LINUX Unplugged - Episode 269: Alternate Desktop Universe

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

What if desktop computing went a very different direction in the late 90s? Deeply multithreaded from the start, fast, intuitive, and extremely stable. This is the world of Haiku, and we go for a visit. Plus the latest community news, true flicker freedom comes to Fedora, and our favorite tools for easy virtual machines on our laptops. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

There's this thing in the back of your mind where you sometimes wonder, I feel like computers used to be easier or they were faster or you could do more with less space. And you always sort of kind of dismiss that. The practical voice comes in and says, oh, come on now, Chris. Computers are great. They do so much more. They're connected to the internet. They have richer content. And they're so much more sophisticated.

And I go, yeah, you know what? You're a practical self. You're right. You're right. Your practical self, you're right. You're right. But then you try out like Haiku OS, which is, it's from an era that almost feels like an alternative universe, the way personal computers could have gone. And you realize that things may actually have been better and they were way ahead of their

time. I didn't really expect to have this, but it just hit me in waves as I was trying out Haiku this week. It is another way of doing computing that I think was better. Like they nailed it back then. If BIOS or B-O-S, however you like to say it, had gotten the user desktop share that Linux has today, you know, something that's not substantial, but it's respectable and sustainable. If B-O-S had achieved that back in the late 90s, early 2000s, they would be the most advanced,

sophisticated operating system on the planet today. Because where Haiku is at right now is phenomenally mind-blowing. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 269 for October 2nd, 2018. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's post-test barbecue and pre-switching to Haiku OS. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. We have a really fun episode today.

In fact, it was one of these special episodes where I jumped on a train, took a ride down to Seattle, and met up with Wes in his home turf so that way we could brainstorm about the show over lunch and on the drive up. At least that's our excuse. Worked pretty well. It did actually work really well. Thank you for the ride, by the way. That was great. I really enjoyed it because I could work on the train the whole way down and prep today's big, big show.

So coming up, we'll get into some community news that I think is going to pique your interest and things that we should probably just keep an eye on over the next few months. Plus, we'll look back at what some may say

was the heyday of computing when everyone hated Microsoft and BOS was possibly going to be a thing. And then we'll look forward now with the new release that the Haiku Project has just put out after a really, really long time. And we'll try to make the case for Haiku and why you should care. If you're sitting there thinking to yourself,

what's the point? I hope we answer that today. Then we'll give you an update on our ThinkPad T480s. My thought on this is, what's the point of doing a review if you don't follow up after using it for a while and tell you about some of the road bumps you've hit? And some of these apply to multiple breeds of laptops from several vendors. So we'll get into that, do a little follow-up there.

Then we'll tell you about some of the new things we set up, the VM environments that we're doing, and some of the tools we're using to try to manage those VM environments on our laptop. And then last but not least, a little bit of a tip. We've talked a lot about the LVFS project. Well, today we're going to talk about doing LVFS the hard way. So perhaps you're not a GNOME shell user. You don't have GNOME software. How do you get all of those great firmwares onto your machine and get your firmware updated if you don't have GNOME software, how do you get all of those great firmwares onto your machine and get your firmware updated if you don't have GNOME software? How do you do it?

I want to know. We'll tell you how to do it. It's just a few couple of easy commands that are probably already installed on your machine. And you can update your firmware from the command line, which is the proper way to do it. It's the proper, come on, that's the proper way to do it. Well, we can't go any farther, though, without bringing in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hey, hello.

Hello. Morning. Wake up and smell the coffee. We got a great turnout. Brent is in there. Brandon is in there. We have two Erics, Eric and Eric the IT guy. Mr. KP, Mini-Mech, Ryan Sipes returns for a second show in a row.

And Sean's back, too. And Sean, you've been here for a while, too. So, guys, thank you so much. That mumble room is open. You can find out more by just Googling Jupiter Colony mumble, really. There's a setup guide. And you just have to pass a mic check and have headphones, learn how to use Push to Talk, and you can join the conversation in the show. Next week is going to be 270.

What? It would be really awesome to have a great showing. Yes, it would. Come join us. It's lots of fun. We did do the test barbecue after have a great showing. Yes, it would. Come join us. It's lots of fun. We did do the test barbecue after last week's episode. It went pretty well. There was one dynamic situation that, all in all, all things considered, went pretty well.

Wes brought a surprise sous vide. But the sort of dynamic situation that had to be dealt with was the brown bear. You see, he, myself, not a big fan of the schnapps, but brown bears recently discovered rupplements, which he's a pretty big fan of, and it's pretty strong. So, you know, we had to,

we discovered the boundaries of how much booze should be at the barbecue. So we'll get that right on the next one. It's an important thing to work out because, well, the results could have been disastrous. Yeah. Everything went fine. Everything went fine.

It all went good. Only small damage. We're healed now. Had some good conversations, though, in the meantime. Speaking of great conversations, before we get into the community news, I just wanted to put out there that if you've been wondering why was Chris gone, what happened to him, why is he talking about himself in the third person, all of that gets explained in this week's, or last week's, I suppose, User Air, episode 49, not dead yet, air.show slash 49. I talk about my recent brush with death and what happened to me while I was in Texas.

And then also we get into some bigger questions about Windows affecting bare metal Linux adoption now. And it's a pretty great episode. The guys invited me on to tell my story about my near brush with death, and I had a great time hanging out with Dan and Popey and Joe. And if you've been wondering what happened, I invite you to check out user error.show slash 49. But with that out of the way, let's get into some community news.

I have had an interesting conversation over the last week and half with System76. And they've released publicly now information. It's just a bit of a tease at this point, but it's piquing my interest. Posted just recently on the System76 blog, they announced, quote, System76 is releasing a new open source computer available for pre-order next month. Hmm. Really now? Yeah.

Yeah. An open source computer. Yeah. Okay. Well, so their CEO, Carl, posted a few days ago on Twitter that at this week's Open Hardware Summit, they'll be showing off this soon-to-be released open hardware desktop, and it might be called Thelio. Yeah, it looks like it will, and there's not

a ton of details yet. We know that System76 has been spinning up a warehouse where they're going to build their own systems, but you're left with a lot of questions, and I'm kind of a naturally skeptical guy. So it's like, is this x86 based? Is this going to be a RISC computer? Because really, you'd have to go RISC-V to go

I mean, I would think. Or, you know, is this something about the binary blobs that will be required to run it? What is the definition of fully open source here? What does that mean? And I haven't gotten a clear answer from them, but I did

get an invitation to go out and visit towards mid-November isish, I'm not quite sure, somewhere in the November month to actually see the machine in person. So I'll be able to see it with my own eyes and see if it boots and what it is. But I think this is a pretty exciting opportunity because they're in a unique position to deliver on something like this. And it is obviously going to resonate with a core audience that they are already well established with. So there's a lot of possibilities here depending on how free this thing is and if they're able to live up to expectations. Right.

These are goals that we talk about all the time that we wish, you know, when we're reviewing laptops, these are things we complain about. But what does it actually look like? It does seem like they're having a lot of fun setting up all their facilities to make this thing. So maybe they'll just get to have fun playing with their new hardware. It's an unbelievable, mind-boggling, honestly panic-inducing investment if you think about it. Carl must be a brave man because they had a very nice office in Denver. And to move all of the operations into a warehouse and then really, you know, be learning how to set this thing up and how to manage a warehouse while at the same

time also trying to get new products spun up, I get overwhelmed at the idea of how do I even lay out a warehouse to manufacture computers? Like that detail alone is overwhelming to me. Not even to consider the fact that it's this massive financial investment for a business like System76 and moving your crew and having them set up in a new location is a massive work culture change for them. At every single level, this is a very big gamble. And it could pay off very well for them. It could position them as a particular kind of leader in this market. And it also could fail to gain enough traction to make everything sustainable.

And it's not the only machine they're going to make out of this place, but it is fascinating to watch, and I'm kind of glad they're the ones doing it because I couldn't imagine anybody else pulling this off. Right, it does seem to be like them living their values to some extent. And if a company's going to do it, well, System76 has talked the talk for sure. Ryan, I'm not going to put you on the spot. I notice you're not tagging me in Mumble to say anything about this.

Do you have any thoughts in general on this topic? Yeah, I think that it's a great company and this has been a big goal of theirs for a while. And I know that everyone there is really excited to do it and if somebody's going to pull it off I'd love to see somebody who cares as much about the open source ethos as they do

be the ones to do it. You know you can almost run for office with that answer. That is a very good answer. It's a safe answer but I know what you mean. I follow you. All right. Well, let's keep going. Let's talk about something that Haiku has apparently nailed already.

Oh, yes. Okay. That is true. Now, Chris, you might be familiar with a little distribution known as Fedora. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, then you probably know Fedora 29 is right around the corner. There's a lot of goodies coming out there,

including, well, you know, some of that work they have done optimizing battery life. One exciting thing I noticed, Fedora 29 is looking to provide a Flickr-free boot experience. Flickr-free, you say? Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the goal we've been waiting for. You get it on those other operating systems, even some surprising ones. But even with, like, fancy Plymouth setups, there's still a little flicker left. You know, it's one of those intangibles, too, because you look at it and go, who cares? You know, but then when you power up a system and the entire process is smooth and flicker-free,

there is a intangible cohesiveness to it that feels polished and complete and the opposite of rough. Like when you see it flashing, it feels like you can kind of see where the tape's holding it together, like the little rough. Exactly, yeah, the connection points.

Yeah, and I kind of commend Fyodorov for just plugging away at this now for what feels like a frickin' decade. But they've had a lot of curveballs. You know, the premise of this long-desired fricker-free boot is to maintain the same resolution and mode set from the system boot through the desktop loading

without any of those unnecessary mode set operations that will cause your screen to flash or sudden graphics changes in order to provide this whole smooth experience all the way. Yeah, they've got a great video showing what it looks like. And it looks like what you see on, you know,

other operating systems. But that motherboard logo, whoever you're system manufacturing, well, it just stays on the screen and then your operating system loads. Oh, so they're doing it, they're doing it through an EFI frame buffer, really. So it's not like they're putting

a Fedora logo up on the screen. Right. Now, there may be some options to add, let's say, additional overlay graphics on top of the logo, but the whole idea and the work they've done

is that whatever the system has drawn at the very start, you keep that buffer and you just add things on top or hand it off, let's say, to Grub or to the kernel. A lot of my machines, not all of them, but a lot of my machines let you replace that logo.

So you could put a Fitora logo in there. Perfect. Or just screw with people and put like a Debian logo in there. So when they think they're putting their – there's a lot of fun you can have with that. There is a caveat to this story. Like many of these new shiny things, there still is work that has to be done to get this working with Radeon or NVIDIA drivers. So it's Intel only at the moment. Not too unusual there with that.

But from the unusual department, this is a big secret that we've heard rumors about. I think we covered them back in March on this show. So don't tell anybody about this one. The cone of silence. All right, now that it's just us kids, Google is working on bringing game streaming to the Chrome browser, and this could have massive implications for desktop Linux. All of the other places out there like TechCrunch and The Verge

are talking about Chrome OS. But screw Chrome OS. Think about desktop Linux in general, because you know this is going to be a feature that lands in Chrome. I mean, we're talking about H.264 decoding, some super fancy input management. We're talking about technologies that are going to be a general stack that gets baked into Chrome itself. When you take just the native library of Steam,

plus now what you can do with Proton or what you will be able to do in the future, and then you combine it with this Google Stream project where it's going to probably be a whole other category of games, we may be months away from just about every game being available to Linux. The year of the Linux gaming desktop? Well, it's really the year of the Chrome gaming desktop,

if this is true. Google this week unveiled Project Stream. And while Google calls this a technical test, pay no attention, we all kind of see where this is going. It's a test to see how well streaming a game to Chrome works. And it's clear that this is a foundational technology for game streaming service in general.

So far, they've partnered with Ubisoft and are giving a limited number of players access to Assassin's Creed Odyssey for free for the duration of the test. It's U.S. only. You have to be able to handle 25 megabits per second. And you have to be older than 17 to participate. And you have to have an Ubisoft account and a Google account. I don't know if I have an Ubisoft account, but I'd make one. So you could sign up already. Perfect. Have you tried it? Are you going to sign up?

Oh, I already did, yeah. Of course. We probably all did, really. I'm not so sure about this. I am not as much of a doubter as I think most of the audience is about streaming games. I've tried several. NVIDIA has their own service that works fantastic on the NVIDIA Shield.

And I've played many games on that, just tried it out for like three months and never really had any issues. I played games I've been wanting to play for ages, but just was never going to install Windows to play them. And they were great. As long as they worked okay with a controller, they were great.

This, by the way, this setup will require that you hook up a controller to your Chromebook. Or your machine learning Chrome. And it's either a PlayStation controller or an Xbox. It does seem like it's going to work better for some classes of game. You know, various games are more or less sensitive to different input

latencies, so maybe it's not going to be the best for your FPSs, but it's exciting. Do we want to moan about how big and bloated Chrome is getting? I mean, a game streaming engine in this thing now. They've got remote desktop capabilities. It really is a platform with a browser included. I am curious, like, has there been discussion of,

obviously it seems like right now they're just donating all the compute and GPUs to do this right in the cloud somewhere. Oh, it's going to be a pay service. So, yeah, what is that going to look like? How much would you pay for that if you didn't have to, you know, get a Windows box? You know, if you look at Google's history, oh, that's a good way to put it.

You're right. If this could save you even a Windows license. Right, because you could set up a gaming machine and do, like, the Steam streaming, for instance, if you wanted to now. I would say the way Google's going to do this is they're going to bundle it with some other service. Like, you know how they have YouTube Premium now,

and then when you get that, you also get Google Music with it and things like that? They'll bundle, I bet. That could be one way they do this. You could just charge separately for this service, but I'm trying to think. I can't remember the name of that gaming service. OnLive, I think it was.

Yeah, I can't remember it. OnLive. They couldn't make it sustainable. Think about the overhead with this. You have to have racks and racks and racks full of machines with monster GPUs, with incredible network performance, with huge CDN connections. This is not a cheap operation, even if you have 500 users.

Just think about the load of 500 users playing high-end 1080p, 60 frames per second, Assassin's Creed. That's a big job for a data center. And Google does have a pretty big head start, right? I mean, they've already got... They're probably one of the few that has an infrastructure to do this

at a massive million-user scale. See, OnLive ran into just run costs. They couldn't charge enough. Plus, they kept running into the issue of the game publishers also wanted a ton of money for every time somebody played a game. And they had problems just porting the games to some of the requirements of their platform. So to do this at a scale, you almost have to be making money on the infrastructure with other things. And then the gaming is something you can afford to do. It can't be like the only thing that makes you money. So they've got the infrastructure in place for all the other Google services.

They've got the bandwidth to the homes. They've got some of their own fiber that they own. And they've got the compute. So it seems like they could probably charge $8 to $15 a month, and you get access to a huge gaming library right in your Chrome browser. And you hit full screen, you don't even know you're in Chrome. Now the question is, do we trust Google of all companies to run a service like this for a long time? Like, is this going to be a test that they do once and then nothing happens? Maybe if we knew more, if we could just know more about what they're doing here. Like Ryan points out, wouldn't it be great to have the details?

Yeah, I was just thinking about the fact that we don't really know how this is running on their infrastructure. And you talked about OnLive. Did OnLive have a Windows license for every instance that ran a game? Is this using Proton? Is this doing something else entirely? I'd be really interested to know. Yeah, I wonder too, since they require controllers,

they could be the console version somehow, although very doubtful. You're going to want them in a PC platform, I would think. We'll keep an eye on it as we do. It gave me the thought that maybe I should consider getting a Chromebook now that they can run Linux apps and soon they'll be able to stream games and they have a Samba file browser in them. Be part of the

zeitgeist, Chris. Well, I feel like maybe I have a blind spot all of a sudden. You know, like I'm not really following that. No, I don't use them. I don't have one, but I'm curious. Let's go back in time a little bit. These days the conversation around Microsoft is how they've embraced open source, 20,000 developers on GitHub. They just released DOS as open source on GitHub. I think it was an MIT license. Their workload on Azure is 50% to 60% Linux boxes now. Visual Studio Code is a massive project.

.NET Core, PowerShell Core, all open source projects. TypeScript. Huge. Yeah. Really huge. And so there is an understandable kind of cock the head, why do so many Linux users still hate Microsoft? And if you go back in time, all is revealed. And October marks the 20th anniversary

of the Halloween documents. In October of 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and open source software was leaked. And it's sort of just gone away. Now, this represents, in my view, a tactical Microsoft, one that was looking at a new threat to its business model and being honest with what its advantages were. And I'll give you a couple of examples here. So here's some key quotes from their analysis of Linux. So they say the Linux OS could become, in a sense, the next Java VM.

And that sounds weird, but they were kind of right. I mean, back in the mid-'90s to late-'90s, Java was huge. And now Linux runs everywhere, even on Windows, just like Java. So they were kind of right. It has kind of become the universal platform. A couple of other things they noted in these Halloween documents, which was so controversial back in the time. How could they say this?

Here's one. An advanced Win32 GUI user would have a short learning cycle to become a productive user under Linux. Oh, boy. Here's another one. Consumers love it. Yeah, they do. That's it right there. That's a pull quote from the memorandum.

Using today's server requirements, Linux is a credible alternative to commercial developed servers in many high-volume applications. That seems to be interesting. They also note the effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated. So there is a couple of interesting quotes in here. But what I read is a strategic plotting Microsoft that hasn't accepted where things are going yet because this is the 90s. They haven't seen anything like this before. Right. Was trying to wrap their head around this. But it caused such an outrage

in the community that a bunch of anti-Microsoft camps came up. And there is a lot in these memorandums, including doing damage control, where Microsoft develops an emergency response team to cope with Linux conversation announcements, I'm sorry, conversion announcements. When people announce they're

converting their systems over to Linux, Microsoft would create a strike team to try to help mitigate that. There's some good stuff in there, including the Get the Facts campaign, which really got people riled up. Do you remember that? I forgot about that. Oh. Yeah, yeah.

Get the Facts campaign and the total cost of ownership, which really riled up. Got to have that TCO. Like, how dare Microsoft talk about the total cost of ownership when we're offering a free operating system for life? You know? It was just great. And it really puts you in that mindset of the 90s. And it was fun to revisit, but you really can see how things have changed,

how far things have come. Well, not everything. Some things may have been better in the 90s. I hate to be that guy. So let's go with the 2000s. In fact, let's go with March 2000. In March of 2000, one of the best operating systems ever released to humanity came out.

And it was called BOS R5. It was the final version of BOS from Bee Incorporated. It came in two varieties, professional and personal. And this was the release that I got my hands on. It was also the first release of BOS for the x86 platform and made freely available to download. So check, check, check for me. You would download it or you could order a CD-ROM.

And if you did that, it would ship with legal encoding and decoding for MP3. On a live CD, a live CD. So it was a very well-designed operating system, I felt. But my bias was I didn't grow up with DOS in the home or Unix in the home. After the early computer eras, after like the, you know, the trashes and the early consoles, I jumped on a Mac because my mom was a graphic artist. So she got herself an old. That makes sense.

This is like the black and white days of macOS. Like macOS system one. I don't know what it was called back then. And it had some simple advantages to it. If you wanted to extend the operating system, you would take an extension file and you would drag it into the extensions folder. And if you no longer wanted that functionality or it conflicted with something else, you would just go into the extensions folder and you would move it out. And then it would no longer, your system would no longer have that. If you wanted to install an application,

you would just drag it into a folder and it was installed. There was a simplicity to it. If you needed to get access to your hard drive, you could just plug it into another Mac. It would mount right there on the desktop. You could move files around. You could even copy over the system folder, reboot, and now boot off of that system folder that you just copied over there.

It was remarkably simple, but yet pretty sophisticated for its day. It also had a lot of issues. It wasn't properly threaded. It crashed all the time. But an intrepid group built BOS around some of those same concepts, but they built it to be multi-threaded at a ridiculously fundamental level. And they created a file system that even Redmond had to dream about, something that was database powered. They created a system that was powerful, very fast, very stable, Unix-like in a lot of ways, but simple in a macOS classic way. But unfortunately, they just weren't successful. They just couldn't really be sustainable. And you do wonder what things would be like if they had been successful.

And that's where the Haiku Project comes in and brings us all something wonderful. If we can take an afternoon or an evening just to play with this free software. And they finally released another beta release. Yeah, it's been, well, almost six years since Haiku's last release, yet November 2012. That's kind of too long, and it makes you worry about a project. But after all that time,

there are a ton of new features, and we have a brand new beta. Haiku is really now its own project. It's a continuation of the philosophy and themes of POS, but mostly it's its own thing now. But it does still have some of that heritage. For example, it has two flavors, 32-bit and 64-bit. The minimum requirements are an Intel Pentium II or AMD Athlon,

256 megabytes of RAM, and you need at least an 800 by 600 screen, and they recommend three gigs of storage. I think I got that. Yeah. Now, their 64-bit version they recommend an i3 at least and 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of storage. But some of the things they've introduced in Haiku are delightful now. They've introduced Haiku Depot, which is probably the biggest change in the way that you work with Haiku. They have a legitimate package management system,

and Haiku Depot sits on top of that. And it's very easy to use. Lots of Qt applications in there, as in Qt. It's nice. And pretty fast. Pretty complete, too. And it matches it with a command line. But the cool thing is, is like the Mac Classic,

some packages are merely activated. They're not installed. And that, unlike the Classic Mac, means you can do even more with Haiku. The bootloader has been given some capacity to affect them. So you can now boot into a previous package state, like say you have a bad update, or you can even go in and blacklist an individual file,

which is just stored in a settings file. So if you want to mount the BOS drive from another system, you can go in there, blacklist an individual file, which is just stored in a settings file. So if you want to mount the BOS drive from another system, you can go in there, blacklist an individual file, plug the hard drive back into the machine, boot up, it's done. That's fantastic. We don't really have that feature now. No. And of course, it's got all the other kinds of

nice advanced features, too, like disk transactions for managing packages. Not only does it do it there, but it's all transactions written to the file system. You can thus also manage installed package sets on non-running Haiku systems. And accompanying the package manager is a massively revamped port system

that has moved from an organized array of build scripts to a well-oiled, full-fledged port street containing a wide variety of both native software and software that's getting imported to Haiku. It's a good list of stuff in there too. It really is. And I mean you can use it too. It has Wi-Fi support. They've borrowed the network stack from

FreeBSD so you've got all kinds of networking goodies in there. And here's another example of cleverness. Haiku's native remote desktop application is slick. Unlike VNC or other bitmap based protocols, Haiku's remote desktop application is slick. Unlike VNC or other bitmap-based protocols, Haiku's remote desktop forwards the drawing commands from the host system to the client system, which for most applications, and pretty much all of them except for video,

consumes significantly lower bandwidth. It's similar to how pre-compositing X11 operates, or it's pretty close to how Microsoft's RDP operates, where you don't send the bitmaps, you send the draw commands, which are just commands, and then the client actually does the drawing locally. You don't need any special server. As long as you have SSH access, you can do this, and you get a native client included with Haiku,

but there's also an HTML5 client you can run in any web browser. And we've had some fun with it. We tried it out on this Dell that will be the Precision laptop that we're going to try to review next week. We were going to review it this week, but we're going to try to review it next week. We loaded on that with the 4K screen. And I also put it under virtualization on my Lenovo, which I'll talk more about my virtualization setup. But I was pleased to see that they have made modifications to the new release to support VRTIO bus and drivers. So it

works pretty great under QMU and KVM. I did have to make a slight change to actually have the mouse input work well. So if you want to try out Haiku and you just want to run it under VM, it'll work pretty good. It's snappy, yeah. But if you're using like VRT Manager and your mouse is jumpy, go

into the details of the virtual machine that you have Haiku installed, go to add hardware, and then input, and then add an EVTouch USB graphics tablet. And the reason why you do this is it forces VertManager to operate with an absolute mouse resolution instead of like a guesstimated mouse resolution because it thinks maybe you're dealing with a tablet or something. I don't know. And that made my mouse nice and smooth under Haiku under VM. So if you want to try it, that's a way to go. So it's nice. It's really, really nice,

but you might be wondering what's really so great about it besides the simplicity, the speed, the stability, and really the cleverness of it. Yeah. I already run a tiling desktop on my Linux computer, Chris. What am I getting here? What are you getting here? Well, eventually, someday, maybe. Actually, what you see is, like I was talking about earlier, it's almost an alternative universe of the way computing could have been.

And you can't help but observe just how far ahead of everyone they were. And they're able to pull off some stuff that we still haven't nailed down in Linux. Like, for example, Haiku has a series of kits, and it's all explained in the B book, which we'll have linked in the show notes. But they have, like, an application kit, a device kit, a game kit, an input server kit,

the mail kit, the network kit. These are all essentially kits that are starting points for developers. The ApplicationKit, for example, is classes that establish an application as an identifiable entity, one that could cooperate, and then also tells it how to communicate with other applications, all described in the ApplicationKit. If you want to connect an input device to Haiku, there's a device kit that describes how you build that for Haiku. And it's all out there. Everything from

how the windows should be drawn on the screen to the way they should look to how you communicate with the network stack or draw OpenGL on the screen. They have all of it out there for developers in a clear, documented, communicated way that's been stable for years now. Yeah, like imagine if MSDN was actually helpful. And included

and in a book on your OS. Just right there in a bookmark that you could just go read. It is really smart. The things they've thought about, you have to wonder why they haven't taken off. And that's why after all this time, after being failed in the early 2000s, that's why people are still excited about this because it is something that is truly unique and you can actually put your hands on it. You can use it.

Yeah, it's a living entity. I mean, yes, you can virtualize it, but you can boot it. We got it booted and we plugged it in a mouse and the keyboard and it worked. You can get Wi-Fi working if you have just the right hardware. So you can get a feeling for the ideas here.

And I think there are still some ideas that we could stand to use. We don't need to just leave this in the waste bin of history. It's complete and integrated in a way that, I mean, you know, the BSDs explore this a little bit more, but it's just so different

from a traditional Linux desktop. It was almost the future macOS. Apple, and I think this is one of the reasons that Bee Incorporated failed, and you could probably find out more if you just go read their Wikipedia page, but my recollection goes like this. Apple was in serious negotiations to use Beos as the next macOS, and that was until Steve Jobs came back to the company, which brought along Next with it, and then they based macOS off of Next.

But they were in early communications with B. When Steve came back, the decision hadn't been made to drop B yet. And so while Steve was still interim CEO of the company, they evaluated B, they tried to hire Linus, and they evaluated Next. And the issue really came down to is the people on the team that had joined now coming from Next, like folks like Scott Forstall, were familiar intimately with how Next worked. And so they had an internal team that just knew Next. And so that was what they decided to build Mac OS X off of.

It was almost BOS though. It was almost BOS for a time. And if that would have happened, we would have an incredible, of course it would be locked down to Apple. So it almost BOS, though. It was almost BOS for a time. And if that would have happened, we would have an incredible... Of course, it would be locked down to Apple, so it wouldn't be as exciting. Because this, you can load on a brand new Dell Precision, or you can load it on a Pentium system that's 32-bit. So it's a much... In a way, you get a lot more

fun with it. And after using it, I really felt... I wish this was the operating system I could deploy to friends and family who don't really like to use computers but use them as a tool and strictly a tool. They facilitate some singular purposes for them. They need to do just something in the web browser, maybe print something, maybe scan at most. And they want a computer that just runs and is very simple to understand. They want a computer that just runs and is very simple to understand.

This Haiku OS is so easy and simple to understand that you begin to just instinctively navigate it within five minutes of using it. It's obvious, it's non-offensive. And consistent. I think that's the other thing, right? There's like a base set of abstractions, and they're used everywhere, and they're all tied together. Which is probably responsible for those kits. abstractions and they're used everywhere and they're all tied together.

Which is probably responsible for those kits. And so that kind of thing I think works really well for that type of user base. And my hope for Haiku is that they get more people trying, maybe they get more people into the project and they don't have to go so long between releases.

And maybe we could actually someday get a Haiku 1.0 that is deployable to end users. There is a surprising amount of software on there. Things like LibreOffice, right? You can get real work done. Which was, for me, that was the killer thing for BOS R5. When I was using it back in the early 2000s, they did two things.

They let you install BOS from within Windows, which was really high tech, right? Especially back then. The other thing that they had is Star Office. Remember that? Remember Star Office? Star Office. Those are the days. I was trying to advocate that my school district, because I was an employee then, and I saw the amount of money

that we were spending on Microsoft licensing, and I just said, let's use something else. Let's use Star Office. And I was advocating at the time for Star Office, and I can't remember if I was actually by then. I don't think I was pushing for the Linux desktop yet, but I was like, we've got to stop paying these $300,000 Microsoft bills.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. And so Star Office was like, that was my foot in the door. I was like advocating Star Office. And so when I saw that that was available for BOS, I was a match made in heaven. I had the main Office suite that I was trying to get everybody to switch to, and I had a great desktop environment

that you could install on the existing x86 PCs. Sounds a lot like Linux now. And yeah, so there are some apps. LibreOffice is out. They have a web browser that is based on WebKit that they had somebody work on, I think, near full-time as part of a Google Summer of Code. They've got a few Google Summer of Code sponsorships over the years, and that's helped out a lot. But it's so neat, and it's

really worth checking out. It's not going to be your daily driver. You know, ours gave it a go, and it didn't really work out so well for the author over there. It's pretty funny. Sean Gallagher tried to use Haiku for a week to get the job done, and it sort of failed on him pretty hard, mainly around the browsers. They just weren't able to do things like some of the Google apps that he needed, like Docs and Gmail just didn't work super well. Web Positive was also, that's the new browser, also not so great. But he noted something of interest. Of all things, the Swift programming language has been partially ported to Haiku,

thanks to a Google Summer of Code effort. I think they're working on Rust as well. So, hey, maybe some of the future apps will run just native to Haiku. Yeah, and OpenJDK was already ported. So if you can put up with the email client that's a bit bare bones and the web browser that won't support all the websites that you want to go to and limited applications, you might be able to use it for a week. But Sean Gallagher over at ours wasn't able to pull it off.

I didn't try. I don't look at it as a – I don't think it's fair to compare it to modern desktop Linux or Windows or macOS. It is – it's more of like going to a museum that's being refreshed and rebuilt. It's a historical adventure. You're going spelunking here. You're not trying to make it your new desktop home. But I got to say, you know, if in another six years or so they release something that is usable on the desktop with maybe Firefox, like an actual Firefox browser or something,

I'd be pretty tempted to give that a go again. I think they could really have something special there. So we'll have links in the show notes for all of that. You can see everything that we've tried, including some fixes to get it working a little bit better under virtualization. It's really easy to give a go. Yeah, it works great under virtualization.

And you can just, you know, etcher or DD the ISO that they provide to a USB disk if you want to try it out live. So yeah, it's pretty neat. It's pretty neat. I want to now shift gears, though, and talk about these laptops. So we mentioned virtualization. I was doing it on my new T480. We did a review a couple of weeks ago. We got these new work rigs. They're identical, Wes and I. And so we did a review on the show. But I thought, you know, after using it for about three weeks after that review, a couple of things have stood out that I would like to amend the review and include, and it's nothing that's a showstopper, so it's not a big deal, but for me, I'd have to say in the not pleased category, I'm not so happy with the speakers. They're weaker than I'd like for serious work like editing or recording a show

I'd be putting on headphones anyways but I'd say if you're looking at getting one of these ThinkPads, one of these thinner, smaller ThinkPads I've seen a couple of them now just don't plan to binge Netflix with them you can hear your system alerts you can make a call, it's going to work

I was watching some Netflix on here just this weekend, Chris Were you underwhelmed? Well, I attached a Bluetooth speaker. Very good. There you go. Also, something we didn't mention in the review, but we got the keyboards that don't light up. Now, that said, this is one of my all-time favorite keyboards on a laptop ever now, but these keyboards are not backlit. After some conversations and reading some reviews online, it seems there's two types of keyboards with these ThinkPads. And the one that has the transparent keycaps so that the light shines through has a slightly softer feel,

and I guess the keycaps wear off. And then there's one with an antimicrobial covering. That's the one we have where the keycaps last longer and it's a little bit better of a type feel, but they don't light up. So that's something I thought I'd mention. Also, I know you've already switched it, but the function key, control key, it's still,

I didn't switch it right away and now my brain is broken. My hands are broken. Yeah, I had to make a call on that. So on the keyboard, in my opinion and Wes's opinion, the function button is where the control button should be. It's on the far left. You know, the far, far left key, that should always be control, so that way you can just blindly mash it, right?

Exactly. On the Lenovo ThinkPads, it's where the function button is. And then control is one button over. And then the worst part is that the sizes are the same. So you can switch them in the BIOS, but then your control button is like half the size it should be. Yeah, yeah. That is the same. So you can switch them in the BIOS, but then your control button is like half the size it should be. Yeah. Yeah. That is the downside. So I had to make that call. They do make it a BIOS level change. You go in there and you flip it. So obviously they know it's a problem. Right.

And I decided to do it sooner than later. I went about three days and I think I went one day too long because I started to remap it in my brain. But the sooner you switch it, it's just easier on you. It's just easier. And then it persists between reinstalls. It's just, it's the way to go. I did finally run into that problem that we did bring up in the initial review that, hey, some folks have had a problem where their CPUs are throttling. And it wasn't a big problem. In fact, I kind of liked it because I kept my laptop slightly cooler and I didn't really notice the performance difference. But I started having a problem when I closed the lid, the laptop wouldn't go to sleep. And it was reporting about a thermal trigger event. So, okay, well, let's look into this. So I started digging around and I found this

great terminal app that I want to tell you guys about this week. It's a terminal-based CPU stress monitoring utility, and it's called STUI, S-T-U-I. And man, does it look slick. And it shows you everything, the frequency of your CPU, the utilization, the temperature, and the power. And it puts it all on a really nice looking bar graph that persists on the screen for a while so you can get a real sense of the range of punishment you're putting your machine through. And when I started watching this, I did start to see where the CPU was throttling me back, throttling me back, and I thought, well, this is bullshit. So I started digging into this, and yeah, it's a firmware bug in the Lenovos.

But like all things Linux, there is a workaround for this issue that's been posted on GitHub. And this also works for the Dell XPS 9370s, so hot tip there, and a whole range of Lenovos. And it kind of tweaks what the range of power frequencies are that your CPU is allowed to reach. So it's not without some risk, I suppose. And it does require that you disable secure boot. You are mostly just banging some bits into, you know, firmware control parts of memory. So yeah, maybe some caution. Yes. And you have to disable the thermal D service.

So I did that. So I disabled secure boot. I disabled thermal D. thermal D service. So I did that. So I disabled secure boot, I disabled thermal D, and you can turn this script off with a systemd stop command. So it's not like it's the reverse process. It's easy to undo. Yeah. And so then I started up the script and I immediately noticed that my laptop was reaching 4.2 gigahertz as expected. And I rebooted and immediately for the first time, as the system was logging in, noticed the fans kicking up.

They've never done that before. I haven't heard my fans today. No, no, you don't. So if you don't fix this bug, it keeps the CPU running at like, I don't think it goes beyond 3.5 gigahertz or something like that. Maybe it depends on your rig.

It can go up a little higher, but that actually makes it run cooler and it makes the battery last a little bit longer. So I did also see a small hit to battery life. Also did not fix my suspend issues that I was having, that I originally tried to fix. No, really? So they're still there? Yeah, and it's weird. It's not every time I close the lid, and I'd say 80% of the time, the machine goes to sleep, no problem. But I have run into the problem where I thought it's asleep and I put it in the bag.

I take it out of the bag two hours later and it's piping hot. Wasted battery. Yeah. It's only on battery when this happens. I believe so. I believe it only happens when it's on battery. I have yet to have it trigger when it's plugged in. I can unplug it after I've put it to sleep and it's fine.

See, now I'm just worried. This is lying in wait. I'm going to run into it. I haven't yet after I've put it to sleep, and it's fine. See, now I'm just worried. This is lying in wait. I'm going to run into it. I haven't yet. I was worried today on the train. In fact, it happened on the train. I was on battery the whole train ride down to see you today, and when we got to King Station, I closed the lid, and it didn't go.

I watched it, and it didn't go to sleep. And I'm like, I want to put it in my bag, because we're at the train station, and I'm like, it's not going to sleep. So like I had to open it back up, put my password in, shut it down, confirm, shut down, wait for it to shut down. And I, you know, I had stuff open. I got to say, Chris, your experience with, uh, just niggling little issues like that, it mirrors my own. Um, I don't know, I don't know exactly what causes these things. Um, but they're super frustrating, right? And they detract massively from the overall experience.

Yeah, yeah, it's a little bit unfortunate. Welcome back to the show, Alex. Brandon, you fixed this on your X1 Carbon? Do tell. Yeah, so have you guys updated your BIOS? Well, that's where we're going to next, actually, but go ahead. Yeah, I fixed the initial stuff. And then if I was using Wayland at all, it would not go into suspend at all.

So right now I'm using X11. I believe I'm on X11, yeah. I'm on Neon, so I think that's X11. So the thing is, the Plasma desktop doesn't yet, although it will soon, have a way to update your firmware from the graphical desktop. You're saying it's worse than GNOME. I never thought I'd hear you say it.

The advantage on GNOME is when you go into GNOME software, it's just along with all your software updates is boom, here's a firmware update. Right. Or maybe you, for some reason, are an XFCE user or like you say, a tiling window manager. You're not going to get this stuff unless you specifically want to install all the GNOME stuff to run GNOME software. And I don't. So in the case of the T480, the firmware update does not fix this issue,

but it does for some systems. But there is a way to do LVFS the hard way. Now remember, the Linux Vendor Firmware Service is the project that's collecting all of these different firmwares from the vendors and then shipping them down to your machine. And part of that is the FW update daemon, or FWOPT. FWOPT.

It's a simple daemon that allows session software, which could be GNOME software, could be Discover, or will be soon. It's coming soon in an update. It allows them to check for firmwares on your local system by enumerating the hardware, seeing what their firmware versions are, and then delivering that information back to the client. So in this case, we're going to be using the command line. It's designed for desktops, but it's also actually usable on phones and several headless servers where you can just SSH in and you can use these same exact commands to update the firmware on your servers if you want. So if you want to find out if you have a device with firmware that is supported by FW Update, you have to get on the command line and run the command FW Update Manager Get Devices.

And we'll have a link to all of this in the show notes. Once you get the devices, there's an FW update manager refresh command which goes out and it's like a package repo refresh. It goes out and it gets all the latest firmwares that are applicable, versions that are applicable to your hardware. Then you can just simply update the

command FW update manager get dash updates. It goes out and downloads all of them and then FW update manager update. Again, all this will be linked in the show notes. So you just made a guide for me, because I haven't played with any of this yet, but it's coming up. Yeah, and it makes it really nice,

because you can just do all this from the command line. It doesn't matter what desktop environment you have, and it's kind of neat. Like the FW update manager, git dash devices, shows you a bunch of cool information about the hardware. Yeah, here's my T480 Thunderbolt controller. Yeah, isn't that neat?

And then you do the refresh command to go out and pull down the latest repos, git-updates to download them, and then just update. It will download and apply all the updates for your system. And updates that can be live will be done immediately. And then it will also set aside updates that need to run at boot up and next time you reboot your distro

it'll stage them and apply them. That's just fantastic. Wow. Isn't that great? How did this happen in the back room without any of us really noticing? And now, not only does it not brick our machines, but it just works.

Yeah, and it's another cool way to get information about the devices in your system. So that's all outlined in the show notes. There's also a really simple, easy ArchWiki. Go figure. As well as the project's documentation. In fact, if you just run fw update mgr dash dash help, all the stuff is right there,

and it's really super simple to mess around with. So I ran that on my T480, and we were fully up to date. They shipped all up to date. And they're pretty new, so that makes sense. Unfortunately, it's not a firmware update for us. But I have read that some X1 users have been able to resolve the issue with a firmware update. So I'm hopeful it might come around to us.

And now we know how to do it. So we'll keep an eye out. A couple other things, setting up this machine, I decided, I got this thing with 32 gigs of RAM, an NVMe drive, let's do some virtualization. Right? Right? You got to put this thing with 32 gigs of RAM, an NVMe drive. Let's do some virtualization, right? Right. You got to put this thing through its paces. So I'm trying out two different virtualization managers.

First and foremost, you got to get Vert Manager. It's the go-to tool for the desktop. So I installed Vert Manager, and that's what I was using for my Haiku review and drive-through, whatever you want to call it. It's not really a review. And it works pretty good. But it's not HTML5 enough. You know what I'm saying, Wes?

No, it is not. I mean, it's nice. It's there. But, well, it's just not that slick. I actually kid. I'm just joking. But both Wes and I decided to take a little look at Kimchi over the last week, which is an HTML5-based management tool for KVM.

And it's designed to make it as easy as possible to get started with KVM and create your first guess. And I like this a lot because it makes it accessible to people that maybe have never really messed around with this before. We have KVM baked into our Linux desktops. I don't know how to state this to you. That is an enterprise-grade virtualizer that entire companies base their revenue source off of. In the early days, like back when I was trying out BOSR5, we had mainframes that did this. This is what mainframes did and they cost so much money and they had to have massive support contracts and they had to have proprietary hardware

and it was a massive investment to have a bunch of virtual machines. And now we have something 100 times better more powerful and faster just baked into our Linux desktops. Every Linux laptop, every Linux desktop out there has the potential to access this thing called KVM. You just have to install a few tools.

And the power of that is just sort of underappreciated by those of us that have just grown used to it. But when people are coming over to Linux, it's one of those cornerstone features. It's something that maybe they want to try for their work, or maybe it's something they've read about and learned about. And Kimchi makes it all accessible. It is a very nice web GUI that sits on top of KVM that makes it simple to manage your VMs. Yeah, because unfortunately, a lot of the tooling ends up sort of focused around, you know, the big server cases because that's like probably 99% of what actually runs on KVM.

But these days it runs pretty darn well just doing desktops. Yep. I also, I really liked, I would never use it now, but back in the day when I first was trying to set up Linux, having a tool like even like Webmin, which was a little dangerous, but was very useful for just kind of closing a couple of gaps. I didn't really understand how to do something like under Samba and having Webmin available to help sort of build out that config file

that I could then go reverse engineer what it had done. Right. When you're learning, you just want like a nice GUI that you can explore and poke around and fiddle with options. For my own systems that I run on DigitalOcean, I use Cockpit to manage them. There you go. And I love it. I think it's great. So Kimchee's pretty nice.

It's a little tricky to get working on Ubuntu 18.04. It requires a package called Python Imaging, which is not in at least the regular Ubuntu repo. It might be in Universe. And it won't install without that, even though it has been replaced by, what was it, Python Ping or something? Pill. I think is that what you would have

installed in an alternative imaging library. So, Kimchi could use that, but they have hard-coded in the dev that it needs this specific package. It is available for 18.04, so I've linked it in the show notes if you want to try giving it a go. It's still early days for Kimchi, but I have a lot of hope that it's going to be a super nice way for people to manage a handful of VMs. You know, imagine something like this on your LAN.

You throw a machine in the closet or in the garage, and you could use this to replace something like Proxmox. Right, yeah, exactly. And it's just nice for those cases where maybe you don't use libvert on the command line all the darn time. You just forget what flags there are. Well, here you go. I'll tell you one other thing I've used this week for the first time was boxes. Oh, yeah. And I had to install Windows for some stupid reason.

I can't remember who it was. I'm so sorry. Thanks. And I threw the ISO into boxes. Thanks. And I threw the ISO into boxes and 20 minutes later or 15 minutes later or something, I had a fully booted, activated Windows 10 system. Completely touch free installer. Amazing experience. Yeah. If you're on the GNOME desktop, boxes is so great. I considered installing under Plasma, but I ended up going for Vert Manager.

Brandon, I'm curious about your use of Cockpit from your workstation and laptop. Yeah. So I use it to manage virtual machines with the machines plugin. So it basically does most of the things I need. If I need to create special networks, I have to go to the command line or open up VertManager to set up networks that are not just the default NAT network, but everything else is available right in Cockpit. It's super easy to use. You can get access to a console, add additional disks to a VM, like basically all the things I would need to use locally. Yeah. And so you use that to manage your own local VMs, not even like VMs up on a server. Well, just local VMs on my workstation, um, for servers in my,

in my basement, I have a cluster of three system. I have a cluster of three servers that are running, but in that case I'm running Obert. So as one does in his basement, right? Yeah. That's what you do when you have a basement, right? And one gig up, down the century link. Oh, yes. That is what you do. Yeah, those are the two requirements, a good basement or, in my case, a garage and a great link. My basement is full of scary spiders that jump.

I do not like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They got a lot of those down there, Alex. They got them up here in Washington, too. You can't get away from the spiders in the States, unfortunately. Just don't let the ones with red bellies get near you. That's the one you need to worry about. Oh, gosh, the spiders around here have a legal right to marry.

Let's not freak out people with arachnophobia because I'm one of them, and it's making me a little uncomfortable. There's a bunch of different ways to manage your virtual machines, but VertManager and Kimchi were the one that I thought would be worth talking about, but definitely a good big hearty plug for Cockpit, because that's what I personally use to manage mine. I mean, you could be hardcore like Wes Payne and just do it all with QMU on the command line, and then VNC in, and just what's the problem?

What's the problem? That's what Wes says. So next week, we should have a review of that Dell Precision laptop. I wanted to give it enough time. I just felt like I hadn't had enough time with it. I did run some pretty hardcore benchmarks. One of the things I'd love to get the audience's feedback on is I'm thinking about trying to come up with a framework to review laptops when they're under extreme load.

So how does it handle thermals? Does it start cutting back on the CPU to bring the temperature down? How long can it run it max before it has to start caving? I've been testing that on the ThinkPad and on the Dell Precision, and I find that to be an interesting workload because like every now and then you just need your machine to be a champion for two hours. Right, yeah. And so how does it run at full bore sustainable workloads? Does it start cutting back? I'm curious what folks think about that idea and other things of that nature we could start testing on these laptops because the goal of these reviews is to give you usable information to make a purchase or to defer a purchase or to just reflect on your own setup.

I'm not here to sell a laptop. I'm here to try to tell you if this is a reasonable tool or not. And so I'm always struggling to come up with ways to properly do that. Benchmarks are one way, but what's the real point of those unless you could actually compare it

to a real world? Right, we want to get closer to simulating something that you might actually do. So I'd love ideas on that in tests. I'd love some objective way of measuring fan noise. Is that really annoying? So, you know, when you hear a MacBook about to take off,

that might be different to what an XPS sounds like or something. Yeah, I mean, I have tools to measure the decibel output of the laptop and I could just get it under load and I could start measuring that. That's definitely something I could check. That's a good one. If you guys out there listening have suggestions, just go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. You can send them in that way or tweet me at Chris LAS. I'd just be curious to know. I showed some recent benchmarks that I was doing and kind of put a

little context as to what I was trying to achieve. And I got some great suggestions on Twitter too. So I've been collecting information and I've always really kind of wanted to nail this down to try to make it something that even if you're not in the market yet, it's still useful. I want to try to achieve that. So give me your tips and what you'd like to see, and hopefully we'll have a decent review for you next week. I can't promise that I'll have it nailed by next week,

but over the next few reviews, as we start thinking this way, I think we'll get it. Yeah, get a little more systematic. Yeah, come up with a way to do that. We have so much stuff going on behind the scenes these days. So we'll be talking about some of that as well. Some of the changes that we're making to our pipeline and how we're going to open source all of that. So that's coming in the future in a future episode as well as time permits. So we have a lot to get into. But I think that's probably where we'll leave it for

this week. We'll try to keep it a little shorter. I'm flirting with the time formats, trying to see what people like. Tuesdays can be pretty busy. That is true. So you've got to let us know. Middle of the week. People have got a lot of shows by the time this comes out. We want you to want to fit in Linux Unplugged. Got to get in that sweet spot.

And don't forget, next week is 270. We'd love to have you show up in our virtual lug and hang out. Just Google for the Jupyter Colony Mumble guide. Mumble is free open source software. You can get installed. We'd like it if you have a headset. And with that, a mic and headphones. You know, not just something that's on your head.

Not like a tiara. That doesn't count. I mean, you can have that too. Don't want to stop you. I don't know. Unless it has a mic built in. The nice thing about the virtual lug is you can dress however you want. They come as you are. I imagine most of them are sitting there drinking something, scratching, browsing the web, and chatting.

Like, you know, they are probably pretty chill. That's what makes it a virtual party. I know. I should go do that. I should go home while you do the show. I'll jump in the lug and just see what it's like. I should try that one time. But not next week.

Not the week after. But maybe someday. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode. Go get more of Wes Payne at techsnap.systems or at Wes Payne. I'm at Chris Elias. The whole network is at Jupiter Signal. Thanks so much for joining us. And we will see you next Tuesday. Thank you. I had a lot of fun with Haiku. Way more than I expected.

I know. It was just so good. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Mumble Room, thank you guys very much for making it. There was one story that didn't make it

into the main show that I wanted to share with you guys. It just doesn't really have like a direct Linux angle, but it sure makes me smile. There is, for some unknown reason,

now a Star Trek Enterprise shaped gaming PC being built by Lenovo. How did this happen? Okay, no, no, I don't even need to know. I'm just too excited. Wes, Lenovo is boldly taking computers where they have never gone before. Oh, it's getting cringy already.

With a newly revealed Lenovo Titanium PC shaped like Star Trek's USS Enterprise. The Lenovo Titanium Enterprise NCC-1701A is shaped like the Starship Enterprise, like Captain Kirk's Enterprise, before he just—oh, I won't spoil it. I won't spoil that part. But let's just say Klingons were involved. It's a real beaut. Fascinating. Definitely not a trash heap.

The technology includes a GeForce RTX 2080, an overclocked ninth-generation Intel, 32 gigs of RAM, and a 1-terabyte M.2 SSD and a 2-terabyte spinning Rust disk. And they say that it's the perfect PC for Star Trek enthusiast gamers. I'm thinking maybe we got the wrong Lenobos, Chris. I know, right? You know, it's super lit, too. And I mean lit up. Like, it's got lights everywhere in the thing. All over the saucer section,

the warp nacelles light up, the deflector dish lights up, and it's on a stand. So like the Starship models themselves, it's on a stand. So like the Starship models themselves, it's on an arm stand, and it's kind of shaped like the Enterprise, and the PC parts are all stuffed into it.

The cooling is on the bottom of the saucer section. The nacelles are wider and larger than the actual Starship. That's where the bulk of the PC is, is in the primary hull, if you're a Star Trek nerd. And it still looks legit enough that if I was a big Star Trek online player, if I still did a Star Trek nerd. And it still looks legit enough that if I was a big Star Trek online player,

if I still did the Scopes podcast... You would have to have it. Also, KDE Neon on that thing would be pretty... That'd be pretty good. So any deets on when can we get it? Where can we get it? Actually, I want you to guess what the price is. Guess what the starting price is before you've even specced it.

Now, it's not insane, but it's not cheap. I'm going to go with $4,000. That is probably what it would be after I specced it. The starting price, the base price. $3,999. All right. Anybody else have a guess? This is price is right rule.

So if you go over, you're disqualified. Anybody else have a guess of what the— $3,000. $3,000. Okay. We have $3,000. What did you say? Four grand? Yeah. I'm going to say 3-2-1-0. 3-2-1-0.

Alright, the Lenovo Titanium Enterprise NCC-1701 has a starting price of $2,180. Everybody, you overbid, so you all should go buy one now.