LINUX Unplugged - Episode 48: KaOS Theory | LUP 48

Episode Date: July 9, 2014

We chat with Jos Poortvliet about the future of KDE, Plasma 5 Desktop, then review a KDE distribution with a direction: KaOS.Plus: The great news for the Blender project, our OSCON plans and much more!

Samsung's quarterly earnings are out and their sales are falling flat. The S5 is not selling very well. Profits are down. Shipments are down. Like big, too. Like pretty big, like pretty big drops. What do you think, Popey? Why is Samsung's sales falling through the floor on their Samsung lines of phones?

Could it be that people now have, that we've reached a saturation point of smartphones and there's nothing revolutionary in smartphones that they're making. All they're doing is making them in different sizes. But look at the, but look at the activation counts. The activation counts are still going up for every month. There's more Android activations than before. But people don't necessarily want gigantic, very expensive phones.

They want a smartphone. And Samsung, do they have a range of low-end Android phones? They also have the same phone coming out every single year now, it seems like. Yeah, yeah, that's true. People got a little bored maybe. And plus, TouchWiz has gotten a bad rap. And people still use their S4 and S3, they're still

on contract, too. I think it's cheaper Android phones. I think that's what it is. I think part of the problem is the same problem that Windows PC manufacturers have had. Cheaper unlocked phones. If it's all kind of the same thing, then why don't I just buy the cheapest one? Especially if I'm not

savvy enough to know the difference between them. Speaking of phones, did y'all hear about the CyanogenGit hub getting pulled down? Yeah, what happened there? It was something about the Broadcom drivers, wasn't it? No, it was Qualcomm, wasn't it? Yeah, Qualcomm, that's what it was.

There you go. And Qualcomm released a statement about that too, but I haven't read it yet. Yeah, they backed down and apologized. Well, it was like a huge pull-down too, right? Like it was a massive DMCA takedown they did. So, yeah, I'm looking at it right now on Foronix. Qualcomm has reversed his

takedown notice and allowed the 100-plus Git repositories to reappear. Qualcomm came under pressure and likely looked at the reported files to realize they weren't all that confidential. In fact, they probably didn't have anything to do with them. Just all bits being like Android kernel source files and things from CyanogenMod. It was weird, too, because the files that they wanted to pull down were open-sourced

ones, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, they all had the Linux Foundation comments up at the top. Yeah, yeah. That's the bogus thing about it. So did you also hear that now SoundCloud is allowing EMC to do content ID on SoundCloud files and issue essentially like the same YouTube notice system on SoundCloud now?

Yeah, and if you protest it, you get told you're out of luck. And if you've got a pro account, tough. So you've got GitHub that has to do DMCA takedowns for code. You've got YouTube and SoundCloud that have to do takedowns for copyright. This is sucking.

SoundCloud has mostly other people's audio on it, so it's kind of hard to not have, you know. Well, I mean, yeah. It consists pretty much almost the entire thing. You could also see that if there's some D-bag who uploads an entire CD to his SoundCloud account or something like that,

I mean, you could see there's a point there. Yeah, but, you know, people also do remixing and stuff like that, too. Yeah, and I just saw, I guess we're kind of more familiar with it in the content sense, but this to me really seemed like here's a real world GitHub code now. The same thing's happening where it's probably the same way it works with Content ID is there's some third party that Qualicom contracts with to go out and find violations of their intellectual property online, right?

And then they issue out, they do the whole thing. They probably have legal representation status. They issue the letter on behalf of Qualicom, and it's like there's a whole industry around this now. And now it applies to code too, I guess. When open source fights itself. Yeah, it's probably an open source Python script doing the scanning. Damn it. Yeah.

Ah, dang it. And they're doing it from their Chromebooks. Okay. Okay. Now we're going to talk about the KDE thing in the show. I'm saying nothing. Can somebody... Okay, here's the thing.

I struggle with how to even phrase and talk about these things. Like, here's why. Here, let me read this. Let me just pick out... Here's the opening paragraph to the announcement. So here's the headline on KDE.org. KDE-KDE ships release candidate of Plasma 5. The next paragraph says,

KDE has today made available the candidate for the first release of Plasma 5, the next generation desktop. This is one last chance to test for bugs and check for problems for the final release next week. Okay, so here's where I get a little confused. KDE has today made available the candidate for the first release of Plasma 5, the next generation desktop. See, but the problem is, KDE is the group and the community. Plasma 5 is the desktop. So, but then there's also something else that's KDE.

I don't know. I'm kind of confused on like... There's a framework and then there's a Plasma and there is... Right, right. So the frameworks are Q... No, they're... What are they called? K5 frameworks, I think.

KDE 5. KDE... Yeah, yeah. Right, okay. So there's KDE 5 frameworks, then there's Plasma 5, and then there's KDE. Okay, so KDE is the group. Right, right. Which is KDE 5, basically, though, right?

Yeah. Right, okay. So you KDE 5, basically, though, right? Yeah. Right, okay. So you have KDE the community, you have KDE 5, the next set of underlying stuff, and then you have KDE Plasma Desktop? Or is it just Plasma? What's it called? Just Plasma 5? Just Plasma. Yeah. Okay, just Plasma. No KDE. It's very confusing for me for some reason. It should not be so confusing. Cygo pasted a picture earlier today about it. I think it was Cygo, where it's like equating KDE to Microsoft, Plasma to Windows, and 5 to Windows 7.

Well, you know, it's interesting that he did that because my first thought was this feels a lot like how Microsoft names products, and this feels a lot like the same kind of confusion that I get when sometimes I'm trying to understand a Microsoft product line. And I also feel like that same confusion and how Microsoft titles their products also translates into their products. And interestingly enough, I feel that same way about KDE. So it's interesting that Aaron made that same comparison because in my mind, when I was trying to sort this out earlier, the first thing that came to mind is, man, I feel like I'm reading something from Microsoft right now. Isn't that strange that KDE, one of the desktops that is kind of heralded for being Windows-like, is kind of confusing you like Windows does?

Oh, man. Check that link in the chat, Chris. It's got an Inga link, which makes it all perfectly clear. All right. Okay. You shouldn't be able to get all that installed in Arch right now, but I tried to. That could not provide for me to get it to work. Yeah.

I figure I'm going to wait a little bit. I've been trying out the new theme, so. Because you've got to use, like, the KDE unstable repo and everything to do it all. Yeah. Yeah. Right now, I've just been getting the next theme on top of KDE 4, the latest, and that seems to be the safer bet. But I am a little curious to try out the new hotness.

I really am. Something about it, man. I can't. I'm a fresh-coat hound. It's like a pie in the window. And I just start walking down the street. Pretty soon the next thing you know I'm stealing pies out of old ladies' windows, also known as Un as unstable repos.

Okay, let me take a look at this. Imager, imager, imager, imager. Now, if only they could fix phonon, that would be awesome. Hey, there's Joss. Hey, Joss. Joss, join us in the mumble room if you want.

Bang mumble to get the server info. Okay, alright, so here you go. Here is the air inside. Go, KDE is not your desktop. All right, so KDE is the organization. Plasma Desktop is the product. And then 5 is the version.

Makes sense, right? Very simple. And you got QT on top of that. So QT 5 now too. Now is it is it irrational is it okay so i'm gonna i'm just gonna say like you know hey maybe if uh uh if this requires an infographic maybe it's too complicated is that is that just me being dense because i honest i understand sometimes like i think i have like a bit of a disability or something this stuff doesn't click for me so i know i'm just maybe

seeing this the wrong way but no i i feel the same way i mean i i looked at this and i was like oh oh okay hey where's that link that you gave and then there's a piss take at the bottom now go boot your microsoft start mozilla and buy adobe Kind of, you know, you're some kind of idiot if you don't understand that KDE is the organization and Plasma is the product. What kind of fool are you? I'm like, oh, alright then. I guess, and

you know, but did it, okay, so back in the good old days, was it just straight up called KDE? And is that where the confusion come from? Is that back in the day it was just KDE? Well, yeah, because before there was a Plasma show. That was coming out until KDE 4.

So didn't they change the game rules on us and they're like, hey, why don't you guys know the rules? Yeah, they're complicating the shit out of this. Before it was just KDE 2 or KDE 3 or whatever and it was Plasma. That's all right. I mean, it could be worse. They could be pulling a fedora and, like, changing their name

and then changing their name back and then changing their name back to it but not meaning the same thing. Wasn't there also the whole KDE software collection and malarkey? That confused me as well. I think that's still a thing. I know. I think that's a thing still. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that says forget legalizing cannabis.

Pizza vending machines powered by Linux are the real crop of our future. My name is Chris, and Matt will be joining us in a little bit. They're working out his audio right now, and it's not only a hot day here in Washington. Let me tell you what. It is a special day, a magical day, if you will, a magical brownie day. Sans magical brownies. They've legalized cannabis here. And you'd think that's what I would be excited about.

But no, I have discovered something called pizza vending machines. Go Google it. It's a real thing. Now, they don't run Linux yet. So I think what we need to do is start a community effort. Maybe we could crowdsource a platform for vending machines. It's going to need a resizable UI. So we'll have to talk about maybe what we're going to use there.

Something for different pizza vending machine form factors is what I'm saying. Different architectures. Put all that in there. We'll get it out into the public. Then we'll send the proceeds to the different open source projects that need funding. Huh? Chris just laid it out for you. You guys can take and run with it. I'm an idea guy. I'm putting that out there to the public, then we'll send the proceeds to the different open source projects that need funding. Huh? Chris just laid it out for you. You guys can take and run with it.

I'm an idea guy. I'm putting that out there to the universe. Well, coming up on the show today, we've got a few follow-up items, news and email-wise, that I want to talk to you guys about, including some epic funding, some Civ V solutions, a little KDE and Plasma V talk. And then we're going to do a community review of Chaos, K-A-O-S, a lean KDE distribution. We have a team now of folks that went through and kicked the tires on this thing.

I've got it running in a VM. We'll talk about it there. We'll talk about it with them, see how it goes. And joining me, as always, is a fully stacked house, a great lineup of Mumble folks that are going to kick around the topics with us, including Joss, who has joined us before on the Linux Action Show, although I believe he was working with Sousa at the time of Novell. Joss, refresh my memory. Last time we had you on the show, were you working with OwnCloud yet? Are you working with OwnCloud yet? I'm pretty sure I wasn't yet because I only joined OwnCloud April 1st of this year.

And I think it's been a while since I've been on the show. Well, I'm really glad you could be here today because a couple of things we're going to talk about are in your wheelhouse. So I'll be deferring to your expertise as we get to that kind of stuff. And we'll get a little update from you and see what you've been up to in a bit too, okay? I'd be happy to help. All right, now go back to the World Cup. All right, so we'll get to our emails first. Ben S. wrote in.

He says, hey, Chris and Matt. He said, hey, Ben. I love the show. I recently started a command line challenge of sorts. I wanted to see if I could live in the command line with no graphical desktop of any kind. I started about two days ago, and it's going really well. I use E-Links for my web browsing, Seamless for my music listening, and Vim for writing.

The hardest part was getting my wireless set up. What do you guys think? Is it possible to work in a command line with no desktop? I thought about this for a minute for myself. In Mumble Room, I'd be really curious to know about you guys. I wonder if, could anybody in the Mumble Room live in the command line exclusively for two days?

Anybody? Yes. Popey, come on. Without HTML? No. I've actually done it. I lived in the command line for two months while my Debian SID system had an X, broken X server. All right, all right, heavens, all right.

Holy smokes. All right, okay, we've got to break this down. I want to start with Popey because I'm calling BS. Come on, Popey. Do you know what? I bought a deck, a vintage deck, VT100, specifically to do this, to have it sat on my desk and be my main machine so I could have some of that retro smell coming from the valves inside of that terminal.

Well, I love the idea of a dedicated machine for it. I mean, I could see that. Okay, all right. So, Heavens, when you were doing this for a while, did you listen to podcasts? Did you just randomly Google stuff? How did that work? What was that like? Well, I was using a command line audio player, and I was actually in my Gentoo compiling

days at the time as well so my second partition was on Gen 2 and that pretty much took up an entire two months of time while my Debian system was just kind of in maintenance. Wow I don't know I kind of fall down with Wimpy it's uh what do you think Wimpy didn't haven't we worked towards perfecting the computer interface and the graphical desktop and building in all these great video cards to get past this hassle? I think so. I mean, I was brought up on Unix systems in the late 80s and early 90s where this was your only option. And we were craving for something better.

And now we've got something better. So on your desktop, use a desktop environment or a decent-tining window manager to manage all of your terminals to your connections to your remote systems. I do all of my development over SSH in the shell. That's perfectly fine. But why would you want to do that for your email and your web browsing and your podcasting and all the other stuff when there are better tools available now? you say there are better tools but mutt is a

fantastic email client like i i actually miss when i used to use mutt before i started using gmail when i used but i missed those days because i was so fast with mutt i could really manage my email super fast and i already use irSSI for my IRC client. So, you know, all I need is GNU Screen or Tmux, and I've got two windows there, one with my email, one with my IRC. All I need is, like, a shell and another. Who needs a GUI? I like the pine.

I kind of, what do you think? How do you read it? Riley, you think it's possible, in other words, but not practical? Yeah, so there's several CLI tools that you could use in TTY mode, and you could use different TTY systems for each one. Like you could have WeChat running in one TTY. You can have like NPD running in another and just do stuff like that. But it's just not practical when it's the age.

Unless you're trying to read Dota X or something. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of how I feel about it. I look at it and I think, boy, yeah, I could... If I didn't need to do podcasts, if I didn't need to do media production, if I didn't need to show webpages, if I didn't have to edit video, if I didn't have to play video or have to

want to play video games, maybe... I don't know. I love the idea of having a fully set up account on my DigitalOcean droplet that's ready to go. Could operate at any time as a full command line only environment. But I wouldn't want to live there. Just out of curiosity, how do I sound over Skype? Because I suspect that this is not an audio problem.

I think it's a mobile problem. Oh, you sound good now, Matt. Much better. You sound real good. You sound really good mobile problem. Oh, you sound good now, Matt. Much better. You sound real good. You sound really good. Yeah. Wow, you sound really good, Matt. Like normal.

Yeah. Well, good job. You guys fixed it. So good. Now Matt's joined us, I think. I think he's gone now. But he has it fixed, so he'll be back. Anyways, I would like to know if you could survive on the command line.

So let us know in the thread in the subreddit for this episode of Linux Unplugged and let us know how it goes Ben, be sure you send in a follow up if you ended up breaking which I think you will alright kernel Linux, open mic kernel Linux open mic kernel Linux, open mic

alright, so I want to do a follow up regarding my ButterFS stuff I had failed to mention during the Linux Action Show episode on ButterFS about recovering that and expanding and reclaiming space and defragmenting. Samuel tweeted me and said, sorry if this was already mentioned to you, which it wasn't, running defrag in general or recompressing on ButterFS will duplicate snapshots. So if you use ButterFS and you take snapshots, you need to be aware of that. And I failed to mention that because I never really have gotten into ButterFS snapshots,

so it didn't really apply to me. That is a huge caveat because that could be a mess. If you're trying to reclaim space and you have snapshots, well, first of all, if you're trying to reclaim space, maybe you should clean up your snapshots. But the second thing is that's just a little gotcha that I wanted to make sure you guys knew about. Hey, before we get into a couple of really great news items that just didn't make it into the Linux Action Show this Sunday, really exciting stuff for a super, super important open source project that we're big fans of here at the Jupyter Broadcasting Network. But first, I want to thank

our first sponsor and a brand new sponsor to Linux Unplugged. You know, we had them on HowToLinux and we decided to bench that for a bit so we could restructure it. But it's such, our next sponsor is so great for you guys that I said, hey, come over to Linux Unplugged. We'll work out the details. I want to make this offer available. And Linux Academy said, yeah, you bet. So here's what I want you to do. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash howto. They've got a summer of learning discount. They're going to take 33% off, so you're only going to pay $50 for the quarter. This is a service that's been built from the ground up by Linux enthusiasts and people who are educators working together on a system that allows you to do self-paced training. Go test yourself as you move along. They have seven plus Linux distributions

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We have to offer it to the Linux Unplugged folks. So we just made this kind of switch just the other day. So that's like an old school URL. If you want to be like a URL hipster, which I'm sure you do, right, go use it, linuxacademy.com slash howto. You can also take a look at some of their courses. They have the Linux Plus exam, introduction to Linux on your desktop. They also have different levels of the Linux LPIC exam.

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You know you have the ability. Get your skill set up there. You know you can do it, and you can do it when you have time. LinuxAcademy.com slash howto to get a 33% discount and a really big thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. I've been using the service now since they were a sponsor on Coder Radio, and it's really great. They also have team courses available,

so if you're in a group and you guys want to work together, they have a system available for that too. It's really a neat service. LinuxAcademy.com slash howto. For a limited time, you can get the Summer of Learning discount. Okay, so Epic Games funded some Blender development, not just funded by a little bit. This actually makes Epic the second major game developer to fund Blender development, not just funded by a little bit. This actually makes Epic the second major game developer

to fund Blender development, period. This is a huge contribution to the Blender project. They're majorly excited about it. They're technically, I think, now the number one sponsor in terms of dollar amount to the Blender project, which is awesome. And other contributors include Valve. Valve backed Blender earlier this year. I guess specifically there's some export stuff that the Epic team wants to see Blender work on.

I don't know if anybody in the mum room knows any more about this, but I think it's pretty interesting to see as some of these big game companies begin to move over to Linux and look at it as a viable market, they're kind of looking at some of this infrastructure project stuff that's not necessarily a video driver. It's not necessarily how the kernel handles a gamepad, but it's still pretty important to the gaming ecosystem. And they're making some investments. They're not like, you know, they're not like, hey, let's just invent our own thing. Let's just, we'll come up with a way and we'll create the way you should all be doing it. They're actually going to these existing, well-respected, open-source projects that have been established for years

and not trying to, like, roll them, but just trying to work with them and contribute to them. And it's great to see now Epic jump on this, too. Not to mention that they don't just do games. They also do a lot of movies as well. I think they did something with the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I'm not exactly for sure on that. But, you know, they do some awesome video graphics as well. Yeah, the Blender project? Yes, very much so. They're kind of all about that. I know. It's really awesome. And so it's good to see... In fact, I don't even know if gaming is really a heavy focus for Blender

outside of the context of just a few things like that, other than character models and stuff like that. Now, if they can have that quality of graphics inside games at 60 frames per second, then I would truly be in heaven. Oh my gosh, the Blender gaming engine? Don't even make me dream, man. That's crazy. That's crazy.

It'd be beautiful. I talked about some audio issues I was having, I think it was last week on Linux Unplugged when we were talking about KDE sound issues. And I managed to get them fixed. Turned out to be a config issue with the default fragment size buffer in Pulse Audio. Changed the default value, which was way high, down to a millisecond setting of 5, and now my Civ V, which had choppy audio, plays flawlessly. So if you've had choppy audio in Civ V or XCOM Enemy Unknown, any of those games, I've got a link in the show notes

where you guys can go check that out and see how I fixed it. Now, this is the story I'm really glad Joss is here because I have a hard time with understanding the way the KDE naming system works, and thankfully we now have an infographic that Aaron Sigo posted recently that tells us how it works. So here it is, ladies and gentlemen. KDE, the project, is happy to announce that they have shipped the release candidate of Plasma 5.

Now, this is the first release of Plasma 5, the next generation desktop. This is the last chance for you guys to test and file for bugs and check any problems before the release, which is scheduled next week. So you have Plasma 5, the desktop component. Then you have KDE Next, a.k.a. KDE 5, sort of the architecture component. Then you have KDE Next, aka KDE 5, sort of the architecture component. Joss, is there anything you want to jump in on here on this story? Are you trying it out? Any insights here you can share with the

group? Do you have a link to that image? Because I'm kind of curious about it, because especially KDE Next is something I've never heard about, so that's kind of new to me which is rather odd. Okay. I mean there's the idea behind the next thing that I do know is that the developers currently refer to an upcoming Plasma release as Plasma Next but that is always

referring to the upcoming Plasma release so after Plasma 5.0 is out, Plasma 5.1 would be referred to as Plasma Next, which is like kind of a code name, eternal code name for the next release. And so, for example, if I have this timing right, like the 5.1 release is already scheduled for October 15th, Tuesday, if things all go according to plan,

if things work out the way the project wants them to. Okay, I hadn't seen that date yet, and I actually thought it would be coming next month. So today, yes, Tuesday, isn't it? So it's last night, actually. Last night, we pushed out um framework five so kd framework five that's basically taken uh where we took our old kd libraries the kd platform the kd lips however you want to call it and basically well divided it in two parts one part we said

okay this we're gonna upstream to cute we brought it back into the toolkit, contributed it to the Qt project, which now has an open governance, so we can actually contribute and work at it. And the other part, we basically cut in little pieces with clear dependencies. We worked on it, making a proper cross-platform, et cetera, et cetera, basically modularizing it, And that's frameworks. So we call it frameworks because there are multiple little pieces,

each of them called a framework, that you can use in your applications. And they're explicitly targeting Qt developers, all Qt developers, and not just KDE developers. This was the main complaint about the old KDE, right? You install Kde as it used to be in the 3.5 and even in the 4 series and then you get all this stuff yeah well we've solved that framework 5 means you just get what your application needs applications are smaller leaner more efficient and a lot of it even went inued so the whole thing got smaller quite a bit as well so this is

really a major release and this is what plasma is going to build on and the idea was actually i think that plasma initially would release this month but because it was meant to build on frameworks and frameworks got delayed by a month the plasma guys also had to delay by a month. And I think it'll come out next month, but that's a wild guess. And maybe the October date is correct, but I thought we would go earlier than that, honestly. And when – so the way this is going to work is really most people probably won't see this ship in a distribution they're going to use until maybe 5.1 is actually out, right? I'm kind of hoping for that, honestly, because as I wrote pretty clearly in, I think, the last time we released something from Plasma, it's pretty good, even for a 5.0 release. It's pretty good.

I mean, it's nothing compared to KD 4.0, right? I mean, absolutely nothing. That was the first version of Plasma we did. And we were literally pushing technological boundaries everywhere. We were pushing the graphics card. I mean, OpenGL support on Linux just sucked back then. And we basically couldn't really properly do the stuff we tried to do. We were pushing Qt.

We were basically taking a new technology, the graphics view, on which Plasma was built, and we were taking it to places where it really wasn't meant to go. But now all that stuff is basically ready. What we're trying to do is pretty much these days what Qt is built for, right? And all the problems with Xorg and the OpenGL support have been mostly fixed. I mean, still everybody's looking forward to Wayland on the developer side. Sure, I bet.

But, you know, a lot of the rough edges are out. In a matter of speaking, yes. In a matter of speaking, perhaps. But for normal, you know, for the Plasma guys, Wayland is really something they look forward. So the first release, on one hand, I mean, it's a first release, okay? We've ported from Qt 4 to Qt 5. We've ported from Platform 4, as we used to call it, to Frameworks 5, which is brand new in itself. So, yeah, you will definitely bump into some rough edges here and there.

But at the same time, we fixed a couple of really fundamental issues that were holding us back. And you couldn't place, I mean, a lot of people complain about the placement of things, you know, like it didn't look really right. Icons were just the wrong size. They weren't aligned properly. That was all because we simply couldn't get that done in

Qt. And now we can. So you will notice on one hand rough edges, but you'll also notice that we're finally building on something that can actually support what we're building. So it's the groundwork in the early days. So does that mean like, it sounds like

what you're trying to say very politely is don't judge it based, don't judge the looks in 5.0 and 5.1. No, certainly not. I mean, there's a lot of work still being done on, you know, there's a lot that was done, but there's still a lot done in the area of polish and also the looks. I mean, there's work on the new theme, but honestly, the implementation of the theme in the first version well to call it hackish is still a compliment i mean it's really put together like okay this kind of looks like what we want right but the way it's done is very suboptimal so certainly when it comes to looks it shows a direction, cleaner, less lines, less icons, less this and that. That's the direction. That's clear. But it's not a final look, not by a long shot.

It sounds like you're pretty excited about it, though. I am. It's maybe a direction you've wanted to see things going for a while? Well, it's a direction. I think that's a big keyword here. When we did KD 4.0, I mean, that's quite a while ago, six years ago. But I remember that. I mean, I worked a lot on the promo and in general, you know, on the whole, yeah, writing about it and everything. And the cool thing about it was there was a very clear direction. We were going somewhere and it was awesome right i mean we didn't know

that our technology and the whole denix platform simply wouldn't be able to well carry us into this beautiful new world so to say yeah so we were all very excited because we were really breaking a lot of technology barriers and i blogged about this a few times you know some of the things we did back then i mean when plasma was designed it was designed to basically converge different user interfaces with one technology right so you would be able to build and we did by the way build prototypes of this you would be able to build a widget that would run on a mobile phone and on a tablet and on a desktop and on a television screen and it would have the same underlying code just a very thin layer of ui work would be different today you still see projects yes companies trying to build one user interface for all these devices surprise it doesn't work

and you see other companies building completely different user interface for each device. Well, seven, eight years ago when we drafted this, we already did it right. Now, yeah, it didn't exactly work out that way, and that's a little frustrating maybe. But now we can actually do it because the knowledge is there. So, yeah, you bet. I am excited, and a lot of us are excited about this. Well, I recommend that if folks out there want to know more, check out where Katie is going. Joss just posted part two a couple days ago.

So check that out. Yeah, let me share, actually, simply a link to my blog because I put a bunch of links in there that probably are all up to them on IRC. I have no idea how to share in. Yeah, don't toss it in there. It's perfect. I'll grab it. Let's see. Yeah.

So this has links to an overview of Frameworks 5. It has a link to an article that I wrote for Linux.com why it is a big deal for free software, because I think this is another thing we didn't get to. But I think Frameworks 5 is actually a really big deal because right now there are half a million cute developers out there and i mean people developing software have cute and there are more people developing software with cute than almost the total number of users of open source and fedora combined right and that's a lot of people developing software of that. And Frameworks basically brings them all in contact with open source, free software,

open contributor process, you know, open governance. Basically, they can, if they want to, and they have the skills and knowledge, at least, you know, if you're a developer, you do, to get involved with free software. And I think that's really a big thing. you do to get involved with free software. And I think that's really a big thing. Well, it sounds like it. It sounds like frameworks is stepping in a direction to give the development community a lot of confidence, too.

Like they're going to have maybe a little more, if they want, involvement. Yes. I mean, can you imagine if only 1% of those half a million developers decides to, I don't know, fix a couple of bugs in framework or other few features. I mean, that will, I mean, come on, that's 5,000 people. That's just crazy. If that would happen, that would just turn everything around, right? That would basically bring more than increase the number of people doing GUI stuff on the Linux desktop, it will increase the number from a few hundred in total to thousands.

So that's order of magnitude. Joss, you've been around for a while. What do you think if you were to put your forecaster's hat on, how long until Frameworks 5 has been out, Plasma Desktop's been out for a while, how long until it's at critical mass and it's actually making a palatable difference where people look back and go, oh, wow, this has really taken off? How far out is that, do you think? Honestly, I think there are two scenarios. If this direction stays strong, and I think you need to have a clear direction as a project,

and honestly, Katie, in my opinion, has been missing that in the last couple of years. But if it stays with a clear direction and gets people together and say, you know, I mean, this doesn't look good, we need to fix it, and we're just going to fix it and not do something fancy somewhere else, right? Because this is the thing that you see a lot in free software.

People love building big stuff and you ask them, you know, I'm quoting Frank Karatek actually here, the guy who started it on cloud. He has very interesting opinions on this, also been on the board of KDE, you know, and he always says, you know, a lot of free software developers work like this. If you ask them for a house, they'll build you a skyscraper, take out the top and say, look, you know, here's a house, right? And this is the thing you can't really do.

If you care about the goal and getting something done, you can't do this. So this, in my opinion, is one of the things that needs to change. It's changing a bit, but maybe not enough. Maybe, I don't know. of the things that needs to change. It's changing a bit, but maybe not enough. Maybe, I don't know. If it does change, you know, by the way, no, in my opinion, has gotten this one down, right? They have a very clear vision and they're implementing it. And if it doesn't fit, they say, no, they're a little extreme in my opinion in it. But, you know, if we can find a middle ground, then I think in a couple of years, you will really see a big difference. I mean, this can bring hundreds of people,

maybe even an order of magnitude increase in people contributing to the KDE project. We already started on that road. Since we started with frameworks, since we started with some changes in our government, we recently did a manifesto, manifesto.kde.org. And since then we had like seven, eight projects join us, including Gcompre, which is downright a known project

that decided to join KDE for, you know, bringing software to multiple platforms like Android. So if that continues, that could really make a huge difference. But the other scenario is, of course, the bad one, in which we lose direction. And then, well, I mean, KD will still be a cool project and it'll still continue, but it'll be where it is today. The Linux desktop will be where it is today, which is unfortunately pretty much irrelevant. It's cool for the people who use it, but let's

be honest, what do we have? 0.7%? Not enough to move the general needle. Exactly. We haven't. And to move the needle, we need to really change a couple of things. And that's not just technology. That's also people. And on that side of things, I honestly don't know. As far as I'm concerned, this is a 50-50 thing. This is a question that kind of came from Heaven's Revenge, how much of a compatibility break is there between the version 4 of KDE frameworks and whatever it's called there and the new versions of all that stuff? Will applications, say, designed for KDE 4 desktop work okay on the Plasma 5 desktop?

I'm pretty sure there will be some quirks there, honestly. I think the best thing is if applications move. And I think the plan is to start moving soon for the Arcadia applications. They are now on the three-month release cycle. Four months, actually. I'm not entirely sure. But I'm pretty sure they will start moving

well before the end of the year. A couple of them have been ported already and it's actually going pretty quick. I know that an initial port of Dolphin, the file manager, which is a pretty complex application when you think about it, was done by someone not too familiar with the code

in, I don't know, a few weeks. Okay. So it's not too bad. No, no, no no we have scripts that actually really do 99 of the work so i think we will be able to basically you will be able to run a full framework five based desktop you know with plasma and the kd applications all on q5 you know probably summer or the end of the year next year uh I mean, some parts will take a little longer. I know the people about KDPim,

they don't expect to move that quick. But honestly, if I see how many people have been joining development there in the last couple of months, I actually think they might be a little too negative about their roadmap, but we will see. Things might improve. Well, Joss, it's great having you join us.

You're welcome to join us anytime and stick around for the whole show and chime in on any topic we get to. We're actually going to do a review of Chaos, K-A-O-S, here in a little bit, which is a very heavily designed KDE distribution. They've really taken a heavy hand at customizing it and making it a very unique experience. So we're going to talk about that here in just a second. Before we move to that, I want to thank our next sponsor

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So let's talk about Chaos. K-O-S. K-A-O-S. I know we had a group of you in here that did the review. I'm really looking forward to see what you guys said about it. Rotten Corpse, do you want to kick it off and kind of introduce it, or do you want me to introduce what the distro is? I could do that too if you want.

Well, I can go ahead and give a quick introduction. Chaos is an Arch-based distro that is based solely around KDE. I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure they have a very strict requirement about the packages, as in if it's not KDE compatible, it's not allowed in their repo?

It's not installed by default. I think it's allowed in their repo because I know they have Chrome and a few other things in their repo. But yeah. Chrome's self-contained, so I think it's more in the sense that they don't have... They don't completely restrict your ability to use it,

but they don't promote the use of it. They mention on their site in their repo they have Firefox 30, Chrome 37, Thunderbird 24, and Adore 3.5. But that's about it. Yeah. And it's Arch-based, but it's not like a derivative Arch. It's kind of like a fork. It's its own thing. Yeah. Yeah. And they call themselves a tightly integrated rolling transparent distribution for the modern desktop built from scratch with a specific focus, KDE and QT. They also even come out right and say their target audience is desktop and operating system enthusiasts. You know, those desktopaholics we were talking about last week. They don't consider this to be a new user distribution necessarily.

They want it to be more of an enthusiast distribution. And the latest version in June, that just came out at the beginning of June, includes the non-free NVIDIA driver, KDE 4.13.2, Linux kernel 3.14.6, and I think there's also an update to 3.15 already, GLIB, of course, SystemD, of course, Xorg Server 1.15.1, KWebKit 2.33, QT 5.3.0, you know, the good stuff, all your regular stuff. It's a modern up-to-date, just as of June, distribution. Rotten, where do you want to start? Well, I kind of want to know what Popey... start with poppy all right that's kind of what i was thinking too because i know we were poppy kind of laid down a few hints last week oh uh but before we get to that wimpy i you want to touch on the philosophy i'll give you a chance

go ahead uh well i yeah i've run it as well i'm happy to chip in later i was just going to say i really like that it's um super focused they've got a very clear vision on this, one desktop, one architecture, and they're being laser focused in that regard. And I also like very much that it's an Arch derivative. So in terms of the philosophy and what I read about it, I was suitably impressed. Now, is it an Arch derivative or is it just using Pac-Man? Now, is it an Arch derivative or is it just using Pac-Man? Well, no, it's their own version of Arch. So whilst it shares a lot of the core architecture of Arch Linux, it is not in any way related to Arch Linux.

They've taken the tools and the packaging tools from Arch and they've made their own distribution around it. Right. Okay. So, Popey, let's start with you. What was your impression of the distribution? Where would you like to start on your journey with Chaos? So, I first of all tried it in a VM, and then I stuck it on a USB stick and installed it on real hardware. I used an Intel based Toshiba laptop that's about five years old. It's a Core 2 Duo with three gig of RAM, five years old it's core 2 duo with three gig of ram um and uh it also has a touch screen um but i didn't really test that part of it i i did the install and you know it when you say it's it's aimed at you know desktop enthusiasts i'm taking that to mean geeks like you know i would i definitely would not give this to my mum uh and i i probably wouldn't give it to any new ish user it really is

very quite technical um so some of the things i noticed like for the install for example you mentioned the nvidia non-free driver like when you first boot up you get the first option is like to boot into the installer and the second option just says nvidia non-free um with no explanation what is that yeah well you know what that's all about at one point when i was booting boot into the installer, and the second option just says NVIDIA non-free with no explanation. Well, is that, yeah. Well, you know what that's all about. At one point when I was booting, I got dropped to like a boot colon blank screen prompt as if it couldn't find the Linux kernel, which I thought was a bit offensive.

I then got smacked in the face with a box after the install was done. I mean, I did do the install and it worked, but it's really buggy, their installer. And I didn't enjoy that process at all. All the bits and pieces on the screen didn't line up right. And it felt overcomplicated and too busy and typical KDE. There was a box that popped up after I installed that said, welcome to chaos.

And then it said, in need of the password file or package list. And then there was like six buttons on the screen. Right, yes, yes, yes. I was like, why smack me in the face with that? It just seemed a bit weird. And the package list, interestingly enough, is just a PDF. Oh, I'm sorry, it's just a text file. It's a text file of just the installed packages.

I'm sure to some technical users that might be useful, but that's not something I want when I've just installed. I don't know. And then I get on to the usual KDE annoyances that, you know, I don't know if these are KDE-specific or Plasma-specific, but this is what Chaos did. Most of the icons had no tooltip, so I had no idea what they were. Bear in mind, I hadn't used KDE for like five years,

and none of the icons were obvious what they were. I couldn't see an icon that looked like a web browser. I had to find something called Quapzilla, which I had never heard of. Loads of weird dialogues, applications that when I opened them, they did nothing, or they popped up multiple dialogues over the top of everything else. And I just found it quite frustrating. Once I got past that, and if I accept that as okay, I could then install some applications and that was okay. But I found it slightly frustrating. But once it was up, you know, suspend and restore works, update works.

I can install applications and it seemed okay. What was your impression of the look? So they've spent a lot of time working on this theme. It's one of the most unique looks of KD. Like they have this special menu that is very heavily designed. Did it work for you? Did it not? No, I think it's disgusting. I absolutely

don't like it at all. But then I don't really like KDE, so there you go. It's going to have a hard time pleasing me. Heaven's Revenge, did you have a chance to kick the tires? What did you think? Well, yes, I had enough chance to kick the tires and then I broke it yesterday

and I'm still actually trying to fix it how did it break what happened oh give me the story walk me walk me through well something is wrong with pac-man even though i am an arch kind of guy i love arch but it's going down the same road as chakra as and it does it has forked and it is its own project so it is not just a customization of art it is a work i completely took away that custom bar at the bottom i put the normal kicker or the normal lancelot menu back i kind of had to get used to octopi considering it's kind of weird but their pac-man the pack and like packet and pac-man package

manager yeah it has a very interesting progress bar it's like a pac-man eating little dots as it goes across yeah yeah which is a setting i have that on my arch box too it's fun i've never i've never seen it before but i've seen that in this and it seems quite custom the file system structure is all just pretty much like Arch. They didn't change too much of that. I've missed too much of the AUR. I cannot access the AUR, even though you say it accesses the CCR, but that's, no, screw it. I also had a friend, which is a, well, going to be a, well, he's dabbling in Linux. So I gave him a choice of three or four different Linux distributions by putting a few virtual machines up and saying,

here, do any of these catch your eye? And the thing is, is that with Chaos, since it is a custom distro, all the packages are custom built for the actual distribution. That means there is no Wine, there is no windows emulation layer and there's no steam to act or at least in the repos you'd if anything you have to go and get it manually so he he needed wine he wanted to play like n64 emulators that isn't available on the so that was a showstopper for him i found the package or the pac-man log viewer to be quite interesting because i've never used octopi before because i'm not much of a

mangero fan but you can kind of get used to the package manager it is very user friendly but the distribution is not aimed at new users it's aimed at people who can break their system, and like me, is attempting to fix it again. Right, right. That is true. It is kind of an odd mismatch. And Riley had a question, I think probably for the group, about 32-bit. Go ahead, Riley. Yeah, according to the website, they don't believe in 32-bit applications.

Like they were saying, in this modern-day age of computers, they refuse to have 32-bit applications on their system. So that pretty much means that Steam will not be supported ever at all. And gaming is pretty much out of the question. They feel that to make the perfect desktop, they have to target a specific

platform. The way they phrase it is they have to take it right, and that was kind of like, we're not doing 32-bit because we only want to think about 64-bit. Was that kind of the reasoning? Yeah, that's what it sounded like to me when I read the website. It's unfortunate because I do believe in 64-bit, but our 32-bit pass has still not completely left us. I agree. I agree. Wimpy, I think I'm in sync with you. They call the distribution chaos, but what they're really striving for is sort of absolute control and not maybe not necessarily control, but absolute. It's exactly what they want it to be. It's exactly what they want to present. Do you pick that up, too, Wimpy? Well, yeah, my point is that the tagline is a lean KDE distribution, which is an oxymoron since it juxtaposes lean and KDE,

and those two things are contradictory. And my experiences with it were when I first installed it, I installed it on some hardware that only had 768 meg of RAM, and the installer spits out a warning to tell you that the installer requires one and a half gig of ram to run oh and you can proceed if you like but you need to be fair warned that you need one and a half gig to install it so that was my first like hmm really lean i need one and a half gig of ram so yeah that's not so lean i suppose no so anyway i got over that one i went to a machine with with more memory and got through the installer.

What was your impression of the installer? I've noticed the disk partitioner is pretty interesting, right? The way it really works is you hit the advanced button. If you have a drive that has no partitions, you immediately have to go to the advanced button. And then from there, it launches kPartitionManager, and then you partition out the drive the way you want. Then you go back into the installer, and then once you're in the installer, you have to flag these partitions

where you want them to be mount point-wise using a different application and flag them again to be formatted. Did you guys find that to be wonky? I didn't have that. Yeah, I did, because I was installing on it, but I DD'd zeros to the disk before I started, and that's exactly what I had.

I was a little bit, well, to me it wasn't obvious what I needed to do. There was no disk that I could select, and I clicked the advance button, and then I was presented with KDE Partition Manager, and there's this whole disjointed partition thing. I may as well have just been using FDISC at that point. You really could. You really could just use FDISC and then go back in here. So, yeah, if you have a blank drive with no partition table,

you get hit with this where you have to go into a separate partitioning program. Not a huge deal, but it's… It does partitioning on itself, but there's a button that I can't remember where it is, but that installer does do partitioning. I partitioned my drive in the installer, which was terrible. All those buttons were grayed out for me. I've got a disk with no partition.

Like not even a table written. Yeah, you have to do it mandronically. The other thing I noticed about the installer was the, well, as Popey said, it's very cluttered. But also the time zone selector is a massive omit. And my notes say here, is this why it requires one and a half gig of RAM? For those of you that haven't installed it, you get like a Google Earth view of the world. I think it's marble embedded, right?

It's the KDE marble. Yeah. Rubbish. Massively over-engineered for choosing a time zone. They should have spent more time on the disk partitioner. It's kind of hard to manage too. And depending on your machine, it can be pretty clunky. Now, I think they get the benefit of it just being able to embed that

because it's part of the whole KDE desktop and then they just take the coordinates that you click. they get the benefit of it just being able to embed that because it's part of the whole KDE desktop, and then they just take the coordinates that you click. Once you get through the disk partitioner, you select that stuff there. You set your swap up. After that, the installer is pretty much done, right? I mean, then it just writes it to disk, and you're off to the races. Yeah, but the installer in itself is a bit strange because it doesn't install in a traditional sense.

It copies the contents of the ISO image to the hard disk and then installs a bootloader. Right, yeah. So essentially exactly what you get in the live environment is what you get on the installed machine, which feels a little cluttered perhaps? Well, not so much cluttered, but it doesn't feel right. Yeah, it doesn't feel quite like an installation. One area where Integros sort of shines here, you know, again, coming from the Arch roots,

is you could have a three-month-old ISO of Integros, but when you install it, it is pulling down the absolute latest KDE or GNOME. It is pulling down the absolute latest kernel, and so it is super fresh packages that are being written to the disk. I don't necessarily, if you call yourself a rolling release, that would be nice, but that can mean different things. And I'm not trying to be critical of the way Chaos does it because I also, on the one hand, really like the idea of somebody taking a really, kind of like Joss was talking about, you know, a direction with a KDE desktop and saying, this is our look. I think I kind of applaud them for saying we're only going to support 64-bit. I mean, that eliminates a huge portion of the market,

but they're okay with that. They've made that, they're obviously aware of that, and they've made that choice. And in some ways, I think we need to see more KDE desktops where the people that are implementing it stop saying, we can do everything, and start saying, we're only going to do these things. And I think it's going to take years of doing that to make it really awesome. Isn't that kind of a contradiction to the KDE project, though? Because they always want to do everything, which is a double-edged sword. It's great and also a negative. Yeah, very true.

Once it was installed, I found there were some odd, strange applications that didn't seem – it seemed like if they were going for real polish, they've chosen some odd things to throw in there, like apps that, A, don't work or do weird things or pop up strange dialogues. It seemed like once they got the installer done, it was a bunch of applications thrown in as well, just because they could. Do you think it's a Qt bias where we only want to feature Qt applications? Oh, my install failed. Bummer.

Darn it. Well, that's no good. Well, there you go. I don't know. That could be for a number of reasons. Who knows why that. Well, there you go. I don't know. That could be for a number of reasons. Who knows why that died, but there you go. Man, this is chaos. The introduction or the inclusion of Kubzilla is okay. It's a very unusual browser, but it's still WebKit-based, so it's good. And the one weird one is the appear.in website, which is a WebRTC Skype replacement bookmark.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I see that. That's what that is. Okay. I see what they did there. And then this – there we go. Yeah, this launches Quopzilla, Popey's favorite browser of choice. Oops.

Well, I did manage to find Chrome in their package manager. Once I figured out how to actually launch it, as I bitched and moaned about last week, using their menu, just searching for the word update or upgrade, couldn't find the update manager or whatever package management tool. It was under add remove programs,

which seemed a bit bizarre to me. This is the only Linux distribution on which I was able to actually look at every single package and read every single one, except from the PBI listing of the PCBSD when it first started making PBIs. That's when there

was so little amount of them there. Because they have such a limited amount that one human can actually read through the whole list in a reasonable amount of time? I read all of the, yes, all of the packages in the repos. Okay. That's an interesting benchmark. I like that. I've never thought about that as a metric. But, yes, all of the packages and the repos. Okay. That's an interesting benchmark. I like that. I've never thought about that as a metric.

But, boy, interesting. So it doesn't sound like anybody's necessarily coming out with a recommendation. Anybody? Well, I would say if you like KDE and you want a pure KDE desktop, then this might be an option. a pure KDE desktop, then this might be an option. And if you're willing to forego the 32-bit stuff, you're missing Steam, Skype, Wine, you know, some of the three annoyingly proprietary things that lots of people want, then, yeah, it works.

And Flash, right? No Flash. Oh, who needs Flash? Steve Jobs told us years ago. That's true. That's true. We don't need that. We don't need that Flash. Yeah, but actually, to me, all of those requirements are completely irrelevant to me, so chaos is a potential option.

And Wimpy, you wanted to say not lean. Yeah, so some months ago I did, I've mentioned this before, some resource consumption benchmarks for Linux desktop environments and they were all conducted on Arch mentioned this before some uh resource uh consumption benchmarks for linux uh desktop environments and they were all conducted on arch linux and i've got some scripts that automate

those tests so i thought right here we go let's see how it lives up to its lean its lean um statements so um chaos uh when i run my scripts which is bring the system up, wait for all of the auto-started applications to execute and wait for disk IO to settle, and then use PSMEM to gather the memory usage. Very nice. So chaos weighs in at 319 meg after first boot with no applications being launched, which is okay. being launched which is okay but a full kde 4.13.1 on stock arch under the same conditions weighs in at 302 meg so only 17 meg but leaner so it kind of raises the question

if the tagline is it's a lean kde, but it's not as lean as the parent OS, they're kind of missing the target on that one. Well, Wimpy, I would say that it is quite lean in terms of CPU usage, as it is just as, it is equally as efficient in CPU as Antergos is under GNOME or running GNOME, the GNOME desktop. It's a little bit like 100 megs more when it comes to RAM consumption, but the CPU usage, it's actually quite good.

I was surprised. It's been pretty robust for me as well. Mine's got an uptime of seven days on my laptop and I've been updating it regularly and trying out various applications. So, you know, despite all the gripes and bitches and moans that I've said that I don't like KDE, you know, it's stable. If nothing else, it works. And the apps that, you know, that do work, work fairly well. Very good. I mean, that's, and if you want to see

sort of an inspired KDE design, it's worth checking out from that standpoint, at least in maybe a virtual box instance. Also for me, I've tried it before. It never really manages to quite grab me. I look at it and go, oh yeah, I do see what they're trying to go for. Good for them. And then I kind of go about my day and I just use a more general purpose distribution. But I respect it. You can check it out at kaosx.us. Yeah, go ahead, Evan.

Well, I would say that it would be a good recommendation for anyone who is wanting to learn the pac-man package manager but doesn't want the complete i'm gonna go balls deep in arch and get way over my head if if you can run antergos then sure that's okay chaos is also another good alternative in order to just learn the pac-man package manager yeah or or manjaro or Chakra or Antegra. I had my Chakra days back when it was first created and when it was first starting to fork. That's why when it went on that path of forking away from Arch, I now stay clear of any distribution that wants to fork from its parent. Yeah, that's kind of, I mean, yeah, boy, that's a whole, all right. We'll save that for, I think actually I want to do a future episode on that topic. I got a couple of bits of business,

and we can do some more closing thoughts on the review, so Mumble Room, compose your thoughts for a second. We have a couple of announcements, too, that I want to cover real quick, but first, I want to thank the folks at Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Linux.ting.com. That'll take $25 off your first device. Linux.ting.com.

Go own it! I mean, why not? They put Linux in the URL just for you guys. Now, what is Ting? Ting is mobile that makes sense. $6 a month. That's all you pay, and then it's just your usage. Ting takes your megabytes, your minutes, your messages,

adds them all up at the end of the month, whatever bucket you fall into. That's what you pay. Plus, no contract. Thus, no early termination fee. What? I know. It's actually how mobile should work. Don't pay into some big old contract where they're trying to get a little off the top from you every single month.

Just pay for what you use. And every Ting plan includes all of the things you'd want. You've got your built-in hotspot and tethering. You just turn it on in the operating system and just pay for the usage. You don't have to be in a family share plan, I think is what my last telco called it. You don't have to be in a specific kind of plan to use the tethering feature that the vendor built into the operating system. You just turn it on and use it, you know, because you own the device. In fact, Ting's perfectly happy if you just want to use them as a mobile ISP or make phone calls all day long.

And, of course, you can have multiple devices. It's just $6 per device. Fact, too, is if you have multiple devices, it's a great way to save money. It's a fantastic way because each device is only paying for your usage. So your heavy talkers just pay for their talk, but the folks like myself who don't use a lot of actual phone minutes, you don't end up paying for those people. It works so well. We have a couple of phones here for the Jupiter Broadcasting crew, and it's fantastic. It's a perfect fit for us, and there's no way any other value would work for us. It's perfect for us, but I think what really, at the end of the day, matters is it's super easy for us to manage and

keep track of exactly where we're at. Ting matches. They're awesome. Online dashboard. It gives you a clear indication of where your bill is. You can turn services on and off, deactivate, activate phones. I've bought several phones from Ting all through the dashboard, all activated, deactivated phones through them. I can set up a call forwarding my voicemail options. And if I ever get stuck, Ting has no hold customer support at 1-855-TING-FTW. Anytime between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. and a real person answers the phone. They've also got help.ting.com and an awesome blog where they're posting stuff

all the time to get you updated on what the Ting crew is up to, apps you might want to check out, ways to save money, all kinds of things, events, giveaways. They all have that at the Ting blog. Start by going to linux.ting.com. See what I'm talking about. Get that $25 credit. That paid for more than my first month.

That gives you an idea of the kind of value you can get. And check out that savings calculator. Go to linux.ting.com, click what would you save, put your current bill in there. And here's a tip, put what you're actually using right now. So the actual data minutes and texts that you're sending and look at the difference. For me, it's like $2,000 every two years. That's a new laptop every two years, just by switching to ting. Linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com. And a really big thank you to Ting for sponsoring. Linux Unplugged. Love it. My mobile phone provider for well over a year now, Matt's too. So coming up in just a few short weeks, oh, I wanted to mention too, we're going to do another community review. So if you'd like to

be involved with that, go over to the show notes. We have a form you can fill out. If you want to be drafted to do one of our community reviews, we'd love to hear from you. So go to the show notes for Linux Unplugged. Scroll down towards the bottom. You'll see the Jupiter Colony review draft, and just fill that out there, and we'll be calling on more of you guys. And Mumber Room, if you guys have more thoughts on Chaos, save it for the post show. We'll get to that in just a little bit. I wanted to just mention before we run, too, that I'm planning to go to OSCon in two weeks.

I'll probably be there July 22nd to the 23rd if all scheduling goes as planned. OSCon 2014 runs from July 20th to the 24th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. And I'm going to be there for right dab, boom, in the middle of it if all of our timing works out. And I'd like to know if you're going to be there for right dab, boom, in the middle of it if all of our timing works out. And I'd like to know if you're going to be there too. We could do a little meetup, maybe have some beers, eat some burgers, high five, fist bump, whatever you'd like to do. Talk about Linux. Just make sure you call it GNU slash Linux when you are talking to me in person.

I don't care about it on the internet, but if you're talking to me in person, you better have GNU slash in that name. OSCon coming up in two weeks. I'll be there July 22nd and 23rd if all goes as planned. I think the 23rd. It's all kind of up in the air, but I might finalize some of my plans depending on what I hear from you guys. So leave us a comment in the feedback thread if you're going to be there. And then last but not least, a little piece of business from the community. I'd love to get your own Runs Linux again. I've made a call out for these from time to time.

I haven't made one in a while. I'd really like to get your Runs Linux. Now, I'd love to get your own Runs Linux again. I've made a call out for these from time to time. I haven't made one in a while. I'd really like to get your Runs Linux. Now, I'd like to have a picture, and even better, a video if possible. I know that's asking a lot, but we feature right at the beginning of the Linux Action Show every single week, so I'd like to give it a splash, make it nice, make it entertaining for the folks. And I'd love to get communities Runs Linux. Could be your desktop. Could be something a, could be something

a little more inventive than that, whatever it is. Here's how you do it. Take a picture, record a video if possible, and write up a brief description and then send it into the show. You can go to jupyterbroadcast.com slash contact, or if it's awesome, just submit it right to the Linux Action Show subreddit and the community will vote it up so we can see that. If you do a video, which I would really, really, really love. If you do a video of your runs linux upload it to youtube and just give us the link now you don't have to send us a big video file and that makes it a lot easier to submit to the subreddit as well because it previews the thumbnail and all that kind of stuff so i'd love to get your runs linux we're going to do runs linux from the people if i can get enough

of these so i'd like to get your guys' contributions and see what you're doing with your Linux. It's not a faux show award show quite, but it's still kind of fun. And last but not least, go check out Tech Talk today over at jupiterbroadcasting.com, our brand new technology talk show Monday through Thursday. How crazy is that? And you can also show up live for that as well and hang out with us. We love that. Man, that's a lot of stuff. So we'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think about

those things and join us next week. We do Linux Unplugged every single freaking Tuesday over at jupiterbroadcasting.com, 2 p.m. Pacific over at jblive.tv, jblive.info. And of course, you can email us. Just go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com, click that contact link, or join us in the feedback thread on the subreddit. We'd like to get it there too. And don't forget about the review draft and OSCon. A lot of stuff I've asked from you guys.

It's a busy week for you. I hope you're prepared for all that homework. I think you can do it. I trust you. I think you can do it. We're coming up to episode 50 soon. So stay tuned. There might be a few surprises in the works, maybe even starting this week.

You never know. All right, everyone. Well, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. Be sure you join us next Tuesday. And if we don't see you on Tuesday, we'll see you on Sunday for the Linux Action Show. We've got a big show coming up. See you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. Mumble Room, thanks, you guys. Great review.

Any closing thoughts on Chaos now that we're in the post-show? It sounds like Chaos was chaos to install. Yeah. Yeah, I was about to say, when he said it was oxymoron, I was like, it's actually kind of, you know, a great way to say that it's a little chaotic. Yeah, well, they're working on something, but it's just like with a small team and stuff.

It's going to take a long time to get there. I heard it there. Chaos is like the KDU project, always in flux and in chaos. Wow. I think it's wasted effort. I'm not going to do it, dude. I'm not going to do it. You can't get me.

I'm not your... I think it's wasted effort. Ah, dang it. Yeah. I think the's wasted effort. God dang it. I expected Popey to bring out the knives a little more and start stabbing, but he kept it dialed in. Well, I did that last

week and I got beaten up on the subreddit. Eric, how are you feeling? Yeah, you alright? I just don't see the point when you don't include or allow 32-bit applications. That does not make any sense whatsoever for a user. It's because 32-bit sucks. Screw that.

I actually like 64. I don't want to do 32-bit. Give me fucking 256, 512 vectors. The bigger, the better, baby. There still sucks that 32-bit only. Give me a friggin' Fi. A friggin' Fi coprocessor or some shit. All right, Eric, how are you doing?

Did you survive? What happened to you last night? So my appendix decided it wanted to say F you, bye-bye. Oh, heck, are you okay? Yeah. Yeah, well, I just got home from the hospital. They removed my appendix laparoscopically. Right now, I'm actually doing okay.

I'm in a little pain from the incision, but otherwise I'm fine. Did they give you any good drugs? Dude, I got hydros. That'll do. That'll do. Okay, so is anybody going to keep running Chaos after today? No. No.

No. We're already much no chance. Yeah. Do we have... Do we already have... Oh, go ahead. My biggest problem with it was it is super focused and very geared towards a specific set of applications, which is good on the one hand.

But on the other hand, it means that there's fewer packages available in the repositories compared to Arch. Right. And that even includes some really useful command line, you know, shell utilities that you would just install because it's just part of your standard tool bag. And it was really frustrating to say,

right, now I've got to go and find the source code for this because the aur doesn't work properly um and then you you find yourself looking at you thinking well and turgus's installer is far superior they have kde as an option and then you've got the entire arch packet repository at your disposal after the fact so why wouldn't you just go to anturgus and tweak the theming? Or if you don't want to use Orchis, use Chakra. Or there's another one called Frugalware. Dude, it's been around for quite a while.

Yeah, that's a good point. Frugalware's, yeah. That's not so great either. I've used Frugalware for everything. They've been around for quite a while now. So do we already have an idea kicking around for the next distro we're going to do a community review of? I'm loving it. I think we should do another one.

What about Calculate? Well, it hasn't been officially decided on, no. Okay, we've got a couple ideas, though. Yeah, we have some ideas. Okay, well, we should announce it soon so people can get on board. Can I toss an idea into the hat? I've never run this distro, but I heard some friends review it a couple of months back. I think it's Simplice or Simplice.

Simplice, yeah. Yeah, they really raved about it. So if you want to pick one that might actually get some positive feedback, it might be worth tossing that in the hat. I actually do like Simplice. Linux Barbecue is another idea. I like that one. That's almost what I want to do.

Yeah, we're going to need like six months to review that one. We've got like 80 window managers and desktops. Well, I mean, Linux Barbecue is actually kind of easy because it's more designed to be like a play, a distro to be played with, not necessarily actually be used. So they don't even want you to install it ever. So it could be easier in that sense. It definitely fills a need, though, because some of those tiling window managers I've never used.

And I'm thinking, yeah, you know, one weekend I'm just going to fire that up and have a good old play. They don't do anything to them. So it's just the default setup. So the next loadout will be nothing. That's what you want. If you're going to learn these things, you need to start with a blank canvas and then figure out how they're put together and what you can do with them. All right. So Chaos Theory is our current leading title.

You guys like Chaos Theory? I like that. That is cool. Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. Very good.

Well, that was fun. It's good to – it's interesting too to hear your guys' thoughts on it because sometimes when I – because I tried out Chaos before. I think I made it a spotlight one time or something like that on last. And so I went through the installer once before and kicked the tires for a couple of hours. And I remember thinking a lot of the things that you guys thought. So it's interesting to – I don't know if validating is the right word, but it's like, okay, yeah, that thing that bugged me also bugged three, four other people. So it's like I'm not totally OCD. Maybe it gives you like a disconnect so it's not you bashing it as well.

Yeah. I'll play good cop, sure. Chaos hasn't been around for that long, though. They've only been around for a couple months. No, no, because I... Back in the last year, I think, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. I think I covered them almost six months ago or more.

I can't remember, but we didn't do a full review, so. Oh, gosh. I thought he was newer than that. He moves so fast. Yeah. All right, well, all you jerks go back to watching your sports ball.