LINUX Unplugged - Episode 94: 11 Years of Linux Benchmarking | LUP 94

Episode Date: May 27, 2015

Michael Larabel joins us to discuss his initiative of daily automated performance benchmarking of some of the world's most important open source projects & reflects on 11 years of running Phoronix.com.Plus our first take on Fedora 22 & how we resolved some rough edges, the best new options for new users that require Microsoft Office under Linux & more!

I think Star Trek has some of the best sound effects in the sci-fi biz, one of the things that's kept them around. And so I was pretty excited when I saw on the subreddit that KabiLinux, K-A-B-I-Linux, he wrote this post saying, hoping some here will like this, but if you have the package SOX installed, that's S-O-X, you can run the code below in the terminal and it will pump out what sounds like the hum of the Enterprise, without the wobble unfortunately, but you also don't need the warp core. So you first have to have the SOX package installed on your machine, and then you run this play command here, and once you hit play, it creates the engine sound effect of the Enterprise-D, which is a pretty cool white noise effect.

And then if you're a professional internet broadcaster, you'll have other sounds ready to go, like Star Trek bridge sounds. And then it really sounds like you're in Star Trek now, which is pretty cool, just using socks. I got a kick out of that. So you don't have to have, although, I mean, I added the sound effects from the bridge. But there you go. So maybe instead of doing Linux Unplugged this time, today we'll do Star Trek Unplugged. You think that'd

be a hit? I think we tried that once. I don't think it works very well. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that spent more time on a spreadsheet this week than the last 10 years. My name is Chris, and we have a heck of an episode for you. This is episode 94 of the Linux Unplugged show. And joining us in just a little bit will be Michael Arabelle from Pharonix to discuss a new initiative he's working on, Linux benchmarking automated style. You know, wouldn't it be interesting to track the progress of some of the most important

projects like, oh, I don't know, the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM. When they release new builds, how does that impact their performance? Well, over at linuxbenchmarking.com, Michael has set out just to find that out, automated builds after new releases with charts. Go in there and say, how has the Linux kernel been trending the last six months? And this site might just show you. What's this initiative all about and what is his goal? We'll talk to him today. Also, we'll give him a little congrats on the 11th year of pharonix.com, so

that'll be coming up. And then later in the show, we're going to talk about Fedora 22, a new release that just hit the web today. I installed it. I've got some initial reactions. We're going to give you a full review on Sunday's Linux Action Show. But but today I ran into a snag or two that you might run into if you have a certain make NVIDIA card that'll prevent GDM from starting. I'll tell you how to fix that in today's episode and give you my first reactions, get some mumble room takes. But before we get to any of that, we do have some serious business to get to. Some unfortunate sad news. Every now and then, a great distribution comes and goes. Sometimes the company and people behind them come and go.

And this week, it appears to be official. Mandriva, the company behind the Linux distribution so many of us so, so many of us started out with is officially going away. Yes, apparently according to a post over in Germany, or maybe it was France, there's

a translation. Thankfully, Pharonix has one for us. Even though the company made $553,000 last year, not enough for 10 to 19 employees, Mandreev as a company is now being liquidated. And to help reflect on this once great distribution, I'll bring in our Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. So any Mandriva users, say aye.

Any Mandriva users in here or Mandrake users back in the day? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of sad.

That's what got me started. Yeah, it, yeah. It's kind of sad. That's what got me started. Yeah, it really was. I mean, I probably started with dubbing in Red Hat technically, but when it came time for Linux for me that I wanted to cut my teeth on and use on my systems, I used Mandrake. And I even became a Mandrake Club member. I was in the Mandrake Club, so I got the special URPMI repos. I felt pretty cool. And I don't know what this means for the offshoots,

like Mandriva and others. Magia. Moondrake? Was that the other one? Rotten Corpse? Yeah, there was Moondrake, and I think there was a spin-off of the original Mandrake. Yeah, okay. I don't know what it means for those guys, but and open Mandriva, of course,

like that. There doesn't seem to have been a lot of interest taking up in those, though. Mandrake 8, yep, Mandrake 8 whiskey. I had that in the box. That was great. Mandrake 8 in the box was great. You know, one of the great things about Mandrake back in the day was that it had the DRAC config. Let's see if I can find a picture of this Mandrake DRAC config.

Do you guys know what I'm talking about? I mean, Open, or DRAC Comp, that's what it was, DRAC Comp. Open Sousa, of course, had YAST, which was, you know, pretty great. But I felt like, in some ways, Linux Mandrake's DRAC Conf had the leg up when it came to, like, the Samba automation and user creation and just managing services. It just felt like a quicker, faster tool. Boy, looking back at it now, it really looks antiquated. Boy, looking back at it now, it really looks antiquated. But this was sort of your only front-end option, really,

when configuring X really meant getting into your Xorg comp file. And if you just didn't want to hassle with that stuff, this was so perfect. And it did get more refined over the years, and it got forked. It's still out there in different iterations, but there was a time where I was able to fully set up Active Directory authentication, automated NTP setup, all these things that you just had to do by hand back then in Linux. Wi-Fi, like when Wi-Fi was brand new,

Mandrake made it easiest to get it working back then. It was a really great distro. And the other thing they did, and they give you really straightforward front-end options for starting and stopping services. The other thing they did early on is they

provided a really solid solution to how crappy RPMs were. You know, they had URPMI, which really was, in some ways, maybe better than Yum, maybe not, I don't know anymore, DNF, like who could say? But it was definitely way better than any

other RPM-based distro out there. This was really, in my opinion, the usable RPM-based distro at the time. Because of URPMI. And then they had like a, you know, one of the first software source managers where you could manage between online sources, update sources, and CDs.

And again, SUSE got all that and yassed pretty quickly. But that's what made Mandrake work so well, I think, for people. And man, they had the best installer. Mandrake had so well, I think, for people. And man, they had the best installer. Mandrake had a really unique installer where the progress was all down on the left-hand side of the installer. Yeah, here it is. Here it is. Yeah, I don't know if you guys remember this. They also had the best partitioner back in the day, too. They really had a great partitioner. And so you always knew right where you're at in the installation process, and you could jump back and forth. And they kept

that look for years. They refined it over time and you could jump back and forth. And they kept that look for years. They refined it over time and made it look a little better, but they kept that basic functionality. So I'm showing you right here. I'm showing you like this is like a super old version of Mandrake. And then here's Mandrake 9.1. And then here is Mandrake 2005. And they kept that – and here's 9.1 again. They kept that list along the side.

It was so cool. I think they had – and they great texan seller too if you had to go that route oh man oh wow oh this this screenshot mandrake linux 8 here it is this was my bag back in the day oh wow this is so old-looking now. I can't really get any better on it. And they were one of the first to make it easy to use RiserFS, too. They made it super easy to use journaled file systems when journaled file systems were brand new to Linux. And they had security things you could do in the installation

that would sort of tell you how secure it was going to be and give you sort of like a report. You could make a boot disk during the installation. So in case you ever screwed up your bootloader installation, during the installer process, it would ask you if you wanted to make a – of course, it would be to a floppy disk because back then everybody had floppy disks. But it would make you an emergency bootloader floppy disk that you could always get back into your Linux installation with if you somehow hosed your bootloader. How come we don't do that now? Why did we stop doing that? And then, of course, because X was a total monster back then, the last thing you did in the installation, because it was actually technically it was fine if at this point the installation totally locked up because everything was pretty much done.

I don't know if it was unmounted the file systems, but beyond that, pretty much everything was done. So the last thing it would do is launch their super cool X configuration thing where you'd go into this X configurator and it had arrows along the edges of the screen. So you could see if you had overscan on your CRT monitor and you could tweak it back in and position it just right and then save that. And it would write your XOR config for you. It wasn't even XOR back then. It was save that. And it would write your XOR config for you. It wasn't even XOR back then. It was just X11. It would write your X11 config. And they put it intentionally.

If you're watching the video version, you can see it's the last step right there. They did it intentionally because that was always the thing that crashed. Because you had to tell it what your video card was. You had to tell it everything about you. You had to tell it what your monitor is capable of doing. It couldn't detect any of that. And a lot of times the CRT monitors were very particular. Oh, and so were the early LCD monitors.

And they had, again, one of the best setups to do that, that final X11 step. It almost makes me want to go find an ISO and do it one more time, except for old Linux is actually never quite as great as you remember uh mumble room you guys have any uh passing uh mandriva or mandrake thoughts you want to share before uh before we move on i think it was time they haven't they didn't have anything in their final few years that made them stand out. And the community fell away, went to their fault products. They didn't need to keep going on because they had nothing left.

Well, and they were of a product of a different time where you had these problems. Like you had to have the X config. You had to have XF86 config was the command. Thank you, Minimic. You had to have things like that. You also, at the end of the installation, towards the end of the installation, had to figure out how was the user going to get online because it was assumed they didn't even have an Ethernet port. They might have had USB, but they probably had an ISP that required something like PPOE or PPTP. And so they had to build these things in. They had to accommodate for these.

And then later on, when the new generation distributions came around, they didn't have to really account for kinds of these things. Now, Colonel X, I wanted to give you a chance. Were you a Mandrake user back in the day? So Mandrake Linux was actually the first Linux I ever used. And I had been asking around if anyone knew of this Linux or where I could obtain it. And finally I found a guy that said, oh, here, I got a copy for you. So he gave it to me on a CD. And I remember sticking it in my computer and I was all excited because I was going to try this Linux thing that was going to be more stable and more secure and was going to do everything for me. I stick the CD in there and

I boot off of it. And I remember an X showed up. The cursor was an X back then. And I was so excited because I was like, I remember thinking to myself, wow, what an awesome cursor replacement at X rather than an arrow. That makes so much sense. And it really didn't make any sense. I was just happy that it was not Microsoft. And I booted into Linux and I was so excited. I was like, oh, look, it comes with games, and it comes with a word processor, and wait, network doesn't work, and sound doesn't work, and my display is limited to 800x600,

and here's a couple other things that don't work. So, all right, no problem. Played with it for a couple days and decided, I'm going to go back to Windows. I stick my, at the time, I think it was Windows ME or Windows 2000, I stick the disk back in there, and it didn't recognize the partition that Mandrake had used, and so it just didn't see my back in there, and it didn't recognize the partition that Mandrake had used. And so it just didn't see my hard drive. And I just didn't have a computer

with internet for like three months. And after that experience, and when I finally did get it fixed, I swore I would never touch Linux again, because it was such a horrible experience. Oh, good thing that didn't stick. Yeah, well, there you go. I remember I also, I was such a Mandrake fan. I tried out their Mandrake Enterprise servers that they rolled out. The first Squid proxy server I ever deployed ran on Mandrake using Mandrake Server Edition. Like I said, I became a Mandrake club member or whatever they called it back then. I was all in.

I bought every box set that they sold. It was pretty cool. every box set that they sold. It was pretty cool. So hopes and our best to the Mandrake folks and the Mandriva company and to the offshoots that continue on in sort of their legacy. So that is being very nostalgic.

Now let's go to the total opposite end of the spectrum. And this is so cool. And it really does make it feel like 2015. Soon, you're going to be able to share your smartphone GPS location information with the location services built into the GNOME desktop to make that more accurate. And you might be wondering why, but it actually is sort of useful. The GNOME desktop derives a lot of information when you allow it based on your IP location primarily, unless you actually have a computer with a GPS chip in it that talks to the Linux system.

And what it does, the things I'm aware of, and I'm sure there's many more, is it sets things like automatically your time zone, best NTP server, calendar settings, a lot of little things like this. And the more accurate you get that, the better GNOME is, especially if you're in a laptop and you're traveling. Like, say, take Noah, for example, when he's in Grand Forks right now, and then he comes over here to the JB1 studio. If GNOME is aware of his location, it will automatically adjust his clock and his calendar appointment reminders for him to be in this time zone. And so as part of the Google Summer of Code project, there is a developer who is aiming to set up an app that will share location information when you have this other companion app on the Android device called GeoClue.

And this is pretty cool. A GPS position is something that most of us are obviously pretty familiar with, but you might not always understand why. So this would kind of be a way you could play with it on your Linux desktop without having to have a GPS chip in your computer to see if there's any value in it. I think that's kind of neat. And they're adding more and more things in GNOME, like maps and things like that, that could use this.

Plus you've got to assume other projects could take advantage of this. So each time the Android location listener application in the background gets a new location, which Android is doing this all the time for Google Now or for your weather checking application. The way it works on Android is for the most part, not always, but for the most part, if an application needs location, it just asks the location service instead of having to hit the GPS itself. Because if another application just checked 55 milliseconds ago, five minutes ago, why hit the GPS antenna again when you can just check that database? So that's essentially what the service does. So anytime that database is updated, this app also gets notified, this GeoClue.

Using MDNS on your Wi-Fi network, it'll auto-discover the companion app running on your GNOME desktop. And anytime that location database gets updated on Android, a copy of that notification will be sent over the network, over Wi-Fi, to the companion app on your GNOME desktop, and any time that location database gets updated on Android, a copy of that notification will be sent over the network, over Wi-Fi, to the companion app on your GNOME desktop. So any app that checks the location on your Android device will then also update the location information for GNOME. So you kind of get the benefit of getting

constant location information without having to hit your battery really hard, because it's just hitting it when the other apps are already hitting it. And of course, you could just turn off the bridging app if you didn't want to use that or not use it. I think it's an interesting start, and it's an interesting use of Google Summer of Code, and it could make the location-based stuff that we're seeing

the GNOME project work on more relevant without having to have expensive hardware in your laptop or desktop. Because I'm never going to put a GPS... I might maybe one day have an LTE card in a laptop that has GPS built in. That'd be pretty cool, but I'm never going to have that in my Arch desktop upstairs in my office. So now I

can take advantage of some of those same location things using that without a big battery drain. I think it's pretty cool. And you can also power other machines. It's not just a, this is the other thing I thought was interesting, is you could have like five of your desktops to this one Android device. So five of your

GNOME desktops, for example, could all be getting location if they're all in the same spot. So it's not a one-to-one ratio. So one phone can update the location for multiple desktops as well, which is kind of a neat feature, I think. I'll tell you about another neat feature. That'd be our next sponsor right here on the Linux Unplugged program. And that is our friends over at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com to get a limited time $50 discount off your first Ting device. Or if you have a Ting compatible device, they'll give you a $50 service credit. Now, when I signed up, I got a $25 service credit. And that paid for more than my first month.

So I can only imagine what $50 is going to do for you guys. Or really, just go get a brand new device. Ting has a great range of devices. From starting literally like around $50 for a feature phone all the way up to the best Android phones and iPhones out in the market today. And they just recently added the OnePlus, which you can get right from Ting, which is really great. So go to linux.ting.com to take advantage of that $50 discount. Now, why Ting's service? Why switch to Ting? First of all, I think you're going to like the fact that you only pay for what you use.

Finally, right? That's how it should always be. And sometimes outside the US, that is how it is, but not here in the US. We have a duopoly in place. This duopoly controls the market with a strong arm that you wouldn't believe. And so there's very little flexibility in here. So Ting had to come up with a whole new way to do this. So you only pay for what you use. It's just flat $6 for the line. And then your usage on top of that, you just take your minutes, your message, your megabytes, whatever bucket you fall into, that's all you have to pay. That's really super nice. Because then if you want to have multiple devices for testing applications, or maybe you have a small business, or maybe like in my case, I have a nanny that is, I can't really afford to pay for her phone all the time. But if I only pay for it when she

needs it, because some sort of emergency, that is absolutely worth it for me. And that's why I love the Ting service. It's based around me and my usage, not my individual devices, which I think is a superior model to begin with. And they have no hold customer service. So if I give the phone to somebody and they have problems, they call Ting at 1-855-TING-FTW and a real human being will answer the phone. So I don't have to get stuck doing the troubleshooting.

I really like that. I just don't want to get tied down helping people with all of the little technical issues. So the fact that I can hand that off to Ting, they also have a really good help site. So, like, in case of Rekai, he doesn't ever have to call in. He'll just go to the Ting help service, and he can just take care of all his problems that way. So there's a great range depending on your ability. So it makes it great for a small business or a family. I love that.

So go to linux.ting.com. Start there to get our special discount. That'll give you a $50 discount off all of their great devices. And then you can check out the fact that they have an early termination relief program. So if you're stuck in a stupid contract right now, they're going to help you get out of that with their ETF program. Check that out. And, of course, your phone's going to be unlocked,

so you're going to get long-term value out of it. So here's what you do. You go to linux.ting.com, check them out. Also check out their blog. They just recently posted this video. Now, this video isn't narrated, but I think I'm going to do the narration for them right now. They can just do this for free. Ting, I'm doing this for you. So this is a Ting tip, and I'm putting this out here because it's probably good for you guys to automatically download podcasts over Wi-Fi. If you're using Pocket Cast, you open up the Pocket Cast app, and then once it's in there, open up the settings menu

where you go to that little hamburger menu, it slides out, and then go down into the settings cog at the bottom of that, and then select episode updates in the app, and it's the second option. And then in there, there's the option, check enabled under auto download, say enabled, automatically download, and then make sure only on Wi-Fi.

So that way, when new episodes come out, it'll automatically download the new episode, but it won't do it when you're on cellular. That's kind of the best of both worlds. So when the new Linux Unplugged, hey, look, there's Linux Action Show right there. When the new Linux Action Show comes out in HD, you don't have to feel guilty about doing the high download,

but you also get it automatically. That's how I do my Pocket Casts. As I have it set to auto download, every show that comes out. I keep the last two to three episodes, depending on the podcast, and I have it set to only download when I'm on Wi-Fi. And so when I'm on the road, I get an idea of what I'm going to have coming up, and I could opt to download over cellular if it's really important to me. And I do sometimes do that. But really what I do is as soon as I get on my Wi-Fi connection, Pocket Cast just starts pulling all of them down for me and the next time I'm on the road,

they're ready to go and I did not use any wireless data and so I'm not paying for any wireless data. And that's just a great way you can, if you're just a little bit technical savvy, just have a little savviness. You really don't have to have much. You can really leverage the way the Ting model works

and save a ton of money. So go to linux.ting.com, use that savings calculator, see how much money you'd freaking save. I've saved over $2,000. You can hit the savings calculator and find out how much you would save. linux.ting.com and a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay, I have to mention something.

Next week, the Linux Unplugged show is going to be live at 11 a.m. Pacific time. And I know you don't know what time that is in your time. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. You hear that, Popey? I'm talking to you. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get it converted to your local time. But, yeah, I have some – or I lied. We're doing it at 10 a.m.

See, it's a good thing I'm checking the calendar. This is why you got to go to the calendar. We're doing Linux Unplug it at 10 a.m. See, it's a good thing I'm checking the calendar. This is why you got to go to the calendar. We're doing Linux Unplugged at 10 a.m. So right after Tech Talk next week, it's going to go Tech Talk and then Linux Unplugged on Tuesday next week. So just a little heads up, we're moving the recording schedule for Linux Unplugged

and I'm making a big stink about it because the Mumble Room is super important to the show and I'd really like to have some people there. I love you guys. I love you so much. So important to me. So join me at 10 a.m. Pacific for Linux Unplugged next Tuesday. Just moving it that

week because I have some family that's coming to town that I have to go pick up at the train station. See, this is what happens when family schedules stuff. They literally arrive at 2 p.m. when we would normally be going live. Could they have picked a more perfect time? I don't think so.

So we're doing 10 a.m. next Tuesday at jblive.tv. Give us the Eastern time. Dude, I gave you a website that automatically converts the time zones for you so I can accommodate everybody. How much more can I give? jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Go take advantage of our robots. After all, I pay them in Bitcoin.

You might as well use them for something. Okay, well, I'm really excited to welcome back Michael Larrabelle from phronix.com. Michael actually joined us back in 2012, shortly after he'd gotten back from his visit with Valve and we'd had all the big Steam news for Linux. And this week, I invited Michael back on the show because he's launched an

initiative that I think is pretty interesting. And I want to see if I'm grokking this right, Michael. So I'm going to run it past you. Tell me if I've captured this right. But it looks like you're kind of taking all of the work you've done with the Pharonix benchmarking suite, all of your experience you have with benchmarking for Pharonix website and the open benchmark project, and you are launching an automated testing site that essentially will be monitoring some of the most popular open source projects and trending their performance impact over time. Am I kind of grokking this?

Hi, Chris. Yes, you're mostly correct. It's basically to monitor the performance over time of important projects like the Linux kernel, the GCC compiler, LLVM, and Clang. And then I've also been working on some other trackers for all the latest Arc Linux packages in real time and everything else like that. And you're doing these testing and the results on a daily basis, correct? Correct. The majority of the trackers right now are running on daily time basis but there's also the ability within the phronix test suite to do per commit testing so basically whenever there's

a new get revision that the triggers would automatically fire off the new rounded testing but for my testing over the past several months i've just found the daily testing to be best off rather than having so many triggers per day of kernel benchmarking when each kernel benchmark will end up taking several hours per system, etc. So, first of all, I've got to say, if I'm following you correctly, this sounds like a massive sacrifice of your man cave. I just finished remodeling the basement and I'm basically devoted entirely to this LinuxBenchmarking.com

I'm seeing that. It looks like it was at one point going to be a very nice theater with a bar and a projector and a bench seat. And it looks like it's now dedicated to a server farm for doing benchmarks. Beforehand, there's some pictures on one of the older Phronix articles that's linked from linuxbenchmarking.com, but it was just like a complete wreck in the basement. I actually just added the bar just because of whenever there's front access suite customers over here.

And then the projector is just nice for seeing the real-time status of all the systems running. Oh, I love it. So the bar is for the benchmarking. Oh, that is so cool. That is way cooler than – I thought it was like some sort of sad sacrifice. And instead, it is actually way more badass than that. You have a bar in your benchmarking suite. That is really cool.

So you say when customers come over, what kind of customers come over for the Pharonix benchmarking suite? Is it like hardware manufacturers? Can you give me a picture of what that's like? Because that's an area of your business that I don't have any insights on at all. Yeah, it's basically for any enterprise customers for the Phonics test suite that either want customizations done for the PTS or openbenchmarking.org to better suit their roles and

whatnot. One customer that's able to be talked about publicly is actually GE that sponsored much of this recent work, which in turn led to the linuxbenchmarking.com is where they're rolling out thousands of servers where they run benchmarks every day, entirely powered by the Phonics test suite and 4Matic. So I'm sure for them, and also really for the community in general, JBHawkatruth in our chatroom asked a great question. And this is something that whenever you talk about benchmarks,

people always will try to poke holes in how the benchmark is constructed or how it's ran. So JBHawkaTruth in our chat room says, could you give us an idea of who maintains the test cases used to measure the target application? Is that something you maintain or is that like an open source project sort of like where different people are contributing to that? Do people add their own metrics from different projects? How is that driven? Do people add their own metrics from different projects? How is that driven? It's all powered by the FrontXS suite, which in turn pulls it from our open benchmarking.org website that basically acts as a repository for all the test cases.

All those test cases are basically comprised of work that's done either by me or many other contributors. There's everything from code weavers. They've submitted line test profiles for measuring that. And, yeah, it's basically an open project, and not anyone's able to recommend any new test cases or adapt their test cases and upload them where the test profiles for the front access suite are just basically a few bash scripts and XML files. Right, I see. So people have updated like popular audio encoding tests to the open benchmarking site.

And so if I, for example, in Jupyter Broadcasting, if we developed a benchmark maybe for like FFmpeg encoding setups, we could essentially upload like an FFmpeg benchmarking script test suite, and then if the community liked it and it got popular, then it would sort of become a well-known. Is that how it works? Yes, indeed, that's correct. And though actually there is already FFmpeg benchmark in there.

Yeah, that makes sense. But, yeah, basically anyone can submit new test profiles, and from there it rolls out to anyone that's doing a public or private deployment of the Frontex test suite, including LinuxBenchmarking.com, which is different than all the other tests. Well, to back up a few steps, like Red Hat, Canonical, and others also maintain their own benchmarks against the latest Linux kernel and whatnot.

But yeah, their test cases are often limited without any intervention, and they're also often focused just around their use cases of Apache Web Server performance or other scientific areas rather than, say, running a Linux gaming benchmark since the Linux gaming benchmarks or Linux gaming customers are what leads to lots of their revenue. Is that a fan behind you, I hear? Yes, actually, just one of the servers I was just rebooting because it's now getting ready

for its new round of testing. Yeah, that is exactly what I thought it was. Man, those things are just banshees when you reboot them. Yeah, that is exactly what I thought it was. Man, those things are just banshees when you reboot them. So when I look at this, I think daily GCC benchmarks, daily Linux kernel benchmarks. What's driving you to do this? What's the core reason?

What is the core benefit of making this information public and putting it out there like this? Why not keep it some secret sauce you can use for special Foronix reports and things like that? some secret sauce you can use for special Foronix reports and things like that. It's mostly just being dissatisfied over all these years with how many regressions still enter, mainly the Linux kernel, but yeah, there's also regressions in many other projects out there that there just isn't too much action being done about any upstream latest Git trying to be universal benchmarking. Because besides Red Hat not caring about gaming benchmarks, they and other distribution vendors often just care about testing the kernels that are going to ship in their next product as opposed to the very latest Git code.

Right. And so I feel like you touched on something that I have noticed as an undercurrent, an undertone in your writing. You, I get the sense, really hate regressions. And you, I think, in some ways, are driven to find when regressions happen and point that out based on data. It's the best your ability.

Do you feel finding regressions and helping people fix them, identify them, is that part of what drives you to do all this benchmarking and do all of this? Are you a regression hater? I mostly just hate regressions, yes, but I'm just really interested in Linux hardware and trying to ensure everything achieves their peak performance possible under Linux. So this is the disconnect that I don't get. So how does it not, it seems like then you would be in a position

where you would be constantly tormented because you're going to see regressions everywhere because that happens in software development and they're right there out there for everybody to see in open source. But also, you know, you've run the numbers. A lot of times you can run the same benchmark for, say, an OpenGL application or a game and get a much better result using a proprietary driver on Windows than you might get with a proprietary driver on Linux. So how does somebody who's constantly checking for the best performance and who has a little bit of regression hate, how do you not just get frustrated with Linux? Here you are almost 11 years into Pharonix. I would think by now you would have pulled your hair out.

I pulled plenty of hair out, but overall, Linux performance is still pretty much on par with Windows. There's certainly some cases where it's not, but it's improving a lot. And it is frustrating, though, when you see such performance strides being made, and then all of a sudden the next kernel release you see your battery power usage just go horribly, and no one notices it until after the kernel ships. Yeah. Yeah, I've always wondered when I'm reading that. And so I think now, you know, with these benchmarks, I look at this and I think, I wonder if maybe

it's time to sort of try to incorporate these kinds of benchmarks into reviews even. Like, do you see the possibility there for – or where do you really see this going? Do you see it more for hardware makers and big projects, or do you see it more used by the community? Where do you see it going? Is it more of a community effort or more of an enterprise effort? In terms of linuxbenchmarking.com, it's a community effort, but with the front accessory and 4-O-Matic, anyone is able to test out their own software on their own hardware and everything along those lines, and there's plenty of behind-the-firewall formatic deployments for running all these benchmarks that various companies use.

But yes, for LinuxBenchmarking.com, it's mostly just a community effort because I have to test out my latest code anyways that I'm shipping to customers. So I'm basically making all that data public and trying to be as most real-world and applicable to the community as possible and all this data that I have to produce anyways.

Well, Michael, before we wrap up, I'm just curious. Obviously, you follow the Linux news pretty closely. What in, like, big picture-wise, what's going on out there in the last, you know, six months or so or whatever that you find to be particularly interesting? That's a very good question. There's many things that's interesting to me right now.

LLVM and Clang continue to be quite interesting, particularly for how they're being adapted by so many different projects. And now with Vulkan as basically the next generation OpenGL, that there's going to be the Sphere V to LLVM converters. All these other LLVM-based products will now be able to easily interact with the GPU. That's one interesting area that always excites me over the past few years. Bluetooth Snappy tends to be a little bit interesting. I still have to read up a lot more on it,

but they have a lot of nice plans. I've noticed, too, you seem like a close follower of the Fedora project as well. What do you think about where Fedora is going? We're going to talk about 22 today. Oh, I'm quite happy with Fedora 22 and Fedora 21 for that matter.

I've had Fedora 22 on a couple dozen systems now, and it's running fairly nicely. I've hit that Nuovo regression that's a bit annoying. Honestly, I've hit that Nuovo regression that's a bit annoying. And then just the other day I hit an issue with the Wi-Fi where I'm getting really awkward internet connection speeds out of it. But aside from that, Fedora 22 has been performing very nicely and it's quite stable. I've tested it both under X11 and Wayland, and the Wayland experience has been pretty much on par now with X11. Yeah, that's going to be a big story, and I could see a specific angle there for your site too. As Wayland rolls out and more distributions start shipping it,

there's going to be lots of performance regressions. There's going to be lots of new territory there. That's got to be a story you follow with some interest. Yes, certainly. Overall, the performance under Wayland or ex-Wayland, for that matter, is pretty nice. With ex-Wayland right now on the GNOME shell, there's some issues just around full-screen apps not being redirected properly, so there is a performance penalty.

But at least according to the developers, that should be fixed in due time. So there isn't anything too major. It's not like you're suddenly having the performance in half. It's just that it's down 10% or so. I love that's where we're at. That's great. That's, I mean, better than you might expect, I suppose. Heaven's Revenge wanted to ask you a question, Michael.

Go ahead, Heaven's. Ask away. Well, with the new release of Clang 3.6 and LLVM 3.6, have you tried out the OpenMP support, as I have, and have running on my system using a few test programs? So do you have any benchmarks coming up with the OpenMP support for Clang?

Yes, I will. A few months ago, I did run some of Intel's OpenMP branch of LLVM and Clang, and then now that everything is totally in Mayline, I am in the process of, this week, running some new benchmarks, and we'll have those out either this week or next week. That's one thing I'm so excited for,

and I'm very relieved that they finally have it merged into their master branch. Yeah, it's very great. And then on LinuxBenchmarking.com is the latest LLVM and Clang benchmark results. And just yesterday I updated the test scripts to make sure that it's installing the latest OpenMP runtime libraries. So within the next day or two, you might be able to see those results for that dozen or so systems organically switch over to the OpenMP support. That's really cool. Derek Delvin, you had a question you wanted to ask, Michael.

Indeed. I'd like to know what are the kinds of features that would you like to see to come into the kernel so that will help you better test and do what you usually do? Because I'm interested in that. There isn't any one feature that I'd like right now, like the tracing features in the kernel are going nicely and everything else.

It would be nice if there was some universally expected benchmark flag for the kernel and user space that people would expect. Like, right now, between the different Linux graphics drivers for X11, they all have a different option for how to disable, basically, V-blank. There's no standardized way of doing that. And, of course, you want to disable V-blank. But, like, within the FrontX test suite and my scripts, I have to make sure that it accommodates every driver and make sure it checks or not, and then writes to their proper name and whatnot that there's no simple universal way

to say, hey, we're going to benchmark, so basically make it in performant mode. Alright. That makes sense. Michael, my last question for you, it came from Corky in the chat room, and just kind of curious, what is your main daily Linux driver? What is your

setup? What distro and what's it look like? My distro right now is Fedora 21. I'll upgrade to Fedora 22 in the next few days or a couple weeks after I find out if Fedora is working nicely since I know when Fedora 21 rolled out that Fedora had some issues. So once I can be comfortable

upgrading that, I'll do that. On my main production system I'm using Intel Haswell or actually no it's already Broadwell Ultrabook and that's basically just using that driver since I'm not running any games or anything graphically intensive on that system and I can generally rely

upon the Intel graphics driver to not give me any regressions for mode setting and other key functionality between kernel releases. Yeah, when you can get by with the open source driver, it does make it really nice. I ran into a snag in Fedora 22 that I'll talk about in our review in a little bit. But yeah, that was one little snafu for me.

But other than that, yeah, the open source driver just... If you're not gaming, I can't believe where it's at now. It really, between that and the Intel stuff, it's, you know, looking back at 11 years of this stuff, it has come so far. You know, just looking at the nine years we've been doing the Linux Action Show, it is fundamentally different.

I mean, listen to that discussion we had earlier about how you set up Mandrake to where it's at now with these open source drivers. It blows my mind. Oh, yeah, I had a lot of fun reminiscing over that with Mandrake's hex config. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Well, Michael, thanks so much for coming on and updating us. Great initiative here, and folks, I want you to go check it out. It's really cool, and we'll have links to all of it in the show notes. It's linuxbenchmarking.com, right, Michael? Yes, that's correct, but I also have linuxbenchmark.com, and pretty much any other variety should also redirect there. Nice score right, Michael? Yes, that's correct, but I also have LinuxBenchmark.com

and pretty much any other variety should also redirect there. Nice score. No worries. Wow, that's a good score. That is some prime real estate right there. You keep it up, and I'll be watching that. I'm curious to see, after you've been publishing these results for a while, to see what kind of trends show up and things like that,

especially in some of our favorite projects. And, Michael, of course, you are always welcome to join us. We have an open Mumba room, and you can stick around for the rest of the show if and things like that, especially in some of our favorite projects. And Michael, of course, you are always welcome to join us. We have an open Mumble room, and you can stick around for the rest of the show if you'd like. We're going to get into taking care of some little bit more transitions to Linux. I've tried to solve some issues for Angela and her switch that really came down to compatibility issues. I'm going to talk about what I did and how they worked. I've tried a couple of different suites, including Kingsoft, a different file format than Office 365. And I tried to go all in when I did Office 365, you know, integrate it into our desktop, give her a dock icon,

make it feel like a true Excel experience. I'm going to tell you all about that here in a second. And then we're going to get into our Fedora 22 review, which I'm really excited to talk about. First, I got to tell you something I'm super passionate about, and that's DigitalOcean, the next sponsor of the Linux Unplugged program. What? You don't know what DigitalOcean is? DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your own cloud server up in the sky. You need root access on a box that's super fast, connected to tier one bandwidth based on Linux, all SSDs throughout.

That's DigitalOcean, and the value is incredible. You're going to get a root console. You can go right up to that website, HTML5, BadMamaJammer, written in Go. You got to watch that thing from post all the way up to the login screen, and you can get your droplet created in less than 55 seconds. And pricing plans start only $5 a month. A month. $5 a month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte, a terabyte, a terabyte of transfer for $5 a month. Like when it's that price, it's obvious why I have four of them, isn't it? I mean, come on. Hello. It's nuts. And they have data centers in New York,

San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, Germany, and London. That one in Germany is brand new. It's super hot. They got great connectivity to all their neighbors. The individual hypervisors have 40 gigabit E connections, the fastest SSDs they've ever deployed. I want to put a droplet over there because it just sounds so dang fancy. Seriously. Plus, you know, help out our folks over in that neck of the woods too. But let's talk about how you manage DigitalOcean. Because yeah, you know, 55 seconds is pretty badass. And the value is amazing. And the fact that it's all based on Linux and KVM is super killer. And the fact that they have great data centers everywhere is obviously essential. But it's that icing on top of that cake.

Let's not lie. We all like that icing. That's DigitalOcean's interface. Their simple, intuitive control panel kicks butt. And PowerUse is going to replicate it on a much larger scale with DigitalOcean's straightforward API that they just revved. Brand new revision of the API. And I love hearing about how you guys take advantage of these APIs. And there's a ton of amazing applications. You know what? I got to go look at some of these apps. So here, go over to digitalocean.com right now. Remember our code DOunplugged,

and then click on that community link right there. And then go over to the project section. And when you're in the project section, look at all of these freaking amazing applications written around the DigitalOcean API that you just get for being up on DigitalOcean. There are so many really awesome apps that make using DigitalOcean blow your mind, like stuff where you can just do incredible things from your phone, snap it right into your puppet management infrastructure, your vagrant infrastructure, use Drizzle with it. They have so many great little indicators for your desktops. There's one in the Arch repository. There's a PPA for the Ubuntu desktop.

So many cool tools built by the community around this API that you just get for free. And then they have a ton of really great tutorials. I mean, not just great, the best tutorials on the web, how to set up SSH keys, how to set up OpenVPN server on Ubuntu 14.04, all free, all up on the DigitalOcean website. And you know what else? They want to double down on that. So they're hiring content editors. In fact, if you're a technical writer, go get a job at DigitalOcean because they're serious about this stuff. And this is the kind of company you want to work for, where they really see the value in this kind of content.

So they're hiring editors and they're paying people to write for them too. They're back at it again. They're taking more entries. Go check it out. And by the way, if you're a Linux sysadmin, they're also hiring those. So there's so many great opportunities over DigitalOcean. They're an awesome company, built their entire business around Linux. And if you use the promo code DOUnplugged, one word, lowercase, you'll get a $10 credit. You try out that $5 rig two months for free. You guys, it's crazy nuts. It's so much fun. They're super fast. They have local repos. So those updates, they blow your mind. I'm not even kidding. Go try it out. Go create a droplet and install the updates. That alone will blow your mind. DigitalOcean even kidding. Go try it out. Go create a droplet and install the updates.

That alone will blow your mind. DigitalOcean.com, DO Unplugged. Go create something cool. My last droplet was a Minecraft server for my wife and son. They freaking love it. And before they do something crazy, I just take a snapshot. It's all possible with a straightforward, super simple interface. DigitalOcean.com, promo code DO Unplugged.

And a huge thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux unplugged program you guys rock you're on fire love it DigitalOcean dot com D O unplugged you guys are wrecking it up okay Noah so Ange came to me and she said honey I can't pay the bills and uh that wasn't a good thing to hear from the wife

and it's this damn Linux and you never want to hear this when you're trying to switch a new user over to Linux. So the problem was is she had a pretty fancy spreadsheet that she created in a newer version of Excel. It was a.xls file. X-L-S-X. And this is like an imitation of LibreOffice Calc? Yeah. Basically, it's like a knockoff, but they've sort of of messed up the UI really bad, so it's hard to use.

I don't know if you've seen this, but they just have these huge buttons across the top. And it's more recent. And the other thing is, this is really weird, but it's like this standalone binary application. It's not available in any repo, and you have to buy it directly

from this Microsoft company, and then you can download it, but you have to buy it directly from this Microsoft company, and then you can download it, but you have to run this weird proprietary installer that doesn't add it to your package repo. Really? Yeah, and they're not even Linux executables. So that was a huge way. So that didn't work out.

Couldn't use it. Couldn't install it. I couldn't go in with Microsoft Office. But then- Sounds like that company's out of touch with reality. Yeah. I know, right? Well, then I found out they're trying this new thing called Office 365, an online version of Microsoft Office.

So like a ripoff of Google Docs. Right. Actually, so I went for the business essentials because, you know, I'm a bidness and I had bidness to take care of. So it's $5 a month or about like $60 if you buy it for a year or something like that. And I'm thinking I'm getting this for her because, you know what, I want to stay on Linux. And if the price I have to pay is $60 so that way she gets access to Office, then I never have to worry about this again. Right? Or five times that. Yeah, right?

Right. That's what I was thinking. That's exactly what I was thinking. Then I discovered when you pay $5 a month, you don't just get like Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. Like that's all I wanted for $5 a month. In fact, I didn't want anything more than that. You get like the entire Microsoft Business Enterprise suite. You get like Active Directory on demand.

You get Exchange. You get Mobile Sync. You get provisioning of user accounts. You get calendaring groupware. You get shared OneDrive storage. You get your own customized domain for all of it. You can do branding with all of it. Like it is this massive, total overarching competitor to Google Apps for Business.

It is a beast of a service. And she has her own exchange server now. So you don't just get Office, which was a little intense. It was more than I really wanted. But nonetheless, I log in and I discover that you can't upload at least from what I could tell, you can't upload into Excel from the local file system the only way to open up

an existing document in Word or Excel online is to either import it from Dropbox or to open it off of OneDrive yeah I was going to say I think that is their prescribed method right? put the document into OneDrive and then you can access it through uh yeah through the you see the slippery slope i'm on so i go from i'd like my wife to be able to open up this spreadsheet to now my wife is a one

drive user she's uploading files to one drive she's you know importing them into excel like it's just this slippery lock-in slope so to be so to be clear so your expectation was that she would have the file locally but able but able to edit it and manipulate it in the club i guess i feel like that's a little unrealistic because you know like in google docs you can upload a file directly into google docs and yes then it's stored in google drive but right i don't know so it's semantics then at that point you're uploading it to one drive or uploading it to office 365 but for her the semantics matter because you have to upload to OneDrive first. So from like a user perspective, like you have to go to the OneDrive area, upload a file, and then you can –

But in theory, you should spend maybe 10 minutes picking files that she needs to use and put those up. And then once they're there, you should never need to pull them back down. Everything should just remain there. You edit them, right? Yeah, I think so. And if you ever create a new document, it's always going automatically be uh saved in one drive yes that's true and but see then this is also what i'm concerned about so i was hoping she'd be able to download them locally and save them in our own cloud folder and see now what i'm worried about is this one drive stuff is sort of

wedging out the one the the one the own cloud usage because now that. Yeah. But I mean, let's, so, so to summarize, you went to Microsoft and expected to be able to integrate Microsoft solution with another open source solution. I know, this was the recommendation of the mom room last time we talked about, you know, what I really wanted. It's a good recommendation. It's a good recommendation and it will solve the problem. What I want is I want to go to, I want to go to docs.microsoft.com and I want

word, I want a word editor in my web browser. I actually want spreadsheet. I want, I guess I want spreads.microsoft. She just needs to be able to put up a spreadsheet. Okay. But I just wanted to walk you through my logic train on this, like why I was going down the Office 365 route. So just to complete the picture because I did try something else and I'm going to tell you about that. And this I think is going to be my recommendation. But just to complete the Office 365 picture, what I opted to do is I went into Chrome,

and I made the Office 365 site a standalone app for Excel. And so I was able to put an Excel icon down in her GNOME dock, and she has a little Excel icon. And when she clicks, it opens up a dedicated Chrome window and launches what looks a lot like Excel. That's awesome. Yeah, it's not a one-to-one. But she launched it, and she dug it, and she thought it was okay. And what's great about that is you say it's not a one-to-one, but the reality is Microsoft changes Microsoft Office so freaking gosh darn much that really what is one-to-one now

would not be one-to-one in nine months anyway. Well, and for her, I think in a way this works because she still has – she still has a Mac, although she hasn't been using it very much. But if she did move back or wanted to use it for something, the files would be there, I guess, and I don't have to worry about getting Office for her stupid Mac now. So that's good, I guess. I'm not thrilled about it. So we talk about the lesser of two evils. 365 is very much the lesser of two evils between that and the actual Office Suite for a number of reasons. One is, like you said, it works on Linux.

And two, you're going to upgrade your regular Office Suite for the $300 or $400 or whatever it is anyway. And then you get four years of use essentially before you have to upgrade. The reality is most businesses are upgrading every one if not two years at most. And so now you're getting that. If it's really, would you say $60 a year? Yeah, yeah. That's actually a pretty competitive offering. It's not bad if you figure it's kind of a business standard.

And it's nice to be able to say you can do this under Linux now. So I totally, I dig that. There is another route that I'm going to have her try for a little bit and see what she thinks. And only she can really tell me about the true compatibility because I've tried to open up her spreadsheets. And, you know, I'm a total spreadsheet idiot, and they look like they work fine to me. But it's Kingsoft Office, and they have a very competitive, I know you're pretty familiar with this, right? They have a competitive looking spreadsheet program that in some ways has sort of a ribbon UI. It's supposed to have fantastic compatibility with Excel spreadsheets. It comes out of China,

so some people are a little uncomfortable with that, I guess. And it has full importing of the more recent 2010-style files. You can switch and toggle between different UI styles, which is kind of neat. And it has the benefit of being a local app, and it's free. It's not open source, but it's

cost-free. It's in the Arch repo. It's like WPS, but it's cost-free. So it's in the Arch repo. It's like WPS Office, I think. Yeah, WPS-Office is the Arch repo package. So it's called WPS Office now. And I don't know if you have the video version up, Noah, but it's definitely got a nicer UI even than, say, OpenOffice does. Yeah, yeah.

We talked about it at last a couple weeks ago, and I looked into it then. Now, did you look into Calegra? I haven't looked into Calegra, no. No, I haven't. Okay, that's the other one that I'm told. I haven't personally used it, but I've been told now by three different people that were previously Microsoft Office users that said LibreOffice wasn't cutting

it for them, but Calegra did it. I'll have to look at that, too. This is looking really solid. And the downside, again, Calegra did it. I'll have to look at that, too. Kings, though, this is looking really solid. And the downside, again, at Caligra, to the best of my knowledge, it's not open source. Oh, it's not? Well, see, here's the thing. If I remember right, it came from KOffice, so I always thought it was, but somebody told me...

No, I'm pretty sure it did. It was the old KOffice, and that's one of the reasons I haven't done it, is because she doesn't have very much QT stuff on her system. Right. But I mean, I'd be willing to – I don't install all the Qt for the KT4-based libraries, but Caligari itself should work always fine for me. So, yeah, man. I give it a go.

So they – yeah, and it looks like the chairman agrees. They say – oh, wait, no. Ram says it has worse compatibility compared to LibreOffice. Well, I don't mind installing it on my machine and giving it a go for it. But right now, I know she can get it done with Office 365. I know that works, so I feel pretty good about that. The only thing I'm a little worried about is it sort of negates her need for own cloud a little bit,

or I'm going to say, hey, Ange, I now need you to use OneDrive, own cloud, and Dropbox. It's a bit of a mess, so I need to kind of work that out, but I feel like this is some good insights I'm getting to help other potential Linux switchers out there in the audience in the future. These are good little bumps to hit. They're not unsolvable, but they're stuff that if maybe you didn't have somebody helping you would be a big sticky point. And so if we can learn these things, then maybe we can help people make that transition.

So WPS Office is one. We can help people make that transition. So WPS Office is one. And if you don't mind giving Microsoft some of your hard-earned dollars or whatever your currency is, Office 365, at least make it a business write-off for God's sakes, people. That's what I did. Jeez. And I got to say, if you're a little Google paranoid, you could totally – literally, you get Outlook. You get Active Directory.

You get everything. You get all the Microsoft stuff for $5 a month. And then you go like $9 a month and you get some other crap too. You get the actual desktop apps and crap like that. So the $5 a month is just the web apps from Microsoft, which if you're a Linux user, that's fine. That's all you need. If you've got some Windows in your life, I'm not going to judge you that much, but you can pay $9. that's fine. That's all you need. If you've got some Windows in your life, I'm not going to judge you that much, but you can pay $9.

That's funny. That's funny. You'd think the people running Windows would get a cheaper deal. So anyways, wps-community.org for the Kingsoft version of the WPS Office. That's wps-community.org. And you can Google search for Office 365, and good luck to you because they've got like 100 different websites you can land on to order that crap.

It's like all other Microsoft products. It's super confusing. But yeah, other than that, other than that one small complaint, I think she's actually going to be okay. I think we're finally sort of in the green, Noah. The one thing we have to work out is the drive space issue. That's getting a little tight. And really, actually, if you think about it, really really that's more of a monetary issue than everything else because we can i'm just looking here we can order an m.2 uh drive uh and she had a one terabyte before

yeah so i don't know if they make one quite that big well they do the samsung has the evo is 465 bucks so we can get a one terabyte i wonder if they and i wonder what she would need she and i have been talking about you know changing her photos to drop that down and so we can get a 1TB. I wonder what she would need. She and I have been talking about changing her photos to drop that down, and maybe we can go buy with a 512, but I'll talk to her tonight about that, see what she wants to do. Yeah, if we do a 512, that cuts the price in almost half. It's $275. Maybe we pick that up on Fridays when you're down here this weekend.

Yeah. Yep. Noah's going to be in town for the Linux Action Show on Sunday, and I've got a few things I'm doing to get ready around here for you because I know you have some shenanigans in the works. What kind of shenanigans are you up to while you're out here this weekend? I have, well, here's the thing. I had more shenanigans

when I originally started planning this trip because the original thing I was going to do was, well, I was going to build a box to fix your HDMI capture and then fix the Nook. But actually, it sounds like for the most part you got the Nook thing strained out thanks to System76. Yeah, at least for now I'm using their Miracat, although I do have to send it back at some point.

Right. Well, so maybe we'll still tackle that. And then I need to fix that other HDMI capture because even if we have it replaced, we can either use it as a backup or we can put it in the mobile production rack. You know what would be an awesome, totally crazy, not going to happen stretch goal? What's that? If we could dig up some

extra hardware around here and put OBS on it and give me that secondary streaming machine so I don't have to reboot the stream anymore between shows. Okay, it's going to happen. Because then we would have our live stream powered by Linux. I just decided it's going to happen. Well, it's a stretch goal, but I think we might be able to make it this weekend. I don't know if we have the hardware for it, but maybe we can move things around. It's going to happen. Well, it's a stretch goal, but I think we might be able to make it this weekend.

I don't know if we have the hardware for it, but maybe we can move things around. It's going to happen. We'll see. We'll see. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So Noah will be in studio. You know what's funny, though? Rotten went to all that trouble to make that really great art, the frames, which we're tweaking my look and Noah's look still, but the frames themselves look amazing on this week's episode of Linux Action Show.

Thank you, Rotten Corpse, again, for making some great frames for us. We have a nice consistent look for the show now. And, of course, we finally get it rolled out and now know it's going to be in studio. So I don't know how that's going to work. So, I mean, yeah, we can have a tweak those frames. But the reality is I might be there this week, but the remaining 50-some weeks in the year. Yeah, yeah. Right, I know.

No, it's good. It's just ironic that we finally got that all in. And then the next following episode, we're going to probably undo it because it doesn't really fit for – Yeah. But I don't know. We'll figure something out. In that case, I'll just make one. I'll make an extra overlay for when he's in –

Like a one-shot camera? Because, yeah, we're both on one camera in that one. Yeah. Yeah. But it's going to be fun. And it's going to be a packed episode because we'll be doing the Fedora 22 review, and we're going to interview the folks from the Autotest site. Right, Rotten? Is that Autotest? I'm blanking on his name.

Yeah, Autotest. Yeah, and these are the folks. Lucas. Lucas, thank you. Lucas from Autotest. Autotest is the project behind the automated testing of Linux kernel, Ubuntu, Red Hat. Whenever you hear a big project saying, we automatically test our builds for automated QA every single day to ensure quality.

When you hear them say that, they're probably using auto test. So we want to talk to Lucas and say, hey, you are the folks behind all of these projects that we depend on and making sure that they are doing really good solid builds. And hey, by the way, this is really important for rolling software too. Obviously, that's my angle a little bit. So we want to talk to Lucas this Sunday, which is great, right? Because on Sunday, we're going to talk to Lucas about auto testing for build quality. And today on Unplugged, we talked to Michael about benchmarking. Two sort of similar veins. And I thought it's great. If you listen to both shows, I think they're going to fit together

really well. But here's the catch. That interview with Lucas is probably going to air in a couple of weeks or a week or so. We'll probably air the Fedora 22 review this Sunday. So if you show up live, you're going to get extra show because we're only going to air one of the two segments first. But we'll record them both this Sunday since Noah's going to be in studio with the Fedora 22 review and that interview. Join us on Sunday, jblive.tv, 10 a.m. Pacific. Then the Faux Show after that. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that in your local time zone. I also just wanted to give a mention.

Ange was intending to join us for the ThinkPad Linux switch update because she has a lot more to share. But her mom is in the hospital today, and she needed to be with her. So my thoughts are with Ange and her mom and she will hopefully join us maybe next Tuesday. Cause it's, it's fun to see her enjoy it. You know, I come down,

I mean, every now and then she's like, she runs into issues and I'm like, Oh, I'm sorry. I'll fix that. But more often than not, she's smiling,

which is pretty, pretty fun because if you guys listen for a while, you know this has not always worked out so well. So it's kind of a nice change of pace to have her say, oh, this is so cool. I love how it does X. So maybe we'll get her to share some of that when she joins us next Tuesday. In the meantime, though, I want to tell you about something you should try out. And then we'll get to Fedora 22, and that is Linux Academy. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged right now.

Once you go there right now to get our special discount, you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and you'll get our 33% discount. Linux Academy is a great service set up by people that had a vision before I did.

I wish I would have thought of this. This is totally brilliant. It's created by people truly enthusiastic and passionate about Linux and open source and all of the technology in the ecosystem around that.

Why do I tell you that? Why does that matter? Why am I telling you that when this is a training website designed for people who love Linux? Because there's a lot of training resources online. There's crappy YouTube videos. There's generalist sites that get paid billions because they teach you everything from fixing your refrigerator to changing the tire on your car to Adobe After Effects. And there is a place in the market for that, obviously. But that's not what you need.

You need stuff created by people that truly care about Linux and open source. You guys know that makes a difference. And that's why I tell you where Linux Academy comes from. Before we brought them on as a sponsor, I sat down on the phone with them and talked for a long time about where they came from, what their passions were, where they're going, why they're doing this. And in fact, we actually hit the pause button a little bit early on in our relationship. And we said, why don't we hit pause? Because you guys are about to do something really cool.

And I'll tell you what that is in just a second. And once you do that, I think you're going to be perfect for my audience. And we waited a couple of months and they rolled that out. And, you know, they were really on the ball with this whole thing. Like they told us what their vision was. And man, they just, they only executed on that. They overshot, and they achieved even more. So I was super impressed.

We brought them in as a sponsor right away, and they've been with us every single week since then because they're perfect. Here's the feature they were working on that I knew you guys were going to love. They were working on integrating their lab system to spin up automatically in the courseware. You just get to that spot in the courseware, and the virtual machines just start up in the back end, give you an SSH login, and you're working on a real Linux box. But the part that was really genius is they said, we're going to have it

so you can choose any Linux distro in your courseware. So the system is smart enough where if you chose CentOS or you chose Debian for your courseware, when it gets to that part in the courseware, then they'll just spin up a Debian VM or a CentOS VM. And then almost every week that we have a spot, there's something new to talk about.

I love these nuggets, these single how-tos. Just get in there and do something real quick. In fact, check this out. They just updated it. If you go to LinuxAcademy.com, start by going to LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged, but then check out their nuggets section. They've been adding this all the time because it's quick content. You don't have to have a whole course on it, just something you need to know to make you better at doing

your job, make you faster at doing your job, make you a little more confident at doing your job, or maybe help you learn something so you can get a new job. So if you go to linuxacademy.com slash nuggets, here's a new one they just posted. VirtualBox. Clone a VM and change the UUID using the command line. Here's another VirtualBox.

Running a headless VM mode. Building a firewall with IP tables. Another quick nugget. How great is that? These are just quick video courses, and when you log in, you just take it and watch it, and you're done. Creating a Pixie Boot server. Setting up Linux single sign-ons. All this stuff.

Look at all these frickin' nuggets they have over here. You could just spend all your time right there if you wanted to, and just learn individual things and get better at each thing. Setting up SSH keys. Editing an ISO image, working with DOSBox, securing SSH. I love that one. Configuring Linux kernel parameters, writing custom Java services, how Nmap can be used to compromise your system, how NetStack can be used to compromise your system, MD5 checksums and how to use them. All individual topics that we could all probably stand a little bit more on. topics that we could all probably stand a little bit more on. LinuxAcademy.com slash nuggets to see those. Start by going to LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. You get our 33% discount. They have new stuff they're rolling out all the time, like the new DevOps courseware,

the Red Hat certified stuff, the AWS stuff is always being updated. First on the scene with Docker and the best material on Docker. All of it. LinuxAcademy. More than that. I literally could spend the whole show telling you it all. They have an unbelievable amount of content, and that's why the subscription service makes so much sense linuxacademy.com slash unplugged

and a big thank you to Linux Academy for freaking rocking our face with the awesome support and creating a service that's truly great for Linux users I really love being able to say that linuxacademy.com slash unplugged alright so Fedora 22 is installed on a system 76 was very nice to

send me a test Bonobo. It's a couple of generations old, but that's fine. It's like a Core i7. I think it has 120 gigabyte SSD in it. I think it has 8 gigabytes of RAM in it. An NVIDIA 7 series GPU dedicated. 17-inch screen. Really nice laptop.

I love the Bonobo series. So this is such a good machine to test this stuff on. Absolutely love it. So today, Fedora 22, or was it yesterday? No, it's today. Fedora 22 was released, and we'll be talking mostly about the workstation spin. Of course, the big feature in Fedora 22 is GNOME 3.16, which means you're going to get them new notifications. That little bar down at the bottom is gone now,

and your icons are off in this little tray area off to the side. I happen to like it. I know some people freaking hate it. And they've done a few tweaks to the default GNOME setup that you don't get on your standard GNOME desktop. The one that you don't care about is that little Fedora logo that's in the bottom of the corner is actually an extension. So whatever background you change, I believe it stays overlaid. I thought that was kind of interesting. They've done a few other tweaks, too, like

when your terminal completes a command, it'll generate a notification using the new GNOME notification system. That's a Fedora specific tweak. That is not in general GNOME. I thought that was kind of an interesting little, like, where they chose to make their tweaks was kind of funny. Of course, GNOME 3.16's backend has better OpenGL support.

You have the improved Edwadia themes. GNOME's image viewer has been redesigned. Files now comes with bigger icons. Thumbnails by default re-organize menus. This is cool. I'd really love to see Fedora doing this. Installation of GStreamer codecs, fonts, and certain document types,

now handled by software. And this is where I realized Fedora's, for me, as an end user, Fedora's edge comes up over distributions like Arch. All this stuff I just said, except for the terminal completion thing, has been in Arch for weeks. But what Arch can't do is sort of have a unilateral decision on how we're going to deliver something and everything pivots and does that now. And what Fedora does, like when they rolled out GNOME software, well, that's just how you get stuff now. You know, like Codex,

you know, you need something installed, like updates, everything is just done through GNOME software. So with Fedora, not only do you get the latest and greatest software like GNOME 3.16 and all these great improvements. But it's presented in a way where it feels like a more cohesive package than it does when you put it together yourself. And so my initial impressions with Fedora are really positive. I'm starting to finally become a little more comfortable with the installer. I have a little bit of complaints still about how you'd partition with the installer. But the installer is looking pretty good.

All of it's pretty nice. It's pretty fast. Graphical boot is pretty good. I did have a major technical snafu. I'm going to tell you guys about that. But before I get into that part, did anybody have any Fedora 22 experiences in the Mumble room they want to share with us? So I've been playing with fedora a little bit um i haven't downloaded the the official uh iso yet i was just playing with the with the beta one um but uh i have you had a

chance to play with dnf at all yeah i've only installed a few things with dnf but there's a couple of interesting things about it yeah thanks for bringing that up uh yeah dnf seems to be faster uh here's a couple other things that i it. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, DNF seems to be faster. Here's a couple other things that I thought was interesting about DNF. Updates that don't work, you know, like a bad update or something, it's just totally skipped. Before in YUM, you had to do dash, dash, skip, dash, broken. But now DNF just does that by default. Repositories, the 404, DNF doesn't lose its crap.

It just skips right over them, doesn't care, which is nice because some of the RPM Fusion stuff isn't up to date. There's a few repos for Fedora 22 that aren't up to date. I think Fusion is now. When you remove a package with DNF, it will automatically remove any dependent packages that were not explicitly installed by the user. And this one, I wonder if it's biting me in the ass

because I feel like I couldn't get my software installed at one point. DNF will check for updates in the background every hour. Wait, no, I'm installed at one point. DNF will check for updates in the background every hour. Wait, no, I'm sorry. By default, DNF will check for updates in configured repositories hourly, starting 10 minutes after the system boots. So after your first 10 minutes, and then every hour after that, it checks for updates.

And I don't know if this is why, but I launched software, and I tried to install a re--edit or re-text whatever the markdown editor and it just hung it never installed and I was wondering if maybe it's because DNF was trying to do an update in the background too to check for updates what's really nice is the GNOME software so when I search so if I

do gparted in GNOME search it's doing a really instant good job of like pulling results out of GNOME software, so when I search, so if I do gparted in GNOME search, it's doing a really instant good job of like pulling results out of GNOME software too. So if I don't have gparted installed, it'll show up and it's just one click and it's installed. And no password has to be entered, nothing. It's really nice. largely why I like to stick with Fedora, at least on one of my machines, and why I kind of consider it my main distro, is because I do so much work in the server sphere where we have so much redhead enterprise, YUM is going to die. DNF is going to be the eventual replacement for it. And I get a chance to play with this stuff. In Fedora 22, the YUM command is symlinked to DNF now, and then it

gives you a warning saying YUM is deprecated. The same thing happened with the service command, right? I don't know if it still works in Fedora, but it definitely works in Red Hat 7. If you type in service space sshd space stop, it redirects that to system control, which is great for people like me. So I'm going to use DNF now for a couple years before

RHEL 8 comes out, and when RHEL 8 comes out and everyone's going, oh, well, and this is assuming they even replace YUM with the NF in RHEL 8, if that happens, and everyone else is saying, oh, this is something new, I'm going to say, well, I actually have been playing with it for three years, so it's great. And that is fundamentally

why I continue to use Fedora. So a couple of big changes for graphical desktops have hit this version, and I think some people have hit some snags with those. And that's where one of my snags was. But, oh, Minimac, I wanted to give you a chance to chime in. Go ahead. Oh, yeah, actually, this is exactly the line where I was going next.

Lib input, yes, exactly. Jump in on that, would you? Yeah, I'm running this on a Chromebook, Acer C720P. And the touchpad was not the best one using the Synaptics driver. And it's working quite better with libinput. But libinput has less features than Synaptic has. So some people that are upgrading from Fedora 21 to Fedora 22 will have some problems using their touchpad in a normal way they were using it before. Yeah, I noticed immediately under the Bonobo that the touchpad has worked.

Like there's just something different about it. It feels like maybe they put butter underneath my mouse cursor. It just is a little smoother. It feels like it's really locked onto my finger. I like the speed. I've heard complaints, though. I've heard people complaining the speed doesn't work for them. It just is a little smoother. It feels like it's really locked onto my finger. I like the speed. I've heard complaints, though. I've heard people complaining the speed doesn't work for them. It's a little glitchy.

On the Bonobo, it's great. Lib input is great. I don't know what it's going to be like now going back to other distros. I think I'm going to notice a difference. So I loved it too, basically. But I have some special workflow. So I'm using a software for mouse gestures. And I was not able to do my normal mouse gesture with libinput. So in the end, I just removed that package.

And I wanted to blacklist that libinput. I was not able to. So I removed libinput. And now I'm working on Synaptics again. And I have to configure it with Xconfig. Oh, boy. God, now you feel like old Linux. So that's the one big change for X users.

The other big change, yeah, you can use – okay, I will try that. So Blackout says you can use xf86-video-libinput on Arch to try it out. I might. the Arch to try it out, I might. The other big change is GDM, if you're using an open-source graphics driver, GDM, the graphical login manager, not GNOME itself, but GDM, uses Wayland by default. I know that's going to cause some people problems because it caused me problems. Essentially, what would happen is I'd get Grub, I'd hit enter, I would begin booting, I would get the graphical Fedora boot screen, which is quite nice, where it fills the Fedora logo up

as it boots. Then it would hang with a completed boot logo for about 35 seconds. And then it drops down to a text console, and I get some sort of libc string errors. I can't even tell what it is. I get some string of errors, and the system never boots after that. Or it never goes forward.

It appears to hard lock even. Because I can't control it, delete it, I can't ping it, anything like that. And my fix, unfortunately, and I have this in the show notes, if you guys run into this, if you, after your installation, even though your live session

worked fine, if after you reboot and after first boot it doesn't go into the graphical session, you can go into slash Etsy slash grub and then you – or I'm sorry, slash – no, not grub. Slash Etsy slash GDM because you're changing GDM not to use Wayland. So go to slash Etsy slash GDM slash custom.conf. Edit custom.conf in Etsy GDM and uncomment Wayland enable equal false. It's already in the file. You just uncomment the file and save it and reboot the machine, and it won't try to use Wayland for GDM.

Now, here's the tricky thing. Because when it tries to launch Wayland, it hard locks the machine. Your options are to do no mode set at grub, edit your grub boot line and add no mode set, and then get in to your basic session and then add that, remove that comment. Or what I did, because I knew this was going to happen after my second installation, because I wanted to change my partition layout anyways, is before I rebooted the installer from the live environment, I just did a mount command

and I looked where my root file system was mounted at, and I just edited the custom.comp file right there from the live session. And all you have to do is just remove that comment line. Leave the WaylandEnabled equal false. Leave that. Just remove the hashtag.

The number sign. So it's not a comment anymore. And then when you reboot, your system will boot just fine. You just have to disable Wayland, and that solved my problem, and now I'm able to use the open source driver. I have full 3D acceleration under GNOME. I'm getting all the fancy OpenGL effects, and my system boots, and it is running great.

I've done updates since then. I've updated the base system. I've been installing applications. I can't believe how fast it runs. I can't believe how fast this thing runs. It's so fast. So my initial impression with Fedora 22 was a little rocky because it never is a good impression after first boot to fail to get to X. That always kind of sucks, especially when it's really reliable hardware and you just had a live environment that was working so you know something's funky.

But almost immediately to me it was probably like a Wayland thing. So there was a bug now here's here's the only thing that might be tricky for you is if you run into this the way the fedora project addresses this is they have a common problem section in their release notes and they say it's a macbook specific problem so they'll say macbook graphics aren't working uh and they even in the wiki they say on certain macbook laptops with google with dual graphics card the fedora 22 live environment boots fine but after installation there's just a working uh and they even in the wiki they say on certain macbook laptops with google with dual graphics card the fedora 22 live environment boots fine but after installation there's just a black screen with no boots boot splash followed by the gnome login screen this seems to be an

issue with wayland the upcoming windowing system used by the gnome login screen but it's actually not a macbook issue because i had it on the bonobo so i would bet it's probably a new vu driver problem or specific model. So yeah. So Ray asked, does the GNOME software tool show GNOME apps? Geez, I can't talk today. No. And actually, this is another problem with Fedora 22. And I have a link in the show notes about this. There is sort of a lack of apps in there right now because there is an app description file that has to be updated in order to be displayed in GNOME software. That went mandatory starting with Fedora 22, and most of the projects that are in GNOME software

have not submitted this app description file. So there is a lot of apps missing right now from GNOME software. Developers will be re-adding those description files, or the package maintainers will be re-adding those description files or the package maintainers will be re-adding those description files over the next few days. So you might be a little surprised by a lack of items in GNOME software. Now, a little bit of silver lining here. Red Hat has hired or is actually moving another one of their developers

to work full-time on the Nuvoo project or work more on the Nuvoo project. So while I just ran into this issue with Fedora 22, maybe it's going to be fixed by Fedora 23, and this has got to be good for Wayland. Red Hat's letting another one of their developers focus on improvements to the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. Ben Skaggs is already a Nuvoo DRM driver maintainer, and David Arley, the overall DRM subsystem maintainer and contributor to Nuvoo, are already employees of Red Hat. So Hans will be joining. He's been mostly known for his Linux USB

contributions in the past. One year ago, he joined the Red Hat graphics team where he's worked on various Xorg and Wayland things. And he was also one of the developers that worked on lib input that we just talked about. So now with the lib input work settling down, his next course of action is going to be working on Nuvoo. Right now, it's not known specifically what he'll be focusing on, but he's still learning more about GPU driver programming. But it's really good to see Red Hat doing this, and he's already shared his new focus with the Nuvoo community

via their development mailing list. So Red Hat's putting some more weight behind this. So perhaps by Fedora 23, this was going to be a problem of the past. It's just, yeah, like Blackout says, or Corky's saying, it's a transition. Right, Corky? It's a transition to Wayland's going to be bumpy

for a little while, don't you think? I do think that, and there's a lot of work to do, but it's very clear that the Fedora team are focused on this. This is one of their main features as a Linux distribution. It only really matters inside the Linux community but it's a big difference. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

And I'm looking forward to... I'm going to continue to run it for the rest of the week. I was running the beta versions. They also have the same Wayland problem. So I was hoping, in fact, I think I even sent Noah like a telegram the other night. I'm like, I'm hoping they fix this in the final ISO because this is the pain in the butt. They didn't, but I'm not going to hold it against them because those things happen during these kinds of transitions and it's easy enough to fix and it is documented. Not necessarily documented correctly, but it's documented. So now that

this stuff's out of the way, I feel like I've got a great setup. I've got a great performing system. It's on a great rig. It's going to be my main system for the rest of the week. On Sunday, we'll give you the full take and see what I've been able to make of it. Both Noah and I will be running it for the rest of the week. Noah, any thoughts so far before we close this topic up?

Nope. I mean, we'll have, I'm sure... It's hard to give any real feedback the day the, like I haven't even installed the actual ISO yet. So I don't want to pass any, any of the problems I'm having. I don't want to talk about them until I actually get the ISO. And then really, you don't know all the problems you're going to have until you've actually used it for like a week.

Are you going to run it on a laptop? Is that what you'll be running? Yep. So my thought process on that is my i have a workstation at my house my main machine at my house which does have fedora and i won't switch that over i'm kind of in the same uh boat as michael i'll wait for a couple days maybe in a couple weeks until everything kind of fleshes out and then once all that's smoothed over and i try everything on my laptop then i'll move my actual workstation over that makes sense i like it yeah i uh i could

see my i could I really can see myself one day maybe becoming a primary Fedora user. Not yet. I don't think. Maybe. I'll let you know on Sunday. Maybe I'll use this for a couple days and fall in love. There's a couple of tools out there I've already found that I really like, so it'll just be a matter of getting some of my favorite applications I've had problems with in the past.

I'm looking at you, Rupat. Telegram. Looking at you. So I'll let you guys know. I'd like to hear what you guys think. Go over to linuxactionshow.reddit.com and leave us your feedback for Fedora 22 and any tricks or tips that you would pass along to us to make it a better experience that maybe we could even pass along to the audience

in Sunday's review. Love that too. linuxactionshow.reddit.com is a great place to make this show even better. You can also email us. Go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact and choose Linux Unplugged from the drop-down and send us in a note. We love that.

That's really great. In fact, I'll try to get to a bunch of those next week because I don't think I've read any notes for a couple of weeks. I guess I'm a bit of a jerk. Sorry about that. So we'll get to those soon. Also, we'd love to have you join us live. And don't forget, we're doing it at 10 a.m. Pacific next week.

Just next week, we're doing a special early recording right after Tech Talk Today. So show up if you'd like for Tech Talk Today at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern, and then just stick around for Linux Unplugged right after that. Should be fun to do. It'll be a morning edition of the Linux Unplugged show, and then I'll be hitting the road to go pick up some

family. All right, everybody. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next week. Thank you. There we go. And it looks like Mr. Larable has left the room, I think. That was nice of him to stop by, though. That was nice. Good show, guys. Thank you very much.

Now we need titles. JBTitles.com. Now we vote to the death. Mwahaha. Has anybody tried out the plasma spin of Fedora? Anybody? Nope. Anybody?

Ooh, is that running Plasma 5? I believe it is. Nice. Yeah. Hmm, poor Mandriva. I've been running nothing but Plasma 5 on Arch lately. How do you like it? Oh, it's so good.

I've been such a GNOMEome fan for like ever since i started you know being in part of linux and then really i've came out i'm like oh same here no no i started trying kd5 plasma 5 two weeks or so ago or something yeah and you like it yeah but uh the what is it dolphin file manager doesn't have Qt 5 support, I think. So the theme looks screwed up. So I'm back to GNOME again. So I'm going to wait for the Qt 5 things to work out correctly. I tell you, Plasma 5 is really great. I mean, it is really, really great.

I just, I still think it's too many options for me, but it really comes down to my sound problems. I switch for weekends. Like, I go on vacations to Plasma 5, and 5 and i'm like oh it's so geeky and cool and they've thought of so many neat things and then i get burned out and i go back to gnome yeah same here and i'm really in love with the window manager kwin and the wobbler windows yes yes yes since Since I moved to Debian, I stopped distro hub. Chris, you mentioned once that Ubuntu, not Ubuntu, sorry, Gnome, has the great advantage now with 3.16 that you almost do not realize that you're running a desktop environment, and that's the way to go for me.

I like that too. Just totally out of the way, except when I need it, it is there. Like when I need to search for files or when I need to check my calendar or manage a setting, it's there and gives me, I think, one of the best UIs to do that. But primarily, most of the time, I forget I'm even using a desktop environment, which I like. you see on my dual screen desktop here i'm running e17 with gnome integration so for me the switch is e17 you don't realize that you're using it it's just there so we should do we the title should probably have something to do with the with our chat with michael or with fedora 22 i would think it's jbtitles.com i like fedora explorer i don. It's clever, but it doesn't really tell anybody what we talked about. You know? You know?

You know? Wow. Says we talked about Fedora. Get it out of here. Fedora isn't yummy anymore. That's clever. Lock in, slip and slide. I like that, but it doesn't really, again, cover what we talked about. Exploring Fedora, yeah, I guess.

Chris, by the way, you're using GNOME 3.16, right? Yes, sir. In the bottom left corner, if you're not using top icons, is the drawer vibrating if you don't if you're not using top icons is the drawer like vibrating if you put your mouse in the wrong position yes it does vibrate sometimes let's see okay then it's not only me because it does that on three of my computers it kind of shakes too

sometimes yeah it shakes a little bit yeah so it's like the top left corner, but it vibrates and acts quickly. Yes, I wonder if they do that on purpose or... I don't think so. But if you turn on off animations, it stops doing that. Yeah, that makes sense. But I want my animations. Right. Chris, may I just ask, which age were you when you started using Linux?

Well, I was still in high school, so I guess I was 18 or 19. 18, I guess, I suppose, is when I really first started. 17 or 18, I suppose. I'm 33 now. Yeah, I'm 19 now. And I've used Linux for the past two years. So I'm somewhere in the 15 or 16-year range. Okay.

Yeah. What was the first distribution? Well, I guess technically the first distribution I probably used was Red Hat something and then Debian around the same time. We had a Red Hat and Debian system. But they weren't my systems. I used them. I destroyed them.

I accidentally did rm-rf on the root while I was using the system. I did all of those things. That's clever. Yeah. But the first time I actually installed Linux for myself, like this is going to be my machine, I'm putting this on my computer now, it was Mandrake. So for me, I started with SUSE 6.1.

So I still have the box here. and a huge book that came with it it really and then i started switching i started switching from the different rpm distributions landed with mandrake then came a short debian phase and then ubuntu started and then i stayed with ubuntu for a long time yeah me. I certainly feel like a noob here. My first distribution was 1004. My first was 1204. But, well, I'm only 19 now and I was 17 when I started.

Well, not for the first time, but for the first nerdy time. I was going to say Fedora 15 was my first one in Athens pretty old compared to now yeah I remember that's funny I remember when Fedora Core became a thing I remember when they dropped the Core

in fact what saved me from my Mandrake hate was Red Hat it was Red Hat I think it was 7 and then they transitioned from red hat to to rel and fedora core and then they dropped the core and i used and it's funny because that's kind of what got me started on on fedora was i used fedora because it was the logical progression from red hat and then i've stuck with every core since fedora core one all the way up and just upgraded my system. In fact, the original Fedora Core box I still have. I never nuke and paved it. I just kept upgrading it, and I think it is on Fedora Core 4 or 5,

and it still works. I turned it on in a while, but that's a testament to Linux. I've never actually had to do anything with it. Hey, you know, changing topics for a second, just thinking about the Mandriva store or the Mandrake story, the Mandriva company story, I think the Linux Action Show subreddit broke that story. I'm not positive, but because it was the guy that submitted it linked,

well, obviously we didn't break it because that German website or that French website did, but I think we were the first U.S. website to have it, and then LWN and Pharonix picked it up. Nobody linked to us, though. Well, the subreddit post was 20 minutes before the Pharonix post. And, you know, I've also been noticing, and it's fine, I guess. I mean, it's a subreddit. It's a public subreddit, so what can I say?

It's fine. But I've also noticed several Softpedia stories based on stories out of the subreddit. Seems to be a resource for a lot of people, which I guess in a way is pretty awesome. I mean, one of the soapboxes we're on all the time is we need to improve the Linux press coverage, and if our subreddit's helping do that,

wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but I mean, shit, at least it's something. And the other thing is, too, is it would be nice if JB got some credit for the... Yeah, that would be, yeah. Just leave, just leave. If you're going to get your kind of common decency, even if it's not copyrighted, just say... Just give us a source link or something would be – yeah. Just link. Just link. It's kind of common decency even if it's not copyrighted.

Just give us a source link or something would be great. Right. Or even if all they said was we pulled this from the JB subreddit and we pulled Jupiter Broadcasting reported today. Something. That would be nice. That would be nice. I guess the way to capitalize – yeah, see, the problem is they can always get it from our subreddit. Like even if we had our own news, even if we published that stuff on the site.

But all right. So right now Fedora Explorer is still our top title. I'm just not digging that. Fedora isn't yummy anymore coming at number two. Fed up, bench it. What's that? Fed up, bench it. Yeah, that's okay too.

Are you fed up? Fed up, yeah. Fed up, bench it, yeah. It's not bad. None of these are really awesome. How about Fedora Milady? What, dude? What's that got to do with anything?

Madriva Falls and Fedora Rises. Or Fedora Milenix. Madriva Falls and Fedora Rises? I got it. Fedora Hipster. Fedorable Benchmarks. Fedorable Benchmarks. But then it sounds like you're Ben your benchmark is Fedora, though.

Mandiria Falls, Fedora Rises. That's not bad. He does use Fedora, so technically that's sort of relevant. Would it be too much advertisement using the name Forenix in it? I don't know. I think it would probably hurt the episode. Fedora gets benched. Fedora now in its future.

I guess we'll go with Fedora Rises, Mandriva. What was it? What was it? What was it? Fedora Rises. As Mandriva falls, Fedora Rises. Fedora Rises and Mandriva falls. Whichever one sounds more catchy to me.

It's kind of long. Fedora Rises and Mandriva falls. Should it be Fedora rises, calm, and Mandriva falls? Yeah, it doesn't really fall. I mean, they were about to die, and they got revived, and they still did. So it's kind of bad for them. How about something like Mandriva passes away and Fedora is a new baby? I don't even think there's a place for Mandriba in the title, to be honest.

Yeah, I think you're probably right. I think that's probably right. Let's see. Fedora. I don't even know if I necessarily need Fedora in the title since Sunday's Linux Action Show is going to be about Fedora. I mean, you're fed up with seeing Linux regressions. You're fed up because Fedora. Because the program Fedora. and you're benchmarking it.

Okay, you make it a good pitch. I'll give you that. You should probably use Fedora anyway just because it was released today anyway. Yeah, that's true. Mandrake is the big news. You think? I'm not so sure it is. In fact, I think the sad thing is that it's not big news.

Well, I think that it makes everybody start thinking back it's nostalgic yeah but to me all it says is that it's just verifying what i already thought years ago so you've got a guest yeah we did have a guest if you name it after the guest yeah the the votes yeah that's true i do agree with that it would be a good way to go uh is michael fed up with bench? The regression killer, regression hater, hating regressions. The quest to quell regressions. What about that? The quest to quell regressions.

The quest to quell regressions. The quest to quell regressions? Yeah. The quest to quell regressions. It seems like the Linux benchmarking dot com. Actually, not terrible. What about

putting Linux performance on the record? Is that too long? How about just benchmarking Linux?

Actually, you already have Linux on the record. You already have Linux on the record.

It's on the record because it's the show. And it's still on the record because we're really recording the benchmarks and not all about it. Benchmarking TNG. Come on, come on. There's got to be something in here. The quest to quell. Fedora chip to Madriva.

I actually kind of like the benchmarking Linux one. Doesn't that sound super boring, though? Here's the thing. The problem with the quest to quell, that's really catchy, but it's like the least descriptive Linux one. Doesn't that sound super boring, though? Here's the thing. The problem with the Quest that's really catchy, but it's the least descriptive thing ever. Yeah, I know. What about Mandriva benched? It's not bad.

How about Mandriva sits the bench? Tip your fedora to Mandriva. Or Mandriva bench no more microsoft buys mandriva that one keeps jumping out at me that would get some clicks uh all right all right benchmarking benchmark just name it clickbait that'd be good fedora next gets bent mich, the regression terminator. See, that's funny to me. That's funny. Let's see. America's next top band. Then everyone's going to be Michael what?

Michael from Coder Radio? What? Yeah, right. Yeah, it's true. How about you wouldn't believe what Michael does in his basement? I like that. Michael's basement. Yeah, that's good.

We should put something about that basement in there. I guess we could do benchmarking. I mean, yeah, we could do benchmarking Linux. That is like our basement benchmarking. It kind of downplays what he's doing a little bit, though. Linux gets benched? Benchmarking Linux only has two votes. Basement benchmarks.

Linux coming off the bench. Actually, no, I just type it America. Step into Larible's basement. Yeah, I don't know. I think we're going to have to go with benchmarking Linux, as lame as that is. God, that seems lame. You know, that feels like a committee compromise. If we were doing benchmark Linux, I would want know. I think we're going to have to go with benchmarking Linux, as lame as that is. God, that seems lame. You know, that feels like a committee compromise.

If we were doing benchmark Linux, I would want to do benchmarks as well, instead of just reporting on one site doing benchmarks. I would do a lot more involvement in that title. So, say again. So, what now? If we were doing benchmarking, as in the whole show's topic,

I would want to also do my own benchmarks and report some fun findings back to the show. Yeah, it does seem like a title for a show where we're actually doing benchmarks, right? Yeah, I used to do file system benchmarks all the time. That's why I landed on XFS back in like 2004 anyway. Is the question in the title something doable?

Because if it is, you can ask are you fed up? Engine. Regression Terminator. Let's see. The Quest? No, I got nothing with that. Let's see. There's got to be something in the fact that he benchmarks because he hates regressions.

There's got to be a title there. Regressing on the bench? Which is terrible. I think we're going to have to go benchmarking Linux as awful as it is. Thanks a lot. Oh, yeah.

And it is true because it is actually benchmarking the Linux kernel it literally is benchmarking Linux oh jeez get it out of here oh oh actually we can use one sentence

that Michael pulled off which is Linux graphic drivers are paired with Windows. So Linux pairs Windows. 11 years of... Okay, I do actually kind of agree. Actually, you know what, Micah89? I do agree.

Actually, Micah89 is right. He's totally right. 11 years of Linux benchmarking is sort of a call-out to Pharonix and Michael, but also still about benchmarking. It doesn't make it sound like the episode itself is about benchmarking and it doesn't make it sound like the episode itself is about benchmarking. But

has he always been benchmarking? Ah, close enough. Maybe it's just news. Close enough. I'm going to go with it. 11 years of Linux benchmarking. I think it's actually pretty good. That's actually, if you think about it, it is once you realize it's Liarbell, it's, I don't know,

it's a good shout out to him. You could do just a decade, a decade of Linux benchmarks, something like that. No. Well, even longer. Yeah, 11's shorter. I know you're right. It reads better, but yeah. All right. Wow. Wow. Just when I was about to flush it too, right at the last moment, you know what, that means we get a hello everybody from Obama. Hello everybody.

Hey, look at us.