LINUX Unplugged - Episode 47: Desktopaholics Anonymous | LUP 47

Episode Date: July 2, 2014

We come clean on our struggle with loving every Linux desktop, until we start up the hate. Plus we discuss the huge news for CoreOS and take a closer look at OwnCloud 7’s server-to-server syncing.Plus troubleshooting KDE sound problems, and a new community initiative!

This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's got all its updates applied as it prepares to go offline and live in a cabin. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey, Matt. It is hot here. Now, it's maybe not hot by everybody's standards, but it's hot enough that we've got a brush fire nearby. I mean, that's hot, right?

Yeah, it's about 87 degrees in the studio today, and it gets wet. It's like a wet hot, Matt. It's like a humid kind of hot. That's what makes it so miserable. And of course, I made my own predicament worse because I was barbecuing today. So we had to close up all the windows in the studio because

I didn't want to make the studio smell like barbecue smoke. And it was delicious. I'm not going to lie. It turned out... Rikai gave me like, here is a bag full of burgers that I made. Why don't you cook them all? It was like, he threw down the gauntlet and I'm like, I'm going to cook all these burgers before Linux unplugged. And I did it and it was delicious. And we had copious amounts of bacon and I made, I

took some of the, this is kind of gross, but I took some of the bacon grease sauce. I took some of the, and made a sauce out of it with the barbecue. It was just, it was just amazing all around, man. That's all I'm trying to say. Oh my goodness. So we got, I kind of lucked out. I pretty cool, pretty cool. Oh, nice goodness. Yeah, I kind of lucked out. I pretty cooled off at the start of the show. But it's still kind of warm. So we've got to just persevere. I'm glad you took wise precautions. I, on the other hand, was not so wise.

But that's okay. We've got a good show. We're going to do some follow-up first, and then we're going to cover a couple of items, a few updates on some big news that's happened on stories that we've covered recently. And then after that, we're going to announce a new community. We're going to call it the Jupiter Colony Review Draft, where we're looking to expand our distribution reviews and cover more distributions. And we want to collate a group of folks out there that would like to get involved

in reviewing a distribution and perhaps come on our show via Mumble and share their thoughts. Now, this isn't going to be necessarily an easy job because you're going to have to download the distribution, try it out, note down your thoughts, and then work with our team. But we want to expand the distributions that we're able to cover. And so we're going to talk more about that in today's show, including where you can sign up and draft yourself

to be in our Jupiter Colony review panel. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. But first, Matt, this is something that's been kicking around. We talk about this a lot on the live stream. We haven't talked a lot about it in a show for a while, but the audience might be familiar that you and I have struggled with audio issues under KDE. I think struggle is being kind.

Oh. That's being kind. Yeah, you're right. It's inexcusable because it's not just like one particular hardware setup. It's multiple hardware setups. Right. Come on. And I want to qualify that I want to completely back that statement up too because I've tried it on multiple systems with USB sound cards, onboard sound cards, HDMI sound cards, you

name it, different machines with NVIDIA, ATI, Intel, all the whole stack has been laptops, desktops, all of it. And I've had issues with switching my audio settings and things like that. So Wiggle Waffles wrote into the subreddit and said, in previous installs of KD, I haven't really had any troubles with phone on, especially running it on a VM.

But since I dedicated to switching from dual booting with Arch and Windows 8 instead of running Arch in a VM, sound on KD has been a nightmare. It works in the most basic sense of the term, but hooking up headphones is spotty. The volume buttons on the keyboard adjust the HDMI audio even when it's not plugged in. And the volume gets reset to 100% every time I reboot, blowing out my eardrums whenever I get an error message. And then he goes on to ask if there's a way to overcome this.

And then the discussion thread didn't go the way they usually go. Usually, I see a ton of people saying, well, I run KDE and I never have a problem. And then I just kind of check out because I'm like, okay, well, I know I've had it on like a dozen systems I've had these problems. But actually just about everybody in here sort of chimed in and said, yeah, I've had some problems, definitely had some problems. You know, it's really bad, et cetera, et cetera. There's something going on.

There's something going on. I don't know if it's the way Phonon interacts with Pulse Audio. I don't know. It's exactly what it ison interacts with Pulse Audio. I don't know. It's exactly what it is, in my opinion, based on my experiences with it and actually experimenting with it and just kind of troubleshooting, looking through the logs. That's where the hang-up is. It's either one or the other. You don't do both, in my opinion. Okay.

I have a suggestion because we can have a religious war about this, or maybe as a community, we could create a database of the hardware that people are trying it on, and the distributions, and the versions of like Pulse and KDE, and maybe we could come up with some common threads, and then as a group, we'd have something we could submit as a bug report to the KDE folks so they could work on it.

Sounds interesting. So I don't know if people in the subreddit would be interested in that. Maybe we could work together, and I'll sort of come together and try to narrow this thing down, and Sounds interesting. set up. I got a brand new Steam game. And all I wanted to do was set my audio out to my speakers. And I probably spent two hours trying to make that work. And I eventually gave up. And it made me just sit there and think, you know, why did I just do that? I felt like I just wasted two hours of my life on something that shouldn't be a problem at all.

And I think a lot of people have that experience. And it can be very frustrating. And it's something I think if we all work together, instead of just banging our table about how upset it makes us, maybe we can, as a group figure out some commonalities like something like that you what do you think yeah it sounds worth it's interesting yeah i think it's worth a try i'm skeptical i'm really skeptical just because i every time it's ever been brought up it's always been well it's just not an issue

and i've just you know if we can get past that and we can get something legitimate out there, then I'll be able to stand behind it and say, okay, that's cool. Let's evaluate. That's why I'm thinking those of us that acknowledge it's a problem, we band together and figure out what it is. It seems like there's so many moving layers and it could even be versions of things that make a difference.

I don't know. Maybe it's more pronounced on Arch. Who knows? Let's shift gears. Let's talk about KDE a little more in the context of Mint 17. They just had the new release. And producer of the show, Eric, has been trying out Mint 17 for a little while now. And he's kind of gone in and made it really kind of finely tuned to the way he likes it. So, Eric, what has been your impressions of using Mint now for a little while?

And what was the first thing you had to change? Well, I kind of went through it. So, Eric, what has been your impressions of using Mint now for a little while, and what was the first thing you had to change? Well, I kind of went through it, and the first thing I changed was the theme. For some reason, the arrow theme for me is just way too bright, so I changed it to one that you can download straight from the Get New Themes button called A-M-A-K-A-G-E. Amakage, wherever you pronounce that, I don't know. So I've got that, and then I got rid of Oxygen. And the way I did that was I changed my widget style to CuteCurve. Right.

And then I was able to install, on top of that, there's a Zeketo. Or Zeketo, however you pronounce it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, however you pronounce that. I was able to download that and make that a theme for Cute Curve. And on top of that, because Zakatwo, wherever it is pronounced, it is available for GTK3 as well and GTK2. So you get sort of the benefit of the same benefit you get if you're using Oxygen, only you can use the theme you want. Correct.

Yeah, exactly. And it gets rid of that glow that people are so upset about. And not only that, but I have not, at least in this KDE setup, experienced the audio issues that are prevalent in the Arch KDE setup. I don't know what it is about that setup. So you've had issues on the same machine and then you've loaded Mint and haven't had issues? Correct. I don't know how that is. It's got something to do with the phone on and Pulse Audio implementation, but it's got to be something with that.

Hmm. Hmm. That sounds like something that needs to be a little investigated into. So overall tool set, performance-wise, you like it? Do you think you're going to stay here for a while? I think I might stay with it, and the reason being is that I have actually run it up against Kubuntu, and with Kubuntu, I don't know

what the problem is there, but it just seems sluggish. Like, if I go to open the system settings, mint KDE, I don't have that problem. It just pops up right away, and I was actually blown away by that. So, I don't know what they mean. Because we're sending all your data to Amazon. That's what it is.

I'm not talking about Kubuntu. I'm not talking about the Unity desktop. I'm talking about the KDE implementation, Kubuntu. Yeah, I was trying to be funny. Poby, any thoughts you want to share with the crowd on KDE from your end? I know you've been playing with it recently. Oh man, why'd you set me up like that?

I just think KDE's a great desktop. I just have sound problems. Honestly, KDE and Bacon go very well together. I got to say that. Yeah, nice, nice. I know, KDE, I mean, probably that might not be a fair question

because you're obviously a Unity guy, I'm sure. I'll bash it. It's okay. Well, you know, I use lots of different desktops, and I've tried KDE in the past, the distant past, and I've tried it recently this week. And I find it incredibly painful to use and verbose and far too many settings. And the layout of the UI is unbelievably painful with bits scattered all over the screen and weird dialogues. I find it a horrible mess. Now let me ask you, though, would you be willing to...

Oh, somebody has an open mic. Hot mic. Hot mic. Close your mic. Hot mic. There we go. Would you be willing to entertain the idea of you're just coming at it from a different angle? You come at it with a different set of expectations of what a a desktop should be so these things that don't meet that set of expectations really stand stand out at you but if somebody else came at it with a different set of expectations those things would be expected and they'd be missed if they weren't there what do you think of that yeah probably i think if you if your expectations were i'm a deeply technical user

and i want to have absolute control over every single pixel on my display. Right. And I want to be able to fiddle with every possible setting that there is. Sure, it's there for you. But if you're someone who wants to turn the computer on and use it, I find it obtuse. It gets in the way.

And I was surprised how hard it was for me to find applications start applications um download updates uh i i just found it really got in the way and and that's from someone who uses unity where everyone tells me that gets in the way of your workflow and it's it's hard to use. I'm lost for words. Okay. See, I like Unity too. And I just like this also. Honestly, I'm the type of person who cannot decide between a desktop environment. I'm a total desktop.

Because I like them all. I'm such a desktop hooker. It's crazy. Yeah, me too. I'll load up Cinnamon for a couple of days and be like, this is it. This is the perfect blend of classic and modern. And then I'll be like, in Nome, I'll be like gonna be like oh i'm in the future and it's finally working it's here and then i'm in katie and i'm like i can do anything i want what is wrong with you people why

don't you just install i know i know just leave it alone it's a sickness man get on and do your work maybe there's a medication for it it's like some sort of ocd i don't know it's weird i can't help myself i'm compelled compelled. Although I do find myself in GNOME pretty much all the time right now. That's what my main DE is. And the thing I love about GNOME is I have several different machines with different monitor sizes

and I think GNOME works great on my big 28-inch monitor and a 30-inch monitor that I have. I have one of those cinema displays that I bought used that GNOME rocks that. And then I've got a 14-inch screen that I've got Gnome on and it rocks that too. I mean, they all do good in that regard, but I just found that particularly works pretty well.

I'm sorry, I cut somebody off. Did somebody want to add something before we move on? Yeah, I just wanted to say that I like KDE's functionality. It's got a lot of awesome technical features like KDE Connect and the widgets and all these things. And it's so cool as far as functionality, but it looks awful.

I'm supposed to put some screenshots then and show you what I've got. Yeah, if you've got them handy, yeah. What you said, I completely understand how you could make KDE look good, and it's possible. You just remove Oxygen completely and it's fine. Oxygen is hideous. But also there's a few things that i don't like about the configuration it's confusing like you can configure everything but you can start a configuration and then right click something in that and there's another configuration on top of it well they've explained the logic behind that but yeah i think it's like they're like well people expect it in both places so we

put it in both places i agree and i i am am watching the Plasma Next and Plasma 5 stuff to see, like, what are they doing there? What's Jens and his team like? What is their vision? And I like where they're going with it. I still – I think it's going to take – I think the next version of KD is going to come out in a big way. They're going to try to keep it the same so that way they don't disrupt the apple cart, right? They don't tip whatever the saying is. But I wouldn't be surprised if once this next version of katie is out and they consider it sort of stabilized if

that's when they really start iterating on some of the more rougher edges i think i think it's going to be a little bit you know what they could do thing is i can understand i can understand why you know people use various desktops i i can see why people use Gnome Shell. I can see why people like Elementary and Mate and Cinnamon. The one that I just can't fathom is KDE. I just can't figure out what psychology brings people to use KDE on a daily basis and like it. It's unfathomable. Maybe you'll change your mind once all the Ubuntu apps are written in Qt

and you're looking for something that's a really solid Qt-based desktop. Oh, I see what you've done there. No, no, no. Just clap. KDE not equal to Qt. I know, I know. Not equal to KDE. You know that.

I do, I do. All right, well, lookBE. You know that. I do, I do. All right, well, look. You trolly monster. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Look, before we move on, I should probably thank our first sponsor. I wanted to talk about, did you guys hear there's huge, huge, huge news for CoreOS? Huge news. Like, we were just, it's probably because they were on our show.

That's the only thing I can figure. It's got to be because they were on our show. But I don't know. But first, let's take a little break and thank our first sponsor this week, and that is the great folks over at DigitalOcean. Now, what the heck is DigitalOcean, my friends? I will tell you, DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server.

And most of you guys could probably get started in about 55 seconds, but if you're a pro, and I'm not trying to challenge you, I'm not trying to say, hey, it's the 4th of July, go have a few drinks, and then go spin up as many droplets as you can as fast as possible. But if you were to infer that from this spot, I would understand. But most people create a droplet in about 55 seconds, and pricing plans start only $5 per month. And that's what I've been using for months and months and months now.

And here's what you get for $5 a month. 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one blazing fast CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. And DigitalOcean has data center locations all around the world, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Amsterdam, tier one bandwidth in those locations, and amazing hardware providers. All of this connected to SSD drives running on top of KVM with their incredible control panel. Their interface is simple. Their control panel has got to be one of the most intuitive experiences I've ever used. And the best part is, is power users can really get at that with their straightforward API. And they have a great development community and there's tutorials

that help you get set up with things like GitLab and there's one-click deployment for a lot of great applications that I know our community uses the heck out of. You can create a droplet in less than a minute. You can do backups. You can do transfers. You can set up the perfect Linux server, and then template that, and then deploy that Linux server whenever you need it again. And DigitalOcean has hourly pricing, so if you want to take advantage of our special promo code, you can get a $10 credit or use that for the hourly pricing. Use the promo code. Now, it's probably going to be changing because it's July now. I haven't gotten the official new one, but it'll probably be Unplugged July. If I was a gambling man, I would say Unplugged July. Unplugged June will still work

too, of course, if you're listening to this right as we're changing over. But use the promo code Unplugged July. That lets them know that you appreciate them supporting the Linux Unplugged show. You want them to keep sponsoring. That way that keeps us on the air, but it also gets you that $10 credit so you can try out what I've been talking about for so long now and see how amazing it is to get your own server that you have root control over up in the cloud connected to tier one bandwidth sitting on top of SSD drives powered by KVM. I mean, really, digitalocean.com. And a really big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. I tell you what, Matt, I'm starting to feel a little bit like I have short timers.

Even though I'm only going to a cabin for two nights, I'm like, as soon as this show is done, I'm hitting the road. I'm out of here. You're packed. You're like Fred Flintstone going down the road. Totally, totally. Okay, check out the great news for CoreOS. They just got $8 million in funding. $8 million. So CoreOS, you guys know, we've just had them recently on the show. We did a review of it as well.

They're the company that makes this, well, now they're a company, that makes a scalable version of Linux custom tailored for servers. They just raised $8 million in a Series A funding round. It's now offering support services for companies. That's going to be their business model. They called a new commercial help service called CoreOS Managed Linux, which the company describes as an OS as a service offering. And they provide organizations with constant patches and updates in case they don't want the responsibility. So they're going to manage that for you. Sounds familiar. And they're promising to help reduce the admin work for people deploying CoreOS. The monthly charge will range from anywhere. Forget this. This is for companies that have

big deployments. Monthly charge ranges anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000. Wow. For monthly. That's a good business. Yeah. And so when Polvy was asked about, like, who's your competitor here? Because this has got to be a hot space. He says, well, one of them for sure is Red Hat. Red Hat's project Atomic is a direct response to CoreOS, he said. And of course, CoreOS relies heavily on Docker, who's been working closely with Red Hat.

And of course, Ubuntu and others, too. Huge news for CoreOS, though. Huge. $8 million for a Linux distro? It's got to be because we just had them on the show, right? Absolutely. Clearly. I mean, you know. The last bump. Hey, the time.

The last bump. It was totally. Yeah. Oh, you know what? Hey, here's another last bump. I'm kidding, of course. But the Creator Project announced that they just didn't really announce it. They just reached their funding.

This is the really nice, really nice Illustrator program for that KDE desktop that Popey loves so much. They just reached their goal of $15,000 in funding. And they still have eight days to go, too. So now if you want to back a winner, you can. And this is really one of the greatest open source desktop applications out there for people who are artsy-fartsy. And, yeah, there's GIMP and, yeah, there's Inkscape. This is something unique, something different. And congratulations to them.

Again, the last bump, I'm sure. I'm sure. And responding to pressure from the Linux Action Show, own Cloud 7. We've gotten more details on the server-to-server syncing. I remember I said on the last – I'd love to get more details on how own Cloud 7 is doing the server-to-server syncing. I remember I said on last night, I'd love to get more details on how ownCloud 7 is doing the server-to-server syncing. We got some details. So I thought I'd give you guys an update on that too, because to me,

this is the coolest feature of ownCloud 7. So the server-to-server sharing allows you to mount a share from another ownCloud instance and seamlessly collaborate on shared files from within each of your own ownCloud instances. Essentially combining your private clouds into one single public cloud between you two.

You can even have the folder locally synced to a client, like through the own cloud client sync. No need to create accounts on your other instances. Just once it's all shared up, you can connect to each other's own cloud. They use the example of a class. You could have your classmates connect to your own cloud server, send them a shared folder link the usual way. Instead of them having to visit your own cloud each time and log in, they can opt to click the Save to Own Cloud button and add a folder to their own own cloud instance.

And then they can add this folder to the list of locally synced folders, and it will sync between your own cloud instances as if it was on their own cloud server. Oh, cool. Right? Yeah. That sounds nice. That's freaking awesome. Yeah.

I mean, they talk about performance improvements. They talk about server-to-server syncing. I am digging that. I am thinking own cloud 7 is the one that this might be the time I switch. I cannot wait to load it up into a… Clearly, I'm spinning up another droplet. I mean, I think that's been settled. There you go.

Right there, right? You could. I've been thinking, you know, I've been really trying to figure out, like, photos for my wife and I and music and then moving them between the two locations. It's not as easy as it should be. And there's not, like, there's, like, you could do BitTorrent sync, but then you have to run individual. You have to configure each client application on each machine. So, like, let's say I'm using Rhythmbox. you have to configure each client application on each machine.

So, like, let's say I'm using Rhythmbox. I have to scan that BitTorrent sync folder and add it as a library on every machine, and the metadata might be tracked differently or the podcast or whatever it is, right? It's just not very smooth. But the promise of own cloud where it could offer that one central library for, you know, even if it was just for business contacts and business events and things like that, that sounds extremely compelling and essentially what I use the Google apps for right now. And then if it does file sync on top of that, gets us off Dropbox for some of our fixed assets because we have like a lot of our art and fixed visuals in Dropbox

because it's just so easy to deploy Dropbox and have it sync up on the production machines. But if OnCloud offers something there too, it might solve a few problems. I'm really excited about it. And I wonder too, like if there wouldn't be a bit of a contracting business and going around and saying, hello, this is Chris's own cloud installation. And would you like an internet that actually works for you and offers file sync and gets your staff off of Dropbox? Let me introduce you to my own cloud installation package for only $1,000. I'll deploy own cloud for you and get all your users migrated off of Dropbox, let me introduce you to my own cloud installation package for only $1,000. I'll deploy own cloud for you

and get all your users migrated off of Dropbox. Like, that could actually be, like, a legitimate thing people go around and make money off of because own cloud's getting serious. And then if you offer, like, server sync, that's a perfect solution for businesses that have a few offices. A small business that has one or two offices,

own cloud sync between them. Moneymaker. I mean, like, especially when you think about like dental offices, real estate offices, anything that, especially when you're dealing with at-home people as well as at-work people, multiple offices, yeah, there's a lot of opportunity there. Yeah, you know,

very much so. I mean, I'm thinking very much of my workflow, but I could easily see like a small business owner that wants a sync of the most vital documents and things like that at their own house for backup, right? I mean, that seems legit. So, hmm. It sounds like a good option for a couple clients I have that it can save a lot of effort for me as well.

Oh, yeah. The other thing, so OwnCloud right now is I'm going to look at for my all-inclusive sync solution. And then the other one I got to experiment more with is SyncThing. I've played with it a little bit. The thing I'm not loving about SyncThing is you have to authorize each device you're going to sync with. So distributing things like podcast files, you know, I can't authorize every viewer out there that wants to sync the Linux Action Show HD folder.

That's just, that'd be crazy. I'd be doing that all day long. But so BitTorrent Sync seems like that's still the go-to thing for that. It doesn't replace SyncThing in the terms of like content distribution. So then if I'm going to be running an instance of BitTorrent Sync anyways, should I just go all in on that and just simplify my life instead of running BitTorrent Sync and own cloud or BitTorrent Sync and SyncThing? I got too many sync options. True. So I'll figure it out eventually and then we'll bit torn sync and sync thing. I got too many sync options. True. So I'll figure it out eventually and then we'll make an episode out of it.

Sounds like a plan. Right? Like solve two problems with one, you know, just boom, two birds, one stone. Hey, speaking of solving problems, let me tell you about our next sponsor and then we'll get into the community announcement, the Jupyter review panel. But first, let me tell you about the great Canadians over at ting.com. Go to linux.ting.com. Why? Because it's linux.ting.com. Own that URL. That is ours. Let's represent the Linux users at Ting. Now, here's really why you want to switch to Ting.

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And I feel like I am living a bit in the future when I use Ting because it's all the things I need in a cellular service. My data is there. I have hotspot and tethering included. I get the pick of some of the greatest Android devices and iOS devices or just feature phones, all available through Ting. It's a flat $6 per month. Then just my usage build on top of that, all managed through an. It's a flat $6 per month. Then just my usage build on top of

that. All managed through an incredibly easy to use dashboard, but also provides real insights. And this is a big thing for me. These dashboards, this is 2014. There is no excuse for the dashboards that some of these cell companies use. They are just trash. And the great thing about Ting is they also support industry standards too. So it works well on mobile. It works well on your desktop. They also have featured integration with Amazon payments to pay for your cell phone bill, which is a really nice feature, and it kind of shows you how Ting is hip to a lot of these types of technologies, and it's refreshing.

It's one of the things I appreciate the most, and that's why I actively follow the Ting blog, because there's always good information, even if you're not a Ting subscriber, on the Ting blog. And it's always worth checking out over there, because they often post videos that are behind the scenes. It's fun to see the Ting crew get insights into how the company operates. And check out their devices too because when you go to linux.ting.com, they're going to take $25 off your first device. If you've already got a device, they'll take $25 off your Ting service. I paid for more than my first month.

Now I've got two phones on my Ting program, and it's barely cracking $30 a month because we're really conscious about how we do it. We're on Wi-Fi a ton. We use Viber and Skype for our phone calls. And the little bitsies that we do use phone calls for, we just pay for when we use it. I love it. It's just worked so well for me. Linux.ting.com. Take $25 off your first device, get or $25 credit and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring. Take $25 off your first device, get or $25 credit, and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay, so this is a fun initiative that the production team's been wanting to do for a while. Not only is it a way for us to sort of increase the distributions that we cover and give attention to maybe some of the smaller ones

that we wouldn't normally want to load up and install just for like a smaller distro, but sometimes when you do that, like you find a diamond in the rough. So we are announcing the Jupiter Colony Review Draft. And this is an initiative that will eventually establish kind of a reoccurring group of folks. But we're going to kind of take baby steps at first. Rotten, do you want to jump in here at this point and kind of mention how we're going to launch this with the pre-selected group and why we're doing it that way? Can you jump in here at this point and kind of mention how we're going to launch this with the pre-selected group and why we're doing it that way? Yeah. So the first week we're going to do – it's going to make it easier to – instead of having to vet everyone to join, we're going to do just kind of a testing purposes of getting people to – just a pre-selection of a few people, maybe like a – probably less than a dozen or so, but just as many people as possible.

Then we're going to have it where we come on a show. Everybody does a show together. You play with the distro however you would normally would. Take some notes, things like that. Take some notes, maybe even try to beat it up a little bit and see where you find some flaws. Then we have

a community discussion about whether it's something that could be good for a new user or just the pros and cons of the distro itself. Yeah. And do you want to go ahead and announce the first one? No, go ahead. I'll let you do it. Okay. The first distro we're going to put in this little roundtable review thing is Chaos.

Yeah, Chaos has been on our list for a while, but we just haven't gotten to it. So that'll be a good one for people to give a go. And it's KDE Distro, right? Yes. Yes, it is. They consider it a lean KDE distribution at that. Yes.

Is that even possible? Wow. Lean in the sense of how many packages they allow in their system. So they only allow KDE-specific stuff. If it's anything other than that, they force it off. And they have that interesting design aesthetic as well, which I've been interested to try out. So the idea here is we get a wide sampling of opinions on this.

You guys can look at it. And some folks will look at it from very technical aspects. Some people will look at it from the design aspect. Others will look at it from a usability and things like that. We'll get a nice rounded set of opinions and then we can accumulate it into sort of a concentrated review for the Linux Unplugged audience. And honestly, there is an opportunity here down the road where if a few folks stood out as, you know, really solid contributors, maybe there'd be a role where you'd come on last and do dedicated review

segments of specific distributions. So there's opportunity for expansion and growth here, but it's just something to start with for fun. So embedded in the show notes, we will have the Jupiter Colony review draft. If you would be interested in reviewing a distribution for us, like Rotten said, we've already picked our first distribution and our first crew. So that way, we just kind of get things rolling. But after that, we'll be pulling from our draft list, and you'll find that in the episode 47 show notes. It'll be linked and embedded in there, and it'll be in the IRC chat room for those of you watching live.

So are we going to do the review next week, Rotten? Yes, next week. Okay, so we'll have chaos on the show. Whoa! Yeah, you know what's coming up down the road. In fact, I want to put the word out there. I'm thinking about on July 22nd. Hmm, I see.

Well, we have something already scheduled on the production calendar, but I'm thinking about potentially being live from OSCon in Portland, Oregon on July 22nd. So I want to put the word out there for the Jupiter Broadcasting audience. If there's folks out there who might be interested in meeting up at OSCon on July 22nd. So I want to put the word out there for the Jupiter Broadcasting audience. If there's folks out there who might be interested in meeting up at OSCon on July 22nd, that's a Wednesday. Or no, it's a Tuesday. If it worked out, it'd be really fun to be able to do Unplugged

live from there. So kind of putting a feeler out there, seeing what people think. We were accepted at OSCon as media, so we could go in there, we'd have media badges, we could do interviews and stuff like that. So there's some reasons to go down there, but I'd really love to do it if we knew we were going to meet up with some folks.

Alright, Ron, is there anything else we want to cover on the community review? The Jupiter Colony draft, as it were? Yeah, the draft is going to be... We first want to make sure people that if they're interested in doing it, they don't have to worry about having an extra computer or anything like that.

It's just kind of play with it. You don't need to remove your existing distro or anything like that. So we're going to do a virtual box or something. Yeah. It can be a virtual box. Some things will provide a virtual box image to make it easier for people. Other times they could just download the ISO. Some things don't work very well in a virtual box box so we figure that out on the way to go yeah it might be distribution dependent yeah because like for example you can't really review

a distribution like core os in virtual box so there's some yeah we were bouncing it around we found some uh some people had some questions about maybe um you know having a whether you should like run it all the week or is it just something we can just kind of like jump in and play with and if that's enough and essentially uh it's not you're not trying to ask people to just you know run live with it in a week or anything just to kind of you know play play with it use it see if you can break it kind of thing yeah i mean it's really going to be results depending on what insights the audience, that member brings. And if like then if they bring something that we're like,

yeah, that was a really great observation. Will you join us for the next review? You know, that's the kind of system it's going to be where solid contributions will be noted and appreciated. And I love the idea too of then eventually establishing a pool of folks and saying, okay, we're looking for everybody who has Intel graphics because we want to try out this Wayland distribution, you know, or something like that. Because if we built up a little pool, we could maybe do stuff that is a little bit harder for

ourselves to do because maybe I don't have a machine with dedicated Intel graphics, right? So I couldn't do that review of something that runs Mir or Wayland. But if we had a resource out there of folks that wanted to participate and wanted to do these reviews, essentially you don't even have to have experience. But if you've done blogging too, you're probably a great candidate if you've blogged a distro review. And just it's something fun we want to do. I'm looking forward to it. I think it could be a good way for Matt and I to discover a few distributions we hadn't really thought of trying before.

And then you never know. Maybe we'll take a look at it and end up switching. Maybe. I don't know. I'm a little skeptical. I don't know, Matt. You seem skeptical. So anyways, form is in the show notes if you guys want to fill that out.

Also, just a little plug-sies. Check out Tech Talk today. Tomorrow's episode, because I pre-recorded it because I'm going to a cabin. Tomorrow's episode is a retro look back at two operating systems that almost dominated the market. One of which I'm sure most of you have heard of. One of which I would bet most of you haven't heard of. And it'll be surprising who was making it and what it was based on. So check out Tech Talk today.

It's a new show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, a daily technology podcast where me and my closest mumble friends discuss the tech news from perspectives of open source enthusiasts and Linux users. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that every story is a Linux story, but what it means is instead of getting that typical Silicon Valley bias where it's very heavily Google influenced or Apple influenced and Linux and open source are very often not considered and not part of their perspective or not part of the discussion. This has been something that we've talked about on Linux Unplugged for a couple of episodes. The quality of journalism, especially those coming at it from a Linux perspective, is pretty abysmal. So one of the goals I have with Tech Talk today is to have a platform for us to have discussions around the tech events, the tech news of the day.

And it's the stuff that actually is worth talking about. It's not just rattling off headlines. It's things that are actually worth discussing from a perspective of a Linux user. And I hope it's an interesting recipe. I'd like you guys to check it out. Episode 18 came out today. We talked about Microsoft shutting down the no IP service, which screwed a lot of Jupyter Broadcasting audience members. I saw a lot of complaints about that in the threads in a couple of different of our subreddits.

So that's an issue we talked about in today's Tech Talk today. It doesn't quite fit in Linux Unplugged or Linux Action Show, but it's an issue we could talk about. And then, like I said, tomorrow is the retrospective at the OSs of Futures Past. And so I encourage you to check out Tech Talk today if you want more show. But I think that's everything we have for today. I think we've gone through our list. We kind of burned through it pretty quick, but I'm okay with that because that means I get to wrap up and head out to a cabin.

I'm not going to complain, Matt, if you get my drift. And it is hot. I tell you what. Yeah, I was going to say. Woo, it is hot my drift. And it is hot, I tell you what. Yeah, I was going to say. Woo, it is hot. Get yourself a Costco thing of water in the back. Oh, yeah. Oh, I got a big thing of water, but I could use another one.

Jeez Louise, I'll tell you what. So, all right. Well, thanks, everybody, for joining us on this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. You know, Linux Unplugged is a great show to join us live because you can participate in the mumble room. You can participate in our chat room. You get to help name the show. Just join us, won't you? Go over to jblive.tv. We do it at 2 p.m. Pacific on a Tuesday. jblive.tv

jblive.info for the audio stream. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to have our robots convert that into your time zone. That's what you gotta do. You just show up live and rock it. And take part in our virtual lug. We really like that. And don't forget, we also want your feedback. Go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact and choose Linux Unplugged from the drop-down. All right, Matt. Well, I'll see you on Sunday. All right, sir?

I'll see you then. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you.