LINUX Unplugged - Episode 251: The Qt and the Ugly

Episode Date: May 30, 2018

After we make ourselves at Gnome, we look at some future open source goodies coming your way, look at how Canonical’s upstream pitch, and get excited about the next great Linux filesystem hope. Plus Chris’ first wreck on the road to Texas, Thunderbolt networking, and our results from the best Linux laptop for 2018.

Screw the iMac. LG has a 38-inch curved monitor. Oh, and by the way, it's also a PC with Ryzen and supports Ubuntu 16.04. How about that? How about that? It's the LG all-in-one. Ready for this catchy name, Wes? It's the LG 38CK900G-B. That rolls right off the tongue. Yeah, it comes with a VEGA graphics, 8GB of DDR4 RAM,

the AMD Ryzen chip, and 128GB SSD, which is blank by default, but lists support for Ubuntu 16.04. Beautiful. Yeah. I wouldn't mind an ultra-wide IPS display with a 21.9 aspect ratio and a 3840x1600 resolution.

The only downside, you've got to contact them for pricing, because they're probably going to want to sell you about $5,000, because these are all for professional deployments. Let's see if we can't find something a little more reasonably cheap. You're saying we're going to outfit the whole JB crew with these? That's what you're saying?

Right on. That's a great idea. That'll be our standard broadcast hardware. I actually think we could make a good business case for that. Yeah, absolutely. That'll be our standard broadcast hardware. I actually think we could make a good business case for that. Yeah, absolutely. I would be more productive. I mean, I'm staring at two separate screens here. It's really killing it. Oh, you need an ultra wide. You would be more productive. You might even be ultra more productive. Yeah, right. All those problems I have in my life, gone. Oh, Wes, if only it was that easy. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 251 for May 29th, 2018.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's not so sure what that smell is. It's sniffing around. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. We have such a fun show put together today. I'm glad we're able to get this connection working so that we can talk about great things like a massive donation going to the Gnome Foundation, Thunderbolt Networking coming to Linux, major distribution releases, and Mark Shuttleworth is turning up the heat on Canonical's rhetoric about Red Hat. Plus, we've got a great app pick. We'll do a look back at Fedora 26,

some new inbound open source stuffs, or at least some stuffs you're going to get on your Linux desktop, and then perhaps the conclusion to our quest for the best Linux laptop of 2018. I've been taking in your feedback. We put a vote out to the audience. We're looking at the numbers and we're looking at the suggestions. At the end of this week's episode, one laptop will go off our list. We'll put another laptop on there if we can come to an agreement. And regardless of what laptop on our list you're thinking about getting, we'll wrap up with some tips for whichever one that are just great to keep in mind when you're trying to buy a system to run Linux. So we've got so many good things to get into.

Plus, I'm on the road to tell you a little bit about why I'm in this awkwardly painted and smelling place in Grants Pass, Oregon on my way down to Texas. We'll tell you about what's going on with that and all other kinds of goodies. It's a packed, packed episode. So let's not go any further without bringing in our mumble room. Time, appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. What's up? Hello. Hello, guys.

I am glad to have all of you here this week because we have so many things to get into. And I thought let's start off with some good freaking news. Gnome is announcing a $1 million donation over the next two years. An anonymous donor, and I'd love to know who this anonymous person is, has donated a million dollars over the next two years, some of which will be matching funds with other folks' donations. That is huge, right? And say what you will about Gnome.

We've had a lot of discussions about it recently, but they do great work. It's wonderful that we have this good open source project, but open source is hard. It takes a lot of effort. And yes, they have funding from Red Hat and other people, but a million bucks over two years, that's just a big commitment that things are going to get better. People will continue doing that awesome hard work, and us freeloading community, we're going to see the benefit. No kidding. That's probably how it'll get trickled into the foundation, too. Yeah, that's a good way to think about it,

which is a serious amount of money. Either way, you crack it, even if it is over quarters or months or whatever. I like that. I like that story a lot. I've seen a lot of people talking about it, and it's not big, big news, but I think it's still worth mentioning. And I wonder if maybe one day we'll get to figure out who it is. But moving on, let's talk about Thunderbolt networking on Linux. So Thunderbolt, like the spec,

allows for peer-to-peer networking with really relative simplicity on macOS and Windows. You plug two machines into each other over the Thunderbolt connection and it just works. That has technically been possible on Linux via the kernel, but there really hasn't been anything in user space to facilitate the networking. And that's changed now, thanks to Christian Kellner and Thomas Holler from Network Manager. And they're working together to figure out what in user space needed to get done

to make Thunderbolt peer-to-peer networking work. Think about this. You have the massive, fast PCI bus to PCI bus Thunderbolt interface, and you could run networking over that. And if you now connect, if you have modern network manager and modern-ish

Linux kernel, it hasn't been in there for like a super long time, but if you have kind of a recent one, you're good. You match those two things up, and all you have to do after that is plug a Thunderbolt cable into one end and another end, and they detect the presence, and they set up the networking. The way it works is when you plug in a Thunderbolt device, it actually creates a little device name on your file system in sysfs. It creates a little

device, and there's some certain attributes if it supports networking. And now what's technically happening here is a UDEV rule and network manager are working together. When they see a Thunderbolt device that has that networking attribute, you can now get an option to set them up. And within a couple of seconds, you now have a local network running over Thunderbolt. That is just so cool. Super handy. I think of so many times where you have to figure out a crossover cable, and then you probably have to understand how networking works to make this work. So if a layperson can use that, that is totally slick. I'm also curious,

I wonder if you could PixieBoot off this? Because then you could have a Docker container or just a little script on your setup to have a TFTP PixieBoot server running, plug in a Thunderbolt cable between two computers and away you go. No more USB drives. That's a great idea. That is a really clever idea.

Like a great rescue system, like a laptop. If you had machines you were saving that had Thunderbolt and you had a laptop with Thunderbolt, you could just blow them away and reload them using network boot over Thunderbolt. That's a cool idea, Wes. Yeah, the other nice part here is that they link to the UDEV rule. So if you're like me and you don't often use Network Manager, you can just load this thing yourself and get it working.

Ah, yes, yes, that is really nice too. Yeah, I could definitely appreciate that right now. I have two laptops that are right next to each other physically, but they cannot talk to each other because the Wi-Fi here is just a mess. And where I'm at right now, I'll tell you more about that in a minute, but where I'm at right now is just, it's devastating for networking. And if I could just take one cable and hook these two machines up, and neither one of them have an Ethernet port either. Ironically, they have USB-C,

but they do not have an Ethernet port. So that's the world we live in now. All right, well, we have different segments of the show today. I'm trying out a few different format options while I'm on the road, and I thought some category names might help me put my head around what we're going to talk about. So this next one is Making Ourselves at GNOME, and this is Endless, and Endless 3.4.0 has come out.

Now, you may recall we had a chat with Michael Hall a while ago. He's now working at Endless, and he wrote a post on their community.endlessOS page about the new Endless 3.4. And they say there's lots of exciting features, but some of them that are jumping out at me right now is options to manage your data consumption in really smart ways. Now, you'll recall, Endless has been really built as an OS that is really graceful at handling when you have no connectivity. They have local Wikipedia articles and stuff like that. It gracefully switches between online and offline. And they're just doubling down on that.

And I think this is really cool. And one of the ways that they're doubling down on this offline stuff, and you're going to think this is weird at first, but stick with me here. They're introducing an Android companion app for Endless OS. And I'm going to tell you more about that here in a moment. But before we go off in too many different directions, let's focus on the data consumption stuff. You can now mark in Endless 3.4,

which is based on GNOME and GTK stuff, you can now mark your connection as having a limited or unlimited data. And then that tells the operating system to enable automatic updates, to wait until you have good, convenient wireless or whatever you might have. You can now use a little bit of intelligence there between it's trying to detect how much bandwidth you have and you being able to now implicitly tell it to not use too much bandwidth is you can just totally turn off automatic updates in those situations. And they're combining that with schedules. So you can now also say with all

exceptions, except for these days and these hours, just turn off automatic updates. Don't even do an apt update. Don't even do an apt update. Wow. And now you can just go in there and there is a gnome settings dialogue that exposes all of that. That's kind of nice. And now you can just go in there and there is a gnome settings dialogue that exposes all of that. That's kind of nice. And I could definitely see a use case for that outside the US and outside places that have pretty generally good connectivity. I kid you not, the town I am in today has no internet. The whole town has no internet where I'm at today. So don't do any updates. No, I should definitely not. And so like I could kind of, you can really even, even in the quote unquote West, you can appreciate features like this.

But let's talk about that companion app for a second, because that's probably what piqued your interest. This is an interesting idea from Endless, and it's an app that's going to allow you to view content from your computer on any Android device. Now, remember, the Endless OS has a whole bunch of native apps that they've created an app that's going to allow you to view content from your computer on any Android device. Now remember, the Endless OS has a whole bunch of native apps that they've created with offline data. And they say, while the Endless Companion app itself is not publicly available, all of the support for this app has been built into Endless 3.4 that is available. The Companion app was created because we found that many of our users have a single endless computer in a household with multiple people trying to access the information at the same time.

With the endless companion app, everyone will be able to access the information found on their computers with any compatible phone or tablet without using any internet connection or data connection. So it's all going to be over the LAN. Oh, really? Yeah. That's kind of neat, right? That's a great, great idea. Smart. Especially in countries where perhaps internet connectivity is very, very limited,

like apparently Oregon, which is now a country. Endless 3.4 is also upgrading to GNOME 3.26, and it will ship with Linux kernel 4.15, which brings the support up for a whole bunch of new hardware. And then they've also updated some of their own Endless apps. And they've also made the decision to include Adblock directly in with Endless. So it's just pre-installed. Adblock is just pre-installed with Endless. That's a lot I just laid on you, Wes, but Endless is sort of reminding me, and I don't know if you recall, but there was a distribution called Zandros back in the day,

and I hope they don't mind this comparison. Zandros spoke in a way that is familiar when you read Endless. For example, Michael writes, and Michael Hall is fully technically competent. Absolutely. They're writing this in a way that is very targeted. They talk about how they've updated their open source core. They're not necessarily talking about how they've updated glibc or they're on the latest version of ButterFS programs. They're talking about the open source core.

It's more generic. It's more about a whole inclusive operating system. And it's just what you need to know. None of the extra details. Do you think that's a fair comparison? Oh yeah, definitely. I'm just impressed with the focus here. They have some consistent design vision and some of these features are things that you see in competitors or you see in other operating systems

that span the mobile desktop world and have expectations from mobile of how you can manage a device, especially for lay users. And they're kind of taking it to the next level that you don't have in a lot of other common Linux desktop environments. That companion app is a really interesting strategy, huh? Oh yeah, absolutely.

I mean, if it works on the land, you can just manage it. If you're kind of the smart one in your house, or you can teach people to use it, then boom, super useful. Anyways, check out EndlessOS if you're interested. I don't feel like it has a strong draw to our audience, but I do really like what they're doing over there,

and I really respect that they're trying to build an OS that is still very useful without internet connectivity, because I do find, like, it's kind of pathetic. When I sit down with my laptop and I have no connectivity, I don't really have anything to do on my laptop. Like, there's not, like like a lot to do locally. And I feel like, and this seems obvious on its face, but I still think it's worth mentioning. I feel like 20 years ago, that wasn't the case. Like I would go online a little bit and do stuff. But the most of the stuff that I did, I did locally on my

computer. But now thinking back, I don't even remember what I was doing because it wasn't games. I mean, it was sometimes games, but I always did stuff locally. I mean, maybe you just need some DOS locally. You can fire that up when you don't have internet connection and you'll figure it out what you were doing. Yeah. Just get back in the zone, huh? So I kind of like the idea of taking these computers and making them a little bit more valuable without connectivity because they're so powerful and they're so expensive. It's kind of pathetic that they're so worthless without an internet connection. And, you know, it's sort of the anti-Chromebook in a way.

And I also appreciate that. All right, well, let's keep moving on. And I got to tell you about my internet connectivity situation today. It is, it is, I've never had a situation like this in my entire life where the town goes out of, loses internet. And it's slowly coming back, but it is, it is so awful. And so I'll tell you all about it. And let's start by clearing the decks and thanking Linux Academy for making this show possible. As I am watching someone almost get in an accident right now as they pull out onto the road, I can't even tell you about the late nights after I worked hours and hours at my job.

I would then get in my car and I would drive down to the community college so I could take my Linux courses. Wow, have things changed. Now I can do it from the comfort of my laptop, from the comfort of my desk, or the comfort of my home. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You don't have to be like this Subaru driver here who almost just got in an accident right outside my window. So that way they can go out and get something done. You can take advantage of it using something called the internet. I know it's new. You're going to have to get an account, but I think it's worth dialing up to and trying out. The information superhighway is going to be game-changing, and these companies are going to

be able to put things online where you can just tap in and get the knowledge directly. And, oh, wait, oh, wait, that's already happened, and it's Linux Academy. Go try it out at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You can sign up for a free seven-day trial. Kick the tires. They've got hands-on scenario-based labs to give you real experience. I say that with emphasis because that means after you're done at Linux Academy, you can go do it in production and you're not going to be all anxious and nervous that you've never done this before. You can speak with authority on a topic because you'll have done it. You pick the courseware, you set the distribution, the servers that's been up match that. They got human instructors, whatever you get stuck, you need help. They're there for you.

They're there. If they're not there helping you, they're helping other people. They're updating content. They're making sure your subscription stays valuable. So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. The number one resource online for people to learn more about anything that runs Linux or anything that Linux runs on top of. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

Free seven-day trial. Yeah, so I'm on my way down to Austin, Texas. I'm going down there actually to see Linux Academy there in Keller, but I'm going down there the week after Linux Fest Northwest or Linux Fest, Texas. I'm going to Linux Academy. So speaking of Linux Academy, but right now I'm on my way down to Austin, and I've stopped in Grants Pass, Oregon. And that's where everything went wrong. It's been a really hard day. And I'm actually, in a way, I'm really relieved to be here chatting with you guys. Because today has been, you know, it's like, you know what I mean? Like when you've gone through like something, and then like you're going back to a little bit of routine, how it just feels right.

You know that feeling? The comforting comforts of home. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we left early Monday after. So it turns out, Wes, Levi is allergic to bees in a really, really bad way. No! Oh, Levi, poor buddy! Yeah, he got stung on just like, you know, here, we just went to a park, went for a walk

and, uh, he got stung by a bee and no big deal. It started with some really bad swelling around his eyes. And then it turned into like mumps all over his face. Like his face got all bumpy and old and weird looking and his ears started itching. And then, you know, by then we were already, we already hot on it. We knew something was wrong by then. And we'd already given him a Benadryl. And then it spreaded to the rest of his body, and he got hives, these big red hives, and his hair looked all mangy and gross everywhere, and he was out of it.

He was a different dog. It was weird. And we had to take him into the emergency doggy ER, and they gave him, like, an EpiShot, they gave him like an epi shot they gave him a steroid and they gave him more benadryl and so he has been in full recovery for three days it's been he has been a totally different dog it's been really weird because you know he's this happy-go-lucky smart clever curious dog he's always spunky and wanting to have fun. Yeah. And he's just been totally like slow and mopey and sad and he doesn't want to jump up on anything and his skin hurts. And so today he's finally been getting better, but we got a little bit of a late start.

And so we drove hard yesterday for eight hours and ended up in Grants Pass, which is our first planned stop on the route to get some work done on Lady Joops, to get the suspensions upgraded, put in some sway bars and put in some sumo shocks and all these things that have coney shocks and sumo springs and all these things that they're putting in there. It's really funny. You got to be robust if you're venturing across the country. Yeah, you know, you do. You're right. Exactly. And he took me under this. They park it up on this, you know, like this whole rig.

And then they've got like this trench underneath it. And so the guy's name was Eric. He took me underneath. And Eric showed me like all the different stuff. And it was just really, it was a really cool experience. And then they're like, you know, and we also have a rental car that you guys can use for the day. And, you know, you can drive around town. We're like, you know, and we also have a rental car that you guys can use for the day.

And, you know, you can drive around town. We're like, well, this is great because I have to get to a motel room where I'm going to be recording my show because I'm not going to be able to record in the RV because they're banging on the frame. So we get in the car and they're like, oh, before you go, we have this waiting room. Do you want to, you know, if you have to do it, because I mentioned, you know, I needed to get some connectivity. We have a waiting room with Wi-Fi. Would you like to just check that out? I'll go over there and do a speed check. So I get in there and I'm talking to people like,

yeah, no, the Wi-Fi doesn't seem to be working. Like, oh, go figure, right? And so we leave, come over to the motel. And the motel's like, yeah, we're having internet problems today. Our Wi-Fi isn't working. And I'm like, oh, okay. Alright, well,

tell you what, I'm going to go drive around for a little bit and I'll be back. We'll see about the internet problem. And so I go over to La Quinta and to Holiday Express, all these different hotels. No, everybody's, internet's down today. Internet's not working today. So I'm at the last hotel that I was going to try,

and I'm in the lobby, and there's a guy who clearly looks like an IT guy because he looks just like I do. And I got a Coda Radio shirt on, you know? And so he's like, oh, yeah, no, no, the internet's out in the town today. I'm like, what? Yeah, no, there's no internet here in the town today. I'm like, what? Yeah, no, there's no internet here in the town today.

I'm like, what do you mean there's no internet in the town today? Because this is all hitting me at once. He's like, yeah, I don't know, there's something going on, and our provider has an outage. And I'm like, provider? Singular? Like, what? You have one provider?

No! And yeah, no, internet's out. I'm like, oh God, okay, well, I guess I'll have to use my phone. All right, you know, that's fine. So I come back to the original motel that I had booked. And I go in there. I'm like, all right, yeah, I think we're going to do it. Well, that's fine.

Nobody's got Wi-Fi. She's like, okay, great. Well, Mr. Fisher, I would love to get you in your room, but we have lost the key to your room. No, that's not a thing. That cannot be a thing. Yeah. And this is a one o'clock, the show starts at two o'clock and I'm like, okay, well, I have a work thing and I kind of need to be in there by 1.30. Is that going to be doable? So the gal

looks around, she's like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to send my husband over to the hardware store and he's going to go get a new key made right now for you, Mr. Fisher. So why don't you just hang tight and he'll go get that key made for you. So he runs over to the hardware store, the husband, and he gets the key made. And I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to go get a bite to eat. Might as well go get some food. So I go get a bite to eat. I come back to the hotel. The story's almost over. I get back to the hotel and the husband's there. And the lady that runs the place is gone. And I'm like, he's like, you know what? I can check you in. Cause I know you got a work thing. I'm like,

yeah, I do have a work thing. Thank you. He's like, here, I got the key made for you, which by the way, barely works. It doesn't fit well. He's like, okay, well, there's just a couple of things you need to know. Uh, we are pet friendly, but you, uh, you cannot let your pet on any of the chairs. Do not let your pet on the bed and do not let your pet in the bathroom. Okay. All right. Okay. So that's a lot lot of that's a lot of policing of my dog uh also no smoking i'm like okay that's fine i don't plan to smoke that's not a big deal he's like no really you can't smoke i'm like that's fine i don't smoke that's fine well but you know what i'm saying right man and he takes like that like holding a doobie hand gesture, you know, up to the lips and does that.

I'm saying no smoking, you know what I mean, man? And I'm like, yeah, I got you. No smoking. It's like, okay, I'm just saying. Wow. What? Do I look like some big pothead? Did I actually wear my hair in dreads or something?

And I'm looking at him, I'm like, okay, can you let me in the room that's all i could say because my dog won't smoke any joints i promise like i'll cut levi off for a couple of hours he's not feeling well anyways so i get in the room and uh sure enough it's like you know two minutes until we're supposed to be live i I'm wiring everything together. Wi-Fi is just not working at all. And I get a text message from Hadiyah. I just got in a car accident. What? Is she okay? She's okay. She's okay. You know, she's the place that's working on Lady Joop's. Let us borrow their car. They got like a little Dodge Neon and she backed it. So the thing about Grants Pass, the whole town is a town of one-ways. It's all one-ways. It's all one-ways except for the side streets. It's all one-ways.

And so she's pulling onto a one-way, but she was pulling the wrong way because she didn't recognize that. And so some people started honking at her. She wasn't – it was like friendly honks, not like, oh, my God, you idiot. It was like, hey, better watch out. So she puts the car in reverse and backs up and backs up right into a pole. watch out. So she puts the car in reverse and backs up and backs up right into a pole. So I am five minutes from lifetime and a girlfriend has backed the car into a pole and is now I'm dealing with that. And I got no internet connectivity and I'm sitting here thinking to myself, why am I doing this? Like, I just want to do a show. I just want to record the show. And so

finally I got the key from the guy. I get in the room, I get everything set up. I get the text message from Hadiyah about the car accident, make sure that she's okay. Make sure that we're squared away with the place that's loaning us the car. And now as I go live, the wifi is working here just enough for us to have this conversation because I've only got two bars of signal. So I've got one machine on the phone and I've got one machine on the Wi-Fi that's still dropping 3% of all of my packets.

I mean, you can't be a perfectionist, Chris. Come on. I know, I know. So there you go. That is my trip to Texas so far. I feel like there needs to be a central database of cell signal and all of those things. There needs to be one central repository of how all of that works. But anyways, the journey continues on. And now I'm in some weird motel room that smells really strange and is very, very yellow.

Oh, hi there. And my lady friend just got back from her walk. And so we're stationed here in Grants Pass and while they work on the rig for one and a half days or so, and then once the work completes, we'll continue on our trip. Anyways, if you want to hang out while we're in Texas, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Texas for the meetup telegram group. And then you can also get yourself a little swag at teespring.com slash JB Texas is where you can get the swag at. Yeah, it is a good looking shirt. I'm very happy with it. And I love tux with a beard teespring.com slash JB Texas to get yourself that. All right, let's talk about

canonical and Ubuntu and the red hat and the open shift and open stack and all of those things, because that's what everybody else is talking about right now. So there was a summit just a bit ago, the OpenStack Cloud Summit or some shenanigans like that that I didn't make it down to. But your good buddy, Wes, Stephen J. Van Hoth-Nicholas made it. And Stephen J., he went down and he noticed that there's been a tone change recently. And I'm not surprised, if you think about it. Canonical is moving towards an IPO. And so perhaps it's time for a tone change.

Shuttleworth started out his keynote sort of typical of a keynote. He said, our mission is to remove all friction from deploying OpenStack. We can deliver OpenStack deployments with two people in less than two weeks anywhere in the world. So, you know, a typical kind of opening to a keynote speech and kind of compelling, like, we can deliver OpenStack deployments with two people in less than two weeks anywhere in the world. So, you know, a typical kind of opening to a keynote speech and kind of compelling. Like, you know, really selling it there is like, we have a real advantage here.

We're using upstream technology. It's super fast and easy to get it deployed, and you can do it with less staff. People love hearing that. Yeah. But then things started to heat up a little bit. Then Amazon came into the conversation. And stick with me, because I think this is indicative of where Canonical is going

and what they feel like their value is going to be. So he said, Mark Shuttleworth, Amazon has increased efficiency, so now everyone is driving down the cost of infrastructure. Everyone engages with Ubuntu. Not Red Hat or VMware. Google, IBM, Microsoft are investing and innovating to drive down the cost of infrastructure. Every single one of those companies works with Canonical to deliver public services. Then Shuttleworth got down to brass tacks and he said, not one of them engages

with VMware to offer those public services. They can't afford to. Clearly they have the cash, but they don't have the complete on efficiencies. And so does your private cloud. So Canonical is rolling out a migration service to help users shift from VMware to a fully managed version of Canonical's Ubuntu OpenStack distribution. Customers want this because when they take out VMware,

they are canonical, is regularly told that our fully managed OpenStack solution costs half of the equivalent VMware service. Wow. Yeah, taking some shots at VMware in a big way, but things got even more interesting when Red Hat came up.

When we're invited to bid and present head-to-head with Red Hat, we win four out of five times, including in companies that have never had any other Linux than Red Hat in the building. Four out of five times. He then goes on to add that Google, Microsoft, and IBM will be using and are using Ubuntu to underpin their Kubernetes offering, because if you want to build on your OpenStack service for containers, it makes sense to use exactly the same stack. It's half the cost of

VMware, a third of the cost of Red Hat, and it's a truly portable multi-cloud Kubernetes. And he's really touching on the difference here between what Canonical and Red Hat are offering for this space. Canonical is focusing on delivering inexpensive services and then offering support on upstream code, upstream OpenStack, and upstream Kubernetes. Whereas Red Hat is offering branded OpenStack and branded Kubernetes. Do you agree, Wes? Oh yeah, no, absolutely.

I can see some large enterprises where they still have that trust relationship where they want those kinds of whatever additional features. But for people that are in the commodity market trying to be as efficient as possible, who are reselling or managing a cloud service for other people to use, you want something where, yes, you have support from Ubuntu, but it's all open source. It's all standard. Everything you already know works. And if for some reason you need to shift or you no longer want to pay Ubuntu, okay, it's all open source. You've already built your experience with it.

It's really a good value proposition. Yeah, and I like just sort of dropping the pretense and just saying, look, Canonical is bringing you a more cost-effective solution. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to compete on cost and we're trying to compete on upstream. We're trying to compete with,

not against upstream, but using upstream. Right. And then as upstream adds features, their offerings just get better and better. Right. And I think that's the opposite of how a lot of people in the consumer space would look at Red Hat and Canonical. They'd look at Red Hat. Oh, Red Hat's going to upstream. They'll upstream it all. They're using everything upstream. And Canonical is the one that has the non-invented hair syndrome. Have you ever heard of Unity? Oh my God, right? But in the reality, in the space where they're going to try to make some money, where it's going to really matter for the IPO,

their strategy is to lean on upstream and then support that. I'm just saying, as somebody who would be coming into this kind of with a fresh take, if I was going to deploy something like this, that would be the approach I prefer. Do you think I'm missing something, Wes? I guess it's maybe the value that Red Hat's adding in there that I just don't appreciate. Yeah, I mean, they do have years of experience in this space

providing enterprise support, providing customized solutions. So if you are an older generation of company, if you have a lot of your own on-premises structure and you have special needs that are already invested in that ecosystem, or you just have a lot of cash to burn, then I think that could still make sense. I can still see people doing it. There's a lot of love for Red Hat. And their services, most of them are open source. They are good. But Ubuntu is just that lowest common denominator. All your developers, they're already using Ubuntu. Who spins up Red Hat containers to dev on? Maybe you're using Fedora.

Ubuntu, it's all the same. You get the same experience, and then you're just using OpenStack and Kubernetes? It seems like a winner. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more competitive talk like this, that might be the way to put it, is not aggressive or however else is being framed by ZDNet, but maybe just more delineation between this is what Red Hat offers and this is what Canonical offers. Because it seems to me that they have a job here to do. And Mark is the number one salesperson right now.

The job is to IPO. The job is to go public. And the way you do that is by clearly differentiating what makes your company a valuable standout in the space versus the competition that could be using similar technology. And really the only way to do that is to message your differences. And how else are you going to do that than by clearly saying, we do this better than VMware, and we do that better than Red Hat?

Yeah, it feels like a good spirit. You know, it's healthy competition. Hopefully, everyone benefits. Now, let's talk about something bubbly and fun, to sort of offset the big, serious enterprise stuff that we just talked about there. There was a wrap-up of KDE Connect development sprint. And I think this is some good stuff here. It happened between March 23rd and the 25th of 2018.

And they were working to get KDE Connect developers gathered in one spot in Barcelona to work for a weekend. And some good stuff was, as you might expect, developed. They kicked off the sprint by going through a backlog of ideas to decide what was worth implementing, and then also focus on what bugs needed to get fixed. And one of the most requested features of KDE Connect was the ability to send SMS messages from the desktop. They already supported SMS to a certain degree with the ability to reply to most messages, but that wasn't quite enough,

and some people even went as far as trying to roll their own solution in the meantime. But during the sprint, Simon and Alex started working on a fully featured interface for sending SMS easily from the desktop that includes full conversation views and the full contacts list support from your phone. They also worked on improving the functionality of the multimedia controls, so now it is possible to display the album art from your desktop on the Android device, both in the lock screen and in the multimedia notifications. And also, you know, less visible but just crucial parts

of what makes KDE Connect so useful is the integration with the system. And KDE Connect got some work on integrating with other systems, like Nautilus. So people don't have to use Plasma or Dolphin to have all of the great features of KDE Connect.

It just makes me so happy to hear this, Wes. Makes me honestly want to get an Android device. Have you thought about setting this up? Yes, actually. I think I might do that after this here episode. I've had KDE Connect running in the past on multiple machines, but it was always a little more awkward, especially

some of the stuff that was missing, like the Nautilus support. So this is really ramped up. I don't know if I care about all of these features, but better integration with Pulse Audio Control, the SMS up. I don't know if I care about all of these features, but better integration with Pulse audio control, the SMS stuff. I don't frequently send SMS, but when I do, I would much rather do it from my desktop. So this is huge usability wins.

I'm excited to give it a try, even on my GNOME systems. What the hell's going on with KDE? What's going on with Plasma right now? Why is it getting, what's going on? It's like everybody's talking about it these days. It's kicking butt. It's a renaissance. It's kicking butt. It's a renaissance. It's blown up.

I feel like we're talking these days about Qt all the time. We're talking about the Plasma Desktop. I don't think it's just because I've started using it. I think something's happening here. I feel like things are changing. How's your Kubuntu experience going so far, Poppy? Are you on Neon? I'm still on Neon.

Now, I saw you tweeting or something the other day about some GNOME issue. But do you kind of use it on a regular basis, honestly? And do you agree that there seems to be more buzz these days about the whole Plasma stack? So, in answer to your first question, yes, I use it all the time. I have two computers. Well, that's a lie. I have tons of computers. But two main ones that I'm sat at most of the time i have two i have two uh computers well that's a lie i have tons of computers but two main ones that i'm sat at most of the time so if i'm sat at my desk in the office then i'm sat at gnome shell used to be unity and now i've switched to gnome shell on 1804 um but as soon as i leave this room i pick up my thinkpad which is running kd neil the same one from the distro

challenge months ago um and i use that and if i go into the office and canonical there's no way i'm carrying this hulking great laptop so i take my thinkpad into the office so probably 60 40 split i would say between no shell and kde neil oh okay and yes i do still love it i've just finished doing a review of the KDE Slimbook, which will go out next week, 31st, on Ubuntu Podcast. Nice. And it's the KDE Slimbook and KDE Neon together. I'm sorry about that train going by. It's like they were designed for each other.

It's just great. On that laptop, it's perfect. Oh, boy, I look forward to hearing that. So what do you think? Do you think there is more buzz around Qt and Plasma these days, or is it just because I'm using it more? I think they've got over that hill where it seemed that everything was insurmountable, that it was just everything looked bad, it performed bad, it felt bad,

and everyone just felt awful using it. And they've got past that. That's now in the past and we can forget all about that and move on and use what they have now, which is brilliant. And I get updates all the time because they've got a KDE Neon repo that's enabled on the KDE Neon images. So I get constant flow of updates. I'm always getting the new crack. It's fantastic. It's really great. I love it. It kind of feels like those post-320 days in the GNOME world when, oh yes, this stuff is new and it's usable now and you can actually use it in a real system and it just works. I really think we need to draw a line in the sand and say, you know what? What went before,

some of it wasn't good, but let's look forward. Let's move forward and look at all the great work the KDE guys are doing and the great work that kubuntu are doing to integrate that into ubuntu so that if people want to stay on ubuntu and don't like the idea of this fast movie kd neon thing they can have kubuntu but and all the other distros that are using kde as well like open susa and and everyone else they're all delivering the best of what kde guys are doing. I'm blown away by it. You know, I just gave the latest OpenSUSE a go, and it's not bad. OpenSUSE Leap 15, but they changed a few of the defaults in Plasma

that I feel like maybe were a good idea, like replacing the launcher and a few other things. But now I kind of dislike it. I feel like it's not as good as the upstream stuff. I thought OpenSUSE was mostly pure upstream. Is that not the case? Yeah, well, their launcher's not, that's for sure. And I don't know.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh i'm sorry to just derail the show but somebody just a motorcyclist just drove by my window and he was sitting on his handlebars he was not sitting in the seat of his motorcycle this town is crazy also there's just some crazy people walking around with their clothes off, nothing but their underwear on, carrying signs about Jesus in this town. This is a fun one to hang out in. Anyways, back to OpenSUSE. Yeah, I mean, so I just gave Leap a try for Linux Action News. Pretty solid release, really. And I like the fact that they're going to make it official that you can upgrade from Leap to

Enterprise. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like you're right, Popey, that we should just sort of draw a line and say things were kind of bad and now things are better. We've worked on things and things have gotten better. And maybe some decisions like replacing the launchers or replacing the login manager and things like that, maybe it's time to reconsider some of that. And to be fair, I kind of feel like that's what Ubuntu just did recently with the 1710 release was a huge reconsideration. If you look back at that original Hacker News thread about all of the stuff they wanted to change

before 1710 when people were submitting suggestions and then you look what shipped, a lot of that stuff got rethought. And I think every distribution just needs to do that from time to time. And I think people's assumptions about some of these desktops and file systems needs to be rethought. Bcash FS is working on going upstream in the Linux kernel. I am a patron of Kent Overstreet because damn am I excited about this development.

And he's been spending a few years working on Bcash FS. And it's based out of the Bcache block cache technology, and he's working now to upstream that to the mainline kernel. He believes, Kent believes, that the on-disk format BcacheFS is now in good shape, and he doesn't see any major on-disk format changes coming from this point forward. BcacheFS is ready to go. It's a copy-on- write file system that supports native compression, encryption, caching, snapshots, multiple devices, and lots of other modern capabilities.

So we can just sort of look at ButterFS and say, guys, that was a great effort. Thank you so much. What's come before is appreciated, but let's look forward to BcashFS maybe shipping in 4.18 if we're lucky. What do you think, Wes? Yeah, it does kind of feel like the last great Linux file system hope for the modern era. And it started from Bcash, which has a really, has had solid technical foundations. Lots of people have used it. We've been kind of, it's been in the wings waiting, just quietly working. It's somewhat surprising in some sense that there's been less, there hasn't been that much resistance. It seems like, you know, Kent obviously benefits from having a long history working with the kernel community in contributions.

So he kind of knows how to play the game here. And there's not a ton of crazy changes all around the kernel that have to get made to facilitate this being upstreamed. Now, of course, we have to wait and see how the patches are received, see what the actual review is. What kind of timeline? Is it going to be a couple releases? Is it going to end up in 4.18? Who knows? But as a personal user of BcacheFS and having to compile the module myself and add it in, I'm not doing anything fancy with it.

But it's been rock solid for me. and add it in. I'm not doing anything fancy with it, but it's been rock solid for me. Interesting, I also saw there's some talk here of providing an upgrade patch for Bcache users. I guess a lot of what Bcache FS really is, is just an improved version of Bcache. So at some point, when you want to switch to this new code, you'll be able to kind of transparently do so. That's really cool. Yeah, you make a good point that there isn't a lot of dramatic changes that have to happen to the Linux kernel to actually facilitate this. So it could be pretty smooth, and Kent does have the experience there. TechMav in the irc.geekshed.net, pound Jupyter Broadcasting,

he's asking if there's any updates on Strata or Stratus from Red Hat, which, if you recall, is their disk management system that looks like it's a whole bunch of really nice utilities, including things like the XFS disk format and whatnot, that are sort of brought together as a ButterFS replacement or ZFS alternative. And I don't think there's a big movement publicly at TechMav, but I believe if things go as planned, we may see more in Fedora 29. And I think there is some previews in Fedora 28 for Strata as well. I expect that's going to be something that lands surprisingly at some point.

It'll just drop. Yeah, and then it'll be in a Red Hat Enterprise release. It'll be like in the next big release. Yeah, exactly. But if none of that works out for you, then why not try NetBSD? Because at least over at the NetBSD project this week, they're announcing some of the initial results from a massive audit of the NetBSD network stack. It's just wrapping up now.

It's been going on for five freaking months. Already hundreds of patches have been committed to the source tree as a result of the work. Dozens of bugs have been fixed, and a good number of actual remote triggering vulnerabilities were discovered. Changes were made to NetBSD's networking stack to strengthen the networking subsystem and improve code quality. And it was done in several layers of the NetBSD kernel, from drivers all the way up to the main L4 handlers. And a lot of cleanup took place as well. And it's one of these, and also code removal,

but it's one of these things when I see this, I go, can we do this in all of the places? So I tried to dig in and figure out, like, what's actually happening here in a code review like this? And it feels very nebulous. It can vary a lot from static code analysis, scripts you run it through that just do static code analysis to experts reviewing the code. There's a big range of ways to audit code, but

it does seem like every time we do something like this a whole bunch of stuff is discovered. I really applaud the NetBSD project for sitting down and doing this work and then also trying to see if maybe some of those discovered. I really applaud the NetBSD project for sitting down and doing this work. And then also trying to see if maybe some of those same things apply to some of the other BSDs. It's nice to see that happening. Even if it's not a Linux related story. It's nice to see an audit like this. Oh, yeah, right. I mean, NetBSD is super useful. It's a great open source operating system. And it, you know, it's just done a great job of maintaining a pretty

clean code base, and they have good features. There's a lot of stuff happening there we don't talk about very much, and props to them for taking security seriously. Yeah, and it's good to see that the BSDs can actually do this from time to time, because nobody uses them, of course, so therefore these things need to happen. I mean,

I had to. It's Linux Unplugged after all. There is a great bit of write-up in the blog post that we'll have linked to the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 251 about like the actual bugs and what they caused and how they were fixed. It's really in-depth, TechSnap level in-depth kind of stuff if you want to go get all kind of cray-cray.

Maybe even future TechSnap material if those BSC Now guys don't steal it from us, Wes. I hope they don't. Now let's talk about an app pick this week. We haven't done one yet in the show. Slow-mo video. Everybody's all about it on YouTube. But how do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it

with open source software? Slow-mo video on GitHub accomplishes just that. It's slow-mo for all the things, and it'll give you a nice step-by-step way to create three different types of slow-mo, in case that wasn't enough slow-mo. You can have three different types, and it is

linked in the show notes, and it does, of course, work on Linux. Slow-mo video for all the things. Why not? Have it. You can have it. And if you can't do it open-source, can you even really do it at all? We say no. We shouldn't call it open-source or free software. We can have it. And if you can't do it open source, can you even really do it at all? We say no. We shouldn't call it open source or free software. We should call it sustainable.

It's sustainable software. There we go. Sustainable software. You heard it here first. Small batch. Small batch, sustainable, organically, locally sourced, open source software. That's what you should call it. We'll have a link to that in the show notes.

Now I want to thank Ting. Thank you so much, Ting, for making even a couple of bars in Grants Pass when the whole town is out of internet possible. At least the cell towers still have internet. Ting is smarter than Unlimited. If you use less, you pay less. So go to linux.ting.com.

They'll take $25 off a device. If you have one that's compatible, because they have GSM and CDMA, then they'll give you $25 in service device. If you have one that's compatible, because they have GSM and CDMA, then they'll give you $25 in service credit. Now, I'm sitting here in a tiny hotel room, if you can't tell, which sounds nothing like my regular studio. And I am literally in a town that is without internet today. And if it wasn't for Ting, I wouldn't even be able to record in this tiny hotel room

while they work on Lady Jupes. It's so flexible. And this is what I love about it as a small business owner. I'm going to take a minute. I try to talk about this from a consumer standpoint, but this week I want to talk to you guys about this from a small business standpoint. If you have more than three lines and you're on Ting,

you're going to start saving money immediately as a small business owner. If you go above 10 lines, nobody in the US is going to beat Ting. It's $6 a month for the line. And then it's just your minutes, your megabytes, your whatever, you just pay for what you use. It's not like in the past where I worked in other organizations where every single line was like $25 to add a line. And then we had like this really complicated pool of minutes and a pool of data. And so if one person was using a lot of data while they were in some really kind of tiny hotel room, then the rest of the team would sort of have to try to conserve data because we had this pool that we were pulling. It's so complicated and so

obtuse that the staff didn't really track it and didn't really pay attention and it didn't really work for anybody. And with Ting, it's just, it's really easy for everyone to understand. $6 for the line and then your usage on top of that. That's it. It's so straightforward. The average Ting bill is just $23 per phone per month. That's easy. That's totally easy. And if you go to Ting, they have an excellent control panel. You can turn off individual services or set limits and usage alerts and all of that kind of stuff. It's so useful when I'm on the road or when we have an event going on. I cannot tell you how great it is. And they really don't care what you want to use or how you want to use it. I really appreciate that too. Like if you get to a point where you can get some crazy ass wearable device with Asteroid OS or something on a cellular network, Ting's cool with that. Just go buy a SIM card directly from them. They have this approach that's really kind of hands off. And I'm putting words in their mouth, but they're just a dumb pipe. They're totally cool. If you only want to use them as a dumb pipe to get data down to a device, totally okay with that. If you want to use them for emergency phone calls and you have like a

phone in your glove box that you use every now and then, they're totally okay with that too. I love that. And they got no big like strategic reason, no strategy tax for why they can't just send updates down to your phone. They're not going to get in the way with the Ting experience. So if you want to go get something from them or bring your own device and you want to get updates every single month, or you want a device that stays updated and secure, they're not going to get in the way of that. I like all of those things. Linux.ting.com. Go there to support the show and get $25 off a device and to get $25 in service credit if you bring your own device. Linux.ting.com. Oh yeah. All right. I want to try something new. You ready? Wes,

you got your, get your, get your pants unbuttoned. Make, make room for a ultimate comfort. Here we go. Let's talk about Fedora 26. Fedora 26, which came out two releases ago. Let's, let's, let's spend a moment and talk about it. I thought about making this an official segment on the show, but instead, this is just an FYI to Fedora users. Fedora 26 is ending its life support. It's no longer getting patches very, very soon.

And I wanted to kind of give you a PSA, but I thought let's look back and see where we were at. And I might do this with future distros too as they end support. Maybe look back at their prime, see at. And I might do this with future distros too, as they end support, maybe look back at their prime, see what they brought new to the table back then, which is kind of interesting to look where we're sitting at now.

So as you know, Fedora 28 was recently released, which means Fedora 26 is hitting end of life on May 29th, 2018. That's just, well, that's today. So as this episode records, that is right now. It is end of life. Fedora 26 is end of life. So you may feel like that's a little early, and you're right. Fedora 28 was released on time. You see, that doesn't normally happen for the

Fedora project. And I forgot to make a big deal about it at the time. So I'm making up for that right now. But see, they screwed you when they released it on time. They screwed you if you're a Fedora 26 user, because that means that Fedora 26 is now at that end of life period, even though it hasn't fully been 11 months for Fedora 26, it's part of the life cycle for Fedora. So, you know, you just kind of have to just move on now. And I apologize for all of you Noah Chalias out there that are still rocking Fedora 26 and everything's working good. That's just the way this works. And we all knew it. And that's why I've been testing the upgrades for a long, long time now. So I recommend you upgrade to Fedora 28, and I tested going from Fedora 26 to Fedora 28, and it works good. It wasn't a super complicated rig, but I would recommend it. And I think it's worth considering because the Fedora 26 wallet was really great. Fedora 28, I think, is one of

their best releases, and I think it's a pretty solid upgrade. But let's look back at 26 for a moment. Just take a moment and look back at 26. During its lifetime, the Fedora community published nearly 10,000 updates to Fedora 26's repositories. During Fedora 26's release, it was hyped for having version 3.24 of GNOME. It came with a new partitioning tool in Anaconda, and it shipped with DNF 2.5, as well as the Python Classroom Lab. And that, you know, all in itself, the new partitioning, actually, the new partitioning tool

in Anaconda was kind of a big deal. And it was something that even Wes and I remarked on our review of 28 recently, is that this is still a little odd. Oh yeah, I love that thing. So looking back on Fedora 26, pretty nice release, but here's the cadence you need to keep in mind.

The Fedora project provides updates for a particular release until a month after the second subsequent version of Fedora is released. So Fedora 26 continues one month after Fedora 28 has been released. So here we are. It is time to pay. But time does move on. Things that were done in the past have wrapped are. It is time to pay. But time does move on. Things that

were done in the past have wrapped up. It's time to embrace the new stuff. And if you're a Fedora 28 user already, then you're probably looking forward to Fedora 29, which comes with a new Dbus, Dbus Broker. Also, Project Silver Blue or Atomic Workstation, whatever you like to call it, is supposedly getting a more feature-complete release. And we're going to see X.Org 1.20 and Fedora 29. So there's already some nice things in the works for the next version of Fedora. I think it's going to be your new distro of choice, Wes. I can see it already. I am actually kind of excited.

And maybe if you're big into IoT, it sounds like there's going to be an IoT edition? Everybody's making IoT editions. It's the next big thing. Their goal is to be the default IoT operating system. We'll see if it happens. If this was two years ago, it would be a mobile edition, and now it's IoT edition. Yeah, you're right. Next up, blockchain edition.

Fedora is, in my opinion, better than ever. And I think if you haven't tried it for a while, it's worth taking another look. Because I think if you haven't tried it for a while, it's worth taking another look because I think 28 was a great release. And I've been using the hell out of QO Notes and NextCloud on Fedora 28. So that's sort of been influencing my opinion of what makes it such a good release.

It's been working great for me on the server. Surprise, surprise. Speaking of servers, do.co slash unplugged. Do.co slash unplugged is where you go to get $100 credit for DigitalOcean, go over to DigitalOcean, and spin up a rig in less than 55 seconds. Everything is SSDs. The entire stack or just the bare system. So take, for example, Fedora 28 Cloud. When you spin up a Fedora 28 Cloud instance on DigitalOcean, you don't even set a root password.

You don't get emailed a root password. You add an SSH key. You add your SSH key because this Fedora Cloud is built to run on these exact types of instances. You spin it up in seconds, and you just SSH right in, and you get working. You can manage all of your DNS. You can add new storage as you need. And they have these flexible droplets where you can mix and match the resources that are most appropriate for your application. So try it out. Go to

do.co.unplugged. You sign up with a new account, you get a $100 credit, and you can try it out. They got data centers all over the world, SSDs for everything, $5 a month for the starting price. My favorite rig, three cents an hour. Check it out, do.co slash unplugged. It's DigitalOcean, and it's something that's worth your time. It's worth trying out. It's worth kicking the tires because I've gone from building systems on my land to this is my data center now. And I would not lightly tell you that. It took me a couple of years to make the transition. I've been a DigitalOcean customer for years now, four years, maybe, maybe even longer. And it's still something that's a transition for me because, I mean, I started in the industry

setting up servers and racks. That's really how I got started, is building servers and installing them in racks and really big data centers. And I've always had that mentality. But the flexibility, the control I have, and the speed in which I can get something set up and running in production, it's a game changer for me. It's a real game changer. And I'd like you to try it out. You can get $100 for 60 days to try out the DigitalOcean infrastructure, do.co slash unplugged. Big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the unplugged program. slash unplugged. Big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. I don't know if I ever saw this one coming,

but I am very, very happy it is here. The Sega Mega Drive and Genesis Classic is now supported on Linux. There's a big price drop. Now think about this as like this arcade to run classic Sega games. And not only did they add Linux support, but they've also upgraded new features like two-player online support, challenge modes, ROMs from other regions, which I don't even understand why they put that in there.

That's so great. VR support, which is ridiculous. It includes over 50 titles. Yeah, seriously. And it's all like these classic Sega games that you can now play on Linux. And it's supported by them. And it's like 30 bucks for the whole collection, the entire collection. Does this make it the year of the Linux gaming desktop? Have we finally arrived? Maybe they're getting ready for all those Chromebooks that are going to let you run Linux apps.

Damn it. Oh, damn it. I hope that's not why. Actually, now that I said that, but they're shipping it via Steam, so I doubt it. But I suppose you could install Steam on a Chromebook. I don't know. LG is shipping a 37-inch ultra-wide screen that can run Ubuntu or Linux. Sega Mega Drive is updating for Linux.

Chrome, aka Google, can run Ubuntu or Linux. Sega Mega Drive is updating for Linux. Chrome, aka Google, is working hard to get Linux support on Chromebooks. Microsoft is spending a ton of resources and getting a lot of public attention for the Windows subsystem for Linux. And Samsung is trying to make Linux apps run on their mobile phones in some sort of convergence environment.

So you tell me, Wes, what the hell is going on right now? It's the future, and I like it. I guess. So why am I sort of worried about all of those individually? Like, all together, this feels like, yay, Linux. But individually, each one of them is freaking me out for different reasons. I mean, it's a little bit like, you know, there's some FOMO. There's some sort of concern of just like, this thing's going in a lot of different ways.

How consistent is the experience going to be across these? What sort of idea will new users who are using that form of quote unquote Linux really get about the wider Linux software ecosystem and community? I don't know. It seems it's so early. I feel like we don't, we don't really know which ones are going to win, which ones are going to be successful, and how it's all going to shake out. Yeah, and like TechMav says, maybe I'm worried that we're putting the penguins in the zoo. That might be exactly what it is, is that instead of having this general technology platform OS, it's like this feature, it's this bullet point on top of these proprietary commercial products. Popey had a great conversation

in the last week Ubuntu podcast that was basically, has Linux sort of failed to attract desktop applications? Instead we get Electron and whatnot. But at the same time you see all these companies that are trying to add compatibility for Linux applications and it's not just command line applications. Poby, what do you think about that?

I'll just encourage people to go listen to Last Ubuntu Podcast to hear your argument, but you make a very salient argument that perhaps we're looking at sort of a future that none of us wanted. And we have a lot of Linux installs, but we don't have anybody that's really got a successful Linux application toolkit or desktop toolkit. But yet, at the same time, you've got Chromebooks,

you've got the subsystem for Linux, which I guarantee you will soon have desktop Linux supports, apps. You have Samsung. How do you square those two things? We're quite a niche. How do you square those two things? We're quite a niche. Like we're, you know, if Linux is like the flea on a dog,

we're bacteria on the flea. Like we're nothing. Like you compare us to what everyone else is using around the world and this significant majority don't even know what Linux is, let alone use it. And so developers don't target it because it's just not worth it. You hear time and time again that so developers don't target it because it's just not worth it you hear time and time again that many developers don't target linux because it's not worth it because the time investment doesn't pay back you know if they release a game the amount of time and effort to

port that game is is is not repaid and so that's why you see articles by liam on gaming on linux celebrating when someone does do that because it's so rare, so few and far between. It's like if someone announced a new game for Windows, it's like, well, yeah, always. There's always new games for Windows. But we clutch at these successful events here and there. But they are few and far between. And yeah, we have, in some ways, lost. I mean, I think, by and large, lost in that sense is accurate.

And we probably won't ever see a mainstream adoption of the Linux experience that we know and love, that the people listening to this show, by and large, enjoy. I'm grateful in some sense that, you know, Electron, those sorts of things that aren't Linux special, but end up working on Linux. Like we've seen more adoption in the case of, I feel like I can use my specialty system, acknowledging that I'm in a niche that I'm doing it, you know, in a strange way to most people, but actually get work done, mostly be compatible with the rest of the world. I do think though, that like, there's not a lot of chance that, you know, maybe maybe your relatives will be using Linux and you won't have to be the IT guy, but it won't be the Linux that you know or are familiar with. I feel like I was a bit of a Debbie Downer in that episode. And, you know, we had a lot of feedback from people saying, well, it depends how you define success.

You know, there's still millions of people using Linux, both, you know, in servers and billions using it on their phones. But on the desktop specifically, I think we're far from what you would call massively successful compared to the others. And we've been doing this for a long time now. I think if the experience has gotten better, it's pretty consistent. I've just converted some of my family over to 18.04

and they're using Steam on it and having a great time. But we just haven't made any inroads in the default deployments in any kind of marketing. And don't get me wrong, I love it. Right, yeah, of course. And I want to spread the word and I want more people to use it. But we need to attract developers

to build software for our platform or people aren't going to use our platform. Nobody switched to Linux for G-Edit. Nobody switched to Linux for Gnome Calculator. You've got to have that killer app. You've got to have some reason for people to switch. Some people switch for freedom. Some people switch because resource management, some people switch for the privacy, right? But there's very few killer apps that make people think, yes, I definitely today want to install Linux. Whereas someone will actively go and buy a Mac for software that is only available on the

Mac and people will install Windows specifically for a piece of software that is only available on Windows. And we don't have that. Right. And we don't have a big brand anymore, really. You know, there isn't someone, a big marketing organization, there isn't some sort of company. We have, we have pieces here and there, but there's not, you know, we don't have a, Ubuntu was the closest and maybe, maybe that can, can be rekindled, but with some, you know, there's feelings of not having much focus in that area or less focus there feels even farther away maybe. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, though we do win on one level and that is the fiddly experience. If you get the right system, um, I've been, I've been recently listening to fellow podcaster,

Mike Hurley go through the process of setting up a windows 10 gaming system. I've been recently listening to fellow podcaster Mike Hurley go through the process of setting up a Windows 10 gaming system. Now, he, Mike, is a Mac guy. Through and through, he loves Macs and iPads and all that kind of stuff. And so he never really built a Windows PC in his life. And he never had to deal with device drivers, never had to deal with different vendors making different components for his PC. And so for the last two weeks, he has been dealing with driver hell. Like he needed to get his Tascam recorder so he can do podcasting and live streaming working. And when he did that, it broke his Bluetooth driver. And then when he fixed his Bluetooth driver, it broke SLI on his video gaming setup. And then when he fixed the SLI setup, it caused another issue. And this is a

brand new system that he just put together. And all of this fiddliness that he has to do is something you don't really screw around with. On Linux, you may have to deal with a binary blob for your video card here and there. But for the most part, everything, if it's going to work, it just works. You're not dealing with drivers. You're not dealing with all of these separate sources to get stuff. I think we have lost sight of how easy Linux makes some of this stuff. And I say that because I was going over setting up a new broadcasting system based on Linux for Linux Academy.

And man, is it so much easier when the bullet point to getting the whole OS and all of your device drivers working is install Kubuntu 18.04. That's it, right? But done. Yeah, exactly. You're done. You don't have to mess with anything else. You install Kubuntu 18.04. That's a good argument for why a lot of people moved

away from Linux to things like the maker community because it was fun and interesting when you had to to some degree, for some people to edit your xorg.conf and make sure the right daemons were starting when you start up. And I know a lot of Arch users still do that and still find that interesting and fun.

I don't, and the vast majority of people don't. They just want to put an ISO image on a a cd boot that cd or usb install it and then move on and i think a lot of enthusiasts move on from the linux community because that's not fun anymore you could just install the os and then use it as a tool now people are doing things like arduinos and micro controllers and 3d printers and stuff like that which are more interesting because they are challenging and they they don't work straight away. And it's not like putting a USB key in and it just works. There's a lot of fiddling and fettling to do.

So I think we've lost some of that. We're victims of our own success. Try out SUSE. It's just like that. Meow. You're in a mood today. I just kid because every time I apparently say something, it triggers Richard and he has to tweet me about it because I give him a hard time

it asked me to confirm my network configuration and card and probe my FireWare devices on LAN so he gave me a tweet about it but I tease yeah I agree Popey, maybe you're right maybe that is why some people are moving away but I don't feel it as somebody who has been trying to make Linux work on my desktop Some people are moving away, but I don't feel it.

As somebody who has been trying to make Linux work on my desktop since long before it was appropriate to do so, and I don't know why my employers let me get away with it, to now where it's what I make my living doing. And I got to tell you, as somebody who is using it now, it is so much easier than it used to be. It is ridiculous. Oh, yeah. I am doing this live show, this entire freaking live show from Grants Pass, Oregon, in this stinky tiny hotel room, all on Linux, end to end. I am even in the studio,

like the machines that are doing all the routing and the recording and the processing and all of it, everything, even the mixer, is Linux from end to end. And that would not have been the case a couple of years ago. Right, and we're victims of our own success there. It's got to the point where you can do a live stream and you can take your show on the road and everything works.

Why would you need nerds around you to help you fix it? Because it all works now. Yeah, that's good and bad, isn't it? I mean, it's good for getting to a larger consumer base. And my big drive for always trying to get wider user adoption has always been for wider application support. I just, for some really naive reason, thought it would be native application support.

I don't know what happened. Right, I think a lot of us did, and we were wrong. Yeah, I did not expect this. But along those lines, I also didn't expect this to happen. And it is actually happening. If I say the name RED when it comes to media production, I think a lot of you would immediately think of those really high-end, beautiful RED 8K cameras. those RED cameras is that they are a beast onto their own. They have their own proprietary capture hardware to pull that stuff down. They have their own RAW format, and I say RAW because it's not quite RAW. Like when I think of RAW, I think of RAW data. When they think of RAW, they think of a tool that you need to re-encode that to make it readable by anything else. And that has only been available on the Mac and on Windows, except for today. Today, Red is releasing their Redline tool and their Red Undead tool,

which are two different utilities for managing footage that has been recorded on a Red 8K camera. They're releasing them for Linux. And they're native Linux applications. They're not perfect. releasing them for Linux. And they're native Linux applications. They're not perfect. I don't have a red camera to test, so I just downloaded the applications and ran them. I didn't have any footage to import.

But they support export to what I consider to be really high-end intermediate exchange formats. So these, much like how when you're moving an audio file or a picture between editing and you don't want to keep recompressing it, like to JPEG or whatever, or to MP3, you have that same issue with video. And so a lot of times editors use something like ProRes, MJPEG, or a bunch of other stuff. And their Linux version of this Red utility is going to support a lot of those, including Apple's ProRes. So that way you can download footage on a Linux box

and you can convert it to ProRes on a Linux box. Wow. That's a big deal, I think. And yeah, I don't know why Red's doing this, but I think that is a really good sign. I wonder if there's just less, you know, there's already a lot of Linux deployed at the higher-end production studios. Is it just, you know, it makes their pipeline simpler? If they don't

have to include some other things, they can get this streamed up and then, you know, sure, the ProRes ends up on some Mac where they maybe edit it down the line, but keeps it a little simpler. It is kind of funny if you look at their website, even it says Redline Linux and then beta, of course, but at the bottom, they still have the Mac and Windows logo for the release. Yeah, it's new. It just launched today. The site's not totally done yet. Hey, I noticed that too.

It's like, so am I getting a Linux version? What is this? But when you download it, it is 100% a Linux application. It's in a tar.gz and everything. Yeah, it's full GNU slash. All right, so let's talk about some new hardware. We were talking last week about the best Linux laptop for 2018. We got a whole bunch of feedback.

And to kind of kick this new segment off, we have a batch of new hardware from Dell. Thinner, lighter, and more powerful. All things that are good. And we have a batch of new hardware from Dell, thinner, lighter, and more powerful, all things that are good. And we have a whole new line. You have the 3530 and also the 5530, the 7530, and the 7730. Beefy. Yeah.

Barton George, friend of the show Barton George, says, These systems, which represent the fourth generation of Precision developer editions, come preloaded with Ubuntu and also have been certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now this is on top of the XPS 13 that is already available. The Precision 3530 is the first one that is available. Its starting price is $943. That'll get you a 15.6-inch 1366x768. Don't say it. Just don't even say it. it i'm sorry i shouldn't have even said it uh four gigs of ram and an intel i5 so don't get the 943 dollar model

yeah unless you have to um and uh but you know as with all Dells, you can configure it way up from there. There's also going to be the other models I mentioned, the 5530, 7530, and 7730 will be shipping later. With 1604 installed on all of them, and, you know, 8th Gen Intel processors, all those goodies. All the typical goodies that you would get in the latest bump of Dell or any kind of recent laptop hardware. So yeah, so as we're about to open up this segment here on the show, you have a whole new batch of laptops you could

potentially buy. So get your credit cards ready. Those precision machines are pretty slick too. I used the older, back when it was the bigger, uglier chassis of the previous generation for a long time. And they're just sturdy, really a good desktop replacement if that's what you need it for. So now that they look a lot nicer, I'm kind of interested. Yeah, and it's always nice to see them just getting another spec bump. Really, what's nice, actually, is just to keep seeing keep working at this, just to keep iterating on this. Yeah, it's more Linux momentum. And it's paid off.

So we sent out the vote last episode. And what I have found over the years is, we may have thousands of you download this, tens of thousands of you download this, but only a few hundred of you ever really vote on these polls. But anywhere between a couple of hundred and a thousand, it almost always shakes out to be the same. And I guess that's just the way that the math works. So let's start with what didn't do well and what did well. Last week, we asked the audience, what is the best Linux laptop on this

list for 2018? We had the Oryx Pro on there. We had the ThinkPad X270 and 280, the X1 Carbon, the Librem 15, and the XPS 13. And we asked you guys, what do you think is, if you were going to buy one today, which laptop would you buy? And I also said, whichever laptop doesn't win the vote, we'll just take off the list. And we won't be recommending that one to folks. And the one that fell off the list this week, I'm really kind of unsatisfied with. It's really unfortunate, and maybe it's partially my fault. The Librem 15 only got 5% of votes. 5% of votes. Yeah, it is a big ouch. And I don't know what's going on here. I don't know what's going on here I think there's a bigger problem that Purism is dealing with and it's this sort of outsider status that I feel like they have

I feel like people don't know about them and they don't think about them when they think of Linux-first hardware and I can't really put my finger on it I don't know if it's because they did crowdfunding or if it's because they're kind of going their own way with PureOS. I kind of have more of a sense it's that. But what's your impression on that, Wes? Do you feel like maybe they're not getting a fair shake?

Because you have a vendor here who is making hardware just for Linux, physical kill switches, it only ships Linux, and it is the bottom of our list. You know, it might just be a weird subset of people that are kind of interested in this. They're not always bargain basement. So if you're on a budget, they're not super expensive, then it's not necessarily an Apple tax, but it's a little bit more over like a minimal XPS or something like that. And I think some of these pre-installed or super customized, strange distributions are off-putting to experienced users that feel like they're going to have to flash it anyway.

And maybe you just want some, to quote Popey, bog-standard hardware that you're going to install your own distribution on anyway. And then for people that would benefit more from a pre-installed Linux that don't want to mess with it so much, they probably haven't heard of them. I mean, there has been a kind of bumpy track record, too. I know their most recent, Librem 15, is a nice piece of hardware, but I don't know if they've just had enough of a track record now in the good for people to have a lot of trust in an expensive purchase. Yeah, that's also a good point. Good points, Wes, all in all.

Mumbler, do you have anything to add? Why do you think it is that Purism isn't higher up on our list? And why isn't the Librem 15 or 13 more forward from Linux users when they want to buy a Linux-first laptop? I think if you have a support problem, you would like an established company, maybe. Also, maybe the keyboard. Let's say you have some worldwide audition.

And here in Switzerland, I cannot buy a Librem laptop because of the missing keyboard for Switzerland. Yeah, I mean, definitely international is a problem that is hard for a company like Purism that's just getting started to address. But it does seem like a deeper issue. I'd like to know the audience's thoughts, because honestly, I feel like they maybe deserve a little more credit than they're getting. I was skeptical when I got my Librem 15, the original one, and it wasn't what I wanted. But when they did a make good and they sent me a, uh, like a second or third iteration on the Librem 15, it was a marked improvement in quality. Like I could easily see where the trend line was going. And it's not just me that said that. Like I, when, uh, when we have guests in the studio besides Wes, cause Wes brings his

own hardware, but when we have guests in the studio besides west because west brings his own hardware but when we have guests in the studio uh i give them the libram 15 to use and people constantly remark on how nice the machine is and when noah was in town he sat down he's like really this is the libram 15 this is way nicer than i thought it would be and a lot of people comment on how great the keyboard is and the design looks great, the performance is good, and it really is the big loser on our list. And I don't really understand because the number two on our list is the Oryx Pro. Well, these are the only two systems on our list that are created by vendors that only make stuff for Linux, that only ship Linux. System76 and the Librem 15. With the System76, you could have put the Galago Pro. We decided to put the Oryx Pro because we were going for something a little high.

It was brand new and high performance. But still, the fact that ThinkPads and the XPS are dominating this list, I think is telling. And so the XPS 13 is the one that was the clear winner. 44% of the votes. The number two was the X1 Carbon with 20% of the votes. And then the number three was the X270 with 17% of the votes. So the Carbon and the X270 were the closest. Then, you know, it drops down to the Oryx Pro at 15%, and then the Librem 15 at 5%. That's devastating. And it, again, gives me concern about how the Librem 5 is going to do. So these are bad numbers for the vendors that ship only Linux systems. And I can't explain it,

to be honest with you. Because if everything I i hear is consistent people want companies that are making computers for linux first but then when you look at the actual numbers in our polls or you go to any any kind of conference or event and it's it's it's stacked full of macbooks thinkpads and then dells that's the three and then the fourth would be maybe an hp and then the fifth is like a mix of chromebooks that's what you get when you go to these events i don't know what to make of that anybody in the member room have additional thoughts on why these linux only vendors are not not doing super well in our linux user poll well i would have to say that there's also the the original premise of purism was, well, I think the premise still

is like to be privacy focused and that sort of marketing sort of alienates people on occasion. I suppose if you don't, you know, if you're not marketing for the other factors, because it's not like, you know, some of the privacy features don't really detract from the rest of the system. But if all you're hearing is, oh, this is all about privacy. These are the features. This is what makes us great and less about this is why this should be a good laptop for you, then yeah, maybe you're less interested. I mean, also a lot of the Linux laptop brands are based in Europe, and they don't have a foothold in the United States yet.

So I don't see any sort of competition. any sort of competition? I know the Sputnik program at Dell is sort of an initiative, but is there really enough competition in order to get Linux-based laptops into a market of their own? Bobby, do you have any thoughts? I've not actually seen a Librem laptop,

but they've sent us one for review. So very soon now, Mark has it, and we'll be comparing because i believe the one we've got is the same hard physical hardware as the kde slim book 2 that i reviewed that i've i've got for review so interestingly we'll be able to compare and contrast and decide whether you know should you buy the purism or should you buy the kde slim book well interesting and then i look forward i look forward to hearing that but you know the Purism or should you buy the KDE Slimbook? Well, interesting. And then I look forward to hearing that. But you know, the votes have it. We'll take the Librem 15 off the list, and we'll have our list of our recommended laptops for 2018 at least. And maybe the Librem 15 gets

back on there for 2019. But Dom emailed in, by the way, he emailed us in at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. He said, I have a couple of recommendations depending on which laptop you get. So if you're going to get the XPS 13, they have two different models that they're selling right now. The 9360 and the 9370. And you'll notice this immediately if you start doing research. There's these two different models out there. Dell is selling both of those models with upgraded 8th Gen processors. The 93070

is slimmer, but it embraces the dongle lifestyle. And the 93070 has a better screen, and it's like, that's really saying something, because the screen before it was already one of the best ever. Now, Dom suggests you don't buy

the Linux version. Now you want to double check this depending on when you listen to this episode, but he says currently the Linux version still has the seventh gen Intel processor. He recommends get the Windows version of the laptop, but switch out the killer wireless card for an Intel card for better Linux support. Get a 1080p screen for better battery life. And also remember that you're not going to be able to upgrade the RAM later. So keep that in mind when you're speccing it. The 93060 has a full side SD card. The 93070 only has micro SD. The 93060 has a larger battery than the 93070, but the 93070 is just slimmer in general. When you're looking at the X270 or X1 carbon models, maybe consider just skipping the X280 right now. Lenovo went kind of MacBook Air

on that one, and they removed all of the features that made it great, including soldering some stuff on. So consider if you're going to go with the X270 or 280 line. Focus maybe more on the X270 for now. And remember, you're going to need an ethernet dongle with that one. But the XPS 13 was our champion. It was the winning laptop for the poll. So just look at this list. We'll have it linked. Dom's going to suggest that you consider looking at the 93060 versus the 93070, depending on your needs. For me personally, I might still want to go with the 93060 because it's got the 8th generation Intel processor and it's got the larger battery life and it uses less dongles. It just has a downgrade on the screen.

And it's already pretty slim. They're not fat laptops. Yeah, it's still very, very thin. Very nice laptop. I mean, I have an older one from that and it's still very thin and very nice. All right, I think we're done with the laptops. Right, yeah, it's still very, very thin. Very nice laptop. I mean, I have an older one, it's from that, and it's still very thin and very nice. All right, I think we're done with the laptops. I don't know, I don't know, hopefully this show wasn't horrible, Wes. I feel like it could have been a little stronger, could have been a little better if I wasn't running around town beforehand trying to find internet. You did have that Levi story, though, that always pulls

it out, even though he's not feeling well well we're all glad to hear he's feeling better And you know Wes, really it was for me this week it was for me just to be able to do this and talk to you guys and not have everything in my life be totally crazy right now so hopefully the audience loved it, I don't think so but hopefully a couple people out there liked it let us know and also let us know your thoughts on the laptops Linux Action...

Nope, it's not Linux. Although you can go there, it's linuxunplugged.com slash contact. You can! You sure could! If you want to let us know over at Linux Action News what you think, you can go to linuxactionnews.com slash contact. It's the same URL, just not the

same URL. It's a different show. I don't know, Wes. I think it's just totally gone off the rails at this point. We should probably wrap it up. But I'll leave Dom's email in the show notes if you guys want to go through his list, because I know I just went through the highlights and all the other things we talked about at linuxunplugged.com slash 251.

Go check it all out there. Mr. Payne, where can they get more of you? You can find me on Twitter, at Wes Payne, or go to techsnap.systems to check out our other wonderful show. Yeah, Twitter at Wes Payne or go to techsnap.systems to check out our other wonderful show. Yeah, so go get more Wes and me at techsnap.systems. I'm at Chris LAS. I'll be tweeting some updates along the way.

And the whole network is at Jupiter Signal. Thanks so much for tuning this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you back here next Tuesday! all right let's uh before we get out of here guys thank you everybody mumbaroon thank you very much for putting up with all of that i know that was difficult and challenging so i really appreciate you guys being here thank you guys go vote people who are still around. We do have, J-Bot seems to be alive today. Yeah, J-Bot survives. Yeah. I tell you what, this day, the one thing I didn't get a chance to say, because I was sick of derailing the show, but while I'm sitting here during the

last few minutes of the show, I saw somebody go by. He's wearing a motorcycle helmet, no shirt, and then I think he's wearing pants. I couldn't quite tell. And he was sitting outside the sunroof of a Suburban, and they were going down the road. So to make it clear,

this guy was sitting on top of a Suburban outside the sunroof with no shirt on, wearing a motorcycle helmet, going down the road in front of this motel room. Well, at least he's thinking, you know, about safety first. That's the only way to get a good tan when you're on the road.