LINUX Unplugged - Episode 267: People Patches

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

Linus takes a break and the Linux kernel adopts a new Code of Conduct. We work through these major watershed moments, and discuss what it means for the community. Plus our review of our brand new ThinkPad T480’s running Linux, the bug you need to know about, and why this might be one of the greatest Linux laptops of all time. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Danielle Foré, and Eric Hendricks.

I'm really glad that we got you on, user. I think you're going to balance out those guys from across the pond. You know what I'm saying? What I think is cool about it is I feel like it's a show that I could play for somebody that's non-technical and they wouldn't be totally lost or bored. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And there's still enough in there for people that really like the technical discussion where you get something deep in there.

I think you guys struck a really good balance. I loved it. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 267 for September 18th, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's mostly patched together and it's ready to go with a huge show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. It's nice to be in studio, you know what I mean?

Oh yeah, you're here, you're operating, you're looking great, and we've got a great show today. I've got a lot of show in me. I've been off the air a little bit. It's filling out the seams. It is. Good thing I've got bands around me to hold me together. Well, coming up on this week's episode of the Unplugged program, we'll get into IPFS, the Interplanetary File System, that works by you requesting a hash to the network, and the network finds the file. It's all been really conceptual until this week,

when Cloudflare has introduced their IPFS gateway. And we'll tell you how you can get started with this in a bit about the Interplanetary file system. Then you heard it right. Mr. Torvalds is taking some time. He's got some patchwork to do, but this time it's on his self, on his own person. Person patches.

People patches for Linus. And we'll tell you what's going on with Linus. We'll read between the lines in a few places and ask if he's dealing with burnout. And then we'll discuss the new contributor code that has been committed, I guess, to the Linux kernel, would be the way to put it. Some of the controversy surrounding that.

And maybe the idea that we're recognizing a new pivot for the development of the Linux kernel. There's been a bunch of others, like workflow and tools in the past, and perhaps now we're seeing a new pivot for the development of the Linux kernel. There's been a bunch of others, like workflow and tools in the past, and perhaps now we're seeing something new. We'll discuss that. Plus, some people are saying there's going to be a fork. We'll talk about some other projects

that have implemented code of conduct and how that's going for them. And then we'll end the show on a really great note. Wes and I have received our new work rigs. They came in just the other day. ThinkPad T480s. I've had a chance to load mine up with GNU slash Linux. I'll tell you the specs, how I'm

achieving battery life that will blow you just away. And there may be bad news, too. The bug that is in this series of laptops that affects CPU performance and the workaround for that. And then we're going to talk about our setup,

what we're kind of doing differently from our past setups. We'll talk a little bit about what's important in a work machine for us and maybe some of the plans that we have to tweak these machines to make them a little better in production than they are out of the box. Maybe some new software too, some stuff we've been playing around with. So we've got a lot to get into. So before we go any further, we've got to bring in the virtual love. We've got to. Time appropriate greetings, mumble room. Hello. Good afternoon from North Carolina. Hey, welcome back, Alex. It's good to hear from you. And how has the move gone?

Hey, I survived the hurricane. Wow. Welcome. Yeah, that is a hell of a welcome right there. Not normally what you have to deal with. Oh, my gosh. Well, it's good to have you back amongst us. You probably heard Brent and Dan is in there as well as Eric, Ionic or Ironic or Mr. Badger, as I call him, Minimac and TechMav are all joining us in the virtual lug today. And I wanted to start with this IPFS story because it sounds, well, it sounds out of this world. So Cloudflare says they are very excited to announce the Cloudflare IPFS gateway, an easy way to access content from the interplanetary file system that doesn't require any special software on your computer.

Pretty neat. Yeah, they say, we hope that our gateway, hosted at cloudflare-ipfs.com, will serve as a platform for many new, highly reliable, and security-enhanced web applications. It sounds like this is just the first part of their distributed web gateway project. Yeah, and this is all taking part on what is Cloudflare's quote-unquote

crypto week. They have crypto week at Cloudflare. And so this is part of it. Now, you guys know this, but just to kind of sort of get into the background of IPFS, usually when you access a website from your browser, your browser tracks down the origin server or servers that are the ultimate centralized repository for a website.

Yeah. You know, it doesn't have to be how it works, really, though, right? There's a better way. There's a better way. So, you know, you start sending a request, it sends a request from your computer

to the origin server, wherever that might be in the world, and that server sends back the content to your computer. That system has served us well for, I don't know,

decades now, I guess. Yeah. But there's a pretty big downside. Centralization makes it impossible to keep content online any longer than the origin servers can host it. And that can be expensive.

Yeah, and fair. If you look at some of our back catalog now, a lot of those links go nowhere because those servers are offline or their pages have been brought down. So what can we do about that? Well, enter IPFS. Ooh.

Ooh. Hmm. The Interplanetary File System is really a peer-to-peer file system composed of thousands of computers around the world, each of which stores files on behalf of the network. These files can be anything, like, you know, your cat pictures, 3D models, pictures of Levi, or even entire websites. Five, what, million or billion files? The number is so huge my brain can't even comprehend it.

Has already been uploaded and published into IPFS. That is impressive. Yeah, that is. They have a really good description of how it all works, including some graphics in a blog post that we will have linked in the show notes, linuxunplugged.com slash 267. But it's like a block storage system, right? Yeah, I think the big thing is it's content addressable.

So with IPFS... Yeah, okay, that's, yeah, yeah. It's not blocks. Right. If there's data blocks, but it's not like a block system like a drive. Right. Now, so every single, you do group them into blocks, but every single block of data stored in the system is addressable by its cryptographic hash

of its content. So that's how you can say, like, I'm looking for this, I've got this hash, go reach out, and then the network in a peer-to-peer fashion can then, whoever has a block that matches that hash, can serve you the contents. And that could be a number of systems, and the network is what figures out where that's stored at. Right, you can actually distribute them, so if you've

got, you know, you've got one, it's like a little CDN near you, but everyone can play, you don't have to have special permission. I like that a lot, and you probably figure there's a number of ways to access IPFS content. You can access IPFS content. You can install IPFS on your machine and essentially become a node of the IPFS network. And it probably is the best way to interact with the network if you were going to really get down into the weeds. If you're going to be developing applications that run on it or really using it a bunch.

But if you're just kind of curious, if you're IPFS curious, there's an easy way. And of course, you want to be able to bridge to the real world. Now, of course, there are already some of these bridges, but there's not that many organizations out there, running one, who have the kind of reach and bandwidth that Cloudflare has. Right, that's the big change here with Cloudflare doing this. They're setting up this HTTPS gateway to it.

And that is going to make it really easy for people playing around. So that's IPFS in a nutshell. Probably just whetted your appetite. We could probably go way more into it, really. Yeah, I mean, it has been one of those topics I would like to play with more and cover more. But up until now, it just had felt like, you know,

it's like any project that's sort of off its own corner, doesn't see wide adoption. Maybe that can change now? That's what I feel like changed, actually. You're right, is it feels like IPFS is no longer off in a corner where I have to go get this Go app off of GitHub and build it myself to connect to the network now.

Now I can use my web browser and if you get the hash, they've just made it so you put the gateway URL in there and then slash the hash and that's essentially it. I mean, it's really simple. So you can see how you can programmatically build fetchers and things like that too for people that could go fetch

the documents off of IPFS without requiring any fancy client-side software. Right. Or if you want to use IPFS for your own things, backing things up or just providing content to people, now you have a plain text link for regular folks. So I also think the other next step is, you know, building your own gateway. So, you know, spin up your own droplet or something and build your own gateway to IPFS. So that way you're not going through Cloudflare necessarily because they'll probably eventually want to monetize that data, I would assume. And we just can't, I mean, while it's nice of them to do this,

we don't really know what their intentions are or how long they're willing to do it. And we certainly, it's a nice thing to have, but we shouldn't rely on it. Yeah, yeah. And I am intrigued by the whole concept. I want to play with it more down the road. So I'm glad that they're making it easier because it's a good way to dip your toe. Last week in the post show, Eric, Mr. Eric, the IT guy stopped by and gave us his recap of the Libre Application Summit. It feels like this summit's getting a lot of attention. And I think it's because they have

the right people there. Well, Dan and Cassidy from Elementary OS made it as well. And they've created a post up on their Medium blog. And Dan's here to tell us a little bit about his trip. And Dan, I'm curious, what was your big takeaway from the Libre Application Summit? Well, it was just like a really intimate setting compared to some of the other conferences that I've attended. So it was really kind of an interesting, different, like really experimental startup-y kind of feel as far as a conference goes. That's interesting. Like everything was really kind of loose and undefined.

And it was kind of like creating the conference as you go. Scheduled talks were kind of shuffled around and new little lightning talks inserted in between. And it was like it was very like fluid environment. It was really interesting. Now, Eric, you know, he seemed to observe last week that there was, I don't know how to put it that doesn't sound like corporate speak, but like multiple stakeholders there. There was folks from the Plasma camp, the GNOME camp,

and different priorities in the open source community were there. Did you get that sense as well? Or did it seem like there was a particular audience it was playing to? Yeah, it was definitely diverse. Actually, there was a moment where Cassidy and I had just given our group talk. And then immediately after, Alish from KDE got up to give his talk. And kind of the premise of our talks were like the exact opposite strategy. And it was really interesting because we were able to kind of poke fun at each other and kind of say, you know, like, we're doing things completely differently, but what can we learn

from each other? That is good. That is good. Yeah. Cassidy puts it in the chat room. He was there. He says, you know, had a real unconference feel in a good way. I like that.

I like it. And what do you think of the location? Denver is, some people love it. Some people think they should move it for next year. How much do you think that matters in an event like this? I'm asking you as somebody who does this as a full-time job, would you travel just about anywhere in the States for an event like this? Or do you think location really does make a difference in who's able to contribute? For me, definitely having it in the States as opposed to in Europe made it a lot easier for me to get out there because our travel budget isn't that big. So it's nice to have more conferences that are stateside. I think that it is definitely a thing when we have so many people that are either volunteers

or individuals or not representing large organizations, that having more conferences that are easier to attend for those people should be a priority in the overall community. You've definitely piqued my interest. You and Eric both have gotten me thinking this is something I'm going to have to attend. Hopefully the timing and everything works out pretty well. Maybe you and I could both go next year. Oh, that's a great idea.

We can lobby them to change the name in person. There you go. Hey, now you're thinking. Mr. Full-time. We can lobby them to change the name in person. There you go. Hey, now you're thinking. Mr. Full-time podcaster over there. If you didn't catch episode 266 of the show last week, we announced that Jupyter Broadcasting has joined Linux Academy. We laid out the grand vision, our plans for the next few months, how we want to utilize the Patreon funding,

and all of that is right at the top of 266. So I encourage you to go give a listen to that if you can. User Air is back as well. We announced that last week. Dan's one of the hosts on there along with Popey and Joe. And I think I'll be on the next one. I'm not positive yet, but my plan is to go on there and talk about my recent, what do you even describe?

Life event. Life event. Yeah, all the surgery and all that. Can I just say, Chris, it's so, I hope I speak for a lot of the listeners. It's amazing to hear you back and healthy, and we're all just super pleased for you. Well, thank you, Alex. I appreciate that. It is fun for me to be back because I do miss doing the shows,

but I very much appreciate Wes has been filling in for me on Linux Action News. He's been killing it. Killing it. You set the standard. I just got to live up to it. I mean, some people show up and they fill in, but then other people, like, they step up. And Wes is doing – you can tell. He's been killing it. Killing it. You set the standard. I just got to live up to it. I mean, some people show up and they fill in, but then other people, like, they step up. And Wes is doing, you can tell, he does the research.

He dives into the story a little. I listen. I hear that. Look at you. He's doing the research. So that's been, him and Joe have been great on Linux Action News recently. I think it's 69, 70, and 71,

if you want to go catch those recent episodes. I think they've turned out great. And it's a little different since I'm not there, which is funny for me because Linux Action News is the child of the Linux Action Show. So I have like a really strong sense of, not ownership, it's like co-ownership, but it's a strong sense of co-ownership.

You gave that to the world. Yeah, so it's weird not to be on there, but at the same time, it's like, now I get to listen to it, which has been great. Also, recent tech snaps, killing it. to listen to it, which has been great. Also, recent tech snaps, killing it. You've been filling in for me extra hard there. We've had Wimpy come in recently and fill in.

And on the last week's episode, Alan Jude. Amazing. Amazing. Both of them. As you would expect, that's an extended edition of the Tech Snap program because Alan. And then this week, I won't say who yet. I'll tease that next week. But someone you likely know, a member of the community who really knows his stuff, a great guy is going to be joining Wes if all works out this week

for the next TechSnap that gets recorded. So there's been some really great stuff going on here at Jupyter Broadcasting, even with me away. The wheels of progress, I guess, continue. Oh, yeah, turning and turning, and there's just going to be more and more. One of the things that we have coming up soon is we're going to be looking at ways to simplify and automate the production part of the show. So you can't really automate Joe. You know, Joe is our editor, and that is just a process that you need somebody talented to sit down and go through.

So we can't— Thankfully, you just feed him flax, and then podcasts come out. So it works really nicely. Yeah, right? That's how it works. But everything after Joe could be done by computers. And that really is going to be kind of our goal is, you know, we'll sit here. We'll do the shows.

You can't replace us, hopefully, yet. Then Joe, you can't replace him. But everything after Joe could be automated. And so we'll be building tools around that. We'll open source whatever we work on. We're going to try to do it all in our new public GitLab instance that Eric has set up for us. What is the URL for that, Eric?

It's jupitercode.io? Yeah, it's gitlab.jupitercode.io. Thank you. And it's just going to be the start of a collection of tools that we're going to use. Hopefully get something like Jenkins or something along those lines up and running at some point. Yet another domain name, Chris.

I know. I love my domain name. You got a collection now. I really do. Turns out, a little side, when you sell a business, those domain names are actually worth something. So it was an investment all along. I just didn't even know it.

So the other potential use for that GitLab instance that Eric has set up is the issue tracker. I think I'm not sure how I want to do this yet, but I will be rolling out like feature requests and content requests. And they might be different systems or they might be together or I don't know exactly how we're going to do it. But I see those as two distinct things. A technical thing you want from the Jupyter Broadcasting Network, like a type of feed. This feed doesn't work for me because of X. Yeah, or I'm trying to build this app and it would be great if I could get

a JSON of X, Y, and Z shows. Versus, hey, it'd be really nice if you had video. Those are two different requests. One's a feature request and one's a kind of like a I guess they're both kind of feature requests versus like I'd like you guys to talk about IPFS more.

That's a content request, and that feels like a separate channel, but I'm not sure. But whatever we do, we'll do it out in the open. Whatever code we create, we'll open source it. And then if time allows, we'll try to document as best we can. That's going to be an area that we're a little weak at, but we might be able to get some help. Yeah, and that's where feedback from you telling us like where it's weak or what

you need to actually use those tools would be great. Yeah, so those are things that we're now working on. And I think when we actually have something to share, we'll talk about it. And if we end up running into some fun problems or have to build some Linux boxes, I actually know we're going to be building some droplets to do some of this. So we can talk about all that stuff and the software we're using and the projects and how they're connecting. So it could be some good stuff. We won't overdo it with the podcast stuff, but when we have an interesting thing

around open source and free software to talk about, we'll do it, and I'm looking forward to that. So those are all things that are sort of coming, and you can check out TechSnap and Linux Action News to hear something a little different there. But I think that's all the delays I had. Did I have any other things I could... I don't know how...

I mean, do you have anything else to pull out here? I don't really think so. We could talk about our laptops. We got these new ThinkPads. Oh, yeah. Oh. But we should probably talk about the major thing that happened in Linux this week. Actually, two major things.

Let's be responsible, I guess. That's our job as podcasters. All right. So this week when Linus was announcing a new RC of the current development kernel, he added something a little unusual that boiled down to his temporary stepping away of maintainership of the Linux kernel, which is a rather historic moment in the 20-year history of Linux in itself. moment in the 20-year history of Linux in itself, but his announcement really has been shaking the entire internet. People are really going all off the walls on this, and he really owns some of his recent behavior or some of his infamous behavior that's been going on for a while. He talks about how the discussions, both public and on private mailing lists, have been building for years. Some of these discussions came about recently, though, in probably a more louder tone

because of some recent scheduling snafus around the maintainer summit where Linus had, quote, accidentally scheduled his vacation to take place. And then in the subsequent discussions about moving the maintainer summit's location so that way Linus could attend, it brought some things to the surface. And he gets into it a little bit. He says it's not like this discussion itself is in any way new to this week. We've been discussing maintainership and community for years. And I think when he uses the term maintainership and community, they're really loaded terms in this context.

I think what Linus is saying is maintainership is not just maintaining the code that goes into the area you're responsible for, but it's also all the human aspects. And then he brings in community as well. Right. I mean, this is a human project made by humans interacting. Yes, there's like the log of git commits, but everything else that goes before that actually happens, you also have to manage. And he's saying the discussion of what that role is

and how it interacts with the other members of the community has been going on for years. And I see that. I did some searching around. I'm sure you could find stuff before this, but I saw conversations in this regard back in 2009. And you've seen it if you followed Linux for a while now, 10 years ago, 15 years ago even, some of these conversations about Linus's outbursts were being had. But he says,

what's new this week is really my reaction to it and perhaps me being a little more introspective. And there's two parts to that. One was simply my own reaction to having screwed up my scheduling of the maintainership summit. Yes, I was somewhat embarrassed about having screwed up my calendar. But honestly, I was mostly hopeful that I wouldn't have to go to the colonel's summit. He didn't want to go. To his, I mean, the summit for his colonel. Yeah, he didn't want to go to it. And he kind of is admitting to intentionally booking his vacation. Clearly there's some psychological

factors here to play. He says, I was mostly hopeful that I wouldn't have to go to the colonel summit that I have gone to every year for just about the last two decades. Wow. But that whole situation then started a whole different kind of discussion. And kind of incidentally to that one, the second part was that I realized that I had completely misread some of the people involved. So here we are, me finally on the one hand realizing that it wasn't actually funny or a good sign that I was hoping to just skip the yearly kernel summit entirely. And on the other hand realizing that I really had been ignoring some fairly deep-seated feelings in the community. He then writes, This is my reality.

I'm not an emotionally empathetic kind of person. And that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Nope, nope, not at all. No, I think we knew he wasn't big on reading others' emotions. Oh, we've covered it. In fact, you might almost say it was a classic aspect of Linus, really. aspect of Linus, really. He says, the fact that I then misread people and did not realize it for years of how badly I've judged the situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. This week, people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. So something happened this last week. He says, this week, people in our community

confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks and emails had been both unprofessional and uncalled for, especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I now know this was not okay, and I am truly sorry. That reads as genuine to me. Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, he's in a position where he doesn't really genuine to me. Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, he's in a position where he doesn't really have to write. It's his project.

It's his, you know, he could write whatever he wants. This is really heartfelt, and it's very public. Very public. He knows as he's writing this, every word is going to get quoted in news articles. It was on CNBC, the entire email. It's going to be all over the web. Millions, if not definitely hundreds of thousands of people will read these words. And he's owning it right here. You got to respect that.

That's not an easy thing to do, even in private. Yeah, right. And he's doing it in a very, very, very public way. But also, it's a watershed moment for the perception of the Linux kernel team. You know, I think you could clearly say Linux kernel has been sort of held up high by many people up on the top of a mountain. This is the example of a community where your technical contribution is the sole thing that decides your merit. And if you submit a shit patch to the kernel, you'll be told it's a shit patch and they'll yell at you. And it's not based on the color of your skin. It's based on the technical merits of your submission.

And this is Linus, the holder of that image saying, that is no longer true. We must also try to be empathetic. We must also try to be, in a word, inclusive. He doesn't use that word. That's essentially what he's getting at. Yeah, we'll get to more, you know, that spirit of being excellent to each other.

Yeah. He says the above is basically a long-winded way to get to a somewhat painful personal admission that, hey, I need to change some of my behavior. And I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely. And then he writes it in one short paragraph. The one that, when I read that Monday morning, I had to take a moment.

He says, I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately. He's stepping down as the maintainer temporarily, handing the reins over to Greg KH, which seems like a huge moment. I mean, has this happened before?

I don't think so. I mean, I know he's taken vacations, you know? I know he's got hobbies. But even then, he's on his vacation. He's posting RC updates to the mailing list. Yes, he often does. He often does. He is really owning this entire thing

and calling himself unprofessional. He is apologizing to people. And that to me feels like it's going to have ripple effects throughout the open source community. And it must also say something about how much he cares about this project and the people that he's worked so long with to build the project because it's easy enough, especially as the guy at the top, to say, whatever my way or the highway, I don't need you contributors.

I'm going to take my kernel over here. Or it's easy to just back away and never come back. It really seems like he cares about it and wants to keep contributing and is trying to find how to do that best. And I find it sort of there's a big disconnect, I guess is what I'm trying to say, between what the public reaction to this has been, which has really spun the whole gamut.

People are freaking out. I have seen conspiracies about Linus being blackmailed. And there's even in the GitHub thread about the code of conduct change we're about to talk about, there's someone offering Linus shelter if he needs to be protected from whoever's out to get him. Like the range of responses to this has been pretty extreme. But I think Lina sees it in a much more practical

sort of way, as he typically would. He refers it as a pain point. And I would swap that word pain point, and I would say a transition moment or a shift. He writes, put another way, when asked at conferences, I occasionally talk about how pain points in kernel development have generally not been about the technical issues, but about the inflection points where development flow

and behavior changed. These pain points have been about managing the flow of patches, often been associated with big tooling changes, like moving from making releases with patches and tarballs to discussions about

how Linus doesn't scale up to 15 years ago. Even the ones about using BitKeeper and then having to write Git in order to get past the point that was no longer working for us. We have had that kind of pain point. We haven't had that kind of pain point in about a decade. But this week felt like that kind of pain point to me. And I think you could replace the word pain point with that kind of transition, that kind of pain point to me. And I think you could replace the word pain point with

that kind of transition, that kind of shift. It's a 20-year-old project that dominates the world. It has to have these kinds of changes every now and then, and sometimes they're painful ones. Yeah, I mean, right? I mean, changing workflows. There's all these human factors that aren't about the actual commits, how they get there, how you work with them, what gets approved, what's the dialogue that has to go through to get it approved. How do you make that work? And that's going to change when you have 10 contributors

or 10,000 contributors and over time. And maybe you could argue there was a time where technical excellency was of absolute importance, especially when you're competing with a lot of cutthroat commercial companies. And I don't think he's saying it's not of importance. I haven't seen anything that says that, you know, just because you're nice means your patch gets accepted, right?

That doesn't have to be that way. Yeah, yeah. It'll be really interesting long term to see if he can stick to this and how long has he gone for. He writes about seeing folks at the maintainer summit, but he doesn't really say how long he's going to be gone either. Yeah. Greg will finish up this kernel and we'll see about the next. Yeah.

So he just says, yeah, I'll be out for 4.19. But 4.19 is fairly far. It's at RC4 right now. So it's pretty far in the development process. Something tells me he might not be back for 4.20. We will just have to wait and see. And then once he does come back, we have to wait and see. And then, once he does come back, we have to wait and see if there actually is a tone change.

Yeah, right. I mean, he's setting this from the top. How does that filter down through all the levels of contributors? And how does that affect new people joining the project and how it goes? Does anybody in the Mamba room have any thoughts on the line of stepping down for a bit or him trying to take care of himself and fix himself up for a bit? Yeah, I mean, you have another Libre Application Summit plug. Cassidy did a talk about technical problems versus social problems.

And the fact that as technical people, we always want to concentrate on how to solve things with code. And sometimes we forget that solving social problems is an often faster and more effective way to get the results that we want. So I think it's really important for someone like Linus to say, hey, you know what? Social problems are actually important too, and we need to really think about the kind of problems that we're creating for ourselves by not addressing them. Yeah. I have at times come on the air

and kind of defended the way Linus works because of the results seem to me to speak for themselves. But then I kind of, this week when this news came out, I kind of put myself in the position of, well, what if I talk to my team this way? Like, what if I just like, you know, just tore you up for doing something, you know, like what if you made a mistake in LAN and I just, I ripped you up for doing something. What if you made a mistake in LAN

and I just ripped you up for it? That would not be productive. Yeah, there is that element of it wouldn't fly in a workplace or other professional environment where you expect to have standards about how people interact with you, even when they're upset or you're being chastised.

And just because it's an open source project, now maybe if it's your open source project that you've been doing by yourself for two years in your basement, okay, you set the standards, but Linux is not there anymore. Yeah, and remember, it's partially governed by that foundation too, which may play roles in some of this. Brent, you've noticed a trend though in just project leads sort of stepping back, and some officially, some unofficially.

Yeah, it feels like maybe once a month on the show here we talk about someone who's either stepping back officially or unofficially just to take a break or go traveling or try to find themselves. I mean, you're kind of taking a little bit of a forced break, aren't you? So just wondering if, you know, some of these, well, most of the people in the open source community are so dedicated and yet maybe they're not taking enough time for themselves. Yeah, especially hard when it's a passion project.

Right. I mean, how many like single person distros do we worry about and talk about? Because you see like, well, can they support it? And when life changes, will there be people to fall back so it keeps going? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I hope he is able to take this time and I hope it is productive for him. I do think it would be good, not just for getting more people involved with the project, because it's entirely possible that people have been scared away from contributing to Linux. It seems to be that's what Greg infers in a post we're about to talk about, is that people have been scared away from the project, that the existing

code of conflict hasn't worked. And Linus has sort of been the representation of that. But more than that, I think it could be good long-term for the reputation of Linux. I think a lot of times when Linus kind of goes off the handle and then people report on it, it kind of puts Linux in that amateur light a little bit. And I think it can be easy too if you are more thick-skinned. You can be like, well, okay, I can take it. I know where Linus is coming from.

I know his intention is just to get good patches. But it's also easy if you're like, well, okay, I can take it. I know where Linus is coming from. I know his intention is just to get good patches. But it's also easy if you're like, well, I could spend my time. I'm a smart developer contributing to this project. Or, oh, I see all those FreeBSD guys. They're really nice. They don't yell at anyone. Maybe that's just my preferred work style. I'm going to go over there. We do see that, actually. We do see that.

And, you know, I think what we're about to get into is the second bit of news. If Linus stepping down for a bit and handing the reins over to Greg, that in itself would have been a huge story for this week that we could talk about all day. But I think it has to be held in context with also the new change in the past, the Linux kernel, for not a long time, but for a few years now, has had a code of conflict that essentially outlined the rules for conflict if it arises. And this week, submitted before Linus' resignation email, he committed a code of conduct change. Now, the introduction here is written by Greg, KH, and I think it's important that we get into this. He writes, the code of conflict is not achieving its implicit goal of fostering civility and the spirit of being excellent to each other.

So that's Greg right there writing that it's not currently achieving its goal. It's not working for us. The code of conflict is not working. He then writes, explicit guidelines have demonstrated success to argue and debate the specifics of what that code might look like, but I think it's interesting to see the reasons and the goals that Greg in particular here and the kernel maintainers are looking for. He writes, here is a new code of conduct statement for the wider kernel. It's based on the contributor covenant as described at www.contributor-covenant.org. From this point forward, we should abide by these rules in order to help make the kernel community a welcoming environment to participate in.

So to appreciate the new code of conduct, I want to read to you the old code of conflict, which is just two paragraphs. It's pretty simple. It goes, the Linux kernel development effort is a very personal process compared to, quote, traditional ways of developing software. Your code and your ideas behind it will be carefully reviewed, often resulting in critique and criticism. The review will almost always require improvements to the code before it can be included in the kernel. Know that this happens because everyone involved wants to see the best possible solution for the overall success of Linux. The development process has been proven to create the most robust operating system kernel ever, and we do not want to do anything to cause the quality of submissions

and eventual result to ever decrease. If, however, anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable. If so, please contact the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board or the individual members, and they will work to resolve the issue to the best of their ability.

For more information on who is the Technical advisory board and their roles, please see, and then insert the URL. That is essentially the entire code of conflict. Pretty straightforward. Essentially says be nice to each other. Expect to have a few conflicts here and there because everybody's really passionate. That's essentially what it's saying. Right.

You're not going to have no project this size is going to have no conflicts. Right. It's not a rule on how to communicate. It's a set of rules to guide conflict. That's changed now. The new covenant code of conduct starts with this. In the interest of fostering opening and welcoming environments, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to make participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone. Examples of behavior that contribute to creating a positive environment include using welcoming and inclusive language,

being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences, gracefully accepting constructive criticism, focusing on what is best for the community, and showing empathy towards other community members. Now, I would pause here. So we got inclusive language, which is a bit vague, but being respectful to different viewpoints and experiences, that is an area that I think is actually pretty important. And to that end, we may have to consider being inclusive to Linus himself, who perhaps like some of the many other developers I've met in my life, has a certain type of personality that is very driven. It is unempathetic. It's the kind of personality that has the audacity to think they can create a world

dominating operating system and when he announces Linux he starts humbly but just the idea that you could go out there and create something better than what Bell Labs had made or what people staffed at universities getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year could create to have the viewpoint that you could make something better, that takes sort of an absurd personality. It takes somebody who's maybe a bit obtuse in other areas. I've met many of developers that are totally normal personalities, totally normal social lives, all that kind of stuff. But I've also met a lot of developers that maybe are a bit off socially.

They're a bit off on the personality. They may even have a personality disorder that prevents them from having all of the tools necessary to understand someone else's emotions. And if that is the case, then we must also be inclusive of them. And Linus may be one of those people. Right. I mean, you have people on the thick-skinned side of things and you have people on the thin-skinned. And I don't think it's right that either side gets to dictate entirely that they meet on their side. We need to find a good way in the middle where you can still be yourself,

but there are guidelines for people from way different backgrounds and experiences and styles of communicating so that you can all work productively together. Yes. Now, so far, all of this is pretty common sense. You know, nothing really too concerning in any of the language. You know, some people can make the argument you don't need to define this stuff. But I think looking at the discourse of the modern internet, I think it's probably pretty clear you do need to define some of these things because the internet can be a dumpster fire of comments and horrible things. And we certainly see it in other things, right? I mean, you have these roles when you work for a business

or are part of a community or a volunteer organization. I mean, even we go to Linux Fest Northwest every year. They have a code of conduct as well. Right. And I think I want to separate out the use of a code of conduct with the specific code of conduct they have now implemented. I think that's important. Yeah. They're different things.

And I'll tell you, there's one area, and there's a few in here that concern me, but there's one area that jumped out at me as a potential issue. And it's about, it's two things, really. And it's about, it's two things, really. Maintainers have the right, it reads, and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this code of conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently

any contributor for other behaviors that they deem, quote, inappropriate, threatening, or offensive or harmful. Some vagary there, but pretty understandable. What is inappropriate? What is offensive? Those are all things that'll have to be fleshed out as that happens, unfortunately. The enforcers are going to be key to this thing working, right? Yes. The level-headedness that they go with this, the balance that they take is going to make

or break this thing. And we are watching a massive experiment now unfold. We are watching a fairly well-defined but vague language code of conduct be applied to one of the world's most important software projects ever on a massive public scale. And now we're going to see how it gets implemented and how it gets enforced. And there is an area where there could be particular chances for abuse. They write, this code of conduct applies with both within the project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples. Now, I like this. They define the examples of this. This is good. Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project email address. Makes sense.

Posting on an official social media account like the project's Twitter account or something. Or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event. Clearly defined, these are public spaces in which this code of conduct is still going to apply to you. Right. But then the next sentence sort of undoes all of those examples and just makes it really vague and arbitrary. Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers, i.e. the people that are in charge of enforcement can decide what qualifies as representation at the time of enforcement is how I read that. And by putting

that in there, they completely undo all of the specific examples where you could clearly define when you're representing the project. That kind of vagary, I think, can lead to abuse. I mean, it also depends, I think, how it's applied, right? You said it really well. This is a tool for the maintainers in the community. It can be used poorly or it could be used well. And, you know, if you've defined these things up ahead, maybe there's a new thing you're attending and the maintainers want you to know that you are going to be a representative, that's okay. If after the fact they say, you know, you were really representative there and you didn't behave correctly, that's where it really could get into trouble.

And who defines what the borders are there? So say, you know, you're part of a project. Say you're part of the closure project now. And you go to an event to go to a closure know, you're part of a project. Say you're part of the Clojure project now. And you go to an event to go to a Clojure booth and you're there representing this project. Well, let's say later on

you decide to go out and get a few drinks with some people at the event and you post a selfie of getting super wasted at a bar on your Twitter feed. Are you a public representative

all of a sudden still? Like, where does the border, it needs to be really, that kind of stuff. Yeah, it needs to be discussed. If that could get you kicked out of the project, it needs to be really, that kind of stuff. Yeah, it needs to be discussed. If that could get you kicked out of the project, you need to be really clear where the line is. Right. And then this also doesn't really discuss what are that, you know, is it, you're banned the first time, are there warnings, what is the procedure there so that people,

you know, have recourse and feel like they're being fairly treated after being accused of these guidelines. I don't know. Eric, you point out, it really comes down to who the enforcers are and how they behave. I don't know. hanging out at a hack fest or something and you and two other developers get into this huge argument over what sort of encryption scheme to use. And you fight it out, you argue about it, and then you come to some kind of decision and go grab a beer. But someone who's external to the community, someone who's external to that process, having been there multiple times as a systems engineer, it's part of the process. It's almost necessary. Yeah, especially when people are passionate. I mean, we could what if this thing quite a bit, I think, but your core point about how the

enforcement gets done and who does it, I think is the takeaway because it's, you know, if they use, if they're wise and they use good judgment, then it really could be a productive tool. I think it shows our trust in that community, right? Like, do we think that the maintainers are mature people who have in good faith and care about the community and really do want what's best? Or are they just going to use this to further whatever agenda that they were going to do? I'll also say that while this does add some specifics, and as we're talking about, in some ways, not enough specifics.

Before, with the code of conflict, none of this was covered and they still had all that power, right? The maintainers could still do what they want. They're still in charge. True. So we're just getting some more rules. They just might not be enough with the right of conflict, none of this was covered, and they still had all that power, right? The maintainers can still do what they want. They're still in charge. So we're just getting some more rules. There just might not be enough with the right type of rules. I'm not big on rules. You know, the biggest problem with this particular code of conduct that I see

is the language used demands the members of the community are a certain way and holds them to some really fairly good-sounding standards. But the trouble is overreach tends to creep in, and a code of conduct should be a document that describes what will get you kicked out rather than the criteria being allowed for you to stay. Do you follow what I'm saying? So I would, a code of conduct to me should clearly tell you where the boundaries are and what the repercussions are rather than defining how you need to behave to stay. I think there might be room for both, just in from the different backgrounds thing, because if the focus really is on,

you know, this isn't a place to shoot the shit, this isn't a place to just have fun discussions with friends, like, we care about kernel maintainership, we care about the kernel. Now, I agree that there should be both. We should be clear about what is totally not acceptable, what are the consequences. But it might be useful in the same way

where you have, you know, style for your code and the way your patch has to be formatted. Maybe there's some amount of rules that can say, like, and here's the phrases that are helpful to us and will facilitate a quick and easy discussion of your code. Yeah. Yeah, I think the other aspect of the code of conflict, which kind of appealed to me,

and I wonder if there couldn't have been an opportunity to just extend that, is the universal problem with rulemaking is it is much easier to introduce a rule than it is to remove a rule. Absolutely, yes. And it's, you know, you see this everywhere in companies and governments, any bureaucratic institution. They never get repealed. You just add more on. Yeah. And that's my other kind of concern. I think, too, you know, there's obviously other voices.

RMS responded to the code of conduct and said, I disapprove of strict codes of conduct. They feel rigid and repressive to me. That's what he says. I tend to agree with that. It does feel rigid a bit. Get it out of here. He also says, however, since I've never participated

in Linux development, the Linux code of conduct will not affect me. Of course not. He says, however, since I've never participated in Linux development, the Linux code of conduct will not affect me. Of course not. He says, however— And he's never even installed the darn thing. Yeah, I do know that Linux is a kernel and nothing more. Linux kernel is redundant. And then he goes into the history of the GNU project,

which is so classic RMS. I would have almost been disappointed had he not. But the core point about what about adopting a different code of conduct? Maybe one that didn't have so much political charge around it. Yeah, I like that. I mean, are there ways we can do this better? How about just a very simple one, which just says, don't be a jerk? I mean, is that enough? Well, I think people are saying it is not.

I think what Greg was saying is that it was insufficient. Being excellent to each other did not work out. But with great responsibility comes I don't know, you know, all that kind of superhero stuff. I did like Dom Getter online. He proposed the No Code of Conduct

Code of Conduct. NCOC for short. It's a new idea designed to help find communities and projects that will not get stuck endlessly debating how members should behave. It's to be adults to each other is the other one. Gen 2 actually has a fairly good code of conduct that I wonder if the Linux kernel could not have adopted. I think the core issue here really is that the code of conduct that they chose itself is very politically charged.

The code of conduct that they chose itself is very politically charged. The core author, the primary author of it is a political activist, and they are sort of a big personality. They're well-known in that circle. They have a very strong opinion, and it chosen to extend their existing one and not chosen one that seems to be one of the most politically charged out there and then tied to an author with a bold and loud personality, we may have avoided a ton of this upset. And I wonder why that wasn't the direction. It almost felt like, ah, hands up. We don't have time to deal with this.

Just go adopt the popular one. I wonder if it was like that or how much has this been discussed behind the scenes that we're not aware of? And how much can we spend some energy for everyone who's concerned? And I think there are legitimate concerns, of course. Can we spend that time saying, like, how can we change this? Because it is, yes, it does come from a weird

background, but I think it's important to keep in mind that, you know, they copied the parts they want and can change it as much as they want. So future commits could make this whatever we need it to be. There is now though that, that looming discussion of, is there going to be a fork? Somebody on the Git post where they announced the new code of conduct says, I would civilly suggest that this commit, if it's not reverted, that I hope the kernel will be forked and stripped of this code of conduct

and available for distribution package managers for easy installation and kept in parity with the current kernel. A move such as this will inevitably not bring about what the code of conduct intends to bring, but will dilute contributions to the project, create more conflict, and punish individuals and excommunicate those who have wrong opinions or politics and push merit aside and bring forth its demise.

Fork the kernel. Come on, that's like the most negative possible way of looking at it. Welcome to the internet, Alex. Yeah, fair point. Yeah, I agree though. It's very much, it's all merit-based, right? Everybody's upset because we're switching from a merit-based system now to something else,

but they're not accepting the merit-based decisions of the current leaders at the same time. Like if it's merit-based and you like the way it worked, then you should be accepting of the people in charge's decisions because it's all merit-based right now. So which one is it? You can't have it both ways. I, like I said earlier, not a fan of more rules. I generally think what we're doing here is probably going to create more bureaucracy around the development of the Linux kernel. I also think the Linux kernel is in a market position and in a maturity where it can handle this and not

be the end of the world. I think it's interesting too because it has been, you know, this is a change after a long-running project where we see a lot of other projects that have come along and either added it with much less drama or have just started with it, right? Things like Curl or Kubernetes that are seemingly doing just fine or have massive momentum, but adding it after the fact,

after a long community that already has its own norms and values, that can be dicey. Yeah, it's really going to be about watching where this thing goes. Yeah, and these agreements and conditions are, you know, they're an aspect of that community and each community, even with the same language, is going to interpret that and handle it differently. Will we see people getting kicked out? Will we see people's speech being suppressed? Or will we see civility improve on the mailing list? These are all questions that we just won't

have answers to until we watch this thing play out. And we really won't know until Linus has been back for a while and we see maybe new contributors answers to until we watch this thing play out. And we really won't know until Linus has been back for a while and we see maybe new contributors come along and we maybe hear from people if it's made a difference or not. We just won't know. We need stories about like, I wanted to contribute,

but I couldn't because of this. Or, you know, the reverse. People said like, I didn't want to contribute before, but hey, now I feel better that I'll be respected and I want to be a part of the community. It's one of these situations

where I think it's worth not overreacting. It's worth taking a measured approach. And I don't want to disparage anybody who thinks this is a great idea. And I don't really want to disparage anybody who has great concerns about this. And I've heard from all of you. I've heard from those of you who felt like they shouldn't contribute before. And I've heard from those of you who believe this will be the end of the Linux kernel and you are looking for another boat to jump to. A lot of people are joking that they're going to switch to OpenBSD this week. I've heard a lot of that.

I just think that's all we can do right now. Yeah, we just have to wait and see. Does the fork become really popular and that's where the community goes? Or does the kernel just keep on going? If I had a DeLorean that could get up to 88 miles per hour, I might go back and try to convince them maybe adopt a different code of conduct just to avoid some of this, even if it's heavily inspired by. 25 years ago or whatever it was when Linus put out,

was it 93 on the Minix mailing list or whatever it was? Yeah. You know, open source was, it just was nowhere. It just wasn't, it just wasn't even a thing. Right. And like Wes said a few minutes ago you know you've got projects now like Kubernetes and loads and loads of other massive open source projects that have been born as a consequence of the open source movement

people now have a lot better idea about how to behave and how to conduct themselves in these scenarios I do think you know you can't just have an open door and just say you know like I said about how to behave and how to conduct themselves in these scenarios. I do think you can't just have an open door and just say, like I said earlier, don't just be a jerk. I think there has to be a little more structure to it than that. But honestly, I think we're at a point now where it's quite well self-policing and governed as a movement. Yeah, I think that's likely the case. And I think we'll learn more.

Perhaps we'll learn about the Linux Foundation's role in this change. That is a good question. I did notice they are the ones that you report to if you have enforcement issues. It's tab at linuxfoundation.org, which is the technical advisory board. So that's interesting.

I would be delighted to learn the backstory there. But I think for now, I'll just leave it to the audience. Let us know what you think. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Send us in your thoughts. The range of it, you know, I'm trying to soak in as many thoughts and opinions. This is one of those things where it takes me more than a week to really come to some sort of...

We're still in the sort of stunned silence phase of this, right? It was just like two days ago. Yeah, it's been literally just like a day and a half really since we've learned about this. So it's still, you know, I'm processing. Sometimes I come on in a week or two, and my position has changed a little bit. But I think that's where I want to end it now. And I'd like to hear the audience's opinion on it, too, on the Unplugged show. So let's transition to our new goodies that we got this week. Kind of perks of becoming Linux Academy employees is everybody gets to pick a

machine. And Linux Academy has a policy, you pick your own operating system. And Wes and I had been kicking around the idea of these ThinkPad T480s, buying them personally, which was taking us forever, because that's a chunk of change. You want to make the right choice. And so they arrived late yesterday. So Wes is about to unbox his right now on the show. You ready, Wes? It's exciting, right?

It's a thin ThinkPad box that's the ThinkPad T480 designed for serious business. And we got it with a couple of extra options. I love it. A little theater of the mind there. Get it out of there, Wes. Yeah. It's light, right? It is light.

Yeah. Look at this. Yeah. Yeah. Now, it doesn't have the – No, but it does have a three-cell battery built in right now. Just built right in? Mm-hmm.

So I'll talk about – I'll tell you why you open it up and get your first impressions on, which I think would be really good. I'd love to hear. But I'll tell you about the specs, okay? Here's the hardware that we got in these. So these are Lenovo ThinkPad T480s, not 480Ss, people have wondered. They weigh 3.6 pounds. This is light.

I mean, I can, one hand, I can hold this for hours. It's got a, we got them with the 14-inch IPS 1080p displays. We decided not to go 4K on these ones. I already, having used mine for a little bit longer than Wes has, obviously, I'm already very thankful of going 1080p because there are certain apps that have never gotten high DPI that I've really strained my eyes to use, and now they just look glorious on this IPS display. It's got an 8th generation i7-8650U, runs at 1.9 gigahertz base, turbo's up to 4.2 gigahertz, although there's a caveat there.

We'll get into that. Yeah. These suckers have 32 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. Oh! So screw you, MacBook, with your 16 gig limit. One terabyte PCIe MVNE drives in them. Oh yeah. And then the way these Lenovo's work, which is pretty fancy,

is as a three cell built-in battery. They don't call it that. They call it like a power station because they got to brand it. It was just silly, right? But then we also got it with the additional six cell battery that snaps into the back. So you get the three cell and the six cell combined. And on my first night of testing,

I actually failed to run the battery down, even when I left it running, downloading for a while overnight. So why right now running plasma neon 1804, I'm estimating about 10 hours of battery life, 10 hours. That is more than I need. I mean, that's fantastic.

That's all-day battery. That is all-day battery, all-workday battery. It's got Intel Wireless in them, and then some of the best parts really is the connectivity. Along the right edge, there's two USB 3 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and one of them is also a Thunderbolt port where you charge the device over USB-C. It's got HDMI out.

It has gigabit Ethernet, a full Ethernet jack, audio jack, SD card slot, and the security lock slot that Lenovo's have. Did you say it has a headphone jack? You've got to be specific these days. I know, right? Pretty freaking exciting.

And it's also a certified Ubuntu machine. Great viewing angles on this screen. Yeah, yeah, it is. ArchWiki is pretty sparse on this machine because basically everything works, with the exception of a throttling bug that the T480s, as well as several other models of Lenovo's and even a Dell have, which we'll have the specifics linked in the show notes. But it turns out there's an issue with throttling that only exists on Linux. It really comes down to Intel and their crappy data sheets.

The cause is simply that there is an activation offset in the master temperature control target register, which they flip some bits. And so essentially the issue is, is the kernel prevents the CPU from boosting all the way to 4.2 gigahertz. On some systems, it'll go like around 3.5 gigahertz, maybe even 3.9 gigahertz in some cases, but it won't stay there

because of this stupid freaking bug that exists. It's just part of, you know, it was really a typo on Intel's part. And as all things in Linux, there's actually a workaround script up on GitHub that will fix this issue, but it involves turning off secure boot. It required a couple of, oh, yeah, you can't have thermal D installed

to monitor the temperature stuff. Oh, okay. So it's not a perfect fix. So we are technically limited in max performance right now because of this bug. And it would require a firmware update on Lenovo's part to fix it. Now, they have released two firmware updates

for these machines for Linux. And as we talked about, we should be able to use them right from Linux. Right, because they're now part of the LVFS project. So there may be a fix inbound or could try this experimental script. I'm curious. We'll have to do some benchmarks with this script and really see like, you know, how much does it really affect and what of our potential workloads will actually benefit. Right. Yeah. Because I did some

testing with the remote connection software that we use to remote back to the studio and it did great. It did better than most laptops do. So I'm pretty happy with it. We'll have some additional resources though if you want to know more about that or read some reviews for the T480 with Linux. But we're doing things a little differently this time. So first of all, one of the things that I really like is that Wes and I got identical laptops. And those of you who've listened to the show for a while might know that one of my ways of achieving solid production is trying to have duplicates of machines. So that way we can swap machines if we need to or swap parts and everything's compatible or move a hard drive image to another system when if like a laptop fries and we're live on location you know there's having two of of the of the

machines that you use to get on the air is just it's it's almost a necessity really if you're doing a lot of live broadcasts or a lot of on the road productions and so that was the main drive for us getting exactly identical systems is if Wes and I are in an event and one of us is having a technical issue that's preventing us from recording a show, we can part swap. Or we could just- Although we have all the right dongles or batteries. Or, yeah.

If I get a dock here in the studio or another power adapter, you can use it. Oh, perfect. You know, there's all those things that are just, I think, really, really great about having two identical machines. But this time around, and I'm curious what you're going to do differently, this time around, I'm leaving Windows on it, which I never do.

I never do that. But I've shrunk the partition down so it's like a 90 gig Linux, or I'm sorry, 90 gig partition for Windows, and then the rest of the terabyte drive is for Linux. That's pretty reasonable. I thought, you know, maybe for some funky firmware thing, or I'm sorry, 90 gig partition for Windows, and then the rest of the terabyte drive is for Linux. That's pretty reasonable. I thought, you know, maybe for some funky firmware thing,

or maybe some game might come out someday, or some, like my Garmin in my RV can only be updated from Windows. Right. Maybe a guest has some software they can only use to communicate, and we got to bring them in on Windows just that once. Maybe. You never know. I mean, I really have not needed Windows for years,

but I just thought, if I'm getting a licensed version of Windows Pro, and I got a terabyte drive, I could burn 90 gigs and have it there just in case. Plus, I've now mounted that partition under Linux, which can be kind of handy when using Wine and stuff. That can be really nice, yeah. So that's one thing I'm doing differently, is I think for now, I don't know if I'll keep it that way. I could see myself reloading this machine and I could see myself blowing Windows away. I mean, at some point, you know, I just haven't used it. The other thing, too, is you can always shrink it as much

as you want and then take a little backup of it and we could keep it on a server somewhere. If you want to send it back for factory maintenance or whatever, you can lay that disk image back down. So that's one thing I'm doing differently. I also opted not to go Kubuntu. I decided to go Neon 1804, even though it's still kind of in the testing.

I just wanted to be on... You're right on that edge, man. I like the fresh plasma. Fresh, hot plasma. But you get the LTS base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those are... Are you doing anything differently?

Are you going to do a different distro? Are you going to keep Windows? What's your plan? Well, I've been debating Kubuntu. I've been enjoying Plasma a lot and it makes a pretty nice, I don't know, GNOME works pretty well for me

for just like terminal and browsing the web. But when I have a lot of windows open and I really want some like complicated window management or I need to manage multiple workspaces, Plasma has a little bit of an edge

in just extensibility. Yeah, I agree. And you've been using it a lot so it would be nice again again, in that same vein, if you need to use my laptop. It's true. So I was looking at maybe the latest Kubuntu, but you're tempting me with that knee.

I'm going to be curious what you see. Yeah, I mean, I think Kubuntu is so rock solid. Like, if you want a true workhorse, then I think you're, you know, and it's 1804 base, too. We've also got enough space. I'm debating, you know, maybe I'll keep Windows 2.

Maybe get, like, just LTS Kubuntu on there, set up, ready to go, all the software we need. That's like your workhorse distro. Backup workhorse. And then have other space for distro of the week and or just whatever. That's a good idea. Yeah.

Because we do that a lot. I probably should have left a little space on mine because we do that a fair amount. In fact, I was thinking about giving Project Trident a go for a week. You know, just live on Project Trident. I am debating some ZFS on Root here for this guy. Really?

Yeah, we'll see. Ooh, that'd be fun to hear. So, you know, we've already kind of covered it, but we also wanted to call out what's important to us when designing and building and then selecting and purchasing a work machine. Because if this was a machine for me just to bop around the RV or something like that, I may have gone with an XPS 13.

That'd be really tempting, yeah. Or maybe a Galago. Like, I don't think I would have necessarily picked a ThinkPad T480 for my personal just, like, stick it on the couch and use it for browsing the internet just for fun. But when it came to a work machine, I needed these quote-unquote legacy ports that all of my current audio hardware uses. USB-A, Ethernet to transfer multi-gig files.

Yes. And I mean, just for live streaming, you can't beat Ethernet. Yeah. And being able to pick the whole package, 14 inches, 3.6 pounds, 10 hours of battery life, which even if in heavy production that works out to be 5 or 8, I'm fine. Fine. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah, they're not the most beautiful. I think they have their own sort of elegance, but you can tell while light, they're rugged. They've been building

for a long time now. They do feel rugged. With those batteries, don't forget, you can do the Noah Chalaya trick of pulling one out and shoving a new one in, and it doesn't have to reboot or anything. Keeps going because that built-in threesome keeps going. It's great. How'd you find the nipple in the middle of the, they call it a track point, don't they? How'd you find that?

You know, I've used it a bit. It's not bad. I kind of actually like it. The, the, the track point is decent. The track pad is one of the better ones on a PC laptop. It's got some grit to it. Um, and it's, it's one of those where you click the whole trackpad. I don't like that part too much. So that's why I've sort of been preferring the nipple. Yeah, I have more experience with the Dell's version of the nipple, but I do kind of like it. It's nice. I don't use it for everything, but when you're just using the mouse, you want to go real quick,

it can be handy. It's nice too because I disable the trackpad as soon as I connect my Bluetooth Logitech MX, which I love the Logitech MX Anywhere series of mice. They're the best mice for a laptop. And so I keep one in my bag. And so as soon as I connect that, I have the trackpad disabled. So that way I don't ever have any like mistaken touches while I'm typing. That keyboard is the best keyboard I've used in a laptop in probably seven, eight years. Yeah. Decent travel. It's quiet, which is nice for broadcasting.

Feels good on the fingers. And I have RSI issues, and the MacBook keyboard triggers them because I'm just a, you know, I'm an old man now. I just type really heavy. I'm used to mechanical keyboards. I grew up on the IBM PS2s and things like that, so I was clank, clank, clank, clank, clank. And I smash my fingers into the MacBook,

and I have to constantly remind myself, don't type so hard, but when I get going, I just get going. You just get going. You're passionate. Not an issue on the ThinkPad. Not an issue at all. It's one of the best laptop keyboards I've felt in a really long time. And so what are your first impressions of it? Now you've had it out of the box for a moment. What do you think? I like it. I think this is going to be just a really good... That's it. It's

not flashy, but it just feels like I can sit down, I'll know that it's going to boot up, it's going to be ready to go, and it's got the guts to perform when we need it to. Yeah, yeah. And I also want to talk a little bit about some of the tweaks that we're going to make to the machine to use it in production. Both Wes and I have been experimenting with a project called KX Studio.

And KX Studio is like a series of packages or repos that you can overlay on your distribution and bring in a bunch of cross-platform pro audio applications. It's a huge collection of different ones, specifically some that are used to set up jack audio, which I'm just beginning to really wrap my head around because for a full mobile machine

where I'm recording my microphone and I got a soundboard and I'm recording my remote host and all of that, I got to use something more sophisticated than just straight pulse audio. I need to start creating virtual sound devices and capturing them to specific files. Yeah, I mean, when you think about all the equipment we've got up here in the studio, it's a

challenge to get all of that working in a laptop. We've done it before but not with Jack, but we've done it before using external audio devices and sophisticated routing, and the goal here is to do it all in software. We'll see. We have members that join us in the Mumble Room fairly frequently that are using

Jack Audio with reliability and have great things to say about it. And there are tools with Jack Audio that allow you to draw a connection from one audio device to another audio device, like you're patching wires and it's a visual thing. It's really cool.

The application's like Katina or something like that. Do you remember? I know you've been playing with it a bit, too. Yeah, I mean, there's several. There's the whole, like, the Cadence suite of applications. Cadence, that's what it was. Yes, Cadence. And Cadence itself is like a nice GUI

that'll help you get Jack all set up. It's got stuff like, you know, ALSA and Pulse bridges built into it. And then Katia, C-A-T-I-A, is the Jack patch-based you know, ALSA and Pulse bridges built into it. And then CATIA, C-A-T-I-A, is the jack patch based software that lets you drag and draw to different devices. It's just such a nice model, you know,

where you get these jack lines and they show up and you've got inputs and outputs and then you can just connect them however you want and jack handles the rest. And our favorite recording software that we use now under Linux to record our podcast, Reaper, has full support for jack devices. Oh, it works so nicely. So they show up as input channels.

It's just brilliant. So I could, you know, have a jack device that is just my microphone, and I can record that as a separate track in Reaper. I can have a jack device that's just Wes when he's remote or if I'm remote, and that goes on a channel. I mean, the potential is huge. And that's one of the tweaks we're going to be making. I've got the KX Studio repositories. I've got Caddy and a few other things installed, but I don't really have not really wrapped my head around

how to actually create virtual in and out devices and stuff like that. That's like the next stage I'm going to be going to. But my hope is in a month or two, I've got this thing down pretty well, and KDE Neon is going to be stabilized by then, and I'm going to have a pretty serious remote mobile workstation that fans don't kick up when I connect back to the studio.

Right, yes. And I think some of the KX Studio 1804 repos are also stabilizing a bit. So, you know, wait and see. Not everything's going to be perfect. It does make me think, too, we need to, you know, we should do, we'll try to do a good job documenting this, too,

because I know, I mean, it'd be good for you guys to see, but also on our end if we just need to redo something really quick, we don't want to be futzing with it. Yeah, I don't want to make it like a holy install that I can't touch. No, absolutely not. Gotta be able to nuke and pave and reset it up. And I think we can get there because it's just putzing around. You and I have made

some progress just individually. Very excited about it. I used the machine all night and all day yesterday. It came at noon. So I got it at noon yesterday and just immediately went to work. Just tore right into it. Yeah, of course.

Oh, my God. So I booted into Windows for the first time just to, like, log into my account that Linux Academy had created and, you know, log in and do any of those firmware updates. But they'd taken care of all that. But I was just curious. You know, he's like, what's this like? What's this environment like? It's so bad. Windows, like when you search for Windows Update in the start menu,

you get like everything but Windows Update. You get like the Windows Update settings and Windows Update hours and all these things that are not Windows Update. Just actually doing the updates. Yeah, if you write check for updates, then you get, I mean, it's just, Windows 10 has got so much going on. It's be-blurking at me with OEM messages and be-blurking at me with Microsoft messages about installing Defender.

When I first logged in, my CPU was completely pegged for like five minutes. And so I launch, you know, I do control-alt-delete to go use the new task manager, but now they've got a baby task manager that brings up. So I've got to click something else to get a decent task manager now. And then I look at it, and 98% of, or it was two CPUs or something, it's just completely being dominated by the Windows Defender doing a malware scan of my system because apparently the first login of my

account ever was the time to do that. Yeah, that's what you want as your first run experience. So, you know, I open up the machine, literally the first time I log in, the fans are going like crazy. Like, there's so much stuff going on. I'm like, this is awful. This is horrible. Could not download that KDE Neon 1804 preview ISO fast enough. How did that install go?

Oh, beautiful. Beautiful. Secure boot worked fine. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Secure boot's on using UEFI, no problem. The only thing that was a little tricky was, you know, I decided to install gparted to shrink the partition

because I just find that the cute Unity-ish, whatever that Ubiquiti installer is that they're using for Kubuntu and KDE Neon, the partitioner is just, it's not great. Like, the fields are too narrow. You've got to expand it all out. You've always got to stretch the window out and make it bigger. You've got to click on the partition and click change.

You can't just double click. It's just dense. It's hard to be Gparted for just getting some serious disk work done. I flipped over to G-parted, did some of my heavy lifting there, resized the NTFS partition there, did a safety reboot back into Windows to make sure everything was good, booted back into the Neon installer, and then I just did the installation like normal.

It went flawless. Beautiful. And since Neon's been installed, man, it's just been beautifully fast. Like, it's just incredibly fast boot. I got Plasma totally customized the way I like it in an evening. And this is with, like, all your Electron amps. Oh, yeah. I'm running Slack and I'm running Mail Spring and I'm running Telegram

and I'm running all that stuff all the time. And each using KDE Windows rules, they're assigned to their specific Windows desktops and with specific window constraints. And it's just great. It's just great. Super fast. I installed a couple of Steam games, you know,

doing all this stuff while we're on battery. I didn't even take my power adapter home. I was like, let's see what this laptop can do. Oh, you're living on the edge again. Yeah, after playing on the machine all day, I disconnect the USB power adapter and I grab the laptop and I go home power adapter free. And I'm like, I'm going to see if I can make it all night.

I was up till 1030. I mean, I got home. I go home power adapter free, and I'm like, I'm going to see if I can make it all night. I was up until 10.30. I mean, I got home. I used that machine through dinner, through watching Deep Space Nine. Like, I did not move from that machine all night. You know, my situation sort of precludes me moving a lot anyway, so I sort of stay put anyways. And so I'm sitting there working on that machine all night on battery, installing software, you know, snapping stuff up,

like just going nuts, and downloading games and trying them out. And I ended the night by just letting the machine continue to download software for another 90 minutes, and I just turned the screen off, and I went to bed, came back, it had, you know, dutifully gone to sleep, it had finished all the downloads, and I look at the thing still has 27% battery, and it's still telling me three and a half hours left of charge oh i'm excited i know it was really something like i didn't know i could accomplish that in linux like i didn't know that was going to be possible so that was really neat that was a really great first impression and the fact that the machine just was never a slouch you know just kept up with everything i

was doing i think having mv and e drives really helps with that and then having that i7 do you have a usbc charger pack for it yet yeah that's what it comes i7 do you have a usbc charger pack for it yet yeah that's what it comes with yeah it comes with a usbc really yeah it's like a 65 water and i guess you can get up to like 100 watts or something if you get the dock yeah because they they used to the 470s is the one that i have and they still came with the square lenovo tip but the cf480 has usb by default all in and that us-C port is also a Thunderbolt 3 port as well. Yeah, it is. That's beautiful. Very

excited about this. Once you figure out how all the cables work in that weird domain, the possibilities are endless. Yeah, I think fully spec'd they were close to $1,800, you know, but that's still significantly cheaper than a MacBook. Significantly cheaper. And for the value we're getting, I mean, well worth it. Yeah, very happy with it.

So, be kicking the tires and I'm sure eventually I'll probably load some other distros on there and stuff like that. But really looking forward to just building a rock-solid mobile

recording studio in a laptop. Yeah, if you guys have tips, let us know. I mean, some of you have been using Jack out there. Maybe you've got some things we really shouldn't miss

when getting that set up. Or, I'm a new ThinkPad user here. I mean, I've played with them before. I had a really old one back in the day, but I'm new to this. So if there's like ThinkPad things we need to do, I'd like to know.

I would go as far as to conjecture, and this may be hopeful thinking, but you almost have to believe that Lenovo has done work to make sure this works under Linux. Because when you look at like the Ubuntu wiki and the Arch wiki, they basically say everything just works out of the box. Like when you read people's like, the Ubuntu wiki and the Arch wiki, they basically say,

everything just works out of the box. And, like, when you read people's reviews for the current T480s, like, everything just works. All the hardware just works. And then you look at the work they've done with LVFS recently. I think there's more going on.

There's some playing ball happening that maybe they're not so public about. Yeah, and one of the things that really drew me to the T480 is I think Alex and others had told me that, you know, there's a lot of folks at Red Hat using this particular model of ThinkPad.

And I thought, okay. They know what they're doing. Yeah, maybe they're hip to what Lenovo's actually doing behind the scenes. They could be having those business-to-business conversations and Red Hat could say, hey, we'll buy 10,000 of those if you can make sure it does XYZ okay for us. No comment on that. So,

Wes, you were saying anything specific to thinkpads and linux there's a website thinkwiki.org oh that has some interesting stuff i dropped a link in irc for you oh well check that out i'll try to toss that in the show notes too i uh yeah i uh i think it was a good choice uh it's not like you've said it's not the most flashy laptop you could find but i think i think it's a really practical solution. And if you're on the fence out there about what machine to get, I really endorse this machine. I think it's pretty fantastic.

And it's nice to see everything just working out of the box. The one thing I'm a little worried about, I've read that Plasma users have issues with the Thunderbolt security model. You may recall we recently covered that GNOME added support for user prompting to authorize Thunderbolt devices when you plug them in.

I mean, these suckers are sitting on your PCI bus. And Plasma does not yet have the facility to authorize and prompt you to authorize them. And I have read, cannot confirm yet, but I have read that if Thunderbolt security is turned on, that as a Plasma user, you have to log out and log into GNOME 3 and then authorize a device, like a dock or whatever it is, then

log out of GNOME and log back into Plasma. And you have to do that every time you change a device. That sounds horrible. And so what I did is I just turned off Thunderbolt security in the BIOS, which is actually an option. I don't know what all the ramifications of that are other than exposing my PCI bus, but...

Your RAM is mine now, Chris. You better watch those ports. Who needs Heartbleed? Wes will just plug in. So yeah, I made that choice for now, but I'm hoping the Plasma project just integrates support for that security authorization. Something we'll cover, I'm sure, right here on Linux Unplugged. Very fun, though. It's great to get

new machines, especially ones that we've been kind of thinking about anyways for a while. I'll be really curious to hear your report after you get it loaded and run. I do think a nice Linux Unplugged sticker is going to look great on the back. I like the way you're thinking. I like that. So if you've got any experience with machines like this

or other tips like the Lenovo Wiki, let us know, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. You can also grab our RSS feed. That way you get every single show. It's just linuxunplugged.com slash RSS. And you plug that in to whatever reader or downloader you like. You got, oh, look at this.

It's already in the show notes. Boom. Very nice. All right, well, go get more Wes over at techsnap.systems. Catch him on the recent episodes of Linux Action News as well. It's some great Wes Payne episodes recently.

Well, thank you, sir. Stepping up, hitting it out of the park. It's nice to have you here full time now, and I think it's already paying dividends. It sure is. Well, so go get more, Wes, and we'll be back next week. I am probably still going to be, for a while, at least a couple more weeks, kind of taking it easy. Try to be here on Tuesdays for this show.

Going to try to make it for Coder later this week, but that's probably about the most I'll be doing for the next few weeks. I'm still there, though. Still working every single day. Still checking in on stuff. Making sure Wes doesn't ruin everything. I need a lot, though. Still working every single day. Still checking in on stuff. Making sure Wes doesn't ruin everything. I need a lot of supervision. Yeah, that's for sure. But in the meantime, that will

bring us to the end of this week's show. I encourage you to join us. We've got that open mumble room where you can comment and participate in the virtual lug. And that goes before the show and after the show. We often hang out and chat a bunch. We have a great time. It really is fun. And I have a strong sense that an unplugged barbecue is in our future. When I've recovered, I can move around a little bit better.

I think I can smell it already. Yeah. I feel like an unplugged barbecue is in our future. So stay tuned for details on that. And hit me up on Telegram, JupiterBroadcasting.com slash Telegram. Join our group and let us know your ideas for a barbecue join us live next week and in the meantime we'll see you back here next tuesday Oh! The unplugged show.

There we go. Oh, yeah. All right, we've got to title this thing. We ran right up to the Ask Nor program this week, so it's a big show. It was a lot to cover. You did half of it twice. People don't know, but we did, yeah.

The recording stopped, and we had to redo part of the show, which was never fun, but we got through it. Here we are now. Super impressive. You guys did awesome. Oh, stop. I felt like I we got through it. We got through it. Here we are now. Super impressive. You guys did awesome. Oh, stop. I felt like I was listening to it for the first time twice. Well, good.

Good. Yeah. You know, when I saw that Linus News, like, I literally had to sit with it for the morning. Like, I guess I didn't realize how much it would impact me. It was hard to, right? You couldn't just, like, chew on it immediately. You had to let it percolate up. I just kind of posted the link somewhere.

I would look at them later and came back to it. I was going to mention, it didn't quite make it into the news, but those of you out there that are running Windows, and my stats show it's a fair percentage of you, our friends over at Microsoft and Canonical have a new baby. There are now optimized Ubuntu desktop images available for Hyper-V in the Hyper-V gallery. And it's kind of legit.

They've integrated XRDP upstream to add support for enhanced session mode. They've improved clipboard integration. There's dynamic desktop resizing support. And there's also now support for shared folders for the host and guest file transfer. And a much improved mouse experience, and it's easy to move between the host

and the guest desktop window. Nice. I mean, if you're on professional, you might not really need VirtualBox anymore. That's what I mean. If you're a Windows 10 user on Pro and you've got Hyper-V, they've now got this Hyper-V gallery

where you can just install 18.04 optimized for Hyper-V. You know, I could try it in my new Windows partition, actually, and see how it goes. I hadn't really realized that, but I could actually try, like, Windows Subsystem now, and this. Oh, now careful, careful. Once you taste it.

But that's negative in the freedom dimension. Is it? Is it? I have a hard time. And the value of this is negative. I can't really figure that out. Or is it like a surreptitious freedom injection into the proprietary universe? Right, it's like a beachhead. It's like a Trojan horse.

We are the wedge. I've never installed GNU slash Linux.