're right. It has been a slow boil. More and more reliance on everything Google, all the APIs. Those insidious bastards.

Joe, you run custom ROMs 24-7. Does this concern you at all, or does that personal device activation slash registration thing sort of take care of it for you? Well, it worried me when I first heard about it, but then I looked into it and read more about it, and it's like, okay, it's going to be one more step. I'm going to have to extract the device ID

and then go to a Google web page and input that and then get my device okayed, whitelisted, whatever. So it's a little bit more hassle for me. But in terms of UbiPorts and Anbox, I mean, Anbox in UbiPorts is going to be the standout feature in 2018, and if this is going to make that harder to work, then that is very worrying for me. In terms of running Lineage, it's a mainstream custom ROM.

I'm not personally worried, but yeah, those extra ROMs like Lineage and, sorry, like UbiPorts and Sailfish, that's where I'm worried. Yeah, good point. And I also saw in the comment section on that forum, but it seems like a pretty good tip, that you can use titanium backup to backup your ID. And then when you load a new ROM, you can use titanium backup to restore that ID, then install Google apps and the G app stuff. And you shouldn't have a problem. Haven't tried it myself,

obviously. Uh, but that seems like that should be pretty solid. That seems like that could work. You know what? I, in the past, I'd use titanium backup.

That was some good ass software, titanium backup, just going to plug it. It's, it is, you know, it is, you got to pay for it to get the full thing. And to really have it work, like to get the ID, you got to have root on your device.

But if you're loading custom ROMs, you've probably already figured it out. You probably already do. You probably, that isn't your issue. Now this is your issue. Like that was the easy part. Speaking of mobile, let's talk about Ting. It's smarter than unlimited. You use less, you pay less.

Linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com was where you go to get $25 in service credit if you bring a device and $25 off a device if you want to buy one directly from Ting. bunch of great devices that you may have never even considered. It's like we always talk about like three or four phones, but there are a ton of other great phones out there. And on the Ting blog too, if this is your thing, if this is your thing for Ting, they just did a roundup of their favorite flip phones, including, it's not quite a flip phone, but including the one that Noah got ages ago. It's about as thick as three credit cards. It's a little GSM phone. You can literally put it in your wallet. That's so easy. That's so nuts. I love it.

Anyways, a bunch of great devices if you want to grab one or just get a SIM or bring your own. Just start by going to linux.ting.com. You pay for what you use, a fair price for however much you talk, text, or however much data you use. And they got nationwide coverage, GSM and CDMA, so you can rest assured that Ting has got you covered.

I just took them down on my scale trip, and damn if the CDMA didn't rock it. Also, personal recommendation, if you are in the Eugene area of Oregon, holy crap, holy crap, the Ting CDMA network is blazing. So is the GSM network. But better than that, crazy great ping times.

I don't know what they're doing, but some of the best ping times I have had probably this year was when I was on my way to scale in Eugene doing this show remotely. I did that whole show over the Ting connection. It was wonderful. Yeah. And I did Coder before that too. I did two shows over that Ting connection. And I love the yeah. And I did Coder before that too. I did two shows over that Ting connection. And I love the flexibility.

You know, you want it as a hotspot? They're not blocking any of that stuff. There's no big Ting strategy getting in the way. They don't have some play for video streaming. It's just pay for what you use wireless. It's great. Nationwide coverage, easy dashboard, fanatical customer service.

Just start by going to linux.ting.com. And thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. That's linux.ting.com. So Microsoft is open sourcing something today. And when you hear about this, it's going to be like one of those, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. They have open sourced a Windows subsystem for Linux. Is that the right Windows subsystem for Linux. Is that the right? Windows subsystem for Linux?

Yeah. A sample to let other distributions that they haven't reached out to personally follow so that way they can package up their distro for the Windows store. Hey-o! The new process makes it clear on how Linux distributions can be adapted

to run on the Windows subsystem for Linux. It's called the WSL Distro Launcher, and it's now open source. It's a C++ code base offering a launcher that could be customized for particular distributions, and it helps you step through setting up the login shell, running commands, setting configuration values. Bob's your uncle. You're good to go. You grab this open source sample, follow that. Then once you got it all done, you just call up Microsoft and say,

please, sir, please, I'd really like to be in your app store, please, please let me in the app store. Yes, I know I'm just a little distro. I mean, that is part of the process. It is legitimately part of the process. In fact, Microsoft outlines it right here on the Microsoft Developer blog, where they

talk about it. And they say you have to submit it to the store. You'll have to work with us to receive publishing approval. If you're a Linux distribution owner interested in adding your distribution to the Microsoft store, contact us at WSPartners at Microsoft.com. You know what stood out to me about that article? They use the word sideload a lot. I saw that. That used to be a lockdown mobile os

term it's now uh now it's a windows term yeah right yeah so the way they're doing this too is they're making these essentially universal windows applications i i um don't don't quote me on the terminology because again i'm not a big windows guy but they're uwp applications uwp which i think stands for universal Windows something or others. And it's a way to package up an application and deliver it in the Windows Store. You know, you and I went down on Friday night.

We went out and had some beers with Mr. Wimpy, who was in Seattle. And he had been visiting some folks at Microsoft. I think that's all public. I think I'm allowed to say that. And it was interesting hearing his insights into the conversations with Microsoft and where they're at with all of this stuff. It's a real sea change, and it's super. He just is sort of said some of the things that I personally identified. And that was when I was there weeks ago talking to them. They don't have this this air of guilt or they're not coming at this apologetically or they're not groveling.

out this apologetically or they're not groveling. They're not treating it like, oh, we've been a bad boy and we're really saw we, and now we want to be friends with Winix. It's we have a legitimate technology. The open source community has a legitimate technology. There's no reason that we can't make these two things work together because that's exactly what our customers want. It's not because all of a sudden they've gotten the smell of RMS. It's not because all of a sudden they just have totally embraced the Linux and Unix philosophies. It's simply because they've figured out customers will pay us really good money to make this shit work. It's business over philosophy now. And so they're meeting on this sort of technical level. There's nothing to do with the former emotional baggage

attached with Microsoft's battle against Linux and open source. And it's fascinating to watch it because from the outside, you have no perception of it. Microsoft makes an announcement. It comes from this large company that has lots of money

and lots of people. And you can't really understand the four or five years of work behind the scenes that's been happening. And so when you see stuff like that, it's really easy to go, shit, Microsoft is just – they're just going to be like – they're going to be the cancer. They're going to spread all over Linux and they're going to embrace and extinguish. When you see things like, now it's easy for anybody to package up a distro on the Windows Store. When you see things like, now it's easy for anybody to package up a distro on the Windows store.

But the reality is, it seems to be that the nature of Linux, open source, and the GPL is this unstoppable snowball. It really is. Like, every time these companies have tried to embrace and extinguish, they just end up being part of the snowball. They just get caught up with it. And I think that's what's happening even to a large company like Microsoft. It's not that Microsoft is trying to rip off Linux users or buy off Linux or trying to influence open source development. It's that even a company as large as Microsoft couldn't stop the Linux open source snowball. Yeah, they're just forced to play ball with it because that's what makes business sense. Yeah. But the emotional reaction when you see that is, oh, man, these bastards at Microsoft are trying to embrace and extinguish.

And this is yet another way that they're doing it. But I think that undersells the power of Linux, GPL, and open source. I think you're underselling how responsible they are for making a massive sea shift in which the entire industry has to respond to even IBM and Microsoft. Right. And I don't think that necessarily means we have to, you know, completely be on board with the Microsoft Linux thing, right? We should still, she'll be skeptical of their motives and try to understand where they're

coming from and what they're doing. But yes, they're not necessarily some evil Linux hating monstrosity anymore. Cautiously optimistic skepticism. Yeah, there we go. Perfect way to put it. Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. I'm also cautiously optimistic about this new 3D Wayland compositor,

which I saw you submitted to RLinux. That's actually how I saw this story, Rotten. So what caught your attention about this? Other than it's yet another Wayland compositor, but this one is called Wayfire. It's based on LibWestin. They say they aim to create a customizable and extensible and extendable lightweight environment without sacrificing appearance.

Those things appeal to me, but was there something else that caught your attention, Ron? Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that they had in like just the concept that they're working on is to move some stuff that are they're already in existing compositors and window managers and making it possible to work in wayfire so that could be used in whalen so like the most the most obvious one and like even the jokey one is the desktop cube yeah yeah totally yeah that was the number one comment like yes finally somebody understands i want my desktop cube back yeah exactly and it's actually kind of funny because the way they're doing the desktop

cube is interesting because they're like it's the cube itself is modifiable in like weird ways like you can make it concave and convex and stuff finally yeah of course who doesn't need that uh but there's other things that are actually like you know somewhat more useful in the sense of like the the expo mode that it's going to have built into it. It already has some of this stuff already working. It's in pre-alpha. I mean, we joke, but I guess the advantage here is then the desktop environment folks

don't have to invent how to do that, right? So it's just done for them. The one thing that made me really the most interested was probably the fact that they were talking about having window rules work. The compositor itself with window rules that is amazing yeah yeah now what's the point of the perfect 60 frames a second compositing if we can't have desktop cubes this isn't probably very applicable to uh like mutter or k-window right i mean this is for desktop environments

that don't necessarily have a replacement for yeah. Yeah, this would be a replacement for, yeah, if they don't have a compositor, this would be for that. Yeah. Like, you know, like basically the window managers that are like dependent on X and stuff like that. Yeah. So this is a solution. We see different things coming up.

I have a pretty strong inclination that we're going to hear more about Mir in the future about that as a middle layer between Wayland and the desktop environments but this is another option and it's it's up on github did you get a sense of how far along they are when I mean it looks like they have some basic stuff currently implemented good stuff even even like touchscreen gestures and stuff they're basically saying here's this is prototyping stuff that we can show works but don't rely on it. But they're saying that it's a pre-alpha stage so that they're not really claiming anyone should use it. But they are talking about that it already works with X-Wayland. So like any X-Wayland clients, you could already use it.

That's nice. Good advice. As soon as a distro actually supports this, because I'm going to see if like Arch or something like that would be interested in it. As soon as something supports it, I'm going to definitely check it out. Yeah. Yeah, and I like that they're trying to solve some hard technical challenges for some of these desktop environments. Kind of push the conversation forward a bit.

Yep. Wayfire. Wayfire will have a link, linuxunplugged.com slash 242. Unplugged.com slash 242. One of the nice bennies about having the Linux Unplugged.com site set up is we can make changes at JB.com. And if you're just following there, it doesn't matter. You know, if you just want the Linux Unplugged show. Simple back step.

Yeah. Maybe what we ought to do is build a whole new infrastructure up on DigitalOcean. DO.CO slash unplugged. Go there for a limited time and sign up and get a $100 credit for a new account. One

hundred dollar credit. I don't know how long they're going to do this. They told me it'd be a limited time. Maybe it's already over. Maybe you should just go right now

and find out. do.co slash unplugged. Find out because what an incredible value. Honestly, $10 would get you by

for two months. You could run a DigitalOcean droplet two value. Honestly, $10 would get you by for two months. You could run a DigitalOcean droplet two months for free with $10. With $10. And if you go to do.co.unplugged, you get a $100 credit. And I have a suspicion. I believe it's because they're rolling out these new droplet plans. Now, for years, they've been a sponsor here on the Unplugged program, and you know that they offer really great pricing on droplets.

My favorite system is $0.03 an hour. $0.03 an hour. That's great. You can get the $5 a month droplet, run it two months for free with our standard promo. But now, when you go to do.co.unplugged and get the $100 credit, why not play with some of the big boys? They got high CPU droplets, flexible droplets where you can mix and match the resources. They got high RAM droplets. Go to town.

Load everything up in RAM. Go cray-cray. Do what Wes does and run everything from a RAM disk. You do that, right, Wes? That's what you do? Of course I do. Why not? Wes does two things and only two things.

Runs everything as root and runs everything out of RAM. That's why I don't. Lean and mean, baby. Just go to do.co slash unplug to sign up and try out their new flexible droplets. Mix and match the resources you need. Play around with snapshots. You can use the team accounts. And then if you ever get stuck, they have fantastic documentation,

including a new tutorial that went live just a couple of hours ago about how to configure 1604, Ubuntu 1604, to reject a whole bunch of bogus SSH connections. Something that monitors for connections. I'm not talking fail to ban. I'm talking about something different. That monitors for bogus login attempts and then starts banning those IPs automatically.

That's the kind of great documentation that DigitalOcean has on their website all the time. They have professional folks that keep that stuff lean, mean, and easy to read. dio.co.unplugged. Go there, sign up, and easy to read. Dio.co slash unplugged. Go there, sign up, and try out their new flexible droplets. Dio.co slash unplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Dio.co slash unplugged.

So I will admit that living in a Class A RV has made me particularly interested in running everything from batteries. But what if you had your own Tesla Powerwall? You know about the Powerwall, right? That was something that Tesla introduced for homeowners. It's kind of funky because you have to be on an actual residential property. you can't just like go buy some land in arizona and set up a power wall uh you you have to be on or at a residence you have to have an internet connection to use a power wall and after you spent five thousand five hundred dollars you then essentially have supplemental power in case the electricity goes out it's kind of funky like just a big battery bank sort of plug yeah to everything't it be great if you could build that yourself from, say, old laptop batteries?

Oh. Turns out, actually a thing. In fact, laptop batteries are particularly good at this. You could build your own wall, and there's a link that we'll put in the show notes so you can go check out, including a bunch of different folks who essentially worked it out and said it's about $5 per battery. And one bloke out of Australia has this unbelievable setup with 40 solar panels in his roof. He's pulling down 40 kilowatt hours, and then he has these racks of batteries. So they look like AA's. But if you were to break open your laptop, your lithium ion battery in your laptop and like take the casing off of it, they're like individual, like double

A looking batteries in there. And they got this like particular color that is set by the industry. So that's how you know, they're the kind of battery that you need. And I don't know, like cyan, I don't know exactly how would you, how would you describe that color was, what would you, it's like a blue-ish, it's like a sky blue, I guess. Yeah, something like that. And when you get ones that are sky blue, you essentially have the right battery. And depending on how many you have, depending on how many laptops you want to murder,

you could set up a Powerwall yourself using a Raspberry Pi to manage all of this. And here's an example. So the Tesla Powerwall is capable of storing 14 kilowatt hours, but this dude built one that could store 40 kilowatt hours out of australia and there's a whole diy power wall form and i thought this is pretty good this is interesting this is useful but if you combine this with a project that joe and i covered on linux action news by eric raymond then you'd really be cooking with gas.

Eric Raymond recently, yeah, ESR recently launched the upside project and they're currently defining the requirements for a smart UPS because UPS is suck. They just, they're bad. They don't really, they don't intelligently monitor the battery. They don't intelligently watch the charge. They're just, they're just the worst and uh so esr was sort of um waxing on about this and from that created the upside project people have joined on and they've created a full requirements now of what you need to do smart

charging to control the monitoring um to fail into a bypass mode instead of completely failing off and cutting the power what the minimum run times should be. I'm proposing that I'm doing matchmaking right here on the show. These two different initiatives, the DIY Powerwall and ESR's Upside Project, they should at least start maybe flirting, take each other out to dinner or something, because this could be a great combination of efforts, something that you could build yourself from your old crappy laptops and then something to actually manage and monitor and keep everything working well it's it's an example of two kind of side things that

are going on out there people are discussing people are trying to figure out because the technology has just kind of gotten there and made all of the stuff accessible but they're not really coming together yet they're not coming maybe maybe they never will but i love the idea of these two things you take those you take upside the smart ups you take the diy power wall you bring them together wes it's a kumbaya yeah if you're already managing power just do it at the whole house scale and you could then do it without any of that cloud crap or anything else yeah i mean if we're not going to have reactors in our backyards maybe we could have power walls without any of that cloud crap or anything else. Yeah, I mean, if we're not going to have reactors in our backyards, maybe we could have power walls. Oh, that's good.

No, I don't. No, no, they didn't make it out to the West. They didn't make it here. They didn't make it out here. We're uncivilized. Maybe someday. All right. Well, if that's not your thing, then you're one of those people.

And you probably like Electron apps. Yeah, I'm onto you. You like Electron apps. You got Slack slack installed oh skype and spotify too well there's no helping you then we might as well we might as well pile on how about an electron based terminal yeah you're right that's the last every other thing i run is basically running Chrome somehow, right? But not the terminal. You're welcome. You're welcome.

My life is complete. You see what I do for you? You see, I do this for you. It's called Hyper. And it's a modern terminal built on web technologies. That's what they say. It's built on web technologies. And you know what, Wes?

It actually looks kind of good. Check it out. Go to hyper.is. Hyper.is, take a look at this thing and tell me at least some part of you doesn't kind of want to run this. Maybe Joe, you know, the XFC user of the house, maybe this doesn't appeal to him. I don't know. I'm launching the app image right now. Do you see how they have effects when you type? You see how they have the blasting? They have destructo effects when you type. Look at that.

You see that? Whoa, fancy. Yeah, they have like confetti blowing up from the cursor when you type. I mean, obviously you want that. Obviously you need that. So why not get a terminal that uses Electron? What's the matter, Wes?

So there we go. That was easy. Yeah, that was. And it actually looks really, really good. It's pretty sharp. Yeah. That looks really nice, actually. I might just give it a try for a while.

Why not? The default font could be a little better. Yeah, right. I'm not going to lie. Wouldn't it be weird if there was multiples of these? Is there? Is that a thing? Up term.

Oh, really? Oh, no. Okay, what's the URL? I got to up term? If I just Google it, will it? Oh, yeah. It's a GitHub repo. A terminal really? Oh, no. Okay, what's the URL? I got to upterm? If I just Google it, will it? Oh, yeah. It's a GitHub repo. A terminal for the 21st century.

Pretty nice scrolling. Yeah, it does have nice scrolling. I agree. Oh, you know what? I kind of like this better, actually. It's an IDE plus terminal thing. Yeah, with legit syntax completion, which is kind of nice. I can't.

Okay. I'll put a link to this in the show notes too. Wow. So not one, but two Electron terminals. That's actually a thing. I mean. And it's in the AUR. Is nothing sacred?

Is nothing sacred? The terminal, like on Windows, I can understand it because the default command prompt on Windows sucks so bad that I, you know, they really need something over there but oh man i can't even with that all right well so we so i guess so there's one app pick for you two for one hey you're welcome before you move on chris yeah there's one big question about these electron terminals okay do they have an option to give a black background and green text so you feel like you're in the matrix? Right. You've got to.

Yeah, you've got to. Yes. Yeah, of course. You don't even ship unless you've got that. You don't even ship. Okay. If you don't like it, you can just edit the CSS because it's a problem. Gosh, this has gone a horrible direction.

I can't believe we're talking about editing the CSS of our terminal window. Okay. Maybe I can redeem myself. This is a native application. How about that? It's called MP4 tools. And what I like about MP4 tools is that it's a collection of two applications that allow you to muck about with your MP4 files without re-encoding them. Nice. That's always good. Yeah. Saves time. You don't lose quality. So MP4 Tools consists of two different applications available for Linux.

MP4 Joiner is a free application that will join multiple MP4 files into one without recoding and without any quality loss. So no retouching the file at all. And then, so you got, that's mp4 joiner. And then as you would expect, you've got mp4 splitter, which is a free application

that allows you to split mp4 files into multiple mp4 files without having to re-encode them. I am going to be using this for some of our live stuff because I'm recording here in OBS on this Linux box. And then I'm going to take this MP4 file

and I'll probably just do a little chop and drop and then upload it up to YouTube and upload it to Scale Engine and I'll be using

AvidMux and MP4 tools to do that. Why not spread the love? MP4joiner.org if you want to check that out. And yeah,

AvidMux too. So there you go. We've got Electron terminals for you this week. We've got MP4 tools. You can use your fun new tools in your fun new terminal. There it is.

Oh, great. I was just waiting for that. F***ing A. Did you look at it wrong again? So when we're recording Linux Unplugged or whatever we're recording and GNOME crashes like it literally just did while I'm talking about this, recording and gnome crashes like it literally just did while i'm talking about this as as if i did this on purpose i can now use mp4 joiner to rejoin these files together so i can upload this live version that's been recorded locally i mean how perfect is that like i was i was literally about to explain why i got these mp4 tools when because gnome 3 crashes on us so often when it just

crashed on us that's that's proof is in the pudding. That is amazing. That is amazing. mp4joiner.org. Enough said there. Go get your Electron apps. Go get your mp4s. I don't have any more to say about that. Linux Academy. Boy, if you want to go figure out why GNOME 3 crashes on you all the time, Linux Academy. You need to get started somewhere, and this is probably the best place to start. Yeah. You need to learn how to read the log, learn where all that stuff's on the file system, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, support the show, and sign up for a free seven-day trial. It's an advanced training platform that teaches you everything you need to know about Linux.

I was just going to say, Wes, you and I get a question, like a super generic question that comes into TechSnap that we really kind of identify with. And it's, how do I get started? Where do I get training? What do I need to do next to take my career somewhere in IT or to get started in IT or to go to the next level in IT? Before the show started today, you and I were having a conversation literally about like, do we need to do like a dedicated segment in TechSnap addressing that question because it comes up so frequently. Right, yeah, exactly.

And it's hard to know. There's so many options and there's outdated tons of outdated information. It can be really confusing if you don't already know. Yeah, and I think the other problem that the industry as a whole suffers from is all of these online training platforms that want to teach you everything

and Linux is just one of the things that they want to teach you. They'll also teach you After Effects. They'll also, you know, teach you how to do something on Windows Active Directory if you want. Like, they're happy to teach you, like, all these stuff, like Photoshop. They don't care. But you do. You care. You want somebody who is dedicated to the topic that you need to learn about. You want the expert in that field. You want a company that is hiring full-time instructors that are going out there and taking the certification test, learning the material, eating and breathing Linux, and then writing courseware about it. That's what you want,

because you want to kick ass when you go out to take the test, when you want to get the next job, when you want to go somewhere in your career, or when you want to challenge yourself. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You sign up for a free seven-day trial. You get to try out the platform. Hands-on scenario-based labs that give you experience on real servers. Instructor LinuxAcademy.com you pick a time frame and stick to it. And if you're ready for certifications, they got stuff dedicated for that too. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, get a free seven-day trial, support the show, and take it to the next level.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. We've been thinking recently, you know, with all the talk about Plasma, that we need to kind of expand our horizons a bit. Try different distros, try different desktop environments. Break out of these blinders.

I mean, I never considered XFCE because nobody ever suggests it. Not at all. Never. But what I've been thinking about recently is Fluxbox and Debian. And that's where Slacks comes in. Slacks 9.4 was released this week.

And they've got a couple of unique features that I think are worth talking about. First of all, distro that is built to be a live distro, first and foremost. You flash it to your USB media, and then you run from there. Saks also is doing a couple of other neat things, including ways to manage Wi-Fi and a couple other nice things. But there's something in here I find more fascinating. They are listing applications as installed.

For example, say Chromium. They'll say Chromium's installed. There'll even be a link in your menu bar for a launcher. But when you click it, in the background, Slacks is like mounting an image, a squash FS file system, setting up paths, getting maybe even the latest binary download, depending on what it is,

and then launching Chromium. Like it wasn't already in the main instance. It's just fascinating how they're doing this. But maybe even more interesting is the fact that the whole damn thing is based on Fluxbox. And it's a unique and interesting implementation. They've picked a background that is 100% aces. This might be the best Linux desktop background

I've ever seen. It's got a wood picnic table in the foreground and then some fake artificial grass in the background. And it makes for a perfect presentation. You feel like there's a shelf and the way the lighting works is it draws your eyes down like you feel like there's a shelf and the way the lighting works is it draws your eyes down to the bar there's a nice transparent menu at the bottom looks very early windows 7 minimal windows 7 with a launcher that comes up that's very gnome 3 you grid of icons and there you'll see the web browser. If I click that in the background, it's actually mounting the squash FS file system and then launching Chromium. This is a simple, clean, very Windows-esque inspired.

It's like a hybrid of Windows 7 and Windows 10. Theming and like effects wise and you get minimum stuff and in a way that's very intentional on the Slacks team. They figure for a lot of modern computers, you don't really need more than a web browser, a terminal, and a Debian base. So they figure, flash that on a USB drive, boot it up.

Despite its small size, Slacks will provide you a nice graphical user interface. And by default, the two programs, your browser and your terminal. You got Debian under the hood, you get the entire ecosystem of Debian, tens of thousands of pre-built packages. Yeah, apt just works like normal.

They have a 32-bit, a 64-bit, and then a really fun version that you gave a shot, couldn't get it working, probably just have to spend a little more time monkeying with it, the Slacks IPXE version. Yeah, super handy. You can just boot that in over the network and boot into Slacks. And what's nice is it loads it all into RAM.

So I was joking about RAM disk, but the whole damn thing is running out of a RAM disk, booted off of your network. It seems like a super nice, especially, yeah, if you're just doing everything in Chrome and a terminal on other machines, this is just a dumb workstation. Well, and let me tell you this. Let's say you had your typical desktop OS. Maybe it's Windows 10. Maybe it's Plasma Neon, KDE Neon. But every now and then, you want a special environment for doing something

something private or or something unique or you just want i can sit down any computer on my network and i can boot into this environment you could do that with the ipxc version do you see what i'm saying oh yeah absolutely because you if you got one of those bioses that supports a choose boot device uh like you know mine is like f12 i had12, and then I get to choose my boot device, and one of my options is a Pixie boot server. Totally. I could choose that, and it would boot off of that, but otherwise it would boot off my local disk, and you could just have that available on your network. So that's another nice thing. Great for, like, just diagnosing things, fixing stuff, reformatting disks. Yeah, and it's interesting, too, to check back in with Slacks,

because we've talked about them in the past, last time we talked about them those guys were basing that thing on slackware yeah totally different totally different approach they were going for like a slackware user-friendly desktop distro they've pivoted and now they are a live only modern portable floxbox based debian distro that's actually kind of nice it is kind of nice i can't really put my finger on it but it was a playing with it today and yesterday it's just been it's been an entirely pleasant activity yeah i don't know if i'll be putting it on my systems permanently but i'll think of it if i if i have a need for this this niche yeah so the slacks slacks team's got some good stuff here i'm i was i was coming in kind of like, you know, I've used Slacks before.

Nothing really new to see here. It's just another point release. No. No, they've really done some good stuff here. And they've got more stuff in the pipeline, too. They have, I guess, one big disclosure we should make is they want Legacy Boot when you're using this distro. Yeah, very much SysLinux. I will also say over on their site, they've got a great

internals page that describes a whole bunch about how it's set up. That's not something you see a lot. Maybe buried in a wiki somewhere, but it is a unique distro in how it's configured, and they're very open and transparent about it. To that end, that's where I was going. They have a slax.org.

That's S-L-A-X.org for English, slash next.php. And if you go to their next.php page, they have, oh, here's what we just released, and they did this site. The slacks 940 came out yesterday, 940. And then they already have slacks next, which where they talk about, we're going to get EFI support working. We're going to get virtual box support working. We're going to get virtual box support working.

We're going to change some settings in the terminal. And we have other things that are coming to the next version of Slack. So even though Slack's 940 came out yesterday as we record this here show, they've already up on the website, got what they're working on. And our number one complaint,

EFI support is already on their radar. See, that's awesome. It is. It is because it made it a little challenging to boot on some of my newer laptops. So it's really good to see them put that in there. You know, if they had snaps, snap packages baked right in, now that would also be very handy. That would, particularly for a use case like this where you're booting it up fresh and you need to hit the ground and you just need to get running.

Yeah. I was really impressed though. Came back to Slacks kind of expecting this haphazard reboot, this sort of duct tape and string to get everything working on Debian and instead came away with one of the more unique desktop Linux experiences

I've had in 2018. It's easy to, like, the 64 bit version is 260 megs, so I can also see myself just leaving this, laying around somewhere in case I need it. Totally. MiniMac, you bring up a good point of somewhere you'd like to see them go in the future.

Yeah, I would love to see, for low-specs Chromebooks on ARM CPUs, I would love to see ARM support. That would be cool. That would be, ARM support would be great. Something like this on the Raspberry Pi with Fluxbox. Ohbox oh yeah i don't know why i expected fluxbox to be animation free sort of like no frills but um even in a even in a software composite environment the menus fade in and out nicely the applications launch the menu comes up nicely like everything's polished fluxbox um i think doesn't get enough appreciation

because that's got to be one of the damn best looking implementations I've seen in a long time, which just tells me that if you just spend enough time with it, you can get it right. Yeah, a handsome desktop. It is indeed. And it's good to see it getting some coverage. Veronix wrote about it as well.

It's based on Debian stable. So if you're more of a Debian testing user, might not necessarily float your boat, but I sure liked it. And you know, if you're considering going to XFCE, why not give it a go? Check it out.

Slacks at slacks.org. We'll have a link in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 242. And if you give it a go or something kind of like this, like did we just miss the mark a bit? Is there something like, guys, guys, you've just got to try this out. Let us know.

Go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Oh, that's right, at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. We got a new contact form. And the way I've set it up now is it in big all caps with like brackets and special stuff that I've set up for filtering says somebody from Linux, somebody responding to Linux Unplugged has sent you an email, Chris. Don't miss this one, you dumb arse. So yeah.

You're taking it seriously. Taking it very seriously. So LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. As seriously as I take email, because I effing hate email. Amen. As seriously as I take any freaking email. I think that we should all make those businesses fail. There you have it.

I think, I guess with that, maybe we'll just leave it at it. If you want to check out Slack, Slack's 9.4 is the one you want. If you want it based on Debut with all the goodies we just talked about. MP4 Tools is the MP4 joiner we talked about. And Hyper is the terminal that we talked about that's a whole bunch of i just realized like a whole bunch of names and pics that we just did kind of all smushed together mr pain is there anything else we should leave people with before we get out of here i think we covered it today i know i feel good we got it all in there all right well uh go

get more joe and me over at linuxactionnews.com. You can also go get more of just Joe and his friends at latenightlinux.com. More Wes Payne over at techsnap.systems. You can go get more of producer Michael on his YouTube channel at TuxDigital. And with all of that, I think we'll wrap it up. Of course, if you're watching

live over at the JB Live site, the Ask Noah program is coming up. You're always welcome to join us on a Tuesday. Go to Jupiter broadcasting.com slash calendar to get our live times because it is a whole Linux celebration. It's Linux Tuesdays over on the JBLive.tv live stream. We start with the unplugged program pre-show and then we keep on going to ask Noah and we'd love to have you there.

You can follow me. I'm at Chris Elias. The network's at Jupiter signal. He's at West pain Linux unplugged.com and we'd love to have you there. You can follow me. I'm at Chris Elias, the network's at Jupiter Signal. He's at Wes Payne, linuxunplugged.com, and we'd love to have your feedback at linuxunplugged.com slash contact, and linuxunplugged.reddit.com. Thank you for joining us.

See you back here next Tuesday! See ya! Welcome to BSD Unplugged, your weekly BSD talk show that's too busy getting actual work done to care about your silly display server. My name is Alan. BSD, guys. Those bastards. All right. So, what do you think we should call this one, guys? Because JBot took the day off.

So, what do you think? We got gotta come up with something good oh i see mr colonel linux there in the chair hello colonel linux i i was really kind of debating back and forth with noah while i was at scale what am i going to reload onto hadia's systems in her acupuncture clinic because i think she's on 1610 or 1604 i'm not sure but one is mate and one is unity and it turns out there's different um little little little issues on each that they would just like resolved and they would like it to be the same interface so that way when the staff use the different computers it's all the same and so i'm like well okay so what distro and what desktop environment do i pick because

they were on unity but i think i'm gonna do plasma as long as it's the one I'm using, is what my thought. What were you going to say? Shouldn't you beta test it first? Yeah, oh yeah. If you do Plasma, I would suggest checking out Ubuntu 18.04. This is what I was thinking. Because there's a lot of polish. Yeah, well, actually, not just that, right?

But it's going to be Plasma LTS and Ubuntu LTS, right? And Qt LTS. Oh. Chris, I've got one word for you, right, to solve your problem. What? Mutiny. I know. Yeah.

I know. It crossed my mind. It really did. Hadea has been complaining to me, and it's not that I don't listen. It's just that I just sort of all kind of collect into a bag of, I got to fix their computer problems. Does she know how to update the packages every month? Well,

she gets the graphical prompt and I have her do that. But, and it's, and so for the most part, all that's been fine with the exception of she's on that version. Well, she's on those versions of Ubuntu where they fill up the boot, the slash boot.

So about twice a year, her slash boot fills up on her computers. And then I have to walk her through the auto-remove. Yeah. Yeah. And she just hates that. So that's another reason to upgrade her because that's something they finally fixed in Ubuntu. You know, with 18.04.

That makes sense. Yeah. And with 18.04, with all that, with Ubuntu 18.04, all that stuff lining up LTS seems like a pretty safe bet. But we'll see the jury is still out I will do some testing I'm gonna have her also I'm contributing to kubuntu 18.04 so that by itself

should be example anything in particular anything just in moral support the whole the whole new design I'm changing a bunch of defaults that i don't like that they're willing to listen to me about no kidding that's great the single click to double click that's changing yes i'm going to remove all the animations oh ouch ouch but

then what would my gpu be doing you could you could but then it wouldn't be as good. you