LINUX Unplugged - Episode 256: Peering Into the Future

Episode Date: July 4, 2018

A major Internet monopoly might just be on the edge of cracking thanks to free software, a bit of initiative, and a lot of gumption. We'll follow up on a major experiment we kicked off last week. Plus SUSE is sold again, Linux on the Nintendo Switch just got way better, Mint has a new release, we look at elementary OS Juno's first beta, and we cover a ton of community news. Special Guest: Eric Hendricks.

Before we start the show, Brent, I wanted to share this story with you. It's not Linux related, but it raises so many questions, and it is kind of related to our whole PeerTube conversation we had last week, and we'll be having this week. I don't know if you saw this, but Sony Pictures accidentally uploaded an entire movie to YouTube instead of the trailer. Instead of the trailer, they uploaded the whole one hour and 29 minute file. I know what you're thinking. How did this happen, right? It starts with Kai the

killer, but then at first in the description, they say coming to VHS or DVD or something like that, probably not VHS. But then later in a press release, they say coming to theaters and you got to wonder, was this large movie file just in the same folder as the trailer? Was this some rogue intern who has as equal access to trailers as the final movie? Did they not notice how long it took to upload? Why haven't they replaced it with a trailer yet? This is so weird. And why even release it at all on the U.S. channel if it's not a U.S. movie?

The entire thing is completely bizarre. It's some sort of Sony conspiracy. Maybe they've been hacked by North Korea again. We've got to look into it, Brent. So, do you think they need PeerTube? Yeah, I think they definitely need PeerTube. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 256 for July 3rd, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's still trying to get that whole Linux-powered fireworks display figured out.

My name is Chris. And my name is Brent. Hello, Brent. Good to chat with you again. Mr. Payne is out one more week, and I confirmed it, he is being a suave world traveler. Can't even stand it. But coming up on this week's episode, we're going to get into that big sale of SUSE. There's huge news for you elementary OS users. And then we'll break down a whole bunch of community news from switch hack stories to Linux Mint 19 and much, much more.

And then towards the end of this show, we'll settle the whole mystery around TrueOS and Project Triton and what's happening with FreeBSD's user first desktop. And then I've got some great news to share. Last week, I put out the call to help set up a PeerTube instance for Jupyter Broadcasting. Within a few days, we got not only one, but two. One for the network and one for the community set up, rocking, and we've got tons of thoughts about what could actually be the first serious YouTube competitor. An open source solution powered by BitTorrent on the back end.

And we've tried it out. We've kicked the tires. We've put some Jupyter Broadcasting content up on there. And man, do I have some thoughts about PeerTube. So that'll be the highlights of what we're getting today. But before we go any further, let's bring in the essentials of today's episode. And that is our Mumble Room time-appropriate greetings virtual dog. Hello, hello, hello.

Happy Independence Day. Hey, yeah. Happy America's birthday, everybody. And Canadia just celebrated their Independence Day, so belated Independence Day to you too, Brent, up there in the Canadias. Thank you. You're welcome, sir. So let's start with a little breaking news this week on the program.

We don't get to do this too often because, you know, we've got the whole Linux Action News program these days, but right here. This is CNN Breaking News. A little breaking news just after we wrapped up LAN this week. Go figure. Seuss has been sold again, and this time for a pretty penny, $2.5 billion. Now, this isn't the first time Seuss has been passed around, and it's a pretty substantial company at this point. Over 14,000 employees all over the globe with, at least according to its floss,

a sales range of $320 million in the months ending October 2017. And it appears that they got a pretty healthy profit for this sale. I think they went for a pretty good chunk of change this time. It ended up being like 26.7 times the adjusted operating profit of the Sue software unit. That's a pretty good deal that they got. Now, you may recall in 2003, U.S.-based software company Novell acquired SUSE for $210 million. So the fact that they went this time for $2.5 billion,

when you consider in 2003 they were going for $200 million, that's a pretty big difference. And then in 2010, you may require that Novell was acquired for $2.2 billion by another U.S.-based company, the Attachmate Group. The Attachmate Group at that time was backed by Microsoft, and Microsoft got like 800 of Novell's patents, which is really what they wanted, which is reminiscent of the good old patent wars that were now thankfully mostly passed or have at least normalized. And then in 2014, Attachmate was merged into the British software company Micro Focus for

1.2 bill. And then this week, Micro Focus sold the SUSE software business to a company called EQT for 2.5 bill. Now, EQT is like an investment firm. It's not the oil company, it's an investment firm. And the general consensus here is that this is a better sponsor, a better home for SUSE. Microfocus had shifted gears in the last years and was more of a milk a company until it's worth nothing kind of model. And whereas EQT has made some big promises about potentially giving SUSE a supercharge with other acquisitions and

resources. So it seems to be a pretty good turn of events for the SUSE company. Now, the OpenSUSE project is going above and beyond to make sure you don't worry about the future of OpenSousa. They really want you to stay calm. In fact, in Richard's and others' frantic attempt to make sure everybody stays calm, they almost come across as that meme with the guy in the middle of a fire standing there saying, everything's fine. Everything's fine here. But if you think about it, this is good news for OpenSUSE because OpenSUSE's sponsor is essentially SUSE. And now SUSE's sponsor is EQT instead of Micro Focus. It's a huge story that everybody is talking about. It's getting tweeted constantly

right now. It's all over all the different outlets. Did you have any initial impressions, Brent, when you saw this big sale? $2.5 billion for SUSE. I was a little shocked at the dollar amount. I mean, I'm no expert in valuing this kind of stuff, but I thought, geez, this feels good for open source, doesn't it? Yeah, it does too, because it's not even, I mean, I apologize for framing it this way, but it's not even like open source's largest success story, right? I mean, that you might go more towards Red Hat. So this is a pretty good amount for SUSE. In fact, just another data point. Again, I think it's a great distribution.

Used to use SLESS in production for years. Lots of our audience uses it. But probably one of the top comments I saw in non Linux forums, like Hacker News, and other outlets where people are aware of these things, but they don't maybe their daily drivers. I think one of the one of the most common questions I saw is who's using SUSE? Who's still using SUSE? Who uses SUSE? Where is SUSE used? I saw a lot of that. A lot of people trying to wrap their heads around what SUSE is still doing. How is it valuable? Where does it still fit in the overall ecosystem?

Because everybody's so focused on cloud and containers and VPSs. And SUSE is over here going, oh, we could do Kubernetes. Hey, guys, we could do Kubernetes. And so it's maybe going to be a good thing for them if EQT is willing to invest in some other acquisitions, maybe hire some additional people, or at least give them the funding to do so. Who knows? It's early days. But it is an interesting change. And it does kind of remind us, and I think JJ, you might agree, that there's more than just a SUSE, or I'm sorry, there's more than just an Ubuntu Red Hat dynamic out there. Yeah. And this sort of begs the question, what sort of assets does SUSE have compared to Canonical's Ubuntu and a bad large organization? Because me as a ultra, ultra beginner, even though I'm still a dual booter in my progress, what sort of value proposition does SUSE have versus Canonical? I think it depends on the perspective in which you take.

It's a hard question for me to give you a good answer for other than if you have a lot of momentum in certain industries, SUSE seems to be a good role or a good fit there. If you have a lot of momentum in certain industries, SUSE seems to be a good role or a good fit there. I don't particularly, like if you were going to hire me to come in and help you build an infrastructure based on Linux, SUSE would not be on my recommendation list. Just from a, and this is probably a, you know, a states heavy perspective. I mean, of course, what else do I have? But just from a maintainability and sustainability standpoint, I would want to deploy something that was based on RHEL or Ubuntu or Debian. So that way, once I left, they could bring in talent that would know what the hell they were even looking at, or they could find documentation, or they could go hire a contractor. And I feel like SUSE, at least in the States, again, is esoteric enough that if you came in cold to an environment and it was running SUSE,

that would be an unusual thing. And so I don't have a great answer for you other than, well, there are some places that have momentum in that direction. And it's a pretty sound technical distribution. So people have chosen it. I know this is gonna sound crazy to a lot of you. And I mean, no offense to the SUSE people, I would be more inclined to run Arch before I would be inclined to run SUSE. Simply because if I'm not going for Ubuntu or RHEL, which are going to have the widest industry and commercial support, then I'm not going for Ubuntu or RHEL, which are going to have the widest industry and commercial support, then I'm likely going for software availability, which is the AUR. But, you know, they got 26.7 times their adjusted operating profit,

so that seems like a pretty good sale. And from what I understood from when I was researching Linux in my younger years, I remember there was this website where you could actually make your own custom version of SUSEF. Oh, yeah. I'm not even sure what the name of the website is, but if anybody can remember and put it in the chat room, I'd really appreciate it. Yeah, fortunately, they've spun that down. So, yeah, that recently was spun down earlier this year. That was a neat feature of it.

So let's shift gears and let's talk about the desktop side of things. Our friends over at Elementary have a huge bit of news today. The Juno Beta 1, remember this is pre-release software, but the Beta 1 of Juno, which is based on 1804, is out. And Mr. Daniel Foray is here to tell us about it. Dan, first of all, congratulations on the big release. I think this is huge for you guys. Thanks. I'm super-duper excited about it.

Yeah, it was sort of in the works for a while, rumor has it. Maybe this has been brewing for a few months. And it's funny, now that you've finally landed the beta, and I totally understand why, but the beta post about the new release doesn't really talk about a lot of the new features because you guys have been, in a way, so forward with some of those features are,

what they already are. But maybe just off the top of your head, what are a couple of the big things that are new in Juno and especially in the areas you guys want testing? Sure. I mean, there's so much new in Juno, right? But the kind of overarching themes that we've been working on are productivity features, refinement, and improving our developer platform. So we've got tons of improvements throughout all the apps, really. We've got some big changes to the way payments work in App Center, which we talked

about in a previous show. We have the new elementary code, which replaces Scratch, which is a huge update and redesign and just huge feature dump into what used to be just a plain text editor. So good. We've got the new shortcut overlay. We've got nightlight.

We have new style schemes in Terminal. We have a lot of changes to the way shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts are handled and configured. We have improvements to the camera app, the latest version of Epiphany with Firefox sync. It just goes on. Full color emoji. Now, there you go. There's the big one. Full color emoji. All right. So you guys, you guys always are very careful with these releases, but I've been, I've been using it for a few days and I got to say, seems super solid to me. And it also is a hard thing to judge. And it's also, it's, it's a bit, it's a bit of your own perception, but to me, this feels like the fastest Linux desktop I've ever used.

Like, for example, Epiphany opens up faster than it has any right to open ever. And, you know, this is on the Librem 15. I've tried out just about every distro under the sun on this thing. I'm comparing a lot of fresh installs against this install. So it's not like it's just because it's a new install. I'm always doing new installs on this thing. Epiphany opens up super fast. The system settings opens up before even one bounce is done in my dock. It just flies up.

Everything flies. Is there some secret performance tweak that you guys have learned? What do you attribute this to? Because it's notably faster than almost every other desktop I use. I mean, we've been doing a ton of work under the hood and we've been kind of blogging about some things that we've been doing. And there's been a huge focus on just massive amounts of code cleaning. There's like something that I've personally been working on for the past few months is just going through the music app. And I think that we've, we've without removing any features, right? It does all the same things that it did before. But since that time, we've removed like 20,000 lines of code. Well, it shows, it shows and everything looks a little crisper.

I swear, maybe it's just new eyes, but the icons look a bit better. Even like the little loading swirl thing in the app center to me, I swear it looks smoother. There must have been a lot of little tweaks to a lot of the art stuff too? Yeah, definitely. We have a new color palette that we've been working with and we've kind of gone through and tried to tidy up some places where styles had diverged between

icon families like mime types for example, the file type icons should all look a little more similar. We also benefit from a lot of work that's been done from GTK 3.18 to now we're shipping 3.22. Ah, okay. Yeah, it pays off. And to shift gears a bit, I think my new favorite feature so far, I mean, I kind of like each day I've had a new pet feature, but my favorite one over the weekend was the super slick integration of Nightlight. I love the UI to set it up. It was right where I expected it to be. It just has been

perfect. Nightlight is a great feature. Does that come to as part of the later version of GTK or is that something you guys wrote from scratch? The under the hood part that talks to the window manager and changes the color profiles is part of the GNOME settings daemon. But all the UI stuff, the indicator in the panel and in the system settings and all that, those are all our applications. I also appreciate, and this isn't, I don't think, new to Juno, but I just appreciated when I was going through the App Center to do updates,

there's little annotations in there about like what the actual changes in user readable speak. So like there was an update to the file manager that adjusted the way it displayed 12 hour and 24 hour times. And it's, I guess I just appreciate that because, you know, you visualize this, dear audience, you're looking at an App Center screen full of updates, and next to it are little annotations about the actual things that are going to change in your software. Instead of updated because of CVE 2018-1605, it's fixed the way 24-hour time is rendered and things like that. So there's small touches in there I like, but let's talk about AppCenter. What's the state of AppCenter right now in the Juno beta? How is that all coming together? Because there's been a lot of work there this cycle. One thing that people will notice when they download the beta, because they didn't ring

the blog post, is that App Center is pretty much empty. There's like four apps in there right now. And that is because we are moving to a completely new release from the old Xenial base to the new Bionic base. And so the repo has to get filled up again. So that's one of the major purposes of releasing the beta is so that our third-party developer community can come in and they can update their apps and then publish them. That makes sense. Yeah, that definitely makes sense.

So the beta ISO is out right now, but maybe not at daily driver status. What's your opinion on that? Not necessarily the official word, but what's your opinion? I haven't found it to be too bad for a daily driver, but I got the vibe from the blog post. It's kind of like, don't really run this unless you really want to help us and are willing to submit some bugs. Yeah, we definitely don't recommend it as a daily driver. Like this is, this release is totally meant for developers to be run on non-production machines. And something that I think is really important mentioning that a lot of people expect and ask about is if they just install the beta and keep hitting update, you know, after the stable release comes out,

won't they have that release? And the answer is probably not. There's oftentimes things that we find out in terms of fixing bugs that can't be fixed through an update, that they're considered part of user settings and they won't be overwritten when a new package comes down. Sure. Yeah, it makes sense. So definitely, this is a release that you shouldn't expect to keep. You should expect to blow it away and replace it with a stable install when that comes out. I also like the fancy report a problem. You go to system settings, about, and then I guess there's a way. I haven't tried this yet because I actually haven't had a need to, but I understand there's a way to actually maybe submit an issue from within system settings.

Yeah, so what we did there is that previously we used to host all our code on Launchpad. And we just kind of had a button in About, and you could click it, and it would open a big page on Launchpad that had a list of all these projects. Then it was like, try to find the one that you wanted to report against. But what we did in this release, now that we're all over on GitHub, is we've built out a little dialogue and kind of divided it up into categories. And we tried to display everything in like human readable terms. So when you want to report a bug against the repository Gala,

which is kind of like our window manager, you would open up this report a problem dialogue, and you'd see that there's a category that's desktop components. And then you can report an issue with notifications or multitasking or window management. So we try to like break it down as like a feature level, something that you can understand without knowing code names.

And then we'll link you to the correct repository. Okay. Now I think I recall too, there's some super sweet improvements to notifications in this release, especially for those of us that are stuck using Electron apps. Remind me about that. So we did some work a while ago

submitting some patches upstream into Electron. We chatted a bit about it on the show, I think. Yeah, and I'm not sure what the timeline is for third-party app developers who are writing Electron apps to be able to take advantage of those patches. But that was one of the big changes that's coming in this release is that in Notification Center, we no longer try to guess where an application is coming, sending notifications from, and we now expect it to report its ID.

So those should be much more accurate, but it does require that developers are correctly reporting the ID of their application in their notifications. So that seems like an area that could potentially need some testing in this beta cycle. Any other kind of surface level things like custom CSS, things like that that need to be tested in this cycle? Yeah, for developers updating their applications, there's been tons of changes in GTK+, and especially with GTK CSS. So if you have custom styling in your app,

you should definitely make sure that that still looks as intended. And we're going to have a follow-up blog post pretty soon talking about all the differences between the way apps were built for Loki and the way they're built for Juno now and how to upgrade smoothly. Smart. Okay, so I just let's shift gears for a second. And I want to just talk about the base. And I know this isn't unique to Juno necessarily. But so when Juno

ships ish, we may have from canonical 1804.1 out. How does that work? Because I assume Juno is based on stock 1804. Will there then be a few weeks, a few months go by, and then a big update? Is it going to ship with 0.1 if that's out by then? How does that aspect of this work? So when Ubuntu rolls out these point releases, we try to build a new image based on that as soon as possible, because we want to make sure that when people are downloading from our website that they're getting the latest hardware enablement stack and making sure that we have regular security updates or pre-installed things like that so that

you can have a download image that doesn't have a bunch of out-of-the-box updates. So we'll definitely be tracking that. But these days the long-term hardware stack is a rolling release. So if you install when Juno first comes out, then you can expect that your hardware enablement will continually upgrade throughout the lifecycle of the operating system. I love it. That's a great answer. That's awesome.

Wow. This is a big moment just because we've been talking about this for quite a while. So is there anything else at this point in time we should mention? Today's like release day for this, so I'm sure it's probably like it's just totally scattered in your head. But is there any other like noise that you want to or anything, any signal you want to get above the noise before we move on? Yeah, definitely. The major things for the beta is we want to make sure that third party developers know that this is like the best time for them to update their applications. is we want to make sure that third-party developers know that this is like the best time for them to update their applications and we want to help them with that so if they need help they could go to jump into our community slack which i believe we've linked from the

release blog post also this is a great time to get involved with developing the actual system itself submitting patches and things like that so you can go to elementary.io forward slash get dash involved to do that. And also translators. So we need help with translations. We've just declared a string freeze. So none of the strings are going to change out from underneath you. And we've also updated to the newest WebLate instance. So our translation tools are all up to date.

And so we're ready to help you localize Elementor OS. This is going to be kind of the first big release since the App Center released and all of these native apps were created. And now it's a bit of a test to see if developers keep up. Are you concerned at all?

Do you feel like you can build momentum there pretty successfully? I'm definitely interested to see if there's any kind of... Lag or whatever? What would that be, like an attrition? Yeah. Right? But so far, just on day one, I'm refreshing our developer review page,

and I already see them ticking in. So I'm pretty excited to see how fast that goes up and seeing if we can get back up to 100 relatively soon. Yeah. Well, congratulations. We'll have a link to the post with all the details about Juno's first beta, including their handy how-to-help-us-fix-problems guide, which I think is probably a must-read before you submit a bug.

It's exciting. I've been enjoying the beta and I can't wait for the final release, Dan. So keep us updated on how it goes, okay? Will do. Alright, sir. Thank you, sir. Thanks for coming on and sharing that. That looks great. Very excited. I can't wait because this is going to be the one I've got to update the Sun's computer to

this because this has so far been just a great beta. Okay. So I want to update everybody on the state of Linux on the Nintendo Switch. This is one of the coolest things. Dan, you've got a Nintendo Switch because I've seen you play it. I don't know if you've tried, have you tried this at all, this hack for the Nintendo Switch, where you put in like one of these manufactured little jumpers and you put that in the right card slot and then you can over time get Linux on there, get custom ROMs. Have you tried any of this with your Switch, Dan?

I haven't tried it, but I am super curious because I would love to be able to sideload some of my totally legit backup copies of games. Absolutely, especially the retro ones that I've had for ages now and all of that. I would love to get that on there. And you've got to figure, eventually, Nintendo is going to make some sort of physical fix for this hack.

Now, we covered this before on the show. We also covered in technical details how the hack actually works on the TechSnap program. But let's do a little bit of an update. First of all, as you probably already assumed, yeah, they got Arch running on it. Arch Linux is running on the Nintendo Switch. running on it. Arch Linux is running on the Nintendo Switch. But a bigger deal now is it appears that hackers have tracked down the cause of a rather nasty battery issue under Linux on the Switch. And it was actually a pretty simple fix. All they had to do was change a value set by Linux for a certain register status to the same value that the Switch OS is setting things.

In other words, it was all on software. And now that they've made this change, things such as hardware acceleration for the GameCube emulators will now become a reality. So we will have good battery life under Linux and old game emulators that have hardware acceleration. It's happening pretty fast. You're not a Switch owner, are you, Brent?

You know, I admit to be behind on some of the retro stuff. You got to get it now, Brent, before they take out the Linux. They're going to fix it. It's a limited time. But with how much sort of energy this is getting from some of the homebrew stuff, do you think they have an incentive to get rid of it? Oh, well. So here's the thing, is with all

good things comes the bad, and a lot of porn and really inappropriate stuff is showing up on the Nintendo online network because Nintendo uses software-side filtering to prevent you from putting a vagina

as your profile picture or a dong and when you hack it you can bypass those filters and you don't have to have a hack switch to see it so you can be logging in to go play a game and say you want to do a match and you go and all of the people you're going to be fighting against

show up on the screen and it's dongs and vaginas all day long because people can do that now. And would you say most people are hacking their Switches to do this? No, no, no, but I bet it's just enough. And, you know, if it causes a couple of really upset parents or a lawsuit or really just a few headlines, Nintendo's going to have to respond.

I think it's a narrowing window of time. What can we do that's more positive than vaginas? It's dongs all the way down. It always leads to dongs. It really does. It's a shame. Hot dog, not hot dog. Oh, why do they have to ruin it with dongs, you know? But this is a good move. I really like the aspect of being able to sideload stuff, especially when you got kids. It's just such a better way to do it. And it's nice. They actually fixed an issue where the switch would randomly shut down

when the battery would just drop below 50%. You'd be like in this range where something could go wrong, and you just, they call it the battery desync issue. Your battery desyncs with the operating system and your device powers off. It sounds horrible. But I cover this story because while you've got dongs on profile pictures, you've also got great battery life

and hardware-accelerated emulators coming to the Switch. So it's a good and bad thing. And thankfully that Tegra flaw is built into Switches. So if you already own one, there's no software update that they can do to fix that, which is my favorite kind of flaw. Continuing now in our community news segment, let's talk about Fedora for a moment.

I had the unique experience this past week of messing around with Amazon's new Linux-powered workspace, which is a virtual desktop up on AWS. And you set up an AWS desktop instance, you now can choose Amazon Linux 2, and then you can go download their proprietary remote connection client, which doesn't work on Linux, and you can connect into a Linux desktop. And they have a RHEL-based Mate desktop for you to use. And it's interesting because it's on their super-fast infrastructure. I gave a bit of a review on Linux Action News 60. But it's also limiting because it's Red Hat Enterprise Linux,

which is great if you don't want to use software. But it's not so great if you want to install software. Now, I was able to load the extra repository and get a few things installed, but the first thing I noticed about it was there was no DNF. It's using a version of RHEL that still uses YUM. No DNF. And so it's kind of with a bit of a smile on my face that I cover this next story about Fedora 29. The next version of Fedora will be dropping yum altogether. Yum is dead in Fedora. And you know what? DNF has been great. Its original introduction was in Fedora 18. It became the default in Fedora in Fedora 22. And now the time has come to just remove YUM and related packages like YUM utils,

YUM metadata parser, and things like that from Fedora. There is a plan out on their wiki right now. There's a few things they still have to work out. But if all things shape up as planned, Fedora 29 is going to be a pretty big update. And there's a lot of changes in there, including the dropping of Yum, and it's currently scheduled to be released by the end of October.

It's kind of funny. In one world where you can have the most expensive enterprise-grade Linux distribution in the markets out there, and it's still using Yum, and then what it's based off of the young pup fedora is so far past using yum they're dropping it from their distribution it's this weird to me as a as not a daily red hat user it's this weird kind of um mismatch between using fedora and rel where a lot of times and alex you maybe have heard this, a lot of times people will say, oh, I use Fedora because it's so much like RHEL, which is my server OS.

It just sounds, that's just, it doesn't check out for me. What do you think, Alex? Am I way off target here? Maybe. I don't know. Definitely one of it's one of those head scratches for me i think um i mean i i have made the switch to dnf and it's now muscle memory so when i go back to rel it's a bit uh janky sometimes for me to have to use yum again but at the end of the day whether i type dnf or whether i type, there's a lot of functionality crossover. Yes. It's really not a big deal. A lot of the same syntax.

It's not a big deal at all. It's just this strange dichotomy that RHEL and Fedora find themselves in, I feel like. It's almost like they're doing, I hate to say it, but an apple with getting rid of the ports just a little bit too early just to push things forward, just to push the agenda. I suppose that is Fedora's job, right? I guess so.

I mean, that's certainly one of the spins of Fedora's jobs, whether that's the main Fedora's job, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. I'm buying what you're selling, actually. I think for me, it is sort of like, well, what if we changed our view and thought about it in this way? Sort of like a thought experiment for me.

When I use Ubuntu LTS 1804 on my machine that I'm recording this show on right now, it is the same exact Ubuntu that I load on my server, that I load in my VMs, that I put in a container. It is Ubuntu 18.04. There isn't like some sort of special privileged enterprise version. And then like the version for us Peebs, there is one Ubuntu. And then if you want to pay for support, you can go get a nice contract with Canonical and pay for support. Or you can just deploy it for free, infinite item. And it to me seems like a much more logical, organic layout. You have one distribution. It reminds me of those phony, although it's not quite the same, those phony baloney differentiators that Microsoft still does between Windows Desktop and Windows Server, and Apple used to do and just gave up on because they don't care about the Mac anymore, between macOS Server and macOS Desktop.

It's product differentiation for product differentiation's purposes. It doesn't actually serve the organic needs of the end user and the market. And I think it's what's contributed to Ubuntu's success on the server, is the same bits I load on my desktop and on my laptop and on my development machines are the same exact bits I can load on a $50,000 server. And I think that really matters to some people. Not everybody, obviously, because Red Hat's doing great. But I think the cracks in this paradigm show in these particular instances,

and it's not necessarily even a bad thing. I just think it demonstrates these cracks. What do you think of that, Alex? Yes, I agree. We're moving to different worlds though. With Snap packages, for example, most people in a desktop world aren't going to be using, uh, apt anymore. Um, I mean, obviously most people will still use it for a long time, but

it, you skate to where the puck is going. It's that sort of mentality. Um, but for me, if you look at the different use cases that a server distro has versus a desktop distro, I think Ubuntu is very good at being all things to all people. Whereas Fedora is very much focused on being a desktop distro with some server capabilities. Whereas RHEL, we all know, is industry standard server OS. It's not a desktop operating system in my view. Yeah, it makes sense. I think that's completely fair. I wonder if in a few years with a little more road traveled,

if this won't seem like an older way of doing things, like maybe it's a model of the 90s, but I could be completely wrong. It seems like to me, the more modular, everything's the same base, and then you just have modules or layers that you load up on top of that. Well, if you go back to last week when you were talking to the Fedora guys, that's what they're thinking, I think.

Yeah. I wonder if we'll see that reflected in RHEL at some point. Maybe we will. Maybe that's where things are going, especially with the integration of CoreOS and whatnot. Maybe we will. Could be really interesting times. Well, Red Hat see OpenShift as the next RHEL. So I think a lot of theirOS and whatnot. Maybe we will. Could be really interesting times. Well, Red Hat see OpenShift as the next RHEL. So I think a lot of their focus and decisions are based around containers at this point. So if you offset what we've just had as a discussion against that backdrop,

I think some of the decisions start to make a bit more sense. Yeah, I agree. That's a good point. So speaking of desktops, you should probably mention while we're in the community news section here, Linux Mint 19 is out. The Cinnamon edition and I think the XFCE edition, not sure, are out. And this is going to be

supported until 2023. And it's got lots of new features, but the one that's kind of like the big headline feature you may have heard people talking about already is Timeshift. Yeah, Timeshift is the star of the show, really. It was introduced with Linux Mint 18.3, and then it was backported to all other Linux Mint releases. It's now the center of Linux Mint's update strategy and communication, as they put it.

They write, strategy and communication, as they put it. They write, thanks to time shift, you can go back in time and restore your computer to the last functional system snapshot. If anything breaks, you can go back to the previous snapshot as if the problem never happened. And as a result, they've made some changes to their rather often criticized update manager that would avoid installing important updates because they now have snapshots. So they write the update manager that would avoid installing important updates because they now have snapshots. So they write, the update manager no longer promotes vigilance. One man's vigilance is another man's ignorance. The update manager no longer promotes vigilance and selective updates. It relies on time shift

to guarantee the stability of your system and suggests that you apply all available updates. That reminds me a bit, Brent, of when they rolled out system snapshots in Windows ME. They also rolled out Windows Update. And so it was like, have at it. Update your system, and if anything goes wrong, you can just restore your box. And I still don't know anybody who really relies on that too heavily

when it comes to Windows. So I'm not totally sure I'm sold here, and I don't think they're using file system level snapshotting, though I'm not sure. Would you consider giving this a go if this kind of functionality was, let's just say, for the sake of argument, Brent, let's just say that this time shift thing worked flawlessly, that you knew if you installed Linux Mint 19, you would have this time shift recovery feature. Would that move the needle for you?

So maybe I can give you a little bit of background. So I've actually helped a lot of people move to Linux as a professional sort of offering and um this is for regular users and so often it's because of their frustration with other systems sure yeah and i've i've seen a lot of users so linux mint was generally what i would recommend actually for for a few years. And up till really recently, I'm thinking of suggesting other things. But so I was looking at this yesterday, this time shift, and I saw it come in the previous version of Linux Mint.

And what I heard from several users that I've helped in the past move to Linux is that, oh, yeah, I have Time Machine, and so I don't have to worry about anything. Oh, yeah, sure, no. And that, I think, is a really dangerous yeah, I have time machine, and so I don't have to worry about anything. Oh yeah, sure. And that I think is a really dangerous mindset, right? Because not worrying about anything means that you're opening yourself up to a whole bunch of stuff. So if this works flawlessly, that's a big assumption.

But if it works flawlessly, then it's a good crutch, I think. But to rely on it 100% for everything feels dangerous to me a little bit. Yeah, maybe it's part of a belt and suspenders kind of thing. Maybe this is your first shot. You have an update install and it breaks something. This is your first shot. I kind of wish, though, I don't know what, I don't know, maybe it's just too hard of a problem to solve,

but I wish we could just focus on updates not breaking shit. How about that? How about Linux Mint comes up with a way to deliver solid updates? Rollbacks don't feel like the way to do it. It's possible. But if you think about it, you got a snapshot system setting, software state. There's so many things that you have to be able to collect and store and

do it in a way that doesn't take hours and doesn't take up gigs of storage space. That's a really hard problem to solve. And it'd be a lot better if we could just say, oh yeah, just install the updates. It'll be fine. Linux has been architected in a way where you're protected. That would be a better answer, I think. I suppose in the meantime, we have time shift, though. Looks like a pretty solid update for Linux Mint users. So if you still are a Linux Mint user out there, I think it's, you know, it's a pretty good update. They now have gotten all of their tools up to GTK3,

so they support high DPI if that's how you roll. It's yet another iteration of their X apps. And they have the Mintbox Mini 2 now. So the Mintbox continues to roll. I don't know if it's actually available just yet. I think you can preorder it. I don't know if it's shipping until about the 15th of this month or the 18th of this month. But the Mint Box Mini 2 Pro is a little teeny tiny, almost looks like a carputer, quad-core Intel Celeron box with 8 gigs of RAM,

120 gigabyte M.2. It's got Intel AC wireless. It comes with Linux Mint 19 pre-installed. And it's got passive cooling heat fins on the top of it. So first of all, it just looks great. But second of all, should actually run pretty quiet. I'm not actually positive, but I'm fairly certain there's not a fan in the thing. So you can get this tiny little box. It's got a couple of USB ports on it. It's got a couple of

ethernet ports on it. It's got mini display port, HDMI out, it's got connectors externally for Wi-Fi antennas. It's not really built to be a desktop, but it certainly does the job. And it's got a metal housing with these cooling fins on it. And it's going to be around $400-ish, kind of depending on where you're buying it from. So there's an actual box you could buy preloaded with Mint. That's pretty cool.

That is pretty nice. So congratulations to the Mint Project for getting version 19 out, and if you give it a go, go over to linuxunplugged.com slash contact, and let me know what you think, because this is one I haven't had a chance to kick the tires. I've been trying out the new elementary OS, so the timing didn't work out. So maybe you could be my reviewer.

Let me know what you think. And if you're like me and you've been switching over to Firefox recently, I've got great news there. The next version of Firefox is going to begin rolling out a service to help you monitor your passwords using the rather famous Have I Been Pwned service. Mozilla will begin integration between Have I Been Pwned service. Mozilla will begin integration between Have I Been Pwned and Firefox to make data breaches searchable in a new tool called Firefox Monitor. It's a pretty big

deal because it's going to bring the install base of hundreds of millions of Firefox users to the Have I Been Pwned feature, which is a great service to check to see if your user accounts have been leaked online if you haven't looked at it yet. So desktop users, got a few nice things coming to them this week. And one last thing in the whole Firefox category before we move on, bit of a public service announcement, stylish browser extension is total trash and you have to uninstall it immediately if you've been using it. It's a real bummer because I have, years ago, mentioned it on the show because it was a great way to make Firefox look like a first-class GNOME application.

But things change, ownership changes, and now it steals all the sites you visit and sends them back up for them to monitor. So, really a bit of unfortunate news this week. The Stylish browser extension is now spyware. And if you have that installed in your browser, it is stealing all of your internet history. Sorry about that. You know, that's one of those where we do a lot of app picks, Brent.

It's not very often I have to come back and say, delete that, it's stealing all of your history. But Stylish browser extension is one of that. It's stealing all of your history. But stylish browser extension is one of those. It happens from time to time. This is a neat example of what the community is good at, right? Is someone recognizes this and spreads it around. And so we can get the news out quite quickly that, wait a second, someone you may have trusted in the past, maybe they've changed their game a little bit. And so everybody can hopefully as quickly as possible just kind of make a decision on whether they trust this

with the new discoveries, right? Yeah, and all those anti-extension folks are like, you see, I've been telling you these extensions are no good. Now they have yet another example to go to. All right, well, I have this story in here that I've been considering covering for a little bit because I keep hearing from folks about Chrome OS and about how, yeah, I tried out Chrome OS and it's great. You should give it a go. And to that, I always go back, why would I bother? I've already

got Chrome on Linux. And then they always say, no, give it a go. It's really, really good. Well, over at androidcentral.com, there is a story about a Mac user who made this very switch. He was considering going to the Linux desktop and decided to try out a Chromebook in the meantime. And now he's sticking with Chrome OS. He says it's got a lot of the features he likes, but something that stuck out to him

is how great updates are handled. I thought this was interesting following up on our Mint discussion. I absolutely dreaded seeing that I've got updates to install. Even though I know I probably shouldn't, I became that person that kept pressing try again later whenever I saw the pop-up about updates coming in. But in Chrome OS, this has been a non-issue. Any big system updates are downloaded in the background, and then when they're ready to install, all I have to do is click a button

and my system is completely rebooted and back up and running within a matter of seconds. It's something that's been around for a while in Chrome OS, but it is a feature that I have constantly appreciated as new software rolls out. Now there's limitations he talks about like a crappy built-in file manager and stuff. But with our recent conversation about Linux Mint and how they're changing their updates

and their new time machine feature, I kind of wonder if this kind of update solution isn't the direction we just need to go. And it just means, and this is a serious question, we'd have to be okay with rebooting. means, and this is a serious question, we'd have to be okay with rebooting. Now, I put that out there because a lot of us, we like to brag about our uptime. You know, we like to claim, oh, I haven't rebooted for weeks. I was doing it earlier. I haven't rebooted these server systems for over a month. Look at me. And then, of course, this week I ended up rebooting them. I don't know, Eric, I'm going to toss this one to you. If you could have flawless updates every time you update your system, but it meant that also every time you update your system,

you had to reboot, would that be a trade-off, honestly, you'd be willing to make? Or do you prefer the existing system? You know, to be honest, as a user who is heavily in Windows for years, I still haven't really broken the, I just ran my update, so I'm going to reboot my system. I'm not really that dependent upon my systems being up that often. So I'd usually do a reboot as just something to clear out all the processes that are running and then make sure that I haven't screwed something up on configuration.

Yeah, I have gone the other route over the years. I became sort of this guy that, oh, I got five minutes to kill. I think I'll update my packages real quick. And I would just have a terminal open. Oh, do a quick update. Oh, look at that, five new packages. All right, let's go ahead and install those.

I think I developed it as an Arch user because really with Arch, the more up-to-date you stay, the better things tend to be. And so I would almost do it daily. Oh, let's do a little Pac-Man, you know. And I've had to kind of make a transition as an Ubuntu user to now isn't the best time for me to do updates. Maybe I should wait. And then I find that I just do that a lot. I wait and I wait and then weeks go by. Oh, I guess now is a good time to do it. And almost every time, you know, there's some small update that I think,

that's probably worth doing a reboot after that upgrade. That's so true about being an Arch user. It's like crack. But so I went to a talk at FOSDEM maybe two years ago now with Brian Redbeard, the guy who is one of the leaders of CoreOS. This was obviously well before Red Hat bought them. And I remember being absolutely blown away by hearing how CoreOS did their updates. They update the partition that you're not booted to. So they have a partition A,

partition B, they update partition B, you reboot into partition B. So if you need to fall back, you just reboot into partition A again. And it is amazing when that works. That is absolutely the future of updates. Yeah, absolutely. And there's been some talk about containers and stuff like that in the chat. And because your hosts are now immutable and they can do stuff like that

and you don't care whether they are long-lived or not anymore, the workloads are not server-specific is what I mean. I just think, going back to our DNF discussion as well, it's, you know, package management is becoming a lot less relevant in this sort of world. Yeah, it's just, it takes more disk, it takes more time, and it takes the reboot.

So what? Disk is so cheap. Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. And I think this is how Chrome OS pulls this off. Dan, would you ever see a future where elementary could have an update style like this? It seems like it'd be a pretty big engineering effort. Oh, we totally talk about it all the time. And actually, that's kind of what we're investigating

for how release upgrades might happen on elementary OS. And I think Pop! OS might end up going in this direction as well, especially because the new installer operates kind of based on the assumption of a recovery partition. So we could do something like that where we're downloading the image to basically a recovery partition, and then you reboot into that, and then it does the big disk upgrade, and then you reboot back into the new container. Oh, yeah. That is a sweet way to do it. Oh, man, I would love that. That does seem like the future.

And I hope we get there. And I hope we beat Windows and Mac OS to that. I don't know why that's an arbitrary goal of mine, but that's just the one I've said. I want us to get there before them, those bastards. Well, okay, you've convinced me. It's the way to go. Yes, you know, the OS tree folks feel that way. I mean, it's a lot of different ways of solving this.

I think Ubuntu core has something similar to this. So it is being worked on at several different approaches that are all trying to basically accomplish the same thing, kind of the standard open source fare. But hopefully in the end, the strongest methodology will sort of emerge. And I feel like that's kind of what's brewing in the background right now. That'd be really cool. I do have one last bit of community news.

I just want to toss out there before we get out of the community news section. The Ubuntu Studio folks have a handbook to help you get started on creating content on Ubuntu Studio. It looks like it's going to be a PDF download as well as an audio handbook. I'll have a link in the show notes if you go to linuxunplugged.com slash 256. You can get a link to it there. It's getting started. It's an overview of the out-of-the-box tools and effects. There's some really good stuff in here about a couple of tools that come with Ubuntu Studio.

Also, the basics of recording under Audacity could be useful if you just want to get started podcasting and an overview of how to use VSD plugins when you might have to install Wine, that kind of stuff that honestly took me a year to figure out. And they've got it all listed here in their book. Also, ways you can share stuff like a rundown of Creative Commons, things you need to consider about if you want to go down the copyrightright Act, royalty collections, things like that. And then also a bunch of other little tidbits here and there that I just didn't even really mention. So it's a pretty neat idea. And when I was talking to somebody about this earlier today,

they said their response was, oh shit, Ubuntu Studio is still going? Yes. What are you, not listening to the show? Yes, Ubuntu Studio is still going. And they've got a handbook available now, which is pretty, pretty cool. I wonder, let's see, audio handbook. Let's see, can I download it? How do I, I don't know how I download it.

But they do have a PDF as well. These might be the kind of things you want to read. So we have links to all that stuff as well as I'll include a bonus link in the show notes where some entrepreneur and hacker right now is trying to take the Chrome OS display manager that Google built to kind of break out Chrome's rendering from Wayland or the Mac OS or from Windows, and they're turning that into a full-fledged display server. And it comes with things like, if you're on Intel hardware, accelerated video playback, full OpenGL acceleration, and improved battery life.

Really crazy project that's not going to go anywhere, but it's a fun idea, and I'll put a bonus link in the show notes if you want to check that out. If you also want to get some stories into our community news section, linuxunplugged.reddit.com is where you go. linuxunplugged.reddit.com. Submit that over there,

and that helps inform what goes into our community news section because we do actually still check that subreddit. Now, I do want to tell you about TrueOS dropping their desktop and JB's experiments with PeerTube, which have been bananas. So before we get to that, let's talk about our sponsors that are making this week's show actually possible. Let's start with Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. This is a massive month for them their biggest content launch in history over 150 new courses hands-on content and challenges and linux academy is doing

a live stream next week to try to cover just some of it and they're streaming on the OBS Linux box that I set up for them. So what else am I going to do? I'm flying down there. Crazy Chris is going back to Texas next week. Only this time I'm flying. And you guys know me. When's the last time I came on this show and told you I'm flying anywhere? I'm the crazy guy who got in a subcompact car and drove that thing to New York for the Ubuntu rally

but I did the math and I'm just looking I'm like I can't set them up with a Linux powered OBS stream for their biggest content launch in history and be like All right, have at it guys. Good luck so I've decided that the best they mean like I gotta go down there and help them out So they're gonna pay for mean, like, I got to go down there and help them out. So they're going to pay for my flight, but I'm going to go down there.

I'll be in Dallas next week. If you want to tune in and hang out with us, July 10th, Tuesday, July 10th, at 10.30 Chicago time, I'll be live with the Linux Academy folks covering the DevOps and Linux section of the new courseware. Of course, they've got a bunch of new stuff. And to that end, I've gotten the word that they're looking to hire a bunch of experts, particularly in our audience, because they're spinning up coursewares on containers and Azure,

which has been standard affair for them for a while. But they are looking for experts in those things that may want to help create courseware. But specifically, something that I think could be really appealing to our audience is they're also looking for experts in Python and security because they're really expanding both those areas right now. And don't tell anybody, but I have reason to believe that down the road, they're also going to need a BSD courseware author. So if you have an expertise in BSD and feel like you could write some courseware, maybe come up with a few educational challenges, things like that,

it would behoove you to contact Linux Academy. Container expert, Azure, security, Python, or BSD. I've been hanging out with these guys, seeing the work they're putting into this, and I can tell you these are the next areas they're going to need people. So I said, I'll put the word out. Go create an email address, and I'll have people email you with their resumes. So this is a hotline for my audience.

Training at linuxacademy.com. If you think you might be able to help them out, if you're a BSD expert, a Python expert, if you're really into security, training at linuxacademy.com. They do support remote work as well. So it's something you could consider. And it's an area that they're going to be expanding into rapidly. So they could definitely, definitely use your help. Training at linuxacademy.com. Get in touch with them if this is an area of expertise that you have,

because Linux Academy is growing like crazy right now. 150 new ways to learn in July alone. And you can get started at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, and you can sign up for a free seven-day trial. And if you are a courseware expert, maybe you're a BSD guy, maybe you write Python all day long, maybe you're an Azure nut, you should let them know. Training at linuxacademy.com. And thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring this year's show.

Thanks to all of you guys for going to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And wish me luck because this is going to really be the first production test of this new system that I built. And it's kind of going all in.

So yeah. And if you're in the Dallas area, of this new system that I built, and it's kind of going all in. So, yeah. And if you're in the Dallas area, I may try to do a few lunches or dinner while I'm down there. Join our Telegram group, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram. That's the real reason you're going, for the barbecue.

You know it, dude. You know it. It's so good. Oh, man. Alex, they have been throwing a party all day long at Linux Academy. So, and of course, I follow a bunch of those folks on Twitter. So, I'm just seeing pictures all day of like all these different things that they're getting to celebrate, like food. They

brought food trucks out. They've got all of the remote staff also got food delivered today. So, like it's a company-wide party for reaching this milestone. And I'm looking at that going, today. So like it's a company wide party for reaching this milestone. And I'm looking at that going, I'll be all right. I'll be okay. I'm going to get my eat on for sure. You know it. All right. Well, let me also thank Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. It's smarter than unlimited. If you use less, you pay less. Your average Ting phone bill is just $23 per phone per month. It's simple. It's just $6 for the line and then your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. A fair price for however much you talk, text, and data you use. Now these crazy Canadians are always doing really fun things and they have the hashtag

Ting Summer Photo Contest where you can share a photo with them on your favorite platform and get entered to win one of those cool Moto Z2s that support like the modules. And they're going to include the true zoom camera that snaps onto the back of that thing just for you taking a picture and doing a hashtag. Ting is mobile that makes sense. They have a CDMA and a GSM network. You pick whatever works best in your area, and then it's just $6 a month for the phone. If you got Wi-Fi and you don't use any data that day, you don't pay for any data. It's pretty awesome. They've also recently posted a review of the Moto G6 Play.

This sucker is going to be top of my list if my phone breaks. It's going to be out on June 28th. So I guess it's out now, actually. For $199, and that's before you even go to linux.ting.com and get our $25 discount, you can get a phone that takes amazing pictures, it stays powered all

day and all night with its crazy great battery, 13 megapixel shooter on the back, 5 megapixel on the front, 5.7 edge-to-edge display with an 18.9 aspect ratio, a great battery, and of course on the Ting service you get updates directly. You don't have to worry about them getting in the way for their quote-unquote experience,

and you just pay for what you use. It's a great service. And you can get started by going to linux.ting.com. Take $25 off a device. Bring your own, and they'll give you $25 in service credit. And the best part is once you get all kumskies, as my daughter puts it, with your Ting service, you can take advantage of their great control panel and their fantastic customer service. And of course, if you want to buy a device from Ting directly,

they've got so many great devices for all those different price points. It truly is a reboot of the mobile industry. And you can vote with your wallet. You can keep the mobile industry sane here in the States. Go to linux.ting.com Oh yeah. Alright. And DigitalOcean.

DigitalOceanDO.co slash unplugged. If you go to that URL, you will get a $100 credit when you sign up with a new account DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean.co. If you go to that URL, you will get a $100 credit when you sign up with a new account. And I have to warn you, you're not going to know what to do with yourself. There's so many things you could do. Maybe set up a PeerTube instance. Why not go with one of their high-performance CPU droplets? In fact, DigitalOcean has these great droplets where you can mix and match resources or go with my favorite system. Three cents an hour gives you four gigabytes of RAM, two CPUs, 80 gigabytes of SSD storage, and three terabytes of transfer for three cents an hour.

Everything is SSDs, enterprise-grade SSDs, 40 gigabit connections coming into them hypervisors, monitoring and alerting so that way you always look like a boss, and simple DNS management that makes you realize DNS didn't need to be such a pain in the butt all these years. Then you combine that with their easy, well-documented, super straightforward API, global data centers all over the world, 99.99% SLA uptime, and cloud firewalls so they block traffic at the network level instead of letting that traffic hit your rig.

It's a pretty slick system. And then they wrap it all up with great documentation. In fact, in the show notes, I will link you to a guide on how to secure NGINX with Let's Encrypt on something called Freebisty. Freebisty. Sounds new, never heard of it before. Probably just got launched. But they've already got a

tutorial on it. Something about, it's probably some distribution of Linux. Freebisty. And they've got a guide on how to set up Let's Encrypt and Nginx on that, as well as, of course, Ubuntu, RHEL, a bunch of other distributions. They support so many different Linux distros and FreeBSD. Plus

they have block storage and they have many, many other features. It's a great platform. It's our go-to when we want to try something out. And now, because it's been around for a little while, it comes with all these great benefits like people in the community know how to work with it. They know how to use the team account functionality.

And when it's somebody new, somebody like, you know, the one outsider in the group that hasn't used it before, it's no big deal because it's so simple. It's so straightforward that they get up to speed right away. So get started by going to do.co slash unplugged. That'll give you a $100 credit when you sign up with a new account. That's do.co slash unplugged and a big thank you to Digital Ocean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. There we go. We got it. We got it.

And I'm happy to say that the feedback has been mostly positive about consolidating the sponsors down into one block in the show. I like it because it gives me one spot in the show notes for you guys to find all the links to the stuff I talk about with our great sponsors, especially when it's an opportunity like getting a job or saving $100 or a new tutorial on how to set up Let's Encrypt. So thank you, everybody, who's continuing to send in your feedback.

LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. Now, Brent, let's shift gears here for a moment. Have you ever experimented with any of the BSDs that are desktop-focused? You know, you've got in the past you had, what do they call it, PCBSD, and then they changed it to TrueOS. And a friend of the show, Chris Moore, was involved with each one of those projects to make like a user-friendly BSD. Have you ever even been tempted by it? Temptations. So as you and I, Chris, are getting to know each other, I will say, yeah, Temptations for sure. I've seen the t-shirts. But I haven't quite tried it myself. And

Alan, of course, being a fellow Canadian, has a thing or two positive to say about it. So, yeah, it's certainly on the list of things to try, and there's some amazing features in there, but I will admit to not having done it quite yet.

I'm in the same boat. There was a feature in there, though, will admit to not having done it quite yet. No, I'm in the same boat. You know, there was a feature in there, though, while we're just talking about backups and time machine and time shift and those kinds of things that Chris Moore and his brother built into their desktop environment that I thought was pretty slick. They took advantage of ZFS snapshots and integrated a slider in the file manager where you could slide back in time to previous ZFS snapshots like backups. Now, again, it's all on one disk.

So if your disk goes out, you're screwed. But it did get me thinking about guys like you who might have a workflow where you're working on some photos, you make an edit, and then you come back the next day and you're like, oh shit, I didn't save the original version or I don't like this edit. You could, in theory, although it might be kind of expensive, but in theory, you could go into the file manager and sort of scroll back in time and get that photo that wasn't modified. So there is some appeal, like there's a workflow advantage, you know what I mean? I wonder if this is an advantage for all workflows, you know? For me, certainly in photos, I can see that as being handy. But anyone who's even creating, you know, text, they're doing text accounting, for instance. Sure.

That's a super niche. But any history is super helpful. And that is, I would say, as far as the research I've done, the main reason to look at or maybe to get introduced to BSD. It seems like they've really got some good advantages there. Oh, here's your final answer, though. XMN in the chat room says that Darktable is not necessarily on BSD yet. Well, that's all. That ruins it, doesn't it?

No Darktable, no Brent. Well, key is you said yet. That's true. Who knows what's coming, right? So let's talk about TrueOS. This is BSD Unplugged, episode 34 for April 1st, 2014. Oh, that was a while ago now. I miss Chris.

So TrueOS is focusing on a core operating system. It's not changing its name, but it's pretty much changing everything else. And they say, they write over on the TrueOS.org blog, today we're announcing that TrueOS is shifting our focus a bit to become a cutting-edge operating system that keeps all of the stability you know and love from OpenZFS and FreeBSD and adds additional features

to create a fresh, innovative operating system. Our goal is to create a core-centric operating system that is modular, ding, functional, and perfect for do-it-yourself and advanced users alike. TrueOS will become a downstream fork that will build on FreeBSD by integrating new software technologies like OpenRC and LibreSSL. My mind when I read this was blown because TrueOS to me was always known as BSD's attempt to essentially make a Linux distribution, to make a Linux desktop environment. And they even have their own Qt-based desktop environment. I didn't know what to make of any of this.

I've been trying to process this for a while because to me this seems like a massive shift. And I did wonder if perhaps there was more to the story, perhaps something with IX, something like, you know, going on behind the scenes. I wasn't quite sure. I had a chance, however, to talk with Alan. I think it was, it came out this week, episode 200 and yeah, 81 of Tech Talk Today, techtalk.today slash 281, I had a chance to chat with one, Mr. Alan Jude. And he was on for an extended edition of the Tech Talk program. And I grabbed a clip

from that episode 281 of our conversation. And this is where we talked about TrueOS and PCBSD and where this is all going and how Project Trident fits into all of this. So what is now,

what we have, Project, is it Trident? into all of this. So what is now what we have? Project, is it Trident? And TrueOS, which sounds like TrueOS now is going to be less of a desktop-focused BSD and more of maybe like something that might be more server-side. And Project Trident will continue the desktop version of what was TrueOS with the Illumos desktop. What is, do I have this right? What's going on? Almost Illumina desktop. Illumos desktop? Do I have this right? What's going on? Illumina desktop. Illumos is the

Solaris work. So, iXsystems had been sponsoring PCBSD and TrueOS for a long time, but they really need to focus on building the bits that become FreeNAS and TrueNAS and other appliances.

So, what they've done is spun off the desktop side into a separate project and took TrueOS back to... So when PCBSD was still called PCBSD, there was a project called TrueOS, and that was basically the modified version of FreeBSD that runs FreeNAS and TrueNAS. Right, okay. And then when they wanted to rename PCBSD, they were like, well, we just reuse this other name because we already own the trademark.

And that's kind of creating the confusions. But basically now they're going back to TrueOS being that base for the appliances. But what they've added to it is a toolkit with these manifests. So if you want to make your own distro, you take TrueOS, you write this manifest and say,

I want these bits on, these bits off, and these packages, and you press a button, and blammo, you have Project Trident. That's awesome. Or the other one is, so they hired the developer from GhostBSD, which is a FreeBSD desktop based on GNOME

instead of Lumina or KDE. And he's rebased that on TrueOS as well. So they already have two examples, and there'll probably be a couple more coming soon, where it's just, you know, take this toolkit that is TrueOS and make your

desktop OS or make your appliance OS or whatever. That's nice. That's actually going to be real. And is it, it's actually appropriate to call them a distro? That's allowed? Basically, yes. So it turns Trident and GhostBSD and so on

into distros of TrueOS. Oh, okay. Or spins maybe is a slightly better word because they're not that different like a distro. I'm calling them distros. I'm officially calling them distros.

Alan, you gave me permission. I'm calling them distros. I love it. I love that they're working'm calling them distros. I love it. I love that they're working on a systemd replacement. I love that they're working on a way to build distributions. I just think the whole thing is a very fascinating development. And so we'll have Project Trident exist still as a BSD desktop, and then you'll have TrueOS,

which is really being built possibly to run NASes and other modular functions. It's kind of complicated, but when you hear Alan explain it, it all kind of makes sense, I think. So that's what our cousins are up to over on the BSD side of things. It's a bit of a mess right now, but I think this transition is going to make a lot of sense when everything is all said and done. And the value of this is negative. I disagree. I disagree. I think it's pretty positive. Get it out of here. Gosh, that guy. That guy. Yeah. And also happy 25th birthday to FreeBSD. Alan and I talked about that in our chat in Tech Talk 281.

We also talked about what it's like for him to go from being a project outsider to now being one of the core members of FreeBSD and what that transition's like and what does that actually mean in terms of responsibilities? What is his job? What does he have to do now that he's a core member of the FreeBSD team? We talk about that. But probably my favorite part of the show was there was this hilarious story where Alan's entire town lost power.

And then over time, like everybody's power but Alan's house was restored. And so in the process of all this, like Alan ends up with a new phone. He ends up going around to different stores. Like it was a great story. It was good to catch up with Alan. And that was in the techtalk.today slash 281. But maybe, Brent, maybe one day when Darktable gets moved over, you'll be a Project Trident user. Yeah?

I mean, you could always kick the tires. Give us a little report from the field. It's always worth tire kicking, right? No one should be scared of that. What is your daily Linux driver, though? Like, what's the go-to, like, say your drive died tonight and you got a new one tomorrow and you just had to get back up and running. What would you install right now? No judgment. Whatever it is, it's fine. So I'm

playing with a few things. So every day here, I'm using Arch with Plasma. But you mentioned if my laptop, for instance, got ran over by a dump truck. Yeah, the bus factory. So in that case, I actually think you and I tested this a little bit

when I was down there seeing you for Linux Fest. I would say Kubuntu would get me up and running the fastest. However, I have to say I was testing it earlier, and there's just a few little things that were a little different for me, but that would get me out of a jam for sure. You seemed to get by pretty well. Do you remember what those things were? I didn't complain, did I? No, not once. I think it's probably that I spend so much time building muscle memory on what I have on my particular system that it was mostly little tiny. So

definitely one of the things was Dropbox's interface is super buggy on KDE for some reason. Yeah, like you left-click, you get one result. You right-click, you get another result. I hate that. Or it drops down, so you can only see, you know, it's awful. And maybe that doesn't matter because I'm trying to move away from Dropbox. I mean, it's just another little tick to get me to, you know, get motivated. Just if you, whatever the click is that causes the menu

to show up below the bar, use the other click and you don't ever have that problem. Problem is, as you can tell, I never remember if it's a right or a left click. But I, yeah, it is, I feel the same way. It's kind of been, it's kind of been slowly moving me over to NextCloud. Exactly.

And actually, just to iterate that point again, I was literally needing to right-click on the Dropbox icon five to seven times for the menu to come up again after having that do. And that's completely unacceptable. I'm just trying to get stuff done, right? So that was one little thing. That's not a Kubuntu problem, I don't think.

But it was like apps grouping, which is all little tiny usable stuff, Yes, yes. Usability stuff. But, you know, if I can get my system up and running after getting run over by a dump truck, those would be very small things. And I'd be smiling. You could make do. Yeah, you know, so that's interesting you say that. Because, so I think the Plasma desktop has a couple of challenges. I am a pretty tolerant guy to esoteric little things. I'm not so tolerant in other areas, but I can be pretty tolerant guy to esoteric little things.

I'm not so tolerant at other areas, but I can be pretty tolerant. Like if I see upward momentum, project seems like it's moving in the right direction and those kinds of things, I can be forgiving on that kind of stuff. That's why I don't think

I've even groused about that Dropbox problem once because it's like I have faith having watched the Plasma desktop over time that either this is going to get solved or something else will change to solve that. But I think there is merit in what you're saying in that you could load Seuss's implementation of Plasma and you get a whole set of defaults. You can load KDE Neon and get pretty close to stock Sane defaults. And you can load Kubuntu and you get pretty close again, but there's a few things that are different.

There's a few things over here that are a little different. And that leads to, I think, a much slower adoption cycle. It took me three solid tries of giving the Plasma desktop a go for multiple months at a time before it really stuck. It took the third switch for it to actually really stick. And one of the philosophies I adopted was the moment I notice a default or a setting is wrong, I have to change it. And I have to change as many of them as I can think of at that time. I know that sounds a little chaotic, but what it essentially does is it adds 5 to 20 minutes of overhead

to the first week of using the Plasma desktop. But then after that, it's pretty solid. Yeah, I'm just like you. I was working alongside someone earlier today when we were running into these things, and that's exactly what happened. I would dive immediately into sort of problem solving mode because I didn't want to have to deal with that ever again. Right.

And it's just little stuff. But it adds minutes and minutes and tens of minutes. Yep. You just got to like swallow it for a bit. It's like the medicine you have to swallow for a bit, I think. But then once you get past that week, then it's like all of a sudden you're cruising, right? Yep. Yeah, that's how I feel at least. Well, and if you had your choice,

would your base be a rolling base or would it be like an LTS stable base for your perfect desktop? So I've been toying with a rolling. So I'm with Antargos. I should roll the R there. Yeah, Antargos. Antargos. And so maybe it's not fair to say

that I'm running Arch. I should give them some credit as well. And so I have really liked that implementation and that kind of rolling. It's that feeling you were talking about earlier, right? Of just updating

whenever you feel like it and feeling like you're constantly sort of attached to the mothership somehow. Yeah. Always getting the fresh stuff. Yeah, it's nice. There's like little tiny things that you run into here and there that you need to do little fixes sometimes. That's

you know, for maybe some of our audience is maybe okay. So I think for me that actually gives me just enough of a nudge to problem solving to learn even more about Linux and how everything works. I think I'm at that stage. But for a recommendation that I make to users, that I'm either switching from other platforms or who are moving from, you know, something like Linux Mint, an older version of Linux Mint, and looking for some options, then I hesitate to certainly suggest the rolling release.

But for me, it's a nice learning tool, actually. I'll call it that. That makes a lot of sense. I like your philosophy on that. I just like to ask, you know, as I get to know people, I like to kind of start to ask them, like, so how are you using your computer?

Why do you use it that way? Because it often makes me reflect on the choices I've made. So I like asking those questions. I'd like to thank you for pushing Plasma so gently upon me. I switched to Plasma after coming back from Texas, and I must say it is fantastic. You did? You did?

It's wonderful. It is wonderful. On the desktop, on the laptop, it's wonderful. That is neat. On top of Arch as well. So all the latest freshness. Yeah. Yeah.

I'll save it because I've gone off on it enough. But I was telling Noah how happy I am that I was able to leave the studio for a month and everything worked. That's at Linux, yo. That's a huge benchmark for me. And you thought I wouldn't make it 30 days, dude. Did I say that? Yeah, you actually said, you said, I'm not even going to clean these wires up

because I know in 30 days, I'll be back here reloading all of this. Well, so here's the thing. I know it's weird because I feel like I live in two alternate realities sometimes. So the thing is simply restarting these machines would take the entire show offline. And I do probably 50% of my shows outside of the studio. So I needed an operating system that I could count on 100% of the time that is always going to work. And so Linux has done that great for me. And at the same time that I'm living in that reality where the stakes are much, much higher,

because I don't have anybody here to do anything. If I'm not here at the same time, I'm living in that reality where the stakes are much, much higher because I don't have anybody here to do anything if I'm not here. At the same time, I'm also living in a reality where it seems like we'll put something in and I'm there. You're not doing anything different than I'm doing. And I just watch weird, crazy problems that I've never seen before in my life that other people, I will ask people like, like producer Michael Tonello, I'll say, Hey, this is what's happening. You ever seen this happen? He'll say, no, never seen that. You found the magic smoke, man. I mean, that's, you know, and so I'll say, hey, this is what's happening. You ever seen this happen? He'll say, no, never seen that. You found the magic smoke, man. I mean, that's, you know, and so I watched that

and I don't know. So basically what I've come to the conclusion is, I think you'd agree with this, is that JB1 is cursed. Yeah, it's solar flares. Yeah, we have, there's a hole in the,

yeah, over the ozone right above the studio and solar flares get in. Yeah. Yeah. So that, like the physical location is cursed. And so for that reason alone,

I thought, wow, it works everywhere else. But if there's one place it's not going to work, it'll be here. Yeah. Computers only do what you tell them, Noah. Come on, you know that. Yeah, everybody knows that. So you say that, but we have three identical machines, identical builds. And at the moment, we swapped two of them, identical builds,

and one of them works in one location, and the other one, as far as I know, is working upstairs in the other location. But they didn't work when they were swapped. You do have a show called User Error. I mean... We can blame that one on Rekai, though. He was part of that.

Hey, User Error's not dead. It's just on vacation. Hiatus. Yeah. I agree. I agree. I couldn't explain it either. However, now we seem to have landed on the right recipe.

Perhaps it's LTS across the board. Perhaps it's the maturity of Plasma. Perhaps Chris is not in the studio anymore. I've spent more time in studio than out of, so I don't think it's that. But, yeah, it's been great. It has been so, so great. And I am super happy for everybody that's rocking XFCE or Unity or Cinnamon or whatever your preference is. But if you're looking for a professional grade desktop environment that is adding features that you see and you

go, shit, how come nobody else has ever done that? Well, that's Plasma Desktop. And now you can say it's also extremely stable. And I'm, you know, I'm using this thing daily across multiple machines, 24-7. It's just been fantastic for me. I have the same experience. I have it on three machines and I've not had a single crash in two weeks. That's, you know, compared to GNOME 3, that is like night and day. Yeah. And if you're out there using GNOME 3 going, God, I don't have any of these problems. That's great. It is so great. I wish I was you, actually. So, Noah, since you and I got together on a Tuesday and did a podcast, a lot of things have changed here at JB1.

I put out the word saying, hey, I would like to try out PeerTube because YouTube sucks. YouTube is a horrible platform. It's only getting worse. And this PeerTube thing looks like it could actually work. And holy crap, holy crap, if I I think it's like t.me slash PeerTube if you want to get involved. And Eric and a few others worked basically for the last three or four days to set us up not one, but two, two PeerTube instances, one for the community to submit their own stuff, and one that's like all JB shows, and the idea is going to be

a dedicated channel for each show. So there'll be a Linux Unplugged channel, Linux Action News channel, an Ask Noah channel, and you can just subscribe to the channels that you enjoy.

And it's all based on peer-to-peer video streaming, assuming other people are watching it. Oh, man, it's been awesome. It's been so great. It's been so cool. We did the production installation, so that way it's all running physically on the box. It's not like a container. It's all on, it's been,

it's so great. If you want to check it out, in fact, check it out right now. Tell me what you think. Go to getjupiter.com. And that, we already have the domain set up. I'm trying to decide. I don't want to check it out in fact check it out right now tell me what you think go to get jupiter.com and that we already have the domain set up i'm trying to decide i don't want to i don't want to screw up okay all right we'll go to get jupiter wow this is really cool this is really amazing what you already saw it i you already said i may i may or may not have been chatting with eric about this since you guys set it up but i don't want to ruin but i don't want to ruin the show i don't want to ruin the show so this is amazing this is thank you yeah so

responsive and you know my favorite thing is There's no ads on the side. That's true. I click on a movie and instantly, boom, I'm watching Linux Action News. And, yeah, so it has all of the advantages of YouTube without all of the de-advantages of YouTube. Yeah, you are listening, aren't you? It is. It's clean. It's simple.

It's all the stuff you used to like about YouTube without all the stuff you don't like. So, Eric, I've talked a lot about it, but you did a lot of behind-the-scenes work, managing the droplet, setting up the Linux Rocks instance as well. What have your been initial takeaways of working with PeerTube on the back end? Yeah, I mean, it was an amazingly easy setup. A couple of us spent a good portion of Wednesday and Thursday

putting off our day jobs to go in and install this thing. And I think the biggest issue we had was proxying Nginx on the back end to support a certificate so we could do HTTPS. Oh, yeah, I bet. I hadn't even really noticed that. But that slickness is already happening. That is pretty good. And resources-wise, like setup time-wise, give me an idea. Like, what do you think? Could you just throw this on a Raspberry Pi or maybe, uh, does it take something a little more powerful? And even using a high CPU, a high CPU droplet, easy for me to say, um, we we've seen that it's

really, really slow transcoding the first time through, but once it's up there, it's amazingly quick, but I wouldn't use a Raspberry Pi. And in fact, we're looking at potentially tracking down some physical hardware for the GitHub or the official JB instance. Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of, I mean, big surprise, everybody. It turns out running YouTube is not easy. And when you build your own YouTube, you have to solve some of the same problems like storage.

And it's not just storage for the source video, but it's also storage for all of the different iterations that you might want to transcode for like low bandwidth, high bandwidth. So you have to store each one of those copies. And then how do you make those transcodes? With CPU time. So when you upload a video, it is a huge job for that server to transcode

three or four different versions of that video. And so you've got to build this thing in a way in which your website remains responsive while your CPU cores are burning away video. And we got through this and I'm like, oh yeah, oh yeah, running YouTube's hard. That's what my first thought was like, oh, we're going to need way more CPU and way more bandwidth and way more storage to pull this off. It's okay. It's all right. We have the means, but it did kind of make me for a brief moment, appreciate the hard work that Google does to make YouTube actually function. And then one of my videos got flagged as inappropriate for advertising. And then I asked for it to be reviewed. And then they told me it's

still inappropriate for advertising because I'm a bad person and I should feel bad. So then it reminded me why we're doing this. And the player has been nice. It's worked really well. I don't think we're quite at the embedded on the JB site yet, but we're trending in that direction in one week. We went from, hey, guys, I kind of want to do this thing to I could see in the near future we start swapping out YouTube embeds for freaking Peertube embeds. That's a big deal. That's a really big deal. And if you're, if you've, if your head's spinning like mine is, this could be a game changer. They're doing an AMA, FrameSoft and Peertube are doing an AMA over on the free software subreddit. It's probably the day you're

listening to this, so you've got to go get your questions in. Is this something that I can donate some of my spare compute cycles at home to? Yeah, I don't think that's super easy to do yet. You mean like just offload the CPU rendering for the video? Right, yeah, I have 12 cores sat here doing not a lot most of the time, right?

Yeah, that's a good question. I feel like it's not super easy to break this thing out the way I'd like. I'd like to have one server responsible for the storage, one server responsible for the transcoding, and one server responsible for the website. And right now, it's all kind of like one box. Because if you can offload things like the CPU rendering to like an auto scaling group or something, maybe on Amazon or something, maybe that's a way to do it. But, you know, you can engage the listeners. And if there was some automation they could run that would spin up, you know,

some special thing on their, like container on their machine maybe that just did transcoding as a worker just for you, then I don't know if that's thinking quite outside the box maybe. I like that idea. Initially, that's how it sounded. But the more we dove into this,

the more it sounds like all the content is in one place. And the distributed part, where the torrent technology kicks in, is while you're actually viewing the content. So if everyone went out and watched this week's Tech Talk today at the same time, then you'd really see the power of what PeerTube can do. But over the past week, it's mostly been one person here and one person there watching the video. So we haven't really seen the real power that this can bring us. Although, I think a lot

of us would agree that if you take the same file off of YouTube and put it onto PeerTube, I think the quality is a lot better, both visual and audio. What about if you distributed the file system underneath or something? There's a lot of ways you could make this office. I think so. I think there are particular

probably some back-end tricks we could do. But it is interesting to note that, and not too surprising, the least intensive thing this system does is serve up video. When a few of us are watching video and you say you have like HTOP going on the terminal, you don't even I mean, you you see a couple engine X processes, but like it's nothing because

it's all client side. The work is being done client side. So that part, like Eric is saying, is really cool. And definitely to my eye, although it could be the free software roast into glasses that I sometimes have on, but to my eye, the videos look crisper. When I upload the same source MP4 file to PeerTube and to YouTube, the version that PeerTube publishes to my eye looks better. So that's also awesome. I didn't even expect a quality improvement when we started talking about this. So it's positive in the freedom dimension, is it?

It is. Yeah. And if you were doing something small for like an office or yourself, friends and family, like the stuff we're talking about, like CPU time and storage are way less of a consideration. You know, if you're not publishing eight videos a day, I mean a week and putting them out to tens of thousands of people, it's really, it's really no big deal to wait an hour for a video to render. You don't have to put it on a super fast box. It's really no big deal to store

50 or 60 videos because, you know, you can accommodate for that. So like PeerTube, I think, is totally at the individual level right now. Small groups, projects, you know, if you have an open source project out there and you've got four or five videos that you want to share with the world and you'd like to embed them on your website, you could be using PeerTube today. You don't need to use YouTube. That's massive. That's a massive achievement. We now have a video platform that is accessible and available to free software projects today, and they have a total end-to-end solution for publishing videos, embedding videos, sharing videos, comments, all of it.

PeerTube is really impressive. Like it's way further along than I expected. It did take some fiddling. So I really appreciate, Eric, you taking the time to sort of spearhead that and working with the rest of the group to make sure it happens. It's been a team effort there. And I really appreciate it because you guys have had the opportunity and also the motivation to fiddle with it, where for me, it was like, okay, I can see this as promise, but I don't think I can take any further. But since you guys did, I really see the promise now. So thank you.

Yeah. I mean, it's been a great project. And for someone like me who doesn't have the time or the resources to build up an entire broadcasting chain, like, like JB has, or like Asno has developed. It's an interesting chance to kind of test the waters as a potential content creator myself. On the Linux Rocks PureTube instance, I uploaded a couple of the podcasts that I recorded in November before my wife had our baby. And so just throwing it up there just so someone can see it, just so I have it linked somewhere that's not YouTube. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So if you guys want to check out what we've got so far, there's two URLs. There is getjupiter.com, which I think will be eventually like the official release channel of Jupyter Broadcasting and PeerTube videos if we get there. And I think we're going to get there. And then there's peertube.LinuxRocks.Online. PeerTube.LinuxRocks.Online.

That is, unless I'm wrong, Eric, that's still allowing community signups, right? And once you sign up, you can upload a video. Yeah, we're doing community signups on Linux Rocks. But GetJupyter is locked down to official content only. And a cool plug for the Mastodon side, the Linux Rocks side, is

there is experimental functionality to tie PeerTube into the Mastodon software, so we're eventually going to tie Linux Rocks and PeerTube.linuxRocks together. So I'm not exactly sure what all functionality that brings,

but it's going to be really cool. An open-source kumbaya. You could see that, right? Because what YouTube really gives you is audience. It gives you a platform for people to come see your stuff. But if Peertube can solve that with integration and Amastadon and Federation and whatnot, I think it makes a pretty big difference.

Like it doesn't completely solve the problem, but it goes a large way of solving the problem. So I would totally encourage you guys, go to getjupiter.com, try out the few videos we have there, let us know what you think, and check out the Linux Rocks instance, peertube.linuxrocks.online.

Maybe try creating an account and upload it. Get your feet wet. See what could happen. Chris, I have a question for you. Yeah. How many domain names do you own? You know, it's funny you ask me that because I just went through the other day and checked

and it's something like 50-something domain names. 50 plus. Oh, jeez. I used to have GoDaddy as a sponsor. So I would just buy them all the time. And then whenever Danica would call me, I'd be like, I just got this new domain, baby. She'd be like, really? I'd be like, oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, it's.com. It was a good conversation starter. Hey, Mr. Noah, what's coming up on the Ask Noah program today? We got all sorts of stuff. We're obviously going to dive into this Google's announcement that they are going to get into the game streaming uh i guess uh platform yeah it's gonna be it's kind of crazy you like that you just picture my face fat slapping around as i do that i need i need an audio i need to know i you know if i ever i tell you what i'll make a deal you ever get me a high wave sample audio and i'll put a soundboard in even you've

been asking me to do that since day one i know that. That has to be, if that's clip one, I'll do a soundboard. Yeah, so anyway, we're going to talk about the Google hardware platform for streaming because I think that streaming games is going to be the future of how gaming is done. Of course, I'm sure you guys talked about this. Seuss got bought out. Mm-hmm. And, you know, that's exciting. And we got a couple other things, too.

I want to talk about privacy. I had an interesting discussion on YouTube, that's exciting. And we got a couple other things, too. I want to talk about privacy. I had an interesting discussion on YouTube, as it were, coming full circle with some of the people that are viewers on there. And they kind of gave me a hard time for my take on privacy. mining user data and collecting user data and looking at user data and analyzing that can be a really good thing for users if it's done properly and with respect. And I think that we're so predisposed to just think of data collection as a bad thing. And I think as users, we kind of screw ourselves out of the benefits that can be brought if companies do that responsibly. Oh, man.

We were talking about that. That's a great one. That's a good conversation. You've got to wonder, too, like, what did you expect? Like, all these years, you know, we've been advocating for the adoption of the Linux desktop. We've been proponents of people switching to Linux. Right.

Well, when you start to arrive there, you've got to have real numbers and data for software companies and vendors to go off of. Like, what did you expect once you get there? Yeah, and one of the comments was the real reason for forced reporting is that even if you uncheck the telemory boxes, it reports that you installed Ubuntu,

and that's a number that you get to show in small business meeting. My question back is, so what? Mm-hmm. So what? Interesting, yeah. There's obviously, yeah, that's a good conversation because there's obviously some dynamics to that,

some edge cases, and there's, of course, all of a good conversation because there's obviously some dynamics to that, some edge cases. And there's, of course, all of the horrible things we hear about with Windows 10 and Spine. And Google. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, boy. So where is that sweet spot? Well, sounds like I need to tune into the Ask Noah program to hear the rest of that conversation. Good news for you.

I have great news for you. It's coming up right after the Linux Unplugged program. It's like people should just show up on Tuesday and they get a little unplugged. In fact, if you got here around 1.30-ish, I think today the pre-show technically started around like 1.10. So, I mean, like you show up a little early, you get quite the Linux afternoon over at jblive.tv. All of that converted to your local time

at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Links to everything we talked about today at linuxunplugged slash 256. Brent, is there anywhere you'd like to send folks to? Maybe a Twitter handle or something like that if they want to get a little more Brent during the day? Yeah, sure. Twitter. So I'm not super active there, but I'll certainly see if anybody wants to say hi.

That's at Brent Gervais. So B-R-E-N-T-G-E-R-V-A-I-S. And I've got a neat little website. BrentGervais.com. Yeah, we have all that linked in the show notes as well if you want lazy links for that. Thank you to the Mumble Room for making it today. You are welcome to join us as well. It's all available.

If you just search for, like, Jupiter Colony Mumble Guide, you'll actually get a whole guide that producer Michael wrote up. But the lazy way is just to head over to our IRC room, and then you just do bang mumble, and then the JBot will just give you all the instructions you need to hang out with us right there. Talk about making it as easy as possible. So you have all the details you need. You know how to get a hold of us.

You know where to find the links. You know how to participate. The rest is just all up to you. You can listen or get as involved as you would like. It's kind of the beauty of the Unplugged program. We have a space for you if you want to get in the conversation, you want to get your voice heard. It's open, but if you just want to sit back and get every single episode when they come out, go to linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe, and then we'll make that possible.

We'll work to make that possible. Thanks so much for tuning in this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And if you didn't know, we'll see you right back here next Tuesday! Unplugged. Oh, man, what are we going to title this thing? Oh, this is going to be impossible. This is the show that cannot be titled. We covered way too much stuff. We got to just keep it to like one topic and then we could just easily title it. We'll make like a 15 minute show and then we'll

just call it whatever we talk about for that 15 minutes. Before we get out of here, I do want to mention, probably should have included this in the community news. I just, it didn't quite, just didn't really kind of fit, but the Humble Bundle folks have a big DRM Freedom Sale up to 90% off, and a bunch of these games, let's see, the first row, the second row, the third row, all of them. Wow, wow, all of the games, at least on the front page, have Linux versions. So there's a big Humble Bundle sale up to 70, no, 90.

Look at this one. So this one's 75% off. This one's 85% off. This one's 90% off. Holy crap. So Humble Bundle's got a huge sale going. That's nice. Check that out.

More games for my list of shame. Yeah, I know. Just make your list larger and larger. Chris, have you ever played Factorio? No. Oh my God, Factorio is the best game in the world. We had a consultant over the weekend that was working on some projects with us, and he's a huge gaming guy. He loves Factorio.

And so I had him over at the house, and he got my son into it, and we blew like most of Saturday sitting around playing Factorio, and now I'm addicted to it. I have 500-plus hours in that game. What? It's so addicting. It's unbelievable. It's so addicting. How have I not heard of this?

Don't ever play it. It just ruins marriages. Factorio. I believe that, and your parent relationship. I haven't seen my two daughters. I think I just don't remember what they look like, but I haven't seen them. Because they're not playing Factorio. Is this a math game?

What is this? No, no, no. It's the best game ever. You build a factory. That's it. Kind of, yeah. So imagine this. Like, you know, in Minecraft or any of these other games you like,

you would mine, like, copper or whatever, right? Okay. But that takes a lot of work. So isn't it cooler to build a drill and then fill it with coal and have the drill mine, the copper ore. Oh,

but wait, it gets better because what if you had a drill that was powered by coal that mine the coal and the, Oh wait, it could get even better though. Cause what if we had a, a machine that was powered by coal that generated electricity. And then instead of all these drills that run on coal,

they run on electricity. So then you only have to maintain your electrical plant. And then all of these other things that could be mined.ed oh wait it gets better because why would you want to do all that by hand you can put belts between them all so the drill can automatically mine the coal and the coal can go by belt over to the electric you can see how this gets really addicting and then there's the trains and then there's oh my goodness so you have this whole supply chain and you think right i want to make this many of this many rockets per minute or whatever which is the end game goal and then you think right well i need more iron plates to do that and to do that i need more of this and more of that so when you think you want to do one small

simple thing it's a four hour refactor of your entire base it's just god that sounds like amazing that sounds like real life that's's awful. But it's amazing. It's available on Steam as early access. It has... No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're... No, no. You can get it DRM-free from Humble Indie Bundle. Oh, okay.

And it gets even better. They'll give you a key to redeem it on Steam after you buy it from them. So you get it both ways. Yeah, I love that. And they never, ever put it on sale. It's been $20 for the entire time. And the dev team... That's fair to know. The dev never ever put it on sale. It's been 20 bucks for the entire time. And the dev team,

the dev team are the most amazing people. It has really good reviews. So, huh? Mr. Cheese bacon. I do love street and highway planning. That is true.

I couldn't imagine, but I, I, I could tell, I could definitely get into one of those games, but I kind of would have to do it. Like, like maybe like next week when I'm traveling and I'm just, but I kind of would have to do it like,

like maybe like next week when I'm traveling and I'm just stuck in a hotel room with nothing to do. God, it sounds horrible. No, here's what I'll end up. Oh, sure. Yeah.

You'll, you'll go, Oh, I have to miss, I have to get on my plane. Oh no, I guess I'll take the next one. Cause I'm busy and I have to redo my electrical plant.

I miss meals over this. Yes. I now hate you all. I just bought it. You'll hate us more next week. And next week there is no Linux unplugged because Chris has been sucked into a game. Thank you for bringing that up, Noah.

It is my favorite game of all time. I was used to, there was literally only one game I ever played. It was Counter-Strike. And then I got sucked into Factorio and I haven't found my way back out. Factorio, SimCity 4, and Transport Tycoon are my top three.