LINUX Unplugged - Episode 254: Don’t Link to This

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

Free Software projects concerned about Article 13 are claiming it could destroy free software as we know it. We debate this controversial copyright law about to be voted on in the EU. Plus a big batch of community news, some exciting hardware updates, and a bit of retro gaming. Plus Chris shares what got done at Linux Academy, and more!

I have to apologize to the podcast audience. There's going to be some rain noise and maybe some thunder, although I think that's past. About 15 minutes before we went on the air, I was watching a storm approach, and it just got bigger and bigger. And then about 10 minutes before we went on the air, I realized it was really impacting my LTE performance. I sent Wes a message, and I'm like, Wes, my LTE coverage is dropping rapidly. So Wes goes and looks up the weather map for me. He's like playing meteorologist over there. You know it. And I look at it, I'm like, it's not clearing up anytime soon, is it? No. So I decide, all right, I got to get the

cell booster up. See if I can't get the LTE signal back up to some sort of usable range. So that way we can do the show because I'm remote. I'm in Wyoming, I have to have good connectivity. So there I am in probably one of the top 10, maybe even top five thunder and lightning storms of my life. Like an idiot, I'm climbing up the ladder on the back of my RV, doop, doop, doop, with a coax cable hanging to the ground in my mouth. So that way my hands are free, doop, doop, doop, climbing up the back of the RV. I wrap my arm around the ladder. So one arm's around the ladder. The other arm is trying to tighten down a coax cable. The wind is nuts. My clothes are getting soaked by this crazy sideways rain. I'm up on the roof getting this thing all tight and I climb down, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. I'm just totally soaked head to toe by now. I feed the

wire, the coax cable into the RV in one of the slides. I just feed it in there. I go get it all hooked up, power up the cell booster, sit down, get ready to do the show. And I notice my cellular performance has not improved at all. I go look. Random air light. I'm sitting there dripping water on the floor with a random booster air light. So I got no LTE. I got a big storm.

But you know what, Wes? The show goes on. It sure does. Can't stop it. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 254, for June 19th, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's live from a very stormy Casper, Wyoming. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. It is good to be connected with you.

Over the power of a somewhat shaky LTE connection thanks to the thunder and lightning. But that doesn't prevent us from having a great show. We're going to get into some major stories that are really concerning several large open source projects. We'll talk about what's going on with Blender and their situation with YouTube. And then we'll get into a bunch of community news, including some important news for one of the important members. Important news for an important member of our community, Techstar. We have an update on his health situation deepin has a new release we're doing update 2 on the libra 5 what they're working on where they're at some new portable hardware coming a distro you might not have considered

and then i'll give you an update on my adventures at setting up linux academy with obs running on kubuntu 1804 and migrating their live stream from a Mac to GNU slash Linux. Then we got a little segment on retro games. I've just sort of embraced it. I've decided it's time to be an old man. I'm going to love the old games in a way that only the old games can love me. Give you a little update on my Texas trip.

Plus, Linux desktop's usability seems to reach a peak and then they want to change everything, whoever they might be. And it all goes out the window for some new design. And often with that, a loss of usability. And a follower of the show has documented this process over and over again, going back to the original Xerox interface to the latest versions of GNOME 3. So we'll cover that as well in the show, get a good conversation going wes before we go any further you know we got to bring in that mumble room so time appropriate greetings virtual lug hello hello good evening hello everybody it's

super good to be connected with you as i was i was driving yesterday for 10 hours and i literally had the thought you know tomorrow i'm gonna be sitting down just hanging out with my buddies. Like today's kind of a grindy day. But tomorrow, tomorrow we get to hang out. So thank you, everybody, for being here. I really appreciate it. I've been looking forward to it. That's what got me through driving nonstop yesterday.

But we'll talk more about that later. Let's get into some of the news that's going on. It's impacting the community. And one that's got Blender Project upset. The MIT courseware that's open has been screwed around with. And it all is kind of building towards my concerns around Article 13. So that's a lot of stuff I just laid on you. Let's start with the bigger picture stuff.

YouTube, it's an ongoing issue. And the centralization of services, we've been constantly reminded of the limitations that open source and free software projects run into when they use centralized services, like Slack, like GitHub, and like YouTube. And several popular YouTuber accounts, including the MIT OpenCourseWare account and the Blender Foundations accounts, have had all of their videos blocked. Channels just been screwed with completely by YouTube. have had all of their videos blocked.

Channels just been screwed with completely by YouTube. And in a little bit of irony, too, the MIT courseware stuff has been taken down because it contains content from MIT, according to the YouTube video. Have you seen this, Wes? Yeah, it seems, oh man, I don't know. It's very frustrating. I'm still trying to catch up on all that's happened

because a lot has happened kind of quickly. But just the fact that there's so many blocked videos that the centralization of this platform is once again so highlighted I just want to watch local media yeah I know right so the MIT one isn't an isolated incident either there's other organizations

that have been blocked by their own content I once got a copyright flag on my own voice you know when I do the introductions, I did one for Coda Radio. I go, this is Coda Radio, episode 283. Yes, yes. They flagged my own voice once on YouTube, claiming that it was owned by somebody else. Because it's just some scripts, right, that are listening to the audio waveforms, doing matching. It's not as advanced as we like to think it is. And that's how Blender is getting

screwed. No, right? Absolutely not. It has so much data to churn through, and it's really just a somewhat simple fingerprinting procedure. So there's very much limits, and unfortunately, we hit them all the time. And you can thank Facebook for all of this. I think also, though, the YouTube Python scripts to do content ID matching, didn't it really start with the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube before Google bought them? Sure, but no other company has promoted more responsibility of the platform to monitor uploads than Facebook. Now there are even actual very concrete proposals waiting to be voted on, especially in the EU side, on actually making Google, for example,

responsible for the content and to require automated tools to exist so that content can be removed within an hour. Right. So if they, like any corporation, they already had content ID because it was for the music association to get out of their ass. Now they have another incentive to try to make sure the algorithms are acting as fast as possible. And as a consequence, we're seeing now open source projects to be mostly affected because those were the ones that usually had more loose policies. I think it's just a natural consequence of the political environment at the moment. Yes, I think you've nailed it there.

And Blender is taking matters into their own hands. They've launched video.blender.org, which is PeerTube. It's just a test at this point, but it's PeerTube, which is a peer-to-peer video distribution platform. I tried it. Doesn't work as well for me. Blender thinks that this is something to do with the monetization strategies at YouTube because they've never since 2008 tried to monetize their YouTube channel, but it keeps getting turned on for them and they keep going and turning it off.

Who knows? But I think what you say, Dar, is the bigger point here is people are really upset about if we cauterize all this with legalese and we essentially take the YouTube problem, which I just mentioned, and we apply it to the entire internet where you're supposed to for every GitHub documentation submission that has a screenshot. You need to have somebody review that. It just gets completely unscalable. And several different projects are raising a red flag about article 13 and ubports is one of them they say dear ubports supporters the freedom to develop software collaboratively online is at serious risk by an article included on the current proposal for copyright reform in the european union the specific proposal known as article 13 which which, just a side note, sounds like something out of 1984.

Sure does. Imposes mandatory upload filters on online platforms that share, quote, large amounts of user-generated content. Large amounts is not clearly defined, so that's red flag number one. And it could be as many as 500 pieces of arts, 500 songs, 500 programs, 500 units of any work that could be legally protected by copyright. This is extremely concerning, and it's not just UbiPorts that's raising this red flag. The Free Software Foundation, over on their website, says free software is under attack

within the European Union. The proposed European Copyright Directive poses a great risk for free software and its development. The Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament will be voting June 20th and 21st on whether or not to continue to allow us, as in the free software community, to build software online together. So one of the situations I say is don't, like especially for open source projects listening, don't flog out of the platforms just yet because then they will say,

see, you have an alternative. Use your voice to actually make your argument against the Article 13. There is a, the EU is actually doing a public consultation. And I will provide the link if you guys want. Yes, please. I'll drop in the show notes.

That you can participate and basically just answer, say, your piece. And it's going to matter. Even if you're not a local business, even if you're not in the EU, it will matter. Yeah, I will definitely put that in the show notes. It's also more than just the 13th article. The 3 and 11 are also terrible. Yeah, and I don't understand them as much, but it sounds like it could actually impact people that are just sharing news articles and whatnot. What's your understanding? It doesn't have any correlation to fair use.

So even if you do something legally in the fair use concept, the European copyright reform would ignore all of that and still say that you're violating it. And there's other cases where if someone provides a service that you display that service, or let's say, for example, you take a tweet from Twitter and you use the embed thing where you display it directly from the Twitter embed code and then you load it on your website, you're violating the copyright reform of Article 11 at that point. Right, and they're trying to essentially protect the journalists and say you have to go to the source to get the information so therefore they'll stay alive, they'll stay in business because everybody will be forced to go to the source. What are your thoughts, Dar?

No, no, they explicitly put a tax on it too, actually. It's not just forcing you to go to the source. What are your thoughts, Dar? No, no. They explicitly put a tax on it, too, actually. It's not just forcing you to go to the source. The ancillary link, that's what they call it, essentially, says that if you include a snippet, it's not so much the link, but if the link brings a snippet over,

that snippet requires a license before you can actually present it. So platforms like Google News would essentially have to pay a tax. What about my show notes where I link to a story and I include a preview of the article in there? Maybe I even embed a quote? If you embed that quote, then again,

if this place that you're gathering this information from is a news outlet, because this is very specific to news outlets, it doesn't go and go and say hey your blog or something it goes like into a news agency um so that that is actually the bigger problem because it's also making distinction between um copyright of some individuals versus other individuals which is actually uh probably illegal but curiously enough, because then you're discriminating against citizens, different types of citizens. But essentially, the end result is still news organizations would be able to get these licensing benefits. At least that's what their intent is.

And when it comes to the other measure that they want to pass through, which is what we already talked, Article 13, like fair use right now is not standard across the EU, which is one of the reasons to bring these actually copyright reform overall. We're losing out in some countries and in some countries people are actually gaining. Even though it feels very negative, when we look at it from a technical point of view, it is easy to see why there's actually still some support for this reform. Some countries don't even allow you to take a picture of a building. And also the parliament in the UK don't allow you to use any content that's for satire. There's all kinds of different things that are violating fair use the idea of fair fair use but there's this that one individual thing um is there's so many things wrong with this this reform that not there's so many things that break the idea of any kind of fair use in trade that it makes it

where most these services are just trying to make as much money as possible and so they like for example the not being able to you have to pay a tax or a license to use display content on your website it's so these news organizations that can't somehow figure out how to you know stay relevant they can force people to if they use use their content, that they have to go, that they have to pay them to use it or don't use it. So that is really, I think, devastatingly awful to those of us in the States. But Dar brings up a good point that outside the States, there are some countries where aspects of this aren't improvement. So I want to move forward in this conversation keeping that in mind. But talking specifically about Article 13, this seems to be where it really goes off the rails because UbiPort's other aspects, Article 3 and those

aspects, maybe there is some merit to that argument. But Article 13 of this whole copyright reform seems really to be where the damning bit that the internet's freaking out about is. UbiPort says that it's going to totally screw over launchpad and github for them and that all user generated content on those platforms will have to be reviewed at the time of submission and it'll have to be if it isn't found in violation or potentially in violation removed instantly yes that doesn't seem possible like Like the bigger companies could maybe, you could argue that big companies could sustain that, but smaller like open source projects would be impossible to review any code like that.

I completely agree. And not only that, if you actually zoom out a little bit and see what a lot of EU countries are attempting to try to do, like France and Spain, even a couple of EU countries basically did it. They've set up what they call AI incentive programs for companies to open their AI incentives.

To be honest, this is a no-brainer. You open an AI tax incentive for companies to bring their AI development to your country. Then you make it so that it's actually required to use AI services like upload filters. And there you go. The economy booms there, not elsewhere. This is a no-brainer. The countries that are pushing more for this vision are the countries that did investments to make tax benefits and tax cuts for setting AI research centers in their country.

Now, from my very US-centric point of view, admittedly, it feels like the EU keeps screwing up my internet. So first of all, can I just say I still am angry about all of those notices about cookies. I don't care. If I care about cookies, I'm taking care of it via other means. I am so sick and tired of clearing those messages. Just this week, I finally started actually clearing them out instead of just leaving them up in protest, wrecking the website. And then we have GDPR, which is, as a business owner, has made my life a little bit more complicated. And now Article 13 is coming down, which gives me once again the heebie-jeebies.

Am I wrong here, Wes? me once again the heebie-jeebies. Am I wrong here, Wes? But don't you feel like we're starting to really run up against the edges of traditional laws and borders and having them applied to the internet? It feels like the only reason why this stuff has any chance of being successful is because of the size of the EU.

If this was some small, tiny little nation, if North Korea was doing all of this, nobody would give any craps. Hang on. Hang on just a minute. Because it feels like you guys are wrecking my internet to be honest with you you're wrecking my net so when the u.s go around hoovering up people for dmca dmca violations outside their borders exactly that's fine and dandy but when we try to implement laws that protect users, that's bad, right? Yeah, right, exactly. There is a place for the GDPR data protections

and especially just giving users control over how their data is stored, that kind of thing, if it's stored. I'm kind of actually for that, not actually against it, but the cookie stuff, really getting old, it's like stupid. What it feels like is old people that don't know how the internet are working are making laws about the internet that affects everyone.

Right. And that's not to give them control. It's to show them what people are collecting about them. And to make this aware is a good step, in my opinion. Except it doesn't go too far. Except it doesn't go too far in which they proved by when they – within the first week of the GDPR becoming in effect, there was like 35,000 requests for removal from Google and various search engines from government officials in the EU. Oh my god, 35,000? Yeah. There was a variety of countries of all levels of their governments.

It was a variety of countries, all levels of their governments. It was the most blatant, obvious usage of it was coming down immediately. It does seem like it's a problem of scale in many ways there, right? Where a lot of these laws, there are intent. And like what you were saying to the nature of the internet, but the economic and political impacts of the internet have grown a lot, and maybe the ways we interact with it haven't. And so a lot of the intent here maybe makes sense because there are these very large corporations that do have nation-level impact, but they are not well-crafted enough to

scale down to the individual contributors that make up the parts of the internet we value a lot. That's true. Nation-scale impact. That's a good way to put it. I do have an extremely positive side note on all of these debates. So one of the situations that has been complained about is ability to link and basically to deal with content online. These changes made it so that it is actually harder to have people like Snowden, whistleblowers. to have people like Snowden, whistleblowers. And because of this high criticism generated in Parliament about the inability to have whistleblowers, actually there is now a whistleblowers protection legislation coming through

because of these debates. So there has been reticence over, because different countries have different policies of what should entitle you to be a whistleblower and making an EU makes it applicable to the 27 remaining member states. And when you look at that, you actually see a greater point that they are aware of the limitations being placed. So now we just have to say that they will not be elected and that we'll try our best to put it down

so that they don't pass it. Because they are aware. If they weren't aware, they wouldn't debate the need of having now better whistleblower protections because it would be harder to expose things. Because when you release the piece of information that is private to an organization, it will be filtered out by an upload filter. So ultimately, making yourself become a whistleblower is kind of impossible then.

Oh, that is really, really creepy. Popey, did you want to jump in? Because I know we kind of just went off on a couple of rabbit holes here. Did you want to follow up on my whole, you guys are wrecking my life or i've calmed down that's fine and just to be clear i don't think anybody here would be happy to defend the dmca no no and i wasn't defending gdpr either i'm not i'm not defending it i agree with chris that it was a law implemented by old people who don't understand the internet, right? I get that. But you can't use it as an excuse for why we're all terrible people when other people around the world do exactly the same kind of thing and they get off scot-free.

Yeah, fair enough. And I got to remember, too, to be nice to old people because not only am I quickly becoming one, but I met a 93-year-old listener, I believe it was, at Texas Linux Fest. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah. So I met a 93 year old listener. I believe it was at Texas Linux Fest. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. So I got to remember to be nice. But now you can get paid for your data. I guess that's a positive thing with GDPR. You know, I'll take it. You know, maybe I could just start selling my, you know what, that could be a good way to make revenue. And there's actually definitely a couple

new advantages. So for example, right now, if you get, let's say, a speed ticket, you can't actually use the camera footage to prove that you had, for example, an alibi. But because the data is yours, you actually have a right to that data to request it and to have it. And therefore, you can use it, for example, to prove that you were in a different place in case of a false accusation. This is just an example of what actually GDPR does for you. It goes even further. Like you're talking about, for example, how your credit score gets evaluated because GDPR doesn't cover just your data but data related about you. Ultimately, you have to make the question of, all right,

if you go to your bank and say, hey, give me all the data that you have on me, they will have to basically show you how they are using your data to evaluate your actual credit score. And as a consequence, it disambiguates lots of services that are around data. I think that's a positive thing, because oftentimes algorithms nowadays make decisions that affect your life. You kind of want to know how that happens. In a way, you could also think about this could be a good thing to, as far as the GDPR, it stops people from asking for data they don't need because they're too afraid to just store it. They don't have it, so they'll disable things. Like the New York Times or some other news organizations would disable JavaScript entirely so they didn't have to deal with it anymore. I've really enjoyed the reduction in spam email that's

come my way over the last few weeks. That's been quite nice. But also, don't forget that the US have just as many ways to screw up the internet as the EU do. You've got SOPA, you've got net neutrality, you've got... SOPA didn't pass, PIPA didn't pass. No, but they could have done, that's the point. The neutrality was good, and it's been removed, and that's true. That is going to be a problem. Yeah, it's a fair point. Yeah, you're right. The US has their...

Everybody, really, that has any major influence. It's what you do when you have the influence, right? Yeah. Yeah. So another influence in our community has been Techstar. He is the guy that made PC Linux OS. I've been following PC Linux OS since I was a Mandrake user way back in the day. It's been a long, long journey. And I have some bad news. I just wanted to make you

guys aware of it. Maybe you can send well wishes or do whatever you do. It looks like Techstar is facing the end of a battle with cancer and he posted on their forum that he doesn't think he's going to be around much longer. And that is super sad to see because Techstar was one of these individuals who was an early pioneer in creating a really user-friendly Linux desktop operating system. And he's held strong opinions. He's been a really unique individual in the community. And he's somebody, Texas, somebody I've followed for a long time. And when I saw this announcement, I wasn't, I don't know, I just wasn't prepared for it.

I was in Texas at the time, too. So I, oh, yes. Siri says, by the way, she says she doesn't understand. I just want you guys to know that Siri just let me know that she doesn't understand why Techstar is losing his battle with cancer. And I don't like to cover down her stories like this, but it is. And it's something I think people need to be made aware of. And we could get into bus factor and small distribution debates in the future.

But for now, the show's best wishes to tech star his family and the pc linux os community i'll have a link in the show notes if you guys want to see that or if maybe you want to go in and jump in if you've been a member of the community and leave your comments i think there's probably not much to add but our thoughts are with them and it's super sad and man cancer sucks cancer just oh like talk about something something that has taken some great people. Absolutely. Yeah. So that'll be in,

links in the show notes if you guys want to read his words and maybe leave a message in the forum. Let's talk about Deepin for a moment. Something that we don't get a chance to talk about very much on the show. Deepin 15.6 was released. It's got a new app launcher. And if you don't remember, one of the things that is sort of unique about Deepin is their own custom desktop, well, quote unquote,

custom, their own unique desktop environment with a new efficient launcher that's all based on Qt. It's a little more modeled off of Windows 7, I would say, the launcher, if I were to give it a description. It's like a start menu. You click it. You get your most favorite apps on the left side. Then you get computer, document, videos, music pictures, downloads, and the clock on the right side. It's a more traditional style launcher. It's a nice update. There's a new

Welcome app as well, sort of reminiscent of Mate Welcome. Does anybody in the Mumble room that knows better than I remember what distribution Deepin's based off of, or what the desktop environment is based off? It's Debian. I think they used to be Ubuntu, but they're Debian and their desktop environment is their own, the Deepin desktop environment.

What are our thoughts on this? It doesn't seem like it gets much attention because I think it's the largest audience is outside the U.S., but they say their claim is sort of expect the simplicity of Gnome Shell and maybe Budgie, but cute. You know, like, cute underneath. That does sound appealing to, I think, a lot of what you've talked about previously on the show. I am downloading it now because it seems like they have caught on to the zeitgeist. I can't speak to it

because I haven't really tried this release, but I will. They're very friendly every time you talk with the devs and they generally fix the stuff you complain about. I had that experience. But also, weirdly enough, every time I go to IRC to talk with them, I get a huge influx, an increase of influx of spam from China. That may be just a coincidence. Also, the other thing is, guess maybe why people are reluctant to actually use it as a daily driver even though there's – technically it's being open source and we can check it. Is that the power that Chinese government has on Chinese companies or whatever organization runs on China. That generally I think would be their biggest bottleneck, right? The elephant in the room always.

They did announce that they did have contracts in some ways with the government. See, that makes it even worse. I guess it will work well for their market because people already are using the system, right? And are already bound to the same legislation. So I guess it makes sense. Like if you're using, it's like we understand,, we understand Google's going to be a friend of NSA, and so Microsoft. We understand that, and we're generally okay because we have that same regulatory environment

in every other company that operates in our territory. So for them, it might be okay, but for us, it feels like, okay, this is a party we don't really go with. Good points. Good points, Dar. You're on fire today. I wasn't going to say it for some reason, but I agree. That was the elephant in the room. I don't know why.

I just felt like it was inappropriate to bring it up. So I'm glad that you said something. What do you think, Michael? It is interesting and it definitely has to be said because it just is what it is. But there's no evidence that they're doing anything wrong as far as tracking any information or anything. There's been multiple attempts to test to see if there's any spyware or anything. And while there are some things that are somewhat sketchy, none of it's technically any kind of spyware. So as far as me, the reason why I don't use it is because it doesn't have plasma.

And that was an easy choice. Boom! Right there. And funny enough, we probably have higher scrutiny for Deepin because just of where they are based, and we actually check more than stuff done in our own region. But, you know, people are biased. Isn't that funny? You're so right. You're so right. We should be much more critical of stuff coming out of the U.S., really, than we are.

So all fair points around. I want to talk to Wimpy in a moment about his new NUC. But before we go there, how about just a super brief update on the progress of the Librem 5? It's something we've been tracking fairly steadily on Linux Action News. But we've kind of had a few smaller developments that don't quite rank moving up to Linux Action News. So I thought I'd just bust them out here for you. First of all, in case you didn't know or forgot, it is a Wayland stack on the Librem 5, and they're continuing to work on that. They've been testing the vibrators in that thing, chargers, and the usability improvements to their Posh phone shell. Posh is

the name, and they say it's running on top of Wayland now. They've had some lock screen improvements. Arrow widgets were added to the library for swiping, etc., so you can get a little overlay. They're continuing to work on their back-end GTK3 dialer application that they call calls. Clever. And on the hardware front, they continue evaluating components like the Wi-Fi module, still in evaluation right now, vibration motors, and battery charges. You've got to test some of that stuff to make sure it's the right stuff, especially battery chargers, I would imagine.

And they're also exploring camera options still for the Librem 5. And I think, like all of the previous outreaches, it's really top-notch. Purism has a great blog where they're really keeping everybody up to date on all this kind of stuff. They're working hard, I would imagine. Having been inside companies, they're trying to expose the great work that's happening to the blog. It can be a long process. And I really commend them for doing that because I love watching how they're building this thing.

Looking at the prototype stuff that they're doing and the fact that you can get a prototype sent to you and stuff like that, it's so cool. get a prototype sent to you and stuff like that. It's so cool that there's people now doing videos of them testing stuff, working on showing the Plasma Mobile working on the prototype builds and stuff like that. It's very cool to see. I was under the impression that the Plasma Mobile folks hadn't got Librem 5 test hardware yet. Oh, they don't have it.

The Librem Purism is doing it. Ah, okay. So the Plasma Mobile people are getting prototypes. But the fact that they're showing that Plasma Mobile is working on their current prototypes that Purism is doing it. Ah, okay. So the Plasma Mobile people are getting prototypes. But the fact that they're showing that Plasma Mobile is working on their current prototypes, that Purism themselves are doing it to show that it is functional, that's very cool. Yeah. And I think a couple other folks are still waiting to get their test hardware yet. But maybe they're not there yet.

And it also sounds like Michael Larable over at Pharonix has noted that they're using a secondary processor. So one processor not good enough, Wes, they're going to have two processors. And it really comes down to like the binary blob. Did you catch this? Yeah, it's interesting. Well, Chris, your freedom is important, right? And if you're, I mean, if that's kind of the whole point of what you're trying to do, it's interesting to see them taking this rather maybe serious approach and just not have to deal with that, not have to embed them on that. First processor have a secondary unit that they can talk to and try to get that information with and still, quote unquote, respecting your freedom. Yeah, that's a neat trick.

So you get the free software foundations, A-OK, because it's a secondary processor. So they need a binary blob for this phone to do the DDR4 memory training. Of course you do. That's just, we're still there. We're still in that world. Oh, wow, though. Like, that's what we're up against is binary blobs that train the DDR4 RAM how to behave timing-wise on boot every single boot. Like, that's the level that we are trying to get down to here. Okay. Talk me out of this because right now I'm feeling like this is like an impossible, never-ending war that we are going to be constantly behind, never able to catch up on.

So talk me out of this, Dar. No, I'm not going to talk you out of it. Oh, God. I'm going to make it worse. There is just in U.S., for example, there is a law, Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA for short. This legislation actually has been used and there's money that government even gives to companies to make sure that their hardware and software is updated to allow actual lawful interception. So I am curious to see how they're going to do

because one of the reasons modems in phones have direct access is not only for performance when it comes down to, you know, reaching out to your microphone and your speaker, and they also have a real-time capability. They connect to the tower. They have generally overriding capabilities on top of their actual phone OS. That's also because it helps with complying with Kalia law when you want to sell in the United States market. So I actually am curious to see how they're going to do this.

Also on top of this, if you have a VoIP service, or even if you just make, let's say, an IP-based only phone, right? You just use data. Well, Kaliya law also says that if you are doing VoIP services, you're then classified as a carrier, the VoIP provider, and therefore you have to support Kaliya as well. There's that part that is interesting, too. So what about this idea of breaking it out into a secondary coprocessor or second processor that you could almost change out per region or situation. Like, is that a good idea?

I could see that actually working, but it seems like it would add complexity. It's an excellent idea. It adds complexity. Of course, it will drain your battery slightly more. Hopefully, Linux and Plasma will just be more battery efficient. We hope for that. And at least we're trying, which has been usually the biggest bottleneck is nobody actually tries because the know-how is,

the requirement is just too big, right, to do it as a single man. And now there's a team working on it. Maybe we'll start to find, but I am skeptical. And I think that in the end of the day, the fight will still end up in the same place. It's going to be a fight to legislative reform, and not necessarily on the technical means, because the law is there, and you have to comply with it, especially because you're selling a product. So now my last bit is a bit of a miss for the purism folks. My last bit is a bit of a miss for the Purism folks is it looks like potentially they may have an issue with their IMX8 ARM processor that's going to be in the Librem 5. It just missed the 4.18 kernel window.

And that's a bit of an issue for them because the next window for 4.19 will be the last release of 2018. And so if this IMX8 ARM processor bits, especially the bits around the system on the chip, because part of it is already actually in the kernel, like the SATA support and some DRM bits are already upstream in the Linux kernel. So close. Yeah, I know. It's just the rest of the bits of the system on the chip, like the drivers and all that kind of stuff that haven't made it in the kernel yet. And if they don't get squared away by 4.19, then there's really not going to be a kernel for the Librem 5 that has upstreamed all of the driver support. Right, they can build it in the meanwhile, deal with the situation of the setback and be then the ones providing a kernel that supports the things that they need until they sync back up and then

you're just getting normal releases. I don't see that as a huge issue. It's manageable probably. I feel like that phrase is said a lot and it's manageable probably. Sometimes that works out, sometimes not. We'll see that. But yes, it probably is. If they can just build it with those almost upstream sources and manage their transition, if they already have a resilient sort of, you know, updating system in place where they can fall back if it fails, then there's less risk. If they aren't smart about that, then maybe it's riskier.

It's a phone. It better update well. It better update well, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a phone. It better update well, right? So it's a good thing, actually. Let them try it before you buy it.

It's certainly interesting work that Purism are doing with the Librem 5. You know, there's a lot of technical challenges here and there's a lot of innovation that needs to happen in order to create a device like this. But I think the people that are following this project and particularly those people that are backing the project probably need to reset their expectations as to when this phone is going to ship as an actual device because um i've i've backed a number of mobile phone type crowdfunding devices in the last 18 months or so and at the

moment they're posting lots of interesting information about the hardware enablement that they're doing and the applications that they're writing and their display stack and all the rest of it. But their goal is to launch in January, February next year. delivery dates they were making prototype devices and manufacturing runs to test the manufacturing processes to square away quality assurance you know niggles and what have you so that they could start to plan for production runs and on both these crowdfunders i'm referring to one was the jelly pro phone and the other was the gemini pda even though they were doing this um four and six months before their release deadlines for the devices both missed their release targets by four and seven months even though they were you know that far along in their you know production planning you're actually making the devices

so for all of the interesting things that are going in in the software, whilst the wireless chipset's not agreed and whilst the camera module's not agreed, that means that the casing dimensions and what have you is also not agreed yet. So they can't be in a place where they're producing casing samples and starting production runs. So I think these devices are going to ship into the back end of 2019. Not January? It will be a Herculean effort if Purism pull it off and they deserve a round of applause

and all the champagne corks popping in celebration if they do it. But I can't see how they're going to be able to do that. Because from what I understand, they don't have engineering samples of the devices, and they don't even have dev boards available to all of the people that are working on this stuff yet. So hardware enablement needs to happen in various projects, and those developers will need devices in order to do that. So it's a very interesting project and it's great to see all of the updates.

But in terms of actually producing a device, a phone that you can hold and use, I think there's some considerable way out yet. Yeah, I can't really argue with you on that. That all kind of adds up. So let's talk about your NUC for a moment, because I have been thinking about making this RV studio setup permanent. The part that is not permanent right now is I'm just using my XPS laptop, which is not quite the right machine for the job.

And I also would like to have that machine available while I'm doing the show for like browsing the web and whatnot. And I've been thinking about installing a NUC in a cupboard. So above where I'm sitting, I have a cabinet and in that cabinet, I have a DBX-286. I have a PreSonos sound interface, and then I have a USB-C hub where I have all of that stuff connected in and then one USB-C cord down to my XPS. And I can get all of that with one cord. And it's fantastic. I love it.

It's great. I could make it a little bit better, though, if the machine was permanent. If it wasn't my personal laptop that I just play around with and I use to play video games, even though it's not got a great video card. A podcasting station right there in the RV. Wes, you might call it a podcasting workstation. Oh, I like it. podcasting station right there in the RV. Wes, you might call it a podcasting workstation. Oh. I like it. So, the NUC was on my,

it was really what came to mind, because I could just slot it right on top of all this equipment in the cupboard, and it has USB-C on it. But the last time I talked to Wimpy about it, he said, eh, there's some stuff missing from the car, also doesn't work so good. He didn't quite say it in that high-pitched voice. But, I don't know, a little birdie tells

me that perhaps Wimpy has reached some level of success. And now I can't help myself. I'm beginning to dream, Wimpy. How are things going with your Linux experiment on the new, what is it, the Hades Canyon NUC? Yeah, it's the Hades Canyon. I have a fully hardware-accelerated Hades Canyon NUC now. Oh. So I thought the big problem was that the video drivers weren't

in the kernel yet from intel like they hadn't actually submitted them upstream or they hadn't no so well it's actually from amd because this is a vega m right gpu um so it's actually the work of amd so what's happened in the last week is this. Linux kernel 4.18 release candidate one has been released, and the necessary kernel drivers exist in the 4.18 kernel. So you need the 4.18 kernel. You need the microcode for the RxVegaM GPU, which is not in the upstream linux firmware git repository yet but it is available from amd's staging git repository and the other thing you need is mesa 18.1.1 or newer

are you writing this down chris the I am. But the weekend, an interesting thing happened. So you can install Ubuntu 18.04, any of the flavors will do. And the Ubuntu mainline kernel PPA now has 4.18 RC1 in it. So you can go and grab that kernel. And Timo Altonen, who's the maintainer for the graphics stack in Ubuntu, he's been updating Mesa in 1804, but has also started to prep what will be the new enablement stack. And Mesa 18.1.1 is in the X of PPAs and installing a different kernel and updating, you know, just doing an update to pull in those Mesa updates and then adding the microcode into lib firmware, uh, lib firmware, AMD GPU. I now have the whole thing going, uh, which is great. Uh, and it's performing

quite well. Um, now the thing is, is that for this to really fly, it needs MESA 18.2, which is currently in development. So if you and I haven't done yet is test this configuration with MESA 18.2. So that's a project for this weekend. And I expect some modest performance games by doing that. But right now, as a workstation, all the bits and bobs are now working. A workcasting podstation is what Freclab calls it in the IRC, and I think that's not bad. Just a podstation? It's a podstation. It sounds like it's a bit of work, but not insurmountable.

It's really quite straightforward, yeah. Once you know what needs doing, doing it is really quite straightforward. Yeah. So how likely would any of this be to land in, say, like a hardware enablement of 18.04? So by Ubuntu 18.04.2, all of the necessary bits and pieces should be landed in order for this to function. Ooh, I mean, you know, I mean, that sounds really nice.

Yeah, but what I'm talking to some people about at work is also, so 18.2 will be out just after 18.10. So the other thing we're talking about is trying to make sure that everything we need is landed in 18.10 because it turns out resellers of these NUCs have approached Ubuntu and asked about, you know, getting the enablement going for these devices because it turns out lots of linux users have been buying them yeah good good voting with the wallet does actually work it sounds like yeah and and the other thing to add i think i may have mentioned this before but um the lvfs project with all of

the firmware updating and what have you this device, all of its bits and bobs are supported in LVFS, so I was able to do the firmware and BIOS upgrades all through FWUPD. Oh, that's fantastic. Which was pretty nice, yeah. That is a sleek system now. That is. Yeah. Oh, okay.

So I think that will be the pod station, but I may be just lazy enough to wait till 1802 just simply because 1804.2. Because after this road trip, and I'm not going to get the knuck on this road trip, I'm back in the studio for a while. So I won't really need it. So I don't think I don't know. I don't think although I say that and then something comes up and I'm back on the road. It's just going to happen. Well, you're making me want to do it. And the eGPU stuff's all working too, Wimpy? The device is your main driver at this point? So literally, I've got this working within the last 36 hours. So it's on the desk behind me. And I need to move over all of my data and configurations and what have you.

I haven't done any of that yet. I've been running benchmarks and things on it and playing games on it and what have you know i haven't done any of that yet i've been running benchmarks and things on it and playing games on it and what have you but i've not set it up for real work yet but it will be over the course of this weekend it will be transitioning to my dedicated workstation and whilst it does work with external gpus because it has two Thunderbolt 3 enabled USB-C sockets on it, so you can really go to town with your Thunderbolt on this device. I want to run it with just the integrated GPU, which in terms of performance right now with Mesa 18.1.1 is operating around the performance of like a gtx 1050 something like that

so it's good enough that for like 1080p 1080p gaming with you know medium to high settings it's it's absolutely fine as soon as you start cranking things up to you know 1440p and you really sort of turn on you know all of the features then it starts to run about you know 30 frames a second for the games but if you go at 1080p it's it's more than capable yeah fair enough yeah and uh i i'm you know for what i'd be using it for that would be totally great well that's that's a good update i'm glad to hear all that. And, you know, if you've got an eGPU, then you just plug in another device.

And on that front, I've also got a Razer Core X now as well. Oh, what? And how do you like this? And so the Razer Core X, isn't that, that's like the, it was released, what, three months ago or something? It's like a fairly new external eGPU unit. No, the Razer Core X was released a couple of weeks ago. So some time ago. Weeks ago? Oh, okay. Yeah, this is brand new. So some time unit. No, the Razer Core X was released a couple of weeks ago. So some time ago- Weeks ago? Oh, okay.

Oh yeah, this is brand new. So some time ago I got the Razer Core and then I got the revised model, which was the Razer Core V2. And now I have the Razer Core X. So these are eGPU enclosures. The difference between the Razer Core X and the earlier models is it's a much bigger device, so it can take triple width cards. So if you've got a graphics card with one of these super spanky cooling solutions on it, you know, that makes it super fat, then it can accommodate those. It's got a higher rated power supply, so it can take the RX Vega 64, for example, which the other models can't quite

cope with and this one's cheaper this is half the price of the other so this is 250 instead of 500 and those cost savings come from the fact that it doesn't have any rgb and it doesn't expose any additional usb ports Ethernet ports on the back of the device, like the Razer Core V1 and V2 do. Ah, it's not quite like a hub. No, it's not like a hub. It is just an enclosure for a PCI card, basically. Yeah, but I do like that additional power.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I've put my RX Vega 56 in that now, and I'll be selling the Razer Core V1, so I should keep the V2 and keep the X. I'm all about the eGPUs. I'm an eGPU hipster. Yeah, you are. Well, I want to talk a little bit about games here in a moment. In fact, one that you were playing on the live stream in a bit. So actually, let's pick that thread back up. But let's take a moment and mention a quick app pick, and then we'll do our sponsor block. My first one I mention, though,

this is one that came in from James via the contact form at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And it is a early days self-hosted Google Photos clone. Frickin' finally. That's all I have to say about that. It's self-hosted. Itos clone. Frickin' finally. That's all I have to say about that. It's self-hosted. It is a front and a back end. Django back end and a React front end. It's in heavy development right now.

Some features are currently implemented. You can label faces. You know, so that way you can find all your Westpain pictures. That's right. You want those. You do. Of course. I've got a Westpain search.

Westpain all the time. All the time. It's Docker-ready too, Wes. So this is, I think, actually, you might have found this. I don't think I found this. I think you... No, no, it was sent in by James. I just said that. I don't know if you had a chance to look at it, Wes, but it looks like it could be the beginning. Actually, yes, I'm playing with the demo right now.

It's not bad. I mean, for the basic browsing around, looking around, it seemed just fine. There's several galleries on the demo site of seemingly random faces grouped together, so I don't know what that says about the actual application performance. But otherwise, it was a fine UI. It seemed to work well. Yes, you can check it out.

If you go to the link we'll have in the show notes, linuxunplugged.com slash 254, and log in as demo, demo, and then demo1234. And the guy says right here in the show notes linux unplugged.com slash 254 um and the login is demo demo and then demo one two three four and the guy says right here in the uh github as noah calls it that it's early days but it's called own photos no relation to own cloud or like uh own notes or anything it's just it's it's just a name kind of it's semi it's in semi name collision uh that happens all the time and uh it's got back-end, it's got like a back-end and a front-end,

so the theory could be that if this were to take off, one day you could have, like, say, Shotwell that is using the back-end of this thing, and Shotwell is a front-end or something. So, yeah, it could have some potential. Could have some potential. And probably with a little bit of help from

the open-source community, it might get there. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Otherwise, like Noah says, it's up on the Jit Hub. Now let's talk about our sponsors this week. We're doing this new in the show, and I'm actually sort of actively soliciting feedback on it. We're trying to block all the sponsors together. It's what's sort of become the new standard

in the podcast industry. If you subscribe to more newer podcasts, you'll notice that about this percentage into the show, it's kind of like percentage based on the content. They have a real formula for it. It's pretty adorable. And they put the ads here. They put them right here and they say, we'll put them all back to back and you can listen to this bit and then it doesn't interrupt the flow of the content earlier or later in the show. I like the idea and I want to see bit and then it doesn't interrupt the flow of the content earlier or later in the show. I like the idea and I want to see what you guys think because it also gives me an opportunity

to sort of collect all of the cool things that our sponsors are doing and link them all up in one spot and collate all of that and kind of get the word out there about the things that our different sponsors are actively doing. Because you may have heard of them before.

You may know that Linux Academy sponsors us or that DigitalOcean or Ting sponsored the show. You may know that by now, but you might not know the new stuff that they're doing. So that's the other thing I kind of like about this opportunity. So I am actively looking for your feedback. Tweet me at ChrisLES or send it into the contact page at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. So let's start with Linux Academy because that's why I am on the road. I'm on my way back from Linux Academy. I'll tell you about that here in just a couple of minutes. Wrapped up their OBS system, got it all built for them. And while I was there, I started to get the inside scoop. People are working just like heads down like maniacs on this new content launch they're doing in July. Now in April, I told

you about 70 plus new challenges and courseware and updates and all the stuff that they'd rolled out. And I was like, that's their biggest content push ever. Well, in July, they're basically bringing Christmas to July with 150 new courses, challenges and learning activities. They're going to be launching in July. And this reason I was down there was for their ability to live stream and sort of try to message what is in all of this update. Because when you get to 150, it starts to get lost a little bit in the details. And so that's one of the reasons they want to start doing more live streams, is they can kind of break it down, do giveaways, tell people about what's in there, that kind of stuff.

But this isn't official yet, but I got the scuttlebutt. Like I was talking to some of the course authors, like I kind of, I got an idea of, I got to get a little idea of what's coming down the pipe. So if you're a Linux Academy subscriber already, if you went to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, you're going to get all of this stuff. Or if you want to go subscribe, you can get it soon.

And this is just one or two of many things, but it looks like they're going to be slipping in, in this 150 plus bundle. Salt stack certification training, Red Hat's certification for expertise in virtualization. Also Red Hat's expertise cert in Ansible and a Red Hat certified architect full support, which is a big one, I guess, in the industry. The Red Hat certified architect full support. Also a couple other ones that sounded kind of interesting. A Lambda deep dive is going to, they're going to have a course where they're going to be slipping in that 150 bundle.

And an AWS Security Specialty Certification. In fact, I didn't really get the details on this, but it looked like they're going to be doing a lot of stuff with security. Like, that's going to be a big area Linux Academy is going to go into. Nice. And it looks like, yeah. And I think they're even doing hiring around that too to try

to staff up. That's going to be awesome. So if you're not familiar with Linux Academy, you can subscribe for seven days for free when you go to linuxacademy.com. Try out their hands-on labs, their courseware, their schedule planner. Hang out in the community that's stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. They got courseware on AWS, Azure, and anything around Linux. Or if it runs Linux or Linux runs on top of that.

And if you're ready to sort of like upgrade your skills on OpenStack, or if you ever need help, they have instructors that are there to help you. It's a great service. And they're launching Christmas in July with 150 new ways to train and learn, as well as some Azure courseware that's going to be in there, although I didn't get the details on what, because the Azure courseware is like, it's hard for my brain to remember, because it's like, it's like Azure 70-535. And I'm like, what does that even mean? Whereas with like Red Hat, it's Red Hat certification of expertise and virtualization. I kind of get what that means. So that I grok. But they're just doing, it's a whole bunch of stuff. And they have some blog posts that are teasing some of it out. So you can check that out. So thanks to Linux Academy.

And thanks to everybody who goes to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to sign up, support the show, and get a free seven-day trial. Speaking of good deals, a big thank you to Ting for supporting the Unplugged program for a long, long time now. The storm has cleared. I don't know if you can hear it, but

the storm has cleared in the background and my Ting connection is strong. Ting is smarter than Unlimited. If you use less, you pay less background and my Ting connection is strong. Ting is smarter than unlimited. If you use less, you pay less. The average Ting bill is just $23 per month. It's $6 for your phone, $6 for the line. And then it's just your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes on top of that.

Nationwide coverage. You can rest assured that Ting's got your coverage from coast to coast. They got coverage. And they got CDMA and GSM. So you can pick whatever works better in your area. Today, I'm on CDMA. I think last time we did the show, I might have been on GSM. I can't remember because I just have both now.

It's $6 a month for the line. That's a pretty easy expense to cover. And I use it like a couple of times a year. I love that because Ting has a control panel where I can go in and I could actually turn the service off if I wanted to. I could transfer it. When Rikai decided to go do Twitch full-time, we transferred his line out of my Ting account to him. So he could just keep that phone number, keep that phone, all that stuff. It's really nice. And in that particular case too, their customer service was fantastic because they need my permission to do a thing and then he's got to call up and activate a thing and give payment info. And they were totally cool about

just sort of coordinating all of that. And it's just a super nice aspect of Ting that doesn't get enough attention. But on top of paying for what you use and that control panel, they have a great set of devices that you can go grab or because they support CDMA or GSM, you can bring your own. Just check their BYOD page page and for a little bit i want to tell you about their giveaway they're doing something new here it's the hashtag ting summer hashtag pound sign pound sign ting summer and if you do that when you like submit a photo to twitter or instagram and it's a good you know it probably doesn't have to be that good let's be honest they're gonna be nice they're ting after all but you know try to take that good. Let's be honest. They're going to be nice. They're Ting after all. But, you know, try to take a good one. And then do a hashtag on there, Ting Summer, on the Facebook, on the Twitter, on the Instagram.

And you will get entered for a bi-weekly giveaway of the Moto Z2 Play. They're also going to give away the True Zoom Moto Mod Snap-on that gives it like an actual DSLR lens on the Moto. Is it like an actual DSLR lens on the Moto? If you ever see a picture of this thing, Wes, it's like a full-fledged lens on the back of a phone. It's ridiculous. It's awesome, though. And they're giving it away for using a hashtag. So I just encourage you to...

Ting is awesome, dude. They're just insane. There's a few rules and the whatnot, so just go over to their blog, but do me a favor. Start by going to linux.ting.com. That'll take $25 off a device, or if you bring one,

it'll give you $25 in service credit. But on top of that, let them know you heard it here. linux.ting.com. Then click over to that blog post and read about the giveaway, because I think you can get in on that. I think you could probably get in on that.

You know, sometimes Wes is snapping a few pictures there in that Seattle area. You had that hashtag Wes, you might get yourself. I'm on there liking that stuff. I see it. I'm like, oh yeah, that's good. I'm liking that. You know that I want you to know I'm liking your stuff. Sometimes it's important. You know, that hashtag ting summer. All right. Now, before we go any further, I got one more things to give out here because we all love and know DigitalOcean and you can get in on the goodness. D.O.C.O. slash unplugged. Get a one hundred dollar credit. Yeah. One hundred. One hundred is applied to your account for 60 days when you sign up with a new account. One hundred in DigitalOcean credit is it's way more than you need. It's it's it's an excessive amount of credit. I think you should go sign up because I don't know why they haven't turned this off yet, to be honest with you.

If I was DigitalOcean, I would cut this crap off right now. Because I don't know what you're doing with that $100. Because here's the thing. Our previous promo was $10. That was enough. $10 was enough, Wes. Just like $640K of RAM was enough. Yeah, right.

It's crazy. It was. It was plenty. And now $100. You know, back was plenty. And now a hundred dollars, you know, back in my day, back in my day, we got $10 in credit.

And then even further back in my day, we had to rack our own gear. Okay. So now that you're going to, I can't even with you guys, but if you go over there to do.co slash unplugged until crazy digital ocean quits it, you can sign up. And with a new account,

you'll get that one Hyundai credit and you can try to deploy a system in seconds. I mean, it just only takes you seconds to get a system up and going. You want to go try out GitLab and say, screw you to Microsoft, which I don't necessarily agree with, but I don't judge you either. Well, you can do it with that one hundy credit and then just see how perfectly useful it is and then just keep paying. That's probably what I would do. But you know what? I can't really say what you're going to do. You may just want to seed your favorite distribution for a bit.

But they do have some really cool options. Like you can mix and match droplet resources now, which is kind of a new feature for DigitalOcean. So say you want like a lot of CPU for all that Monero. Well, then you can just throw like a ton of CPU, which I also do not recommend, but you could. And let's just say you want a lot of disk because you're like crazy Chris and you're backing up all the photos from your road trip using NextCloud to your cloud, which is your own cloud up on the digital ocean. I want all the disk, Wes. That's what I do. So I attach 250 gigs of block storage. That's how I do. And let's just say that I had this really long video

message I wanted to send Wes. You know how I would do that? DigitalOceanSpaces, generate an URL. You know what somebody ought to do is they ought to take, and this is a serious thing, they ought to take that DigitalOcean API, which is really well documented, easy to understand, and I think their crazy great dashboard might be a client of because it's feature complete, I tell you what. Just make me one app for iOS, and you can make it for those Androids if you want to. Put it in the share sheet. So I hit a share button, it comes up, and then I hit a button on my share sheet and it creates a DigitalOcean space using the API with my account and then generates a link and then I could send that file to Wes. Because you see,

that would be awesome because a DigitalOcean API is so slick that there's already tons of great open source software that's been created for it. So this is just one more thing that Chris is asking for. Somebody out there go take advantage of it. Also, because DigitalOcean is not satisfied with just giving you $100 in credit, in credit, they're also going to enable you to donate your time for writing tutorials to open source projects and charities. You can write for donations. I'll have a link in the show notes. And if you want to write up some, say you're an expert on WireGuard, which is probably not super common yet, or maybe something else that is more common that people are interested in, you could go write that up, submit it to DigitalOcean, and and if they like it what they were going to pay you because they do

sometimes pay their course authors or whoever's writing up like their tutorials and stuff instead of giving it to you they'll give it to the charity of your choice isn't that pretty cool i uh up to 400 bucks too i have uh i have information in the show notes if you want to check that out do.co slash unplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So I got some retro gaming nostalgia on during LinuxFest Texas. And it feels sort of good. Like at first I was like, I shouldn't do this.

I shouldn't succumb to nostalgia. I shouldn't allow myself to revert. And, you know, I don't want to be like my folks who, like, are still listening to the stuff from high school when they were in high school. They're listening to that music. I try to keep my music taste current, even though all new music's horrible. You want to be fresh, huh? I want to stay fresh. I want to stay current.

I don't want to let myself become an old man. However, the classics are the classics, man. And you can't ever beat Mario. Mario is solid. And there's some other things in that category. I still love to sit down and play a great game of Doom. Can't help it.

I love it. And another game in that category for me where it may not look the best, it may not be peak first-person shooter, but damn, I love original Quake. And if this didn't land at just the right time for my soul, there is now a snap to install Quake shareware. Snap install Quake-shareware. And you can play that classic Quake first-person shooter back when id Games was making Quake. And you get the shareware one.

Boom, right there. And it's done. It's good to go. Isn't that awesome? This couldn't possibly be easier, I don't think. I mean, unless it came pre-installed, but that's really just, that's not, that's crazy sauce. So I guess I know what I'm doing after the show. I also, because I'm kind of Snap stupid, so maybe somebody could educate me on this, but I have a Snap install that I cannot link you to. And I don't understand how this works

because it's in the Snap store. So I thought I could go to snapcraft.io and link you to it. But I installed something, I think, I can't remember the exact syntax, but something like snap install gog-galaxy-wine space dash dash edge, I think. And then I get the gog-galaxy client for Windows in a Snap container. And I just used that to log into my GOG account and started installing software. And it was great. And I wanted to link you all to it so you could try it out. But I don't understand. Maybe because it's an Edge release, I can't link you to it.

Is that what it is? So by default, the web version of the store only shows you stable channel snaps, and it hides everything in the other channels. But we're looking to change that. So you will be able to see and link to snaps that are in other channels. But it's just the default at the moment. It's stable only.

Okay, so that is out there if you want to install it. I don't really know what the utility of it is, other than it just made it really easy to get the Galaxy Client going. And then I installed a couple of games i also um i recently installed the the battle.net manager so i could get diablo 2 and starcraft 2 installed yeah this is it's been happening over here wes it's been happening the guy who made that uh gog galaxy snap is actually in the irc it's still down um and he's going going to give you what you need to do to run it. Oh, thank you, sir. Very nice. So the other thing that I noticed was created as a snap.

It's not exactly a retro game, although it did come out in 2008, so I guess that was like a decade ago, is Trackmania Nations Forever, which I got to watch you and Wimpy play on wimpy's live stream the other night this is now a snap that you can just install somehow i don't understand how this works maybe somebody can explain this to me you can snap install the trackmania snap and it comes down it pulls down like a windows installer which then launches and loads additional software am i getting this right yeah yeah so uh

trackmania nations forever is a free-to-play windows game but it's proprietary and you can't redistribute it so the snap is called tm nations forever and the snap contains a wine runtime and some scripts to bootstrap that environment so when you install the tm nations forever snap and run it for the first time it interrogates the isolated wine prefix sees that the game isn't there reaches reaches out to the internet, downloads the installer from the internet, and then installs the game into the contained wine environment that that snap created. And then you have, you now have this Windows game running in wine inside the snap and now it's just a game that you can use and also you're saying it's retro but for me i'd been using linux on a full-time basis for 13 years by the time this game came out so when i actually discovered it for the first time this was a new game as far as i was

concerned irrespective of what the release date was and i think it stands up i mean it's it's quite it's pretty it runs very fast it works really well on integrated graphics and discrete graphics and it's it's at and the most important thing is it's really really good fun it's easy to play but very very difficult to put down yes, I really just enjoyed watching you two play at the other night on your live stream. And I thought to myself, when I saw the year was 2008, I thought to myself, how did I miss that? When I was watching them play that the other night,

I would have thought it was a game from maybe just two years ago. It did look really sharp. So the 2008 thing isn't a put down. The other thing is when we were doing that live stream, we were both live streaming. So the Popey was live streaming to his channel and I was streaming to mine. But we were obviously using the snap of the game.

We were using a snap of Firefox to drive Twitch. We were using a snap of Discord to communicate with each other. We were using a snap of OBS to do the live streaming and then a snap of telegram to orchestrate our listeners and we were joined by several of the ubuntu podcast listeners who installed the snap and came in and joined us in game incredible wow that's the part i like yeah it just makes it super easy for people watching to also play snap install and you're good to go which is yeah that's a really great feature yeah and this was extensive qa because we just published that snap

into the stable channel so being uh the dedicated people that we are poppy and i were um doing qa on twitch from half past nine until half past one in the morning just to make absolutely sure it all worked fine bless you my job that's the kind of dedication that you just can't pay for you know that is true dedication gentlemen yeah write a letter to uh canonical and uh stole right mark at ubuntu.com yeah yeah well it does seem to work quite well and And so we'll have links to that in the show notes as well. Mr. Wes, you and I were debating on the pre-show, like how to cover this next story. It's from a listener of the show, Pro Bono, and he's also involved with App Image.

And it does influence his write-up a bit over on Medium, but he makes some solid points about Linux desktop usability. some solid points about Linux desktop usability. And he writes, why do desktop environments increasingly degrade the desktop UX that once used to be straightforward and common sense? Now stick with us here. This isn't like the common rebaked argument we hear all the time. And don't mistake pro bono for anti-Linux. He's a fan of the Linux desktop and the projects we're going to talk about here. But he says there seems to be a tendency specifically for desktop environments and applications to mess around with the proven concept of menus. Menus specifically seem to be what have him upset. And Bill Atkinson, the inventor of menus, well describes them. He says in a quote, I'm proud of the pull-down menus. I thought that pull-down menu was a very good

solution to providing visibility, spatial memory of where the commands were as well. And that's a, you can find that quote in where the commands were as well. And that's a, you can find that quote in the computer history museum as well. He says pro bono. He says, he goes on. Why is there an unsettling tendency to kill the beloved file, edit,

et cetera, menus that also date back to the Lisa interface that has been engraved in our brain muscles for 40 years. This goes way back, but yet we seem to keep wanting to reinvent it. Going back to Bill Atkinson, another quote he says, the nice thing about this menu was because the titles of the menus were always much narrower than the items. It basically tripled your effective screen. You could scan along the top and see all available commands without doing any of them. You could harmlessly see what is available. And discoverability seems to be a big point of

Pro Bono's case here. He mentions like the new GTK3 popover menus, which they were super, super proud of, have taken out all of the keyboard shortcut commands in order to make the menu shorter. So there's like no control C for copy, no control P for paste, no control S by the save. Discoverability is gone. But to make matters worse is, and the browsers really started this offense, is it's all compounded by the hamburger menu.

Like we gave Microsoft a hard time for the ribbon, but the hamburger menu is the biggest offender of all of them because it's just this lazy cram everything in this three dot menu. Just put it all in there, cram it all in there. And that's really like a huge step back. In fact, and I love this, Bro Bono goes to point out in his post that when you go way, way, way back to 1981, the Xerox Star, the original thing that Apple ripped off the idea from and iterated on, the Xerox Star had a hamburger menu in 1981,

had a freaking hamburger menu in 1981. And then Pro Bono shows the design notes for the Lisa interface, where they try out a global menu, application menus, and they also try out a hamburger menu. Like they try out all the different stuff in the 1980s, early 1980s, and they have solid notes on why those designs did or did not work. And so when we go back to the hamburger menu, when we drop global menus, his point, Pro Bono's point is, we're actually going back to design mistakes of the early 1980s that designers worked and iterated to get us out of for years.

And now some of the most popular open source desktops, like GNOME 3, are making the mistake that we made 40 years ago. And Wes, this is a pretty strong argument that he makes with lots of pull quotes, screenshots, early UI concept design. And it leaves me just going like, damn, dude really has a point here. What did you think?

Well, I mean, we are lucky to live in a pretty rich ecosystem, you know, of different paradigms that you would like to use. And he makes reference to a really large number of them, especially in projects like Monte, where there's even more customization of different layout styles. I think some of his points are

spot on about there are some simple features that could help discoverability that maybe if they're not enabled is an option in the installer. Maybe there's some degrees between not having them at all or options to have them there. I'm wondering, what do you think, now that you've spent some time with Plasma,

do you think any of this is less relevant? I tell you one of the things that I like about having in Plasma is I've gone in and I've turned on all of the menus for like in Dolphin. By default, they're off. But now when I launch Dolphin, I have like my alt, you know, if you hold down alt to get those menus,

I have them now. And the reason why is what he points out where he makes a strong case here is discoverability. When I'm learning a new UI, I like to have that. I like to get the little hint of what the control C would do for copy or what the control S would do for save. Like if I didn't know that, how do I learn that unless it's put in some menu somewhere? And he makes a strong case for global menus, which I am not so sold on because the basic idea for global menus comes down to, well,

look, you can jam your mouse up to the top of the screen faster than you can finesse it to the top of an application that I'm not so sold on. I don't know. Does anybody in the mumble room have thoughts? Has the desktop made steps? So I actually did a good portion of a master's thesis on the Linux desktop usability. And I tested Cinnamon, Mate, KDE.

It was all the stuff that was on Antegros back in the day that was all the defaults that were there. I didn't install anything special. And the most quote-unquote usable desktop was Cinnamon. And if you look in the Hacker News comments for this article, there's actually quite a few people who say, oh, have you tried Cinnamon in some kind of magical way? And I think there's a lot of stuff that different desktop environments do well.

And one of the things that's mentioned in the article is on the Mac, for example, they have the search in menus for help. I can't tell you how many times that's actually saved my bacon when I've been looking for something quickly. And I think there's a lot of small things that Linux could learn from Mac and Mac could learn from Windows, and it's a cycle. But the other thing that's happened in the last 10 years is that obviously mobile interfaces have come along and they've kind of shaken up how most people interact with devices. And you look at things like the hamburger menu and they are as a direct consequence,

I believe, because of mobile stuff. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I don't necessarily need to have the about stuff available, taking up valuable screen real estate all the time. But I do probably want my history to be available, for example, easily in a web browser. Yeah, I definitely see there's a compromise too when you're trying to save development resources

and you want to create mobile applications, you want to create desktop applications, you want to create web applications. There's going to be compromises that are made. I think it's a tight line between compromises and repeating old mistakes. And there's also, I mean, who are you targeting? You have to think like some of those desktops you can be very productive in once you've learned everything and discoverability is perhaps less of a priority for you. Obviously, that's not the best for reaching a wide audience or a number of things,

but for power users, sometimes that's all you care about. Yeah, and I definitely agree once you kind of know a system. That's a good point. Alex, you ought to drop a link in the IRC to that write-up you did. Now, I want to kind of get out of here with just kind of an update on how things went at Linux Academy and with the work I did there and just spend the last couple of minutes on that. But just a quick mention, I think it's FreeBSD's birthday today. I think they just turned 25. So congratulations to the FreeBSD project. Just want to mention that too in the show. So today we're doing the show from Casper, Wyoming. We were just in the middle of a storm,

but now actually blue skies are starting to clear. Since we did the last Linux Unplugged, I've driven 1,070 miles. 19 hours and 25 minutes. Impressive, sir. Thank you. I left Linux Academy last Friday and for some crazy reason, Hadea flew back to Seattle Friday a.m. really

early, picked up all three of our kids and brought them back to Dallas and now they've been with us for the drive home. So that's been fun. And it was a good way to spend Father's Day for sure. That sounds great. Yeah, it's been, yeah, it has been great. It has been great. It's been challenging, like to do work, but it's also been really nice to have this opportunity. And we split our time up between playing hard, getting sunburns, which we've now gotten out of our system,

and driving like crazy and doing a bit of work here and there. We had 95 plus days though, you know, for like weeks. We were just ready to get out of there. So we pushed hard yesterday, drove a lot. Kids are off at the movies right now as I do the show. They're actually on their way back right now.

And then we're going to continue. We're going to keep on pushing home, probably do like a couple of more stops like some swimming holes and things like that. And then make it home probably this weekend. Wow.

If all things go well. Yeah. So then next unplugged, I should be back in the studio, I think. That's wild. And so I got Dell. I got Dell. I got a Dell XPS desktop set up at Linux Academy with Kubuntu 18.04 minimal install and the latest version of OBS.

Now, they got a couple of PCI expansion. I can't remember. The Kubuntu 18.04 minimal install and the latest version of OBS. Now, they got a couple of PCI expansion. I can't remember. Oh, Sonnet, I think. I can't remember. Somebody makes, but they're just standard PCI USB cards. But each port has its own dedicated controller. And they got like six ports or something like that on the back of each PCI card.

So each one has a controller with full USB bandwidth going into the PCI bus. Yeah, it's nice. And then they got Elgato capture cards that hang off of those. And they have different sources coming in like a Chromebook or like a guest machine or like a desktop. And we also got them set up with a bit of a mixer setup so they could do a little mix minus action and a 4K Canon camera coming into that thing, which is the first time I'd ever worked with 4k and OBS, which was fun. And yeah, it's a pretty straightforward setup that they're going to be using in July when they do their new big content launch. And I got them set up with the same switcher, the same shuttle pro switcher that I have in the JB one studio. They had, so now they have one of those, which is sort of fun.

Oh, nice. Took a little funky work to get that going under linux these days because it's not really well supported anymore but it's still my favorite switcher yeah yeah but it went pretty well i i kind of want to go back down there in july which is crazy because i've just gotten home but that's when they're doing their live stream stuff for this big content release and i kind of want to be there for the first stream because I don't really want to. Make sure it goes well. I don't want the first stream on Linux to go badly.

Your reputation's on the line. Linux is reputation too, right? Because otherwise it's right back to Wirecast and the Mac. But I got to give credit. I met Jacob, their production guy they just hired recently. And he's never used OBS. He's never used Linux. But he's totally on board with learning because, you know, he's working at Linux Academy now. That's awesome. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And so he was there. I was showing him

how it works. Meanwhile, he was dealing with some exciting family stuff at home. And so like that was like we were balancing all of that and everybody was super dedicated and really invested in making it all work. So I just want to be there if I can when it happens. I don't know. I'll probably fly down if it's possible. Just to make sure that first live stream under Linux where everybody's watching goes smooth. And then after that, I'll feel much better.

We did a test stream on Friday. So I know it works. But it's a little bit different when it's actually like the time where it's go time. You know? It always is, right? So we'll see. We'll see how that goes. But yeah, it was a good trip.

Now I'm on the way home. And by the next time we see and you hear and see me, I'll be in the studio. I'm a little sad, but I'm also kind of looking forward to getting back to Seattle. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be nice. I miss the studio.

So let's wrap it up with just a little bit of deets if you want to support what we're doing here at the network go to patreon.com slash jupiter signal if you'd like to go get more of producer michael check him out tux digital or um destination linux also you can check out our friends wimpy and poppy on the ubuntu podcast go check out ubuntu podcast it's always a great show and their adventures uh continue there a lot of things we talk about get picked up or continued on their show. So go get that at Ubuntu podcast. And if you want more Wes and myself, then TechSnap's your show. TechSnap.systems. Boom. How about that for all the pluggsies? Like I got through them all. The little block of pluggsies. Also, why not join us live on a Tuesday? I'm going to just throw this out there. Come get yourself a nice healthy Linux sandwich.

It's way more fun. Way more fun. You see, we start out around 1.30 on our live stream Pacific time. We get going with the Unplugged show. We chat. We say things we shouldn't say. Then we do the show. That's the part you just heard.

And then we kind of hang out a little bit more, say a few more things we shouldn't say. And then that crazy cat Noah takes over and he starts answering your questions live, all right here. And you just sit back and absorb via the process similar to osmosis, but nothing like osmosis. Thanks so much for tuning this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll be back here next week, back in the Seattle studio. I'm looking forward to it, actually. See you next Tuesday! All right, now we've got to pick a title. Those kids are out from the movie. They're in the Uber. They're on their way back to the RV.

So the countdown has started. It's go time. So the EU broke the internet is currently in the top one. It was a play on words. It was supposed to be you broke the internet. But anyway, never mind. I love it. Who's going to read it like that?

Who's going to read it like that? Well, me, but then I'm weird. Yeah, yeah. Article 13, unlucky for some. Nation scale impact. First and foremost, that hasn't been passed really yet, okay? Let's not get ourselves in trouble.

Copyright is broken and stop killing the internet. Wow. Super positive show, guys. But they would actually reintroduce 20 years in a way. Because if you really think about it, currently it's 8 years plus after that after the author's death and uh these these new provisions would make it 20 years only i can't though we can't all these are super depressing we can't

name the show that we can't name the show you broke the internet or or uh uh stop killing the internet like ionic Come on now. Ironic. Okay, how about this one? How about everything is great. How about just everything is great? Let's just do that. Let's just do everything is great. We love you.

Everything is great. Everything should feel fine. Nothing's wrong here. Nothing to be concerned about. Linux unplugged 254. The longest title ever. Bury your head in the sand. Yeah, yeah.

Nothing to see here. How are you?