LINUX Unplugged - Episode 86: Evolve Your OS | LUP 86

Episode Date: April 1, 2015

The proprietor of Evolve OS stops by to discuss what makes Evolve OS a unique Linux desktop & the challenges smaller projects face getting coverage and attention.Plus a look at tiny powerful Linux hardware gadget that we think might be worth backing, a debate about “the look” of Linux apps & more!

So, Popey, you made a post about 11 gig. Oh, yeah. Yeah, 24. Oh, you left yours running as well, did you? The recorder? You left the recorder running or something, or what? Yeah. So we all use NTP to make sure we're all in sync, so we don't have to clap or click or anything to get all of you all in sync.

Oh, so you're all using your own custom NTP server? Is that what you're doing? No, we just all point at the same one. Oh, that works. Yeah, sure, sure. So we're only ever, like, 0.02 out or something like that. So all the audio recorders start at the same time. Very smart.

So they're very easy to line up. But the problem is because we've set it to, like, start recording at 9 o'clock, and audio recorder by default will auto-spa log in so the next day off now yeah me too i reboot and audio recorder sat there in the background and i didn't even know and at night talking the evening started recording four days later and i'm shutting down my pc for like a kernel update or something and the very last thing to shut down i look and see hang on a minute that thing's been recording for four days and there's an 11 gig file nothing but silence no no no there was there was me babbling away in a

conversation with my wife about birthday presents and wish lists and i was like no i need to delete this there is going to be something incriminating yeah i'm gonna get rid of it now oh my god i was what drew my attention to it was i suddenly thought why is the system monitor showing that it's always CPU activity? What the heck's going on? And then I ran HTOP and I was like, what's audio recorder doing running now? I went and looked and I'm like, oh, I've been recording audio for four and a half days. This is a legitimate reason why I have.

I try to always have an extension that puts my CPU usage up somewhere on my screen because that's often how I'll catch stuff is I'll just glance up and notice, wait a minute, that CPU usage looks a lot higher for them. What I'm doing right now on the computer. And I don't, I normally don't check it. And sometimes I wouldn't even notice unless I had a little system monitor applet that told me.

So have you seen, um, uh, there's a new Chrome bit. So now we've got Chromebooks, Chrome boxes, and now the thing, the songs of a Chromecast that is effectively Chrome in a HDMI stick.

And you plug in the power and you plug in a keyboard and there's your computer. I was just looking at this, actually. It's funny you say that. It's a bit longer. Google are completely eating our lunch with these machines. Are they? You think? You think they're totally like taking a Linux desktop's market share?

Yeah. Well, they're number one laptops on Amazon. If you go to Amazon and look at laptops, the number one seller is a Chromebook, not a Windows laptop. Right, or a MacBook. We should be there. Well, I agree, and we are in a way, but the thing is Google's got brand, they got OEMs working with them, and it's a simplified package. It's capitalizing in a way. Isn't it almost in a way capitalizing on the failed promise of tablets?

You know, the tablet didn't do it. You ended up needing a keyboard. But you still need something kind of simple like a tablet and something cheap. And I don't know, maybe this is the right product for the right time. Doesn't necessarily, now I wonder, I don't know about these USB sticks, but a Chromebook doesn't necessarily mean it's a loss for a Linux installation. People might get bored with the very basic nature of Chromebook and want to look elsewhere. Maybe it'll eventually make more Linux switchers.

I mean, like I look at those stream PCs, those really cheap HP PCs that come with Windows 8.1 pre-installed with Bing. And you know what? I just look at those as future Linux boxes as well I'm not too worried about it I wish Google would have just wouldn't it have been crazy in a crazy universe if Google just would have done like Ubuntu that would have been nice

that wouldn't have been that crazy considering that they have their own in-house Ubuntu script it would have been so cool if they just would have done that. Well, originally it was. Chrome OS originally was based on Ubuntu, then they switched to building their own packages using Gen 2 portage. I mean, that would have changed everything. Found it used to use Firefox.

Oh, right. Right, it did, didn Firefox. Oh, right. Right. It did, didn't it? It did. The very first Chrome OS was before the Chrome browser, right? And it was Firefox-based, wasn't it? Yep. What?

Yes, this is a thing. I don't remember this. The original concept was Firefox and a really, really thin Ubuntu-ish thing. Yeah, and it wasn't like Chrome OS so much as it was a distro, really. I'm going to go look for it. Early Chrome OS. Yeah, because I don't remember that. Yeah, I wasn't...

Not from Google. Yeah, it was an ISO thing. Neither do I. I know I was using it from like... Oh, my. I'm going to go find this. Well, not when it was a Chrome OS release as a product. When they were coming up with the concept for it, it was Firefox-based.

Yeah, and I think... Did you read this in a book? Is that where you and I both saw this, entering the Plex? Is that where you got this? It wasn't a book. I can't remember where I remember this from, but I just know it's somewhere on the history of Chrome OS. Yeah. When Chrome OS was based on Firefox and rejected by Google.

My goodness, you're right. I had no idea. Where did you find it? Where did you find it? Yeah, I'm looking for this. The Verge. Ah, there you go. Chrome OS was originally based on a different browser, Firefox. Yeah. Could you imagine if they would have gone with Firefox and Ubuntu, how different the world would be at this point? I wonder if it would be

successful. See, people still refer to Google having their own in-house ubuntu but i think we're you know looking back quite a long time poppy i mean do you know anything about that or is it really an internal thing they still use it internally yeah and is it ubuntu or is it their their own you know spin of ubuntu it's it's ubuntu it's called gubuntu and it's it's ubuntu with some stuff ripped out and some other stuff added like any corporate desktop is windows yeah stuff ripped out and stuff added so it's no different than that um and the last time we interviewed uh you know if you listen to the show you would have known We interviewed the guy who's responsible for this at Google, and it was basically, as a new starter at Google,

you would have three choices. Sorry, two choices. You'd either have a PC or a Mac, and if you got a Mac, you'd get OS X. If you chose PC, you'd either get Windows or Ubuntu. You could install something else if you want to, but that's what you would get. And, yeah, Ubuntu is basicallyubuntu. You could install something else if you want to, but that's what you would get. And yeah, Gubuntu is basically Ubuntu.

I mean, we have bugs in our bug tracker from the Google IT people who are... Working on problems. Delivering it to their users. But I haven't heard much about it for the last year or so. I don't know where it is. I had.

Or whether they all use Chrome OS internally. You know, is Chrome OS their new internal desktop operating system? So this is what I was told from someone who got hired recently. And so, Poppy, I wonder if this lines up with what you heard, is you get like three choices when you get hired at Google right now. You get a Gubuntu, which is based on 14.04, and they rev a new one every new LTS, and that's what they've been doing for a long time now, is the official Gubuntu is based on the latest LTS. And then – so that's your first option.

Your second option is a Chromebook, and your third option is a MacBook. And I guess if you want to buy a Windows machine, you have to get approval, and I think there's a whole different path you have to go through to even get a Windows box at all. So I don't know, Popey, if that lines up with what you've heard at all. Yeah, it may well be that policies change over time. But as I understand it, Gubuntu still exists. That's all I know. I heard it was the first choice. I heard Gubuntu is the top choice.

Chromebooks, second choice. Or MacBooks are second choice and Chromebooks are third choice or something like that on average. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that is bracing for the fools of April. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey, Matt. Episode 86, buddy. That's not too bad. 86 already? Wow. I know. It means we're getting, I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with the way this works,

but I think that means we're nearing episode 90. I believe so. I'm mathematically challenged, but I do believe we've got 87 and then a few others. I'm new, so I'm not sure. Hey, so, but don't worry. We're not even looking ahead. We haven't lost track. We're focused. We're hunkered in. We're in the trenches of episode 86 this week. We've got a lot to cover. First up, there is a horrible rumor. Horrible rumor spreading around the internet right now. And that is that the Linux

kernel is being forked by a very ambitious team. We'll tell you more about that in just a little bit as the show goes on. And if it's true or not, you probably have heard this rumor. It's spreading like crazy right now. Also, some new improvements coming to the Cinnamon desktop. We're going to talk about that.

Official LinuxFest Northwest planning coverage begins. And also, we're going to hopefully get to it this week. Have we been negligent in our coverage, Matt? Have we been negligent in covering some of the other distributions that we all know and love out there? So, Matt,

today we will find out. We'll take it to the audience. We will take the test. Matt, I will challenge that assumption of yours. I don't know. We'll see. I just kid. And then last but not least, there's a really cool device that runs Linux that is just one

of those things that reminds you it's really 2015 and it's pretty exciting. And we'll talk about that coming up a little bit in the show. But, Matt, before we go too far, we do have – you won't be able to hear it, but over far in the distance, Matt, just over the horizon, Wolf Blitzer is over there with a little breaking news. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we have a little breaking news right now. You might have heard it, but apparently the SystemD team is planning to fork the Linux kernel. Everybody, get your pitchforks. It's time to fight.

We are going all in. No, not really. They are not forking the Linux kernel. But various places on the Internet, it even made it to Hacker News, the Foronix forums, Reddit. And apparently a GitHub account was even created with the name System Damon and registered to somebody. And the whole rumor was that the SystemD folks were going to fork the Linux kernel in order to make things just work a little better, streamline areas, and have full control over the entire stack. Turns out it was totally an April Fool's joke.

Totally. Mumble Room, did you guys catch this this systemd is forking kernel the kernel story I saw something saying that it

wasn't true on reddit but that was mainly it I saw the chatroom talking about it all morning it was in

distro.wix weekly and it got linked to an actual github repo and the name of the

github repository's name or at least the system GitHub repository's name, or at least the system daemon's name, is Ivan Gotchovich. Gotcha. Ivan Gotcha. Yeah, in other words, April Fool's.

April Fool's, right? This isn't really April Fool's. It makes a nice change from people saying the next thing Canonical will fork is the Linux kernel. So that made me happy. Oh, they have it? Oh. Oh. Yeah, I thought they had it.

I've got to pull that post down then. Hang on just a minute. Just kidding. Yeah. People are like, are you going to talk about this, Chris? Are you going to talk about this? Yeah, I'm going to talk about this. I'm going to talk about this.

Somehow it missed the Linux Action Show this weekend. I don't quite know how that happened. Also, I also wanted to give a shout-out to the Digi... Oh, hi there. I wanted to give a shout out to the Digicam project. They were at CBIT 2015. Digicam got an award. It's really cool. They actually got the best open source photo management application. Digicam is often compared to Adobe Lightroom, which the project considers to be pretty much an compliment. Lightroom is an application popular among enthusiasts and professional photographers on Windows and macOS,

so they consider that to be an achievement. And congrats to Digicam. I've been specifically looking at Digicam perhaps for a close family member's photo workflow in the near future. As the fruit company who also makes hardware is sunlighting their long-term iPhoto photo management program, now seems like the perfect opportunity for those of us who are open source enthusiasts to recommend a really solid open source alternative to iPhoto. I don't think Photos is it. I don't think Apple's replacement is it. I'm not a big fan of the near-line system.

I don't totally trust iCloud for the things that I consider to be the most precious digital asset that I own, the photos of my children. So for me, perhaps that's a great opportunity to recommend the transition to an open source photo management program. So I'll be doing that for a few people in my life. And I think Digicam is probably the one I'm going to pick because the timing is now. It makes sense. I mean, because I'm actually in a similar situation with my wife, who is not real pleased with that news either. And that might actually be a solution. I could actually – she's perfectly comfortable with Linux.

So it's certainly plausible. And what do we always say? If you give people tools that are available on Linux and available that you can first set them up on their existing platform, when they make that transition to Linux, it's even easier because all the applications are the same that they love. Exactly. Congrats to Digicam. I just want to give them a little shout-out at the top of the Linux Unplugged show, episode 86. See, it's good luck. all the applications are the same that they love. Exactly. Congrats to DigiCamp. I just want to give them a little shout-out at the top of the Linux Unplugged show, episode 86. See, it's good luck. It's good luck.

And then last but not least, get ready to run that GNOME application everywhere you want, anywhere, everywhere, across any distribution. Could it be true? Can it be real? The GNOME project thinks so. We've talked about it a little bit before, but the official first GNOME SDK runtime builds are out. Yeah, this is a GNOME runtime. So you can build your GNOME application against this runtime, and then this runtime gets distributed to any distribution.

And as long as you have that runtime, the app runs. It doesn't matter what distro it is. It's based on GNOME 3.16's run libraries. And this is definitely just a developer preview, so they're considered to be weekly supported. The developer will try to keep them somewhat updated as major issues and APIs come up, but right now it's a work in progress. And I think it's kind of neat. I don't know if anybody in the Mumble Room has any thoughts on this,

but I thought this was a neat way. This is kind of clunky. I'll totally admit that. It's a little low-tech. You're bundling up a whole bunch of libraries and stuff and sticking them in some directory somewhere and then telling developers to write to that. That's what Steam does today. But it works.

And Steam's selling $60 games doing this. I don't know. I'd like to pick Wimpy's brain. What do you think, Wimpy? Well, yeah. It's a departure from the traditional way of doing things on Linux, but I think systems like this, a way that you can bundle either a runtime or an overlay to give developers a predictable development target is the way that Linux is going to have to go if we're going to continue to want to drive adoption, particularly for application developers. Could you see a distribution like Ubuntu Mate

shipping this runtime out of the box and maybe even having a package in the repository that gets updated or Ubuntu might or somebody? Could you see a world like that? Yeah, I can see Ubuntu doing it. I can see OpenSUSE doing it. I can see Fedora doing it. And as soon as you get the big

players doing it, then everyone's got it. And then you've cracked it, haven't you? Yeah, because essentially you create an API, a stable API that people can write to. You've created a certain set of expectations that you can write to. And GNOME 3.16 is no slouch. That's the latest

and freshest GNOME, so it's not going to be that far behind. Even after a few releases, having 3.16 as the base is. That's the latest and freshest GNOME, so it's not going to be that far behind. Even after a few releases, having 3.16 as the base is actually going to be pretty good. I mean, Steam seems to be successfully doing it, so maybe others can successfully do it. And we have the hard drive space to have a few extra libraries,

and as long as they keep updated for security fixes, which is always the trick with this kind of stuff. But that's not a challenge we're incapable of solving. We have package managers everywhere. So, yeah, I think it's kind of interesting. We'll see. This could be a great way to get... It would be funny if Qt

has all the real nice technical advantages and market share advantages, but GTK comes along as well. But we've got Builder, we've got this runtime and we've got a pretty good looking desktop so here's all the things you just here's your here's your complete solution to delivering it on across all distributions um and you don't even have to have like file system overlays and and containers and i think it's not a bad solution

we'll see if anybody really uses it that we'll see. It's going to take somebody to actually package up their application with it. Someone's bound to do it. Has anybody tried it? I mean, how difficult is it? Super new. Super, super new. Like yesterday new. Yeah.

It was just posted online yesterday. So I don't think there's much of anybody using it. But I've just been following it closely on the show because what I'm really trying to crack, and maybe I should make this more obvious, is universal application distributions across all distributions. Because on Coder Radio, the email we get in all the time, and when we started Coder Radio, the email we get is, hey, so I'm an iOS developer, and I just got myself a little Linux machine for the first time. It's really cute and quaint, and I wanted to write an adorable little app for that Linux desktop. Can you point me in the direction of the SDK? Can you point me how I'm supposed to get started, what I'm supposed to do?

And every time, we just have a different answer, depending on the trend. And this is a full-fledged answer, which I think is kind of exciting. I think it'll be interesting to see where it all ends up in the long run. I agree, Matt. I agree. So you can find out more information in the show notes or check blogs.gnome.org.

And maybe it goes nowhere. This is all part of their work on sandbox applications, too. So I imagine if you're going to be sandboxing apps, this will become more important as well. So it all fits in with application distribution, sandboxing, the future of different desktops. It's a big picture that we're watching come slowly together in front of our eyes. Speaking of bringing things together in front of your eyes, how about your education over at Linux Academy? I mean it. Go over to Linux Academy right now and check them out.

They freaking rock. Linux Academy is our sponsor right here on the Unplugged program. And they, I think, are one of the best sponsors for Linux Unplugged because they're such a great fit for you guys. It really is the matchup of open source enthusiasts, Linux administrators and educators coming together to build something special. And you can take advantage of it by going to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Head over there right now, check them out, and get our special discount at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

Step-by-step video courses for everything they cover, and the content is always expanding. So that's very nice. And they have downloadable comprehensive study guides you can bring with you on the go. Maybe you're in the shower. Maybe you're traveling. No judging. I'm not going to judge. And they're always like the best, the best, because these people really truly get the content and what your goals are, because they've been in your shoes. They've been in your position. And so when they see things that come up like Docker and things like Vagrant and Amazon Web Services, they really can wrap their brains around how to make scenario-based labs so

that way you can go in and really get your hands on with that technology. And they have self-paced courses where you can set your own limits. You get your percentages when you log in. It's exactly where you're going to have to take off, where you're going to leave off, exactly how long it's going to take you to get through that course. And I like that. I guess I'm a bit of a data head. I like to be able to break it all down and see how long something's going to take me.

To me, the idea that I could see the goal of learning Python will take six hours, or I think it's like five and a half hours on Linux Academy. That is a quantifiable thing that I can put that in my head and go, I can learn the basics of Python in five and a half hours? That is a huge, huge pivot from like, I have to learn this nebulous thing called Python. And it's this programming

language that's going to be very complicated. You know, it just cuts through all of that. Plus, you've got instructor help, you've got live streaming, a fantastic community, and they're going to do some big content updates. April 16th, they're going to do a live stream, new content coming to Linux Academy.

I've also gotten notes about folks that pass their certifications after training at Linux Academy, and it happens more and more all the time. It is a really, really great setup. And I think one of the things that I've found is when we'll follow things in the news, I'll be like, this is obviously going to be a big deal.

And I end up talking to the folks who run Linux Academy. They're already working on courseware for it. They have a really cool lab setup. When we first brought them on as a sponsor, I got sort of geeky with the back-end technology and really sort of was like, wow, man. I was talking to Anthony who runs Linux Academy. If I was going to do this today, like if I was going to launch Jupyter Broadcasting Day, I might seriously do something like this because it's so genius. They've got everything. You've Red Hat training, Python, OpenStack, DevOps, Android, PHP, Ruby.

The Amazon Web Services stuff is particularly great because I find that to be an expensive thing to learn. really great because I find that to be an expensive thing to learn. And the fact that all of the Amazon Web Services are just included with your Linux Academy subscription makes that really stress-free. It makes that you don't even have to worry about getting that accidental charge from Amazon, which I have done, and it is not cheap. I accidentally one time got charged $200 because I left an AWS services server running for 30 days by mistake, not doing a single thing, but it was like $280 just running because I was just trying to learn Amazon Web Services.

I don't have to worry about that with Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Get our special Linux Unplugged discount. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys are powerful. All right, so we got some feedback into the show. Tell me that I'm a dummy. You guys are powerful. All right, so we got some feedback into the show. Tell me that I'm a dummy.

He says, Ubuntu touch apps and other distributions are how Chris is wrong. Right. Okay, so this has been stopping me from sleeping for a while because, well, it wound me up. On a certain episode of Linux Unplugged, Chris questioned how Ubuntu applications made with the Ubuntu SDK would look on non-Ubuntu desktop environments and quite rightly came to the conclusion, well, they would probably look out of place. Fine. Let's stop right now and talk about something else. GNOME apps.

GNOME apps are effing S. Under anything that isn't GNOME, however, nobody is giving GNOME a hard time over this. GNOME is effing all over everyone else in their poorly designed applications and the Ubuntu desktop and other desktops are suffering because of it. And he includes some examples.

Here is a GNOME app under Unity that looks horrible with the client-side decoration. Here's one that also looks quite horrible because it doesn't have the right decorations. He says, this is just totally effed. This is Canonical's responsibility for patching GNOME apps to make them look right under Ubuntu. You could

make that argument, but he disagrees. If that's the case, Canonical should be allowed to do whatever they want, and everybody else just patch that as well. It goes both ways. So if Canonical can make their own applications look or don't look remotely under any other desktop, then that's just fine because GNOME's getting away with it as well. Canonical shouldn't be given a hard time for making their applications.

And if they don't work on anything else, that's nothing different than GNOME and the GNOME apps right now. Or you could say maybe the elementary apps and things like that. What do you think of this argument, Matt, that's like, hey, if they want to reinvent the wheel and make them only work okay on the Ubuntu desktop and not look okay on, say, Fedora with GNOME, that's totally fine? And this is just my opinion. The whole thing, in my opinion, is just completely ridiculous. It's like, okay, look, as long as they're willing to make their efforts public and

the code available and all that sort of stuff, I don't care what they theme it with. Because that's really where the ethical responsibility ends, is that, hey, we did something cool, here's the code for it. You want to pretty it up, go ahead. But it's not their responsibility. They are, in fact, looking out for their desktop environment and what they're doing. And if that doesn't, you know, play well with other things, well, you know, whether it be GNOME, Unity, doesn't matter. Same thing applies.

It just feels like a real straw man kind of argument. I have a hard time getting behind it. Okay. All right. I can see, yes, I can see that point. Anybody in the mumble room want to jump in before I share my thoughts? If I'm an individual working on an application, I wrote an application called Journal for the

GNOME desktop, and it's because that's what I use. If I was going to port that over to Ubuntu Touch, that would be fine. But, you know, I would want some assistance from some actual Ubuntu Touch developers to do that.

So here's my question. So I think there's a pretty big difference between a desktop environment implementing something like a client-side decoration and the world's most popular Linux distribution coming up with a new way for applications to look. And the reason why there's a difference is because one is a desktop environment, and one is the most important Linux distribution in the world for desktops. Okay, you see the difference there? So if you want to write applications for Ubuntu, they are going to look different. And there's more people that probably want to write applications for Ubuntu

than they do for the general Linux desktop. So now do you see the difference there? More people want to write applications for the Ubuntu desktop than they want to write for the Linux desktop. So that means more applications will be looking like they're designed for Ubuntu regardless of the distribution you're using. Do you see a problem with that, anybody? No.

All the way through this, I've just been thinking it's kind of like Qt and GTK. If you run a GTK application on a Qt desktop, it looks absolutely horrible. And you know, I actually don't know if it's going to

be a bad thing or not. I think maybe I was getting a little more hate for it. I'm pointing out it's going to be a thing. Doesn't mean it's going to be a bad thing or not. I think maybe I was getting a little more hate for it. I just, I'm pointing out it's going to be a thing. Doesn't mean it's going to be a bad thing. Maybe it'll be fine. In fact, maybe, because there's going to be like a standard design language, maybe they'll be the best looking apps on the Linux desktop. Maybe. Could be. Could be.

Maybe it'll just take off because it looks good. We'll wait and see. I doubt it. One more little update before we get into Linux Fast Northwest stuff. I thought we'd talk a little bit about Cinnamon just super quick because yesterday Clem did a blog post, an update for Mint, and he said a huge amount of work has gone into making Cinnamon load faster. And I just got an email into the show the other day. It said, how come you guys never talk about Cinnamon?

So he says, we're only halfway there. The results aren't conclusive yet. One of our test machines on there, Cinnamon was able to load in less than a second in normal conditions, but can take up to 12 seconds to load the very first time the computer is turned on. Investigations show that this delay took place

in Cinnamon menus and Cinnamon desktop during the initial loading of application infos from like the menus and the user share applications, directories, and the icon themes, of course. Through optimizations, the loading times were reduced from 12 seconds to 7 seconds on average, which is the first step, but doesn't yet solve anything.

He says, we're still working on this and hoping we'll be able to drastically reduce that initial time. Wouldn't it be cool if Cinnamon becomes one of the fastest, snappiest desktops? That would be very cool, especially considering all its little bells and whistles. Mint has also made a call out for photographers and graphics

designers and web people. They need a lot of work there, and they'd eventually like to have somebody that could maybe even take over responsibility of the look of Linux Mint. Some also information about upcoming releases. Linux Mint 18 is going to be released sometime in 2016. We don't have a specific date yet.

However, Linux Mint 17.2, which I believe is based on Ubuntu 14.04, will be coming soon, probably very soon. So we'll keep an eye out for that. Congrats to the Linux Mint people. I wanted to try to give them a little coverage since we've been kind of missing that. Anybody want to chime in on anything before I move on?

Okay, good enough. Sometimes there's nothing to say. I wanted to mention that I started a meetup and a couple of things. Boy, there's a lot to cover today. I'm sorry I'm going kind of fast, but I wanted to get to some of our topics. So I decided to do something. I decided to create a meetup group for Jupyter Broadcasting.

I've been kind of trying to figure out the best way to sort of organize future meetups and as well as LinuxFest Northwest. So I kind of wanted to get an idea of how many people are coming to LinuxFest Northwest for planning, but I realized long term, as the weather gets nice in the Seattle area, I'd like to maybe do semi-frequent meetups with Jupyter Broadcasting audience members, maybe like once a month. Maybe we could even record them or stream them, you them. Eat, chat, talk about show stuff.

And then, of course, if we travel and we have an event, we would use this Meetup group that I set up to organize events in your local area. So I have linked, and I will link it right now in the IRC as I'm talking too. I've created an event for LinuxFest Northwest, and I've created just a general Jupyter Broadcasting group on meetup.com I don't know if meetup.com is the best place

but it seems to be pretty popular in the Seattle area there's lots of open source meetups already on there so I was hoping maybe we could capitalize on some of that too so I created an event for LinuxFest Northwest if you're going to be going please go to meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting and go to the LinuxFest Northwest event I'll have it linked in the show notes.

And RSVP, so we just get an idea of how much food and swag items we need to bring. It'd be a rough idea. But the other idea is... I think it's got a lot of potential if you think about it because there's a lot of local folks that would love to do that. Yeah, I think maybe then we could get a list of local folks and in the future we'll have the list

and we can let them know we're going to do other meetups as well. And I don't know if Meetup lets you, but maybe we could can let them know we're going to do other meetups as well. And we could all, I don't know if meetup lets you, but maybe we could just notify you when you're going to be in your area too, because I figure when we travel or we go to other fests, we could use this as a way to sort of organize events in that area too. So the site is, or the page is meetup.com slash jupiter

broadcasting, and the event is linked in the show notes. So start with LinuxFest Northwest, maybe give us an idea of how many you're going, and we'll use it for other stuff that'd be neat who needs a mumber and buy guys I'm replacing you with people in real life ha no kidding right

actually Wimpy sounds so good this week you'd almost think he's in studio I know it's a new mic or something what'd you do Wimpy tell Matt it's an old mic I got some kit from the loft and a few USB adapters and had

a bit of an experiment last night. And you sound good. Wow. You sound good, right? Doesn't he sound good? He sounds really good. He sounds so good, you'd think he's going to be here for LinuxFest Northwest, but he's not. I really wanted to try and go. Really wanted to try and go. Yeah, I know. Maybe next year.

Maybe next year. Maybe next year. I think next year, definitely. So check out. Maybe even present. Really? That'd be really cool. Yeah, you could go totally wimpy. Oh, my gosh.

Don't tease. I would like that a lot. All right, so if you are going to make it, check out meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting, and you'll find the LinuxFest Northwest event there. Let us know if you're going. And also, if you'd like to'll find the LinuxFest Northwest event there. Let us know if you're going. And also, if you'd like to maybe volunteer for LinuxFest Northwest,

they do have a contact page, linuxfestnorthwest slash contact, and you can give them your info. Maybe you've got something you can help them do. That'd be kind of cool. Just give them a mention. All right. So I want to talk about this hardware device. It's made it on one of the top stories in our subreddit this week. It's called the Onion Omega, and it looks like it's smaller than a USB It's made it on one of the top stories in our subreddit this week. It's called The Onion Omega.

And it looks like it's smaller than a USB thumb drive. I'd say it's a little bit bigger than a quarter. And it's kind of amazing. It's a tiny but powerful Linux with Wi-Fi, an app store. You'd think those Chrome sticks look interesting. They got nothing. They got nothing on this thing. So I want to show this to you guys and see if this could be a viable thing. And if it is, maybe

we'll get one. Maybe we'll review it on the show and put Arch on it. I mean, Matei. No, I'm just kidding. But first, I'm going to tell you about our friends over at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. That'll take $25 off your first device. Or, you know what? You probably have a device

that works with Ting because they just take all these GSM devices now, and they take a whole bunch of CDMA devices. So if you've got a device that already works with Ting, they'll give you $25 service credit. Wait, you don't know what Ting is? Oh, my gosh. How did you not hear about the best thing to happen to mobile ever? I'm serious. Ting is really here to shake up the mobile duopoly.

It's mobile that makes sense. No contracts. You only pay for what you use. Flat $6 for that line. You want a new line on your tingle? You just boom, $6. $6. That is less than a sandwich these days for a cell phone line. $6 a month in your usage on top of that. They have a kick-ass dashboard that totally dominates all the other carriers' dashboards. It takes their dashboards and smashes them into the ground by the face. It is such a great dashboard.

But then to, like, lap them, they have no-hold customer service. You call that ting at 1-855-TING-FTW anytime between 8 a.m. or 8 p.m., and a human answers the phone, and that human is empowered to solve your problems. You know why? Because they're like, hey, here's an idea. Let's hire Android geeks to do our Android phone support. Let's hire iOS fanboys to do our iOS support. So you get the enthusiast. And then they said, hey, you know what? Let's give them the ability to actually just solve the problem on their first call. Solve the problem on their first call.

What a freaking concept. What a freaking concept. That's Ting. And they just, they just like, that kind of just very straightforward logic applies to everything. I'll give you another example. You want hotspot and tethering? Turn it on. Just check the box. That's why Google built it into the OS, and that's why Apple built it into the OS, and probably Microsoft does it.

I don't know about Microsoft. That's why it's there. You should just be able to turn it on. It's a wireless ISP. You want to treat Ting like a wireless ISP? Do it, bro. Go for it, sister. I don't care.

I'm not judging you because you're only paying for what you use. They take your minutes, your message, your megabytes, and that's it. Go to linux.ting.com to get started. I'll tell you how crazy like a Fox Ting is too. Look up over on their blog post right now. Ting tip for Android. Make calls through Hangouts for free. They talk about this app that's in the Play Store that just sets up your dialer to use the Hangouts app.

So you just make calls and you dial phone numbers on your Android phone. it just routes the call through Hangouts. So all your calls are free. Now, that's going to cost Ting money. They're going to make less money off you because you are not going to use as many cellular minutes. You're going to be making your calls over Wi-Fi. That's crazy like a fox. That's Ting. Linux.Ting.com. Go check them out. Been my mobile service provider for well over two years now. Linux.ting.com. And a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged program. You crazy foxes over there, you keep it up.

You keep it up. And I can't wait to get myself a brand new spanking Android phone soon and put it on the Ting GSM network. Linux.ting.com. All right. So this is maybe the coolest thing ever. We've shown many hardware devices on the Unplugged show. In fact, I want to show more. But we've also shown many a Kickstarter.

Many a Kickstarter. But you guys, not only is this one of the coolest Kickstarter devices we have ever seen on the show, I think this is the best Kickstarter video I have ever seen, at least for anything that runs Linux. So here it is, the tiny but powerful Linux Wi-Fi development board with 166 backers. It's currently at $5,285 at a $15,000 goal, a nice modest goal, $15,000. That's modest.

34 days to go. Here we go. Check this thing out. This is so, so freaking cool. And I think I've got to give him mad props for a great Kickstarter video as well. There are two worlds, the real world and the digital. And then there's the cat world. Oh, the lovely cat world.

Oh, the lovely cat world. The problem with the two worlds is that in order to connect objects in the real world with the digital world, you need to be a rocket scientist or some sort of physicist from the Manhattan Project. Or one of those brains in a jar. But not anymore. Meet Onion. For the past year, we've been hard at work building something that's small, affordable, and really easy to use so that we can merge the two worlds together.

We wanted to be like Tony Stark and be able to build whatever comes to our mind without learning how to build these things. And that is exactly why we created this, the Onion Omega. Thanks, Oliver. It's a tiny computer with built-in Wi-Fi and it runs the Linux operating system. This little bad boy lets you create connected devices in environments that you're already familiar with Using tools such as SSH, Git, and NPM And it also allows you to write software in Python, Node.js, PHP, or whatever language you feel comfortable with You now have the power to build anything you can imagine Such as smart home devices

Security drones Yeah, I want that. Yeah, I want that, too. What? I don't want that. I do not want that. I do not want that. I do not want that! I do not want that!

I do not want that! With a laser? A laser pointer. a cat feeder that realizes your cat is too fat. With a laser? And then makes it exercise. A laser pointer. Or if you don't want to build from scratch, you can browse the Onion App Store for ready-made apps. In fact, if you want to see what you can build on the Omega right now,

click on the live demo below and start to experience the Omega in real time. I want the cat stuff. That's cool. Yeah, so this is the Omega Onion. And I'm telling you, it's the future. You're going to have one of these in your backpack. You're going to have one of these in your milk jug. This thing is nuts. It's tiny. It is one-fourth the size of a Raspberry Pi. Wow.

It's got a full Linux environment. Full Linux environment, they say, with a powerful processor capable of running the full Linux operating system. That is just... I mean, it's just the stuff you can do with it. And the ready-made apps, that's going to make this work.

That's what's going to make this work for people. Because someone like me that's lazy, it's just like, I just want the cool stuff. Yeah, that is actually a pretty good point. And that's lazy, it's just like I just want the cool stuff. Right. Yeah, that is actually a pretty good point. And it comes with a pretty nice little UI out of the box where you can load stuff. To me, this looks like finally a version of this kind of tech that might be more approachable to somebody like me. Whereas, like, I think the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino boards are in the BeagleBone Black are super cool.

But I just – I am not inventive enough to see them and come up with something, right? But this looks a little more approachable to me. I don't know. Mumberum, any thoughts? Would you guys back something like this? The prices here – I'll give you the prices and you guys tell me what you think, okay? So here's your vacuum prices. If you just want to get in sort of cheapo style, you know, like low rent, you could just, you could get, there's, oh, they're all gone. They did start at $19. They're all gone now. For $25, you get an Omega and a dock. $35, you get an Omega

and a dock, and a dock or expansion. But you really start cooking when you get up to 99 bucks. 99 bucks, you get a camera kit, which is you get the Omega, a dock, a camera kit, a tilt mount, a servo, an Omega servo, and accessory instructions and wiring. And then it just keeps going up. Like $109, you get the printer kit.

$119, you get all that stuff and a starter kit and essential items to build something else. Like everything, you get more and more stuff. So it's a pretty straightforward pricing structure starting as you can go as low as $35 or

really $25 for a little bit longer. There's only 21 spots left, I think. But, you know, I don't know. It seems like a pretty reasonable price for a pretty interesting device. Yes, no? I'm not really happy with the software. Well, I think it is. I'm sorry, what with the software well I think it is I'm sorry what about the software they've kind of

made their own onion cloud own lab own everything I'm not sure how future proof it is if they're only a small company it's actually pretty fair critique I have two reasons okay

two things one called the onion in omega yes which i mean it gets points right there and then two the guy almost sounded like morgan freeman yeah yeah that's great right a few points so just based on those two things i guess you almost have to see, that was great, right? Which gives it a few points. So just based on those two things, I guess you almost have to. See, okay, that was what I was thinking is the Morgan Freeman really did it for me. I thought I liked this idea too because, you know, last week we talked about – oh, I should follow up on that too. Last week we talked about a computer for my kid. And I think it was Wimpy that recommended, you know, get him a computer, but maybe also get him a Raspberry Pi.

I think that was you, right, Wimpy? What do you think about this as opposed to the Raspberry Pi for kids? Well, this is, I think, the step on from the Raspberry Pi, isn't it? This is the next level of sort of DIY computing and experimentation. computing and experimentation. So yeah, definitely something when you've surpassed the initial novelty of the Raspberry Pi and using it a bit more like a traditional computer and you want to get into robotics and actually embed a device in something or, you know, motorize small things,

then this looks like a neat solution for that and not too expensive. Lots of language support as well. And this looks like a neat solution for that. And not too expensive. Yeah. And lots of language support as well. And I see Python in there, which, of course, you're soon going to be an expert in. So that'll be good. Oh, I see. There you go. Although now they're trying to get me back onto Ruby again.

So, you know, after this week. Don't do that. Don't do that to yourself. You know, so a follow-up. You know, I wanted to get a computer for my son. And I had an exchange with our friends at System76. Now, I won't say who, but I got like an Apple-style rumor for you. You ready for this?

Rumor has it. Now, I cannot confirm or deny this, but rumor has it on Thursday of this week. So let's see. What day is that going to be? So this is Tuesday the 31st. So on April – oh, yeah, it's probably a good idea they don't do it on Thursday of this week. So let's see. What day is that going to be? So this is Tuesday the 31st. So on April. Oh, yeah. It's probably a good idea.

They don't do it on April. Yeah. So on April 2nd, a new System76 laptop is going to be announced. That's the rumor. That's the rumor. And so it might be the perfect machine for my son. And I might have first dibs on it. It's all might be things that are true.

They may or may not. So we'll see. If they do have a new laptop that releases this Thursday, then we'll probably have one of the first reviews, because I think I'm going to have one of the first units on the Linux Action Show. So that was... I decided to go with a laptop so that way he could come to the studio

and I'll probably make him use this machine for like five, six years. Or he'll use it for a couple of years and then his sisters will use it for a couple of years as they get a little bit older. So yeah. Hopefully that'll work out pretty good for him. I think he'll like it quite a bit. And I think it's going to be the perfect machine

for him too. I really like him. I was really nice to him. So what do you think? Should we back this Onion Omega? What do you guys... I could go in. I could go in for $25. Is it worth backing to see if we could get one for the show? I think so. I mean, I think just based on the fact that it said, hey, Chris, would you like to be your own Tony Stark?

I think they kind of win there. I would like to be my own Tony Stark, man. Right? Yeah. All right. Do it. Chat room says do it. Mumble room.

Anybody want to say don't do it? Anybody want to vote for not backing this project? Speak now or forever hold your peace. I'm going to do it. There we go. Wow, okay. There we go. I'm going to back in it right now. I'll back at $25 because I feel like $25 is totally worth it if we can have it here on the show.

I know you've just bought a device that you can use to exploit your newfound Python skills. You're really pushing me in that direction. I feel a slight amount of pressure to go in a certain direction. As long as you learn something, Chris, we'll back you in a letter or what.

Oh man, alright, so there we go. I just backed it, and I felt good. I feel like that was a good choice. At first I wasn't sure if that was a good choice, but then I remembered that I wanted to be Tony Stark, and then I felt like a good choice. And I also want Morgan Freeman to narrate my decisions and all decisions I make so that sort of

sealed the deal for me and if you'd like to if you'd like to as well it's I mean they're only they only have a couple of slots left at the $25 and then it starts getting expensive but there we go I mean at the $35 level that's that's a pretty good

deal because you get basically the same components as the... You can opt to get the network card and then you get the same components as the Raspberry Pi, basically. Now you tell me after I just backed the $25 one. Dude,

way too late on the commentary. Way too late. No kidding, right? Sorry, I should have mentioned it earlier. I was going to mention it earlier, but then I was like, eh. No, you got to mention that. I pulled the trigger. Should I cancel it? Can you cancel a Kickstarter? Is that like a – what's that called when you back something and then you pull out?

What's that called? Are you talking about a Kickstarter or in real life? Oh, a Kickstarter. You're not completely pulling out. You're just pulling out and getting more money instead. Yeah. Yeah. You can just give them more giving them more money instead. Yeah. You can just give them more.

Formers call birth control. I should just send them a note like, I'm not judging you with this cancellation. I love you. Really, I'm just giving you more money. I'm sorry. No, I think it's fine. $25 is fine. I think you can do it.

That's fine. No, $25, I don't. Well, it's not too committal. You get in there early. If they grow cool, you can always add to it, right? I suppose. I suppose. Tell yourself that.

Yeah. I just wanted something for the show. Okay. All right. Well... If you wanted... Oh, you know what we need? That's why he has three kids. Wow. Wow.

You can change your pledge. Okay. All right. So maybe I'll do that. I don't know. We'll save that for the post show if I remember. Yeah, there you go. That's probably a good point.

Okay, so we might have a little ass kicking that we need to be handed to us. And we got a couple of good notes that came into the show. And Ryan, did our friend from Evolvos show up? He's here. Okay. Who is that? Ike. Hi, Ike.

Hi, Ike. Welcome to the show. Oh, thanks. And you're with Evolvos? That's one way of putting it, yeah. Okay. Well, you are Evolvos? Yeah, for the most part, yeah.

Okay. All right. Well, good. I'm really glad you're here because you could give us a great perspective on this, I think, discussion we're about to have. And really, which sort of translates into how much attention do we give distributions that maybe don't have a larger user base as some of the other ones, which obviously translates into audience interest. So it's kind of a tricky topic for us. it's into audience interest. So it's kind of a tricky topic for us.

But because part of the goal of our show is to give exposure to things that deserve more exposure that aren't currently getting it, it's something I feel it's worth reevaluating pretty frequently. I don't want to make it obnoxious, but because you, the listener, have a bit of a stake in this,

I think it's probably good we just have this discussion with our lug on the record. So you know where, if there's a bias, where it lies, which there isn't one, but you at least know the logic and the process that goes into selecting what we cover and what dictates that coverage. So before we do that, I'll thank our third sponsor this week, and that's DigitalOcean. Now, this is the secret right here.

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A terabyte. They're all SSDs, too. They did that early on, and I think that's a really smart move. It made them really competitive. And they've got data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. But their interface is really great. The DigitalOcean control panel is like their secret sauce.

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It's the best out there. It's very intuitive, and you can replicate its functionality on a larger scale with DigitalOcean's very straightforward API, which a lot of the community is already doing. You can take advantage of the stuff that's already out there. You can do DNS management. You can take care of your snapshots, back things up, destroy them, use the template to get started even faster,

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Try it out. Check out their tutorials as well. They're really top-notch. DigitalOcean.com, DLunplugged. Get the $10 credit and a big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. It's a really good service. Okay, so let's talk about our coverage. So we've kind of got Gabriel3 in the subreddit kicks it off.

He says, hi there, Chris, Matt, Noah, JB producers, Mumble Room, fellow community members. On the latest Linux Unplugged episode, Chris announced a roundtable on distro coverage criteria. In my opinion, it's worth to express our thoughts on this as a community, too. He wanted to kind of work through this. You know, you have mainstream distros. You have new distros. Third, derivative distros that are beginner-friendly. Fifth is, you know, he says you also have, fifth, despite Chris and JB's goodwill, some interesting distros will not be covered because there are hundreds of distros.

It's quite impossible. That's very true. So he started off a pretty good conversation and folks, you know, sort of kicked in like some people want to see more coverage on NixOS. And I wasn't so sure I wanted to get into the specific distros we should be covering. Although we can talk about specific distros. But I wanted to talk a little bit about sort of the selection criteria. And then maybe Ike can chime in with what he thinks about it from somebody who's maybe tried to get more attention from media outlets. So our selection usually is based on what we perceive to probably generate the most interest in the audience.

And also it has to be something we have experience with or use ourselves to some degree to be able to review it. And that depends. So, you know, we'll try out a distro for a couple of weeks that we don't actually run just to do a review. But things that are more in our wheelhouse are going to be stuff that's closer to our daily run. So that's sort of, if there is a bias, that would be it. And then what we select, the only real selection criteria

is if it interests us and we think it might interest the audience. So sometimes we will feature something that maybe the audience has never heard of, but we think based on what we think they're going to like, once they find out about this, it'll pique their interest. And so we'll run it. But that does mean that certain things kind of get left out more often than not. Distributions that maybe you could label as less relevant, but I don't really feel like that's fair because even a really small distribution can have something very innovative going on. But it's maybe distributions that

have a much lower user base. I don't know exactly how to say this. That sounds about right to me. Yeah, you know where I'm trying to go here, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Something that makes... Ryan, you have an idea of what makes something coverable?

Yeah, there are derivative distributions out there and a lot of distributions that build just ever so slightly on an innovation from its parent distro, which is fine. But to me, that doesn't make it necessarily worth covering. doesn't make it necessarily worth covering i think you're right when you say you you really want to cover distro when it's doing something innovative and new and something that might actually be a game changer one reason i contribute to and enjoy volvo s is because they ike did a really great job of pulling out a lot of stuff and he built it on top of not, it's not a derivative of another distro necessarily, or at least not any living distros. And, and really just rethought the whole desktop,

you know, environment from the ground up. And so when, when you look, what I would like to hear as, as a five year listener of Jupiter Broadcasting is, is about distros that are doing something new and exciting, not necessarily every distro that pops up as a derivative. I don't want to hear about the Ubuntu derivative.

Sorry, Opie and Wimby. Well, wait a minute. Sometimes they're really good. Well, if they are, then that's great. I think Ubuntu Mate is worth hearing about because i mean where are you going to go to try out mate you know if you're not on arch or someplace where you're just gonna throw it on your machine and go everywhere it's in every distribution but not done right it's not done right is it uh well no it's not some distributions do it better

than others but you know okay so uh ike, coming from the, you know, the Evolve OS perspective, you probably don't hear Evolve OS mentioned as often as you'd like. What are your thoughts on that sort of spot you get stuck in when you're a distribution of that size? Love us, basically. We wouldn't get a lot of attention, so what people are interested in now is, ooh, shiny. So, I mean, I'm not going to point out any specific distros at the moment um because like people listen to this

and i'd get in trouble um but people are really really interested in the whole design-led philosophy at the moment so something's really really pretty they take something else and basically whack a new skin on it and that's what people seem to be interested in so for us um i guess you could say in that way that we suffer um because you know i mean we got the budgie desktop and you know it's kind of sexy um but people want all the shiny google things um which we're not really doing we're more interested in making something that works um so yeah we do have to work a bit harder but unlike some of the other projects we're not actually financially dependent on success, which kind of makes things a lot easier for us.

Like we're not whacking a new wallpaper on and saying, can we have a donation because, you know, we look good. So it's easier for us in that respect. And the thing that seems to be the hump you have to find, the hump to get over is that, oh, there's something interesting happening here. And then once everybody kind of agrees something interesting is happening here, it seems like the coverage just sort of naturally starts rolling. And so why don't you tell us a little bit about Evolve OS and people's interest because it looks super slick. It looks really nice. I mean, so it's got a bit of a history behind it. So, I mean, a lot of people would know that i

was you know involved in well involved in solar swiss i was solar swiss before all this um so what i did there is you know we made a couple of mistakes along the way with solar swiss um one of the things i really really really wanted to do is make something that only targeted the desktop now to a lot of people that's going to sound really stupid because they'll be like, well, you can take Ubuntu or Fedora and just only have a desktop on there. But the problem with those distributions are they are very much generic. Now, I don't mean that by way of an insult to those distributions, but if we look at Debian, it advertises itself as the universal distribution. It's the universal operating system. You can use it anywhere. To be fair, I only have desktop machines, and I really couldn't care less if I had the potential to run this on a Raspberry Pi

or something like that. I just want to run a desktop machine. I mean, it's great being able to do that. But for me, I just want something that runs on what I have, and that happens to be 64-bit machines that are desktops. So I only want a desktop, and I don't want to be able to run this like with Apache and MySQL and, you know, all those carry-ons. Sorry, MariaDB.

Got to be politically correct. Right, of course. Got to keep it hip. Got to keep it hip. But, you know, that's all I wanted. So it had to be very, very, you know, it had to be trim from the get-go. It couldn't have all these possible options. So you can only run Budgie Desktop on that.

That's all you're getting. For anyone who doesn't know, Budgie Desktop is a GTK and modder-based desktop similar to, I guess, similar to how Pantheon is implemented. You know, where you just use the same libraries and basically piggyback on all that hard work, to put it bluntly. But another approach with this was

kind of to show people what you can do with gnome so you know i mean gnome has been forked so many times now that they're going to need to puncture a peck it's like there's just loads of forks like flying around the place um we wanted to show what you could do with the technology you know it's a bit more work but in the end it pays off So we've got a healthy upstream relationship with Gnome. We contribute to Gnome. I know I was supposed to be saying Gnome, but, you know, I have the remnants of an accent, and that's just not happening. I see.

And you have your link to Friends of Gnome here on your site right here on the blog. That's nice. Yeah, you've got to be nice. You know, you've got to help them out. And we find bugs in them. Sometimes they're not interesting bugs to the GNOME project. So I don't know about you guys, but, like, I like to play Kerbal Space Program because I'm so rad and cool.

This is not selling, is it? So one of the problems that I actually found is on older versions of GNOME, GNOME Shell or, in our instance, Budgie, would just die, which was really, really oddly depressing. i couldn't play kerbal space program so we found out the fix for that and sent the patch upstream that's now living in mutter so that's some of the stuff that we do that you wouldn't find in say a respin where they add a new wallpaper on that you know there's not a lot of upstream stuff happening whereas we build everything right yeah and that's a ton of work i mean that's the downside right is it doesn't that doesn't that seem like a huge huge never-ending amount of work uh yes and no um so i mean when i was

building libra office wow i mean i'm getting flashbacks now that That was hard. I was ranting all over Google Plus about that. And then four hours into the build and it's like, yeah, dude, I needed this tool that I didn't tell you I needed. It's like, ha-ha, thanks. But, I mean, a lot of it is people seem to think distribution building is all about packaging because that's the concept we've been exposed to, that you get all these packages and you put them together. Well, to be honest, packaging is really boring.

So if people tell you they like maintaining a load of packages and updating them, they're either lying to you or you need to refer them to the local mental health unit because it's not nice to do it. So some of the stuff that we're tackling in Evolver West is basically just to get rid of all that crap. So how does that work? So how do security updates work? Is there a package manager? Does it pull down updates? Or is it, what? How does that system work?

Okay, so we're using, I can't even say the name of the package manager because we've renamed it. I guess you would pronounce it PC, but it's spelled P-I-S-I. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so that was abandoned by part of slenox like a couple of years ago so the the way i was looking i wasn't really interested i know it sounds bad but i wasn't interested in package management itself because i think that's really

really really really boring so i mean if you're looking for a real hardcore package manager that's got all the bells and whistles and all that kind of stuff, then use Arch Linux or something that really care about their package manager because I don't. I want to be able to install packages and update them. To me, that's what a package manager should do. But I noticed like Firefox 37, which came out today, is available for a Volvo OS already. It is because it takes me no time to update it at all. So the thing that we want to do is make everything really easy so it's about the development process because it's mainly me doing the packaging i've also got

justin doing packaging now but if i'm going to spend hours doing packaging then there's gonna there's never going to be a feature in the distribution there's never going to be any level of integration which is so if i'm super concerned about security fixes should i maybe use something else so this is more about experimenting a little bit. Oh, no, we do security updates. So I think it was just the other day that we did some glibc updates. There was another one that went in yesterday. I'd have to check the Git log, to be honest, but it's all up in GitHub.

So one of the projects that I've done in my own work time, like in my own professional work, is open source, and that's called CVE Check Tool. Now, that's usable by all projects. So, yes, I made it for work, but I also made sure that it worked for Evolver West as well. You know, you've got to do these things. So, I mean, that particular tool is something that's now being used by Evolver West, and it uses the National Vulnerability Database,

which is synced every three to four hours and maps them to every source package we have in our distribution. Which to be fair, I mean, it's not the greatest number, but they'll then tell us if we have any vulnerabilities, what we've patched, what we've addressed. You know, like the latest OpenSSL incident, it discovered that before it had been formally announced. But it's all non-embargo TVs, but there is a process to it. Sure. You've got to have secure up-to-date software, but we're not a rolling release. Right.

So there are points in time where I would sort of maybe reload after a certain new release. It wouldn't be necessarily upgraded to that new release. Right. And, I mean, that's kind of across that bridge when we get to a situation because we haven't done a one to two yet. That's kind of across that bridge when we get to a situation because we haven't done a one to two yet. But ideally, we want to make it an update that works because, you know, Linux is notorious for it doing like between two major releases. So we want to make sure that actually does work

when we go ahead and do that. That sounds really exciting. That sounds like a really interesting... Does anybody in the mumble room have any questions for... No? I think I'll download the ISO and give it a run. Sounds pretty fun. I think it's something I want to test out.

I've actually got a machine in mind I'd like to pop it on there. It's going through the website and just kind of getting a feel for it. I like the layout. I like where it's going. I think it's interesting. But it's definitely something I want to immerse myself in for a little bit. Also, you guys would really probably want to chat our software center. It's pretty darn lightweight. It loads center. It's a pretty darn lightweight.

It loads instantly. That's not a jab at anybody, but, and, uh, granted right now it's, it's still getting defied kind of by our art team and our, and our app,

uh, developers. But, uh, okay. We hope that it'll both look sexy and be speedy because nobody wants to wait whenever they're ready to install a new package. And I'm really excited about what that could be in the future. Yeah, really.

Yeah, that's definitely up our alley. Wimpy, you had a question. Yeah. So, hello, Ikey. I'm running Evolve OS on one of my laptops it's one of the distributions that i tinker with and take a look at to see see what inspiration i can draw from it um but i was wondering what's your sort of long-term plans for the project where do you want to take it and what's your sort of drive and motivation for making it sure so i mean i guess to shorten my question that's

basically is it a hobby or is it something that's actually going to go somewhere, right? Not necessarily. Just, you know, why are you making it and where do you want to take the project? So, for me personally, I've had, you know, I've had a bit of a problem with Linux distributions for quite a while now. You know, I've been around doing the whole Linux distro thing for a while. I've been around doing the whole Linux distro thing for a while I kind of have a vision of what a distribution should be and to me personally nothing I use on the desktop suits what I want to me you should never have to open a terminal

yes I am a geek I'm paid as a software engineer I use a terminal a lot but I don't believe I should be using that to do something as stupid as make pulse audio work again or to reload a configuration or i mean the most common thing you see on any forum is just like just open the terminal and type sudo apt-get install or sudo yum this that and the other you shouldn't be doing that like everything should work from the get-go so this isn't a packaging effort it really is like an integration and distribution effort

um the if you like the distribution model when we go forward from like the stable release you're looking at basically two years support per release because it should keep working and why should everyone keep updating because things just don't get that exciting in two years um so if we're rolling release distros i mean that that's all well and nice but i personally personally don't want to deal with a breakage in libpng, and I don't think anyone else does, you know. For me, for users, the thing that are really important is, like, is my Firefox browser two years out of date?

No. Great. Do I have VLC? Is it recent? Do I have all the support I need? Yes. Brilliant. Like, you know, I'm going forward, we're going to have things like automatic driver management, which is basically a given now. going forward. We're going to have things like, Oh mate, drive the management, which is basically a given now.

Uh, but there's other things going on behind the scenes, like a backup and things like that. Um, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know,

it's just a silly little thing. So one thing that's always got me, and I don't know about you guys, but when you boot up now and you look at grub on any single distro, you've got a recovery option, right? Now, what if grub is gone yes yes i've actually experienced that yes right so it's completely redundant option and you look at package managers so i mean the package manager that we basically inherited and

slash forked if you like i mean it's got options to do like, it's got rollback, which, you know, that's absolutely great. But that needs to roll back from the internet. So if I push out an update, say, and I broke network manager, which I totally didn't do a couple of months ago. That was well awkward. But, you know, I mean, you're absolutely screwed. You have no network connectivity, that that's gone.

Or let's say, like, you know, Gr grub has gone or you you've corrupted the first few blocks of your hard drive you're absolutely and utterly screwed so i don't see anything out there at the moment they're solving them for desktop digital there's no like immediate recovery option there isn't the whole thing you have windows yeah i mentioned windows people can burn me i don't care it's cool. But you don't have realistic recovery options. You don't – I mean, what's the most common thing people do? It's like, oh, no, that's screwed. I'm going to reinstall it.

Well, no, you have to think in the concept like – I mean, you know, I'm not making a product here. I'm really not. But you have to think along the lines of that this is a product. And you have to imagine as if it was an OEM installation. They have no disk to reinstall it. What are they going to do? So you have to start thinking of solutions like that. How are these people going to get by for the next two

years with no recovery disk? You don't want them to reinstall and you have to be able to solve the problems. You need to be able to roll back somewhere. So that's the kind of things that we want to address in the Bolivar West. Longevity of an installation, basically. Very nice. Lael, you wanted to ask a question? Yeah.

My question is this. I notice in, I mean, most of the distros I've tried, right now I am on Ubuntu Mate. Most of the distros I've tried, whether in VirtualBox or actually on my system, they require you to type in the command prompt to resolve dependencies. How does your distribution answer the question of resolving dependency through installing it through your package manager? So the package manager is something

we basically wanted to abstract. I mean, you can use it from a terminal. That's really, really fine. If that's what gets you going, more than fine doing that. But I mean, it works the same as any other package manager. You have binary dependencies. When we build our packages, that's actually automatic at runtime, similar to RPM.

So there's a binary dependency by a shared library. That's automatic. So dependency resolution, all that stuff, you know, works the same as any other distro, but we don't really want people to use that because that's dull, boring, and not what, quote, normal people do. So you'd have a graphical software manager where you get everything done.

But yeah, dependencies and everything, that's all automatic. And there's one place that we do differ to, say, Ubuntu or Debian. We avoid package conflicts. So in the likes of, especially things like build dependencies, which are not applicable to a user. But in Debian you have LibJPG and you have LibJPG Turbo, which both conflict with each other. With us, we'll just choose

one and we'll use that across the entire distribution. So you won't install something and say, ah, but you need to remove those 49 packages and probably break your system. So we avoid those and design it to work going forward anyway. And Colton, you had a question. Yeah.

So I went ahead and I torrented your ISO and I loaded it up in a virtual box just now. And I'd just like to say that I really like your desktop environment. And your installer is pretty nice too. But it seems a little bit technical. And your installer is pretty nice too, but it seems a little bit technical. Like there's no options that allow the installer to automatically create a partition on the hard drive or like the option to install Grub is unchecked by default. So like do you have any plans to fix that in the future? Oh, yeah. I mean that thing, you know, it's ugly.

It's like an abortion of free will. Oh, no. So, no, it's getting replaced. I mean, that's got a bit of history, that installer. So it's probably, next to Ubiquiti, it's one of the oldest installers in Lenox land. It was originally the LMDE live installer, which, I mean, I used to be involved in that once upon a time. You know, we all make mistakes. No, I'm joking.

And then another thing that I noticed is when I was setting up the disks, like one thing is I had to open gparted and do everything manually, which is, you know, something that most people aren't going to want to do. And then also, like it didn't have options. It had an option to set up a root partition and a swap partition, and that's it. No custom home partition or anything like that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not proud of it. It is being replaced, I can assure you. Visually, it looks nice, but just the actual content of it is not very useful sounds like do you need help what is the situation like that do you are you kind of like doing it sort of uh

with a small team or just yourself or just a few helpers how does that work for you no i mean if people want to jump in by all means jump in you know like i mean obviously it started out for myself i wanted you know i had certain needs that weren't being for that doesn't that doesn't sound right um i had certain needs for a distribution we all do i think we all do um wow uh but yeah certain needs that won't be fulfilled in the distribution sense um you know so that started out for me but then other people started getting interested probably because i actually spammed the crap out of Google plus for screenshots. Now I think about it.

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't sometimes have something to do with it. Yeah. I mean, we're on GitHub. They can just jump in and send us a pull request. And I will put a link to your GitHub page in the show notes as well.

So that's cool. Awesome. I'm downloading the ISO right now. Well, one thing I will say is I know it's like a pig in VirtualBox. Everything is. I don't blame you for that. I could make excuses for it, but I just don't think you should run it in VirtualBox.

Yeah, yeah. In my opinion, no one should ever run anything in VirtualBox. But right now, I don't have a free machine that I can just load it on. So VirtualBox is like, oh, it's at my fingertips, so I can go ahead and do it. I mean, it does make for easy testing. I will say one thing. It is very, very, very, very fast on real hardware.

So you'll find I did most of my benchmarking on an Intel NUC because they're awesome, obviously. That is a good test rig. If it runs good on a NUC, it's probably going to run good on a lot of hardware, and the NUC's not a bad idea. Yeah, I mean, this're awesome, obviously. That is a good test rig. If it runs good on a NUC, it's probably going to run good on a lot of hardware, and the NUC's not a bad idea. Yeah, I mean, this is a Haswell i5. I mean, to be fair, it's got 16 gigs of RAM. You know, it is a little beast.

It's not a slouch, yeah. But it boots in 2.134 seconds, 2.314 seconds or something like that. It's really freaking fast, basically. Ike, thank you for coming on here and chatting to us about a distro that we haven't got a chance to look at a lot. And you're always welcome to join us. We have an open mumble room, so join us for any show and give us an update on what you're working on or chat on stuff. And I also would love to see other distro makers that want to stop by and tell us about what they love about the distribution they're making. Because take Ike.

Nobody knows it like he does, right? He's passionate about it because he's making it, he's working on it. It's cool to hear it from him. And so if you're out there working on something, you're always welcome to join us. We just got to check your microphone. Make sure you're going to pass the, uh, the sniff test. You know, the sniff test, Matt, that's what I call it. Sniff test, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why I call it that because it's a sound check. It's not nothing, nothing about smell at all. It sounds cool. I do like that. I do like that. Hey, Matt, is there anywhere you want to send folks throughout the week?

As always, I've got stuff going on with articles and whatnot. Always have new projects around the bend. MattHartley.com, just as it sounds. Otherwise, if you forget the URL, you type in my name, and I'm number one at the top. That's magic. That's magic. Hey, join us live on a Tuesday, too. You can chat with Matt.

You can do that, too. You can chat with me. You can do it over at jblive.tv. You can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com. That's calendar to get in your local time zone. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you right back here next week. We got to do it all over again.

Twomp in the chat room. Yeah, he twomped in the chat room and fell asleep. So he missed the whole show. We got to do it all over again. Twomp in the chat room. Yeah, he twomped in the chat room and fell asleep. So he missed the whole show. We got to do it all over again. You know, next time, I'm just going to record the thing, and then that way he can just catch it on download. That would be way smarter. Why didn't I think of that one, Matt?

Well, if we're sniffing voices, we might as well have something to wake people up, right? Maybe I was sniffing too much glue. Maybe that's it. That could have been it. There you go. All right, let's go pick our title. JBTitles.com, last chance to bang and suggest the title and all of that goodness.

Thanks for showing up today, guys. Good show. Appreciate having Roboto here. And thanks, Wimpy, for showing us all up with your audio quality. That was good, too. Yeah, that was awesome. You're welcome. It's just amazing.

It's just amazing. Evolve Your OS isn't bad. That's not a bad title. That's pretty good. Yeah, I like that. Linux Evolved OS. For Evolve OS, I think we should go for something subtle, just so people don't feel that it's been rammed down the throat,

like world-dominating OS should be in your front room. Go buy it now or we'll kill you. Right. Something simple. Something really subtle. I like that. Yeah. How about Evolve OS?

It's better than the others. Well, actually, we got into the whole social media thing the other day because basically I'm an absolute attention whore. I've got to be blunt, haven't I? We put up a tweet just to make everyone feel comfortable. It was like,

it was one of the first tweets. It was like, oh, yeah, we haven't suddenly decided to start competing with all the other desktops right now. Oh, wait, yeah, we have. So they kind of know. You're in it to win it. Evolve your OS is coming up at number one right now. That's not bad.

The Kickstarter withdrawal method at number two. SystemD trolls Linux at number three. I think Evolve your OS is a pretty good one. I think it's pretty good. That's where I'd go. Yeah. I feel kind of bad because we co-opted the show, kind of. No, it's okay.

It was actually kind of fit because it's like – That's how it works. Yeah, it's like we wanted to get attention. That's the whole point. That's what I love about the show, actually, is we have the mumble room. And it's like totally unexpected. Like we had stuff to talk about, but this is just love i love having a show where we can just go with it and it works out better that way i think definitely yeah it's uh it's it's it is i think honestly like

if you had a lug we get pretty close like i think if we had a lug and we all showed up every week and talked about stuff and every now and then somebody brought a friend to the meetup this is what would happen very true it's pretty cool oh you're my friend yeah somebody brought a friend to the meetup, this is what would happen. Very true. It's pretty cool. Aw, Ike, you're my friend. Yeah, you brought a friend to the Lug meetup. It's pretty cool. Well, hold on now.

That's too official, isn't it? Can we go for acquaintance? Yeah, there you go. You can bring acquaintance. This is too close and comfortable for me. Lover, whatever it is, I don't care. Just bring him. Well, part-time manslave. We're past that now.

Yeah. This isn't being recorded anymore, is it? No, of course not.