LINUX Unplugged - Episode 95: Disjunctive Normal Fedora | LUP 95

Episode Date: June 2, 2015

A follow up on our Fedora 22 review, including a few areas we missed. How Google’s Cardboard could kickstart open source VR & new features coming to Gnome 3.18.Plus our take on the state of openSUSE, why 2015 might really be the year of the Linux Laptop & much, much more!

Is anybody in here running any Docker images in the Mumble room? Anybody use Docker? Nope. Well, I think Docker is getting pretty popular. Yeah. And I'm worried that we are creating ourselves a bit of a long-term problem with Docker. They could give us a bit of a bad name, and the BSD guys are going to give us a hard time about it. We've got to get our act together when it comes to Docker containers. So a study was just done recently showing that over 30% of official Docker images in the Docker hub contain high-priority security vulnerabilities.

Honestly, what did you expect? So, I mean, really, what did you expect? I mean, that is the fundamental tradeoff. Either we have everything is linked, so you have the binary, and that links to all these libraries, and those libraries are dynamically updated, which, let's face it, in practice, never works. Well, I wouldn't say never. Okay, fine. I mean, it works. It almost never works.

Well, I don't know. I think that's a little harsh. It's not harsh. Eventually, it will cause a problem. Eventually, it usually causes a problem. But if you think about it, that problem happens the minority of the time because your system works the majority of the time. That's true. Okay, so in the grand scheme of things, I agree with you.

However, from the perspective of if you need that one piece of software and that one piece of software doesn't work, and I have been bitten by this so many times that I admit that I am overly sensitive to the issue. Well, and you're working at it from an enterprise angle, too, where it's much more of an issue. Right, because these companies, like I said, they release software for one version of Linux. So here's the issue, though. I mean, yeah, I guess it's not that surprising, but we're talking things like these Docker containers

are vulnerable to shell shock, heartbleed, poodle, et cetera. And then images published by Docker users not explicitly verified by any authority. Like, if you just go to, like, the general images in the Docker hub, it goes up to 40% of the images having serious security vulnerabilities. Over 40%. uh a lot of them are old mercurial when you look at the official images is the number one source of vulnerabilities but of course when you look at community images ones that are not from the

official hub then the vulnerabilities primarily come from bash apt open ssl uh file bin utils mercurial rpm like you know the basic stuff, the basic stuff, SQL, sudo, HTTP, WGIT. Like, these things are just not getting patched, and they're getting these weird vulnerabilities. So now I think you're being too harsh. Really? Well, here's why. Look at this. Look at this.

So here's why. Okay, but the numbers, Noah, are disgraceful. I mean, we're talking really well-known vulnerabilities that haven't been taken care of. We're talking, like, you put this stuff into production. Unless you have taken serious mitigation steps, 40% of these images created by the community have critical vulnerabilities. And by the way, dude, if you drop from critical down to medium vulnerabilities and you include everything rated as medium, then 70% of the images have vulnerabilities. Yeah. So let's start with this.

You start with a technology that is relatively new, right? Docker has not been around a terribly long time. I mean, it's still, I mean, granted, people were putting it into production before Docker even said, you should be putting it into production because they're so excited. But the reality is it was just last year, I think it was itself, when the guy came out and said, all right, we actually now support you to put this into production. So it's not like it's been out that long to begin with. Second of all, they're doing something relatively groundbreaking from the standpoint that

we don't really have any sort of cross-platform container that can – Cross distro, cross – yeah, that's true. So, okay, so then you have that working for you. Then add to that the fact that the people that are doing this, the people that are smart enough and the people that have the resources to do this have other things to do so they might be able to create this docker container but the ability to sit there and maintain it and update it constantly yeah they got better things to do right well so corky you think this is just fundamentally uh the flaw with having a docker hub well i don't think we really need it. The whole point of having a hub

is to replace what official package repositories. If we just did what the Rocket project is really about, just taking the container and then sticking it in package repos, such as the Ubuntu repos or the Arch repos,

and have people install and use Docker containers from repos or the Arch repos and have people install and use Docker containers from official package repositories. Would this be a big issue? That's an interesting approach. You know, I was going to argue with you. You're right. I mean, I guess you could take the

Rocket approach and do it at the distro level. I wanted to back up and say doesn't this actually justify the need of a hub? Because here's a different approach. What if, okay, so what these guys are doing, this guy at BaniOps that wrote up the post, is they're doing an analysis of the code.

They're scanning it. They're checking out these images. They're running vulnerability assessments against them, and they're creating like Nessus reports or whatever the hell they're using. Somebody at the Docker company could just as easily do this. Docker could automate this process. Docker could automate the flagging of images that have known vulnerabilities. It could even rate them

with scores. It could say this one has high vulnerabilities. Docker could do all of this, and they could add that as a value add to the Docker Hub because I think there is a place in the market for the Docker Hub. You know, we were talking about that new Office suite that's going to be server-side Google Docs competitor, and they're bringing it to Linux for the Docker Hub. You know, we were talking about that new Office suite that's going to be server-side Google Docs competitor,

and they're bringing it to Linux for the first time. And their option for distribution when they come to Linux for the first time is a Docker image because they can wrap their heads around a centralized repository that distributes these Docker containers down to end users for server software.

For server software deployment, it does make some sense. Have one spot to go for all Linux distros. I don't know if I wanted to be Docker. I don't know if I wanted to be owned by a company. But I think it's interesting to give the market a chance to play this out because you could see a value add by doing that automated vulnerability assessment, automated checking, rating things. You know, Docker could staff that up, almost treat it like App Store reviews without all the dickishness of it and make sure people know.

Right now, though, it almost feels like Docker is being negligent in this matter. Because these are on their platform, because these are being offered up to their end users, is it not their responsibility to make sure – I guess, how far do you take it? Because if you say it's Docker's responsibility to make sure that these things don't have vulnerabilities, then isn't it also Docker's responsibility to make sure they don't have back doors or rootkits or something like that? I mean, I wouldn't say that. What I would say is it's Docker's responsibility, if sure they don't have backdoors or rootkits or something like that? I wouldn't say that. What I would say is it's Docker's responsibility if they're going to have a central hub to give an interface that will allow people to communicate what they like and what they don't like. So take Torrance, for example.

There is a great system in place, and it's not mandated by any user group. It's not mandated by any committee. But the reality is when you go on to the Pirate Bay, I can tell you the best torrent to download from the worst torrent to download because that's all being rated on, voted on. And if there was some that had some snarky snark that was connected to that torrent, I would know about that because it would be in the comments. Or if there's some sort of software. So is that really that hard to implement? That's kind of what you're talking about, right? Yeah.

I guess that actually works even at the AUR level. I can go and read the comments and usually know what's up. That's a good point. And I guess that would sort of be a good middle ground for now. And the other thing is from their perspective, all they have to do is provide the infrastructure. Everything else, it will be provided by the users. Yeah. Yeah.

Right now, it's a bit of a clown show, and they need to get it cleaned up because it's all happening really fast around them, and people aren't going to take it seriously if it has these kinds of problems, I think. And I think there's going to be competitors out there. They're coming up and being canonicals, launching their own format. You've got, obviously, the Rocket stuff coming out of the CoreOS project. You've got the FreeBSD guys have had jails and had this fixed stuff figured out for a really, really long time already. Plus, they can back it up with a great file system that also provides a lot of advantages in conjunction with jails.

Right, and we should just get all that done in just a couple months here. Yeah, you should all be done. I mean, like, come on. I mean, like, so July, is that about when it came out? What's that? Officially? Docker? Yeah, when they said it was ready for production.

When the latest Red Hat Enterprise 7 shipped. Okay, so that would have been, yeah, so June, July, somewhere around there. That was, and I'm using air quotes here, 1-0. Yeah. But 1-0 shipped, it shouldn't have been a 1-0. But I think they had that new partnership with Red Hat. Yeah. You know, Red Hat didn't want to ship a non-1-0 thing in Red Hat Enterprise.

Right. And so I think they called it 1.0. Yeah. Even though they didn't even have signing and things like that. But it is new. The thing is, the reason, but here's what, here's where, and then we can get off this because probably people don't care too much, but I think

here's where we would give them a little too much slack. It's new, but the technology they're using, they didn't invent, right? They're using kernel features. And containerization has been around for a while. What they invented is the layer that sits on top that does the GitHub, like, checkout, check-in, the container formats. Like, the specs, they came up with all of that stuff, and that's super value-added.

It's obviously made a huge difference and cannot be downplayed. But at the same time, that's the layer they're working at. I mean, obviously, they're working with those other layers, too, because, you know, they have code at that layer. They have interest there. Right. But what I'm trying to say is this is the area they should be focusing on. This is where their energy

should be going. So there is only so much room I'm willing to give them, because it's not like they're creating the entire containerization from whole cloth, and they have that entire burden. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I agree. That's all I have to say about that. That's it. Not that you're upset or I agree. That's all I have to say about that. That's it. Not the trip set or anything.

Also, why are people complaining about the containers having vulnerabilities when they can just update them for vulnerable software in the containers themselves? Yeah, here's the issue. And I was just reading a blog post about this. God, this, you know, and this is part of what I think gets me a little pissy about this issue. I don't – have you ever worked with a developer who just really hates the sysadmin? Like the sysadmin is the guy that slows me down. That's most developers, actually.

He's always worried about security permissions. He's always got a firewall rule that I have to go talk to him about. Guy wants to do updates and it breaks my program. Like, they just hate the sysadmin, right? Yeah. In fairness, a lot of sysadmins hate the developers. Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Alright. And so, one of these guys, one of these developers is brogging about

why Docker is so great. And it's not because it, you know, makes it, it takes care of all the different distros and it makes a single point of deploying software through the hub. No, no. The reason why this guy likes Docker is because now the sysadmin doesn't screw his stuff up with silly updates and permissions. He just gives the silly sysadmin – and he didn't say silly – just gives the silly sysadmin one file, and it's a two-step process to get his creation running up on the server,

and then he doesn't, in his words, mess it up anymore. And the whole idea is, and the reason why I'm bringing this up is, there is a mentality where people are creating Docker images, and they are creating these things thinking, this is a static world that will never change. The world around it is going to be updated, it's going to be chaotic, libraries are going to change, kernels are going to change, whatever. But this container, everything in this world, this Ubuntu 14.04 little world in here, or 12.04 little world in here, will never, ever change.

And you don't want to know something, Chris? I like that. I know, but that's – I'm a system administrator, and I like that. But that's the problem, though. That's because then those processes maybe say, like, what do you – for example, let's say you put Zimbra inside a container. Wouldn't that be – just get Zimbra in a container and keep it nice and contained on a CentOS box. nice and contained on a CentOS box. The problem is, what

if, in that container, Zimbra is using a version of IMAP that gets to be a year old or so that has another Heartbleed-like vulnerability in it? Right. Well, then you have to go update that container to get rid of that vulnerability, but now you are doing something that was against the original design of the people

that distributed that container, so your only option at that point is to essentially, and I might have this wrong, but I believe... Tweak the container. Well, yeah, you essentially, not this is the right or wrong word, but you essentially like fork the container. You copy it and now begin running your own version of what you maintain separately than the one that comes from Docker Hub.

Right. So there are a couple things. One is I would rather have an insecure program than no program. So if my choices are to run something insecurely... Are you sure? Are you sure? Like in something that could be really bad, where people can read their memory on your server and stuff like that? I go back to a client I had and this was not all that terribly long ago.

In fact, one of the first things we had set them up with the System76 computer and the version of Ubuntu that had shipped with the System76 was newer than the last LTS. But the Intel drivers to get the Wi-Fi to work had to have that newer kernel. So we ran into this weird issue where the software manufacturer would not give us – they didn't have a version that would run on the newest version of Ubuntu. But he didn't have Wi-Fi. So the solution was, as crappy as it sounds, he bought a brand new laptop and he had to have a USB dongle for a couple months. And so if my, and I think if that was, if that was a wider scale, if we were going out to a server or something like that, if my choices are there's some sort of security

vulnerability, and granted Heartbleed is a bit of an extreme example, that would probably require us to sit down and talk about if using that software then is really still the best course of action. But if it's anything slightly smaller than that, I would rather have the software work at all rather than – even if it has some security flaws, then not have access to that solution. Yeah. I mean I can follow that line of thought for especially a class of software and use cases like word processor or anything that doesn't have, anything that doesn't, here's where I draw the line, anything that could potentially reveal my user information

or other users of the system's information. So, like, say Jupyter Broadcasting had its own mail server, right? And we were running it. Very likely, if we did that, we would be running it on a container on a DigitalOcean droplet. And let's say, let's go back to this Zimbra thing. Let's say we got a compromise.

Now, maybe I wouldn't care so much about my information leaking out because I'd probably have a unique password for that server. And so they'd just compromise just that account. Getting my email would suck. But I do have the responsibility of everybody else that logs in. Right? And so if Rikai's logging in and Alan's logging in and you're logging into it and Angela's logging in, everybody's logging into this thing. If that thing starts to have a year old – see, the problem is, too, is the longer these vulnerabilities hang around, things like shell shock and heartbleed, those are so well known and there's such low-hanging fruit. that they just get written into IP scanner scripts, and then it becomes really almost no effort for somebody to start banging on your box

and reading whatever. It's like because it's so easy for them to do it and because other people are impacted by it, I feel like I have the responsibility to keep it up to date even if I don't care about my own personal data. So I'm not saying that security isn't important, right? I'm not saying that we shouldn't have

a methodology for updating. I'm saying that the priority level't important, right? I'm not saying that we shouldn't have a methodology for updating. I'm saying that the priority level should be get the software to work, then let's make it secure. And so that means that the security then falls upon whoever is releasing that Docker container. Right now. It shouldn't necessarily rely on you. So when something like Heartbleed comes out and all this data is leaked, I think we should just treat Docker containers just like we would

treat a piece of software. Thunderbird had a security function. You're saying the vendor should update it. Right. Well, I'm just saying you wouldn't expect to say,

well, Thunderbird has a security vulnerability. I better log in there and open the code. Well, so shouldn't the way it work is like, so say, let's go back to Zimbra again

because we can both wrap our brain around this. Shouldn't the Zimbra guys, let's say they're distributing their software by Docker containers. Shouldn't they test it in a Docker container on their network,

certify that the latest security updates work, and then publish that version up to the Docker hub and then have that distributed down to all of the people that are subscribed to that Docker container?

Yeah. Shouldn't it basically be like a software vendor update? Because if they can test it in a container and verify it works and push those changes up to the Docker hub and then everybody else is in a container,

it's not like there's random library vulnerabilities or randomness or anything like that. They can just overwrite the same files. It seems like the solution here is for the vendor to patch, but then vendors, in order to do that, are going to expect some money. Like, you want us to update our images, then you're going to have to pay us for a support contract. There's no way vendors are going to update an Ubuntu 14.04 container for five years for free, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's probably true. Maybe they would. I don't know. Maybe they would because that's how people are getting their software. I don't know. But it's an interesting world we're moving into. Software over the next couple of years on Linux is going to change a lot.

over the next couple of years on Linux, is going to change a lot. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that invites you to insert your own Monday morning joke. My name is Chris. My name is Noah. Hey, Noah. Hey, how did I get here?

Happy Monday. Happy Monday. So we're doing this show on a Monday, because Noah's here. He's flying out this evening. When are you flying out? Tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow morning or whatever. When are you flying out? Tomorrow? Hopefully tomorrow.

Oh, tomorrow morning or whatever. Yeah. We wanted to record today. Yeah, we say tomorrow morning but really that involves leaving here at like 1.30 in the morning. Wow. Yikes. Yikes. Well, so that's, we're going to get you now before we have to worry about that. Coming up on today's show, we're going to follow up on our Fedora 22 review in just a little bit. We're going to spend

some time talking about GNOME 3.18, the upcoming of gnome and also gnome 3.16 victory lap as of fedora 22 yeah i know i know i know i'm being a little insinuating also we're going to talk about the new google cardboard how it could work for linux dell's perhaps huge embrace of ubuntu this is a big deal We're going to talk about that. And then also, we have a little surprise coming up in the feedback section of the show, Noah. It's a packed show. It is.

Somehow, even though you and I were just on air less than 24 hours ago doing the Linux Action Show. Yeah, we just talked about Linux. How is there more Linux to talk about? We literally, it's literally been less than 24 hours since we did last. Does that blow your mind a little bit? Yeah, and it's been like less than 12 hours

since last actually got published. Yeah. Wow. Talk about a content factory. Hey, so let's get into the catch-up. There's some interesting stories that have actually managed to develop since we put together Linux Actions, even though it's only been a couple of hours. So I want to bring in the mumble room.

Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug! Hello. I was like, is anybody there? That seemed like 30 seconds. It was. It was. It was a really long delay there. I was like, is anybody there? That seemed like 30 seconds to you. It was. It was. It was a really long delay there. I was like, wow, okay.

We lost them all. So Google I.O. was last Thursday, and it was the biggest I.O. in the history of the world, which isn't that actually hard of a record to set when you think about there's only been so many I.O.s and Google just keeps getting bigger. But it was a monster. It was like a four-hour keynote, And I am excited pretty much about one thing. I mean, I'm excited about a few things that came out, but hear more of my thoughts on Coder Radio. But for us Linux users, I think there's some potential here. I think we need to get on board with this.

You're familiar with Google Cardboard? I am, yeah. Their VR cardboard that they gave out at last year's Google I.O. You know, it's funny. I've heard this described a couple of ways. Some people say this is Google flailing, saying they can't come up with any ideas in the VR market, and so they're just dropping this on the public and saying, here, figure it out. I am not such a pessimist. So they updated their 2.0.

This is Google Cardboard VR 2.0, and it supports up to 6-inch screens now, including internet phones if you're a masochist. And it is completely published as an open spec. There's already websites that are selling an entire kit for like $20 or whatever. And you basically get a fully usable VR environment. It comes with little glasses that it comes pre-set in there that are in there. And you just put your smartphone in there and you have legitimate virtual reality for $30. And there's already apps out there to do this.

There's already apps in the Play Store to take advantage of it. And there's nothing that says you couldn't hook it up to a Linux box and create. This could be the avenue for the community to create the beginnings of their own open source response to the Oculus Rift. Yeah, yeah. And you know what's neat about that is if that, so imagine this, Oculus wants to take this, the quote unquote high road with, with,

with, who's, Microsoft. Microsoft. Do they make, do they make small things? Well, they make that,

the, that challenger to Linux. Microsoft. It's, that sounds like a Viagra competitor to me. Windows. They make Windows. Have you ever used it?

Yeah, man. It costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of money. It crashes a lot and stuff. And they break, you know. Yeah. But it has tiles. So that's cool.

Oh, okay. But they're going to take that road. Imagine this. Imagine when this takes off like the Raspberry Pi does. And everyone that wants to play with this. This is what I'm thinking. Everyone wants to play with it goes, well, I could get that thing. But I'm locked into the games that they tell me I can play with the operating system they tell me I can play with. And the SDK that they're going to tell me when it's going to release.

And then there's this. And it's like – I think, too, it's almost a bigger competitor to Samsung. Samsung Gear VR is essentially this. You put a smartphone in a Gear VR. But Corky – or I'm sorry. It was in a Go-Go. In a Go-go.

Do you think that maybe we're just getting too excited that Google Cardboard is kind of a crappy product? Yeah, mainly the cardboard bit because I got the last version for Christmas and it was, by the end of February, it kind of had fallen apart.

Would it make you feel better that there is several different companies right now that are working on 3D printed versions of Google Cardboard? So it's a much sturdier case. You can print it out at home or buy it. It comes with the lenses. You can get it in different colors. There's a lot of people that are working on different kinds of moldings for the Google Cardboard, too. It doesn't actually have to be cardboard. It's just the nice thing about cardboard is

you can make it yourself. And it's sturdy. It's sturdy, too. And it's super cheap. The great thing about corrugation. Yeah. But not all phones work with it, either, because there's one feature that requires a compass,

because there's this trigger on the side. Yeah. And not all phones have a compass. Yeah, and there is definitely definitely gonna be limitations there i know i mean i kind of look at that as like saying well not all hdmi monitors not all keyboards that are are going to work with uh are going to work with the raspberry pi i also look at this as sort of a model t that is available to the community to tinker with like not like uh not like a full-on competitor like honestly uh we need to start somewhere it's kind of my philosophy

about it is and when you get that price point down so and this is the thing that was great about the pie and that's this is what's great about this thing is i cannot afford to spend five or six or seven hundred dollars on a computer for a project that may or may not work but i can spend the i can spend uh the money a couple 30 $40 on a piece of cardboard to put my phone in to play with it. And if it doesn't work, that's fine. Yeah, I do agree with you there. And I look forward to seeing where it goes. Hopefully there's something that comes out of it and it doesn't just fizzle away.

I don't think it will, but I'd like to see the open source community embrace it. Just think about the potential. Window environments, all kinds of things could be really cool. But we'll have to wait and see. Hey, Noah, I know that you and I have talked about Dell before. Matt wasn't a huge fan of Dell. Yeah. I'm not a huge fan.

I talk about Dell kind of like I talk about cars and things like that. Like, I feel like Dell's, like, a pretty good choice. It's not always going to blow me away, but it's going to get me a pretty good value for the price and come with a warranty. So full disclosure, as you know, we own an IT company, and we are partnered with Dell. So I'm probably a little biased because we've had a very, very good experience with Dell,

and part of that experience probably comes from the fact that Dell really values their commercial market, which is kind of funny because when Dell started, they started really valuing their consumer market. And somehow they kind of made that switch. But from a business perspective, the nice thing about Dell is as a Dell partner, when I want doing large server purchases and things like that, and then screwing me a few times on things I didn't really need, or selling me an entire series of bad tape drives, an entire series of bad perk controllers.

Which was the entire reason for the partner program, because now you don't deal with those people, you deal with me. And I can come onto your site, and I can look, and I just go into a portal and order that stuff. Yeah, but my preference there, though, is not to deal with people like you. come onto your site and I can look and then I just go into a portal and order that stuff. My preference there though is, I mean, not to deal with people like you. I actually prefer the

IX approach. And that's sort of when I realized where I have the issues with Dell. But if you remove that layer of Dell, I like things like their service tag setup. I like that they have a really good database and you can really look up all the drivers for your machine. And to be fair, when we had those tape drives that just failed one after another,

they're always very solid about replacing them. Right. And so where I've always ran down with issues with Dell has been in the consumer space and sort of how they kind of keep putting their foot in with Linux and then they dump it and they're like, oh, just kidding. In the US. Yes.

In the US. Because in other parts of the world, that's a very different story. Right. And that's what's been very frustrating for me, is to see them be committed in other parts of the world and be like, why aren't you committing here? Just stick to it like you do in other places. Just stick to it. Yeah.

And so I was really happy that when they first launched this. Which parts? Sorry. China, for example. And India. And India. Yeah. I mean, so they have widely pushed.

In fact, if you go to like the kiosks in the mall, here we see kiosks in the mall that have Dell computers. If you go over to China or India, you go into those malls, you're going to see a lot of Ubuntu kiosks, and they're going to push the computers that run Ubuntu. And the reason for that is because the market is so much – I think the market is better – or they believe the market is better there to push those open source solutions than they can do that in the US. Yeah, I guess. And I guess it's probably partially driven by cost and partially other factors, political maybe. I don't know. But that has always kind of left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to Dell's approach. The Sputnik program first gave me some hope and then they launched the XPS 13 Sputnik version, which is a pretty solid machine.

So when I saw this article, this kind of grabbed my attention. Like this seems to be another pretty big step in the right direction for Dell's commitment to Ubuntu. Check this out, Noah. Of course, Dell and Canonical have been longtime partners, and they just updated. What was that $200 Ubuntu Dell laptop you were looking at? Yeah, I was just pulling that up. It is the – it's a $249 laptop. And in fact, I have a person in my mind of who might be the first recipient of the –

Oh, yeah. Except for it's like a week out, but yeah. Right, right, right. So what's going to end up happening is I think I'm going to start her with another computer that I have set up. But if it takes off and she's like, you know, I really like this thing, just be nice to have it on some newer hardware. It's the Inspiron 153000 series. It's available for $249 and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. $249 computer.

Do you have the specs on it at all there? Yeah, I have it actually right in front of me. So it's four gigabytes of RAM. It's an Intel Celeron, which is basically what you expect. So what this is – I know, I know. What this is, Chris – It's a Chromebook-like machine.

That's right. It's a Chromebook that I can just – that comes with Linux. And I think that'll do all right. 500 gig, it's a spinning Rust drive, of course, integrated graphics, and then 1366 by 768. But boy, for $250, you could go with Newegg, spend another 80 bucks and put a decent SSD in there. Right. And the thing is, for the people that are checking their email, for the people that

are browsing Facebook, editing some basic Word documents, not doing anything too heavy, this is a great computer for them. Yeah. I think it's a real sell for Dell. Yeah. Yeah. So they're playing at the XPS level, which is around a grand, and now they're playing down at the $250 level.

I think the $250 level is – I'm surprised somebody else like HP or somebody else hasn't come out and said, let's take our Chromebook hardware and just put Ubuntu on there. Exactly. Why not? What's going to happen? Because I think that those companies think that there is a bigger investment to be made on Google's Chrome OS. I honestly suspected, too, that Intel and Google have been subsidizing the hardware, And I believe Intel is pulling back on that now to a degree. So anyways, Dell tweeted out on the 27th of May. Dell's Dell Cares Pro account, at Dell Cares Pro, tweeted out, time for a new OS.

Time for a new OS. Why not try hashtag Ubuntu? Check out our Ubuntu installation guide. This is coming from Dell's official verified Twitter account. It's saying, trying for a new OS, check out Ubuntu from Dell's freaking Twitter account. That's pretty cool. I'm going to check how many followers. Maybe they don't have any followers, so it doesn't matter.

Oh, they have almost 10,000 followers, so that's not bad. It's Dell's global technical support for business customers. Follow us to get valuable information and support your company's IT infrastructure. And they're recommending people try out Ubuntu. And they've included a link to a Dell support article, which is how to install Ubuntu Linux on your Dell PC. Yeah. This is legit. Look at this article.

This is legit. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the thing is, there are other things that Dell can push. The chat room is figuring it out. Dell can sell this computer and say, listen, you don't need an upgrade for a nanovirus. It's not necessary. Yeah, that's not necessarily a perk for Dell, though.

Those are upsells that Dell makes money off of. That's true, but Dell also makes money off of selling their computers. And if they can get away with saying this is a more competitive product than other offerings from other manufacturers. That puts a leg up. If everyone's buying this $259 computer instead of the $300 HP that is at Best Buy. Well, if they can deploy Ubuntu, I don't know what their arrangement is with Canonical, but I got to imagine they're probably not paying for every seat of Ubuntu. And I don't really know the details of Dell very well.

I don't know if you follow them, but are they now a private company? Is this maybe the result of all this? That's a complicated question. To the best of my understanding, they are owned by a private company which is owned by actually, I believe it's Microsoft. The company

that gave them the money to buy Dell back is backed by Microsoft or investors of Microsoft. I got an idea. When in doubt, you know what we do? We Google. We just ask Google. Okay, Google.

Who owns Dell? Let's see what Google says. According to the Dallas Morning News, Dell Inc., which had grown to one of the biggest computer makers in the world during 25 years as a public company, is now privately held. Michael Dell, the 48-year-old company founder and CEO, owns about three-quarters of the company and his investment ally, Silver Lake Partners, owns Tress. That's it. That's right. I remember Silver Lake.

Okay. So if you look, Silver Lake is somehow in bed with Microsoft. Yeah, I do remember that now. Okay, Google. Who is Silver Lake Partners? According to Wikipedia, Silver Lake is an American private equity firm focused on leverage, buyout, and growth capital investments in technology, technology-enabled and related industries. Yeah. Founded in 1999, it says.

So that's interesting. That's really, yeah. So, and I actually sent it, my Dell rep is very, very much aware of my strong Linux preference, right? And so he knows better than to ever recommend a product or tell me about a product that I can't put Linux on, right? So when this came through, I actually called him and I said, hey, how is this going to affect things? Because right now, every Dell I've ever bought, I've been able to throw Linux on and it works right out of the box. Is that going to change? And he said, no, it's not. Because you're worried about the Microsoft connection.

Yeah. This seems to be an indication maybe you shouldn't be worried. Yeah. Well, and here's the thing. You can't actually trust, to be quite honest, I don't actually trust everything he says because he's going to say. Well, yeah, right. He's a rep. He's going to sell me the company.

So he knows what I want to hear because i made it very clear to him in the past so i know what he's gonna say even before i asked but i wanted to get it on record here we are and this is why i brought this whole topic up is because here we are on the preface of like god what's dell doing are they doing some good stuff here i mean they're shipping more machines than ever with ubuntu they're tweeting out to their business customers switch to ubuntu they're creating guides on their support site how to switch your Dell machine over to Ubuntu. But then they're owned by a- Well, they are owned by Michael Dell.

Michael Dell got his money from a finance company, which is owned by- So there are so many steps of removal from Microsoft that the influence may be not there. At the end of the day- I'm excited to see where this is going. I'm getting excited. Are you getting excited about it? Well, I'm getting excited because I've been excited for a little while because as a Dell partner, that's what we sell.

That's what we give to customers. So I need to be able to go into those clients and say, well, you bought your computer with Windows. I want to put Linux on it. And I've never had a problem doing that. And I don't ever want to have a problem doing that. Right. But the thing that is exciting about this $ 249 laptop is i am the kind of

person that if i see somebody that is not using linux i would like to get them to use linux and to do that oftentimes that means you just buy them a machine sometimes what that means i was trying to think of a more graceful way to say it but the reality is a lot of times if i come to your house and you have everything set up you're not just going to let me erase your computer and put something else on it. But you will. You will. If I'm like, here, play with this new toy, you'd give it a shot. Especially if it's nicer.

And then once you get it hooked, and I just dealt with this. I just dealt with this before I came out here. There was a guy that I had – he actually bought a Lenovo Yoga based off of – on my recommendation, based off what Angela was doing. And the way I got him to switch was I didn't give him a laptop, but I gave him a hard drive with Linux on it and put it in his existing laptop and he just didn't want to go back. And then he bought hardware and Windows is gone. But so

this $249 laptop is, because there's a limit to how much I can do that, right? Because I have a finite budget, but $249 laptop, brand new. That's kind of a game changer. I mean, the warranty might cost a little more, and maybe they'll let you customize and put an SSD in there. Rotten Corpse, do you have information about the Silver Lake connection there?

Yeah, the reason why there was a connection to Microsoft is because Silver Lake owned, inside of a consortium, they owned 70% of Skype. Oh, okay. Oh, interesting. So when they sold to Skype, then they'd become part of, like, it wasn't completely... There was actually some kind of stuff with the CEOs of Silver Lake or some kind of... are connected as well.

But it all started with Skype in 2008. I see. Thank you for the information. And Corky, you think maybe we're getting too excited. Maybe there's a much more practical reason for this? I think... I haven't checked recently, but Dell has traditionally had a banner saying dell recommends windows 8 for quite a while yeah that must have been an advertising deal and if that's come to an end and they know no longer contractually obliged to recommend windows right

they might be taking advantage with this. Could you imagine? Yeah, because you're right. They might have even had a marketing deal that was so lucrative and so important to Dell that it might have been something like, you need to position your company as supporting Windows. Your entire company needs to position. And then Dell's wiggling these Ubuntu machines out.

And then if that deal expires, they're no longer... I mean, who knows? Yeah, maybe. But the reality is... And InigoGo is checking their site, says the banners are gone. I don't take too much stock in that because the reality is Dell doesn't exist to advocate for Linux or open source.

Dell has one goal, and that is to make money. No, no, oh, for sure. So where I'm going with that is this idea that if Dell wants to sell computers, they're going to sell with whatever they think the market wants. And so if Microsoft says they want to recommend Windows 8, so be it. But if the people that are looking to buy Ubuntu, I don't think that's going to cut into their sales, whether that banner is there or not. Because the people that want themselves as supporting Ubuntu. Like tweeting it and creating guides and things like that.

I don't know. But that's kind of what I'm getting at. I mean, Microsoft's here's the difference between a million dollar contract and a ten million dollar contract. Position your entire company, here's a ten million dollar contract. Okay, so where is the money coming from to position themselves to support Ubuntu? Selling more machines. Here's the difference between a million-dollar contract and a $10 million contract. Position your entire company. Here's a $10 million contract. If I'm down, I'm taking that. Okay, so where is the money coming from to position themselves to support Ubuntu? Selling more machines. As that contract expires, they're no longer getting that money.

They just want to sell more machines. Why not market your Ubuntu machines? Something you haven't heavily marketed before. Also, if I was them, I'd be hedging my bets. So that's my question. Why is it that you think that they're going to sell more machines by saying we support it? I like Corky's theory. Corky, you have a good theory, and I'm totally on board with it.

Yeah, well, I'm just trying to understand. Corky, why would Dell be doing this right now? You think it's a negotiation tactic? Well, I hope it's a positive thing, but then this is Dell. So maybe they're just trying to force Microsoft to up their bid with renewing this advertising bid. The reason why I give that stock is because I think some of the reasons why they've flirted with the Ubuntu market in the past and pulled out is they were negotiating with Microsoft. Yeah, that could be. I guess what I'm getting at is I don't see – I guess what I'm saying is I don't think it's going to affect their Ubuntu market to a certain extent anyway if they

remove all those banners and say we support Ubuntu or they don't do that because I think the people that are buying an Ubuntu laptop are buying it for two reasons. Either one, they know the advantages of the operating system or they want a cheap computer. Well, so then the banner being gone and that deal expiring probably

won't change their dynamic much. Unless now they're promoting it more outwardly, like through Twitter and on support calls and things like that that they weren't doing before. We can hope. We can hope. We can hope. Well, I think what we should do is a little market research. Next time you call Dell, you ought to ask them about Ubuntu and see what they say.

Sure. Well, my rep, like you said, he... No, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your rep's going to... He's a little different because he'll look up and before he even gets on the phone with me and he'll say, well, this is the latest machine we have that runs Linux. And you'll be happy to know that we had a client that bought a couple hundred of these particular Latitude series and they all worked with Linux flawlessly. All right, boys.

You know, all of a sudden I'm just starting getting notifications like crazy on my phone today. Like now Spotify is notifying me about tracks added to the radio stations I've listened to. Because you're popular. I guess so. Spotify wants to. You know what I need to do? I need to zen out. I need to go to my comfort zone, my sweet spot,

my place of absolute education and focus and learning. That's right, my friends. I call it the man cave where I bring up LinuxAcademy.com and I begin to learn. And you can too by going to LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged, sponsor of the Unplugged program. Perfect sponsor. And no, you got to check out Linux Academy. Have you been there?

I have. Yeah, I have a membership, whatever it is, a subscription. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to get the Linux Unplugged 33% discount and then go check out their features. It's a really great service created by people that are truly passionate about Linux and open source

and they do a great job. They have self-paced courses. You can get all the content. You can download it offline and take it at your own pace, too, which is great for commuters if you want to read the stuff. And they have over 1,500 video courses for you to take. They have scenario-based labs, so you get a real hands-on experience. Seven plus Linux distributions in the courseware will automatically adjust to those distros and the virtual machines adjust to those distros.

I love that. Have you seen some of the new stuff they've rolled out recently? So I went to, when RHEL released, when RHEL released RHEL 7, usually I pay my,

you know, whatever it is, $800, $1,000 to go out for two days and get a little refresher course. Yeah. And then they tell me all the things that are new

and then I go take the cert. I did all that on Linux Academy this year. Because Linux Academy has, they actually have a course. Yes. I already have, there's two courses. There's a course of teach me about Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Right. And then there's a, I understand Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I just, I've been supporting six. I want to support seven. So tell me, what are the headlines? Give me the bullet points of what has changed between six and seven. That is so nice. It is because I don't have the time.

No, I know, right? And you know, the thing is, training events, the problem is, even if the training is really condensed because they do,

Red Hat does a fantastic job about getting it real down, but it's still, it's a day, I have to arrive a day ahead of time. I have to rent a hotel. The rest of the day

after I'm done with the class is blown because I can't go anywhere. Or you're going to rent a car. I am renting a car. I'm paying for meals out. There's this huge expense and time suck of going to these things and now I can do that on my laptop when I want in my skippies

at night before I fall asleep. And this is the best stuff. This is the best stuff around on how to do this and you can get all of the study material. You can bring that with you. They're always keeping this stuff relevant. They just rolled out some new Red Hat stuff. It's really nice. And I think, you know, you know what you ought to do? You can bring that with you. They're always keeping this stuff relevant. They just rolled out some new Red Hat stuff. It's really nice. And I think, you know,

and you know what you ought to do? You ought to think about it. They're starting to roll out public profiles. Oh, really? So you can put your achievement courses and stuff like that on a public profile.

I'd be embarrassed. Here's the thing. Yeah, but you know what? The Red Hat stuff, if you did nothing but the Red Hat stuff, at least it'd be all hardcore stuff on your thing.

Well, it's one of those things where I just do things I'm interested in and then i only i only will look at the area you need yeah that's nice though it is they've got they've got so right yes i know yeah i know you wouldn't want to publicly show that but they've got they've really got like so much great stuff like are you going to try out their python courses actually so funny you mentioned that uh so the not being a developer but i kind of want to i'm like you i kind of want to dabble in the idea of development because I like to understand these things. And so the great thing about that was I will – because my mind is so ADD. I'm like, oh, I got done with the Red Hat stuff.

Well, I'll go start Python. You know what I noticed, Chris? The guy that teaches Red Hat lives, eats, and breathes Red Hat. Like you can just tell by the way he talks. The guy knows Red Hat. And he'll make off-handed comments like he'll say oh you know that you know this particular thing of course back in version five this way yeah i'm like that's a guy that's been around right then i go and take

one of their programming courses and that guy knows like everything there is to know you know about what he's like they are true testaments of their profession and it's not just like they have hired a couple people and said all right you're going to sit in this room and we're going to prepare content and then you present it. No, no, no. They took the time to go find industry experts to present this stuff. And then they have, you know, like you've seen that where you can customize the course to do, I just want to learn about this specific thing. Nuggets, that's what they call it. They have the new Nuggets and there's a ton of them.

In fact, you can go to LinuxAcademy.com slash Nuggets and just there's a ton of them. In fact, you can go to linuxacademy.com slash nuggets and just do a deep dive. I love that. That's another new feature they've just rolled out. A lot of cool stuff coming to Linux Academy all the time. That's why the membership makes so much sense, and I want you to get that 33% discount by going to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thanks to Linux Academy for rocking support of the Linux Unplugged program. You guys are awesome. All right, let's get into some emails. We haven't

done emails on the Unplugged show for a while. And we got a bunch. So Dario R writes in with the Ubuntu CC topic. He says, not sure if you guys are going to cover this or not. Oh, really? This one on Unplugged or last? But I just found this comment on the same site. I really think it's to help understand what's going on.

Alright, so he's talking about the Kubuntu drama. Do we want to talk about this? It's up to you. Does anybody in the. So he's talking about the Kubuntu drama. Do we want to talk about this? It's up to you. Does anybody in the mum room want to talk about the Kubuntu Community Council drama? I mean, you can if you want to. I mean, I'm not avoiding the topic.

I just... Okay, well, here's what I'll say on it. In our feedback thread for Fedora 22, you can... There's a comment thread open and Palaszo has the epic comment of all comments noah um it look at this thing here uh he breaks down uh what is the

ubuntu community council what decision is being made the redaction to the decision or i'm sorry the reaction to the decision i have light shining on my screen and the aftermath plus closing thoughts and he breaks down some acronyms too this is such a solid contribution uh i don't know what more we could contribute than his comment here yeah and uh we're this there's really been no development for those of you are not familiar what's going on jonathan riddle has been asked to stand down as leader of the ubuntu community council i guess he actually explains it all in here uh And a lot of people in the project are upset by that. The decision remains at a standstill. And, Plasso, you're in the Mumble Room right now. Did you have any thoughts you wanted to add to the coverage of it?

Great write-up, by the way. Yeah, you seem to be following it very closely. Did you have any follow-up to our coverage or any comments you wanted to kind of get on the record? I don't have anything else to add than what I wrote. I would like to mention that there were two things, two issues that Jonathan Riedel were asking about on the Ubuntu Community Council. One of them was the donations that were on the Ubuntu.com website and it seems that the

Ubuntu community members don't know how they have been used and the other that was mentioned was the part of the IP policy of Canonical about the binaries.

Yeah. And it's one of those things. The write-up itself explains a lot of that stuff and goes into it with a little more detail. And we talked about it on LAS, but the reality is nobody really knows the whole story, right? Yeah. about it on last but the reality is we just nobody really knows the whole story right yeah so it's it it's it we you kind of want to stay away from making presumpt you know making presumptions um the only information we have is been basically handed to us by yeah one one side of the party yeah um so you want to be a little careful on that um but yeah that's a tough i don't know if

there's a whole lot to add yeah um and and i think you know it so the straw poll we uh i think it was uh somebody a corkier, somebody started a straw poll in the Linux Action Show subreddit to see, do you guys care about this topic? You know, because one of my concerns is, should we even be talking about this at all? Obviously, it's getting coverage. It seems to be a popular topic for some people. Yeah. And I feel like it seems like we're not paying attention if, I feel like it comes off that we're not paying attention if the number one thing in Linux is being talked about all over the internet and we're like – we gloss right over it. Yeah. So right now, 58% of the votes say yes, they do care and 37% of the votes say they don't care. Only 71 votes so far because it hasn't been a very popular thread. But there's a link in the chat room right now.

We'll continue to follow it to see if there's been any interesting developments outside of just additional drama, like maybe statements from the canonical guys. Oh, and also, Plasso, thank you for breaking down the structure of the Ubuntu Community Council. Yeah.

That was good insight today. It was very good to have because it does seem pretty connected to canonical. Right. Basically, it's Mark Shuttleworth and seven people Mark Shuttleworth likes.

Yeah. Well, but hold on because it's not actually from canonical. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The, but hold on, because it's not actually from Canonical. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The name is not in there.

So there are currently... So here's how it goes. Just for those of you... I'm making fun, but the Ubuntu Community Council consists of eight people. One of them is Mark Shuttleworth, and seven others are nominated by Mark Shuttleworth and elected by the community for a term of two years. Currently, there are two Canonical employees, Michael Hall and Daniel Halbach, and one canonical ex-employee, Laura Kalzinski,

the canonical owner himself, Mark Shuttleworth, and four others from the community. One of the roles of the Ubuntu Community Council is to resolve issues of violation of the COC, Community Disputes with the Participation Involved members. So it does kind of seem like a stack deck a bit but i mean it was there were elections yeah yeah i i guess i don't have a problem with them saying this is not an official canonical thing and it's not the official word of canonical i don't have a problem with that what i do have a problem is when people want to try and remove it so far as to say, Canonical has nothing to do with this. I mean, it's not a Canonical thing.

It's totally separate. That is, come on. First of all, Canonical controls the branding of Ubuntu. Second of all, the head of the community, or a member of the board on the community council is the head of Canonical. So there's definitely a connection there. There's more than a passing connection there. I agree. Yeah.

I agree. All right. So David M. writes in with a question about OpenSUSE. He says, hi, I'm just wondering why you don't mention OpenSUSE as an option. I can understand why you don't like Ubuntu and Arch is cool, but it's not for production. I enjoy your shows. I plan on making a contribution next payday. Oh, that's nice.

Thanks, David. So he's asking about OpenSUSE as an option. And do you want to take this one? Well, the reason actually I put that in there was because, so he says that Arch doesn't belong in production. And you know what? If you had asked me before I had spent time in the studio, I would have agreed with him. I would have said, listen, I would not put Fedora, I would not put Arch on a production machine because I don't want something that, I want to treat the production machine essentially

like I treat my KitchenAid mixer. On the face of it, it actually seems obvious. Yeah. I just want it to be an appliance. Once I get it working, I never want to touch it again unless the face of it, it actually seems obvious. Yeah, I just want it to be an appliance. Once I get it working, I never want to touch it again unless the hardware fails, and then I will do something. In practice, though, in practice, the total opposite has proved to be true.

Numerous, numerous times. So much so to the point that even though I really wanted to put Ubuntu Mate on here, I don't dare open my mouth because I know, basically I know that three weeks after I leave, some update is going to come in here, I don't dare open my mouth because I know basically I know that three weeks after I leave, some update is going to come in here. And even if we try not to update it, somehow that stupid updater rolls

back up and then somebody clicks on it. Or we have to install something else so you have to update the back. Something happens where something gets updated and then something breaks. And now, because it's so far gone, not just one thing breaks, like three different things happen at the exact same time. And you don't know if they're connected or if they're separate.

And all of a sudden you've got problems like every time you reboot your sound cards get remapped. Right. And so – and I have argued that perhaps in media production because of the underlying stuff we rely on needs to be so current all the time that Linux by its very nature just is difficult in these kinds of roles. And so maybe being more current is more helpful. Yeah. So OpenSUSE offers Tumbleweed and also Evergreen releases. So OpenSUSE has potentially that sweet spot, right, where OpenSUSE could fill a role on a machine that needs to be uber-current, and it could fill a role on a machine that could stay fairly static, like, say, my Bonobo.

Yeah. But you don't use OpenSUSE in Enterprise. You don't use OpenSUSE in your you don't use open susa in your personal stuff uh why has it not really ever been a contender for you uh so there's a couple of things i i actually really like the idea of an rpm based distro that i could use in production because really i'm not going to put uh i'm not going to put fedora or at least that might be changing now but a year ago or so i wouldn't have put fedora into production on on on a client's machine uh however uh we tried open susa in one client i was going to go out and we were going to a year ago or so, I wouldn't have put Fedora into production on a client's machine.

However, we tried OpenSUSE in one client. I was going to go out and we were going to do that. And I ended up bringing him a test machine. We set it up. But it had this weird thing where it will show the – when you click on – you plug a thumb drive in. It will show up as if it's mounted. But it doesn't actually create the mount point and show the files from a removable storage. And they had some sort of script that kicked off that did something when somebody plugged a thumb drive in, and the script kept failing because this thing wasn't mounting.

And I worked with it a little bit, and I couldn't get it to work, and I said, eventually, just screw it. We'll just go to Ubuntu. Because the reality was, everything else they were doing other than this one tiny little piece of software, which had both RPM and Deb, was all being done on the browser. So I just went with them. So that's an interesting reason not to use it. Mine's a little more nuanced than that.

Yeah, yeah. So I actually thought I would be sitting here and I thought by this point in time, OpenSUSE would be the far-gone conclusion because the build service was so awesome. They have Tumbleweed. They have their Evergreen releases. I'm still a fan of Yast. And yet I sit here and I think, I don't know, it's still a bit of an unfinished mess. Rotten Corpse, what's your take on it? I would say that OpenSUSE has like a ton of potential and they do a lot of things that make you really interested in them.

But then they kind of fall short in the actual production of the stuff. For example, the OBS is cool, but then they don't have any focus on it, and it's very clunky, and it requires specific files and configurations that you have to know in order to send something to the OBS. And then they have the SUSE Studio, which is cool, but not a very good environment to reuse. And they have one-click install that's actually like 12 clicks. Right, very clunky.

Yeah, they have a lot of great ideas, but they never actually all come to fruition. Actually, I don't think any of them really fully come to fruition. And it's just like, it's really cool and then disappointing. Yeah, and I think a lot of the changes around Zipper and the Package Manager

for a few releases a while ago sort of, I lost momentum on my open SUSE Edge. Like I had, for a while I ran SUSE Enterprise Linux on quite a few servers. I thought it made, it was so great because, you know,

you could have... It was so easy to make a Samba file server with SUSE Linux using the YAST that would connect to the domain and authenticate

all of the users and set up all of the permissions and you could set up extended attributes on all the file systems because SUSE was super easy with riserfs and xfs

out of the box back then and it was just like I could drop a SUSE box in within 10 minutes I'd have it connected and authenticating to a Windows domain controller, and I'd have it all updated in YAST, and it was beautiful. And for a while, I even used this program from the Zemarian folks to manage all of the – it was called Red Carpet, and I could manage all of the patches on all of my SUSE boxes from one GTK console on one desktop, and it was so amazing.

And when they went through all these package manager changes, I just really lost momentum on all of that. And I just kind of fell back into Apt, Git, and Ubuntu for a long time. And it just seems like such a more streamlined process to manage your packages. And there's so many layers on the OpenSUSE side. And then the other thing that's given me a little bit of cold feet with SUSE is I'm not very comfortable with their parent company. And I'm not very comfortable with how they've been passed around in the last few years. And I'm not super clear on what the parent company's priority is for SUSE Linux other than making a distro that is a companion piece to mainframe-type software.

And I'm sure that's not their purpose and vision. I just – I feel like they haven't articulated it yet. And so I'm not willing to invest a lot of my personal energy into that. Yeah. The one thing that I see that OpenSUSE really, really digs down on is if I had a – if somebody came to me and they said, I had a lot of experience administrating a Windows server and I want to switch to Linux server, what should I start with? Man.

Yeah. It's great for that, right? Yeah, it is. And SUSE is such a capable distro, OpenSUSE is such a capable distro that I think it has a lot of... But, you know, here's the other thing too. If you were going to use OpenSUSE,

would you not use KDE? Because it's a really nice KDE implementation. Really nice. And KDE is... They have a good GNOME one too. I mean, they do overall, they do good work. And one of the things I like is like, Yasta is like a QTUI under KDE and GTKUI under GNOME.

Like, they do a lot of good stuff. It's just, it all doesn't really come together to make it super compelling. But Heavens, I'll give you a chance to give them a bit of cred here. Yes, trying to judge the desktop usage of OpenSUSE based on their OpenBuild service

is not exactly doing it justice. I do use OpenSUSE, at least in a couple virtual machines, just to test and make sure that it is up to snuff, at least in my standards. It is up to my standards in terms of desktop usage. In every way, the Zipper the zipper package manager even though it is a little bit different from rpm but in terms of rpm distros opensource is the only one that i kind of like yeah but yeah i don't know it's just a monthly for a dev or pac-man kind of usage, but I don't think it has much to...

You can't blame it based on its other services, even though, yes, it should work, but one install package manager, or at least one click install package is useful for users. The package search is useful for users. Adding extra repos, especially with GPG based repository authentication is useful and, you know,

it's nice. That's not even the problem. The problem is the whole package. There's a lot of cool things and they make really good ideas with the package search and basically everything is on the website you can install from. Really cool.

It's just clunky when you actually go through the website you can install from. Really cool. Yeah. But it's very clunky when you actually go through the process. I think I'm done on this topic. Oh, no, it's not. No, hold on, hold on. Let's talk about more in the post show because I don't want to spend too much more time

in the show on this topic. Because honestly, here's where I kind of come down on OpenSUSE and that's why I don't want to spend a lot more time on it. Is despite as much as I'd like it, I wish this wasn't the case, and despite as much as a lot of people

in the community who really love this distribution wish it wasn't the case and the people who work for the company wish it wasn't the case. And despite as much as a lot of people in the community who really love this distribution wish it wasn't the case, and the people who work for the company wish it wasn't the case, I believe the reality is, and I'm sorry I have to say this, this is the final word for this episode on the topic, and we can take other I just need to move on from this. I'm getting orange on the topic. Red, really.

But I just, I unfortunately do not believe that OpenSUSE really makes much of an impact in the market, in the industry. They don't really move the needle when they make an initiative. nobody really pays attention except for them. They're not super relevant, not like Ubuntu or Fedora or even Arch or honestly, definitely distributions like Debian and Slackware even. Maybe, I don't know. There are just a lot of distributions out there that I feel like when they say something,

it makes a huge, huge wave. Like when Debian decided to switch to system D, holy shit. Right? Yeah. When, when Seuss switched to system D, do you know when that was? No. In fact, I wasn't even aware that they'd switched to system D to be honest with you. Right.

They did a while ago. Yeah. Right. That's my point. And I, I mean, I wish it wasn't that way. And that's why, to be honest with you, as somebody who's an enthusiast about this market, I like to use a distro that's a little bit more relevant, that has a little sway. Not a lot.

I don't want a lot of drama. But I do like to have a distro that has some solid relevancy in the areas I care about. I just don't feel like that's where OpenSUSE is at. And that's my final word on it. So Harold writes in about Angela's Yoga 3. And he says, I'd like to move my wife to Linux as well. But how do we sync an iPhone or iPad to iTunes using Linux? That's her greatest stumbling block.

He also wants to know what spreadsheet program she used. A lot to choose from. So it's funny that he writes in and asks that, right? Because just like I think – yes – no, Friday. Friday. Yeah. It was Friday. We were working on show notes and you said, hey, while we're working on that, you know what would be awesome?

If you could get Angela's iPhone to sync up to... She's like, I'm basically doing almost everything on the yoga except, you know what? I take pictures with my iPhone and when I plug it in, nothing happens. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's right.

We never went back around to get that working. We talked about it on the show, and then I just – I forget that there's still people pulling photos off their phones using USB. I just think when you take pictures, it syncs to something. And she talked about using Dropbox and own cloud, but none of – she takes so many pictures, and they're fairly high resolution. She likes being able to plug it in, have them suck off the device, and then delete them off the camera roll of the device. But the fundamental problem is you have to get the Linux box to recognize the iPhone. And this has got to be a common problem in our audience. Right.

So the answer is actually fairly straightforward. There's two or three packages you need to install. We'll have a link in the show notes to them. But once you get those packages installed, what it allows you to do is mount the phone as either an MTP device or actually mount it as a drive. Now, we actually set it up so that it mounts as a drive, but it doesn't have right access to the phone. And the reason for that is we want to be careful. And she's had problems in the past where she does something on Linux thinking that she is just making copies of her photos.

And in fact, it's moving them here. There is no possibility to move them. Right. The only thing you can do is copy them. Now you can actually set it up so that inside of Shotwell it looks when a given mount point is mounted. So when slash media slash Ange's iPhone

mounts, it will automatically look inside of that directory and then the DCIM folder to sync up all of the photos. That's not a hard to set. Right. No. And so the nice thing for her is she just plugs her phone in and somehow all of her pictures will magically populate in Shot And she actually likes the idea, too, that it's in the file manager. So if she just wanted a single photo to post online or something. Right. Or send it to me over telegram. So that would be that would be. Yeah, that would be mounting it.

And yeah, you're right. So she can log in there and just manually copy that photo out. But it actually really took what? Take five minutes and four of those minutes were researching it and 30 seconds were implementing. You know, so the Librem is on the verge of shipping. July, I think, yeah. The XPS 13 is very solid. The Yoga is very solid. Dell's got this new $250 laptop. Yeah, Linux is big.

Yeah, and that doesn't even count. Like, System76 has their best Bonobo Extreme yet. Like, that thing's a monster. They're shipping the Meerkat. There's a great ton of options desktop-wise for System76. The Galago is amazing. You have, like, this is the best year for Linux laptops ever. Yeah. And a lot of these are shipping

with very good Intel graphics that are plenty good for average users. And for those of us who want to have dedicated graphics, those options are available too. Yeah, but really, if you think about it, the Intel embedded graphics are really what have kind of driven this market so far forward because now you don't need

to have dedicated... Before, like five years ago, when you bought your original Bonobo, I bet you, like buying integrated graphics was a joke. Not an option.

Because you can't get anything done on it. Not even possible. You can't game. I couldn't use OBS. And this thing has to drive, this thing has to mirror the display out

to the capture machine. So how are you going to do that with integrated graphics? How can I show any video games under Linux with integrated graphics back then and then to mirror the display out to the capture machine. So how are you going to do that with integrated graphics? How can I show any video games under Linux with integrated graphics back then and then also mirror the display 1080p? Right. And now, look at that tiny little nook over there. It does the same

freaking thing. I know, I know. It's gotten light years better and it's only going to improve. In fact, one might even wonder at least in the mobile sphere where you want a thin, portable, powerful laptop, at some point, do we just stop putting Upward graphics on for the purpose of getting that laptop down a little bit in size and compact, if integrated graphics get a little bit better?

That's why I had a great hope for Thunderbolt. I wanted to be able to have an integrated graphics laptop and then hook up an external GPU and have at it. Yeah. But we'll see. Alienware's got something like that. So integrated graphics have been changing the game for portability on the Intel-based machines, the amount of performance you can get it. It's the same thing

sort of in the server space like DigitalOcean has done. That's our next sponsor, where they've taken something and they've been able to get it to a price that's just unbelievable. $5 a month for your own server at DigitalOcean. It's incredible. And when you use our promo code DEO, unplugged, one word, you're going to get a $10 credit. What? You don't know what DigitalOcean is? What? DigitalOcean. It's not like I have like 30 droplets. Which is crazy. It's not like I had to email DigitalOcean and ask them to expand my droplet offering so that I could get more droplets. That didn't happen.

Game freaking changer. That's what DigitalOcean is. Game freaking changer. I can't even imagine if I was doing what Noah does as a day job and DigitalOcean was around. It would change how my business was structured. I mean, actually. You would have made a lot more money. Well, yeah. Absolutely. was around. It would change how my business was structured. I mean, actually... You would have made a lot more money.

Absolutely. And in a way, now I think about some of the stuff we're doing server-side for Jupyter Broadcasting. And how would I have done that before DigitalOcean? You either had rented Rackspace. You would have either had to rent an actual dedicated server, which would cost you like a couple hundred dollars a month. Or go crazy and I could maybe set up

a server here. But then I got bandwidth problems. Hold on. Before you ever get to the bandwidth problems, you got to come up with 2,500 macaroos to get the drive, to get the server. And oftentimes that's not even going to include, you're going to want to put some solid state drives in there to beef that up.

Yeah, and these things are, these things like, so there's a lot of automated backend functionality. If this doesn't work, shows don't go out. So I'm going redundant power. I'm going to go hardware drive array. Okay. Right?

I mean all – and then I'm setting this box up myself. Now still, you're hoping – you're counting on a couple things. One, you still have the risk of a hardware failure. Even if it's redundant, there's still – they're going to be – Or a Comcast outage. Okay. So we haven't gotten to bandwidth. First, the server itself can die. Second, you might have a bandwidth issue.

And third, what about your expandability? In two years, in a year, it's dead, and you can't upgrade that thing. Or what if the network starts growing really crazy fast? Then what am I going to do? Then I'm just going to have to replace it anyway. And that doesn't even settle the fact that I'm going to probably need to set up a DMZ on the firewall, get that all wired in, get the firewall rules all set up. But even if all that worked perfectly and nothing ever went wrong, which let's face

it, what's the chances of that happening? Thanks. Even if nothing, well, that's because you need us, Rekhi and I to come in here and do some wiring for you. But if that happened, you'd probably have a decent chance of staying up. Oh, okay. Even if. Oh, really?

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What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? Even if all of the hardware functioned for a year or two, at the end of that two years, now you have to do all over again, and you have to set all that crap up again. It's ridiculous. And meanwhile, DigitalOcean's over here. They're going to get you going in less than 55 seconds when you spin up a Dropbox.

For $5 a month. You get your 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. But it's a terabyte of transfer at tier one data centers with unbelievable connections. They have data centers in New York. They have ones in San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, and Germany. It is really nice. And then the best part is, and I wouldn't get this if I rolled my own rig, they have an amazing interface to manage it all. They really have a super intuitive control panel, and you can get all kinds of additional functionality on your own using their API.

super intuitive control panel, and you can get all kinds of additional functionality on your own using their API. And I'm thinking like create your machines, obviously destroy them, duplicate them, make backups of them before you make a big system change with a really nice snapshot system. Full feature DNS management allows you to easily manage your domain. Snapshots are a great functionality. They're not just like backup. These are like full, this is a great way to deploy servers. Like you get a server set up just the way you want your snapshot, you make it a template. You want to snapshot something and send it off to another customer. Hey, let me set you up a WordPress machine. Think about this, you guys.

You could go over there and have a droplet that you set up with the perfect ghost installation all set up for customers. And you could sell it. You could sell that. Make that a service and re-host it. And DigitalOcean has referral programs and all kinds of things. It's a really great offering for the customers, too. They've structured it in a way to incentivize you as well. So go check out some of those options.

Like their one-click installations that make the control panel super nice. And by the way, tons of job openings right now. They've asked me specifically to mention that they're looking for some of the best Linux admins out there. They came to the right place. I know. And they also want to get some content editors because they're doubling down once again. They're doing another big push on their content for their community tutorials and whatnot. They're willing to pay people.

And, you know, the real secret to DigitalOcean is a lot of these tutorials are not necessarily DigitalOcean specific. Like how to set up an SSH key. Look how well this is done. Look how clear this is. That is super nice. That is super clean. And none of this, none of this is specific to is super nice. That is super clean. And none of this, none of this is specific to a DigitalOcean droplet.

Yeah, that's the super nice thing, right? Is that they have those set up as just, we want to help people. We're going to set this up and provide that information to you. They look at all of that as like a whole product. They really do. When they rolled out free BSD support, they rolled out a whole bunch of tutorials with it. Like I said, they don't want you to just sit there and have a droplet. They want you to really get some use out of it. That They really do. Because when they rolled out free BSD support, they rolled out a whole bunch of tutorials with it.

Like I said, they don't want you just to sit there and have a drop, but they want you to really get some use out of it. That's really cool. Yeah. And they have great products built around that API, too. Like, you've tried out the Swimmer app. Yep. Mist.io is really cool. Command.io.

You can manage your digital ocean droplets using the command line. Yeah. That's neat. And you know what's interesting? You know, you talk about that control panel being easy to use and intuitive. The other part of it is, for people like me who I do the same repetitive task over and over again, I'm not using a lot of their features of clicking this and changing that and modify. I'm going to do all that from the command line once I SSH in. Right. For me, once I log in, it's like three clicks to get stuff rolling. Yeah. And then I just I have the IP IP address and I throw that in my DNS server and now I can access that machine. And like I said, I didn't get a chance to show it on Sunday, but the way that you can

set it up with SSH keys, they just have a button. So I can check. Yes. Noah's lanyard, Noah's laptop. And then when I spin up a DigitalOcean droplet. Yep. Boom. I can instantly have access to it.

I don't have to wait for the email to come through. Do you remember when I had that problem here? Yes. And my email went down, so I couldn't get the email. And that took me, what, 30 seconds to set that up? It's very nice. Yeah. It's quick.

It's easy. You've never had a better experience. Because usually what you have to do is you have to SSH into the computer, and you have to enter this huge long password. Then you have to run all these stupid commands to get it. And copying an SSH key is not as easy as you might think it is, because you can't have any spaces. You can't modify it.

Right. It's just a pain. There I click a button. One button. Now I have my SSH key. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DOUnplugged. One word will get you a $10 credit. Tread that $5 rig for two months for free. You'd be surprised what you can do with it. I

have so many things I actually frequently forget all the things I'm using it for. It's amazing how much I've integrated into my life and how hassle-free that is. DigitalOcean.com is so cool to have your own server up there that rocks, and you could use it for so many things. All right, Mr. Noah, I want to talk a little bit about GNOME 3.18.

Major updates are coming for GNOME 3.18, and, of course, we're going to see that land in a little while. But probably the ones we should talk about today is the changes coming to the files, you know, the old Nautilus application. It's going to bring numerous under-the-hood and user-visible changes. It also fixes bugs that

have been reported by users for a while now. So, fix for window focus issues that have occurred with the file manager, handling the command line options in certain areas. They're going to also introduce a public API for files to allow for plugins to be written, and a documentation for developers to create those extensions as well will be released.

Interface has had some modifications. They've added padding on the window list and views and things like that. I'm going to show you a picture of it. Oh, they took the picture down. Well, good thing I put that in the show notes. We do have, I do have, here's another copy of it. And I'll zoom in. I don't know if you can see, Noah, a little bit

here, but they're adding some, like when you create a new folder, this pop-down area here is new. They've cleaned up this area here and added some padding. The search area has been changed a little bit. So Files is getting quite a bit of attention in GNOME 3.18. Yeah? No, I'm just, I'm looking and I'm thinking, I kind of, you know, I'm all about innovation. I think that's great. I'm glad that we're always trying to move forward. And I can always appreciate a company that attempts to be innovative even if I don't always agree with the innovations.

But, like, I don't know if I want to create my folder up in the menu. I think I want to create a folder. Like, I want to right-click and create a folder. Or if I have to go up here and create a new folder. You still build a right-click. All right. But, yeah, have you checked out Nemo? No.

Nemo is a fork of the Nautilus file manager started by the Cinnamon Project, I believe. And it's pretty good. I don't know, Noah. No, I care. Greater says, wow, GNOME 3 will bring updated apps. It's incredible. Who cares? I feel like we can be such dicks in the open source community.

Are we so callous that we have stopped caring that a desktop that was down on the ropes that people thought was a failed desktop initiative is now coming out with incredible updates that are genuinely impressive and, in some cases, more trendsetting than any other desktop on the market? I mean, look at Yosemite. Yosemite and some of the UI changes they made there were direct ripoffs of GNOME 3. You look at some of the changes in Windows 10 and the way they're managing virtual desktops and things like that. Very much a rip-off of the way they do things in GNOME 3.

I think GNOME 3 has been a trendsetter. And I think GNOME 3.16 is the best full desktop environment for Linux. I say you stack Plasma 5 is getting great, but it's still not there yet. It's still not there yet. As far as a full-featured, complete, modern desktop,

I'm not talking about your awesomes and your ex-monads. I'm talking about a real, full-blooded desktop. Nothing is beating GNOME 3.16, and I think it's a little sad that as a community we don't give them enough recognition. The updates they have made are genuinely reflecting user feedback. They're genuine improvements, and as somebody who has used desktops

since we have had graphical environments, literally, I have been using desktop computing since GUIs were a thing for mass adoption. And I, in my personal opinion, have never used a better graphical environment in 30 years of using computers. Okay. So let me take the other side of it,

if only for the purpose of discussion. Why is it that basic things that Unity has are still not implemented in GNOME? So I'll give you an example. When I open the Display Manager in Unity, I can choose where I want my launcher bar to be. If I want it on the far right display, if I want it on the center display, left in my house I have six, I can pick which one of those six displays I want it on.

Why is it in GNOME, not only can I do that, I can't set the refresh rate, I can't set... You can't do that in Unity either. Yeah, I guess that's true. Now, remember, Unity's what? Had eight releases now almost? Seven releases? Yeah.

So, okay. I'll give you that. So you're saying they're further on? No, are you not able to set where that... Like, I'm able to set where that bar goes. How? In Nome Tweak. Okay.

Okay, well, then maybe it's something I'm missing. I guess where I looked for it was inside of the displays. I can't say, oh, yeah, maybe the bar. How about the activities menu? So what I want is if I have three monitors, I would prefer that the activities menu be on my far left monitor. The reason for that is because when I send my mouse up to the far, I send it all the way to the end, then I want it to activate the activities menu. The last time I've done it, the way it sets up, the activities menu shows up on my center display. And then when I scroll through my virtual desktops, it moves this other monitor.

I feel like we're arguing slightly. I think I'm on another level. Okay. All right. That could be. That could be. What I'm saying is like I guess don't mistake what I'm saying to say that it's flawless. Right.

Because that's not possible. Of course. What I'm saying is – But you said – Because what you're talking about is like an esoteric's flawless. Right. Because that's not possible. Of course. What I'm saying is what you're talking about is like an esoteric use case, honestly. You're talking about a three to six monitor setup and you want the activities menu to be... Two monitors and I just want the activities menu on the other monitor.

Well, that's how it works now. Whatever is your primary monitor is where the activities menu is. Okay. So if you have a dual monitor setup and you set activities to be whatever your primary monitor is, that's where that menu is at. Okay. So if you have a dual monitor setup and you set activities to be, whatever your primary monitor is, that's where that menu is at. Okay. So yeah, you can't say if I have three or four

or five or six monitors, I want it on monitor number four. All right. But these are also changes that as the desktop matures, they're going to add these refinements back in. They have, see, and this is the other thing, is the thing that we really crapped on them for was pulling a bunch of features out.

But to be honest with you, they are the developers. They know what code has been rotten. They know what code needs to go. They know where they want to take things. And where they need to restart. At some point, you have to trust that they have some more insights than us users do at some level. So if you accept that, then perhaps they can do some reduction of functionality. If you also grant that basically since GNOME 3.10, it's been nothing but adding a bunch of great features that we all wanted back in there. And with GNOME 3.16, we're really down that path. And with GNOME 3.18 now, we're going even further down that path.

And I would argue that I also think that we have been way too hard on them for their focus on the touchscreen. Because now that I've had a couple of users try out to... I know, I know. I can't believe I'm saying it either. I seriously can't believe those words came out of my mouth. You roll your eyes all you want, because I still think it's also an excessive use. But the couple of users now,

and this is super anecdotal evidence, but the couple of users I've had use the touchscreen laptops, they all think it's great. They think it's great. It is, to Angela, the best thing about her yoga is that she swipes that touchscreen up

to unlock it. To her, that's one of the coolest features on that laptop because these people are primarily mobile users. So the fact that they can reach out and touch it from time to time is almost an intuitive way to interact with the computer. So I could see that if the touchscreen in GNOME functioned the way that the touchscreen

functions on mobile. But the reality is I still feel when I touch the touchscreen on GNOME, I still feel like I have taken a touchscreen and plugged it into a desktop. I don't feel like I actually have a touch-optimized desktop. Where she's using it is like she touches the activities corner or the dock launcher or to unlock the screen. That's about all she uses it for. I can see unlocking the screen. That feels normal enough.

But even the activities menu is just small enough that I have to kind of wiggle my finger in the corner to get that to launch. I don't know. It just doesn't feel – My perfect desktop would be exactly what G GNOME is today written in Qt. Well, okay. So let me take it from another angle then. If GNOME has done such a good job with the desktop, why do we have to apply so many extensions to make it usable?

Yeah, that's a fair argument. I mean, but can't you say the same thing about Firefox and Chrome? Yes, I could. Except I don't use any extensions in Firefox. I think it works perfectly right out of the box you really don't use many extensions in gnome though either i don't yeah i don't i i don't but that's because i'm too lazy to install and if i but it works for you without them it does it does that's true it's i'm not saying it's not usable without extensions i'm just saying that it i guess i did just say that yeah i've seen my approach with

extensions is i i find gnome irritating to use without them but usable. Yeah. With extensions, it's so in that sweet spot where I've got kind of my cool heads-up information that I like to have. But it's not at the KDE level where I'm constantly tweaking it because the options are there. It's just that sweet spot. I probably couldn't – Until you update the next GNOME and then your extensions are going to break. But that's been getting better too. I grant you that as well.

and your extensions are going to break. Well, you know, but that's been getting better, too. Like, I grant you that as well. But, like, my update from 3.14 to 3.16, I didn't have a single extension that didn't work because either the authors were right on top of it or, like, I think maybe I had one extension that didn't work, but it's so minimal that it doesn't really matter. I don't think I could use GNOME without the extensions for a long term,

but, like, for a few days after an update, it's not a big deal. Now, how do you think that that relates to a new user? One of the nice things about Ubuntu and Unity is that big dock along the side makes it really, really obvious. They recognize Firefox. They recognize Chrome. So when they see those icons, it's pretty intuitive just to reach up and click them. Now, granted, there are certain things that are horrible in Unity for new user experience.

For example, it hides all the menus by default. I think by default, GNOME is a little hard for app discovery. Although, remember when we sat Angela down? The first thing she did was went up to the corner and looked for applications. Remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we even asked her. She's also used GNOME, right?

No. Oh, really? Well, I mean, she's used it here, but I have the dock. Yeah, okay. I mean, she's never used that menu before that I know of. And so I just thought it was to her, it seemed kind of intuitive to go up in the corner and launch an application. But I agree. I think

for normal users, I take that dash to dock extension and I set it to auto expand like the Unity bar. Right. And I think that just makes a lot of sense. No, it totally does. I guess my question was, then, do you see GNOME as primarily a power users desktop then? Maybe that's a wrong term. Experienced users.

Not necessarily power users. I think it's perfect for experienced users right now. And I think if they could stabilize the extension stuff, I think it would be a lot better for regular users. Or I think the stuff they just keep adding to it you won't require extensions. So I actually, I'm pretty excited about it, to be honest with you, because I think they're going in a direction that is great for users like you and I that have been

using Linux for a long time and are comfortable with GNOME tweak and comfortable with installing some extensions. Ironically, those are some of the more hardcore things to do for a desktop that's supposed to be super simple. But if you're comfortable with that stuff, which is pretty much everybody in our audience, I think it's perfect for them. And then if you can get somebody like, if you get one extension on there,

basically like Angela's desktop, she could get by with just Dash to Doc. And I think she'd be fine. So I think for her, it's fine. I guess if you don't know what to look for, or you don't know what you're missing, or you don't know what is available. If you don't know, you could have a Bitcoin ticker in your menu bar or a ping indicator. You don't care when they go away. Yeah, 14.2 milliseconds.

Yeah. Oh, really? Really? I'm at 11.3 milliseconds right now. I'm wireless. Oh, I get the wired advantage. Hello, Ethernet. Wired advantage.

You know, Mr. Noah, we could go on about this for a long time. We could. But I do want to just take a moment here, and I want to talk about our next sponsor, and that's Ting. And then, my friends, we have got to dig into this stuff going on in Fedora. Actually, there's some really interesting things. One in particular I forgot to mention in our Fedora review. Major oversight because it's totally changed the way

I use my laptop. So we've got to talk about that in our Fedora. I know. Can you believe I forgot that in the review? Well, the way you changed your laptop right before you decided that you couldn't deal with Fedora anymore and you have to go back to Archer right before the show. That doesn't have to do with this thing, though. No, that's true.

Yeah, I'll talk more about that, too. Okay, all right. But first, let me tell you about, that's right, our buddies over at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com, please, won't you? Hi there. Not only do you get to put Linux in your URL bar, but you get a $50 discount off your first Ting device. $50.

Yeah. $50. That's a lot of money. Dude, they have some devices50. Yeah. $50. That's a lot of money. Yeah, dude, they have some devices that are nearly only $50. It's almost the whole device. Yeah, yeah. And if you have a compatible device, you'll get a service credit. Now, why Ting?

My friends, I will tell you why. Ting is mobile that truly makes sense. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. Mobile that makes sense. It's no contract. You only pay for what you use. $6 is all you pay for the line, and then it's just your usage on top of that.

It's really straightforward and obvious too. There's no hidden secrets in there. There's just like your usage, your taxes, and the line. And the devices are unlocked. You own the device outright. So that's super nice, isn't it? You can get there, go over there and bring your own device if you have a GSM compatible one, or they have so, so many nice ones to choose from now. And one of the things I really enjoy about Ting is I can fully manage it just using my own web browser. I really never have to call Ting, even though I could. Ironically, Ting is so well-structured for that. If you call them at 1-855-TING-FTW between 8 a.m. or 8 p.m., a real human being answers the phone. Wrap your head around this, you guys. It's mobile service

with no contract, no early termination fees. You're only paying for your actual usage, and they have no hold customer service. Plus, they have a CDMA or GSM network you can choose from. That's super powerful and a lot of flexibility. For me, it's really nice just from a straight, this probably sounds a little excessive, but see with Ting, it's very easy to have multiple lines because I'm just paying the $6. So Ting now has the Galaxy S66 edge i think that's the best phone of the year right now yeah oh i think many would agree with you so i also still have my nexus 5 which is also a very good phone the thing i love about the nexus 5 that this the edge i don't know if it does is that the nexus 5 can be moved between gsm and cdma so like when we go to conferences and stuff i can look up the coverage map and see if it's stronger to have CDMA or GSM.

But on top of that, if I get there and I discover, oh man, the GSM network's blasted at this conference, I can try switching over to the CDMA network. I just got to swap the SIMs out and stuff, switch over to the CDMA network. And now I have like, that is such a unique competitive advantage to Ting right now that I just, that blows my mind. And it's, you just pay for what you use. And the great thing about it is because of their intuitive dashboard, you can shut that phone off and it can sit in the studio here for six months. You never touch it.

Then when you get there, you log in. In fact, you can do it on your Ting app. You can open it up. From my app. That's what I do. I just turn it on and off from my other phone. It's really like the way it should be. You said you thought that it was most of the cost of a phone.

You can actually get the Kirosera Dura XT for $47. Now, at first glance, you might look at that and go, why would I want that old looking flip phone? I don't know. You know how I, you know how I got started on ting. I was, I was, I was, I was, I was listening to the Linux action show and the only time I had to do that was at like three in the morning. So my wife was next to me sleeping and all of a sudden I get out of bed and I'm over at the, I'm over at my computer and she goes, what are you doing? And I'm like, I got to check this out. I think you can get a phone for like 10 bucks a month.

And she's like, what, do we have to do that now? And I'm like, yeah, we have to do that now. Yes, we have to do that now. So I ordered something like this. It was made by Samsung, but it's very similar. It's just a little flip phone. And that was how I got started on Ting. And it was just my, like what you were talking about, a bat phone.

So I gave Sarah the number and I'm like, here, you're the only one that has this number. Anything really important happens, call me on this. The battery will last a while and I'll just have this with me. And then once I learned, you know, that made sure that I could get coverage everywhere I wanted,

then I just switched over whole hog. So this is a Cura Serra Dura, right? This is a $47 feature phone. It's super durable. They joke here they can get hit by missiles and it still works.

I don't know about that. Why haven't they tested that? Well, it meets the military 801G standard, which means the phone can take dust, rain, radiation, salt, still works. I don't know about that. Why haven't they tested that? Well, it meets the military 801G standard, which means the phone can take dust, rain, radiation, salt, and humidity. I don't see anything about missiles.

No, I don't either. It has Bluetooth. It also has a camera. Now, it's not going to be a very good camera, but you know what this made me think? If it's rugged,

which means it's probably going to handle heat and stuff okay in my glove box, it has a camera. I could just have this thing plugged into my cigarette adapter for $6 a month at which when you get a fifty dollar credit the phone is freaking free and then it's just it's six dollars yeah and i could have an emergency phone in my

vehicle at all times right that's really nice you could have an emergency phone in your vehicle or you know i like to spend a lot of time at the lake in the summer be a great to throw that in the backpack and just know that if i ever need a phone and it gets a little wet, I don't have to baby it and stuff like that. Yeah. Or like, you know, I was just out at the lake recently and I was very, very aware that I just got the S6 and it's out there at the lake. And I'm like, if I freaking ruin this phone out on the lake, and it's just like even out in the sun and stuff, it bakes.

So like that'd be the perfect day to take my day phone now it sounds really crazy to take a different phone with you depending where you're going but it's so easy to move numbers around like with google voice and stuff or it's so cheap to do it at six bucks a month yeah and and when you get the 50 service credit this phone's free yeah and so it just and the same thing like they have my they have the mi-fi adapters you could get actually you know what i noticed the phone is 47 so actually the phone is free yeah and they're gonna pay for half of the line charge for the first month or whatever. They're going to pay the first $3 for the service. Yeah, I know. It's nuts. How can they afford to do that? Well, that's what's so awesome about the MVNO structure is they didn't have to

dig the dirt and put all of those towers in. So they didn't blow out a billion dollars doing that. So they can focus on the customer service. They can focus on the right devices. They can focus on the awesome plans and making the deals possible. They buy up all the spectrum from these guys at wholesale and they get a great price on that. And when you remove that layer of having to constantly invest in the infrastructure and all the techs

and pulling all the fiber and all that, when you remove all of that, you can focus on really the customer experience. And that's Ting's secret weapon. And that's why they're always going to be more competitive than the other guys. So go to linux.ting.com and thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. Alright, so Fedora 22 came out

and we've talked, the last couple of Fedora releases we've gotten a lot of coverage. We've gone from really not talking about Fedora very much to now we talk about Fedora a lot. And I feel like... Linux action shows are definitely improving. Noah takes no credit for himself there, of course. I wasn't there for the other two reviews. I'm just saying the quality of the show is improving

because you're talking about Fedora. Uh-huh, yeah. It's for people who like to mess with computers. That is true, actually. I would agree with that. Fedora is for people that like to mess with computers. I actually grew with Leo Laporte on something. That's amazing. as well. What does DNF stand for? Do you remember? Does not stand for anything, maybe. But here's the one thing that was the miss in our review that I wanted to follow up on

right now. And I also wanted to kind of mention it because it's one of the semi-controversial things about the new release of Fedora. It's not the use of Wayland for GDM, but it's the new lib input that changes the way trackpads are handled. And for my Synaptics trackpads, I have noticed a huge improvement in accuracy.

Right now I'm using it to scroll this page. And I can't quite describe what it is that feels different about it, but it feels very good. Like this scroll, it's right on the money. It's responsive. It's right on it. And did you notice the difference too with the mouse input not on this piece of crap but uh but the on the on my uh on my system 76 or on my uh on my i have the the that uh not a dell i have that lenovo that's what it is my wife's uh lenovo i was testing it on there and on those with with smoother trackpads it works it was very responsive

and and like i think you made the you said this i think linux unplugged maybe it was last week and i just it struck a chord with me. It feels like the cursor is glued to your finger. Yes. It's like it's attached to your finger. Exactly. Like it's right there. They've really nailed it.

It feels like a level of mouse responsiveness I've never seen in X before. Like I thought maybe that just wasn't capable in X11. And I was going, okay, I got to wait for Wayland, I guess. I hope they fix it then. But lib input's real nice. So DNF, by the way, stands for Danified Yum. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dandified, right? Dandified Yum. Dandified. It's amazing how

they come up with these names. It's something. Here's what's funny. Here's what's funny. That is going to be in some sort of corporate brief at some point. The selling points of RHEL 9, RHEL 10 is going to update an update package manager and they're going to be using the Dandified Yum. Like some guy, RHEL 10 is going to update and update Package Manager. You're right.

And they're going to be using the dandified YUM. Like some guy in a business suit is going to sit there and have to listen to that. It's just kind of funny to me. It is. I never thought about it from the RHEL perspective. Yeah. Anybody in the Mumba Room want to share their perspectives on Fedora 22 before I kind of get into what's coming up for Fedora 23? Nobody has used Fedora 22. You're all all missing out do you know what you're missing

i've used every fedora release since one that's a great nobody has tried fedora 22 this might be the best release of fedora yet yeah i've with a couple of exceptions i have i've had some weird problems with chrome under fedora 22 a couple of my extensions did not install yeah uh which has never happened to me before and flash video plays The Chrome tab shows the audio is playing, but I don't actually get any sound out from Chrome. That's an Adobe problem. It's a Flash. I know, but I've never had that problem before.

I'm just kidding. I don't even know if it does work. Is it even Flash? Because isn't it rendering in HTML5? Oh, that's right. I don't think it's a Chrome. That's right. We tried HTML5 video, and it doesn't work either.

It's just any sound in Chrome. Yeah. And Firefox doesn't have that problem. Yeah. So I've had those issues. But for the most part, it has been pretty good for me. Chrome is sort of a sticky point. I'd like to get the audience's response. Obviously

our virtual lug has not been too excited about Fedora 22. Here's the thing, too. Fedora is not for everyone. And Red Hat acknowledges that Fedora is not for everyone. And I am a die-hard lover of Fedora, and I acknowledge that Fedora isn't for everyone. Fedora is a great release if you, for one, for a long time, if you wanted to use GNOME, it was a great release to have. Because if you don't want to take the time to put Arch together, because maybe I just want to install my operating system and I'd like to have things like a software manager and stuff like that, I think that Fedora fits the bill pretty well.

stuff like that um i think that fedora fits the bill pretty well um and but and then like i said i think the real sweet spot is if you're a system administrator and you want something that you can try out the newest versions of something before it actually goes yes into into a into stable production i wonder too i think is where and i maybe not many i wonder how many people are waiting for corolla 22 that the respin of fedora that includes all the codecs and makes it much easier for end users. So I want to clarify this. So somebody says they want to bring up the comparison to Antragos. Antragos is a great installer. It's a great distro.

And I think it does do a very good job of just you plug the USB key and then I have Linux. However, first of all, there are tiny little issues that do come up with Antragos. Like its installer can be broken from time to time? Like the installer doesn't recognize the internet. That seems to be an issue. But the other thing is, too, is Antrigo still is a very customized and it's very minute. So, okay. All right.

Give me like one example. All right. So when you plug the USB drive in, you have to choose if you want to. You have to choose which desktop. Sorry. You put USB drive in, you have to choose if you want to install it. You have to choose which desktop. Sorry, you put the CD in, Chris. No, I just like that you're, like how the desktop environment handles the USB storage medium is like a major issue for you. Like it's like a deal breaker.

I was talking about installing it. But you have to choose the desktop environment, right? And so for somebody that plays a lot of Linux distros, that's super nice. And I think that's an awesome. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I was saying you get to choose a desktop. Yeah, that's true.

You get to. But kind of the nice thing about Fedora is when I plug it in, I can just install it. Some of those things are gone. And in some respects, it's kind of nice because I get it's kind of a mix between this really bleeding edge and not just having to custom – A curated thing. Pick every single thing. I have a mail client. I have a web browser.

So have you tried Corora? No. Well, yeah, a while ago. I haven't tried it with – obviously with – They don't have Corora 22 out yet. Well, there you go. And I think like people in our mumble room, if you've been kind of – or in our audience, if you've kind of been borderline curious about fedora but you're worried about it maybe not working for you you could just try straight up fedora it's pretty great yeah corolla 22 when it hits though you know like uh i i one of the

things i really like about it is it just it comes loaded again i know this is always my go-to but it just comes loaded with a ton of stuff that i like so you get to choose from cinnamon gnome kd made or xfce it's's got Adobe Flash already installed. Dropbox Google Chrome is loaded with the Google Talk plugin. RPM Fusion repos are already set up. VirtualBox is already ready to go. Third-party driver support is set up and ready

to go, like for NVIDIA graphics cards. Steam is no problem to get going. Like, it just takes all of the stuff that you might want and makes it ready to go. So I guess where I get kind of disappointed with that is I guess it makes me disappointed that we have to have essentially a fork of Fedora to get those things. It's a re-spin. They're using the re-spin tools, I think, in Fedora.

I would like to get that re-spin if your opinion is reflected on a large user base, and I think that it is, I think it would be, it'd be nice to see those changes implemented in the actual servers. You bet. You know they won't

because of the legal issues. Right. So this is taking care of a problem that Red Hat can't legally do. If Red Hat wanted to make the most amazing desktop ever, they couldn't

because of the legality. So these guys take care of it for them. And the thing is it follows pretty closely to Fedora. And if you want to use regular Fedora, you can. I just think Kerora is a great option. Fedora 23 is going to have a new way to upgrade. So FedUp has been around since Fedora 17.

Have you ever used FedUp? Yes. Yes, I have. FedUp is getting rewritten. To be totally honest, I would not recommend upgrading Fedora. I've done it. I've done it. I've done it a couple times, but I've run into issues far more times. Like probably – it's probably not an exaggeration to say probably one out of every three times something bad happens.

Between 15 and 16 was particularly horrible because what would happen is you would upgrade the system, and it would just do this thing where it would load the login manager and you'd type in your password and then it would just go right back to asking for the password again. And I could not find a way to fix it. How annoying. Well, it's annoying when it's on your laptop and all of your work is there and I can't log in and I'm sitting in front of somebody and they're going, well, why can't you log in? Then I have to explain that I don't know why I can't log in and not only can I not log in, but I can't even log in to find out why I can't log in.

So here's what they're doing to FedUp. They say they've come to the conclusion that the current design is unsupportable, mostly due to upgrade.image, which turns out to cause more problems than it solves. So for Fedora 23, FedUp needs to be redesigned. They're going to download packages for the new system. And then they're going to use SystemD and its offline updates facility to install the packages. This is really simple.

They say it's going to be a simple enough approach that it probably will be provided by the system packaging tools. They have a proof of concept already up on GitHub integrated in as a DNF plug-in. As a DNF plug-in. A dandified yum plug-in. Yep. This behavior could be implemented by PackageKit,

which would make it easy to write a GUI wrapper for it. So the plan is to drop upgrade.image, move to upgrade support into the system packaging tools, and make it a simpler system. So use the systemd offline update functionality. Bob is indeed your uncle. What do you think of that? Look at systemd being an essential tool to do the updates.

Do you think that that? Look at systemd, being an essential tool to do the updates. Do you think that this is another sign that the Red Hat group is trying to move, is trying to repurpose and restructure Fedora to be more streamlined for the workforce

rather than just being a testing bed for Red Hat? That's a, yeah, why do they care? Yeah, why do they care about being, I mean, blowing away a desktop, it isn't? That's a, yeah. Why do they care? Yeah, why do they care about being, I mean, blowing away a desktop, it isn't that big of a deal. I mean, especially if you're using Fedora.

Especially if it's for enthusiasts. Yeah, right. So it almost, and you know, look at the wording. They've changed it to Fedora. Now they call it Fedora Workstation. That alone is interesting. The only thing that is missing for me

to go to every client I work for and say we're done with using this, that, or the other, we're going to switch to Fedora. I have to have an LTS. I have to have, I have to have some sort of a locked thing that's there for three or four or five versions, um, that is centered around a desktop operating system. And 18 months isn't enough. No, it's not. And then the other thing that would be nice, I can live without it, but it would be nice

is if they, if they could offer support. So I could say pay eight, $900 per workstation and you can call this company anytime and they'll help. There are clients that would demand that. So that would be nice, but I can live without that. We can do the support. So that's not the end of the world. I mean, that is how I make money, right? I guess.

You could turn it away as a moneymaker, I suppose, but I'm still not convinced it's going to be a workable solution because the problem honestly is Fedora releases, and I think 22 is an example of this, in my opinion, take a month before they're good. I think it takes a month of updates, a month before RPM fusion is all cut up to date for everything I need, a month before everything in copper is where I'm at. And so what you really get is – so if you're going to turn this around to a client solution, so you're going to wait a month before you deploy it to your clients. But I'd wait a month before I deploy the next LTS. Of course you would. Of course you would.

But for Fedora, you're going to wait a month. Then you're going to schedule it. So it's going to be two to three months before you actually get it installed. And then what do you really have? You have a 15, 14, 16-month support window. Oh, as it is. Yeah, it's not usable. Even if the day it came out, I could get it installed, I still wouldn't do it.

I don't have the time of day, the effort, and I'm not going to tell my clients they have to pay me. You know why we use Linux to begin with? Because I can set it up one time and then I can make my money actually doing useful things. And the customer sees value because they're not paying me to redo things constantly. If I tell them that – because you can't wait the actual – the full release. I would probably up it by one so if the release cycle is let's say they release every six months and then the support cycle is 12 months i would be replacing every six months or this is 15 16 yeah so i'm going to replace the the cycle before that because i want a little bit of i want to give

myself a little buffer time um so even if i could do it the day it came out it wouldn't be practical yeah they've really if they really want workstation, and it seems to me it'd be so good for so many of their initiatives if more people are using Fedora Workstation. The more people that are using Fedora Workstation are going to be writing software for Fedora Cloud. The more people that are deploying Fedora Cloud, the more people that are going to use Red Hat Enterprise when they step up to the next level. The more people that are buying Red Hat Enterprise are buying huge fatty support contracts that

milks the cow. level. The more people that are buying Red Hat Enterprise are buying huge fatty support contracts that milks the cow. So it seems to me like I know at first pass you can't quite see how Fedora how doubling down on Fedora and making it a long term supportable product makes them money. But to me it seems pretty clear. You can put it

on a lot of desktops. And plus they're just going to have to compete with other distros anyways if they don't do it. And the model has been here for a long time to do stuff like this. So for example how many times do you have a program that you have the choice between the unstable and the stable? Why can't we do that? Why can't we have Fedora Workstation and Fedora

Bleed? And Fedora Bleed is the every time, you know, every time a mouse moves. Yeah, right. Exactly. Every time something moves, we put something in there and we see if it works. And then when it crashes and burns, oh well, at least we have, you know, Fedora Workstation. And then you can move, and then fedora workstation you take all the best of that and turn that into realm that becomes a server that's essentially what they do but without

the support though yeah well kind of except not really because i still see a lot of really dnf would should not be you know well i mean actually it has worked really well so i guess i can't say that yet but i feel like there should have been more. I should have had more of a chance to play with DNF before. It was in 21. Yeah, I guess. Actually, DNF was instituted in 18. Oh, really?

I started playing with it in 21. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I wanted to give, while we're talking about DNF, I wanted to give Heaven's Revenge a chance to geek out. I know you and Rotten were looking at it. Go ahead, Heavens. All right.

DNF is an acronym for a SAT solver algorithm, as in a satisfiability solver. It started up in YUM on OpenSUSE to do their dependency management for package dependencies. Yeah. So DNF means disjunctive normal form. It's just the item of what the class combining algorithm is for how they do the self-solving. That's geeky. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. That's a good way to end the Fedora discussion right there. I think, you know, I invited Matthew Miller, the Fedora project lead on the show today, but then we moved the show today. Sorry, Matthew, if you were going to make it. I'm fascinated to see where they're going, fascinated to see what Fedora 23 has in store, and see what they do with the workstation spin. I have a lot of interest in that. I think that's going to be a big deal.

Just a couple of bits of business. We'll be back at our regular time slot on Tuesday next week, 2 p.m. Pacific. You can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that all up in your business. We're also attempting to raise some more funds for the network, post Linux Fest and events. We are hoping to get some more support on our Patreon page over at patreon.com slash today.

We'll have some interesting developments coming there soon. And when you go over there, there is a video that Noah and I posted. In fact, if I go to post real quick, I can go pull this up. Noah, do you remember we did this? I posted this from my phone. Yeah. Yes. May Studio Update posted for our patrons

over. Look at your face right there. It looks like I'm calling you out on something. Yeah. Yeah. I think you were. Yeah. So we were there. I am rocking my HTML5 shirt and Noah and I are doing an in-studio build where Noah shows us. Here. Look at this shot right there. Look at that. You can see the rig we're working on.

And we talk to our patrons about that. We try to do those from time to time for our – oh, jeez. Don't put Rikai in the shot. There's almost a beard in the shot. That's for the patrons only. Yeah, yeah. Cannot show that on the main screen. See, that right there is worth signing up to be a patron.

Yeah, patreon.com slash today. The money raised there isn't just for the Tech Talk Today show. It is for all of the shows. And Tech Talk Today is the way I thank you for that. And with that, we're going to have some announcements of where that funding is going. But it helps us build a little runway and predictability without having to increase our sponsor load.

Patreon.com slash today. Also, last but not least, I'd love to get submissions from the audience for Runs Linux. If you have a cool Runs Linux rig, get some video or audio of it or pictures of it and send it to linuxactionshow at jupyterbroadcasting.com. If you have a cool Runs Linux rig, get some video or audio of it or pictures of it and send it to linuxactionshow at jupyterbroadcasting.com.

If it's like a YouTube video, you could upload that S and send us a link. We'd totes appreciate that. And then we'll feature it on an episode of the Linux Action Show. Now,

we have a lot of really good episodes in the pipeline for the Linux Action Show, so tune in on Sundays as well, 10 a.m. Pacific, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.

And if you want to make this show better, linuxactionshow.reddit.com including the feedback thread to share your thoughts on anything we talked about today. Noah. Yes, sir.

Is there any place you'd like to plug for folks to check out for you throughout the week? You can head over to AltaSpeed. There you go. And check out what I do during the day. In fact, actually,

I think next week on Linux Action Show you're going to find a slightly different aspect of AltaSpeed that we haven't really talked about before. Yeah, we're going to have

a feature on that. Also, check out my new Twitter account. I've changed, but it's still ChrisLAS. You just have to re-follow it, at ChrisLAS. All right, everybody, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Analytics Unplugged. See you right backbtitles.com jbbtitles. Let's go. And a last chance to vote.

We got the Fedora 22 discussion in here. We have a lot of topics we talked about today. So jbtitles.com, and we'll pick that. Disjoint of normal Fedora and do not Fedora. Wow. Fed up with Fed up. Wow. The year of the Linux laptop.

Ooh, that's not bad, Ubi. That's not bad. Cardboard container catastrophe. That's not bad either. Some good ones. Dell recommends not bad. Cardboard container catastrophe. That's not bad either. Some good ones. Dell recommends Ubuntu. Crappy desktop environment. Ouch, guys.

Ouch. What's a crappy desktop environment? Well, I don't know. Apparently somebody thinks something's crappy. JBtitles.com. JBtitles.com. What'd you think, Mr. Noah? What'd you think?

What are we doing after this? I'm going to do Coder Radio. What are you doing? Really, isn't it what you think of this? What are you doing after this? Well, Rekhi and I are going to go. Ooh, Mr. Noah? What do you think? What are we doing after this? I'm going to decode a radio. What are you doing? Really, isn't it what you think of this? What are you doing after this? Well, Rekhi and I are going to cuddle. Oh, nice. And burgers, right? And burgers. I have to give him five guys.

Because he gets really crabby if you don't give him five guys. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. He comes out and he's like, where's my five guys? Yeah, and he whips you with his beard. That happens. A disjointive, disjunctive, disjunctive normal fedora. I misspelled it. Can't even.

What are you trying to say? It was disjunctive normal form, and I changed it to just disjunctive normal fedora. Cardboard container catastrophe and year of the Linux laptop are our top contenders. JBtitles.com. It's a tight vote. It's a tight, tight, tight, tight vote. So, you guys, I got a little anecdote for you. You want to hear an anecdote?

I'd love to hear an anecdote. I don't know if you would, actually. Oh, okay, because it's going to be a rip on Fedora. Why would I do that, dude? I don't know. Do not Fedora? Why would you do that? Why would I do that?

Why would you do that? So, you know, it kind of goes like this, you guys. Before Noah came out, Rikai comes into the studio, and he says to me, he says, you know, Noah and I have been talking. Like, they've been talking offline for a while about what a mess it is in the studio. And about how they're going to come in here, and, you know, it's just time for the professionals to come in and clean up, because, you know, Chris, you just haven't been able to figure it out.

So, yeah, the big boys are going to come in, and we're going to clean up this wiring mess and make sure that all this is cleaned up. So if he has any audio issues, it must be because of that. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to tell you as I stand here, the wiring mess is now ten times worse. Oh, okay. Ten times worse.

So you prefer the buzz is what you're saying. Uh-huh. I'm just saying. I'm just saying your audio buzz is gone. I got schooled on my wiring and how it's going to be all cleaned up, and then you guys spent a couple of days in here, and it's ten times worse. Look at that mess right there. Yeah.

So, I love, you're very good at presenting one side of the story. Oh, am I? Yeah, yeah, you're very good. So, here's the thing. First of all, the cables that I have to work with are the spare ones that are in the box, because, you know. This is an interesting argument you make, and I like it. So your argument is, and this is great.

Hold on, let me tell you what he's about to do. Everyone, just so you can appreciate this because it's really fun. What he's about to do is make a totally undestroyable argument, and he's going to do it in such a quick and precise manner that you'd think that he sat up all night and rehearsed this. No, it's obvious. I think it's funny

that this is your argument. So your argument is,. I think it's funny that this is your argument. So your argument is, if I understand it correctly, that this would not be such a mess if you didn't have to use just a random assortment of odd cables. Actually, that is exactly my argument. So my argument is as such, it wasn't such a mess when I used those same exact cables. But you have the same cables. I used the same cables. So what you're saying is. I don't make that mess. So what you're saying is some other owner of Jupiter Broadcasting was in this room and

ordered all those cables to begin with when he decided that he was going to move his studio from his house over to this studio over here. Here's the thing, though. That happened. Somehow, somehow, the same amount of computers is in this room that was in this room before. But there's way more wires now. And the reason for that is... And you say it's because they're an eclectic set of wires except for when I used that set of wires,

it was not this messy. You did, but you also didn't have stereo in and out of the M-Audio, so you weren't feeding stereo to the mumble room. We don't have stereo return into the I'm not telling you. That's just one thing. That's one of the very many things that I've done. Hold on. Let's just pause because you're painting a bad picture. Oh, okay. That's a very compelling argument except for the fact that all of those cables are like three feet long and they're on the

other end of the room over there. None of this mess is because of that fix. Fair enough. But, so to get that, so we have improvement, so it's not the same setup as it was before that. I was destroying that argument independently. But the real reason for that cable mess,

that rat's nest, that horrible mess, is because you don't have enough HDMI. The mess that you step in the wrong spot, it knocks the PC over, which actually happened during the show. So the reason for that is because since we don't have enough HDMI cables to go all the way over here, I can't put the computer where it was before. So it has to go on the floor so that this godforsaken VGA cable,

which I haven't used a VGA cable in probably 10 years, somehow I have to use it because that's the only way that you can see this on here. So, what we could do, if the cable mess bothers you that much, is I could go back and put the Nook back in. We could go back to a buzz. Because, the buzz is kind of nice, actually. It does change the buzz. The buzz is gone.

This PC, if it wasn't for that VGA cable, could be on the other end of the room. Yeah, that's true. So, what you're saying is I should go to Best Buy and buy a... What do I need? Oh, you know what? Actually, you know what? I don't know. I'm about to destroy my own argument.

It's not an HDMI cable that we need. It's another HDMI output on the box. Yeah, we do. Well, I could go buy an HDMI splitter. VGA is fun.

So, yeah. So now, and now, of course, Noah flies out tomorrow morning and leaves me with a mess. But that's fine. That's fine. That can be. That can be.

There's a reason that I plan for longer just in case I need to. I wonder what a spectrum analyzer would look like right there. They say in the chat room. It looks like a pit of doom. I have a spectrum analyzer. I should have Photoshopped this a little bit and added some additional cables. Yeah, should you? I'll tell you what.

I'll come in here while you're in the middle of Coder Radio. I can zip down. Good, good, good. All right. Speaking of that, we've come in here while you're in the middle of Coder Radio. I can zip down. Good, good, good. All right, speaking of that, we've got to go. So let's see where our titles are at. JBtitles.com, JBtitles.com. And I'm refreshing.

And our top vote is, ladies and gentlemen, Disjunctive Normal Fedora. Really? I guess you guys like the clever ones, huh? Do you have a preference there, Noah? Mine is still the Year of the Linux Laptop. That's only because I really like the idea that we're going to have a year of the Linux laptop. What? We've had one every year for the past 15 years. Yeah, right. No, that's a Linux desktop. Now we're in the Linux laptop. Catch up. I'm on a different level.

The desktop, oh, burn. The desktop is a part of the laptop. Oh, is that how that works? All right, all right. We'll go with disjunctive normal fedora. That's fine. I desktop is a part of the laptop. Oh, is that how that works? Alright, alright. We'll go with Disjunctive Normal Fedora. That's fine. I like it. I like it enough. We can do it. I think that's pretty good. And I like Blaster.