LINUX Unplugged - Episode 247: Year of the Linux Desktop 😎

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Ubuntu and Fedora have new releases, and our early impressions are great. We’ll share the features that we think make these distros some of the best Linux desktop releases ever. Plus some important community news, some Darktable tips for beginners, and some select clips from this year’s LinuxFest Northwest. Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

Google box. And it's basically cameras pointing at people in the lounge watching the TV. So you watch people watching TV. It's quite entertaining, mindless bullshit TV, but it's, it's the characters. It's like people sat around in their lounge watching some TV program and the

way they react to it. It's, it's crap, but I love it. People. Wait a minute. You're watching people watching TV. Yeah.

They know they're being watched. Are they at home? And they have webcams? Yeah, they're in their homes. Wow. It's proper cameras. Where do I see this? Where do I see this?

You can probably find it on YouTube. Tell me what it's called. Tell me what it's called again. Google. Google. It's this thing called the internet, Chris. Everything's on the internet. Oh my God, it's not that good.

You don't need to go and find it. It's on Channel 4 in the UK. I feel like I need to find it box yeah so anyway um oh my gosh this is reminding me that these two old ladies were sat there and they were using a remington fuzz away just last week to get rid of the bubbles on a jumper thanks was was the innovation technology technological innovation of 1986 that thing it was and then one of them was going oh i'm getting all the bubbles off. And the other one was like, oh, isn't that marvelous?

Series 11, episode 9, is literally a couple of old ladies sitting around watching Britain's Got Talent, Antique Roadshow, The Queen's Green Planet, Buy It Now, and Yorkshire Vet.

And so you're watching these old ladies watch those shows. It's not just those two ladies. It's between lots of different families. There's like big families. There's an Asian family. There's a group who live up north. And so there's all different accents in there

and different like characters. And there's a woman and her best mate who live in a caravan, like a mobile home somewhere. And those two sitting next to each other are quite, it's just quite entertaining, the kind of characters. If anybody ever wondered if there was a market for people watching people play video games, this shows you there.

Oh, totally. If there's people, so can you hear the TV show? Can you hear what they're watching? Or do you just- Well, they cut to it, so you know what they're watching. They get clips of whatever it is they're watching, and then it cuts to them, as if you're cutting to the audience of a tv so you're watching their reaction

i see i can't believe i've outed myself as watching this program because you'll never live it down not for a day brilliant i love it it's my guilty pleasure yeah good oh wow i can hear the guilt just peeling off you goggle box well guess what I'm adding to Usenet? I just, I gotta see it. I just gotta see it. And it's actually current, because they record them, like, that weekend. And so it's about the programs that you will have watched the previous week. Oh, that is handy.

Yeah. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 247 for May 1st, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's still smack dab in the middle of the Linux Fest hangover. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. Hello there.

Are you well fed, sir? Oh, I am stuffed. Yeah, I supplied the burgers and Wes supplied the caffeine. So this should be a good show. Coming up on this week's episode, not one, but two, two major distribution releases. Fedora 28 is out today. Ubuntu 1804 came out just the other day. And we're going to give you our initial impressions on both of them.

Loaded them up, kicked the tires, and man, is there some cool stuff in both of them. I cannot wait to tell you about that. So it's a packed Distro episode. Plus, Mr. Daniel Foray is here from Elementary OS to give us a little taste of what's just around the corner in Juno, and some of those features speak deep to my soul. You guys will totally understand once we get there. And then later on, did you hear that Google just forked a popular GTK theme? What?

Mmm. And you know how NFS tables is the new hotness to replace IP tables? Yep. That's out. Something new is coming in, and the one, the only Mr. Alan Jude will stop by the show live from LinuxFest Northwest and tell us all about BPF

plus a new release of Darktable is out and listener Brent stopping by the show to give us a walkthrough of that and then we will do our Ubuntu 1804 roundup with a look at the flavors, the new features in Ubuntu itself our thoughts on some of the server stuff they're introducing

and much much more but before I go any further, our thoughts on some of the server stuff they're introducing, and much, much more. But before I go any further, before I even get to the virtual lug, a special in-studio lug member, Mr. Brent, the very, very, we're going to call him Dark Table expert now for the show, is actually joining us right now. Hello, Brent. Hey, how's it going, guys? It's going good. How are you doing?

I'm doing good. The barbecue is good. A couple of nights on the couch? Mm-hmm. Good here at the studio. Brent stopped by for LinuxFest Northwest, took some great pictures. He's been talking? I'm doing good. The barbecue is good. A couple of nights on the couch? Mm-hmm. Good here at the studio. Brent stopped by for LinuxFest Northwest, took some great pictures. He's been talking to me about Darktable. We've got a new release of Darktable 2 to sort of button it all up,

so we'll be getting to that a little bit in the show, so stay tuned for that. And now, without any further ado, we've got to bring in that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. What's up? Hey. I heard that random UbaCon. I heard that. Yeah, actually, that looked like an amazing venue, Wimpy. I saw your Mate roundup of the new features, and it looked like you were

in a church of Ubuntu. It was impressive. We were in an historic building, and it was rather wonderful, yeah. Well, I would love to chat about that in a moment, so let's get there too. But why don't we start out with the huge news of the day, just to get things rolling here on Zeold Podcast, and that is the release of Fedora 28. Fedora 28 landed today as we record, and it's available as an atomic workstation image too. Yes, it is. Which is the first time that's officially happening.

It's not all out. They haven't really talked about it a lot yet, but if you go on the atomic development list, which I troll all the time. Every damn day. And you'll see that they have a release announcement over there, which is a pretty freaking big deal. But let's talk about the workstation version.

I can't believe I'm about to tell you this. Let me double check. Is this actually Fedora? It's real. You sure? Yeah, 100%. Sure. Verified. Well, a new feature, apparently, I don't believe it, of Fedora 28 is the inclusion of popular

third-party software repositories that you can just turn on in GNOME 328. They include applications like NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver. What? Google Chrome? The Steam? NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver Google Chrome the Steam client

yes and more like PyCharm are now all available with just a few clicks in GNOME software under Fedora 28 I did not think I would see this day but hey this isn't anything I just can't even right now.

I'm still processing this. And I think what it's got to be is Fedora trying to appeal to developers who use these tools. That's got to be what it is. I don't know, anybody in the Mumba room, before we move on to the other features, want to just take a moment and reflect on the fact that Fedora's making it a couple clicks now to install Google Chrome

or the NVIDIA driver? Anybody think that's remarkable besides me that's i mean i think it's definitely a change from you know the behavior we've seen in the past but it's i can't be the only one somebody in that mom room's got to think that's remarkable somebody does they just don't want to say i understand it's remarkable there you go isn't this something that ubuntu mate has done for a while oh sure they're definitely by no means the first. Absolutely. I thought they would be the very, very last. Minimek, did you want to throw something in there? Yeah, I tried to install Chrome in the Chromium browser last time,

and it told me that it needed 600 megabytes to install all the packages. I was pretty much surprised. So I'm going to test how much the normal Google Chrome uses. This is going to be something I'll be testing too. I'll be testing all of this a lot more soon. But I want to take, spoiler alert, I'm going to round up some of the new features, the new things people are talking about,

what initially seems really great to me. I'm not giving you my review for either Ubuntu 18.04 or Fedora 28 yet. I've got initial impressions. I'm going to share those with you. But I want to run both of these for a while because I have been living in Kubuntu so deeply that I just need to take time to give them a proper quote-unquote review. But I'll give you something else in Fedora 28 that seems initially pretty appealing to me. They've really sort of tuned down some of

the things that suck battery life with various different hardware power saving features that they're turning on by default now. These are all things that scripts will turn on or some people, other distributions turn on automatically. But I think in totality, this is actually pretty impressive. So we now have a new default saddling power management policy on all the Intel mobile chipsets that is way more disk-friendly low power. So like when it's idle,

it'll save approximately one to one and a half watts of power on idle, which when you have like a 50-watt battery or a 36-watt battery— I will take anything I can get. Additionally, the Intel HDA Audio Codec power saving is now enabled by default with a one-second timeout, which I think that's pretty good. One second means if there's nothing going out over the sound card for over a second, if you think about it, that's a pretty long time in computer land.

And then that saves about 0.4 watts of power on idle. Now, finally, USB auto suspend for USB Bluetooth receivers has been enabled by default, which saves an additional 0.4 watts of power. You combine all that together and it's pretty noteworthy. And again, not the only distro to do it, but I think it's pretty nice to see Fedora including this stuff by default. And I think everybody would agree with that. And again, not the only distro to do it, but I think it's pretty nice to see Fedora including this stuff by default. I think everybody would agree with that. And then, of course, the headline feature, the biggest deal, is that it's shipping with GNOME 3.28, which includes the new Thunderbolt Bolt D support, which is that system daemon for security connecting, for the security of Thunderbolt devices when they connect, and allows GNOME Shell to interact and alert you about that. And then finally, for RMS sake,

they're including VirtualBox guest editions by default now, and they're shipped in the Fedora Workstation install. Any installation of Fedora Workstation as a guest on VirtualBox will have the guest edition features working out of the box. I think that really, that just plays to your case that these are developer-aimed improvements, right? But nice.

I mean, really, really, really nice. I will say, they have a little blurb in here about the streamed-on installation. I was skeptical. I've been something of an Anaconda hater in the past,

but it's better. It's getting better. I'm glad to see it. Yeah, it was pretty painless. Yeah, it was. I went through an installation on a laptop earlier today, and I let it do

the auto-disk partitioning for the first time. And it uses LVM, and it makes some sane judgments. And the other thing I've noticed is I feel like it's faster now to when it's actually throwing files on the disk. I agree, yeah. Did you, like, it felt like it was already copying files before. Well, part of it is because it does, like, a post install, too, where it runs you through creating the wizard for users

and, like, setting a few other small details about the system. So it takes that out of the installation process. So you're really, in the installation, you're setting your disk configuration, you're adding a user account, and you're setting your time zone. And then there's final details that'll ask you after the system boots.

And in fact, you don't even have to add a user account necessarily. Oh, that's perfect. Yeah, and you just get to blasting files on the system. It's a really good version of Fedora 28. And since Ubuntu is shipping the same version of GNOME, I'll just say this now, and maybe if anybody in the mumble room wants to chime in with their thoughts, this is by far the best version of GNOME I've ever used.

It is cleaner, simpler, and more efficient than macOS. I think it is, if Apple were to have to hit the reset button today, if macOS wasn't nearly a 14-year-old operating system, but say it was nine months old, I really think this is what they would have as a goal. The new system settings is just, it's so good. Like the Adaptia theme now is good. Ubuntu's theme is, it feels a little old to me, but in actuality, GNOME still looks great. It still looks good. So it's such a good version of GNOME.

It's not one that's pulling me back to GNOME, but if you are a GNOME user, GNOME 3.2.8 really nails it. And of course, Fedora's always got a great implementation. Does anybody in the Mamba room have any thoughts on the GNOME aspect, either for Ubuntu or Fedora? So this begs the question, has it crashed for you yet? Well, I've only used it a little bit. And I'm not using it

in production. I don't have any intention to. So I'll see in the review after I've used it for a couple of weeks. We'll see. At least get a week into it. But if you are a GNOME fan, it definitely feels pretty fast. It always feels good on a clean install, but it just is so great. It's definitely worth it. One thing, I really appreciate that because

when I'm running Gnome on Arch or something else, I'm really fine with Gnome defaults. I don't do a ton of tuning to it. They do a little bit more than even I'm willing to do on most installations. So it's just pleasant. Yeah, and Gnome Photos also is now the default in Fedora 28. That's finally coming along. It's been a long time coming.

Just small things, lots of small things in there. Check it out. We'll have links in the show notes if you guys would like. But last chance, if you guys out there have any thoughts before I get to my review, let me know. Go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and send me your thoughts. Or something I should try on Fedora. Because since it's not my daily driver, I'd love to know. Also, linuxunplugged.com slash contact.

Last chance to get in before the review comes, because I'd always be down for trying something. Or your experiences, also really good. I'll share an experience with you, Wes. How about that? Please do. I'm curious. You ready for this? Linux.ting.com.

No way. Whoa. Linux.ting.com. It's mobile. It's better than unlimited. If you just use less you pay less you don't have to pay

for a whole bunch of minutes or a ton of SMS messages I don't I don't know if I used a single SMS message

last month I don't actually think I did the only thing I might have done to trigger an SMS message would be to log into a

Twitter account from like a new installation and then it does like that SMS verify thing that I hate so much that That might have been it. There's other ways to get to that.

So why pay for messages? There's no reason. I don't even need a hundred messages, let alone a thousand or whatever. It's not 2001 anymore. It's not. And you've got Wi-Fi at work, so why are you paying for data when you're not using it? Or if you've got Wi-Fi at home? It doesn't make any sense. And you might have better signal on GSM networks in your area

or maybe on CDMA. So why can't you choose? See, that's all just normal with Ting. You pick and choose what works best for you. There's no contract. There's no early termination fee. It's really mobile the way it should be. If the whole market had to start over today, this is what they would have to do.

I get messages all the time from people outside the country. They're like, you know, that's how it kind of works here. That's how, you know, the way Ting works. That's kind of how it works here. And I'm like, yeah, that's not how it works here in the States. And that's what makes Ting so great. It's pay for what you use, six minutes for the line. And then just whatever you use, minutes, messages, megabytes, boom, you're done. You don't want it. You don't want the phone anymore. You turn it off. You're done. You want to bring over a new phone. You can activate the whole freaking thing through their webpage. They got a BYOD page where you can double check everything.

You put in the ESIN or whatever it is through the website, boom, activate, you're done. You never even had to talk to a human being, but here's the crazy thing. If you need to, they've got really nice ones.

Friendly support people that are actually phone geeks, crazy concept, control panel to manage everything. And then great support to back it up. You can buy a device directly. It's not loaded with like the ting experience. They're not going to, they're not going to prevent updates because they need to get their new ting video store on your phone they don't do any of that stuff you just want to use them for simple services or you want to use them

as your main internet connection ting don't care and you can get started at linux.ting.com take 25 off a device or get 25 in service credit if you bring one that's linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring this here program, linux.ting.com. Now, did you hear the story that we covered in Linux Action News this week? Google has just forked a popular GTK theme. Now, what are they doing? What are they doing? I really want to know. It's like Adaptia, but it's Googlified, paperized, and blued.

And it's a new GTK theme. It's got a material design, and it looks pretty good. It's called Cross Adaptia right now, and it's up on Google's Code Hub. And commits show that their designers are already busy making changes and adjustments to the theme. And it looks like it's something that'll be used on Chrome OS as part of their new Linux application containers,

which starts to suggest that we're not just going to be seeing a terminal for SSH, but perhaps the ability to run things like Eclipse or other GTK applications inside Chrome OS. And you got to figure Google's designing this for end users if they're going in to the trouble of creating their own theme that looks like other Google properties. This is a lot of specific work for something else, right? It's not just a whim. There's people being paid to work on this.

So why does Chrome OS have its own theme now, Wes? What do you think is going on here? Are we going to start seeing Linux desktop apps on Chrome OS? I'm kind of concerned. I'm kind of excited. What does it do to their, you know, their sort of mantra? These are like simple machines that you simple machines that you can't mess up that aren't complicated for people to use

I know they're implementing it with containers and other technologies to keep things isolated and controlled but still it might seem like a different sell to a simple user I wonder if it's not just it could just be about adding additional value to Chromebooks to make them

more appealing to businesses or system administrators and developers could totally be all of additional value to Chromebooks to make them more appealing to businesses or system administrators and developers. It could totally be all of that. But I do also have some conspiracy bacon. Fry it up. Fry it up for me. We've been eating a lot of meat these last few days here at the studio, so why not fry up a little bacon? And I'll tell you what I think it is, and I hope I'm wrong,

but I think Fuchsia OS is going to replace the underpinnings of Android as the core operating system. They're going to boot Linux out of Android, and it could be semi-devastating for Linux. I'm not the only person that thinks this, obviously, but some people I really respect recently have been talking more and more about it. And it seems like Fuchsia OS could be the perfect little wedge to get Linux out to just get rid of all of that pain-in-the-arse LTS issue,

pain-in-the-arse GPL stuff, have their own OS in there that's been purpose-built to power mobile devices, and they essentially would dump Linux for their Android platform, and at the same time double down on Linux on the Chrome OS platform. So Chrome OS will stay Linux.

Chrome OS will have the ability to run Linux applications. Chrome OS will have the ability to run the terminal. Chrome OS will have the ability to run the terminal. You know, you'll have complete Linux environments in these containers. They may even go the direction of Windows 10 and start offering different distro environments that are similar to like the Windows subsystem where you can pull down Ubuntu or you can pull down SUSE. They're going to have probably, you know, the same thing,

CentOS, Ubuntu containers, maybe not initially. Right. This is reminding me also kind of got like a Mac feel. They've got their separate phone-controlled environment and then maybe something a little more developer, power user-friendly on the desktop. Yeah, you could see how that would be appealing to them, right? And I don't know about that, because I feel

like if Android switched away from Linux, Linux development could lose quite a bit of momentum. But it does seem like this is where this is going. Anybody in the Mumble room have any thoughts on MyBacon? Well, we're just about a week away from Google I.O., so we could hear some stuff next week. Yep. Yeah, we may have answers sooner than later. I'm planning to cover bits of I.O. that are interesting in Tech Talk today.

If there's anything very Linux-specific, I'll cover it here in this show. But regardless of MyBacon and regardless of Android, I think this is great for Chrome OS because it means more desktop Linux apps in way, way more users' hands at a lower point of entry for cost. And in some cases, like my kids,

they get these books via school, the Chromebooks. They just, boom, here you go, here kid. Here's an entire laptop with the Google Chrome browser on it. Have at it. That makes me a lot more excited, right? There's a terminal there they can actually play with and learn from. That's great. I think everybody now is

paying for laptops that are made for selling services, not for you to own them. That's a fair point, yeah. Their goal here is to get more people locked into Google services, and they're going to use Linux apps as the way to sweeten that pot. That makes me feel horrible now. Not even that.

Not even just the Google services. The apps will be services. Yeah, and I see what you're saying, too, because realistically, you may have to have, like, certain Google account to get these things, or you may be controlled through the admin control panel of the community,

or of the business administrator. So, yeah. Okay. Well, I want to change topics now, because that's really depressing. I don't want to get bummed out. Keep this train going. Yeah. We had an interesting chat at LinuxFest Northwest with one Mr. Alan Jude about BPF. Now, you may have heard, and there's an article that I'll link to that was posted just a couple of days ago. Why is the kernel community replacing IB tables with BPF?

And this is a pretty complicated little system that will be living inside the kernel. There's a great talk that just came out recently that really explains it. This is essentially an entire virtual machine that will be running inside the Linux kernel. Now, I know that sounds like a really bad idea, but there's other virtual machines that already exist that we just don't really talk about very much.

It's already happened. That damage has been done. This will be one of many, and they're really on the right track. They look like they're securing this thing well. And Jed, Wes, and Alan Jude were sitting down at the booth at LinuxFest Northwest, and the topic came up. And I thought it'd be great to get the clarification on what BPF is right here on the show. The successor to IP tables is NF tables, right? Okay. So there's a successor to that now, too.

I was reading a little bit about that. Is that EBF tables? EBPF is the tracing framework. I think this is just a BPF-based firewall thing. So do you know what BPF stands for? A Berkeley Packet Filter. Boom!

So you're like, oh, look, if we compile the firewall rules down to a BPF, we can match them fast like TCP dump does. Do you know what firewall's been doing that for 20 years? Oh, yeah. IPFW. Totally. Yeah, it turns out there's a fast way to do a firewall. It's because, oh, look, this machine language is specifically designed to match packets.

Exactly. It's really good at matching packets. Yeah, totally. Well, writing rules can be difficult. Like, yeah, just the syntax between TCP dump and Wireshark, they don't use the same syntax. And I find it continually confusing. I'll jump from one to the other. I have to go back to the web page and look up more examples

because I can't remember them all. Back in school, for our firewall class, we learned three firewalls, IP tables, IPF, which is the predecessor to PF on FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and Cisco PIC. Although the... Is it PIC? The Cisco we had was literally like a 486-based appliance. Oh, wow.

Is that right? The old one. Before they made it a dedicated, it was like a regular 486 with some firewall cards in it or something. But the Cisco PIC, that's been dead for a decade. Or should have been. It was pretty much dead when we were learning it.

The syntax is pretty similar to what you would get on a newer Cisco, like an ASA or whatever. Even ASAs are out of fashion. In particular, we had one client who was doing some streaming video. TV Ontario had this system called Homework Help,

where after school, they would pay some teachers to be available via an internet chat thing to help you with your math homework. And every student in grade 7 through 10 got it for free if they were enrolled in a public school. But they would have a streaming video part, too, and they were pushing up to like 600 megabits out of the network. And their Cisco ASA couldn't handle that.

Couldn't keep up. Yeah, so we replaced that with, we turned their dev server into a PFSense. And oh, look, now we can push a gigabit with no problem. No problem. Yeah, that's Alan's way of saying it's because of performance. It's because you can compile it down to this machine language, and the rules can be executed wicked fast. He goes into some bottleneck troubleshooting that he did for a 40 gigabit.

I think it was actually two, so it was in total 80 gigabits worth of transfer bottleneck troubleshooting he did on a FreeBSD system in this week's episode of TechSnap. Yeah, go check that out. Yeah, TechSnap.systems. But BPF is coming. IP Tables is out. And speaking of other things

that are just coming down the pipe, not too far away, is the next version of Elementary OS. And I am getting a little hyped, I got to be honest. And that might be because Mr. Daniel Foray keeps stopping by and telling me about all the great stuff.

And this one speaks to me, Dan, deeply, deeply speaks to me. I love this stuff in the new update you guys posted about notifications. And I didn't realize how much freaking work you guys had put into it, like the heuristics that you had in place. But now we're coming out. Can you kind of recap what's going on here? Yeah. So kind of historically what happened was last cycle, we introduced this notifications indicator, right? So that when an app sends a notification and you miss it,

the notifications indicator will catch it and you can review it later. Same as you have on like notifications that are on your phone. The problem is that only some applications were actually sending their ID with the notification. So some notifications come through and we didn't really know which app it's from. So we had this heuristic in place to try to guess. And it sometimes was wrong. And so we get people saying, hey, your notifications indicator is broken. It doesn't work.

It does it wrong. And we're saying well you know the problem was that these applications never sent an id uh and so it was kind of hard to say you know hey this is not really our fault uh while we still had this heuristic in so now we're pulling the heuristic out and any application that doesn't send its ID is just going to be categorized as other. But at the same time, we went and we submitted patches upstream to Electron, into Firefox, and into LibNotify to make sure that application developers had an easy way to make sure their applications are reporting their ID correctly and didn't have to use the raw Dbus API. And I would imagine Electron apps are probably the most frequent offender of this missing ID? Yeah, and the Electron patch has actually been committed upstream as well. Oh, great.

Hopefully that'll fix it for all Electron apps. And this isn't just specific to elementary OS and Pantheon. This is actually how I did notifications identify in Gnome Shell as well. Oh, that's awesome. So that'll be great for Gnome users. Everybody wins. Now, what's the LibNotify part for? It sounds like it's involved with notifications, but what specifically is LibNotify responsible for? So we have a problem because way back in the day, there was a specification proposed that was the free desktop notification specification,

but it only kind of lived on the GNOME wiki. And it was kind of adopted de facto by a bunch of different desktops, but it never really made it into free desktop. And LibNotify kind of represents that spec. Well, GNOME added a G notification to their stack. And this is kind of a new version of the spec but it's not really compatible with the old lib notify version and all of the gnome apps use g notification and so it's like different libraries that kind of do the same thing but don't all kind of respect

each other so there's a bigger story and we're trying to work closer with Upstreams to make sure that we all kind of agree, like, what should the spec be, and what should it support, and try to make sure that things work good across desktops. But this is kind of a first step. Right on. And also just honorable mention here, Files is looking so good, and it sounds like... So clean! Yeah, look at that.

It's beautiful. We're looking at a picture of it here in the studio, and we'll have a link at linuxunplugged. It's so clean. Yeah, look at that. It's beautiful. We're looking at a picture of it here in the studio. We'll have a link at linuxunplugged.com slash 247 if you guys want to read Dan's whole post and see the picture of it. It is great looking, Dan. And I got to say, it sounds like a lot of the back end is sort of getting retooled to match the more modern development processes on elementary OS. Yeah, absolutely.

I think that some people might know that Files is our oldest app. We started way back in the very beginning with the Nautilus fork. And then we eventually kind of outgrew that and then wrote this file manager, Marlin. And the modern day elementary files comes from that background.

So it was a C app. It was before we adopted Vala. So we're kind of still migrating that code base. And this cycle, we were able to do way more of that and a lot of cleanup and migrating to better versions of utilities from upstream libraries like GTK and GIO instead of using our own internal libraries. So that's performance improvements, stability improvements, more maintainable code. It's just getting way better all around. That does sound really good. Well, I will definitely kick the tires when it comes. Any other honorable mentions you want to toss out from the post before we leave the rest to the listener at home to read?

One thing actually I'm really excited about is improvements going into elementary code. So we landed support for editor Config by default in Elementary Code last month, and this month we have it turned on and enabled out of the box. And now the guys over at Elementary Code

drew a nice little icon for us, and we're on their homepage now. That looks so good. We're seeing some steady updates to code this cycle. This has gotten a lot of attention. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. We're definitely trying to get more feedback from developers about the tooling on our platform

and documentation and find out how we can meet their needs and make it really easy to write applications for App Center and Elementor OS. I love the focus. There's so much focus on application developers. You're actually curating this in a really great environment for people to do that. So all these improvements, people are just going to be happier to be there.

That's how we got up to 87 new natives. Wow, I was just going to ask. Right? 87. That is really good. That'll be a strong amount in the App Center when Juno releases. That's really cool. How close are we getting to a beta release here? Because I know there's just, what, under 10 bugs left to get squashed?

We are so super close. So we're kind of looking at if we can maybe punt a couple of those issues to the second beta so we can get a public beta out sooner. And what are the other release tasks we have to do with the website and things like that. So I'm trying to get

it pushed out ASAP and I'm working with our teams to make that happen. But as it stands right now, we just have the seven issues left on our tracker. Seven. Okay. I'm excited. I like that it's not a date. It's when the issues are closed or when the issues can

be at least punted to the next beta. That's great. Well, Dan, keep us posted because it's a fascinating case study to watch this for the show. And it's fun to see how you guys work, the thought you put into all of this, how it all has kind of been coming together over the last year. And we're

so close now that you've got to keep us posted because we're almost to the goal, which is the release. All right. Well, we have much, much more to talk about as the show goes on. I'm really looking forward to covering some important news and then talking a little dark table because this is, I think, going to be one of my new tools in my bag. But before we get there, I got to mention the tool that I've had for years now, and that's the tools over at DigitalOcean. And you can be one too. Do.co.

Wait, hold on. Let me get that prop out. Sorry. I got to rustle it. There we go. Oh, yeah. It's so fresh. Not to really.

No, not anymore. I've done a lot of rustling. Do.co. Slash unplug. Go there to get a $100 credit when you sign up with a new account. Yeah, I said $100. Yeah, I know we usually say $10. I said $100, and with the

three cents an hour, my favorite rig, I mean, you're going to go nuts. do.co.pl. DigitalOcean is simple infrastructure that you can deploy and use it in production, use it for testing, use it for learning in less than 55 seconds. And everything is SSDs.

Every single machine, they have 12 data centers around the world. They got 40 gigabit connections coming into those hypervisors. The whole stack runs Linux, KVM for the virtualizer. Then they put an amazing interface that no one else in the industry

can touch on top of all of it. They call it the dashboard. It's a dashboard for days. And then to make things better, they've got an API that's well-documented, clear, easy to read. And I'm pretty sure that dashboard is a client of that API because everything the dashboard supports you can do in the API. That's great because that means there's a ton of open source code that's already written

that you can take advantage of. Good to go. Just have that at Haas or build something yourself from the ground up. DO.CO slash unplugged. But it gets even better. Even now, what has 1804 been out but just a few days? They are rapidly updating their documentation. I just today read a guide on how to configure Apache with an SSL cert on 1804 in just a few minutes. Easy to read, clear documentation. They're updating everything for the new releases. You can spin up whichever version of Linux you like,

or you can even deploy that free BSD. I know, I know. They're updating everything for the new releases. You can spin up whichever version of Linux you like, or you can even deploy that free BSD. I know, I know. And they also recently announced flexible droplets where you can mix and match the different things that you need. So maybe you need a lot of CPU for your application, more CPU. You don't need much disk? Yeah, just put it all in CPU. Or you want a ton of disk because you're doing some logging and you don't need a ton of RAM or CPU or whatever you need, you mix and match. Flexible droplets, $15 a month. With that $100

credit, you can get pretty far. Just go to dio.co slash unplugged. That's dio.co slash unplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Random excessive paper flopping and oops, just tore a little more. Look at that. Dio. I don't know how much longer that's holding up. Dot CEO slash unplug. I think once that paper's ripped, they're going to end the $100 deal.

I think that's because he better go soon. Okay, let's just talk about a little serious news before we get to the dark table stuff because this is just a heads up. If you are a Void Linux user, you need to be paying really close attention to a situation that's been going on for a while and isn't really moving anywhere. And you could end up getting misinformation. So I want you to just kind of track this in the show. We'll keep links in the show notes. I may even try to retroactively update the show notes for 247 down the road, if anything changes. So linuxunplugged.com slash 247 for those.

But right now, the Void Linux maintainers have lost contact with the guy that used to be the head manager of Void. I don't know how to put this. It's really awkward. Basically, the project leader has disappeared. And they have no contact with him since the end of January. They've had no meaningful contact really for over a year with him. And he's got the keys to several things like the GitHub page, the IRCs, the domains. They've tried to contact GitHub and GitHub told them to go F a duck that they weren't interested in this dramatic situation. They've contacted

Freenode support, but they really haven't gotten very far with that yet. And they've gotten partial control over VoidLinux.com, but they don't have control over the one

that people use the most, which is VoidLinux.eu, which is the one they really want. And they're in limbo, they say, trying to get back on track. They don't see any possibility

of regaining access to the GitHub organization, so they're going to have to move to get back on track. They don't see any possibility of regaining access to the GitHub organization. So they're going to have to move to a new GitHub organization. They feel like it may be the same for domains. And for the IRC channels, they're still trying to get in contact with Freenode. Now, this has been going on since January, and I didn't really know what to do with this. Because I thought, is somebody sick? Is somebody, you know, are they missing?

I didn't know what was going on with the project leader, but I've heard from a few folks who say that they just kind of went AWOL and that it might be like, he's fine health-wise, but no longer interested in doing the project or something like that. You know, and isn't this always the concern about these mom and pop small distros? Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, and if you're going to make it, if you're going to involve the community and you're going to have other people that feel responsible for the project, then it's probably essential to set up

some sort of minimal governance process or at least, you know, make it so that one bus accident can't take out the whole project. Yeah, and you don't want to undermine the Linux community's faith in small distros because if nobody's going to be willing to give a small distro a try, they'll never become a big distro. And then we have a chicken and the egg problem.

And the only solution I really see for this is something similar to Canonical's Ubuntu flavors where you kind of graduate into an official member of the Ubuntu community, and there's some governance. I believe you have to hear it too. Obviously, Wimpy or Popey could speak much more coherently to this. And there's at least some assurance of a structure as an end user. It feels like some test must have been passed.

Maybe, Wimpy, why don't you start with because you have so much experience with mate uh am i is my read on that right like is that is there some sort of assurance if it's becoming of an official flavor that it's not just going to go away one day yeah so the first thing is is in order in order to become official an official flavor of ubuntu you have to demonstrate that you have some sort of long-term maintainership of the packages that are specific to the flavor that you want to create. So in the case of Ubuntu Mate, back in the day, I had to demonstrate that I had been maintaining those packages in Debian for six months before we were granted flavor status, and that's for the flavour itself.

Following that, then you can become an Ubuntu member, which also is a demonstration of a long-term commitment to the Ubuntu project, and that buys you some additional rights within the Ubuntu project, such as voting powers for the councils and what have you. So there is some process there to ensure that people coming into the project have already got a track record of being long-term contributors to the thing that they want to work on.

Okay, that makes sense. So I want to bounce around here a bit. I want to go to Dan. He has a point about open governance, and then I want to go to Eric after that. So Dan, why don't you bring up your point about open governance, and not just even for open source, but just in general? Yeah, there's a point that was made earlier about bus factor, right? And so it's not just necessarily if someone voluntarily steps down, but you never know what's going to happen in their life. But I remember there's a thing in the canonical code of conduct, or Ubuntu code of

conduct about gracefully stepping down, right? And I think everybody should kind of have this idea built into their governance of what happens when someone needs to step down. Yeah, okay. And Eric, you've had some experience with this with Ubuntu Studio recently. That's correct. It's been a whirlwind. Basically, what's happened is Seth Hallstrom, he's the project leader for Ubuntu Studio. He just completely ran out of physical time in his life to be able to be dedicated to the project. around the idea of making it an abutu studio council well there were a handful of people that got into it but nothing really ever came of it so in february they re they reassessed and said hey we want to try to make this go forward and um but nobody was really stepping up so i finally like hey i'll step up i'll join the. I'll help to lead this thing. I became the council chair since I was the one running the meetings already.

And then Ross Gammon, who is the release manager, he had to step out due to timing reasons as well. So then I stepped in to be the release manager. So it's been a real whirlwind. wind. But this is one of those things where if you can open it up to like a council type idea, where you have a bunch of people helping to lead the project, the bus factor gets significantly lower. I believe there's another better strategy that nobody really mentioned. Go ahead. Money. You know, if you buy something, there's a contract there. And if you're actually willing to pay for the development of the distro you use, you incentivize the person. And if something else fails, like you lost control of the, well, the person just disappeared, there's no control of the website, you can actually prove legal ties to that project. You can actually, as a collective ownership, get that. And that actually

is a better, I believe, better business model for the creator to have an incentive to stay, for the people using the software to have actually demonstration of possession of the product. And ultimately, that should simplify the whole thing. And why does canonical flavors work? Because canonical has money to maintain it. No, no, it's not about money. The project, when it first started off, it's about people. It's about community. It's about the fact that there are people willing to step up and look after things. And as Dan said, the community came together and made a code of

conduct that said look if you if you can't do this anymore everyone has real life people have children get married take a sabbatical change direction buy a mac whatever it is they might move away from your open source project and if they do as long as they hand over grace gracefully then it's fine and one of the things we've done in ubuntu which i know a lot of other projects do as well is when you create something you create it in a way that it's not just you looks after it so for example if you create an irc channel on freenode just as a simple example, if you create an official Ubuntu channel, so that means it starts with hash Ubuntu dash something, right? So you create a new IRC channel. We recommend that you give rights to that channel to the Ubuntu IRC council, so that in the event that you got

hit by a bus or your IRC account was compromised, or you had a baby or bought a mac or whatever it is someone else could take over and then give that hand that on to the next person it's not that you're a bad person for moving on it's not that any money changed hands in any way shape or form there was nothing about money it's just about people and process and having a simple process in place which allows things to move from one person to the next person down the line. I do kind of agree about, you know, if you have this as your primary form of income, though, there is kind of more of an obligation, right? Like if you depend on this open source project to put food on your table, you're much less likely to buy a Mac. Yeah. And

not only that, actually, there's the other part, which is when you are stepping down, I'm talking about, let's say you get hit by a bus and you really wanted to control things on your own. You didn't really trust anybody at the time you started the project because this counseling thing is very pretty, but it requires trust. Like you're talking to other people that you may have seen or not. And this takes time to build that trust. Until then, you're really not assigning things you paid for where your name lies on to other people. So ultimately, it's a process. And until that time, if the monetary incentive is there, it facilitates that, number one, you being incentivized to actually be responsible to the stuff you're putting out.

And secondly, there's legal ways for people to get to you if you're not putting it out, if there's a commitment to it. And ultimately, even if you disappear, it is easier to prove because there's transaction records and to get something done. While if nothing exists, you really don't. That might be true, but that's not how it worked in Ubuntu. Now, this is also really kind of a benefit of an organization like the Software Freedom Conservancy. Now, you don't really see a lot of distributions underneath it, although I don't know if that's entirely true,

but you do see a lot of large projects underneath it. And the Conservancy provides an infrastructure to open source and free software to focus on what they do. They do the code and they do all of the, you know, the legal stuff and the operational stuff and take care of the, like the getting, make sure your donations are legal and stuff and documentation for certain aspects of the business. And that's sort of what the, some of the services that the conservancy offers. And I don't know, maybe, maybe one day the conservancy would extend that to more and more distros. I don't know And I don't know, maybe one day the conservancy would extend that

to more and more distros. I don't know. I don't think the solution is really easily attainable for how to make sure these small distros don't go away because you're still dealing with perhaps potentially tens of thousands of end users that just kind of get caught in whatever drama is going on behind the scenes. But additionally, I think it does an untold amount of damage

to the reputation of Linux, of open source development. And I heard a term the other day that just really got me mad. And it was a derogatory term for the reliability of open source developers. And the podcaster said, well, you know, he's just really open sourcey. He's just open source developers. And the podcaster said, well, you know, he's just really open source-y. He's just open source-y. I don't like the sounds of that. And I'm like, what does that mean?

You know, like he just doesn't do a good job. And he just sort of flaked out. He's open source-y. And I was just, I was like, it's, I don't know. It really got me upset. Were you going to say something, Wimpy? I was about to. I was saying what open source-y like Linus Torvalds

who's been doing what he's doing for 26 years. Yeah. Oh, I'm actually angry right now. My heart rate is up just even remembering, recalling it. I got so upset by it. So, all right, let's change gears to something that makes me happy. There is a new release of Darktable this week. Version 2.4.3 comes out, and it's perfect timing because I'm just kind of getting my Darktable this week. Version 2.4.3 comes out,

and it's perfect timing because I'm just kind of getting my Darktable on. And Brent, your timing was really good. Brent is a professional photographer by trade. We're going to have some of his photos linked in the show notes. You've been using Darktable for how long? I've been using Darktable since about, I believe it's 2012, maybe even 2011. So you've been watching the development for a while.

Yeah. And you use it for a professional workflow even 2011. So you've been watching the development for a while. Yeah. And you use it for a professional workflow, like you were working here today at the studio, and you were touching up photos all day in Darktable. I would say for me professionally, it's 80%, maybe even 90% of where I do all my work. Oh, really? Okay, well, see, this makes me pretty excited

because I always thought Darktable was for only individuals like yourself, but Brent stopped by the booth at LinuxFest Northwest. That's where we met him, and he told me an anecdote that made me realize that even I could probably figure out Darktable. I think it was about actually a week ago, I was invited to do a workshop at a Maker's Fest, which was a first thing for me and really great.

And I thought, okay, how do I introduce some sort of Linux or open source into this because I actually didn't see very much of that in there so I thought okay I'm gonna do a workshop based on using dark table because people get easily attracted to photography and that's my specialty but I'm gonna introduce it in a way that applies to any user so I ended up with you know a class full of people that were ranging from enthusiasts all the way to kids. And actually the kids were the ones that picked up on it the fastest. And so there's the beauty about Darktable, I think, is that it can be extremely powerful and extremely flexible, but it can also be very, very simple. So if you just determine a workflow that is one, two, three steps, then your adjustments and your cropping is just slider bars.

So that's the way to go. It's super straightforward. Start like that. Oh, yeah. Ignore like Photoshop's and GIMP's and stuff like that for regular everyday stuff. What would you say are three things that you should touch on every photo you take? So I can tell you that easily. So every single photo, I would say A, cropping.

In camera, you know, sometimes you don't always do it well, or you get a different idea once you see it on the large screen. So cropping is number one. And in the cropping tool in Darktable, there's some, like, skewing of angles, which kind of comes into play as well, and they make it super, super easy. You just right-click and go, this should be straight, and it fixes everything for you. So that's one. Two would be exposure.

They have an exposure slide bar with blacks level. And so that can get you pretty darn far. And then color is the third one, I would say. Like boost it a bit or what? Like what do you mean when you say color? Like white balance kind of a thing. Right. So if you shot in various environments, sometimes your camera can't.

It's not as good as our eyes at adjusting to color differences, right? So anyone who starts to be able to learn to see color can then determine that, oh wait, this photo would actually be a lot more dynamic if the colors were actually corrected to true. So for instance, behind you, you have this crazy green light that keeps changing.

We've noticed. It makes it impossible to set our camera. So then necessarily, and that's the beauty of RAW, is that you can adjust that later on. So every 30 seconds you have a different color going on, and we'll just correct that later. Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah, all right.

You did. You convinced me to try it. So I'll install it. Actually, we installed it on one of the machines here in the studio already to give it a go. And Chris, tell me how easy it was to do that. We were talking about that. That actually, I think, was a big takeaway for me

when I was looking at it. And it must be something you appreciate too, is we didn't have to go log in to some proprietary vendor's website and authorize anything. Find your license key. Yeah, Brent was like, you know, before I go, I could just take care of these right here.

Do you want me to just do that now? And I'm like, okay. App to install Darktable. And he was off and working. But then you took it, you have like an extra step that you take. Do you want to share that secret? Absolutely. So, yeah, I'm not even using the same distribution as you. I'm on Arch, but that doesn't seem to be a problem anywhere. It seems to be a little bit

everywhere. But what I've done for myself because I was thinking something like this may happen in the future, and just to make things easier in my own system, I actually keep my favorite Darktable settings database. It's like a whole profile? Yeah, the entire profile that you find under.config. And that includes your common colors that you change things things to like your common presets for photo editing. Yeah. I've got a bunch of presets. So every single module in dark table can have its own presets or multiple presets. Uh, and you can also define defaults for when you import images, what gets applied. So, um, I was able to, you know, despite never having

used the laptop that, that I was on in five minutes, I had my own home environment right there. That is slick. It's so great. It's so great. And it kind of means you're not married to any one hardware vendor. You're not married to any one particular OS or even distribution. And Darktable's free software. So you don't even, it's just, that's great. And they just recently had an update to GIMP

that we covered in Linux Action News. Oh, gosh, yeah. And GIMP is now working with Darktable, so you can send from Darktable to GIMP, and they're going to understand each other, and it's like a big kumbaya now between the two. And it's a new version of GIMP that looks pretty great. It does look really nice.

First big update in six years. You can't see that, but I have this giant smile on my face. Oh, yeah? Yeah, you like it? Are you a GIMP fan? So the other 20% is I'm doing in GIMP, and I haven't quite launched into Critter yet, in GIMP. And I haven't quite launched into Krita yet, but GIMP for me for many, many years has been

doing the simple, offering the simple features that I really need when I need that extra 20% of doing some really specialty photography-specific adjustments that need to be done that Darktable just isn't designed for and I don't think should include

anyways. We have a bunch of great photos that have been tweaked by, and taken too, by Brent in Darktable from LinuxFest Northwest. 158 of them and they're great. And the cutest pictures of Levi

ever. So cute in there. It's ridiculous. If you like puppies, you've got to go check out the link in linuxunplugged.com slash 247. I'll drop a link to the album in the IRC, too, if you're watching live. Some really great photos of our party at Lady Joop's that we had out in the parking lot. So Saturday evening of LinuxFest Northwest, we decided to have like a tailgate style party. System76 brought a ton of meat. I brought two barbecues and a table and some camping chairs. I stuffed them all into the bays of Lady Jubes. The advantages of having a Class A is you have some big storage bays.

And brought two bags of charcoal and a chimney starter. And we put the awning out and started cooking. And we cooked for hours in the parking lot. And Brent was there snapping photos the whole time. It was a lot of fun. We were flying drones and geeking out in the parking lot. And here, oh, jeez, some good pictures right there. And there's a good time. Yeah, we had a really good time.

And I just thought that was maybe the highlight of the whole thing. So thanks for taking those pictures. And thanks for making them available to the whole audience to check them out too. That's really nice of you. Yeah, I'm happy to. And give people a little info maybe if they want to know more about your photography services and whatnot. Because I got to tell you, I'd like to bring you out to future events. Especially keep taking these cute pictures of Levi.

Where should they find you? Levi's an easy win, right? So website brentgerve.com. So I'll spell that out. B-R-E-N-T-G-E-R-V-A-I-S.com. That's just where you can see a little bit of my work. And there's, I'm not super active on social, but you can find me on Twitter, at Brent Gerve and I guess around the network.

Cool. Yeah, you may hear from him some more in the future, and check out the link in the show notes if you want to see the cutest puppy pictures ever. I mean, that's just indisputable. It's just a fact. It is not even my bias. It's just purely indisputable. All right. Well, we do have a roundup to get to of Ubuntu 18.04, the flavors, the new features, the server stuff, and maybe even a pretty cool feature that I didn't even think about until I heard about it from Ian at System76. And I went, why is nobody else doing that? So we'll play a clip from Ian from System76 about something that Pop!OS is adding that blew my mind. Really made me just really impressed. So we'll get there,

but let's talk about Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. That's where you go to sign up for a free seven-day trial and coincidentally, just surprise, surprise, support this show. Yeah. Keep us on the air. Maybe even get us to 300 freaking episodes. Linux, maybe this show. Yeah. Keep us on the air. Maybe even get us to 300 freaking episodes. Linux, maybe this show will have even more episodes than last. That would be amazing. Well, people go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug. They'll help us get there and you'll get a free seven-day trial. It's a platform

to learn more about Linux. A full-featured training library with everything you want to get new skills and advance your career. Now, I love the self-paced video courses. This is the sweet stuff. And Linux Academy, I happen to have firsthand experience as investing in great recording hardware. They've really put a lot of effort into this. They also offer hands-on scenario-based labs. They spin up the system on whatever infrastructure you need.

So if it's AWSs, or if it's an OpenStack system, or if it's just, you know, a Debian box, they spin that up for you, you log in over SSH, you get to work, you get a real scenario, something you can take and do in production. And if you ever get stuck, they have full time human instructors that are happy to help and answer your questions. So you get actual hands on experience. And you got the humans, that's pretty much as good as it's going to get because that's all they do is Linux. So they build features in that help you get there, like learning paths, which are a series of content and courses planned for instructors that get you into specific career tracks. Or if you're ready to take some big tests, they have courses created specifically to prepare you for certifications and practice exams too, which I got to tell you, if you don't practice,

you probably won't pass. So that's a great feature. And they have a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members who are surprisingly supportive. It's ridiculous. It's like an educational support group. And they do it all on their own. They're just great people.

Try it out, seven days for free. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Oh, and a big thank you, Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Oh, and a big thank you, Linux Academy, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So this 1804 release is big. I don't know if you've heard about Ubuntu, but it's a pretty big distribution, and they've got all kinds of different flavors. We've never talked about it before on the show,

so I can understand if you'd be unfamiliar with this, but there's a bunch of them. And let's talk about some of the main changes that are coming in Ubuntu 1804 itself. Because, you know, we're going to talk about the flavors here, but you're going to get Linux kernel 4.15. It's pretty nice. Yeah. You're going to get five years of support. Of course, this is also the first LTS to support and ship GNOME, where you get X11. You get the new minimal installation feature, which is a little different across the flavors,

but it is the best thing that has come to Ubuntu in a really long time. And Ubuntu's live kernel patch service, which I don't think is getting enough play in this release, is now front and center. It's part of the welcome screen when you log in for the first time. There's a GUI to turn it on. Live kernel patching is here. It's available. And I think it's kind of a big deal. And the fact that they've now wrapped a GUI around the whole thing to make it accessible to workstations, I think deserves a little more credit than it's getting. Files is getting a revamped user, or has now, a revamped user interface as well that looks really compact. There's also other things that are just nice to have because it just makes it back to normal.

Close, minimize, and maximize buttons are back on the right side of the window. And I do prefer GDM over LightDM, and 1804 has shipped GDM as the display manager. It's big. It's bulky. It's weird. But I just happen to like it better than LightDM. It does work. Well, I just, I find it to be smoother.

I don't know what it is. It's like my lock screen and all of it. I just, I than LightDM. It does work. Well, I just, I find it to be smoother. I don't know what it is. It's like my lock screen and all of it. I just, I find LightDM to be clunky. And I find GDM to, I don't know, just it suits my needs better. So those are some of the core big things that are coming in Ubuntu 18.04. And that's what I would look forward to.

Also, you know, you've got the other things like the Thunderbolt 3 support. You got GNOME 3.2.8. There's other really nice things. LibreOffice 6.0 is in there. But that's the main things I'd be looking for. And then you have a brand new LTS flavor. For the first time, Ubuntu Budgie 1804 LTS.

This is the first LTS, first official time they've been a flavor during an LTS release. It's going to be supported until April 2021, and it ships with the latest Budgie desktop, 10.4 Irish Summer, and it's accompanied with the GNOME 3.2.8 application. So that's kind of a big deal for them. Kind of a big deal, yeah. Congratulations. It's real now. That's awesome.

Friend of the show Dustin and teamwork on that. And then, of course, you've got all of the flavors that are available for download. Zubuntu, Kobuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu Proper itself, Kylan. And the flavors come in at three years of support instead of the five years that the mainline gets. Kubuntu, as I've mentioned many times, is shipping Plasma 5.12 LTS. So you've got a whole LTS stack there. Producer Michael has contributed several tweaks like Plasma Dark

by default, or I'm sorry, Breeze Dark. Nice. Yeah, it's actually really, really well done. VLC is the default video player, which I know a lot of people like. LatteDoc is in the archives, and KDE Connect is pre-installed. Excellent. Yeah, also, one of the other things it does is double-click is the default behavior

to open files and stuff. So Ubuntu 18.04 comes out now with a mostly high DPI support theme, which is good for them. And Studio has an 18.04 release, but it's only going to be supported for nine months. But they do have a new release. It's there. It's just not an LTS at this time.

And then look at that Ubuntu Kylan release. Coming in at three years, ideal for Chinese users. But damn if that doesn't look like Windows 7. It sure does. I'd say anybody that just prefers the Windows 7 UI and layout, you might just check out Kylan. The whole wonderful Ubuntu user layout. Is it Chillon, Wimpy, or is it Kylan?

It's Chillon, and it's based on Mate. Yeah, it really looks... What do you think of this? Well, it's delightful, right? Because it's really nice to see what we're making being used elsewhere in a very different way. I mean, they've layered their own tools and utilities on top of it to give it a very distinctive look. And, yeah, well, they're making what their users want and it's good to see.

It does look pretty sharp. Do they share the size of the user base? I mean, they must be large enough to have gotten flavor status. I have no idea how big their user penetration is. I think it's considerable. Yeah, I imagine.

It'd be interesting to test it. And then of course, our friends over at Mate, Ubuntu Mate is, I think it's considerable. Yeah, I imagine. Yeah, that would be. And then, of course, our friends over at Mate, Ubuntu Mate 1804, which ships Mate Desktop 1.2.0. It's got that new keyboard-friendly HUD, global menu if you want

that mutiny desktop layout, high DPI support that we know Wimpy's been working towards for about two years now, hardware acceleration and Marco, just like Wes always wants, color emoji support. Heck yes.

Got the Brisk menu in there. You got the improved Mate tweak tool, the new software boutique updates. I mean, I might be a little biased here, but this is one of the strongest flavors by far. 1804 Ubuntu Mate looks like some of your best work, Wim. Thank you that's very kind of you to say so and my own assessment is it's the the best release we've we've put out but by some margin I was really pleased with 1710 and when we when we released that I felt like that was good enough to be

you know the 1804 Lts but it's amazing how much we've got done in the six months because in 1710 there was no high dpi and there is now so you know it just goes to show how much of a hustle we've had on in those last six months to really really make uh this lts something for the next three years. It is really impressive. It's fantastic. I think a congratulations to the whole team is in order for that because it's really nice. I want to also talk about, in Ubuntu proper,

the new welcome screen because I might be wrong. I haven't dug deep into this, but when you're all kind of done with the new walkthrough, it brings up a new screen that says install some new apps. And you got Spotify on there. You got a lot of really well-known apps like Skype and Slack and more. So is this, maybe you should answer this, I don't know. Is this a Snap screen?

Are these all Snaps? Are these all Snap apps if I click one of those? They are. Every single one of them is a Snap. They're a selection of applications that we thought people who are coming from other platforms might like the familiarity of. So, you know, people who are coming from Windows or Mac or anywhere else might like to see, oh, I can get Spotify on here, I can get Slack, or I can chat to my friends on Discord, or my kids can play Minecraft on here, or if I'm a developer, I can easily get Android Studio, you know. So there's a whole set of applications, plus, you know, your favorite open source things like Brave

Browser and GIMP and all kinds of other stuff in there. Well, I just noticed that I recently seemed to be able to tell the installation spread across the different versions of Ubuntu. I don't know, is that something that's recently being published in the Snap Store? All of a sudden I'm seeing comparatively how many 1804 users over 1604, and it seems like this must be having subtraction because the 1804 numbers are skyrocketing right now. The view you're seeing there in the Snap store is a logarithmic scale of which platform those snaps are being installed on. And it's to represent that you can install these snaps

in lots of different places. And here are some of the places that you might find users who are using those things. Okay. That's a nice stat to have. I really do appreciate having there. And it was when I saw the 1804 numbers, I mean, it's already like the number one on some of those snaps. It's really mad. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I think it's all, if it hasn't already, it's probably close to overtaking the 1710 numbers already.

Yeah. Yeah. I looked a couple of hours ago and yeah, it's yeah, it's just nudging the 1710 numbers. Yeah, I'm looking at VLC right now, and exactly, exactly that. And then after that, it'll be on to 1604, which is remarkable. And it tells you that I think that welcome screen

is a great idea. I'm glad that was added. So I think we'll see those numbers move a bit more soon because we haven't turned on the prompts for 1710 users to get the prompt to upgrade to 1804. So that will be later this week. And then, of course, around June, July time, the 1604 users will get the prompt when we release 1804.1.

So, you know, the ramp up of 1804 at the moment is all people clean installing or deliberately choosing to do the upgrade. So we'll see that rock on a bit more as the upgrade prompts kick in. I wonder, does anybody have a guess? If you take out 18.04, 17.10, and 16.04, the next top distro is not an Ubuntu distro for the Slack snap. Does anybody have a guess what distro it is? It's not an Ubuntu distro for the Slack snap. Does anybody have a guess what distro it is? It's not an Ubuntu distro.

Arch Linux. That's a good guess. I see Neon on here. I see Linux Mint, Zorin. Arch is a little bit further down the road. No, Elementary 0.41 is the next distro after Ubuntu 18.04 right now for the Slack snap. Those elementary users, they love their Slack.

They're getting their work done. That's why they need to get their notifications done right. It's a good thing you're getting that done, Dan. That's pretty cool. It's pretty neat to see that. Debian 9 is doing pretty good. Neon 16.04 is doing good. Fedora 27 on the list.

Pretty cool. I like that you guys are releasing that. Fedora 27 on the list. Pretty cool. I like that you guys are releasing that. I'm going to keep an eye on that from now on. It's interesting to sort of compare the different apps and see what different distros shake out. Same with MailSpring. It's the same kind of spread on MailSpring. Yeah, people on elementary OS are just getting some damn

work done, apparently. What it's there for. Now, we can't really have an 1804 release discussion without getting to some of the cloud stuff, because that's just a huge part of what Ubuntu does now. But I know that Wimpy might have a story that someone like myself could appreciate. Yeah, so

we've inherited a couple of features from Debian's current developments that I think might be up your alley. The first is, if you install FFmpeg and you've got an NVIDIA card, when you install the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, that will automatically enable NV-ENC capability on the FFmpeg on the host. And also if you install OBS,

that will automatically pick up the fact that you have NVNK-enabled FFmpeg and turn on the hardware acceleration for you. Wow, I was literally just talking to Wes about this before the show, about how we were reviewing if we really needed to have the NVIDIA card during this last Linux-fast rebuild, and we landed on firmly, yep, we still have to have the NVIDIA card, we still got to have that acceleration,

so that is so great that you just made that easier. Yep, so no more building from source. Just install those two things and you're off to the races. Huh, yeah. Boy, it's getting good there because this new GIMP release I just mentioned earlier, one of the things they're including now is GPU acceleration too. So having a good working GPU setup on an Ubuntu desktop

I think is going to become more and more important. And I don't need to tell you guys that because I'm sure machine learning and all kinds of workloads like that are a big part of why that's been done, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, these contributions come from being based on top of Ubuntu, but Canonical have done a heap of work with NVIDIA to unlock compute performance for deep learning and AI and all that sort of stuff. Oh, right. You said it came from Debian, right. So let's talk about the new multi-cloud reality that Canonical finds themselves in. And this seems to be a point that Mark wants to hit in his interviews about Ubuntu 18.04.

He says that they've done boot time and performance optimized images of Ubuntu 18.04 on every major public cloud, and they made sure to be the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing. I would hope he thinks that way. He says having an OS tuned for far advanced workloads such as AI and machine learning is critical to a high-velocity team. And that's from actually the product manager at cloud at Google, who says that they're looking forward to deploying 1804 on the Google cloud infrastructure.

And Microsoft came in with their quote saying this was Craig. Their program manager says we're going to have hyper V optimized images that we've developed in collaboration with canonical. These will be enhanced experiences of Ubuntu and windows and our upcoming release this spring. Hyper V's quick create VM Gallery will now include an image for the latest Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release, officially stamped straight from Canonical. And I read this because it kind of underscores a theme I'm noticing in this 18.04 release is Canonical

is working with AWS and other large partners like Microsoft with Azure and Microsoft Hyper-V, and I presume many others, to say, well, what do you need us to custom build into these images for you? And it's something that they seem to be taking to a much larger scale with this release. I think, I mean, that matters a lot, right? Not every shop and everyone doing this

has time or even makes sense for them to do that sort of tuning. So if you can get that out of the box, it makes Ubuntu a natural choice. Yeah, it's definitely an incentive. So in Ubuntu podcast, season 11, episode 8, we interviewed David Britton, who's the lead for the Ubuntu server team. And he talked about the customizations and performance optimizations that Canonical do for the major cloud providers. So for each of their clouds, they get tailored images that are Ubuntu, but specific to their environment and their boot processes and their hardware.

Which episode again? As we're recording this, the current episode. So it's season 11, episode 8. Oh, very good. I look forward to listening to that. Now, that seems like all of that is all good and fine, but we haven't talked about Papa West, which isn't a flavor, not an official flavor, but it is one of the more well-known Ubuntu derivatives at this point.

And Ian sat down with us at the LinuxFest Northwest booth, and he told me about a feature they're adding in there that I think is pretty clever and I wonder if we're going to see it in other places pretty soon. The new installer sets up a recovery partition. Oh, okay. So that's something new that I haven't seen in Linux. I might have missed it.

I was just thinking about that today, actually. Yeah, so it's basically, there's an extra partition on the drive. It's about four gigabytes, enough to hold two ISOs conveniently. And it basically just holds the latest ISO so that you have media to reinstall your OS even if you don't have like a flash drive

or a CD drive available. I love that. Yeah. So can you do a fresh install, configure install, or does it give you a when you install a machine, does it come does Populous itself come pre-configured with all of the System76 repositories, assuming that you're using System76 hardware? Or is it come just as like a stock distro and then you customize, further customize Populous? You have to add like a PPA later and stuff like that. Right, for the hardware that's specific to System76.

How does that work? So, the new installer should be automatically installing the System76 package for all of the hardware support stuff. That's in the main Pop! OS repository now. I see. Okay. In addition to being in the System76 repository for other OSs. Okay. So, it should be installing that.

That may not be set up yet, though. I'd have to double-check on that. But I can message Jeremy on Slack at some point and figure that out. Yeah, because we are talking down the road here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, it's pretty well set up, and it's a whole entire distro, and it will be doing the hardware integration for System76, but it will work great on everything.

It doesn't require a System76 computer. Yeah, I mean, it's not lost on me that when you say the installer, I mean, that is something that most System 76 customers won't even see. Actually, no, because another thing the installer does is full disk encryption. Oh. And so now...

There's like a user interaction process. Right. So the first run for a new System 76 computer, it's actually going to run the installer, and it's going it's actually going to run the installer, and it's going to do a couple steps in the installer, and it's going to ask you if you want to encrypt. If you choose you don't want to encrypt, it'll just say, cool, we're done.

Now, it'll say you're done, and then it goes to the user creation. I got cut there because there's a lot of noise in the background, and somebody jumped on the mic. Because there were people having a really good time at Linux Fest. They sure were. But, Popey, you were noting in the chat room that there's other ways this can happen, maybe other companies that do this. Yeah, Dell have been doing this for a few years.

They ship their systems with a little Dell utility that when you first install it, it says, do you want to create recovery media? Basically, stick a USB key in and it'll make that. But if you don't, that's okay okay because they've done the same kind of thing where they've got a recovery um area a partition and you can just reboot and make it nuke the system back to clean and when i when i reviewed the dell laptop that they send us i just did that and reverted it back to factory defaults and then put it back in the box and sent it back to them. Right. That is really nice. I think I've always traditionally just nuke and pave the entire drive when I get a new machine. And I've always kind of regretted it

in the end because it is very, it's a nice convenience. So I like that they're essentially bringing that to everybody with Pop! OS. Yeah. more people should do this. And I wish we could do that more easily in Ubuntu so that the default Ubuntu install had a recovery partition and could do all of this magic voodoo. But we'd get a bit of pushback, I think, from some people. It's a lot of work to do. And it's easier for System76 to bake this in and for Dell to bake this in at the factory

when they're putting the images on the hard drives. It's a little less easier for us to do it as a USB stick, but it could be done, but it's a lot of engineering work. Yeah, right, and you know in that case that it's going on a laptop whereas Ubuntu goes lots of places. So I've been pretty impressed. My initial impressions, this is all they are at this point with 18.04, is that it's shipping just such a great version of GNOME,

and it iterated on top of 17.10 in a lot of great ways. The choice to go with X11, I think, was a safe one. And I can see where maybe a few things are going. I can see perhaps a new theme that I think people have talked about. It might be coming on the horizon. But I could also see interesting directions that new Ubuntu welcome screen goes. Perhaps more in the direction of Ubuntu Mate's welcome. That could be really interesting.

I would love to see that develop more in 18.10. And I would like to see just more of what they're doing. So far, my initial impression has been pretty solid. We'll see what the stability story is. We'll see what third-party application integration and support is. But right now, I can see where things are going, and I'm liking it. It seems like

1710, they pulled it off. And the 1804, they would have had to really blown it to mess up 1804. And they didn't. They didn't blow it. They just iterated on top of it. So both Fedora 28 to mess up 1804. And they didn't. They didn't blow it. They just iterated on top of it. So both Fedora 28 and Ubuntu 1804 might be, so far, my initial impression, some of their best releases I've ever seen out of either group.

It's a super exciting time to be a Linux user. I mean, there's so much going on. And 16.04 felt like it really shook up the landscape. It was kind of a monumental release and 1804 it's like now we're on that first just strictly better polish LTS I'm so excited yeah and I'm really I'm really uh I guess I can't even remember how long it's been since I've been tracking a Ubuntu release and a Fedora release around the same time where they're shipping at the same time and they're both shipping like the latest and greatest gnome. And so we're back to, well, who kind of has the cooler gnome implementation? Like it's been a long time since we've been there

and it feels, it feels kind of nostalgic. I love it. I'm really excited about the whole release cycle. So I think just a couple of solid releases. I got a cup, I got Fedora 20 on a machine. I got Ubuntu 18.04 proper on a machine. And then I have a mess of systems on Kubuntu 18.04. And I would be negligent if I didn't just say, hot damn. We put it in the belly of the beast. A trial by the greatest fire. There is one thing we can do at Jupyter Broadcasting to break a machine every single year.

Every year we've broken a machine. We sometimes had to run out and grab parts in the middle of the fest and rebuild our system right there on the table at our booth. We've had to reload operating systems, reinstall OBS, set up NVIDIA drivers, reimport all of our scenes. This year year we decided if kubuntu 1804 could survive linux fest northwest without crashing it would become our de facto production

operating system at jupiter broadcasting because there was literally no better way to break a system and we built one really great obsBS system. We Frankensteined a couple of systems together, but they're all really solid parts. Six cores, really fast, 32 gigs of RAM, MV&E drives, multiple MV&E drives, brand new fresh power supply, cleaned it all out, everything. It's just a gorgeous system. And we installed Kubuntu 18.04 minimal install on it. Minimal install is so perfect for the studio. It's so perfect. Nothing's missing. Nothing's missing.

Nothing extra. They nailed it. It's so great. And so we loaded that on this new OBS Frankenstein machine. And Noah and I sat around for hours because last year didn't go so well. We had a lot of crashes. Every episode of Linux Unplugged would suffer a crash.

And both Noah and I just felt super bad about that. And he's like, you know, Polar Bear, I don't want to leave and have that thing crash on you the next day. And I said,

Brown Bear, I don't want to have to go buy a Mac. So we got to make sure this works. That's like, you know, we're sitting here, we're getting real talk here. Like if this fails on us,

what am I going to do? Because I'm at a point where I've tried Unity, I've tried Arch, I've tried Gnome, I've tried Zubuntu. We tried Zubuntu during this whole transition. Like, I've tried it all. Fuchsia, that's probably it. Yeah. Like, what am I going to do? So we have to know this works. We have to be 100% solid on this.

We'll build it. We'll set it up. We'll do some testing. We'll run through every single show. And we had Alan by this time. Alan had joined us, so it's me, Noah, and Alan, all working this problem, and then we got the new Kubuntu rig set up. We went through every single show. We did a mock version of every show on the network. The three of us. It was a lot of fun. That's amazing. And we were able to be ridiculous, because we weren't

streaming any of it, so, you know, we didn't... I hope you recorded this. Nope. I mean, I did, but I don't know if I kept the files. We didn't unfilter. We did a Linux unplugged. We did a BSD now. We did all of them and made sure everything worked. We certified it as good and said, okay, now we're going to take it up to Linux Fest. If it survives that weekend, we'll put it back in the studio and we'll lock everything down to Kubuntu 18.04. And it performed so well that Chase Nunes, who was running the board,

ended up loading up a pinball application on his laptop and playing pinball while the machine just ran and did its thing. Just ran and did its thing. That says so much. He played pinball. And afterwards, he went up to Angela and said, this was the smoothest, easiest year we've ever had. It's never ran better.

Did not crash once on us. Beautiful. Did not have a single issue. Now we've recorded three shows through it since we've been back from Linux Fest, running Kubuntu. We have it installed on five systems in the immediate room that we're sitting in right now.

It's on another system outside. It's just been rock solid. So I really can't say enough good things about Kubuntu 18.04. And I've really started to just take to Plasma. I tweak my defaults. It takes me about a day of just sort of putzing here and there. It's like the first time I open up Dolphin, I change a few settings. You know, the first time I log in, I open up settings and I change like a few things. But, you know, after the first day or two of just doing

that on and off, I'm pretty much done and it's set. You've got it dialed in now. Yeah. And loving it. The performance overhead is less than it was on some of the other desktop environments. And I was surprised every time I saw that. We have an active monitor right here as I'm watching. I'm still watching the system. CPU and memory usage is lower by quite a bit than it was on some GTK desktops. You were mentioning earlier, you know, it just, it feels like a professional workstation. Yeah. It feels like what, what I was teetering on, what am I going to do? I need a professional grade workstation environment that I can put on powerful hardware that feels like it's designed for people to get worked on as professional.

And that's how Plasma feels for me. It just feels professional great. You know, it's just really well done. Kubuntu is a really great release. I wasn't the biggest fan of their last, the one that was based on Plasma 5.5. This one, they nailed it. So my most experience,

because I've been installing it on systems for two weeks now, is with Kubuntu 18.04. God knows I've tried it in every which way, different configuration, and even ran it on, I even got to see how it performs with failing hardware, which was pretty entertaining.

It was, we had a disk that was going bad in a system, and KWin disappeared. Goodbye. Just completely disappeared from the system. And then after we got that fixed, VLC disappeared, just completely gone. I closed the window and it was gone. The entire application. Never to be seen again. So it was funny got that fixed, VLC disappeared, just completely gone. I closed the window and it was gone.

The entire application. Never to be seen again. So it was funny to see how Plasma handled it. And we telegrammed producer Michael and we're like, Rotten,

is there any way that KWIN could disappear while we're using the system? No, that's impossible. He writes back. We're like, um... It just happened.

That's when we knew we had some trouble. But it even did fine there. Like, you almost wouldn't have even known except for KWin disappeared and then VLC disappeared. But it actually did pretty well for quite a while. I've been really, really thrilled with it. I think it's maybe my favorite Linux release maybe ever.

Maybe. We'll see. I mean, we'll see. Maybe it'll blow up in my face, and I'll change my tune. I mean, it's early days, right? But that's the most exciting part is you have so much more to go. It'll be with you for a long time, I expect. Yeah, it is one of those releases where I'm like excited again to spread the word.

I got it installed on Hadea's computer. I'm excited to play with it. But I'm not getting distracted by tweaking it too much. It's just, it's so good. It's so good. And there's little things it does, like remembering the right spots for my windows to open up. So when we're in the studio, we have to launch things really quickly. They all go in the right place and little things like that that make it efficient to use that I just really super appreciate. And I still got Neon on a couple of systems,

still pretty great. I'm really enjoying KDE Neon on my workstation upstairs and I have it on a laptop, but everything else is Ubuntu H.0.4. So it just matches my production system. And then on both, you're still, you're still on Ubuntu, right? It's mostly the same, just a little difference on the skin? Yeah, yeah. You know, I was tempted by Arch a little bit over Linux Fest just because I love that AUR. You know, Brent's an Arch user, so I know he understands. But, you know, just that idea of the whole stack,

the whole stack being LTS, and my machines just become appliance-like as close as possible. And then you've got LivePatch in there, too, so I can even reduce having to reboot there. It seems like it's just the right time for you to have this be stable. Yeah, because it's really come to a point where we were considering, do we hire an IT person? Because we've got a lot of systems. Rekai used to help pick some of that up. But we've decided if we can just get these systems manageable to a point where I can manage them

and folks can help me out here and there when they're at the studio, that's perfect. And that's where we kind of moved away from Arch. We'd look at something getting 300 packages behind on updates before we could get to it. And that's where you start rolling the dice with Arch in a pretty big way. Arch will run great as long as you stay on top

of it. But when you spread that across six systems and those six systems are there to serve the purpose of doing work, not to do anything else, it's hard to stay on top of that. So we'll see. Very happy with it. Very, very happy with Ubuntu 18.04. I really recommend people give it a try. But go get more of our friends over at the Ubuntu podcast.

Sounds like they have a doozy that just came out. I'm looking forward to hearing that. And our friends over at Late Night Linux just did their review of 18.04 as well. And I thought that was pretty great. So you can go catch out on more of that. And also, you may have heard recently that Ubuntu

18.04 got loaded on the Nintendo Switch, which is pretty cool. The touchscreen works. It's all... Well, Wes and I did a technical breakdown of how that's done at a hardware level. The exploit, some of the ways that people are going to make it easier,

and the software in the tagger that was actually vulnerable. All that's covered in our TechSnap program, TechSnap.Systems. That would be... It's 365. Thank you, sir. Episode 365, which, how can you forget that? Now, if you're watching live, which is, I mean, come on, right? You should join. It's too much fun.

Everybody's doing that, right? It's so obvious. Well, then you stick around, because the Ask Noah program's coming up, and you've got your Linux sandwich. You start out with the unplugged program. We've got our live show. That's where things really start. Then you've got the main show. We've got our post show.

And then that Noah Chalaya guy comes in. Messes everything up. Takes a whole other round. Woo. Woo. Yeah, I was on his program just a couple of episodes ago, and we talked about encryption and how some of the different laws that could affect encryption could affect open source.

I thought it was a pretty good chat, so look for that. But we'll be back here pretty soon. Thank you so much, Linux Unplugged, slash 247 for links. See you next Tuesday. So many good distro choices this week. This is really, it's a good week to be a Linux user. It's almost like it's the year of the Linux desktop, isn't it? It's feeling like it. It is in a lot of ways.

Not as we foresaw it, but... You mean because it's Chromebooks? You look at Chromebooks adding Linux application support, you look at Microsoft adding the Linux subsystem to Windows, you look at these really solid releases from Ubuntu and Fedora, and we've never been in better shape.

It is looking really good. Although the doubters are still going to doubt. Yeah, that's true. But what do they know, right? Alright, we've got to name this thing before we get out of here. Yeah, make suggest, jbtitles.com Oh god, did you guys see this? Facebook dating

was announced just recently. Oh my god. I'm off Facebook these days. Did you guys see this? Facebook dating was announced just recently. Just for you, Dan. I'm off Facebook these days. Oh. I've been thinking about it a lot. Yeah. I saw that and I nearly included it as a news item for the Ubuntu podcast.

Smooth. I've been thinking about doing the Facebook account delete thing. I'm not sure. It's just a few family members that I would lose touch with. No, I just unfriended all of the randos that I'd collected. OCD shone through, and it was like, where are all of the people I knew when I was at primary school and connected with people that I haven't seen since I was 10? And then some years later, I realized I'd got, you know, hundreds of friends

that I didn't really know. And I just unfriended all the randoms and just coalesced around the people that I actually know. So Facebook, I actually know it's basically you and my wife. Are you not worried about the data tracking aspects of it, the monitoring you and other sites via the Facebook like buttons and whatnot? I am, but if I am not on Facebook and like everything my wife posts within a maximum of a 37-minute time frame. Then she thinks you're mad at her or something. Yeah, exactly. So I have to be on Facebook to have a harmonious marriage.

So that's why I'm on Facebook. Yeah, I do for Facebook. I need to create a bot that every time Louise posts something, it likes what she's posted within 37 minutes. And if I could do that, then I wouldn't have to interact with her. Yeah, that's worth every cost. Do you have a Facebook, Brent? Do you have a Facebook account?

I do, and I've been having this exact conversation. It's like you're repeating what has been happening in my mind. You're wondering if it's time? Well, yeah, and I've, you know know maybe one of the solutions to some of these problems is that new firefox plug-in that came out to isolate containers yeah oh here we go i can i can double you double you up on this so i'm using the facebook well i'm using firefox containers generally but i use the facebook one now on my phone i've removed all of the actual facebook app so i've removed facebook messenger and facebook itself yes and and the pages administrator whatever it's called and i have installed there's a there's a an application

called um i forget the exact name i think it's just called Notifications or Notifications FB or something, but it's called Notifications. I'll find the exact name in a moment. I have that installed, which polls the web service to see if you've been sent a message or if somebody's liked something or whatever. And then I have another app installed called Slim Social, which is a web wrapper around the facebook website and the notifications thingy integrates with the slim social so now everything on my phone to do

with facebook is constrained to this web app that is in its own little sandbox so i i still get the notifications so i can still like everything louise posts within 37 minutes but i don't get all of that invasive shit that the facebook applications have hooked up to the rest of your system wow i'm gonna totally look into that that is so neat i just installed the sorry go ahead i was just i was gonna say i'll get the actual names of those apps. They're available in FDroid, and they're also available in the Android App Store. Neat. What were you going to say, Brent?

I was just going to give a thumbs up there. I just installed Slim Social for LinuxFest Northwest to get my Twitter up and going, but I'm kind of anti, or trying to be anti Google Store. So yeah, FDroid, it's in there, and it actually works really well. Super responsive.

Oh, great. Double plug. Hey, Dan. Hey. What's going to be the recommended retail price for the next version of elementary? Are you going to, like, you know, what would you say would be a reasonable amount for someone to pay when they download the ISO?

The default is currently at ten dollars are you gonna keep that or change that or what you can do um i don't think we're gonna change it we always talk about oh we should you know run some kind of ab test or some crap or whatever right if no one ever was alan then make the number 50 or something yeah there you go that's a good idea actually that'd be a good feature i, really what it is is it's like what you can afford is the appropriate price to pay. So if you're, you know,

destitute, like don't pay. Yeah. But if you're Bill Gates, like pay a lot, maybe pay a lot. Yeah. That'd be nice.

Actually. I look forward to that. Well, Brent, thank you for being on the show, man. Yeah, this is awesome.

A lot of fun. You got a long how many hours do you guesstimate for that drive back? Well I have luckily planned ahead so I've cut it up.

Oh yeah good good. So I'm meeting a friend almost halfway so taking a ferry on a Victoria for a little bit. Yeah good for you. That's a great ferry ride.

I've never taken it. Yeah. Are you doing a walk on or are you going to drive on? I'm going to walk on. That's a great ferry ride. I've never taken it. Yeah. Are you doing a walk-on or are you going to drive-on? I'm going to walk-on. That's the way to go. The price is just... That's the way to go.

Good for you. And then hitting up my brother in BC as well. And then are you flying from BC to Ontario? Yeah. Good. That's not too bad.

Good for you. That's a good way to do it. Well, thank you for being here today. Thanks for having me this week. It's been awesome. To our side of the world. Yeah, it was fun.