LINUX Unplugged - Episode 258: The Future of Retro

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

Atari has released details about its upcoming Linux powered console, some of us are sold… And some of us are rather skeptical. Plus how SSH got its port, Mir goes to the farm, and what happens when Linus retires?

It's a Linux Unplugged birthday party. Slackware has turned 25. No, no, no, they didn't turn 25 before. I know, we all thought so. But it was originally released, version 1.0, on July 17th, 1993, and its founder, Patrick, originally never intended to do a Linux distribution. He just wanted to help out Softlanding Linux. But you know how things go in the open source community. It's the oldest Jistro around, and it's been very influential. The earliest releases of Soos Linux

were based on Slackware. Distributions such as Arch Linux can see their philosophical heritage back into Slackware. It's been around for a long time. So for this episode only, Wes and I are running exclusively on Slackware. I mean, since we did that whole Slackware

experiment, I just have never gotten rid of it. It's its own little place on my hard drive. We've never gone back. Right next to Gen 2, no doubt. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 258 for July 17th, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's loaded for bear this week. And I'm not so sure if that's a good thing, but we have so much to get into that maybe you won't even notice. We'll come around to how SSH got its port number. We'll talk about Chrome using a little more memory.

But then we'll dig in to some crazy projects that are going down this week. I'm talking stuff that we've been meaning to get to for months now that are finally making it into the show. Plus some ideas that I'm not so sure are fully cooked, but we'll run them past you guys and see what you think. We've got an update on the Atari VCS and the Librem 5. And then, towards the end of the show, after we've gotten through some app picks and some community news, we have a question. This is in light of Python's benevolent dictator for life stepping down. We covered that on Linux Action News this week, and I thought maybe we could use the context of that situation to talk about a broader topic. What happens when Linus steps down? What happens to Linux? What happens to

the structure? Where does that go? Does it go to Greg KH? Does it go to the Linux Foundation? We'll talk about that, and then we'll also discuss maybe how other open source projects could learn from what happened with Python. We'll do a quick recap too, just in case you didn't hear that. So Mr. Wes, we're fully loaded. It's just you and I this week. No, no Brent. No Brent. He's ditched us, but he, I think he might've been intimidated by just how much show we've packed in here. I was scared myself. Yeah. You know, it was either that or it was the man eating clams. I'm not sure. It was, it was something, something to that effect. But I think after the show, we'll head out and see if we can't find him and save him

so we can make it back. But we do have a mumble room, and they're here. Time-appropriate greetings. Virtual lug. Hello. Oh, you stop it, you guys. You stop it. There's so much to get into this week. I don't even know where to start with it. We have a bunch of community news.

It's good to see some familiar faces in the mumble room. Daniel Foray made it back, even though, I mean, I thought he's busy working on Elementary OS. Dan, how did you make it here? Aren't you supposed to be busy? Oh, you know, taking a break. That's my nice way of thanking you for being here, really. You know, I'm nice to my guests. What can I say?

All right. So we have much to get into, so much to talk about. So let's start with the one that I thought was kind of just the most interesting. I had never really known the story about how SSH got its port, and the author wrote it up. And I wanted to relay it to you guys because it's fascinating how SSH received its port in the spring of 1995. fascinating how SSH received its port in the spring of 1995. The author starts with, I designed SSH to replace both Telnet and FTP, Telnet being on port 23 and FTP being on port 21. Port 22 was free at the time, and it sat conveniently between ports for Telnet and FTP. I figured having that port number might be one of those small things

that would give some extra credibility to SSH. But how could I get that port number, he writes. I had never allocated one, but I knew somebody who had allocated a port before. The basic process for port allocation was fairly simple at that time. The internet was smaller, and we were in the very early stages of the internet boom. Port numbers were allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which really at that time, run by John Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds. Among other things, John had been the editor of some minor protocol standards you may have heard, such as IP, ICMP, and TCP. And he was a little intimidated by that fact, but he built up the courage and he wrote an email to John.

And he wrote in July of 1995, Dear Sir, just before, just like a week before the announcement of SSH, Dear Sir, I have written a program to securely log from one machine onto another over an insecure network. It provides major improvements in security and functionality over existing Telnet and our login protocols and implementations. In particular, it prevents IP, DNS, and routing spoofing. My plan is to distribute the software freely on the internet and to get it as wide of use as possible. I would like to get a registered privileged port number for the software.

The number should preferably be in the range of 1 to 255. And then he goes on to notice, I am currently using port 22 in the latest beta test, and it would just be great if I could just keep using that. The service software name is called SSH for Secure Shell. Sincerely yours. And then it looks like the next day, almost within just a couple of hours, but I think there was a different time zone. Joyce writes back, we have assigned port number 22 to SSH,

and we've marked your email address as the point of contact, Joyce. And that's it. And we've marked your email address as the point of contact, Joyce. And that's it. On July 12th, 1995 at 2 a.m., the final beta of SSH was announced using port 22. And it was one of those small touches that he believes helped it gain credibility. And it's such a simple, easy, elegant story. Like it's not this big corporate explanation.

I guess I always thought it was like a big standards body, Wes. I made that assumption. Where are the forms filled out in triplicate and the months of procedures before you can get anything approved? I don't see that here. And it's very confusing and kind of heartening. Yeah, it is kind of just a simple email. Dear sir or ma'am, to whom it may be concerned. And the response email is so short, too.

Just like, yeah, no problem, 22. It's yours. And we just added your email address. No big deal. Makes me think of the Steve Jobs, or the quote in Steve Jobs' book, that when you realize the world around you is just made by people. Yeah. It's just two people emailing, and yeah, that's fine. Let's do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just two people emailing and yeah, that's fine.

Let's do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's just as smart as you. I think it also sort of harkens back to that era of the internet when, you know, if you were on the internet, you probably had an email and you used it to correspond with real humans, not just receive junk mail or ads in your inbox.

So it's kind of, it's kind of quaint in that respect. Like that you don't have to be, you don't have all your guards up. You can actually communicate. Yeah. Quaint is a good way to put it. It's like kind of, it's kind of quaint in that respect, like that you don't have to be, you don't have all your guards up. You can actually communicate. Yeah. Quaint is a good way to put it. It's like, oh, it's a simpler time. It was so easy back then. And it's so, it both, it's, it's fascinating. The launch of projects like Linux and SSH and many, many others that just blatantly humbleness of the, of the, like, you know, I think this could be a good thing. Maybe it'll replace our login and telnet, you know, helps fight against DNS spoofing. And I think that's kind of a good thing. And now it's like the underpinnings of how we administer all of these

systems. Like SSH is so pivotal to what we do now. It starts so humble. I think that's fascinating. Just like Linux itself. We have some books we could talk about. Maybe mention those right here at the top of the show. The Humble Bundle folks have a Humble Book Bundle, and it's the Linux Geek Bundle by NonStarch Press. So they have a whole bunch in here that you might want to go check out, including Pearl One-Liners, The Art of Debugging, The Book of GIMP. That's kind of cool. The Book of GIMP. That's kind of cool.

The book of Inkscape, that's also very cool. Blender Masterclass. Oh, I might just have to pop on over there. How Linux Works is probably just a good one to page. Oh, Absolute OpenBSD, who would ever want that? I don't even know about that. Think Like a Programmer, the Linux programming interface, that's awesome. So there you go.

Humble Bundle, I'll have a link in the show notes if you want to check that out. It's got 12 days as we record this. You know, we think a little bit too much about our desktops, things that we have like bookshelves in our home. Make sure you have a robust e-bookshelf too, though, and these will really stack the deck when you want to open up your browser and look really smart in front of your friends.

Yeah, when you want to open up the browser in front of your friends, because that's something you do all the time. Well, I don't know about you, Chris. Hey guys, come over here, look at my browser real quick. You know, just get a really big monitor. If only the ebook market wasn't taken over by one single proprietary source, RIP. RIP. Now, I wanted to just give a quick mention, just an update on everybody. I am still down here in the Tejas, Texas. And boy, was that a mistake. Holy crap. I have learned a new kind of hot, 112 degrees outside right now.

The National Weather Service has just issued a warning for the next two days. The dead of night, it's going to be like 86 degrees. It's intense. But boy, have I been having a blast. So Linux Academy has been doing these live streams where they're like doing giveaways and launching new content. So I've been hanging out for that. They put me up in a hotel. So it's not like I'm not having to pay for it out of my pocket or anything. So they put me up in a nice hotel. And I decided to stay here because they just had me give a talk a bit ago at their summit. They have a company-wide summit here that most of the company is at. And had me give a talk on community and leadership and contributing upstream. They're working on something that I probably can't say what it is that will be a big code project that they're going to start contributing to open source upstream.

And they're getting ready to try to figure out, try to learn how to do that and how to position it and all that. Wow. That's really exciting. It is. It's really neat to see them do that. They've – the other thing that they've talked a lot about at this summit is they've had a program in place where it's like choose your own weapon. So you come in and you say, you know, I'd like a Chromebook or hi, you know, I'd like a MacBook or hi, I'd like a Linux box. And you just picked whatever worked best for you.

But now what they're doing is to try to encourage people to pick more Linux boxes. They're setting up like a little Linux like support group, like people that are also like it's not like support like in terms of technical support, but like support group and like, like, hey, I it's not like support, like in terms of technical support, but like support group and like, like, hey, I'm switching and I don't know how to do this. Like they have like a little internal group that helps everybody figure that stuff out. And so that's pretty neat. I've seen a lot of Gnome Shell here at Linux Academy,

which I'm not too surprised by. I don't think I've seen any Plasma desktop yet. So I don't know if I can leave just yet. I may have to stick around until I converted a few people over to Plasma desktop. Yeah, if you join that group if I can leave just yet. I may have to stick around until I've converted a few people over to Plasma desktop. Yeah, if you join that group, you can just sort of be like, oh, no, that's just a GNOME problem. If you install

this other shell, it works way better. Oh, man. That's so insidious. You troll, you. I'm trying from the top. So I'm trying to get the CEO switched over to Kubuntu 1804. And then once I get Anthony on Kubuntu, I'm going to set him up with LatteDoc. Because the other thing I've noticed is when people see my Plasma desktop setup, they are –

it's like the old days when I used to have Compiz and Barrel. People used to be like, oh, what's that? And in my IT department, then they started trying out Linux. And it's why I actually became a big fan of desktop effects, not because they had any practical effect other than they helped me switch people to Linux, and so I was all for it. Same thing now with my Plasma desktop setup,

which, you know, does look good on that XPS 13 with the Infinity edge-to-edge display. It's 4K, and I got a high-res background, and then I got LatteDot going, and I got a dark theme going. And so I was showing Anthony, I'm like, yeah, this is how you can make it look. And this is pretty nice, right? And like, this is LatteDoc here.

He's like, I'm doing that. So you'll see. I'm beginning to spread my tentacles. And I don't know, it's like, it's not good enough just to get them on Linux anymore. No, no, no, I must go all the way. But actually the folks that are running GNOME, they love it.

It's great for them. So it's been pretty cool to see that. It's been cool to see people that come in from different organizations. Like there's some folks that they hired recently from Rackspace and brought them in here. And Rackspace was all Macs. And so they came in here and they wanted a Mac. But then they started seeing other people's Linux desktops

and started working here at Linux Academy for a while. And now they're trying to figure out how to switch over to Linux. There's people that are like, how do I run Linux on a Touch Bar MacBook? I'm like, oh. Don't even start. That's been a thing. It's been a real thing watching that. I'd be curious to keep tabs on how that goes

throughout the company as they make that shift. It's unique to see. It's not like you're a secret group hiding around like, oh yeah, we use Linux. We don't really talk about it's unique to see, you know, it's not like you're a secret group, right? Hiding around like, oh, yeah, we use Linux. We don't really talk about it much and don't tell desktop support. But here's some tips. It's out in the open.

It's even almost sponsored. That is awesome. I know that if I was an employee, I would much prefer a you-choose-your-system policy than, you know, you have to use XYZ regardless of whatever it is, because it's never going to be perfect. And, you know, one year, maybe I like to use Kubuntu. And then maybe the next year, I like to use KDE Neon or something. And I want to be able to move around and I want to be able to change.

And so I like that. I would like that if I wanted to use Windows 10, I think I should be able to. So I think that's kind of a cool policy. It feels a little bit too like, you know, if you were, you know, a master carpenter and you came into a job and like, no, we only use this brand of hammer. So here you go, throw away anything on any tools that you know and love. And I think from the security side, it's good. Like if you have to deal with whatever operating systems are going to be on your network, you have to have a better level of security than if you're just going to trust whatever crappy programs you force on the Windows desktop. I think this is probably the most prolonged time I've spent at a company that is a Linux

shop and what they do is Linux. You know what I mean? Like I've definitely been at lots of places that use Linux, lots of places that use Linux, but like the product is all based around Linux and the people are using Linux and the server side is all Linux. And like it's, it's, but it's not like a thing. It's just normal. It's not like, it's not like this weird thing. It's just, well, yeah, it's Linux. It's, you know, of course I'm using it. I started a job as a developer a few years ago. And, um, the first

day, the girl who was doing my mentoring said, here's your laptop. It's running windows. What I do is I run Ubuntu in a VM and do all my dev work in a VM. I'm like, why couldn't you just erase it and put Linux straight on? Oh, it's too complicated. Yeah. I mean, sometimes there's an advantage to having your dev environment in a VM for sure, but I could just never live with the performance. I've tried. It's just no good. Yeah, it's been pretty interesting to sort of be around where it's, I was trying to come up with a term for it. This isn't a great term, but what it feels like is just ambient Linux. Like Linux is just an assumed, it's just like this normal, not this edge thing. It's just this normal thing. It's just Linux isn't assumed. It's

ambient Linux. And that's not a big deal. Like every it's, it's, it's never been a big deal here. So it's like not part of the cult. It's just so weird though, because like it's always been other companies I go to, it's like maybe the, maybe they have a product that runs on Linux or, or something, but and then I've been to companies like system 76 that are all Linux, but you know but it's 20 people where this is over 100 people and it's a huge summit and all that kind of stuff. Like it's a big group of people. So it's an experience to be inside a corporation, like an actual legitimate corporation with over 100 employees. Like it's just a really – but they're all geeks.

It's just a very strange experience to me, but a good one, but one that the younger version of me who fought the good old wars of Microsoft and Linux and trying to get people to use Linux all the time and trying to convince people that open source didn't mean it was bad quality and fighting all of those fights that I used to get in the middle of to try to get clients to switch their systems over to Linux. That version of me now seeing this is still having a hard time accepting what I'm seeing. Like, you mean people, people besides my, my little social group use this now?

Like it really is a thing. You're no longer a cool outsider, right? You don't, there's no fight to win. You just, you can get work done now. In the best way possible, in the best way possible. Like, like the fight, the fight is so over that the earth is no longer warm from the bombs even like they've rebuilt and repaved the roads and now life just goes on you've mourned for the dead you're moving on yeah exactly yeah and i'm like the old war vet going uh i remember how it used to be though um

we're all okay with this now it's where the latent distrust of microsoft is still there and we have all these wounds deep in our psyche and it's kind of it's just kind of bringing some of that up um and it's so that's the thing is like there's a couple of people here running windows um but they're you know azure administrators like that's what they do is they write azure courseware right and then it makes whatever you know then you can be there's no judgment on either of the sides i don't mind if you use windows if that's what they do is they write Azure courseware. Right. And then it makes whatever, you know, then you can be, there's no judgment on either of the sides. I don't mind if you use Windows, if that is what helped you get your job done. And you don't care if I use Linux to get my job done and we can all be happy and everyone

gets stuff done. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. It's pretty neat. And I'm really glad I stuck around a little bit longer, even though the heat is, it is now a heat death. It is a massive, massive heat death right now. So in fact, this, I'll move on,

but just something I've never witnessed before, but grasshoppers like get paralyzed by the heat down here. So they, when you walk around the sidewalks in some places, there's grasshoppers everywhere. Like you're crunching them as you're walking around because they jump out of the bushes and they land on the cement and then they paralyze. It's so hot. And so you have these grasshoppers all over the ground in some areas all day long until the evening when the sun sets and the ground starts to cool. And then they come back to life and they hop back in the bushes. It's super gross.

Oh, that sounds like a really useful trait. Yeah. It's great for harvesting if you want to cook some grasshoppers. Just go get some sun-dried grasshoppers. All right, well, let's talk about Linux. I just wanted to update you guys and while I'm still down here roasting my balls, but it's been a really good eye-opening experience

to just spend some time around a large-ish, or to me, 100-plus organizations getting there. It's obviously not a big company. It's still a small business. But it's been really kind of a good experience to just be around a whole bunch of Linux users for an extended period of time, and where it's not like, oh, we're fighting a good fight. It's just, this is life. This is how we do our work. And it's not even a big deal. Let's talk about Fedora, though, because speaking of Fedora, that seems to be one of the more popular ones around here. Fedora 29 isn't eliminating YUM, as we reported recently. It looks like it was up for debate. And at Fedora's engineering and steering committee meeting, the plan to drop YUM for Fedora 29 was rejected when the council realized it was still shipping

in RHEL. No, I'm kidding. When they realized that it was connected to a bunch of other components in the infrastructure that would cause major logistic issues if they wanted to pull it out. So if when I said recently

that Fedora was losing YUM and you panicked, well, now don't you feel silly because I was just wrong and they hadn't decided yet and now they have decided. I did panic. I just, sometimes I get

a little worked up, especially on these Tuesdays that are so intense with all the linux news i know but i think i think actually it's a pretty mature choice especially i don't know i certainly do get the itch for spring cleaning and i don't want any extra binaries floating around but in the world of open source where you really want to make things compatible and you want things that worked on fedora 27 to work on 48 and you want it to work on 29 and 30 and 31, just keeping these things around for a little longer than feels necessary sometimes can make, you know, a good subset of users lives that much easier. And it's probably worth it for, you know, one megabyte of disk space. Yeah, you know, these seem to be fitting in line with a series of decisions that I feel like I've

witnessed the Fedora project make recently that conservatives the wrong label, but it's not as breakneck pace as it once was in some regards. Like they're still, they're still hauling butt and innovating. But there was a, there was a time where they would ship stuff just way early as, as almost like a point of pride. And it seems like they've sort of dialed it back a bit where they're trying to find a balance there where people can get a little more predictability and experience like a little bit more, I don't know, is consistency the word I'm looking here

for, Wes? Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's a little more intent. You know, it's no longer just the sort of bleeding edge proving ground for things that might make it into rel later it is actually sort of shipped and marketed as something that an end user could and should use you know i mean you still have to be the right yeah the right end user but that doesn't mean that you grab some like it's not like getting a random snapshot of arch and just hoping things are all working nicely together there's actually been a lot of intent and design put into it yeah speaking of a lot of intent and design mirror yeah canonical's Yeah. Speaking of a lot of intent and design, Mirror. Yeah. Canonical's Mirror, still kicking,

still rocking with version 0.321 coming out recently. And it's looking really good. Think of it as an abstraction layer. And it's more than just a Wayland client now, but of course it's been, they've been rewriting it, I suppose you could say in a way, for Wayland support.

And the Mirror AL shell, which has reinstated the spinner when you're starting the Wayland shell. So now you'll have somewhat of a status indicator when the shell is launching. And the developers are working on support for XDG shell, as well as supporting the Wayland extensions and other upcoming work. So this was, oh, I thought, okay, that's kind of interesting. It was like following a trail. So then after I read that, I thought, well, what is canonical really envisioning the use of MIR? Like, really? Like, why are they actually spending real money?

Well, it's funny money, but I mean, their version of real money on Mir. Like what's the why? And the individual, at least that I have met, and then it's probably more than one, but the individual I've met that's working on Mir has got to be one of the more talented developers I've ever met. So it's like real money they're probably spending. At least I hope he's getting real money. And it's an implementation of something that we are starting to see other solutions for, especially when it comes to stuff sitting on top of Wayland. So I really was trying to grok where it fit in.

And it appears that the mere graphical stack is really being positioned down the road for IoT devices by Canonical. They say when we first conceived of it six years ago as part of an initiative to unify the graphical environments across desktops, TV, and mobile devices, we continue to move it forward into modern standards like the Wayland protocol. The thing is, is MIR is designed with low memory and disk space and CPU usage baked in. So memory and disk space is much lower than other solutions, and they've also tried to build it with security in mind. If you, for example, were setting up an Ubuntu core distro, Mir, and a small LCD display server with a low-cost sensor and a Raspberry Pi 3, the next thing you know, you have a 24-7 monitoring solution which could graph information with Mir and Ubuntu at

the core. And I thought to myself, I said, self, that sounds like a very specific example that they just gave there. Why that specific example? So Jamie is the author. He's a developer over at Canonical and is involved in their IoT efforts. So I started digging around a little bit. I saw he has a blog post, which I'll have a link in the show notes, about setting up an Ubuntu-powered greenhouse monitoring system on his home. In one of my favorite areas in the UK. It's a town or an area, I don't know, a village. I don't know what you guys call them over there

called Bath. It's a city. It's a city. Okay. Bath. I love it. That's so awesome. It's so, it's so awesome. And over in Bath, he's got a greenhouse and he's been looking at different solutions on the market to monitor his greenhouse. And so many of them are consumer products. They only work with iOS or Android. They don't really let you get to the data. You know what? You and I have talked about this quite a bit, sort of off-air more, but like, you know, sensor data and things like that that I've wanted to track.

Yeah, very much so. And he was looking at some different solutions. He came across – by the way, his greenhouse is, it's a pretty cool little greenhouse. He says that he's cooking, or he's cooking, growing in there chilies, tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, probably cannabis, although he doesn't say that. I'm just assuming lemons and things like that. The UK exports more cannabis than any other country.

Just saying. No way. Is that true? Yeah, apparently so. You guys. And also, our minister for drug controls husband also works for the largest medical cannabis company in the world apparently or something like that jeez you stoners you yeah really gosh get to work you slackers um so after a bit of research uh jamie

came across the yaomei temperature sensor, which does temperature and humidity for like nine funny dollars. And you just get it from a Chinese reseller. The sensor itself is small. It's Zigbee based. It's powered by just a little, you know, cell watch battery kind of thing. And it has a range of negative 20 to 60 Celsius, as well as bringing in the humidity and he can get access to it. Now, at Purdue, they provide an Android and iOS application, but he wanted something where he could get the data elsewhere. So his initial idea was to put together a small, dedicated, low-powered device like a Raspberry Pi 3 running Ubuntu Mate.

Ah, that's awesome. Set up SSH, ding, boy, we're hitting all of the points today. And then from there, he had a fresh Ubuntu environment. He also installed a MQTT messaging system in the form of Mosquito, which is an open source, I guess, message gateway would be the way to put that, where you can send messages between applications. Not like text messages, like data messages. between applications, not like text messages, like data messages. He also loaded some Python on there and Wes's favorite, Grafina, to visualize the whole thing into some beautiful charts, which is pretty cool.

I know when you see the charts, you're really like, oh, yeah, this was all totally worth it. Just like looking at the temperature in the greenhouse over multiple days, as you can see the cycles of the sun. It's just so cool. Yeah. Yeah. And the weather's been hot over there recently too, so it's actually been pretty great to have this. He puts all that into an InfluxDB,

and then Grafina looks at that. He generates two charts, one for the temperature and one for the humidity, and he points out that then you could put Mir in kiosk mode with a nice little display on there, a little small LCD cheapo, and have it visualizing 24-7 in real time a view of the data.

And you can do all of this on small ARM devices with Ubuntu Core and then using Mirror to generate the displays, Grafina, which is another open source project. It's pretty nice how you can build all this. And it should all scale pretty well. You invest a little bit of money in the sensors, a little bit of money in the Pi. If you're like me, you probably have Pis just floating around

that you haven't yet found a use for anyway. So you need to stick it out there. And then as you go, if you want more sensors, you find more sensors to buy, you add them on there. They can all just send data to the same backend you already have.

So boy, this is a fun project. Poby, before we move off of the Mirror topic, is there anything we're missing about this subject that you've heard in the hallways, the virtual hallways of Canonical about Mirror? No, you've got it about right there. I personally, I have it running on a laptop here.

I've got an Ubuntu Core laptop. So it's only Ubuntu Core, like super minimal install with a bunch of snaps on top and I've got the Mir kiosk on top to test out delivering graphical applications as snaps for Ubuntu Core, which should be fun, but that's something we're just playing with. Have you looked at what the total install size of that setup is?

It's got to be not much. Yeah, it's not a lot. It's not much at all. That's neat. Well, cool, and I'm glad to see that Mir's chugging along. It sounds like it may be just digging itself out a little niche that it could serve quite well, so I'll keep tabs on that let's uh let's move up the stack a bit and let's talk about mutter um big big performance improvements coming to mutter because it's

going to be doing a lot less math this is going to be landing if all things go as planned in gnome 3.30 and it looks like aside also from just other little things like, I don't know, dependencies on X11, there's going to be performance optimizations. A GitLab request was merged about reusing paint volumes. Now, that sounds like a simple thing, but it cuts down approximately all paint volume calculations, all of them, anytime it has to redraw a window. And particularly, there is massive improvements if there's a window for some reason that needs to be redrawn, but hasn't moved. In the past, essentially, Mutter would do all of the math and repaint that entire thing and recalculate all of it every time constantly. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

In fact, way faster than that. And this, instead, essentially will just keep a cheat sheet of the math answer and just keep referring to that until it has a reason to change things and redraw, like the window's been moved. That could be a big improvement for GNOME. And I think I've witnessed this issue,

perhaps, although it could be way wrong with my terminal window. So don't, you know, if you've been a GNOME user and all of this Plasma talk has really been kind of tempting you, maybe don't disrupt the whole workflow yet. Maybe stick it out for GNOME 3.30. Maybe. Although things are getting good on the Plasma side too. I was just talking to Wes on the pre-show about how we're still kind of like going back and forth on just the perfect laptop. And Alex in the Mumble Room has been sort of convincing me that perhaps a Lenovo T480 would be the way to go. 14-inch, 2K display.

And it's got an i7 four-core processor. It's got Thunderbolt 3. It's got a 512-megabyte NVMe drive. And it's $ an i7 four-core processor it's got thunderbolt 3 it's got a 512 megabyte mvd drive and it's two thousand dollars now that's kind of see it sounds like a lot of money but this is a machine to do live media production and it's cheaper than a you know equivalently a priced macbook it's really tempting and when i think about that the reason why i bring all that up is when i think about when i think about when I get a new piece of hardware, I really, really, really can start to understand why some people do these super minimal desktops. Because the idea that like the fact that Mudder is sitting there redoing this math every time it has to repaint a window from scratch every single time is disappointing. It was really, really disappointing.

It sort of makes me think like I'm wasting some of that horsepower. I'm wasting my money when I try to get something that powerful. So I say all that with, I really, I can really kind of, even though I'm never going to be like an awesome window manager guy or an ex-monad,

I can completely appreciate some of the logic behind it. I thought you were just running OBS straight on top of X11 these days. You know, that's what I should be doing. That's what I should be doing, shouldn't I? All the things. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I have in the day. We also have ourselves GTK4 coming in the spring of 2019, it looks like at this point, of course, all of that is possibly to change and we're going to be getting just as a

reminder, no, I'm sorry, GTK plus three dot two four, which is a minor feature update very soon. It looks like there will be some things we are hoping for that won't land in GTK four. They're going to be postponed until GTK five,

like constraint based layout support, shader compilers, application-provided shader support, and the UI designer support. It also looks like GTK4 with the macOS Quartz backend is in a pretty bad state. But they think that they can probably get it cleaned up soon. So there you go.

How's that for a little gnome corner? A little gnome corner for you guys. We all know that you're secretly forever plasma biased, but you're really doing a good job of pretending that you're not. But plasma's really good though, Wes. Come on. That's true. We've got to turn the show into the plasma hour at this rate.

Hey, that's a cool title. Hold on. Hold on. I know, right? Yeah, go ahead and suggest that. Our next story is really probably I should just defer to Poby because he is an expert on all things Bitcoin and blockchain, and he is our resident expert. So I don't know. I'm sure you're probably aware of this,

but there is a very fancy phone. I think you pronounce it Sarin Labs. They're the folks, you may have heard it. They once had like this celebrity phone that was $16,000. They call it the world's most secure phone. And they're out with their next product. They call it the Finney. And this time, it's only $1,000. And it's got blockchain built in. It costs much less than that $16,000 too. So it's already a great deal. And it's got the world's best security. Just ask them. They've included phrases like decentralized economy in the advertising, decentralized apps. What? Clouds.

I'm sorry. Colds. Yeah. Cold storage wallets and a decentralized app store as well as their own cryptocurrency. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't use Bitcoin. It doesn't use any actual established cryptocurrency. It uses their own cryptocurrency. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't use Bitcoin, doesn't use any actual established cryptocurrency. It uses their own tokens. And then users can trade tokens on their own blockchain.

It has a dedicated firmware for verifying wallet transactions. It has supposedly intrusion protection. It has a decent Qualicom chip with six gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage. But the most interesting thing about this blockchain-powered phone is it has a secondary 2-inch display which slides up from the body of the phone, like some of those new cameras we've seen on a few phones, that is your wallet display. So you can check your balances in your wallet without having to wake up your entire phone. Oh my, wow.

Maybe it's just an extra heat sink when it does all the crypto mining in the background for you. It's definitely an extra heater. That little screen probably, I could just see it sliding down and failing to turn off and warming up the back of your phone, which warms your battery and decreases battery life. It's a brilliant idea. You also didn't mention that it has a notch, everyone. So don't worry, the notch is there. Yes, it does.

I somehow missed that. I must have blacked that out. So HTC might be the ones to pull this off then. So they're coming out with the Exodus. And no, it's not an Exodus of HTC's customer base. It's the name of their next smartphone. And they really, really need this thing to pay off. They announced it back in May, and I kind of made a little murmur

about it. But now, this week, we've got some details. And it's not looking good, in my opinion. It appears we can expect their blockchain-powered phone from HTC at the end of this year. And the price, although they wouldn't commit, will probably be around $1,000 for this too. They envision a phone where you hold your own keys, your own identity and data. Your phone is the hub. That was what they said back in May. But now they're kind of walking that back a little bit,

that whole stuff about your identity and keys. That's not so much in the first model. But the first model will have a wallet, and it'll come with CryptoKitties, a crypto game where you play with CryptoCats on your screen. Can I ask a question? What does blockchain powered actually mean? Oh, yeah, that's a completely reasonable question, Alex, and one that you would think that they would have a very solid answer to since they're basing the entire messaging around that.

Well, you see, it's going to have a cryptocurrency wallet that will, quote, be the most secure hardware wallet out there. He also hopes that by trading virtual cats, it'll encourage gamers and people who are less familiar with cryptocurrency to try out the phone. They think it's going to be the most approachable thing on mobile for the non-crypto crowd, even though the crypto crowd is the only people that would ever be interested in buying this. So they don't really talk about how it's a blockchain phone other than it can have a

wallet on it. They wanted it to be like the storage of your driver's license or whatever, like whatever identity information you'd have. But of course, that would take wide range and government support, and nobody's going to do that for HTC. I'll tell you what blockchain powered means. It means we go high up in the Google search results.

That's what it means. This is so sad. This is really sad to see this happening. And there's a trend. A lot of companies are just like relaunching and just putting blockchain in the name and like Kodak did that. Obviously now Kodak is pulling back on their plans. That's kind of one of the famous ones and just today saw a news story go by saying that Kodak is basically screwing the pooch on that. So here's their idea.

And this really – it's a conflicted message. HTC hopes to build an Android phone with all of this Bitcoin wallet stuff baked in. But of course, I would fundamentally argue that if you're shipping Android, especially with the Google apps pre-installed, that automatically disqualifies it as the world's most secure hardware wallet automatically, especially when it has a hardware wallet with an always-on cellular modem that runs a firmware that we have no control, no insights, no even insights into what it's doing at all. Not even, let alone source code,

just you're not even aware of what it's doing at any point. That, by its very definition, makes this an insecure hardware wallet. So they're blowing it. They're blowing the very premise. And then they have this mixed message. Like Chen here says that they think that the niche market of 30 million Bitcoin wallet users is their demo.

But then later, early on, he says, but we're bundling CryptoKitties because we're hoping to convince gamers to try out a bitcoin blockchain wallet phone so are they targeting gamers or are they targeting bitcoin users because neither group is going to take this thing seriously nobody gives two shits about crypto kitties and no bitcoin enthusiast is dumb enough to think that an always on google connected cellular modem powered hardware wallet is secure like no bitcoin enthusiast is going to

buy that don't print out your keys anymore and put them in secure storage just use your phone it's fine i'd love to think that after the uh craziness that was last december january that people have kind of learned their lessons about crypto and blockchain and it's not a way to make a quick buck and but i don't know things like this makes me think that maybe people are more gullible than we give them credit for. Yeah, I mean, I think also it's just one more way they can try to get you to buy into their, oh, you know, use our currency on our chain to buy media from our apps and purchase things in this weird little private community. Right, yeah. Who is the target market?

People with money. That's who. Private community. Right, yeah. Who is the target market? People with money. That's who. I'm really, I am such a hypocrite about this topic because I completely agree.

Like creating their own cryptocurrency feels so cheap. It feels so basic. But then at the same time, I'm sitting here thinking to myself, man, I really wish cryptocurrencies had gotten more traction in some ways. I don't mean like Bitcoin should be $20,000 a coin, but I wish there was a healthy, legitimate cryptocurrency ecosystem because the idea of open source money is a good one. Well, it's coming. There are some customers that I'm aware of that are working on all sorts of blockchain things. And there was a house sale ledgers in Northeast US somewhere

that someone sold a house and recorded those house sales on the ledgers. So they're coming, but it's just not as crazy as we've all thought. I agree, it is coming. And what we're seeing right now is the lag as businesses build their products and research markets and stuff like that. We're just in the lag of that, I agree. It is coming. And what we're seeing right now is the lag as businesses build their products and research markets and stuff like that. We're just in the lag of that, I think. But just – it will take time for legitimate trusting brands to build products around this technology and then market it in a way that customers will accept. But where I was going with that is I think it could have gotten better traction faster and more usable amongst open source projects. I really saw there was a potential avenue there

where there could have been a way for, I mean, this is really dumb, but just because this is off the top of my head, so I hadn't really thought this out, but I imagine if, I don't know, let's just pick a, let's just pick Solus. Okay. Let's say Solus had a package in their apps center and it was the Solus donate package. And I click that and I install it and it spends the evening. And I said it, you know, a small, minimal, but approachable UI where I have a little slider and I say, dedicate three hours of CPU time a day to Solus.

And I run it and it keeps a little system tray icon. It lights up when it's going, you know, it lets me know what's happening. And, you know, maybe back, bacon, you know, you know, some, even some cool stats there maybe. So I could like see some chart numbers and make a pool and have a Solus pool and have all of the Solus distribution users who go into the App Center

and choose to install this and choose to dedicate a certain amount of CPU time to the project all automatically join a pool and have that revenue go towards the project. It could be a sustainable model that scales with the distribution as it grows, and it could be something that they promote. They say, hey, if you want to support Solus, install it and launch that miner for us and be completely upfront. But instead, it has a negative connotation now.

It's seen as more like spyware and malware, like a browser toolbar. And I think that was a really missed opportunity because it's something that a technical audience would grok. It's something that one thing that people are experimenting with is crypto mining in the web browser. But legitimately, like you go to a project's website and you press a button and you say donate some time and it just runs while you have the browser open.

It's not hidden. It's not sneaky. It's a user opt-in thing. And then all of a sudden, you're donating something to the project. I really don't feel like it's any different than people who seed torrents for weeks at a time and donate gigs and gigs of bandwidth to projects by

seeding torrents, or they mirror infrastructure and set up FTP mirrors and donate their server bandwidth. I see it as a similar thing, but it could have been that, but instead it's turned into this negative association. Am I crazy, Wes? No, I mean, it seems like another symptom of all the hype before things are very useful. Because I think we're, you know, this

discussion has been pretty spot on. It's not there yet. We've seen a lot of false claims, but the technology itself is interesting and certainly does have some use cases and will probably lead to some exciting things in the future but everyone's just soured everyone's burnt out on like i've been overly hyped i've had i've had all of these web pages trying to steal my cpu time i just don't want to have anything to do with it and i think it's it's a long slow march of showing real you know real deliverables before people's attitude attitudes start to turn around again maybe Maybe it will, over time. A lot of people lost a lot of money.

That's one way to get burnout. Yeah, that sours people too. Right. All right, well, let's talk about the Atari VCS. It's sort of struggling for credibility right now as well, especially after a pretty brutal trolling by the register. So Rob Wyatt, the system architect for the Atari VCS project, did a FAQ.

And I want to go through just a couple of them. Now, quick reminder, Atari VCS is a Linux-powered Atari console that's coming out next year. And I backed it. I backed it so that way I can talk about it on the shows. I backed it because after going through it, I think they have something here. And I think what they're trying to pull off is not insurmountable. And one of the things that I really appreciate about the Atari VCS project is they looked at the OUYA specifically, that little Android cube, and said, well, how did

that fail? And why did that fail? And then they said, okay, let's not do that. And I think that is, I think, a really good starting point of lessons learned. So Rob here answers various questions that I can only presume he created himself and then asked himself, which is always a little awkward, or maybe they were really legitimately frequently asked, but he gives us some details on the VCS hardware specs. The VCS, Atari VCS hardware will be powered by an AMD Bristol Ridge family APU with Radeon R7 graphics. And they're going to add eight gigabytes of RAM, which is more than the original amount they're going to add. And he does note, yes, that means this is not

going to be a Ryzen family board. But they did the math. They ran the tests, and they said increasing the cost and increasing the thermal ceiling for a Ryzen APU that couldn't run at full performance because of the thermal ceiling didn't net an appropriate amount of performance increase. It was a marginal improvement. And so they figured that cost would be better spent on adding more RAM to maximize bandwidth. And then that benefits everybody all the time because now the RAM, I believe, is – I guess you call it unified. And I know some people were upset about that.

That seems completely reasonable to me, especially for the types of games you're going to be playing on this thing. So that leads the question then to development. So will there be development hardware? And he answers, you won't need development hardware. Any Atari VCS device will be a development kit. To get an application in the Atari store, there will be a few technical requirements and rules as to what is permissible, as with other curated stores. Atari is

a neutral partner, and we have no say in what applications get developed, or when an application gets released. You are free to develop any application you like, as long as it fits the guidelines. There is no developer program that is open yet, but there will be one that comes online in the coming months. And if you have an application in mind, you can start today, and I love this part, by

making sure it runs on Linux at a high resolution using a standard runtime libraries, and then you're pretty much good to go. The changes from that to what they are going to be calling Atari OS will be minimal and mostly related to application startup and packaging. So Atari OS will be based on Linux with a modified Linux kernel. Now, you remember, they're also going to allow you to load your own OS, they claim. They have an open platform and a sandbox for that. So say you want to run X own OS, they claim. They have an open platform and a sandbox for that. So say you want to run XBMC, something like that. They specifically talk about this in the FAQ and mention that.

So the way they're going to do this is they're going to have the Atari Secure Hypervisor, which is probably KVM. And they'll have all this stuff, all of the core stuff for this in flash memory. And before the Atari loads, any external storage device that is checked for a bootloader file, if it's bootable, the Atari VCS will boot that device instead. So you can hook up external USB storage, and if it detects it and it's got the right type of boot setup, it'll work. They don't have a typical bootloader like Grub,

because they have the CPU in protected mode, boot setup, it'll work. They don't have a typical bootloader like Grub because they have the CPU in protected mode and they have their own firmware to check for the other OS drive. And they're going to release example code on how to do all of this, they say. And they're going to release a demo OS that boots on the Atari

VCS that's based on a standard Ubuntu image. So how is this thing going to compare to the Nvidia Shield TV in terms of power and everything else? Well, the Nvidia Shield is an ARM platform, right? So this is an i686 platform so there's that aspect

to it. So that's kind of nice. But yeah, and it's going to have newer graphics, more capable graphics. So it should be in some ways, more competent. But, of course, the NVIDIA Shield now has multiple years on the market. If they do even half as good of a job as NVIDIA have done, then they're on to win it.

And that box, damn, is beautiful. Yeah, it looks good, right? Yeah. And, by the way, when you load the, quote, other OS, you'll get access to the hardware. The hypervisor, you know, set up in a way where you get access, raw access to CPU, GPU, memory, audio, USB.

That's not bad. And then you just reboot, unplug it, and you're back in Atari OS. They say they have test hardware running. They have different prototypes. They have crazy, ugly, wires everywhere, doesn't fit in a box prototypes. And then they have prototypes of the hardware mold, but with no motherboard in a box prototypes. And then they have like prototypes of the hardware mold,

but with no motherboard in there and stuff. But I think it's pretty cool. I think it's a decent solution. I know there's a lot of skepticism around this. People really think they've screwed the pooch here. But I think what they're trying to pull off is achievable. The hardest job they have outside from the hardware, which is achievable because they're working with all known

good quantities here. They know the thermals and all this stuff. They're working with the Linux kernel. They've got all of that that they bring with it including all of the networking,

all of that that they don't have to invent themselves. Now they just have to manage to stuff a Bristol Ridge APU into this little case which they've already

figured out the thermals. That's why they rejected the Vega or the Ryzen, sorry, stuff. So they're obviously monitoring that. And then they got to write their UI, which they've already got art mock-ups for. And I'm not saying writing a UI is hard, but let's be honest. It's writing a television UI is, as far as UIs goes, much simpler than creating a desktop UI or even a phone UI. All of this is achievable. Yeah, no, I think you're right.

They have a lot of the basics there. They just have to actually deliver on all the goods. I wonder, too, is there any chance that this will be something people who haven't heard of Atari would be at all interested in? Or is it really only a retro market for those of us old enough to have fond remembrances and who also are interested in open source technology? To anybody listening, I highly recommend going and reading the Medium article on this in the show notes. There's a wonderful description about how Sony made loads of missteps,

not giving people GPU access, how Microsoft made missteps, allowing XBMC to be installed on the original Xbox. It's fascinating. I highly recommend going and reading that. Yeah, I agree. We have a link, linuxunplugged.com slash 258. And I hope Atari pulls it off, not just because I backed it, but because every time somebody's tried to do this, like I just mentioned the OUYA, but there's been others. I mean, going back to the boxy box, really, every time somebody's tried to do this,

they've gotten so close and just missed the mark. And I'm not saying that they are hitting the mark, but I think they're close. They're like really close to hitting the mark. And I think the fundamentals are there and the stuff where they're going to miss is going to be content partnerships or the applications, but all of that can be

added after the core product ships. It has a lot of potential, especially because what you get these days for a decent price is fully capable of playing HD video. It's fully capable of playing HD games. Most people are going to be hooking this up to a 1080p display. Right, exactly.

So I think it could if they get all the other little bits right, games i mean most people are going to be hooking this up to a 1080p display right exactly so it's i think it could if if they get all the other little bits right it could work speaking of a lot of bits to get right purism has an update on the libram 5 this is their 15th progress report and um so this is not looking good as far as i'm concerned i really appreciate their hard work i think their laptops are really banging these days. And I'm really glad they're keeping us updated. But every red light is going off that I could possibly think of for this. So this is, you know, kind of understandable.

But let's start with this one. The dev boards have slipped. They were supposed to ship in June. That was the projected ship date. And the current rough estimate they have now is August, so next month as we record this. But they're going to have more details as that kind of firms up. These things happen. There's red flags, though.

They had certain issues like getting all the information available to what appears to be possible builders, information like the camera, wireless, the battery, how the buttons work, those kinds of things. So those weren't finalized and ready yet. But that's understandable. That's early days and you got to get things rolling. The other thing I'm pretty concerned about is if you remember from the specs, for those of you who backed it, they promised to build in there around the iMX8 development board. That's the actual phone. It's got a little bit faster of a processor.

Still a MediaTek, but it's a little bit of a faster one. However, after some experimentation, they've learned that there's basically very little support for getting actual Linux working on the iMX8 board right now. Very basic mainline Linux kernel is possible, but drivers like display driver and all that stuff, it's not happening right now.

So all of their development images are based around an older board, the IMX6. That's what's in the hardware team. That's what the image they've built around. Now they believe that they can use this to kind of get things rolling. And then once the IMX8 boards are on board and working with the Linux kernel a little better and the drivers, they can do work to shore up the gap between the IMX6 and the 8. But I don't know, Wes. Building all of this stuff around one version of the CPU and board and then trying to up right before a release or something,

doesn't that sound like potentially disastrous? What do I know though? It's, it's a hard game. I mean, this is just a hard space to be in and trying to get this all right and still make a good release time and have something that is, you know,

really well battle tested. You're right. I think that's a, I think it's a tall order. I don't know that it's impossible. And I think, you know, the people over at Purism have done some pretty incredible things in the past.

So I wouldn't put it past them. It does make me a little nervous. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they can pull a real-life rabbit out of their hat. You might be right. I really want Purism to succeed. But wasn't Purism the one where you had a laptop without a fan that worked and all the rest of it?

The fan worked. The fan just never stopped working. And they did a make good, and they sent me a working one. And that's one thing that gives me a little hope to tell you the truth is I had a really early version of their laptops, and then I had the third

crack at it, and there is noticeable improvement in the unit. Right. I mean, it seems like they care about this stuff a lot and take it very seriously. It's really just the limitations of physics and the universe that are the most threatening here. Yeah. Plus, then there's the software stack, which I'm really uncomfortable with. If they had me in there as a consultant, I would be pushing hard against this because they're writing to, well, they're writing or contributing, trying to contribute code upstream to create their own whaling client. So you have Posh or however you say it, Posh, and you have WLroots.

WLroots comes from Sway, which, you know, that's good heritage there. But they are trying to contribute things to that too to make it work. And Posh or Posh is sort of their creation. That's the shell that will be running on top of Wayland. Their GTK shell is Posh or Plosh, however you freaking pronounce it. They've made up a word. Now I'm just sitting here. I'm a dumbass on a microphone trying to say it for the first time. So this is all getting work to like try to support the Dbus API. They're trying to get Redshift to work. Like they're doing a bunch of groundwork that would already be done

if they were say using Plasma Mobile. And so they're having to create work. Epiphany is going to be the phone's default web browser. I couldn't think of a browser I'd least like to have on my mobile phone, but I guess they don't have any other choice. They've kind of got an XMPP mobile messenger working. And they say down here in a footnote that their collaboration with the Plasma community continues. They have some flat packs of Plasma software for their architecture now

and they're actively investigating a Plasma image for the IMX6 board as well. So what gets me, the real red light here is, if in case it wasn't clear, is they're building things like lib-handy GTK. They're creating a keyboard and a phone dialer in GTK, like a full phone interface. They're trying to patch a version of Mutter to work on their phone, and they're creating their own GTK-based shell. They're not using GNOME shell. They're creating their own. And they're using a CPU and board that will not be the final

CPU and board that they ship. None of this is like unbelievable and just completely untolerable. It's like, okay, I can kind of see the logical reasons for all of this. You know, the hardware wasn't ready. You don't think the other software stacks it. You want to build something you own. I can kind of get all of it, but I'm thinking that Q1 2019 ship date is slipping at this point. This is a massive investment. And Wes, I suspect it's one of those things where you don't know what you don't know until you start it. Like if I knew how much work it was to do podcasts and to do broadcasting and live shows, I never would have done it. You know what I mean? Like you don't know until you start.

And it's always those last minute details that suddenly, you know, I never would have done it. You know what I mean? Like you don't know until you start. And it's always those last minute details that suddenly, you know, you couldn't have planned for because you didn't think or couldn't have known that it was going to be a problem. And then it's three days before you need to happen and you realize, oh yeah, nope, this has a higher failure rate than we expected or whatever it is.

And suddenly the whole world falls to pieces. Yeah, I really want this to succeed. And I wonder, and I kind of want to toss this to the mumble room. Popey, I'm going to maybe ask you. Dan, I'd like to ask you too. Alex, I'd like to get your take on this. If this bombs, maybe they ship something but it never takes off or they never even ship it. Like if this doesn't work, is this concept of a crowdfunded all free phone dead is it die

here um well speaking of someone who worked for a company who tried to do this um the the whole concept of building on one device and then switching to another device later in the cycle it like fingers crossed that it'll work it will take way more time to do that switch than they can possibly imagine and they will need a long lead time to do all the necessary hardware enablement and conversion to this new device it won't be like sticking a usb key in a new laptop and the same software will just work on this like history has taught us that does not work um and and so like when we were building on um the lowest end hardware that we could like the nexus 4 and the bq 4.5 we had an eye to the future and we knew there were other devices coming and we had those on site flashed, you know, Ubuntu Touch. So we had access to the devices, and we couldn't make that work.

Now, neither could Firefox with Firefox OS, and Tizen isn't a blazing success on phone. It's certainly way more successful than Firefox or Ubuntu Touch ever was. So maybe Purism aren't the right people to do this. I don't know who is. Yeah, that's why we need this to work. Dan, what do you think about this from a project standpoint even? I start looking at this from a project management standpoint,

and it starts to make me cry a little bit. I don't know. I mean, I talked to some of these guys at Guadec, and I think, like you said, they have a lot of reasons for the things that they're doing, especially stuff with like GNOME Shell isn't really set up to work as a mobile shell. But they're actually making a lot of headway as far as trying to make GNOME applications more responsibly designed designed doing some interesting things there and actually we're showing off some concepts they have and talking to different people and there's designs they're trying to push upstream and i've seen some patches landing in epiphany to this end but um so so like you said i don't i don't know how how realistic u1 2019 is because uh i i could

tell you out of anybody that you know deadlines are hard yeah it's totally unrealistic they're not google they're not apple they're not microsoft they don't have enough i mean you look at what microsoft did and they failed spectacularly with nokia um they just don't have enough clout i'm afraid is the goal mark here maybe not a successful phone in the market but is perhaps the goal post for us improvements to gtk and making gnome and the gnome desktop even more modern like some of this may remain like this upstream work they're doing may persist regardless of the success of the phone and either way we'll have purism to thank for that. I'm not sure.

We got a lot of flack when we got, in inverted commas, distracted by Ubuntu Phone and the desktop took a backseat. I don't see how GNOME can improve by being, I'm not saying core GNOME developers are going to get diverted by this but i don't see how core gnome can get made better by a phone project that may not even come to fruition they're going to come back to the desktop again after that are they quick question poppy how many people worked on a buntu phone versus i don't know if anybody knows how many people are working on this libram project uh Well, a significant chunk of the company,

and at the time the company was, I don't know, 800 people. So there was a fair chunk of people across many disciplines, like hardware enablement, Qt, OpenGL, QML, Qt, like people with many, and then the general infrastructure stuff people building build systems there's a there was a ton of people it was more than 100 people working on it at its height that's a lot of people wow yep i think that a phone is just such a high bar for just an even minimum viable product that people will even consider putting in their pockets and even if you get all the pieces right and build a perfect mobile os then you don't

have an app ecosystem and you know what are people gonna do on this phone look at the essential phone that was a beautiful piece of hardware but it went nowhere yeah if you're not in every carrier store you're never going to get mass market adoption. Now, maybe that's not the goal. And even if I, you know, even if you get just the tech audience, I don't mind having a couple of extra, maybe less useful devices at home. But I'm not going to carry a second phone around if it doesn't meet all of my needs. That's what I was thinking is how freaking badass would this be if we were just dominating some tablet? Like we had a great tablet workflow. You know, I hear like a lot of Apple users talking about using the iPad Pro and there was talk of

convergence forever ago, but I just would love to be able to pick up, say, three or four market tablets out there that I could go get, you know, like you would get from like a community project that's supporting a small range of hardware. And what I get is a complete kick-ass hardware and tablet experience where I have multiple windows, I can multitask, I can do real work, and I could even maybe like hook up a USB device somehow to this thing and it's got the whole Linux USB stack inside there. Really, I think what I'd kind of like, the more I talk about this,

is just a really, really great Surface Book focused Linux distribution where you could just go get the latest Surface Book. Isn't that just a laptop, what you've just described? Yeah, yeah. The tablet thing is there is something about like when you're at home, you know, you're watching TV or it's the weekend

and you want to like consider yourself not working but you want to stay connected. Like a tablet is that extra level of casualness. And the ARM processor and its long battery life contribute to that. So I don't know if a Surface Book would actually do it. And I'd like it to be Linux-based. I'd like it to have a bash terminal. But I really have no interest in a phone. I really don't.

I would be more likely to go get a basic bitch, no feature phone and some flip phone with a week-long battery life and then just have a tablet and a laptop. That would – and I know that's not a huge market. But I feel like there's probably a few people listening nodding their head right now probably going, that's how I do it. I just do it with Android or I just do it with iOS already. And I tried when I went to System76 for their Superfan event. I tried only bringing a tablet. And I ended up having to use computers at System76. It's interesting.

My boss often turns up to work with only a tablet, and will do everything just with a tablet. Won't even have a Bluetooth keyboard. He will just have a tablet and does everything from documents to joining us on Slack to having meetings with people in Hangouts. Everything. He just uses a tablet. Must have some fast thumbs over there.

No, he dictates to us. He delegates. Oh, okay. Well, you have minions. Maybe that could work too. That's what I got to do, Wes. That's just what I got to do. I'll have somebody else use my Android phone.

I thought you were training Dylan to fill that role for you. Right. I need, yeah, I need like Dylan following me around carrying my phone for me and then relaying messages. You know what? That's probably what, that's probably the solution I need. Well, while we're talking

about phones, why don't we take a break and thank Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You can go to linux.ting.com to take $25 off a device

or get $25 in service credit. Ting would work great for this solution that we were just talking about by the way because you can just buy a SIM card. Sometimes they have crazy deals too right now, but like,

even when they're just like regular price, they're nine bucks and there's no contract. So why not? It's like, you can buy it and then activate it when you need it. So for example, we had an Android tablet that had just been sitting around forever. And I had a SIM and I just thought, you know what, we're going on a trip. Why not pop it in there and have it? Why not? Then it's one less like Wi-Fi situation I have to worry about when I'm traveling. Like it's just, why not do that? And then when I get home, I can log in and turn it off. I never have to talk to a human being. You just pay for however much you talk, text, and data you use with nationwide coverage. And they have CDMA and a GSM network, and no contracts, no other termination fees.

The average Ting bill is like $23 per phone per month. That's it. And they've got a great control panel. They've got a ton of devices. You can bring your own, or you can go get a device directly from them. They've got a bunch of the really good Moto phones, those ones that are like a super great value and have pretty much a clean Android implementation with just a couple little actually kind of nice tweaks.

Those Moto phones, I think, don't get talked about enough. And so Ting, though, Ting knows what's up. So they've been expanding their lineup. So go check that out. And if you go to Linux.Ting.com, they'll take $25 off. They're also giving away a Moto Z 2 Play with the attachable camera that basically turns it into a DSLR. And they're also giving away a Sony Alpha

A6000. I have details linked in the show notes if you want to check that out. Or just go to linux.ting.com and then visit their blog. They're doing a Ting Summer giveaway. It's pretty sweet. So a big thank you to Ting for long time support. Actually,

you know what I just realized, and I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, Ting has been such a big supporter of the Unplugged program. Ting became a sponsor before we ever launched our first episode. They said, you know what, we love what you guys do. We love being on the Linux stuff. We love the Linux audience because

they're smart and they get the value of Ting. You know, like where they have to like really educate like average consumers that just buy into the duopoly stuff all the time. Like they really have to teach them. Like that's a big part of their marketing effort. But with the Linux crowd, like you guys understand what a text message is and data is. So like it's a great audience.

And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll sponsor. Yeah, absolutely. We'll sponsor. So they've been a sponsor on the Unplugged program from the very beginning, and we really appreciate it. Go to linux.ting.com to keep them going and keep us going. And also, a big thank you to DigitalOcean, do.co.unplugged.

Do.co.unplugged is where you go to get a $100 credit when you sign up with a new account, do.co.unplugged. You got to go there to get the $100 credit and then try out DigitalOcean. You can use it for 60 days with that credit. They have industry-leading price to performance. They have machines that are killer. My favorite system has 4 gigs of RAM, 2 CPUs, 80 gigabytes of space, 3 terabytes of transfer, and it's 3 cents an hour.

That's just crazy. They got optimized droplets, which is what we're using for our PeerTube instance, which is crushing it. Also, we've run a lot of our backend stuff up on DigitalOcean because they just have great uptime. They have a 99.99% uptime. That's fantastic. They got cloud firewalls.

I was just seeing on Reddit, some noob was having a hard time with his DO droplet. He's like, I don't understand. I'm getting this traffic here. I'm like, go to the cloud firewall and just block it. It just blocks it at the network level before it even hits your droplet. It's sweet, I don't understand. I'm getting this traffic here. I'm like, go to the cloud firewall and just block it. It just blocks it at the network level before it even hits your droplet. It's sweet.

They have monitoring, alerting, baked in that you can turn on. Great DNS management. You point the name servers to DigitalOcean and then you can just start assigning subdomains to your droplets. And I have a whole system. I've got subdomains

and domain names for my personal droplets. Of course, I've got a system for the Jupyter Broadcasting droplets, and they're crazy fast. They've got 40 gigabit connections coming into those hypervisors. Data centers all over the world, and then every single instance, regardless of the three cents an hour or the one that's like a monster with like 64 gigs of RAM, 32 dedicated CPU cores,

9 terabytes of transfer. You know that one? They're also all enterprise-grade SSDs from the three cents an hour up to that guy. In fact, you can even go in there and do the, they have these new flexible droplets. You can tweak and mix and match resources. You can go crazy with the RAM. They have even more configurations than that it's let's see here do they list on the website yeah so here's a droplet for you 196 gigabytes of ram how about that one 32 cpu cores oh my god maybe that will run gnome yeah yeah mutter's gonna repaint real quick on that one oh boy isn't that? So they got a whole range of hardware and they've just recently launched tons of updates to the tutorial section. Lots, I mean, for days and days now they've been releasing new tutorials. So there's tons of new docs, which you don't have

to be a customer to read it. I don't know if Crazy Digital Ocean knows this, but they're giving this stuff away for free. And they just posted a great VPN setup guide using StrongSwan. And StrongSwan is an Ike2 VPN server that gives you like a whole UI to manage users and revoke keys. And it's slick. StrongSwan. And they have an introduction to setting up StrongSwan on 1804 and then getting your clients set up. They walk through.

It's a seven-step process. But by the end of it, you've configured the VPN client on like a Windows or Mac or phone and connected it to your droplet running StrongSwan IPsec VPN. This is killer. I love their documentation. It's so well done. Everything DigitalOcean does has a bit of a design touch to it. is killer. I love their documentation. It's so well done. Everything DigitalOcean does has a bit of a design touch to it. From their dashboard

to their marketing to even the guides. It's just so clean. They also release something every quarter called DigitalOcean Currents where they surveil their customers without them knowing.

No, actually, they just send out a survey and say, hey, what programming languages are you using? What desktop environment are you using? What server technologies are you using? And then they answer and then DigitalOcean takes all the results, collates them and puts them in their currents. And it's great.

And I covered it recently on Coda Radio and you can find it on their website too if you're curious about trends and containers and programming languages and just sort of where the market is going. Because DigitalOcean customers, again, are a little more cutting edge, you know. So they are a good indicator audience, and that's why I really appreciate those currents. And then last but not least, another from the beginning, Linux Academy has been a sponsor of Jupyter Broadcasting since 2014. That is a really long time in this business.

I'm really proud of that, because it's a great fit. The Linux Academy goals and our audience are like – it's like a perfect lineup because they are so dedicated to the students. It's obnoxious. It's so much of what they talk about around here. It's great. It really is great to hear. It's one thing to see it online, but then it's been a totally another thing to be here and be at that summit. The effort and the expense of flying all these people out and putting them in the hotel

room is enormous. And the reason they're doing it is to, you know, keep a remote team working well and cohesive and help people build relationships, which is massive to a functional setup like this, you know, where people are all remote. They're really invest in these people. But what I've learned being down here, and you've never asked me to tell you about this, but it is the truth, is there is a ginormous staff of real experts in this stuff. Like these people that are here, the Azure people are from Microsoft. The OpenStack people are from Red Hat,

on and on. The AWS folks are coming in from, well, all over the place, really, but they've got people here from Amazon. And it's interesting. It's a very competitive environment for the folks that work here because when you are really high up in those fields, your skill sets are in demand. So that has been an interesting thing to watch too. And so Linux Academy tries to treat their people really well here because some of these course authors are really in demand. And that is a massive investment they have made to keep these people happy, keep their team working together, and keep them turning out content, which is a massive job. This last, these last two weeks, they've launched over 75 new courses and challenges and learning activities, and they're not done yet.

That's one of the reasons I'm still down here is we're doing another little release this week, and then there's two more, which I don't know if I'll stay for next week. Plus, they're doing a hardware giveaway of this Ancetel One, which is this monstrous red, like rocket red box that you can take cloud images and run them locally and then send them up to different cloud instances like AWS and DigitalOcean. It links it all up and it's a super cool learning tool and it's going to fit really well with a new feature the Linux Academy has in development right now. That once it's done, we will be obvious why this is such a cool box. And so they're doing a giveaway on their live stream next week. I may or may not be here for that one, but you can go to linuxacademy.com slash live if you want to learn more about that. That is just a thing, man. I tell you, that box is this, it is this really neat appliance idea that I've seen different companies take a crack at.

And the Ancetel One, you can go look it up. It's like a $700 box, but it's great for learning. It's just so awesome. Also, I don't know what Anthony's Twitter handle is off the top of my head. I'll go look it up for you. He's giving away exam vouchers on Twitter. in my head, I'll go look it up for you. He's giving away exam vouchers on Twitter. And that is if you don't, you don't have to be a Linux Academy subscriber to get those. He's just Anthony D. James on Twitter. If you want to follow him, he's doing giveaways from time to time, Anthony

D. James at Anthony D. James on Twitter. And he's given out LPIC exam vouchers and things like that. So also not a bad way because really think about it. It's not like you're not competing with thousands of people. You're competing with a couple hundred at most, maybe 30, 40, 50 people, depending on when he does it. So if that's something that would maybe be a break for you and really help you out, go follow him because I think he's got like 40 of them to give away or something. He's got a lot.

I don't know how many he's going to give away on Twitter, but you just got a whole batch of them that he's going to be giving away. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged is where you go to learn more about them and support the show and get a free seven-day trial. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. And yeah, thank you, Wes, for posting that there in the IRC. That's a good deal. Those are not cheap, those exam vouchers.

So it's a pretty nice deal. Yeah, that's awesome, especially if you're just getting started or want to really, you know, coming back to the field and want to really feel like you know what you're doing. That's a great way to start. So a couple of app picks. Everybody loves command line apps. So how about an RSS reader for the command line? It's called Newsboat, and it's a pretty snazzy text-based RSS reader. It's sleek.

It also supports Atom feeds, of course, and it's meant to run in the console. And it is a fork of NewsBoteur, which is how I used to pronounce it, so that's how I pronounce it now. And it looks pretty nice. It's pretty straightforward. It's kind of what you'd expect.

And it has a configuration file that's easy, and it's in the Debian repo. If you want to install it on vanilla 1804, it's NewsBoat, so. If you want to install it on vanilla 1804, it's Newsboat. So just apt install Newsboat. And you can read news articles on the command line. Actually, not as

ridiculous as it sounds. Actually, no. I was going to say, I've kind of shied away from RSS readers in recent months. Really? I don't know that I would use it for everything, but this could really be No, I was going to say, I've kind of shied away from RSS readers in recent months. Really? Really. I mean, I don't know that I would use it for everything, but this could really be sort of useful. Especially, I think I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, I've got some tests running and I'm waiting on some output of some program.

Just pop this open real quick, check on a couple things, do some show research. Might be handy. Actually, it's also got an additional feature. It can download podcasts, too. Oh, good catch. Really? Nice. Oh, good catch. Really? Nice. Yeah.

Good catch. You know, where I really hit my power stroke with automated messages from servers was when I came up with different systems to dump it all into RSS feeds, and I got them out of my inbox. You know, like cron jobs that have output or a backup report and stuff like that. Got them into different like systems that would convert them into an RSS feed and then put them in an RSS reader. So I could just check on all of my cron job reports and backup reports as part of my daily news routine. And that was a

next level hack I did. I really liked that. Oh, that's clever. I imagine that would help you kind of see things that stood out as well, rather than having to sort through an inbox, you get like legitimate chains of related content. I was trying to keep this to be a short episode, but I got to side rail us here because you don't use RSS. You cast a pretty wide news net. Like when we do our link dump, you got a big list of links. I thought for sure you must be doing RSS to collect all that. You know what?

Surprisingly not. I mean, it's not like I haven't ever done RSS. Just lately, I haven't been that happy with any of that particular reader, so I've just kind of fallen off, and I obviously have indexes and other lists I keep of places to check, so it's sort of just a hacky manual system, really

in need of some more automation. Well, to keep us on the text-based train, Joey over at OMG Ubuntu calls out Browsh, I guess is how you say it. Browsh, B-R-O-W-S-H. And it is a modern Techspace browser built for the command line. And it's pretty great because unlike Lynx, it supports JavaScript.

It supports WebGL content. It supports photos. The only hard requirement is you do have to have a version of Firefox on your system. Browse uses Firefox to fetch the web pages and then passes the necessary bits via a web extension so it can then render it in lo-fi glory in the terminal. So I guess you just got to leave Firefox running somewhere, Wes, and then set this all up and you're good to go. Have you seen like the images it renders?

It's pretty rough. It is pretty rough. But one interesting thing I saw too is they have a way that you can actually view it on the web as well. So you could almost just use it as a way to take some sites

that were way too complicated or full modern web and turn it into something a little older. Yeah, that's great. I kind of want to do that. That's sort of a cool look. That's pretty awesome, though. I think we're not going to be able to beat that for AppPix for the day, so we'll stop there. But Browse

and you can get it at brow.sh B-R-O-W dot S-H. I will also say they have a call out here. It's early days for the project, so you're probably going to find some pages that don't work. But don't despair. I think if this is going to ever get really good,

it's important for people to go submit URLs. They have a way to do that on their GitHub repo so you can get better support for the sites that you actually want to visit. Nice. I would say we could end it there, but I do have to ask the question, what happens when Linus quits?

This got on my mind because after Joe and I finished Linux Action News where we covered Python's leader stepping down and sort of what led to that, Joe and I were talking off mic and afterwards, they're off recording, they're still on mic. What happens

if Linus rage quits one day? I mean, you can tell the job is stressful at times. And you got to figure he's going to get to a point where he's going to put his hands up and go either very happily say, I'm done. Thank you, everybody. I've had a great time. I'm passing the torch. I wish you all the best. Or there could be a time where he tells everybody to go F themselves

and he signs off the internet and never comes back. But either way, what happens when Linus retires? And where does that role shift? And is that something that we even need to worry about? These are all the questions that have been floating in my head. So let's break it down a little bit. Does anybody in the Mumbroom actually know what the official handover process is for the Linux kernel when Linus moves on? When he retires?

We're not saying he dies. He retires. Maybe he gets acquired. Yeah. Microsoft buys Linus out. I mean right now he's employed by the Linux Foundation. So my assumption has been that the Linux Foundation would sort of manage that. So I did a little research because I didn't know the answer to this.

So I did a little digging around. And what I found is a post by Linus on the mail, on the mailing list, uh, forever ago. And he says, not everybody reads every post in the Linux kernel mailing list. In fact, nobody expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work. We'll even read half of it except for maybe Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but a thousand gnomes working in underground caves are powering Alex Cox.

None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either. They just work together very well. So if there's one person he might pass the role to, people speculate it could be Alan Cox. There's also been discussions I found online where there's a group of people that they would probably pass the torch to. It looks like someone had asked Linus at an event and the way that they would probably pass the torch to. It looks like someone had asked Linus at an event and the way that they described, Linus described, oh, there isn't a transcript of it at

the event, was that over time he would start to make a slow transition to different people. So he would essentially break his role out and then others would begin sort of filling those spots and then they would start vetting other people, and it would just sort of spread out from there. In the end, he said the result would be better for Linux in the long term. Rather than having one person who gets overwhelmed by vetting everything, it would be spread out into a process that could scale, which would probably be better for Linux in the long term.

So Linus himself didn't seem to be too worried about it. As long as there's the case that he doesn't get hit by a bus and that we're left in a little more chaos, I imagine it'll be kind of like what Guido seems to have done and, you know, an announcement of retirement or whatever else, and then a slow fade as things are doled out and the community, I imagine, would naturally sort of step up and some rules would be established. Maybe it starts off with one person doing most of it and that gets further delegated. Maybe it's eight people that are all just taking it piecemeal. Now, it might be a good idea as that gets closer to have some more formalized stuff. I do really like the way, for instance, the FreeBSD project is managed

and have an actual organization responsible for this. Maybe it'll go that way long term. It would be nice to have some maturity, even if it's not really a problem that we expect to have right now. I have a question. On a day-to-day basis, I mean, this might be an obvious question, but what does Linus actually do? He did a recent interview where they asked him what he did, and he said, you know, my job is mostly very boring. And, you boring and he sits there reading emails and processing pull requests and doing admin. So it's mostly admin. Yeah, exactly. And facilitating communications.

My vote would be go to Greg KH. I've only had like two opportunities ever to talk to the man but really just just really respect him. And I think he's really level-headed and he really seems to stick with stuff. So Greg Cage would be high on my list. Somebody better step in though. I think we do need a leadership role. I feel like you do sort of need somebody to sometimes push things through. And if it's not Greg or Alan Cox, you know, it's going to be Lenart Pottering and you know, it's going to be Colonel D and he'll announce a fork. It'll be Colonel D it'll be system D Colonel D and Lenart Pottering, and you know it's going to be Colonel D. And he'll announce a fork, it'll be Colonel D, it'll be System D, Colonel D, and Lenart will control the entire stack.

Oh, finally! A unified stack of the future! Yeah. You know what, Lenart, I love you. I'm just kidding. It would be great. It would probably be a good stack, and we'd finally, finally have a decent API. Go get more Mr. Popey over at the Ubuntu podcast. He's over there

doing his thing. A new episode is just around the corner. Go get more Wes. Popey over at the Ubuntu podcast. He's over there doing his thing. A new episode is just around the corner. Go get more Wes. He's on the TechSnap program at TechSnap.Systems. Shout out to the Mumble Room for making it this week. Really appreciate you guys. If you'd like to join the Mumble Room, go to irc.geekshed.net, and you can do pound mumble in there, and you'll get all the info.

Or just Google search Jupiter Colony mumble setup, and you'll get all the info or just google search jupiter colony mumble setup and you'll find a guide it's absolutely magic hey did you know this show is live on tuesdays and you can join us get it converted in your local time zone at jupiter broadcasting.com calendar and jblive.tv for the live stream saying thanks for being here and you know what see you next Bye. you know the real question chris is what happens when you when you resign that's the real question i'm gonna are you kidding i'm gonna be broadcasting until the day my mouth quits working. I can't help myself. I get antsy if I take a couple of days off. It's good for my sanity to keep going. Unless I could go live on a big piece of land, maybe a ranch somewhere, park the RV. Oh, ranch style. And then just start a small colony there. And then I might be happy to.