LINUX Unplugged - Episode 88: Churning Over Btrfs | LUP 88

Episode Date: April 15, 2015

I'm washing my Dell right now before I talk about it. I'm going to talk about my XPS a little bit. Washing your XPS? Yeah, because it's touchscreen. Well, you know what I mean? I've got one of these. You've got to get the V8 off the screen, first of all. It can't come out tonight.

I'm washing my Dell. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, I'll be busy washing my Dell tonight. But it's because it's got the touchscreen. I wanted to get my fingerprints off of it. Right. Yeah, that's the thing about touchscreens that I don't quite get because I'd be

reticent about actually touching the screen for putting greasy fingerprints all over it. I've sort of given it. I've given it. I really have. The thing is what I've been finding because this XPS 13 is so light. It is two pounds. They talk about

the new MacBook Air being crazy light, the new MacBook with USB-Cbc well this has got a little more weight on it for a way more computer i mean it's just ridiculous how light this thing is i literally thought dell shipped this to me without a battery in it when i got it oh seriously it's that light usually batteries are where all your weight is so i uh i usually end up sitting when i'm sitting on the couch it's on my belly and i have my thumbs on the screen and i actually have been finding that i really like navigating it turns out turns out i don't mind using touch screen to navigate the web i just also really like having a full desktop with like an i7 processor um and like 512 gigabytes of storage so i it's not that it's not that i don't

but i also like having i also like browsing the web sort of with a tablet. So from time to time, I'm just sort of on my – and you know what? Because I'm not a huge trackpad fan. I'll talk more about the trackpad in the show. But I'm not a huge trackpad fan. You like nipples like me. Maybe. Maybe I should try nipples more.

Every now and then I experiment with things like that and I find I like it a lot. Every day. Eight hours a day I'm a nipple man. Really? And you never go, you're never going, you never bring your hand down and touch that pad. You never go? No. I'm more of a leg guy.

I never take my hand down. I leave my hands on the nipples all the time. I never go down. I deliberately buy old computers that just have nipples. Well, yeah, I know. I know. You guys are very hardcore about it. So what I've been finding is when I want to avoid the trackpad, I've just been using the touchscreen. And the

trackpad's actually gotten pretty good. I'll talk about it more. But I didn't expect to actually find myself. I thought, I don't know. I've been using, I don't use touch a lot here in the studio. I use it sometimes. Actually, I use it just about every day. And I thought that, I don't know, the more I have touch, the more I end up finding myself actually wanting to use it. When I was doing a lot of couch surfing with a touchscreen Chromebook, I really got used to it. And it was actually more comfortable than reaching down for the trackpad than to reach up from the keyboard. And it made my wrist feel a little bit better. Yeah.

Interesting. So I found that to be interesting in the fact that it's one more thing that keeps me in Chrome because the touch support is a little bit better. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's prepared for the first laptop of my son Dylan. That's right. Happy birthday, Dylan. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt.

It's all staged, Matt. I'll tell you more about it here in just a second. I've got a laptop ready for him to go with the Minecraft launcher in his dock, all queued up. He's going to open up the laptop lid, Minecraft be right there on the screen, ready to go. It'll be his first experience to Linux. It's going to be glorious. Yeah, it'll be glorious. It'll be glorious.

And it was kind of cool. You know, I was trying to figure out if maybe I could grab a System76 laptop and load it up for him, or if I had a machine here at the studio I could convert. But with LinuxFest coming up, that's where all of our finances are sort of invested right now, is getting ready for LinuxFest. There's no way I could afford a new laptop. And Noah from Linux Action Show said, well, why don't you hang on to the—well, actually, I asked him first.

He said, yes, it's fine. Why don't you hang on to that Sputnik XPS laptop that he'd sent up for last year's Linux Fest that I'd been hanging on to that I replaced with my XPS 13 recently and was, you know, when he came back up, was going to have him take that laptop back. He said, no, hold on to it. So I reloaded that Sputnik laptop with elementary OS, and I got Minecraft ready to go, loaded up for him, and we'll be giving that to him tonight.

It'll be his first Linux computer, which is crazy. What is crazy about that is not only is this Dylan's first computer and it runs Linux, but then this weekend we're switching my wife Angela to Linux as well. So it's a big Linux week in the Fisher household. I've been working on Angela for nine years to get her to switch, and she was like, I think she was more committed to iPhoto than she was to me oh and see for my wife it's photoshop she's like but can i but can i do this one thing can i do that one thing does it have that one support it's like it's all about the photos yeah yeah for angie it's all about the photo management totally understandable too right we have three

kids you know we've we have our wedding in there we have our construction of our house in there the construction of the studio is in there like She has a lot of really important events that we have in her iPhoto library. It's about 500 gigs worth. And so there's not a lot of programs that handle that super well. And she's got all the metadata and all the tags and all this stuff. But Apple has discontinued iPhoto. So we're using it as an opportunity to move her to Linux. So it's a really exciting week for me. We have a lot going on. Plus, we have folks from the JB team beginning to fly in this week. So that's really cool. So there's a ton

of stuff going on, Matt. But nonetheless, we are gathered here today with a pretty big Linux unplugged. So why don't we bring in our Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Yo. Hello. Great greetings. Hello. Yo, guys.

Hey, there's, you know, I've been picking up some of the gaps of stuff that has developed between when Linux Action Show aired and when Unplugged airs, which is unbelievable. There's, like, actual stories of development, what feels like eight hours amount of time. I know it's more than that, but to me it feels like it's eight hours. And this was a big one. Linux 4.0 has been sort of released, I guess. Meh. Linus Torvald's whole approach on this whole thing, this is so funny,

this would never fly with a commercial operating system. It would have to be a big release. It would have to be so much buzz and bang, and 4.0 comes out, it's like, eh, it's kind of a release. So Linus starts, So I decided to release 4.0 as per the normal schedule because there really weren't any known issues, and while I'll be traveling during the end of the upcoming week due to a college visit, I'm hoping that won't

affect the merge window very much. We'll see. Linux 4.0 was pretty much a small release in both Linux Next and in the final size. Although small is all relative, I suppose. And then he goes on to give us some stats. He said, that's it. There's a few interesting things about it. He goes on to talk about a couple of them.

Feature-wise, though, he says, and I love this one, 4.0 doesn't have all that much special. Much has been made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically, that not only wasn't the reason for the version number change, we've had much bigger changes in other

versions. This is very much a solid code progress release, so go out and enjoy it. Linux 4.0, everybody! Woo! Woo! Linus, we're all sheep Torvalds, it's signed. All that hype minus the turtleneck.

You know, it's definitely pretty well done. Very, very low-key. Very low-key. And now, of course, I'm like, when am I going to get it? When am I going to get it? Yeah, I get – when am I going to get it? Yeah, I like that he's like that big patching thing. Yeah, that's not even a big deal. And everybody was kind of like, oh, you know, they ought to take that patching feature and spin it as the new version.

Like I've actually heard people say that. Oh, yeah. We should spin that – for 4.0, we should spin the kernel live patching thing. And there have been some articles that actually ran over the weekend that did do just that. In fact, I saw an article with the headline, New Linux Kernel 4.0 is the beginning of Skynet.

I'm going to go see if I can find that. I'm going to go see if I can find it right now. Kernel 4.0 Skynet. That should probably bring it up, right? Yeah, here we go. PC World. Yeah, here we go. PC World. Skynet closer to existence thanks to Linux kernel 4.0. And it has a big ominous tux with glowing blue eyes right there.

So some of the press is having a pretty good time with the 4.0 release. However, Linus himself, not so excited about it. Just seems to be pretty meh. Well, you know what I like about him is he has his priorities straight. It's like, you know, really in the grand scheme of things, this is really a big thing for him. It's like, it's just another day at the office. He enjoys what he does. He provides value to people. Now he's

moving on with his life. He's good. I love it. Yeah, it is pretty cool. Shout out to our friends at, hmm, let's see, Antegro Cineart Antegro Yeah, Antegro. So go with that. They just released a new ISO, and I've heard from a few folks in the community who've tried it out.

As you might expect, it's based on Arch, so it's got all the latest stuff, including GNOME 3.16. If you want a really pretty straightforward way to get a semi-close vanilla Arch install loaded, it's a pretty good distro to go with. I installed it on my recent rig that I had to reload, and it's been working great. And I've also tried it on that XPS for a little bit. Yeah, go ahead. I think that for anyone that's looking to try Arch out first, I think it's a great way to get up and running quickly. If you're basically all about the Pac-Man and not so much about the configuration, it's really a smart way to go. All about that Pac-Man.

Yeah. All about Pac-Man. the configuration. It's really a smart way to go, I think. All about that Pac-Man. All about Pac-Man. Hey, and then something else that didn't necessarily develop between now and last, but we have Wimpy here to talk about it with us, is this really great deal between, at least I assume it's a great deal, I will ask Wimpy,

between the Ubuntu Mate project and, I think, is it Entroware, Wimpy, the hardware manufacturer? That's right. That's correct, yeah. So, this looks like a, this, if I'm understanding, looks like a deal where essentially when I go to order an Intraware machine, it's not like, at first I thought it was like one machine that's going to have Ubuntu Mate on it, but all of the machines will have it as an option, is that correct?

Yeah, all the laptops and desktop machines will have Ubuntu Mate 1504 as an option when final release drops. So this will go live when 1504 is live? That's right, yeah. Are you super excited or what? I mean, this seems like a big deal to me. Yeah, I am. When I got to sort of the end of 1410, I thought it'd be really cool if you could find somebody

to put Ubuntu Mate on computers because my family have got a lot of old computers and they need replacing, and it's like, you know, what would you get? And now, you know, Entroware are based in the UK, and you might have been able to tell from my accent I'm in the UK, so that's handy. Yeah, I know. So, yeah, this is a local computer manufacturer supporting Linux,

putting an operating system that I've had a hand in developing. So, yeah, when my family are up for new computers, I know where I'll be going to get their new computers. So, wait, this whole deal is just so that your mum can get a new computer, is that right? And my wife and my dad and my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. Hey, sometimes that's what it takes. Awesome.

It's all about the family. Yeah. Actually, it's West No. 2. That was the origins of the project, so it just stands to reason that I did this for the family. That is really neat, Wimpy. That is really neat. I didn't know that.

I think this is probably the first Ubuntu flavor where there's been hardware available on the very first release that it's become an official flavor. Surely. Interesting. Very cool. Yeah yeah i see they have a steam machine so i i i didn't realize that mate wasn't yet actually an official flavor yet they knew the current releases weren't official i will be by next thursday oh okay yeah so 1504

is the first official official version yeah now uh this now uh this is not available in the u.s or will be available in the u.s they're not not shipping to the U.S. at the moment. So at the moment, this is only available in the U.K. And I've spoken to the guys from Entroware, and they're currently putting things in place to offer their products throughout Europe with the appropriate European keyboard options. So I don't think you're going have intro where shipping in the u.s anytime soon but if you're in europe uh you certainly will do and keep an eye on intro

where's twitter and google plus feeds to find out more about that because they'll be there'll be updates soon but you know you're spoilt for choice in the u.s you know you've got plenty of options over there with system76. That's more than fair. It's more than fair. And this is great. This is great to have another vendor to recommend to the audience. And I just... To give somebody a machine preloaded with Ubuntu Mate

is going to be so nice. It's such a great option for people that want to come from Windows. They're not comfortable with a totally different environment. They really like that paradigm that Matei lets them have. I think this is going to be a lot more common. And surprisingly, Popey, we didn't see that from elementary OS

after their countdown ended, did we? Yeah, I got that completely wrong, didn't I? Well, I was all in with you. I thought it was great. Cassidy tagged us and said, well, nice try, guys. It was fun to listen. Hey, it's fine. You know what? It was actually a pretty good announcement on their part. Tip of the hat for them putting out a good

message. I thought they did a pretty good job. Well, congratulations, Wimpy, and you guys can find out more at entroware.com, E-N-T-R-O-WARE.com. And expect to see it with Ubuntu Mate 150.04 ships. Yeah, a couple of weeks. That should be available. And keep an eye on them because they've got a couple of really interesting announcements.

I wish I could tell you what one of them is because it's so up your alley, Chris. It's untrue. But they've got a real interesting thing in the pipeline that is, yeah, that will be the next thing I buy, I think. I have a feeling I'm going to be begging you to send me one. I'll be like, I'll send you a check. Just send me one. All right. Well, cool.

Keep us posted when that happens. Do they have a newsletter where people that want to get the latest updates on what's going on, they can subscribe to? Yeah, they do. Awesome. Okay. Check that out. So they've got the various social media outlets, and they do have a traditional newsletter via email, which is low volume, and they'll give you all the details there.

Oh, fantastic. Okay, cool. There you go. Cool. All right, guys. Well, so I'm running right here on this machine that I'm doing the visuals on. This is my Bonobo. I've got GNOME 3.16 on this machine that I'm doing the visuals on. This is my Bonobo. I've got GNOME 3.16 on this.

I've got a machine upstairs that is my reloaded Antigros box that's running GNOME 3.16. And here in studio with me today, I've also brought in my new XPS 13, which is also running GNOME 3.16. These are all machines that I use heavily every single day. These are my three main machines. That's where I spend universally 100% of my computer time, unless I'm editing video, which is very, very rare these days, is on GNOME 3.16.

And I've talked a lot about GNOME 3.16 on the show. I've just said it 100 times. I haven't talked about some of the problems it's had. And we got in a note on the subreddit from SpeedGhost about some of the issues he's ran into with GNOME 3.16, and the list is a bit extensive. So since that's going to take a couple of minutes to break down, and it seems like a pretty decent topic change, I'll take a minute here, and I'm going to tell you a little about something that makes me feel like a wild man, like I'm on the frontier of a new technology,

and that's my friends at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com, not only does that support the show and keeps us going, which is a great idea, but it actually gets you a $25 discount off your first Ting device. And if you have a Ting-compatible device, which you probably do because they now support a wide range of GSM devices, they'll give you $25 service credit. Or if you get something like one of those MiFi devices, then you get $25 of data credit, which will last you quite a while.

Ting is mobile that makes sense. No contract. You only pay for what you use. It's a flat $6 for the line. That is Ting right there in a nutshell. They have a wide GSM network and CDMA network right here in the U.S. of A. A brilliant dashboard to allow you to manage multiple devices. I pay $6.

I got three phones. Three phones. I pay $6. I feel like I'm some sort of crazy Leolaport baller with all these phones, and I'm only paying $6 for a line. It's genius. And if you really are savvy, you can save so much money. You really can. My average bill for these three phones is below $40. And then this month is probably, this month and maybe a little into next month are my busy times with LinuxF Fest Northwest where I'm making phone calls and I'm downloading stuff on the road. I'm driving with maps going and all this kind of stuff. That is like my high period.

Maybe I'm going to hit $60. Maybe. I don't know. And actually, it's kind of cool because the Ting dashboard is really smart. It'll say, hey, based on your previous usage and your current usage, this is your trends. You can set alerts. You can turn devices on and off. So if you don't need to use them for a little while, you don't got to pay. That's great for

like those MiFi devices. And they have no hold customer service at 1-855-TING-FT-DUBS. Go check them out. Try out their savings calculator. You know, what I really find nice about Ting, too, is the fact that they do have that customer service. And as the GSM rollout is going, they're a little busy. So I've never in more than two years that I've been using Ting needed to call. Seems like such a shame. But the reality is their dashboard is so great. Their help system is so well done. And they have established communities on Reddit. There's a Ting subreddit on YouTube, on Twitter. They have very active forums where there's people getting Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch running on the Ting network. I've never needed to call in.

It's really nice. So go to linux.ting.com, get that discount. That way you can start saving early. And if you have a contract right now, Ting has an early termination relief program where they'll pay up to about, I think, 25% of your termination fee. That's pretty nice. And then you don't have to worry about it. You get to own your device from Ting. I've got the Nexus 5 on the Ting network. They have a great range of devices. I think the Nexus 5 is really sweet.

I know it's getting harder and harder to find it now, unfortunately. But it's just such a great phone. And it works perfectly on the Ting network on CDMA or GSM. I've ran it on both. It's $9 to get a GSM card. So if you've got something you could put GSM in. It's $9 to get a GSM card. So if you've got something you could put GSM in, it's $9, and then you just pay for what you use. Get the Motorola G. This is a great Android phone. $91, no contract, unlocked, you own it.

$91. Then you're on Ting, right? And you're getting that $25 discount, which is crazy. The Novotel MiFi 5580, $121. Then it's a $6 hotspot after that. $121, you own that, and then it's a $6 hotspot. All right, you get the point. This is just great. Kyocera Vibe, $159. They got the iPhone. Go check it out.

Linux.ting.com. This is a way better way to do mobile. You have better things for your money. I've saved over $2,000. Oh, they're selling the Nexus 6 directly now. Oh, seriously? Oh, they're selling the Nexus 6 directly now. Oh, seriously? Oh, no, Chris. You know, Chris has been wanting a new phone for LinuxFest.

Oh, no. Linux.ting.com. Go get yourself something nice. And then, you know, if you're like me, you'll save about $2,000 in about two years. And then when you're buying a laptop from that money, you'll be like, oh, yeah, why did I support that duopoly? Linux.ting.com. Thanks, Ting, for sponsoring Linux Unplugged.

Good stuff. I wonder if anybody in the Mumble room has had any problems with GNOME 3.16. Anybody in here had any issues? Other than some of the obvious, like maybe an extension doesn't work? Nope, just an extension. Yeah, okay. So it's been really smooth for me on the three primary machines that I

use. Really smooth. Like the smoothest GNOME upgrade I've ever done. I do have one minor complaint, but it waited until all my extensions were up to date before I upgraded my Arch laptop. When I did, here's what I found. My home.config folder was empty and all previous settings for GNOME and a few other apps were gone. Each time I close my laptop to hibernated sleep, it crashes, it opens all programs

and starts the sessions new when it resumes as if I had just restarted the whole computer. The temp directory, which is 4 gigabytes for some reason, is now usually half full on every startup. I admit, I'm on the bleeding edge with Arch, which is what my backups are for, as well as the stable dev machine that runs Fedora.

Oh, hold on a second. That's rich. Okay. Did I hear you correctly? And he said, okay, that's cool. Yeah, that's good. That. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I like that.

I like that. I like the idea that something lasts for nine months is stable or whatever it is. All right. Okay. So my dev machine, whatever. It's fine. No, Fedora's great. Fedora's super stable.

So my dev, I love Fedora. I really do. My Fedora machine, my stable dev machine that runs Fedora. Okay, I'm just getting caught up on that. I'm sorry. My stable dev machine that runs Fedora where I get most of my up on that. I'm sorry. My stable dev machine that runs Fedora where I get most of my real work done. Okay, I just had to get past that. I didn't have any of these issues with GNOME 3.14 and consider this release a step back for me.

Things can look pretty all they want, and they do look pretty, but they break my workflow for prettiness. Then I'm unhappy. I love GNOME 3.14, but I've had nothing but problems with GNOME 3.16. Boom. Hmm. I'm still getting over the Fedora thing. Boy, you know, it's interesting because, you know, obviously I've moved on to

Mate, you know, as far as my desktop experience. Oh man, but this is what's getting me, Matt. This is what's getting me worked up. This is getting into the ButterFS thing and I don't want to jump the gun too much, but what I really hate, and I'm telling you, I'm dancing right now. I'm so upset about this. I really, really, really, really hate it when we just default to, well, it's Arch.

That's the problem. You know, if you weren't rolling. Now, here's the thing. I think what that is is I think that is a bias that makes us jump to that conclusion. Is it possible that it's because it's Arch? Absolutely. Always possible because you're rolling software. Absolutely, every single time that is certainly possible. But I believe it is irresponsible and a disservice

to jump to the conclusion that it is Arch. Because here's why. I think we need to get past the bias that software is scary, that developers develop software that is scary, and that all upgrades are bad. Because develop software that is scary, and that all upgrades are bad. Because really, that is not true. Yes, upgrades, it always and inevitably eventually invites some regression. But on the whole, upgrades on open source are generally improvements, stability improvements, feature improvements, improvements. And most of the time, it doesn't

break. And this is from somebody who does have Arch machines that are multiple years old now. Right. Well, wait. Two years old. I don't know. Very old. I mean, I just I hate jumping to Arch. And the reason why I'm a little a little sensitive to it is not only did this post do it, but I got like a bunch of emails that do it. We have several threads that did it about the ButterFS stuff last week. And it's just the immediate jump reaction to let's blame Arch. Well, OK, that's fine, I suppose. But it seems lazy. It seems it seems intellectually dishonest to just always assume that's the cause. Well, so I think we take a step back and look at it from a practical point. I've had this problem upgrading release to release. So it's not that it's Arch at all. It's just anytime you change software, it is. You are choosing to enter an environment to where you're saying, okay,

I clearly am tracking the packages that I have, and if I need to roll back, I will. If you're not able to do that, don't use it. I mean, that's my philosophy. I like Zerolock here, Matt. Zerolock sounds like he's my kind of masochist. You love the updates, Zerolock. You love them. I wake up first thing in the morning and I run an Appiatus upgrade.

I'm on Debbie and Sid, so I get my nice rolling updates as well. I used Arch for nine months and updates were my crack. They're great. And in the nine months that I was using Arch, I only ever had one problem, and it was because of a proprietary NVIDIA driver. Yeah, yeah. I also get a little bit of an endorphin squirt when I see a big list of updates, and I also get a little like, oh, when it's only like three updates. But then I'm like, well, at least I got three updates,

because I really never want to run that and not see any updates. Yeah, I know. That's how bad I am. See, and I'm the opposite now. It's like, again, I'm big on taking responsibility for your desktop. If you broke it, you bought it. Deal with it. It's your fault.

But at the same time, it's like I don't necessarily want a lot of updates unless it's actually offering me a security fix or a feature. If it offers those two things, cool. Blaster, you agree with Matt. Like, if I decide to run Arch, then I'm taking my life into my own hands, right? I decide to run Arch that I'm taking my life into my own hands, right? Yeah, I feel like if you're going to be running Arch or really any bleeding disro that offers a bleeding edge option, then you're kind of taking your life into your own hands there when you run updates. You're accepting the responsibility that something might break. I mean, I grant you that. But what I argue is the level of risk that it actually genuinely is.

See, my point is not that what you say is inaccurate. I grant you it is wholly accurate. What I would like to argue is how much of a risk it truly represents. And Wimpy, you've had an arch workstation for how long? Three years now. My main workstation is installed three years ago. And so what is your thought? Is rolling inherently more dangerous and unstable, but just yet manageable? How is it?

No, I don't think rolling is inherently more dangerous. I mean, you've got someone there, Xero, has got a SID installation and he's rolling with that. You know, software developers don't just throw out releases and hope it works. You know, they have been tested. So it's not because it's a new package. It's untested software. It's already been tested. All that's happened is it's been packaged so you can install it conveniently.

Right. And it just happens to get packaged faster in Arch. Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of one of the key. Or other distros as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, if you look at, you just reckon, but, you know, Fedora, Rawhide, for example, they're pretty much on the same curve as Arch. But I would actually, I wouldn't compare Arch and Fedora in terms of Rawhide in terms of stability, though. Because Rawhide doesn't, I mean, there is some intention in Fedora for the system to be stable, right? Whereas with Rawhide, they sometimes have a work in progress that gets introduced into Rawhide. Yeah, yeah. But the thing with Arch is that managing your updates in Arch Linux is not simply a case of running Pacman or PacAUR.

You're responsible for actually tracking what the new configuration changes were that were introduced by packages and then merging those. And if you don't read the documentation that explains how to do that and you ignore it, eventually bad things will happen. But that's a contract that Arch Linux makes with you at the outset. They explain that you have to be a competent Linux user and you have to be prepared to learn how the system is put together

and learn how to maintain it. I agree. And like Ryan says, Ryan, you think that means Arch right there, if you accept that, means it's not for everybody, right? I agree, yeah. I don't think that Arch is for everybody. Yeah, absolutely.

Just because you can run Arch and just because you can run the updates doesn't mean that, I mean, like Wimpy said, you have to be tracking what's changing and also be aware of what's already in your environment and if there's going to be any breakage. And that's why distributions

that are out there that aren't rolling release are good for some people because that falls on someone else to test all these things and make sure that there's compatibility. Yeah. I would argue though that we put too much faith in that and we put too little faith in the rolling system. Like,

like neither one are as good as we pretend or as bad as we pretend them to be. Yeah. Yeah. No, I would agree that stuff breaks under ubuntu all the time and other distros as well sure um nobody can anybody who's been using linux for longer than a year knows that this stuff happens and and things break even when it is curated by a distro but yeah at the same time uh as we've talked about before as you you've talked about before, there's a certain level of competency that you want someone to have before they start curating their own Arch Linux installation.

And you want that person to be able to look at the changes that are coming through and make sure that's going to work in their environment. Because I have used 3.16 on a rolling release distro and it worked just fine. So I think that person has to be ready to troubleshoot problems that they have like he described. Now, I like TechDragon. TechDragon's like, no, no, roll all of the things. So rolling for everything, TechDragon? All of the things? No.

If it's not my desktop, it's rolling. Oh, so not all of the things. So rolling for everything TechDragon? All of the things? If it's not my desktop, it's rolling. Oh, so not all of the things. I trust 9 terabytes of files to a rolling distro. I would be completely devastated if that went out of the way. So you have pretty

you feel pretty confident. I actually I don't blame you really too much. It's a little risky. For my file storage, I'm pretty happy with FreeNAS right now just because I like ZFS quite a bit. Oh, I'm on ZFS. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. But it's ZFS on Linux and rolling with current. Yeah.

Which distro? It's on Ubuntu, but I'm actually running it on the current upstream unstable packages. Of course. Why not? Daily updates. Of course. Of course you are. Good job. Every morning. You're brilliant. Yes, why not? Daily updates. Of course. Of course you are. Good job.

Every morning. You're brilliant. Yes, you're brilliant. Yeah, of course. And another way to look at it, too, is that when you're working with an operating system, at the end of the day, if your user data is at some level safe, whether it be backed up or off-site, or you just feel comfortable in your home directory setup, you know, fixing anything is just a matter of time.

So it's really not the end of the world. When we get to the follow-up on my file system loss, I will follow up on some interesting ideas the community has for some really nice, efficient backups that are really like low-key, not high-impact kind of stuff. Sweet. So we'll cover those in a few minutes in the show. I just had a couple more follow-up items before we get to that because that generated a lot of feedback last week. But I have seen a steady trickle of interest in the Dell XPS 13 continue now that the developer edition is out. And I wanted to give thanks to Slack Warrior in the subreddit

who mentioned that the BIOS update for the Dell XPS 13, which I have right here, does fix quite a few problems I was having. So now the current version as of this recording is the A03 or A03 BIOS. And so for the Dell XPS 13, the one that came with Windows or the one that runs Linux, once you install that BIOS update, one of the things that immediately starts working is sound. So that's really nice. The sound card just started working instantly. Also, issues I was having with the trackpad earlier are now pretty much all cleared up. The trackpad

seems to be one of the better trackpads I've used under Linux. Two-finger scrolling is working quite well. The touch-to-click works really well. The laptop itself is now, with these issues resolved, I still have some problems with the display port, but with these primary issues resolved, the laptop itself is becoming one of my favorite computers. I bring it with me all the time because it's super portable. I think it's about as light as the new MacBook with only the USB-C connector, but it's a lot better of a machine.

So now, because it's so light, I just toss it in my bag and I bring it with me all the time. And I've been finding myself really enjoying it. And there's just a few naggling issues with high DPI. I wouldn't buy the laptop based on the screen, but the screen is quite nice. And with the new BIOS update, I would actually give the XPS 13 a pretty solid recommendation,

developer edition or the Windows edition. I would go with the developer edition so that way you don't have to mess with the Wi-Fi. The webcam's working, the sound is working, Wi-Fi is working. It all seems to be working quite quick. And the other nice thing... Oh, also keyboard.

I had some keyboard repeating issues that are now solved because of the BIOS update. And the other nice thing is you don't keyboard. I had some keyboard repeating issues that are now solved because of the BIOS update. And the other nice thing is you don't have to have Windows or DOS to update the BIOS. You download an EXE file, a quote unquote EXE file from Dell's website. It's 2.4 pounds. Thank you, Micro 98. So it's more heavy than the MacBook, but it's so great. You download this quote unquote EXE file from the Dell website. You put it on like a USB flash drive, and then you boot, and on the boot menu options, there's an update BIOS option,

and it reads the flash drive, and it just flashes the BIOS right there, and no Windows or free DOS or nothing needed to update the Dell BIOS. So that's really nice. Let's see. I guess I'll just give a quick Linux Fest update just since we've been doing those,

and I'm going to do it until Linux Fest is here, which is almost here, so don't worry. Let's see. I guess I'll just give a quick LinuxFest update just since we've been doing those. And I'm going to do it until LinuxFest is here, which is almost here, so don't worry. Let's see. One thing that's kind of cool, not directly related to LinuxFest, but as the hosts arrive over the next week, beginning on Friday and then trickling in after that, I'm going to try to snag some of them for Tech Talk today and maybe grab one or two of them to join us on Linux Unplugged next week if the timing works out. I don't know. It might just be Noah who's in town then. I think Alan arrives on Wednesday. So I'll try to maybe get Alan

on a Tech Talk today in the future. Maybe we'll try to get Noah here in studio on Unplugged to join us. So as hosts are arriving, I'll try to grab some of them and bring them here. We've got all kinds of stuff planning. Everybody's going to have some time in studio to record something for their shows, which will be great. We'll do Coder Radio in studio.

We'll do BSD Now in studio, all of that stuff. We're going to shoot two TechSnaps in studio. So a lot of great content coming up with everybody here in person, some for the first time ever, and then it'll be ending at LinuxFest Northwest. So it's going to be a pretty cool week lead up to LinuxFest Northwest as well, April 25th and 26th, and we'll be live streaming that over at jblive.tv Saturday and Sunday.

We'll be recording the Linux Action Show there at LinuxFest, so you're welcome to join us Sunday. We'll have hopefully some seats for you to sit at. Last year we just kind of made do with what we had, so hopefully we can do that again. And if you're going to be there, also I encourage you to sit at. Last year we just kind of made do with what we had, so hopefully we can do that again. And if you're going to be there, also I encourage you to join our meetup. We now have, let's see, 130 it looks like. Yes, 130 participants over at meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting.

The first event we have listed is the local Linux Fest. The next event you might see on there will be another local event. That will be Linux Unplugged 100. We're at episode 88 right now, and I think I want to do 100 on location. So that'll be a local meetup event. And I'm also opening this up to the individual hosts. So I've offered it to Alan and Noah and Michael Dominick as they travel to go to their different meetups and different fests and different events. And Mike's doing like a developer thing, and he's going to be traveling to New York.

I've invited them to use the meetup page as well to meet up with you in different locations. And Alan goes all over the world. So that could be a pretty cool tool, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. If we have an event in your area, it would be a great spot. We'll be organizing it. You'll see a lot of local stuff because I want to do more out of the studio stuff. But from time to time, you'll definitely see stuff all over the world. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting if you want to get in on

that, and then we might eventually turn that into kind of like a lug thing where we take, if we get it, what I would really like to do is if we got enough people joining us and we could take the really hardcore Linux user group and we could do stuff for Unplugged, record stuff for Unplugged,

go, wouldn't it, okay, now here, okay, let okay let's just get crazy like what if we use this meetup group to like organize like a big like um install fest or something like we go to a lot like we like i would i would pre-work out like an arrangement like at a library like hey can we come in and do all the maintenance on your computers we'll blow them out we'll clean them up up. We'll, you know, fix the keyboards up. Well, maybe we could even set aside a little budget to replace some of the components. And by the way, we'll install Linux. And then we just use this.

And we record the whole thing. And we go total reality show style where we're like, we'll do like, we'll have a room for confessionals with the camera. Well, people will like, they'll like, they'll sit down in front of the camera and be like, yeah, I wasn't sure how that install was going to go

when that drive started clicking. It got really tense. We weren't sure how that was going to develop, even though it was already totally pre-done and we just had them go back and record those confessionals so we could cut to them. It sounds like I'm joking. I would totally do this. If this meetup thing works out, let's go use our powers for good. Let's go install some Linux some places and record and make sure. Seriously, we could big brother this Linux installations. We could go deploy Linux, convert people to Linux, and make show content out of it. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting.

You think I'm kidding? Test me. Go sign up. Let's do some meetups and let's see if I do it because I'm serious. I'm serious. Could be cool. And even if you're not in the area, you can still sign up for when we are in your location. All right.

Well, somebody's trigger happy in the mumble room. Whoa there. You not... Hey! Hey! If I have to come in there, I will. Do not make me turn this show around. I'm glad you guys still got the dad reference. Mumble room!

Mumble room! I will turn this show around. Hey Matt, I'm glad you guys got the dad reference. Mumble Room. Mumble Room. I will turn this show around. Hey, Matt. All right. We're going to talk about my rig blowing up. Oh, boy. I do this sometimes, and I seem to do it the most on this show. And I think it's just sort of the free-flowing nature of the show,

where I just get on, I just get going. And last week, you know, I was raw, Matt. It was rough because my main rig, my boo, my bae, which is such a stupid word, it died. I'm just kidding. Anyways, so I mean, what really happened is there was, you know, when I kernel update in a Butterfest thing, there's a hard lock. What happened is there was, you know, a kernel update and a Butterfest thing. There's a hard lock. And what I – I applied the NOAA philosophy.

I was like, let's see. It would take me about five, ten minutes to fix this. And I've got this USB thumb drive with the latest Antigros image on there. I've been thinking about reloading anyways. Pop, and, you know, I reload because I have all my data backed up. It's not a big deal. Makes sense. It does suck some time up, and it always sucks up more time than I think like every time i go to reload a machine i'm like ah what this will take

take like five minutes it's no big deal take 15 minutes wrong no man it always takes a whole day it always does every damn time and every time somebody tells you i can get it installed in 25 minutes that's lying because even once you get the software installed you got to change all the settings you got to change the themes you got to change the everything you just shut up it takes more than 25 minutes. So, I was a little raw. I came on the show, I talked about how I kind of regretted using ButterFS. I wish I hadn't used

ButterFS. And I kind of got up on a soapbox and I kind of said what I think, well, I still think this. I kind of think that ButterFS is an amateur show, and I kind of think that ButterFS weakens Linux, and I kind of think that ButterFS is a shame, and I kind of wish that ButterFS was in a lot better place so that way Linux had a much serious and much more competitive

answer to ZFS. And I didn't mean to say it was the end of the world for Linux. I didn't mean to say the ButterFS was trash but of course, of course I kind of did. And of course I even said I'd rather use NTFS which was straight up trolling. That was kind of a... I thought about

I should go clip myself because that really was straight up trolling. That was kind of a... I thought about I should go clip myself because that really was straight up trolling, and that deserved a clip, but I'll admit to that. So I have some follow-up. I have some thoughts on file systems, and hopefully Heavens will join us here in a moment. Well, he is here. Hopefully he'll get into a good discussion with me on XFS.

I got ridiculed to no end, no end for my choice of using XFS. People assumed that I was a bozo, that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, that I picked some esoteric ancient file system while spitting on ButterFS and condemning it for a future adoption by the open source community because my words are going out over the air. Seriously. So we're going to get into all of that and the lessons I learned from that. But first, I want to thank Linux Academy. Why? Because they're perfect for you. Baby, I know you. Linux Academy knows you. Why?

Because they're Linux users. They're open source enthusiasts. They're developers and they're educators. And they came together and they created a truly unique thing, Linux Academy. And I get them. I get their passion. And I get coming together and making something better than anything anybody else has. I get that because they're enthusiastic about Linux and open source, that means they produce content about Linux and open source that's far beyond anything anybody else produces. And you can find out for yourself to go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug. I could tell you what courses they have, but I don't need to because anything that's relevant, anything that

makes you a better professional, anything in the Linux space that's important, they have courseware on it. They have seven plus Linux distributions you can choose from. And I'm saying if you want to go learn how to use Docker on Red Hat Enterprise Server, go do it. You need to know how to use it on Ubuntu, go do that. They can do that. They'll spin up servers for you on demand when the courseware requires it. They'll give you public access. You get to SSH into that bad boy.

And if you take advantage of some of their AWS courseware, which a few folks in our chat room have been, I've been hearing from a few folks recently, it seems like the AWS stuff just keeps growing and growing and growing. And so people need to learn it. It's very relevant. And so their courseware on this stuff is top notch. And the other thing that I love as somebody who had to jump into AWS when it was fairly new, I got bit big time. I had a $200 bill just because I left my rig, my AWS rig that I was using for training. It was 230-something, 280-something. I got a big bill because I just left it on. I left it on.

Well, they include the AWS instances as part of your Linux Academy's training. You just go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplug. Get our super awesome 33% discount. 33%. It's a powerful number, and you should go over there and get more powerful by making yourself more valuable. Seriously. It's very rewarding. And it's sort of mind-blowing when something you've known, like a technology that you've wanted to wrap your head around, but it has seemed so nebulous where to start. When you go to Linux Academy and they have it broken out for you, you will learn this part about this technology in this many minutes. For me, that is a game changer because that is a quantifiable boom. I get that. It's no longer nebulous. Boom. What? Five and a half hours for

Ruby? No problem. I get that. I can spend five and a half hours to learn Ruby. That seems worth it to me. And with their scenario-based labs, you'll actually get how to use these technologies in a production environment. And that's the final gap. Right there, they close it. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. They got a huge announcement coming up in just a couple of days, April 16th, 9 p.m. Central. I've been telling you about this for a while because it's a big deal and I'm really

excited. And these guys are super passionate about it too, so that's going to be great. They're going to stream it live over at LinuxAcademy.com. Go sign up now and you just get all of the new stuff and you always will as part of going to stream it live over at LinuxAcademy.com. Go sign up now, and you just get all of the new stuff, and you always will as part of your Linux Academy subscription. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Keep this show on the air, train yourself up, and

go support one of our local Linux friends. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged, and a big thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys are crushing it. So, for those of you who didn't catch last week's episode, super, super quick version is my number

one rig died, my baby. It gave up the ghost, couldn't mount my main partition, couldn't boot, and there were several options I could have had, including, you know, use a live CD, try the fallback kernel, have file system snapshots. I mean, there's like a lot of different tracks I could have taken. I opted for the nuke and pave. And part of the reason was, is I was done with

ButterFS. Is this directly caused by ButterFS? It wouldn't have happened if I wasn't using ButterFS. Ergo, for an end user, yes, right? It doesn't really matter technically, was it a kernel bug working with ButterFS? Was it a problem with ButterFS? At the end of the day, if I wasn't using ButterFS, I wouldn't have had a problem. And for users, that's all that matters. So in my opinion, it probably means it's time to stop using ButterFS on computers that are important to me. And what I found to be interesting is the number one piece of feedback I got wasn't that I was using ButterFS. It's, well, goddammit, Chris, you're using Arch, you idiot. You're using Arch. Well, that's your problem. Well, see, I kind of disagree. See,

I kind of think that this is yet another example of how ButterFS just isn't really fully baked into Linux. But people came to ButterFS's defense. And we had a whopper of one sent in to the subreddit. and I liked the title quite a bit. The title grabbed me. I wasn't so hot on the content of the post, but Corky has a good point here and there, so I want to address it. Why I think ButterFS remains the future for those who want it. And this is why I wanted to use ButterFS too, because I felt like Linux really, it needs a solid solution here. It needs a pretty advanced file system that can stay competitive. It needs something that also allows us to do things we just don't do today. Like we've heard some discussions about actually using ButterFS to distribute software. Like there's a lot of really cool possibilities when your file system

is modern and awesome. And I'm going to talk about how PCBSD leverages some of those in a minute. But back to ButterFS. These kinds of features are kind of fundamentally required. Like a lot of people came back and said, you don't need these things. That's not your choice to make. I think the market says we do need these things, and I want these things as well. And so Corky writes here, Chris on the latest episode of Linux Unplugged took the time to vent his latest frustrations.

The issue in question is a bug that causes Arch not to boot on kernel 3.19.1-3 and 18.9 and 3.14.35, so a decent range. And quite a few others have experienced this on Arch and Butterfest setups. My frustration is not that he blamed it on Butterfest. This was a standard bug you expect in some kernel.

My frustration is not that he had it, but that he did blame it on Butterfest, and this was a common thread. And again, I feel like this is a bit of a nuance here. He says this was a standard bug you would expect in some kernel versions, and it's quite common for a kernel upgrade to cause a set of users to have unbootable set of systems.

That is the nature of Linux development, and it is true the nature of Arch. These Linux kernel versions will not be released on Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, or Fedora, and will never reach Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Debian. Linux LTS releases are chosen because every other kernel version seems to destroy a particular set of users' experiences. And I'm actually going to stop there. That's a pretty common argument, and it's really not true. Big, big gotchas. There's a pretty good chance they won't make it into some of those kernels. But kernel 3.13 is a shitshow. And there is a pretty major distribution, a couple of them't ship a bad kernel because they do. And then what ends up happening is you get anchored to that piece of crap for the length of that distro,

or you go outside the box and end up replacing it, which a lot of people do. And that's not much better of a situation. And then you run up exactly in the same situation I ran into. So he goes on to say, Arch Linux is an insane distribution because it lacks sanity checks. Other distributions are sane because they have a team of people who are fixing these breakages in stable packages, not development experimental technologies. I kind of disagree there as well. Some do, some don't. It's kind of a wide range, right? Well, I think part of the problem, too, is a lot of times when people see breakage, 99.9% of the time it's because you went outside of the box.

And if you're an Ubuntu person, that would be a PPA. And if you are an Arch person, that's because you actually went with the Arch user repository. That is not official Arch. That is you decided to try something creative, and that's cool, but you're kind of on your own there. So a lot of times I think that when people experience breakage on Arch, that's usually where it happens. And that's user error. Here's what I'm kind of coming to, though. Because I think fundamentally Corky and others do have a bit of a point.

And that point is maybe it is true that if you are going to use a rolling release, you have to kind of settle on a subset of technologies to utilize that are like sort of tried and true technologies that maybe don't have as much fluctuation. And this is something I've been, this is something I haven't fully formed yet, but it seems to me like something I've kind of been, I kind of have been falling into. Like, for example, when it comes to servers, and if I want something to be server, but I want it to be a rolling distro, I'll sort of keep it really lean. Like it'll only do a couple of things, and then I just spin up another VM, and then it only does a couple of things, and then I spin up another VM. That way I don't have a bunch of packages on a rolling

server. And that's one way I sort of mitigate the risk on servers, and I can individually snapshot those before I upgrade them. And this is great on DigitalOcean. This is how I do it now. And the same is not really necessarily true for your desktop, but I essentially have found that if I kind of do more common file systems, if I do more common things like maybe instead of using KDE on a rolling release,

I go with GNOME or I go with XFCE or Mate. And maybe if these kinds of like, maybe if instead of using ButterFS, I use Extended4 or XFS, then I sort of reduce my amount of risk. And so I find myself sort of narrowing my choices in what I will fully take advantage of if there might be some additional risk. But at the same time, the choices I find myself landing on are pretty solid. So I want to take a moment here and bring Heaven's Revenge in, because he's my XFS buddy, and I really wanted him

here last week when I was talking about XFS, because Heaven, you were the one that really sold me on XFS originally, and so do you want to just take a moment and sort of break down in your mind ButterFS versus XFS and why maybe one might be a better choice over the other? If you have that.

Sure. But it will also. Oh yeah. I generally do. But the point that you brought up a little bit earlier about arch and being a rolling distribution and having the whole problem be arch and having it just the nature of being rolling. That is approaching this problem from the wrong perspective,

because ButterFS is an experimental file system. It's blaming Arch for a problem that ButterFS has specifically tried to over-advertise itself. It says it's a stable file system. They tried to market like that, I think, a year ago. Stability of a file system is simple. No incompatible on-disk format changes. If a file system is stable, or the on-disk format is stable, that is a stable file system.

Otherwise, it is not. The ButterFS developers have claimed it to be stable, while it is not. It is still in flux. So your problem is from ButterFS, not by virtue of it being a rolling distribution. Yeah, that's an interesting point. In fact, what they say is,

yeah, we may very well have format changes, but we'll try to make sure that newer kernels can still mount the old stuff. Yeah, they try, but there's always corner cases that kick everybody in the ass all the time. The most, even open SUSEs, they try to say that it's stable. And let's say for the most cases, for the most common and no or not complex situations if it's just pretty much putting files on the disk you should be okay if you're trying to do anything relatively new with the distribution or with the capabilities of butterfs you will run into something so would you uh have anything there

or shall i go on to the active s and butterfest? Yeah, yeah, continue on, because I think that's a good point. Well, actually, I'll let the person finish up vacuuming behind you, and I'll let Corky respond to his subreddit post, and then we'll transition into the discussion of XFS and Butterfest. And I hope this isn't too dry, but the reason why I want to really hash this stuff out with you guys is because I get this question a lot, like, which file system should I use? And then when I say which file

system I'm using, I find out that a lot of people out there go and deploy that. And I didn't know, like, sometimes when I announce what I'm using, I didn't really realize that then people also use that same one. So I just really kind of want to make sure we discuss this and really talk about the advantages and disadvantages, because I think it's pretty important. And I do admit that

sometimes my sysadmin bias sort of gets in the way. But Corky, do you want to touch on anything I mentioned from your subreddit post? Yeah, my subreddit post was, well, in development. It's not a professional view because I'm not a developer. But I'd agree with some of Heverin's Revenge's points. I have to say ButterFS definitely has been getting better as someone who's been subscribed to mailing lists has been following their gotchas wiki one of the great things about wikis is you can look through the history and if you look through the history

it's gone from nearly two pages long in recent years to, well, less than a paragraph now. Yeah, it's not done, and I'm not particularly happy that they used that word stable to try and get media attention. It's definitely a lot better. So Alan has a great quote, and I'm going to butcher it, and I don't I'm going to butcher it and I don't know exactly how it goes but Alan says that

that trusting the butter FS is going to get better one day is like trusting the serial murder is going to stop killing people one day and the reason why he says that is

when they shipped CFS it was that was done the format was stable when they shipped it it was it was baked and and it has it has always your flag yes exactly it has always been considered stable since then and then they build on top of it with feature flags it was from day one they considered it production grade and the and and that is and honestly when they said that i was like yeah screw you guys no file

system is production grade until it's been out for a while. And it has had some growing pains, but it is now widely considered just sort of like the master race file system. And so that is a fundamental approach to ZFS that I guess it just seems like Butterfest is like a top-down approach, like create all this great stuff and then make it stable, whereas ZFS is like make it stable first, then add all the great stuff. I think that's a big difference. But, Heavens, now, I wanted – then this is probably a good time to start talking about XFS and Butterfest.

So, Heavens, why don't you take it back? Okay. Well, ever since approximately 2008, I have been using XFS on everything that I can use it for. It is all desktop or external drive usages. It is not, let's say, corporate business usage. But don't let that turn you down, because NASA and pretty much every large government agency probably uses XFS for their mass storage systems. NASA does, yeah.

It is awesome oh yeah because sgi the sgi master blades like super big iron servers that's xfs so it has a long history back from irex or erics way back in the freaking 1980s days and i've never found a problem with it they used to say that it used to lose data but i have never seen that personally and it is let's say an incorrect assumption to assume that it is based on its past problems that's basically there's not really a file system that doesn't have some growing pains. All file systems essentially have some issues, like little problems. ZFS has as well.

I have used XFS almost since it was originally ported to Linux. And the reason why, and I did this under Opus Sousa, or actually at the time it was Sousa Enterprise. The reason why is XFS originally was one of the few file systems under Linux that extended attribute support. And so because I was integrating it into a Windows domain and the Windows administrators needed to be able to right click on files and change the permissions in the Windows Explorer dialog, you needed to be able to support those NTFS style attributes. Under Linux, they don't have something that's sophisticated. So you have to have something

called extended attributes and your file system has to be able to support this. And XFS is now a lot of file systems, too, but XFS at the time was one of the few under Linux that did. I think maybe riserfs was close to this. And so I went XFS across a set of six file servers for this bank that were under massive heavy load, and XFS never once lost a file for us. True. It's extended attributes, and it's journal-based, and basically that I could change the amount of log buffers that the file system had.

I used to tweak the hell out of every file system I could possibly try, just because I started on Gen 2 and was having so much fun, especially the tailpack packing on Riser 3 I did it on Gen 2 as well and Wimpy, you had a comment on the old XFS bug, right?

Yeah, it still gets brought up as though it's current and there was a bug in XFS, it was over 10 years ago and it would truncate files to 0 bytes 10 years ago, yeah Yeah,uncate files to zero bytes. Yeah, 10 years ago. Yeah, it was a long, long time ago.

So you still see people referring to that as, oh, it'll eat your data and it's just rubbish. TechDragon has... TechDragon, go ahead and slip in the inconvenient truth about Butterfest and I'll bounce it back to heaven. The same company that put so much effort into the start of ZFS and I'll bounce it back to heaven. The same company that put so much effort into

the start of ZFS is the one currently employing at least one if not two or three of the people contributing to ButterFS. So it's not like they don't know. There is, yeah, there is Oracle people working on ButterFS. Chris left Oracle,

he now works at Facebook. Oh, that's right. That is true. He wasn't the only one. No, but he was Facebook. Oh, that's right. That is true. He left ages ago. Yeah, that is right. He wasn't the only one. No, but he was the main guy. That is true. And he works at Facebook.

And Facebook, I also got a little bit of scoop on how Facebook uses ButterFS, which totally makes sense. They use it in a totally different way than I was using it. So, yeah, they literally like they use it it in a RAM environment, where it's not even a persistent file system. They wipe it all the time. So I bet it has very few issues, because it's constantly getting wiped out. So Heavens, did you want to pick up from there?

Sure, I'll just finish with XFS is not a legacy file system. They do constant refinements, code quality improvements, dead code removal, everything that you would think in modern and well-kept, up-to-date, stable file system should be and have within a modern Linux kernel

is I used to watch its mailing list and watch its Git log as they done their commits and watch the evolution of it. It also now has on-disk checksum so it can detect on-disk errors when they happen it just can't fix them within the file system because i they consider that other systems or at least other subsystems of the storage system should handle things you know well unix, do one thing and do it well.

XFS, store files well. That's what it rocks at. BetterFS, if I should go on to that. Sure. Its concepts are beautiful. I love it. But B-trees are one of my most favorite data structures that I've ever used. Red-black trees.

The thing is that it is a little bit too early for it to be as stable as I need it to be or would want it to be. I consider it far more advanced than ZFS could ever be. As ZFS complain about, oh, they can't defragment, oh, they can't re-silver, oh, they can't reallocate files on the disk. You can't remove. Or they can't deduplicate. You can't read silver. Oh, they can't reallocate files on the disk. You can't remove. Or they can't deduplicate. You can't remove a disk. Well, of course, they've just added the ability to remove a disk directly from a pool.

I believe that was just added after all this time. Maybe. I think. I don't know if it's actually in production yet. They don't care about enterprise usage. Right, right. It is very, very enterprise-focused. It is almost exclusive.

They do not care at all. Yes, they don't care pretty much at all about desktop or laptop usage. You must have money. You have to throw disks at the problem. That's what ZFS is built around. But ButterFS, they are a lot more desktop-focused. It's more practical. It has the duplication.

It can do encryption. Well, ZFS says, oh is oh no we can't do that we have to do i can't remember that darn feature that as i try to i loved zfs too but it just let me down so much like ubuntu has in the past i don't like touching it anymore i just hope i've never had you know zfs for me desktop it's been totally rock solid. I've never had any issues, but the problems I have with ZFS are exactly what you're saying, is anytime

I need a storage, anytime I have a solution for ZFS, the answer is throw more disks at it. Even when it's like I have a disk that died and I need to remove it, okay, cool. Add four more drives, set up another pool, move stuff around, and then you can extract that one drive once you destroy that pool. I'm like, what? No, no, no. I just

want to put another terabyte drive in. Yeah, no, probably the better thing to do is buy four more drives. And it's like, what? And it is seriously like, oh, I see. You expect me to have a blank check for storage all the time. That is their assumption, which is unfortunate so i just hope that they'll come around one day and see the reality that there's more than just the server that there's probably millions or hundreds of millions of more users of desktop usages than server usages even though there sure is a lot of or a large number of server installations so i would say i love the snapshots that's awesome but they they had this weird bug that they had this table or they didn't their entries within the table in order to do the sub volumes they limited themselves

artificially and they had this ridiculous bug which also was an on-disk format change in order to fix that problem it was so weird how they just said oh yeah we'll never have to worry about that and all of a sudden no it blew up their file system they have to completely wipe and re you know copy everything back into the file system to make it usable again of course all the vironics articles or Pharonix articles, you can look at so many different problems that Butterfest has had in the past, but I think it's got promise. It just needs some time.

Yeah, maybe so. I think it's still too early. Maybe, I agree. It's too early, but really awesome. I think it's probably going to be a down-the-road thing. My current solution right now is XFS for my main rig. So my boot partition is Extended 4. I was hard on Extended 4 last week, but in reality I'm using it in a few places. My boot is EXT4. Oh, XFS 4 is so awesome.

Okay, well hold on a second. Hold that thought. And then my root partition and my home partitions are XFS. And then my editing and gaming mirror that I still haven't set up yet are going to be, I think for again I might do butter FS there but I'm thinking where I'm going to use butter FS now is in sort of low load where the the file set isn't changing a lot the size of what's in there isn't changing where with editing I'm constantly adding huge files and then deleting them and downloading steam games and then deleting them and I don't know if that's a proper use for ButterFS. But at the same time, there are a couple of games

like Bioshock 2 or, yeah, Bioshock Infinite. I guess that's not Bioshock 2. It doesn't work under XFS because it uses that EOS wrapper. And so it doesn't make me all that inclined to want to use XFS for that use, for that editing gaming mirror. Well, that's an unusual gotcha that you have found. Yeah, it is, isn't it?

But tell me about XFS4. Oh, XFS4 is my second favorite file system, or at least second most trusted file system. If people are a little bit too hesitant in order to try XFS just because it seems a little bit too different, X4 is beautiful. It is based upon X3, which is thus based upon X2. Oh, not XFS4, X4. It has years and years of stable... Oh yes, for EXT4. EXT4 is based on EXT3 and EXT2. You're talking about Extended 4. XT4 is based on the EXT3 and EXT2.

You're talking about Extended 4. They've built upon it. Yes, Extended 4. They didn't have a log or no journal, X2. Added the journal, X3. Added extents, metadata to the file system, X4. That has so much man years behind it and stability behind it is, it is trustworthy in my mind.

It's a lot of clustering file systems all have to be or almost require either X4 or XFS. BetterFS is just more of a buzzword that a lot of people say, oh yeah, we can use X4, but I agree. Go for it.

X4, all right, so I'm going to probably end it here because probably people are dying about file systems, but X4 is a great file system. But Extended 4 is a great file system. I'm using it for my boot file system. However, it's not selling any hardware. XFS, maybe. No, probably not.

But ZFS definitely sells hardware. Just ask our friends at IX Systems. ZFS sells machines. And people are switching out. And I know this because I'm being told by people they're doing the work. People are switching out their Linux file servers for FreeBSD machines using ZFS. And they're not opting to run ZFS on Linux. And that's why I actually refuse to run FreeBSD because it doesn't have a correct or a good XFS progress port in the port street if i if they did have a correct xfs port that i could use my xfs

file system from in freebsd i would probably run freebsd yeah it's just more people but for businesses that want zfs they're going freebsd and i just that's that's the only reason but for for my laptop and my desktop i'm going to extend it for xfs extended for XFS. And I want to tell you about things I could have done differently now and a couple of really kind of quick and easy sort of really no-duh kind of backup solutions or recovery solutions that you could do if you ever run into a problem like this and things that maybe I could have done if I wasn't sort of already primed to reload, which I sort of was primed to reload. But before we do that, as you know, this show is sponsored by our great friends at DigitalOcean.

And wasn't I just mentioning DigitalOcean? DigitalOcean is really a great, it's like my secret. Well, not really, because I tell you guys about it all the time. So if I keep, I'm not very good at secrets, as you might be able to tell. But like if I was a contractor, I would. But it kind of, because it makes me feel like I'm a boss. It makes me feel like I got a data center. Like I got multiple data centers. Because I'm just like,

you know what? I could use a Linux rig today and just go spin one up. That makes me feel like, okay, I just got infrastructure on demand like a boss. And that's why I say it's my secret. But really, you guys all know about it. In fact, some of you might have known about it before I did. But if you don't know about it, let me tell you. Because DigitalOcean is a game changer.

And they're really taking Linux, and they're taking KVM, and they're utilizing open source, and they're really making a super compelling product. They're a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your own cloud server. You're going to get root access to this bad mama jamma. They've got an HTML5 console for this business, so that way you can get up in there with your web standards. You're not going to have to complain about Flash or Java. And you can get started in less than 55 seconds. And pricing plans start at only $5 a month.

That's less than your crappy burger or your pretentious coffee for the entire month to get yourself your own cloud server. And you can get started in less than 55 seconds. You got that to spare. What are you, a boss? Of course you got. I could do that right now while I'm doing a show so fast. 55 seconds for $5 a month. 55 seconds.

And honestly, some people do it less than that. And that's one of the things I love because I know I'm going to get in there and get it done fast. You're going to get 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. And that major center there, the internet center in Germany, a little birdie tells me they're going to have a data center there very soon as well. I think, you know what, why not put some files up in there? It's great.

It's a great way to distribute files like with SyncThing or BitTorrent Sync all over the world. And one of the great things you'll really enjoy when you're over at DigitalOcean is the interface to manage your droplets. It's top notch. I've been in IT for like a million years, you guys. And I was like one of the first fools messing around with VMware's proprietary horrible GUIs. And man, nothing burned me more than administering all of these

Linux-based VMs from a Windows box because the VMware crapware only worked from a Windows rig to manage all of these ESX boxes. And gosh, that drives me crazy. That was sort of my introduction to large-scale virtualization. So when I saw this DigitalOcean interface, I wanted to have its baby. I wanted to go get a uterus surgically implanted into my body, and I wanted to be impregnated by DigitalOcean.

I was so impressed by this interface. I'm not even joking. It's incredible. You can do snapshots, DNS management, one-click deployments. You can move between data centers. You can transfer between customers. You can destroy machines. I mean, it's the best interface I've ever seen to do any of this. And all of that functionality can be replicated with their straightforward API. And they just released their brand new API, version 2.0. So go over to DigitalOcean. Try out the one-click install. Go play with some freaking Core OS. It's like the new hotness. Or if you want to be a masochist and cut yourself, go install FreeBSD. I'm not going to judge. Does it sound like I'm judging? Because I'm not.

But here's the best part. Use our promo code DOUnplugged. Don't be a jerk. You'll save yourself some money. You're going to get $10 credit and you support this show. DOUnplugged. They apply that to your account too, so there's no credit card required. Now'll save yourself some money. You're going to get a $10 credit, and you support this show. DO Unplugged. They apply that to your account, too, so there's no credit card required. Now what excuse do you got? You're going to get your own Linux rig powered by Linux, KVM, SSD infrastructures, Tier 1 bandwidth, any data center you want because they got lots of them. You can do one-click deployments to some of the most badass open-source software available in the world. And you get a $10 credit when you use the promo code DO Unplugged. And you're

supporting the show. That's a no-brainer. DigitalOcean.com, go check it out. Use the promo code DOUNPLUGGED, and a really big thank you to Digital Ocean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay, so maybe what I could have, would have done, instead of rage quitting my machine and then going on the internet and telling everybody about it. Nah!

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got the bell here. I should get rid of this bell because I'm just dinging it all the time. Get out of here, bell. Order's ready. I threw it out of here. I got out of here. All right.

So Cora, Cora, Cura writes in. Oh, yeah, Cura. That sounds right. All right, so Kiora writes in. Oh, yeah, Kiora, that sounds right. He writes in with a great tip for easy fallbacks and rollbacks after an update that goes bad using ButterFS and Grub. It could work pretty much on any distro that has that combo. This one is written specifically for Arch, and he's got it in here.

And what he's done, Matt, check this bad mamma jam out, he has an alias. So he just runs the command sysupgrade. And what that does is that executes a ButterFS subvolume snapshot. It snapshots his stuff, date and timestamps that snapshot. Then it actually executes the software update. And then after the software update, it appends Grub with the snapshot. So that way you can boot into the snapshot if you want to. And so with one command, he runs – this is the Linux kind of stuff I love

where you get one line and you do all this cool stuff in one line. And so he's aliased all that to just the command sysupgrade. He types sysupgrade and it does all of that. Well, the fact that he aliased it, that's – now you're speaking my language because you're taking easy. And he's done the hard work for you. He's got it all laid out here. He's got all his logic here

and how you can change it for yourself. This is just a super great, this is one of the greatest contributions of the week, I think, to the subreddit. Because I'm going to do this on my rig. Because, you know, essentially, and I'm going to tweak it a little bit because if this is just me, don't do this.

This is something Chris does that you should not do, audience. But since I'm doing a snapshot, of course, I've only got ButterFS left on one more rig rig but i might as well do it on the rig i've got it left on uh i'm also gonna see where i'm gonna do packer instead of pac-man and i'm gonna do the dash dash no edit no confirm because i just feel like when i just hit when i when i so going back to loving to see the updates when i do a packer and an SYU and then a no edit and a no confirm, what I'm saying is update all the things. I don't care.

Yes to everything. I don't want to change a thing. Take it. And I don't know if it's going to be one package or 100 packages, and it's so glorious when it's 100 packages. Oh, let's do it right now. Let's do it right now. I think it's a box of Cracker Jacks experience for you. I think you like the pull and the trigger on it.

I do. So I'm going to do a Packer-SYU. See, no dash, dash, no edit, no confirm. We'll do it right now because it just feels, oh, I've got to put my password in there. Don't look, guys. That probably helped. All right, so let's see. I'm synchronizing right now.

This is on the Bonobo. We're doing it. Oh, there's some good packages. Yeah, look at all those. Look at all those packages. 60. We're going to update. Let's see.

We're getting a new Dropbox up in here. Oh, GNOME 3.16.1. So I'm getting an update to GNOME 3.16. I'm getting a new Lite DM, new YouTube DL, new Xorg. Oh, this is a pretty solid update for me, Matt. See, this is great. And I'm saying no edit. I'm just taking it.

I'm just taking it. And so now what I could do in the future is I could alias that to also do a snapshot. See, instead of doing that, I could do like a – let's just take it all. I'll make the command take it all, and that will do a snapshot, and it will do a packer with the no edit, the no confirm. Because why not do it while I'm doing the show live on the air, right? I mean, why not? It seems like a perfect time to update my rolling desktop. Light DM, huh?

Boy, if I – I will say that one out of every seven times that I update that, it breaks. I'm not worried at all. I'm not worried at all. I'm not worried at all. Not one little bit. Everything else I'm okay with. But yeah, that's one area where it's like I can consistently point to example after example that I've had issues. Update's done. Okay.

Kind of anticlimactic. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. So that was one thing I could have done differently is I could have had a sweet, really no-brainer snapshot. Totally should have been doing that since I had ButterFS anyways. And you can see you can all do it in one command line. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes if you would like to try that on your rig. Kind of fun just to play with it anyways.

And maybe not bad for your servers too. And our Arch servers here at the studio are running ButterFS. And yes, I said Arch servers. Yes, we run those. Jason wrote in with another suggestion, and this one's a no-brainer too. He says, you know, if Alan Jude was in the Mumba room, I'm sure he would have pointed out

that PCBSD has a great backup solution. Now, I thought this was great. I got this mentioned a few times, and I think what this fundamentally demonstrates as PCBSD is taking technologies that are just built into the file system that they're using, and they're wrapping it into a really user presentable package. Here you go. He said it has a great backup solution. It's called Life Preserver. And we've actually talked about it before on this show and on BSD

Now. But it uses ZFS to create snapshots that can be replicated off to a FreeNAS server. So you see what they're doing here, right? This is beautiful. So IX Systems is the umbrella in which PCBSD and FreeNAS and, honestly, a shit ton of ZFS development are done underneath, right? So they are just now just connecting the dots. So if you have a PCBSD workstation and a FreeNAS file server, you can use Life Preserver to take ZFS snapshots and they just replicate in the background off to your FreeNAS server. Now here's the final punch.

When your machine dies, you pop back in a PCBSD install CD and you choose the option to rescue and restore using Life Preserver backups. And then it just goes and fetches them from the FreeNAS box and writes it back down to the rig. Wow. I like that.

There's no reason OpenSUSE couldn't do that or Ubuntu couldn't do that with ButterFS, right? True. And it's just interesting. It's just that small. Remember last week? I think it was last week. I think I was going on about how the reason why

Docker has had so much success is because they closed that 10% gap. They made some existing technology usable by more people, by developers, by companies and by organizations. They closed that 10% gap. That's what PCBSD is doing here too. They're closing that gap. They're connecting those final dots. It's all stuff you could roll your own solution.

I could do Butterfest snapshots that may be right to a mounted NFS partition on my FreeNAS server. I could do that. But this does it for me, and they can integrate that with the update system. It's integrated with the file manager, so you can be in the directory, and you can reverse in that directory right there, which is way more palatable to end users. It's way more sensical, and it's an example of just a gap that in Linux we just don't sometimes close. Interesting.

So I'm pretty sure you say Ubuntu could do this. We did. I'm pretty sure if you run your system partition on ButterFS and you do an app get disk upgrade, there's a snapshot option that will snapshot your system before. I like that. And there's – We do have it. It's just nobody uses it. Yum does it too.

Yum does it too. I like that. And there's – So once you have it, it's just never easy. Yum does it too. Yum does it too. But what I'm talking about is like this full connecting of like here's the GUI. It's integrated with the file manager and it writes to the file server. That's a pretty sweet combo, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the things that impressed me about Fedora is they also jumped on that and it works really well. You can have Yum do snapshots and all that. And I really should have been doing that. I just – for me, a reload isn't the end of the day other than just the productivity. I think maybe because it's so straightforward to snapshot,

it's probably worth it. I think so. But it is interesting to see how the other side does it over on PCBSD. Makes me a little jelly. I would love some really user-friendly distro to kind of just solve that. Or maybe even kind of rip off Apple a little bit and use Butterfest snapshots but say, hey, I've detected you've attached – or you have plugged in a 20-gigabyte or larger external storage.

Would you like to start saving snapshots to this sort of like Time Machine does? Or detect it on the network. I mean, that would be cool. That would be nice too. Like there's a file share on the network. I prefer that actually. Yeah. I really would too prefer to back up over the network.

Just because, I mean, the whole buy USB thing, it's like, that's adorable. How last year of you. And end users are always going to mess that up. Yeah. So I guess I lesson learned a little bit, but I thought, I still think I'm going to, for now, I'm going to hold the position that moderate, I think unless you're really comfortable with quick recovery solutions I just don't know if I can recommend Butterfest to people

and I think I'm going to hold that line a lot of people wanted me to retract that and I think not that I just not that I want to argue but I think for right now maybe it's best to stick with Extended 4 or XFS and leave Butterfest to those of you who maybe have secondary to stick with Extended For or XFS?

And leave Butterfest to those of you who maybe have secondary machines, you know, and things like that. Well, here's why I can actually agree with that sentiment and just point it out to where this really takes away the debate. When you break a file system, chances are your data is probably okay. However, when you break your installation and your data is okay.

Now, with a file system that's containing, say, oh, I don't know, your data, and that breaks because of a kernel update or whatever the issue may be, that's not really something you just take some time out of your data to recover from. Because potentially, that could also be your backup. I mean, how far does it go? How far do you actually put into trusting that particular file system? And again, I'm just speaking as someone looking through the peephole here. My impression of it and why I've never bothered with it is because I never really had clear answers on how much trust

do I want to put in a file system that I really don't have a lot of faith in, really. I don't know, it's just me. I'll give you the final word. I'm not surprised to see you agree. I picked on your post quite a bit. You seem to be a pretty big ButterFS advocate. You said it is the future. I still believe

it is the future, but I would agree that I wouldn't recommend it to other users. I've been done quite... I'm not that big a Linux switcher, but I've done quite a few Linux installs for other people. I haven't been using ButterFS, but

to play with it, anyone who enjoys Linux, I would definitely recommend having a play with it. Whether you trust your data to it, that's up to you. Right. Well said. I think that summarizes it perfectly. And I'm going to end on this. For people, what I'm going to continue to recommend is ext4 and a good backup.

Just get ext4. That's what I do. Ext 4 isn't going to blow my skirt up. That's fine. Extended 4 isn't going to sell file servers off racks. Extended 4 isn't going to stop the bleed to free BSD. That's all fine. Maybe Butterfest can take another five years and lose less files and then we'll finally by then have

an answer to a file system that's been in production in the market for five years. And if that's the loss we have to take because we didn't have the right solution at the right time, not the end of the world for Linux. It's not going to kill Linux. I think you need your bell back. Because that needed, I don't know, it kind of needed a name.

I did kind of try to wrap it up positively and then managed to put a little bit of dagger in there again. There were some claws. I didn't really need to. I felt a scratch. I felt some scratch. I'm a little damaged. I just take it so seriously for some reason. I don't know why. You know, Matt, I used to be

responsible for file servers, and so this is an important thing to me because I was sort of the guardian of data, and so I take it very seriously. It's a call that I must answer. In the meantime, I'm going to be so obsessed with LinuxFest Northwest that I'm not really going to care that much. Matt, where should people find you?

Right now, with everything that's going on, best thing to do is go to MattHartley.com and make sure you're subscribing to either the Google Plus or the Twitter, or preferably, if you want the best solution of all, get on the email list. I won't spam you. Oh, nice. Just going to get you some updates. I like that. What's going on? It's like the personal line to Matt. Now, hold on. email list. I won't spam you. Oh, nice. Just going to get you some updates. I like that. What's going on? That's like the personal line

to Matt. Now, hold on. Now, what if you happen to make some sort of random appearance on, say, Linux Gamecast? Would I find that at MattHartley.com? You would. Any type of appearance I'm going to have, you're going to actually know about it because you're at MattHartley.com. You're subscribed. You know what's going on. That's smooth. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of

Linux Unplugged. Be sure to join us next week. We do this show on Tuesdays. Go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get this in your local time zone. Don't forget about our meetup group, meetup.com slash jupyterbroadcasting. Last but not least, make this show even better. Show up live. Join our virtual lug. You can get the mumble address in our chat room or go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com.

See you next week, everybody. I got randomly accused by Wimpy for being drunk. And I get this accusation from time to time, and unfortunately, I wish it was true. The studio has been dry for, I think, more than three months. There has not been any liquor in here, unfortunately. Oh, wow. Really? It's true. You plant a uterus in me and impregnate me?

Chris, I think I will fix that when I'm out there. I know. Definitely going to fix the state of liquor. I will be drunk for probably a few weeks of shows after LinuxFest Northwest. I mean, I refuse to throw booze out, so I have to consume it all. But, yeah, I was on fire a little bit. You know what? It's true, though.

I would have DigitalOcean's man-child, so I'll admit it. I'm just being honest with who I am. I would have their love child. I would go have dirty, dirty love. I probably shouldn't say this, but I would do it. Did you know coconut oil is a good hangover cure? JBTitles.com. And so when I was shopping today, I noticed that now Costco in very large bulk is selling coconut oil.

In huge things of coconut oil. Now, let me tell you, if you're looking for a good, solid, healthy thing to fry your foods in, coconut oil, my friends, coconut oil also works as a lubricant. This is true. It's, yeah. It's totally natural and healthy to use as a lubricant. That's right. So you can cook with it and you can, you know. I wonder if it would work

on my truck door which is kind of squeaky. You could, yeah, it could be like a poor man's WD-40. Have you seen that video about coconut oil?

How it does, it solves everything. No, is there a video out there? Hold on. Yeah, it's just, it's like a parody video

about it. Is it long? I wouldn't mind seeing that. No, it's like, it's like two or three minutes. All right, well I could play that

while I tweet out that we're live and stuff. Do you remember what it's called? No, but I can look at my history. No, it's like two or three minutes. All right. Well, I could play that while I tweet out that we're live and stuff. Do you remember what it's called? No, but I can look at my history. Oh, jeez. Okay. Okay. Yeah, sure.

Oh, not that. Oh, gosh. Not that. Oh, gosh. You wouldn't want to see my history. Oh, not that. Oh, boy. All right.

So here it is. All that. Your skin is looking great. I'm going to play this while I tweet out and stuff, so I'll be BRB while that. I'll be bathing in oil. Gross. Gross. You know what?

Your skin is looking great. Oh, my God. Thank you. I'm using coconut oil. That stuff is amazing. Oh, I know. I love it. I take my makeup off with it.

I wash my face with it. I moisturize with it. I cook with it all the time. I wash my face with it. I moisturize with it. I cook with it all the time. Did you know you can brush your teeth with that? Yeah. No, no, no. I knew that. You can also use it on your hair. And did you know that it's a natural deodorant? Yeah, it's great for your metabolism.

It's great for your circulation. Also, really good for wounds. Any kind of wound. You know, you can run your car on it. I mean, the government doesn't want you to know that, but you can run your car on it. Did you know that one time't want you to know that, but you can run your car on it. Did you know that one time I found a dead bird in my garden, and I brought it inside, and I dipped it in coconut oil,

and then it came back to life? For real. Yeah, I mean, it is amazing stuff. Hey, you know that deep pit of anxiety that you carry with you every day, but you don't really notice it until it's all consuming and completely ruining your life? Totally. Wouldn't it be great if you could put coconut oil on that?

Totally, yes. Totally, yes. God, fix me already. Oh, my God. All right, that was great. That was way better than I expected That was actually quite good Yeah That makes me already Of course I didn't

I was super busy watching I didn't really tweet But that's okay Yeah Yeah although Coconut is awesome So eat it Oh it truly is

And you know I put it on my wounds And what not I bring things back to life I wouldn't say that But I do put it on my wounds and whatnot. I bring things back to life and all sorts of stuff. I wouldn't say that, but I do put it in my coffee sometimes. What? I do put it in coffee sometimes, and it's great to cook with. It really is one of the best oils to fry with because it has such a high burning point.

So it's a great cooking oil, and it makes – yeah. It's really good for you in fact it is good it sounds weird but even to eat a spoonful of it is actually good for you oh man I'm doing my Linux unplugged stretches I've been doing a lot of driving around today because today is Dylan's birthday

my son Dylan so I had to go get him a cake this is how it goes so I have to go get my son Dylan a cake and Costco makes some pretty good cakes so I decided I'd go get him a Costco cake because they have a chocolate cake with chocolate filling that he likes and chocolate frosting. So I go over there and I get this Costco cake. It says happy birthday. It's great. It's perfect. In fact, I think I even have a picture

of it. Hold on. I'll pull up a picture. And, you know, I should probably give you a little background here. I'm not big on doing sort of, um, vaguely defined errands, uh, before I go on air. Uh, because it's just, you know, I, I just so many times have had a situation where I just didn't expect something to come up. And so then I'm like, I'm, I'm rushed to get on there. So I decided, but you know what? It's his birthday. Today's a special day. I'm going to go to Costco and I'm going to get him this birthday cake. So I go pick up a birthday cake and it looks good. These birthday cakes are fricking huge. It says like it's two pounds or whatever. No, it's like, it's like 25 pounds. Seriously. You can barely carry it with one hand. I'm not even kidding. And so then I can barely fit it in my truck,

my truck, like, like he does too big to fit in a seat and it's too big to fit on the floor. So like it's precarious to transport. And so I get it home. I mean, I get it to the studio and surprise, surprise, it doesn't fit in the studio fridge. Well, okay. Now we got a little bit of time crunch because I have a lunch meeting and I've got to get this cake delivered back to my house and in the fridge, which means I got to clear out space in the fridge because this thing's a monster. This is like literally trying to fit Godzilla in your fridge. It's the Godzilla cake. And so I'm like, okay, I got to make sure I get home. I get a spot cleared out.

I get this in the fridge. I get back in the truck. I get to my lunch meeting. And then I get back in time to do Linux Unplugged. Like this is all running through my head. Major pressure to get this cake. I get to the studio first. I'm like, if I can just bypass getting to the house, I can save myself about 20 to 40

minutes. So I say, self, here's what you're going to do. Let's take this back to the studio, skip running home. That's just a waste of gas anyways. And you can just remember, you can remember to bring this home at the end of the day. You can do this. And I think to myself, you know what? For Dylan's birthday, I won't ever forget this cake. I will remember. So I say, compromise. All right, self, we'll take it to the studio. So I get in the truck. Somehow, I precariously drive this thing back to the studio, which is only about 10 minutes away from Costco, so it's a nice quick run.

I get back to the studio. I clear out a whole shelf, which, to be honest, is not easy in the studio. Mostly my fault. I got a lot of meat parts up in this business. And so I clear all the meat parts out of the way, throw away some of the nasty meat parts. In fact, I threw away about a shelf's worth of stuff. And I try to fit the cake in the fridge. Well, guess what?

Cake doesn't fit in the fridge. Too big. Of course. And you know what? Nothing makes you feel more like a middle-class pedestrian than when you've just bought a cake that's too big for your own fridge. I was just like, God, am I that cheap? What did I like cheap out when I bought this fridge? I seem to remember this being an expensive fridge fridge and yet I can't even fit a birthday

cake in it. Like, and then I start thinking like, this is a problem rich people never have. I don't know. I don't know why my mind goes there, but I started hating my entire life because I cannot fit this cake in the fridge. Like this obviously is a judgment on my failure to properly provide myself a fridge large enough to fit this cake. And now I got to drive this cake back to my house,

and it's time to start the show? And I was getting very upset. I'm sorry. So anyways, I rushed the cake home. I made it to my meeting. Cake's in the fridge. Everything's fine. But, but, I then had an overflowing garbage back at the studio. Disgustingly full of meat bits,

and like a big bottle of spicy V8, which nobody likes spicy V8. If bottle of spicy V8, which nobody likes spicy V8. If you like spicy V8, I'm sorry, but come on, doesn't that give you farts? Right? So you go with the regular V8, right? So I go with the regular V8 normally. So there's this half-drinking thing of spicy V8 because I hate to throw it away, even though

I don't want to get farts. So I drink, I halfway drink this thing, but you know what? It gives me farts. So I decide, you know, I'm not going to finish drinking this V8. So I put it in the fridge. It sits there for like three weeks because I'm trying to bring myself to the point to throw away half a thing of a gallon of V8. Finally, today I'm at that point because I was trying to make room for the cake. You know what? Cake takes priority. That justifies throwing away the V8. Boom, decision made. So I get back to the studio. Garbage is full of crap. V8 sitting on top of it.

I'm like, you know what? I got to take this garbage up before I do a show. It's going to stink this place up. So I go to lift the garbage up out of the garbage can. And of course, all the handles just rip off because it's like stuff full of food. And it's been in there for like probably two days longer than it should. So I'm like, oh, God. So I try to pull the bag out.

And of course, I go to pull the bag out. And of course, the bag just rips. So I'm like, all right, fine. You know what? Just go the hard way. And I just pick up the entire garbage can because you know what? Why not? So I pick up the whole garbage can. I gracefully, thanks to years of IT of carrying computers and monitors and still having to carefully open up doors, I gracefully managed to carry the garbage can and open the door. No problem there at all. I walk around the bush. I walk around my truck. I sidestep around a cat that happens to walk by.

And I go to open up the garbage can. And as I open up the garbage can, of course the thing of V8 falls off the top of the garbage can. And when it hits the ground, it just explodes everywhere. V8 all over my freaking legs. V8 all over the garage. V8 all over the truck. I am covered in V8 right now. And I'm ready to do a show.

That's been my morning. There you go. Wow. That seems like quite a journey. And that's why doing something as simple as getting a cake is never that simple for me. And you know what? I just don't need that. I just don't need that kind of thing.

And you know what? My son will't need that. I just don't need that kind of thing. And you know what? My son will never know. He'll never know. Unless he comes back and listens to old pre-shows. Yeah, yeah. Anthony and the IRC said that you should just eat some of it until it fits. The logical solution. I just should have thought of that.

If it was pie, I might have been tempted. Chocolate cake. You know, this is the other thing. I'm just not like, I'm not excited about this cake at all. It's all chocolate. And I'm not all chocolate cake. You know what? Chocolate is delicious.

I just, it's mono. It's like one note. Eh, all right. How about we hit a few notes? Let's combine a few ingredients. Then it's like those ingredients are making love in my mouth, and it really tastes good. But if you just go all chocolate, eh, okay, all right. So, Chris, you know how you make that better?

No. Vanilla ice cream. Yeah, that is the truth. A raspberry later would be awesome as well. Yes, exactly. See, that's all I'm saying is just put a little spice in there. Put a little would be awesome as well. Yes, exactly. See, that's all I'm saying is just put a little spice in there. Put a little berry. Put a little white cream in there.

Go a little white. If you're going all chocolate, if you're going chocolate frosting, chocolate cake, go a little white buttercream in the middle. That's amazing, right? That's amazing. You just go chocolate in the middle. I'm like, okay, more chocolate. Well, good thing I like chocolate, but I've already had a lot of chocolate. And then it's like I have this huge plate of chocolate, which is fine, but I get the idea after about three solid bites. Fourth

bite, I'm feeling like, yeah, I love chocolate. Fifth bite, I'm like, okay, I got it. It's chocolate. Six bites, I'm totes done, right? But you add up some variety to that. I'm like, ooh, it tastes a little bit different each bite. Sometimes I get a little more of this, and I get a little bit less of this, and I like that. Every single freaking bite can be its own custom experience. And all you have to do to have a custom experience with every single bite of cake is just have a little variation. Add a tiny bit of variation. It's not that big of a deal. But yet everybody's like, oh, I love chocolate cake.

Chocolate cake's great. Yeah, it's great. But it can be way better. It can be like, it's like, never mind. I just, so yeah, it's chocolate cake. I did all this work for a chocolate cake that I'm not even really going to enjoy eating. I'm going to have like three bites of it. Happy birthday.