Tech Over Tea - CEO And Founder Of System76 | Carl Richell

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Today we have the one of the 2 founders of System76 and current CEO of the company Carl Richell on the show to chat about the history of the company, how we got here and some of the cool stuff they've got in store. =========Guest Links========== Website: https://system76.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/system76 Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/carlrichell ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to episode 206. Five? One of those. Five. I want to say five of Check of a Tee. I am, as always, your host, Brodie Robinson, and today we have the CEO and one of the founders of System76, Carl Rochelle, on the show. How are you doing? I'm doing great, and thank you for having me. Absolute pleasure. This is one of those episodes where I'm like, you know, this would be a cool thing to do at some point, but you know, I'm never going to get the attention of someone running like a computer company in this space. That's not going to happen. And then you're like, oh yeah, I just happen to watch the show sometimes because i yeah i mean i told

you when you reached out like i really enjoy your podcast i think it's great i try to catch as many as i as i can really they're um entertaining fun i even like uh i like how you start uh almost always not sure which episode number it is i have the folder open. I could check it. Yeah, it is 5. Okay, it is 2.05. Well, it's great. Great content and thanks for covering Linux and all the fun stuff people in open source are doing. It's great.

Thank you. Thank you. I guess we should probably just get straight into everything you're doing because there's a lot of stuff i do want to cover uh and you know there's only so much time in the day so i guess the first place i want to start because i know some people don't know this the origin of the name system 76 because i i know where the 76 came from but i know a lot of people don't, and it's always amusing when they find out.

Right, right. So the 76 is a reference to the American Revolution. So the intent and our purpose and what we've been working on for 18 years is independence for proprietary software. That's where the 76 comes from. How long has the company been around for at this point uh just over 18 years wow wow yeah yeah by tech terms they were ancients well especially for what would you describe the company is like a system integrator so like what term would you use for it there's a bunch of different terms we will use for pc companies yeah you know that's kind of uh that's kind of a good question because we um and the traditional term is oem you know original equipment manufacturer um so we you know decide these days we do a lot um that's unique amongst our industry. We design a lot of hardware in-house.

We built a factory in Denver. We do a lot of manufacturing. We've been bringing more and more of the things that we, instead of a lot of companies where we're designing and manufacturing outsource, we've been bringing more and more of that in-house. But we also develop an operating system. And so that's...

And you also have like keyboard as well that you sell? Right. Yeah, we design, manufacture, launch keyboard. Interesting story with that. So with the factory, what we want to do is open source. I mean, our ultimate goal is to open source the computer entirely. And it just takes a massive amount of endurance, a lot of time, and it involves a lot of things.

And we have to knock off pieces over time. So that means whether it's the hardware design, PCB design. Eventually, RISC-V is really exciting to us because at some point I would love to be building RISC-V computers that can compete with the latest Intel and ARM stuff coming out. So we've been chopping all of, slowly chopping those pieces off year after year. The launch keyboards was the next step before getting into laptops.

And the reason that we did launch was because we wanted to learn precision engine milling in our factory. Right. And actually the form factor is actually pretty similar to a lot of things that you see in a laptop we also wanted to learn and get more experience with electrical design for high-speed traces so it's one of the reasons it has a high-speed usb hub built into it so and of course the pcb for launch is all open source and so so we wanted to you know learn and experience get some experience doing those things before we move over to laptop design, which is another project that's coming in the background. Yeah, I did see the picture, I think you posted it, of the milled out

case from a couple of months ago. I guess it's like half a year ago now. Of the Virgo case. Or the panel, whatever it was. I am really interested to see what ends up happening with that. Because I did see when I think

Jeremy posted about the design specs for it being open under what license was it? I think we're going to use, well, probably this OpenCern license, the reciprocal version. Okay. And I, you know, we saw what Framework did a couple of years ago with their devices. And we're seeing a couple of fairly small companies moving that direction. And obviously, you know, there's no...

We're not seeing like HP or any of these like massive, massive providers yet. But if you create this small groundswell, this creates a market for it. And if there's a market for it, then, you know, if users actually really want to support this, then they have a place they can go. They have companies they can support. They, you know,

and, you know, if they want to start using these designs themselves, they have the tech know-how to do so, they can go and do something really cool with them themselves. Right. Right. It's the hardware equivalent to open source software it's a lot harder yeah in many ways because it just it takes um capital or machinery and you know other things to actually realize these you know physical products but 3d printing is becoming much more interesting um and what what we want to do is in the same way we want to do with open source software,

we enable people to create things with what we build. We're really interested in what people can make with the stuff we make. We want to do that with a laptop platform in the long term, whereby you would have a board and extra and modules. And you can use these different components to mix and match them and create your own products. Because at the core, a lot of these things are very similar.

And the differences come in with how things are laid out, manufacturing quality, the component decisions, a lot of other decisions that every individual person could innovate and work on, create their own customer experience. But all the guts are really very similar. We think something that can be done, Intel's been quite interested in doing something similar to this for some time.

You know, a lot of companies want to do it it's done in desktops already it's just we need to miniaturize all that and get down to the point where people can can uh instead of i'd like people to be able to take components off the shelf and um and hack together their own laptop they'll be awesome so uh you know so we i think it's a very long project. I think it's going to take us a couple of years to really get there and to nail it. But once we do, I hope we build something

that people can use as a platform to not only be how we make laptops, but how other people can experiment and build and grow and see what they can make of it as well. Well, it sounds like the future is really exciting, but let's go all the way back to the past. When the company first started, what was the landscape like back then?

And what was the first system that you guys started shipping? All right. Well, you know, I don't remember what I had for lunch yesterday. What was the first device class you had? iOS or desktop? Yeah. Okay. So, well, I've got some antidotes that I think could help draw a picture of what those early days were like. So I started System76 in a basement with $1,600. Okay. Okay.

That's all I had. And Intel had a program. Intel was very worried about their customer base kind of becoming two or three really large customers and then not having any you know ability to innovate or do things that you know on their own because they just be you know encumbered by what these four or five customers might want they were used to at that time still the desktop market where there's a huge enthusiast market it was you know building pcs and a pretty healthy system integrator market and they wanted to try to reproduce the same thing with laptops right so they had a program called the white book program okay and so you could uh they partnered

with odm's the original design manufacturers to make a few different designs where companies like ours um and uh and a few others could go and pick out a few models and make your own OEM product out of it. So really, System76 and especially the laptop or ability to deliver laptops was just lucky timing. If it hadn't happened to be 2005 and Intel didn't happen to have this program or didn't do any kind of white book program, there is a very decent chance that we would have been making desktops and then never been able to grow to the point where we could continue delivering broader and broader product lines. But fortunately, it uh good timing and um so we had the ability to buy products um uh that we could ensure worked really well on uh with linux um and the first

products because we only had 1600 bucks the first products i put on the website when the first one was ordered i had it overnighted to me and in four days did all the engineering to get the hotkeys working, to get everything on their product. Because I had never seen it before because I didn't have the money for that. And so got everything working, boxed up, shift off to the customer. And and from what I recall, they love the product. I remember our first return even.

Oh. Because it broke my heart. I guess I didn't have as thick a skin. 18 years old kids have thicker skin. But that first return broke my heart because he didn't like the product. Oh, there's another story. Okay. It's all flooding back now.

The first laptop we ever sold happened to be someone in Colorado, and I hand-delivered it to their house. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I said, here, here's the laptop. They didn't even say a word. They just said thanks and took it. It wasn't like, thanks for bringing your hand-delivering it. They just grabbed it and closed the door, and I moved on.

That's the fun of it. They just grabbed it and closed the door and I moved on. Has the website you've... Sorry. I was going to say, is the website you've always had system76.com? Because I've got archive.org open. I can go back and check it. It is, yes. Sweet. Let's see how far back we can go.

There should be a statue with a cone on its head. That'll be on the homepage, I believe. Oh, wow, it's archived all the way back. Incredible. Okay. First archive, November 27th, 2005. Let's look at that one. Let's see what it is.

So, Ubuntu was what... Yeah, okay, I see it. I see it. Ubuntu was what you guys originally offered why was it ubuntu that was decided upon i decided upon because that would have been really shortly after what 2004 was the start of ubuntu yeah yeah 2004 that was really shortly after i I think Breezy Badger was the first venture release we shipped with. Is that 504? And before that was just Warty Warhawk.

Okay, yep, yep. Yeah. Very early. So it was very early. And the first time, so when we were deciding which distribution to go with, I tried Red Hat's. It was basically, I've already been using Linux for quite some time. But spent more time with Red Hat, SUSE. I really like this little distro called Yoper.

I thought it was awesome. And their claim to fame, or the thing that they did, was we could pile everything for 64-bit, so it was faster. awesome. And their claim to fame or the thing that they did was recompile everything for 64 bit. So it was faster. And but of course, they broke other things, but it was kind of cool. And, and try to been to try to bunch of because they had like these really racy wallpapers or something like that. I thought, Okay, well, I gotta try that. I know exactly what you're talking about i will find it um keep going uh so i got so i loaded up ubuntu and at that time sudo wasn't really a thing

it wasn't how we ran root commands you would usually su to root and then do whatever you're doing and then and then exit um i tried to ask you to root and it didn't work and i said oh screw this waste of time and i threw in the trash uh i went back to like red hat and susie and the other distributions that were out there uh play with gen 2 for probably a month it takes a month to play with Gen 2. And then I decided to come back around to Ubuntu. The difference this time was that there was this great handbook I found that Ubuntu was like a community handbook. Okay.

And you went through it step by step. You just, by the end of it, understood how Ubuntu worked. Right. And the decisions behind it, a lot of things that were different than I was used to with other distributions. And it clicked at that moment. And I thought, well, it really feels like there's something here.

And so let's go with Ubuntu. That makes sense. But then eventually you guys moved off of Ubuntu. And that was around the... Was that after the Unity when when was that related to Unity because I know that's part of the the story oh yeah well it is um it happened to be that so the week that Canonical announced they would no longer develop Unity they had their sales team was in our office downtown and so I was sitting across the couch from the Canonical sales team

when they announced that Unity wasn't going to continue any longer. And it was a shock to us. I was really excited about Unity 8 and the prospects there. I think there's kind of this Cassandra effect that would happen with Canonical and Ubuntu sometimes. really excited about unity eights and the prospects there and they you know i think there's kind of this cassandra effect that would happen with kano and abutu sometimes to my mind at least where uh they had this uh you know they had the right um they had a lot of the right ideas and but they were just always like too early to realize them and even a lot of the things i i think about we're doing today with gestures on phones they were way ahead on that with with unity 8 um i think the work they did in ux was really impressive drove linux ahead considerably um but ultimately i can also

understand um it wasn't where you know the the revenue it wasn't where the revenue was, wasn't where the real business was, wasn't where they were serving customers. And so it also, after the shock, made sense. But it also meant an opportunity for us because the desktop is everything to us. It's what we think about every day. And it matters for our business and for our customers and us personally. And so that while it was sad to see that go, it also seemed like an opportunity for us to kind of express the things that we wanted to do in Linux desktop that we couldn't really get done through Ubuntu either.

Your camera just died. Oh, there it is. Okay. All happened there. That was weird. So Unity was a weird situation for Ubuntu because I know when they swapped, a lot of people didn't like it. Then when they swapped off of it, a lot of people didn't like they swapped off of it.

They got used to it. swapped off of it a lot of people didn't like they swapped off of it they got used to it so what was like when they did swap to unity what was that like going from you know this gnome thing that was established at that point to this whole new thing they had just developed like were you guys worried what the experience would be like how did how did that really go oh i think we had um How did that really go? I think we had, whether right or wrong, we had a lot of faith in the Ubuntu team. And we thought they were being careful with what they were developing.

And maybe, perhaps it came out early. I know, I mean, I remember Mark Shuttleworth going through bug reports from people and reading what the responses were and taking that all in. I think there was a lot of care and effort to listen to the feedback that happened with what was a pretty dramatic change for people. And change for users can be hard. We went through it when we developed the Cosmic UX, and we wanted to deliver that to our customers

because we had faith in the testing and the user testing, the UX work and the things that we had done. And we broke things for people that they were used to. that we've done and we broke things for people that they were used to but over time i the the overwhelming response was positive and i think it was the same for unity that over time the response was more positive by far than it was negative and the negative things are in some ways ux changes in other ways perhaps not having the right feature sets available early on. But in the end, like you said, switching away from Unity was just as disruptive for a lot of folks as moving to the first place.

Yeah, I can't speak specifically for Canonical, but the way it looks to me from the outside is they really overstretched. They wanted to get into TVs. They wanted to get into phones. They wanted to get into tvs they wanted to get into phones they wanted to get into all of these things like they they had like a phone um a kickstarter and indiegogo like it seemed like they were just trying to like do too much at once and then they had to pull back to what they knew worked and that ended up also meaning we had to move away from what unity was and then move back to gnome and i i'm

sure at that point if you were a unity user or if you're in that position just the whole situation just it was confusing and it was unclear like what was really going to happen like is gnome going to be in a good state now is it going to be like it was before like what's really really going on here yeah i think um i think that's a great point there's i i think the maybe the the prime motivation was right to make it you i uh responsive ux in a desktop experience that was absolutely right to us it's completely critical that we do that because ours is because of tiling. So all of our apps need to be responsive, but that also means that our platform will work on lots of different form factors.

But the difference between maybe our approach today and the approach that Canonical had taken was that Canonical's target was the mobile phone first. And that wasn't where the users were to start off the platform. And we're going totally to the desktop, which is where all our users are. And then we'll see where it goes from there rather than the other way around. In other words, we're not depending on mobile to be successful for the project to be successful. Right.

We just need to build a better experience for our customers today. So what year did pop os start 2017 okay so i guess just what was that discussion like saying that you like you guys wanted to run your own distro obviously it was based on ubuntu so you weren't doing your entirely own thing. It's not like you were running, you know, full-on package repos for everything, but it's still a massive burden to take on maintaining a distro and because now before like you could send people who had software issues to Canonical and obviously I'm sure you guys were still helping people with things before that, but now it's not canonical responsibility for anything to

be working now to the user it doesn't matter that under the hood it's still very much got a lot of those core Ubuntu features now it's your thing so what was that like it's doesn't actually quite work that way. Okay. When you ship a laptop to someone, you own that experience. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. It doesn't matter if it's Ubuntu and our customer would never, wouldn't even expect to go to Canonical for help. They call us for help, whether it's software or, and a lot of the experience is really how well the operating system is adapted to work with the hardware. So by that time, we were already rolling our own kernels.

A lot of times, a lot of large parts of the stack because we wanted to be a zero day hardware manufacturer for Linux. meaning that when Intel has brand new chips, when Nvidia does, when AMD or whomever, that you can get that brand new, you know, Meteor Lake, which is, you know, all around the corner, Meteor Lake laptop with Linux on it. And you don't have to wait six months for Linux to catch up. A lot of that happens upstream with Intel and AMD,

but getting it packaged and getting a good experience in the distro, that was our responsibility. So we had, we were already doing a lot of it. The, what was added on, especially for the first release is our thinking of, okay, well now let's take this operating system and let's make it match the aesthetic of System76.

So when you get a, when you come to our, maybe customer experience starts with an ad that has the coloring, the brand feel of System76, and then that takes you to the website that has the same feel, and then you get the product that has the same character and characteristics, and then you start it, and now it looks similar.

I think that is a really high quality experience that we wanted to start to deliver. And the first release was about doing that. Let's set our aesthetic. And then from there, we started chopping off the pieces that we knew our customers needed or were requesting. Full disk encryption was a huge one that we couldn't do as an OEM. Because if you do full disk encryption and load the image and ship it, that means you have the key and that's not secure.

So we needed to write a new installer to make that possible. If we're writing a new installer, how about we have a restore partition? Because when our customer has a problem, they call tech support, we can fix it in five minutes for them without losing files and things like that. So then after that, we started adding our own value based on the experiences that we have with our customers and really just making things smoother and easier for them.

Well, yeah, one of the nice things I do like about Pop!OS is you have that tiling. And I know a lot of people, there are a lot of people who don't like tiling or like they've never tried it. I will keep saying until the end of time that tiling is just a better way to use a computer. And the only reason you don't like it

is because you haven't tried it. I, okay. I'm surveyor customers a lot. i have a lot of feelings about this the uh um about 40 percent of all pop users use tiling wow they report using it all the time it's very high but that means 60 percent use floating. So we're developing Cosmic. Everyone in Systems 86, all of our engineers, designers, all use Tile. Yeah, of course they do. But we're working on releasing a new desktop environment

where we know 60% of people are going to use floating. And so I have been using floating windows for five or six weeks to tighten up that part of it. And I just, I said in our Mattermost channel that I just can't, I just, I can't believe people still use computers this way because tiling is just so superior. Do you guys have...

I agree with you. With your floating windows, do you have, like, window snapping if you, like, go to the edge or something? In Cosmic, we do, yes. Okay, yeah. Without that, I don't know how anyone uses floating. Like, if you go to, like, a macOS system, it's like... There actually is a hotkey

on macOS to do it, but if you just have... You have to, like, resize windows to the exact size... I don't get it i really don't uh yeah i tried um i installed windows on um on a laptop a couple nights ago i just wanted to see how it's looking what what they're doing i can't believe the size of their interfaces everything's enormous but um but the tiling is really interesting it's uh But the tiling is really interesting. It feels very, to me, it feels very heavy because you have to have,

it's almost like you have to have forethought and to put things where you want them to be. Whereas with auto tiling or dynamic tiling, things pretty much end up where you want them, and it's really easy to move them afterwards rather than thinking about it first and then placing things um yeah it's uh i think it's it's something that we we're really passionate about um making it easy for more people to get into tiling that's one of the reasons we you know it's an opt- thing in POP so you can just turn it on and start playing with it.

I think we're going much further with Cosmic where the mouse tiling experience is going to be really, really slick. And so for those people that are used to floating, they can tile but use the mouse and move things around and organize in a way where you don't need to learn all those shortcuts to do it so we we i think it's i mean i think it's a it's a sticky feature that once you get used to it you just can't get you you don't go back to floating windows yeah it just doesn't doesn't work that way

i don't think so i i have use cases for floating windows like when i'm doing these i um i have a browser window open that i can show you in my capture as well. I put the browser window over my face because I don't want to look at my own camera. I have things like that, or if I want to open up quick notes or something, I don't want to disrupt the rest of my layout. Having a strong floating feature there as well, I think is really important. A lot of tiling window managers, they have floating there sort of as an afterthought. It doesn't really... You don't have window snapping for example in a lot of tiling window managers and that's... And like other little niceties that can make the experience good if it's a floating first

environment, but... Yeah I like that they're both being there because you do have a lot of people that use both and it is majority floating so you need to make sure both are important but I'm sure I'm sure the engineers would love to make the tiling stuff

more of a focus if they could we're building into our tiling applet. So, you know, Gnome has extensions, right? Yes. I know you love Hyperland, right? Yeah, I'm running Hyperland right now.

I do have a bit of an issue that I'm dealing with the dev on a really bad crash when I stream sometimes. But besides that, Hyperlens is great. I haven't used Hyperlens yet. I've just watched videos. Do you use like a polybar or a weight bar or something like that? I use a weight bar.

Okay. So, I mean, you'll be familiar with these things. There's a, like each item on the bar is a separate application. Sure. You can arrange them however you'd like and put them in different positions, put the bar is a separate application. Sure. You can arrange them however you'd like and put them in different positions, put the bar in different positions. Well, that's what you can do in Cosmic.

The difference is you do it in a settings app where you can add or remove and then move things around. One of those, we call them applets because we didn't want it to feel like extensions. It's a different kind of thing um and then we um uh so our tiling applet what's new in with upcoming cosmic is you can do tiling per workspace so um and workspaces can be per monitor so that means if you want tiling over here and you have a separate monitor where you want where you want it to be floating and it's its own workspace,

then you just have floating windows over there and you have your tiling over here. And now you get that mix of environments that is best for your workflow. Yeah, Austin WM does the same thing. I love that feature exists. I really wish that more tiling window managers just copied it. And I'm happy that you guys are.

Because this goes back to what I was saying, where a lot of tiling window managers have tiling and have floating. But if you want to do floating, you have to manually float every window. And that's just annoying. So being able to dedicate a floating... This is my floating workspace, and I'm sure you can set as many of them as you want to that, and if you just don't want tiling at all, you can just turn

everything to be floating. That, I think, is the best way to do it. Absolutely. Now, I'm sure some people have asked... We'll get to more on Cosmic in a bit, but I'm sure some people have asked why even bother with the effort of doing pop west i know

you said you were already like customizing stuff in the first place but why go like all the way to have your own branding for it they're so like make it its own thing that people can install like why even why even bother with that like what what's the point of that? Well, as a company that makes Linux computers and is very passionate about the experience our customers have, I think it was absolutely necessary to, especially with Canonical pulling back from the desktop for a while, while they refocused their business efforts. This was the thing that we live and die in, how well the Linux desktop is doing, how well it's advancing. And in 2017, I think the Linux distro environment

and desktop and DE environment and compositors, I think it's far more dynamic and far healthier today than it was in 2017. Our choices were pretty thin then. And there were of course, great distros like Fedora and SUSE. But to take our tens of thousands of customers and say, okay, well, now here's Fedora. Right, right.

It would just completely, it would be extremely jarring. And most of our customers are businesses as well. So they're depending on the platform, not just the hardware that we're providing, but the software as a platform that they use to build things with. We couldn't do that to our customers. And so those two things together were our motivation and why I think it was really important for us to take that step. Yeah, I'm looking at the, I've never actually properly read the page for Pop!OS. And I just noticed that, obviously, like you've got your like the feature list here, like workflow customization, auto tiling, but then you get down to development tools, and it's very much like businessy focused stuff it's like hey you can do

deep learning you can do engineering and like i i guess that makes a lot of sense then um so i i don't know if you can say like specifics but how much of your like sale base is businesses and then individuals like what's that split sort of like it's about 70 65 to 70 percent um business and then um 30 35 consumer wow okay that is a massive split i didn't realize it was that much yeah yeah it's uh i mean it's a lot of um uh know, it's kind of the way I think about it is what we don't do is really big deployments inside of a company. But all those engineering departments inside companies, they really like using Linux and having it. And they like they need to have a harder provider they can depend on for both support. need to have a hardware provider they can depend on for both support, someone they can call when there's a problem, someone that has engineers that's working on a kernel regression because you're our customer. And so while we don't sell 10,000 computers to the energy company,

we might sell a few hundred to the engineering department. That's where we operate. So when I had Jeremy on, he was very excited to talk about the engineering aspects of Cosmic. You know, he is very much a fan of Rust, as you can tell from his Rust operating system that he started during the Rust beta um but from the business perspective why did you guys want to do a whole desk term environment like what was gnome not offering or was it the direction that gnome's going was it just wanting the stability of having something yourself why why go for cosmic why do this? Well, there's two main reasons. First, when we develop our Cosmic UX,

which is essentially extensions on top of GNOME, PopShell and what else, and other extensions that we used to put together at the UX. The launcher, the doc, it's the application library, it's auto-tiling. All those together, that's the user experience that we wanted to develop for our customers that in our research, in our user testing, was a better experience for our customers. And the response to it was really,

was overwhelmingly positive, especially the launcher and auto-tiling. They became, once you get used to using them regularly, it's really, it's similar to other things. It's hard to, like, alt-tab is terrible to try to get to an app. But if you can just type the name and then switch to it, it is a lot faster and a lot easier. And so the response to the UX work that we did in GNOME

was positive. GNOME wasn't very interested in the direction we were taking. You know, they have their own design ideas. And that's, of course, you know, perfectly fine. A project should, you know, should go after its, you know, its philosophy, its design ethos. Sure. Ours was different. And so we had a choice of between every six months, adapting GNOME to our UX, which means all of our engineering cycles are used

just making the same thing and maybe adding some features here or there. But that's a lot of engineering time and cycles, just adapting something that can break out of underneath us and isn't particularly sound for what we're trying to do anyway. Or we could go build a desktop environment. It seems like very, very stark differences. Because one is relatively small and what is absolutely massive. But if we wanted to continue adding value as much as we possibly can to the user experience, add value to the ecosystem of open source, it wasn't going to be adapting GNOME every six months.

It was going to be going out and building Cosmic. The second reason that we decided we wanted to build Cosmic is because we thought it'd be really interesting to build a Linux desktop environment platform that people can use to build customer experiences with. So Cosmic will be the flagship experience on Pop! OS, but it is designed and architected so that people can take Cosmic and create their own user experience. So if you, in our testing with our users, you know, we like really powerful little applets that can do lots of different things. We like the launcher. We like tiling features in the app library and a dock. Maybe your users don't need that at all.

Maybe Manjaro's users need something completely different, and a quick list menu would be better. So you can just remove our applets, put your own applet in, change our app library however you'd like applet in, change our app library however you'd like to change it, change the orientation of the dock, and change what opens when you hit the super key. You could do all of this.

And all of the groundwork that makes that really hard to do in a lot of desktop environments is already done for you. It's mostly changing configuration files to set it up the way you'd like and maybe writing a couple of applets so the user experience is a little different for your users.

Like we talked about a little bit earlier, I think the ecosystem in open source is really, really healthy and creative and quite incredible. And so the idea with the second reason, the idea with Cosmic is to enable that ecosystem to do really creative things and just take it and do what's right for their users or experiment with it and see what kind of user experiences they might build. Whether it's a distribution or it could be a different device.

It could be a tablet. It could be an exercise bike for a company that's developing something. This gives the world a platform to take and it's architected to adapt to the experience that you want to build so one thing that's really curious about cosmic is most linux desktops are gnome gtk or qt you guys are going a whole different direction. Obviously, it's all Rust-based. You're using the Iced toolkit. You're using this Smithy library to build the compositor. How did these discussions go?

Was it the engineers who were like, hey, let's... I'm sure people like Jeremy were a big part of this. I can see the Rust influence there so how did those discussions go were there any concerns about going in this direction of realistically

like a fairly untested toolkits in the general Linux desktop space I just want to know what happened there how did it happen it's not for lack of desktop space. I just want to know what happened there. How did it happen?

It's not for lack of trying everything else first. So we look very closely at GTK. The compositor was important because with our experience with hardware, developing a compositor is very important to us. A compositor has a huge impact on the experience for a desktop or in an operating system. Early indications that this is going to be a bigger project, was that if we want to really do what we want to do, we're going to have to write a compositor. So we considered GTK. But what we really wanted to do was build a pure Rust platform.

Like you say, a lot of the UI and just the gui ecosystem around rust especially there's only so it's been almost two years since we've been developing this especially two years ago was was very very early didn't even exist you guys are basically the driving force behind the kui rust stuff right um but that's also been awesome because um we because we've been like an early entrance to this growing ecosystem of Rust development, Rust GUI development. We've been able to contribute key parts to it that are used across what is now this growing ecosystem. Text rendering is, I think the standard is just cosmic text because that's what we wrote, it works really well, and so now that's what people use. And I think that's really cool to be a part of.

There's obviously that made the project a lot larger. We had to build cosmic toolkit. We had to build all of our own widgets. We had to work on accessibility. Unfortunately, it's a great project. It's an access kit that was pretty well long that we could integrate into ICE. I think there's a great community

building the GUI ecosystem for Rust and it's just a fun part to be in. How many people do you have working on Cosmic? Um, seven. Okay, okay. So it's, uh, it's, it's not really that many people, realistically. Yeah, yeah, um, you'd be amazed with, I don't know how big the first Android team is, but I don't think it was much bigger than that. Okay. That's fair. 20 or something. And I think Android took three years, two, three years, something like that too.

Bigger projects for sure, but might've been 20 people, something like that. Yeah. I think it's but might have been 20 people something like that yeah I think it's sometimes surprising what a small group can really accomplish with a lot of people that are kind of insane I know that

there was the blog post that came out recently saying that the alpha probably is going to happen in a couple of months do not say dates because people will hold you to it. I've told people this before. I told the budgie developer this,

stop saying when things are going to happen because it's not going to happen then. But is the project on track is what I want to ask. I disagree a little bit. Okay. ask i i disagree a little bit okay i think i think you need to have a date to help your focus i think it's important to have dates internally you just don't need to tell people those dates well if you don't tell people externally then it's a lot easier to break that's fair that's fair So, in short, yes, I feel like we're on target. We're going to be very close to finishing all alpha features at the end of this month.

Okay. That means we have two months of polish and bug fixes, which I think for a project this size is a nice amount of time to get there. Of course, we're going to need rebase under 2404 and do some distro work and installer work, things like that as well. We might be, I don't know, there might be a two- to four-week window on either side, probably on the latter side. That's more realistic.

But I think it's a good target for us except by the end of end of march early april ish so is the plan to have the alpha with the next version of popo s is that how it's gonna go that's the alpha will be the next well the alpha of cosmic will come along with the alpha of pop os yes okay that's exciting that that's really exciting because i i've been following this project for quite a bit at this point and you know early on it was like you know a lot of mock-ups and you know cool ideas there to see it actually coming together and being something that's you know actually i know there's been people trying out some pre-alpha stuff and it's been in a relatively good state obviously i've said this to the kde guys as well you can do

however long of an alpha that you want but the second that you give it to the general public that's when you're going to realize there's a lot of cases that you didn't test there's some weird hardware configurations people have got some weird input devices that you just never considered or there's just like use cases and interactions that just didn't come up during that early testing and i wish you guys the best but i I guarantee there's going to be some rough edges there that were just never spotted. Absolutely, especially with something of this size. So at the end of January, we're going to open up.

It's basically myself and the engineering and design team. We're all using Cosmic. We have some folks in tech support. But the business folks, as I'm saying, start getting added at the end of January. So that's going to be our first internal dogfooding of what we've built, where

we're going to find... A simple example is, a lot of people use Alt Spacebar to open the context menu. You know, window. We don't have that right now. I'm absolutely certain that that's going to show up in a bug report. There will be hundreds of little things like that.

I think it is timing for when you actually put something in the public, I think to your point, is really sensitive. It's what I want for us to be effective with an alpha, it needs to be for two reasons. For two reasons. One, to be effective with the alpha. But two, because this is the first experience with Cosmic, we don't have trust from previous releases. We don't have folks that can say, well, this is the first time anybody will experience this.

So it needs to be better than what you'd expect an alpha to be. So for me, it needs to have all the right features so you can use it daily. But it needs to be really polished. But it's okay that we don't have – you can adjust the sound with the app, but we don't need the sound panel and settings. We don't need some of those things. So it should be a really polished product with a list of very clear things that we know aren't done.

So we don't get bug reports and all the things that we know aren't done. They'll still come in. But that's my hope to kind of handle the fire hose when the alpha time comes. Hopefully that goes well. Hopefully. I know, obviously, it being on Weyland as well, there's going to be those Weyland-specific issues. And, you know, like, the whole...

All of this stuff related to portals and video capture and... Yeah. Just... It's going to be interesting. I'm excited for where we are right now with the Linux desktop because KDE is going to be out with their new version very soon. You guys are going to have your alpha out very soon. Things are getting a lot better in this space.

A lot better than they have really like, they've really ever been. I think, especially for Weyland, the past two or three years have been the best time in the project. Weyland's been around for 15 years at this point, or probably 16 at this point. But realistically, I think the past two or three is where the most work has been done dealing with the issues that actual users have, not just these fundamental windowing issues

the other, you know I've talked plenty about the multi-window stuff the discussion that's going on with that I've talked plenty about video capture video capture only worked three years ago thanks to George Savarkas, that's a fairly new thing um I've talked plenty about video capture, which only video capture only worked three years ago. Thanks to Georgia. So that's a fairly new thing.

Um, and we're getting there and I'm, I'm happy to, that cosmic is going to be another, another desktop with like a massive user base that can be part of this discussion that can hopefully provide a different context for some of these problems or just act as another voice to getting some of these problems dealt with, that, you know, maybe...

I've said before this. Certain desktops can be a bit of a challenge dealing with in the Wayland space. So I'm happy to have Cosmic there as, like, another member to help get these things done yeah I appreciate that it's um uh I'm excited as well Wayland's protocols are really getting there they're getting close um uh Ian and Victoria and our team spent a lot of time in uh you know in Wayland and working and helping contribute to the conversation. And I think they're all, for the most part, it gets hot, but that's all right.

We're all passionate about what we're doing and we're making progress. My concern is NVIDIA. Yep, that's very concerning. is nvidia yep that's very concerning this um the 550 driver is supposed to be the holy grail which just solves all our problems in 545 do you mean uh 550 545 the latest one is 550 thing as well now 550 is what's coming oh okay that makes as well now? 550 is what's coming. Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yep.

Okay. Yep. Yeah. It's what's coming. And there's an OEM beta version now. Oh, okay. And it's supposed to solve all our problems. But to me, this is the biggest risk in the project because we can't ship without great nvidia

support yeah um it's uh it's like 50 of our products ship with nvidia so we just can't it has to be great so that to me that's biggest risk i'm really hopeful that the 550 driver really lives up to the hype and solves a lot of these problems. Because if so, then, then gnome, KDE, Cosmic, we're all, you know, we're all in for a much better year. If that's the case, all of us users on, on Linux that are using NVIDIA, that will, that will make a big difference if it's real. that are using NVIDIA that will make a big difference if it's real.

I guess one last thing I want to touch on is your desktop stuff. You've got these... You guys actually make cases for your system. Like these aren't just like cases, they're just out there. So what is even the process of like getting a case like this made? And you also sell cases separately now as well yeah um all right so there's there's actually a nice video on i think it's a thalia page or there's a manufacturing page um so so it's it's quite i i think one of the another reason that we're building cosmic is because we're we're just addicted to making things i think so i think that's a healthy thing some people think it's bad for you but it's

what we we love and the same goes for hardware so the desk thaleo desktop comes in as a flat piece of metal it goes on top of a laser that clamps it and then drags it across the laser and punches and lasers features out of the metal it goes through a sander and then a break that bends it and puts it into shape. It goes into a powder room where everything's painted. And then there's folks that assemble everything together. QC processes along the way. And then there's a pre-assembly where fans and things that are coming across all of them are installed. And then there's a pre-assembly where fans and things that are coming across all of them are installed.

And then there's the next step where the customer's order has come in and they have specifics about the drive and CPU and so forth. And then that all gets assembled and it's boxed and shipped to the customer. So it's a flat piece of shiny aluminum that at the end of the day is a desktop. We ship out of the door 50 feet from the one that came in it i'm watching the video right now that i think i don't know how many times you watched the video because you basically got like piece for piece as the video was going well i built the factory well yeah no yeah, no, I'm sure. You just got every step of the video, like basically as the image appeared on the screen.

Myself and John and a few other people, there were about four of us. The whole damn thing. And we never built the factory before and so um so yeah it was it was an absolutely incredible life experience to build to build that um and now it has an amazing team that that upruns it it makes it much better than we've we we like i said we never did it before we were terrible there were things that we did that were stupid. And they were terrible. But they got us there.

They got us shipping products. And now it has a real professional team. And they're continuously improving the product that we're delivering and the way that we're delivering it. So, yeah, it's a pretty cool thing. I know people have asked for the cases to be sold separately for a long, long time. I found posts going back basically since you started the desktop, because they are really nice cases. What were the challenges in actually selling a case by itself?

Because I'm sure that has different like manufacturing level, like a order volume maybe? I'm not sure how I would say it. Also they're slightly different cases as well. They're actually the exact same. Well they don't have the wood panel on the front. Yeah, just a different accent. So that accent is exchangeable.

Right, okay, okay. So it's really the same product but um what we well so our motivation one was just to enable people to use the things that we're making this open hardware and make their own things with it whether it's the like sata backplane we have an i o board that's that controls the fan curves inside the system that's how we we keep them quieter than we have more information than the motherboard does about what's happening in the thermally and so by taking that off we can make better fan curves and better performance but you know anyway it just enables people to use this

stuff to make things with with the case um it made thaleo far better when we built a case that was general purpose. Right. Because instead of only thinking about the things that we put in it, we have to think about what anyone might put in it. How do you fit a 4.9T in a computer case? Yeah, there's some. We never, on our ATX size case, none of the motherboards in our four years of manufacturing Thalia needed the top slot cut out ever because the position of the PCI slot was one below. Well, other older motherboards do have a higher PCI slot. We didn't catch that until too late and then we had to fix it.

But ultimately what that means is because we are servicing customers and using it as a case, all of our customers that are getting it at Staleo are getting a better product. Sweet. Yeah. I know you said you had to go around this time,

but there's one last question unless you're still good for time. Yeah, I can go maybe another 15, 20 minutes. Okay, sweet. Well, I was going to ask you, I'm sure that you've got your pick of hardware. You could probably use anything you wanted from the lineup, but what do you personally run yourself?

Right now, I'm on thaleo okay i really like i really like the small form factor desktops um and i'm not i actually don't i don't game much on my desktop i'm a i'm a couch gamer and so some jeremy hates me for that but it's just the truth i work all day on a computer and I just want to be away. It's gaming time. So that's where I'm at on that. So I don't need a 4080 for anything. And for a laptop, I use a Darter. I use either a lemur or a darter. The lemur is, that's our ultra-portable 14-inch. So it's really thin and, like, it's nice traveling.

But I'm also finding I kind of like a little bit bigger display. And so, you know, an interesting fact from the PC industry, a lot of folks think that, think that smaller laptops are most popular. Actually, 15-inch is the most popular size by far. I've used a 13-inch display and my eyesight's pretty good, but like 13-inch is a little rough. I feel like I need to use zoom on a lot of things. And you don't, you know, 1080p,

you don't really have that much screen real estate to start zooming everything Right. Yeah, I have kind of moved more to 15-inch when I used to always like the smaller laptops, I also really care about open firmware and so That's another reason I use the daughter. I also read map my keys Because I want control where the caps lock is. I like super next to my space bar. I do. I like to remap my keys.

You can do that on our open form firmware laptops and on launch. And I like my launch to match as close as I can to my laptop. So that's why I use the daughter. That's fair. That's fair. You mentioned the control caps lock thing. Look, I don't know why caps lock key exists. We don't need it.

Get rid of it. Delete it. Remove it. Yeah, I don't know either. I agree. I used to put function there, actually. But then I changed it to control, which kind of changed my life. Because control, C, V, K, L, and all of those things that I use a lot,

it's just I'm on the same road. It's great. The other thing with Cosmic and our UX, the super key next to the space bar is really big the reason for that is that instead of like contorting your fingers anywhere to get to it you move your thumb over a little bit and you use your thumb to hit the super key and that changed my life when i learned that one because because I use my thumb to launch applications. It's your strongest digit, and it's much better than kind of contorting fingers

to get to control or super or anything. So that's why we put super next to the space bar on the launch keyboard. I'm just trying it out now. Yeah, I've got my alt is next to my space bar, but if those were swapped, that actually would make a lot more sense, wouldn't it? Yeah, and you I've got my alt is next to my spacebar, but if those were swapped, that actually would make a lot more sense, wouldn't it?

And you probably don't use alt much, and so you end up not using your thumb. I have two key macros, but I don't use alt separately. It'll be like super and alt, so if they're swapped, it would not affect me at all. I just press them both anyway. Right, yeah.

So yeah, mine is super and then function is next to that. Right. Because I use the second layer. Yeah, my keyboard doesn't have a function. This is a, yeah. I don't know. You have the alt. Actually, no, the function's on the other side.

Yeah, it's on the other side of the space bar. I don't know what the deal is. This is a Logitech keyboard. Okay. This guy. Oh, right. Yeah. it's got a it's got a uh volume wheel on it i really like it i can just go and volume just changes up very convenient i can't buy a keyboard without having that now oh that's funny

yeah our our volume controls are under the function row it's function function page up, page down to get to those. Logitech really likes adding free-scrolling wheels to everything, though. They have a bunch of mice with free-scrolling wheels. They have this keyboard with free-scrolling wheels. It's sort of their thing at this point. I like it. It's nice. I kind of wish more keyboards had them, but I don't know if Logitech...

I would assume Logitech has some sort of patent on free scrolling wheels. I... It wouldn't surprise me. Actually, it's not. That's the contrary to everything we believe in. It's... How can a wheel that rolls be patented? I did... That reminds me.

I think it was you that posted... It was probably a while ago. There was a screenshot from like an apple um an apple conference where they said like four we have four thousand patents and i i think you had i'm pretty sure it was you that said this was like anti to everything that we aim to do i it was either you or one of the engineers that said this. Yeah. Yeah, I do recall that. It's just the antithesis of everything that we believe. And not because we don't think companies should be able to make money.

Sure. We just think the very idea that ideas come out of nowhere is nonsense. The very idea that ideas come out of nowhere is nonsense. Anything was built on everything that came before it. And that's one of the fortunate benefits that we have is what progress is. Newton's apple hitting his head. This isn't the reality. And so I don't think an idea can be owned if everything that made its foundation was free.

I think that sort of ties us into sustainability and repairability as well then. Because a lot of companies are very, very touchy about their devices being open, very touchy about things being repaired, and this is getting more and more so, especially in the mobile market, you know, you've got Apple putting, um, uh, like, hard-locking their devices to serial, uh, like, parts to serial numbers, so if you replace something, even if it's from an official device. I believe this was a couple of years ago, someone took a battery from- it was either Apple or Samsung, they took a battery from one device, moved it into another device, or it was the screen, one of the two,

and even though they were both official devices, it was official parts, the device just didn't work. It just would not function and That Like you think what we can do on the desktop, right? You can take out anything you want. We've got very much like obviously, it's hard to repair the individual parts, but they're very complex, so I will at least accept being able to take a part out and replace the entire part, but I will at least accept being able to take a part out and replace the entire part, but that just doesn't really exist in the mobile space or the laptop space for the most part at this point and It especially with companies talking about this idea about

We want to be sustainable. We want to like to the environment it's this weird it's this weird disconnect where they don't want to let up and make it so easy to get access to this but also they're going to talk about how it's such an important ideal it is a strange dichotomy between the talk about

and how it's practiced when it comes to the products. It's hard to be too speculative about some of the reasons. I tend to think that most of them are good.. Why can't you take a battery from one device to another? In an Apple device, are there true security reasons that the Touch ID needs to be attached to that particular device? Maybe there is, if I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt. Sure. That doesn't excuse that. Oh, well, I mean, and then sometimes it's market demands, too,

that are saying we want thinner and thinner things, and so we use more and more adhesive. And that makes repairability harder. Is there more creative engineering we can do to avoid that so these devices can last longer or be repaired and so individuals can repair them uh yeah it's our our belief is is that it's it's your device i think there's very very little risk for a uh for a computer manufacturer to just allow you to open up and do whatever you want with it. It doesn't mean you can open it up and put a screwdriver through the screen and say, hey,

you know, I got a warranty request here. My screen is busted. So that's why it's not, you know, it's not a risk to us to just enable people to repair their own devices and make components available to them to do so. And I know I've seen really thin designs that don't require adhesive. And so I know there's a lot going on there, but I agree. It shouldn't be intentionally blocked. One of the excuses that's often used is that people, that these devices are too complex for people to repair themselves. I think that's one of the most absurd reasons for this. I testified once for right to repair in Colorado. And that was what John Deere had said when there were two people that were against this, John Deere and a wheelchair manufacturer.

Okay. They have some crazy monopoly over wheelchairs, electric wheelchairs. Okay. It's bizarre. I don't know if it's just a U.S. thing. And so repairability was something that they were fighting against. But their main argument was that these things were too complex. And to my mind, I mean, to the person that had a horse

and then got a Model T, I mean, that was complex. But we figured it out because we had the ability to do it. These things are, you know, whenever your policy depends on not having faith in people, it's the wrong policy. Well, I think even if the argument isn't too complex for an individual, I don't know how to repair my car. I know little about my car,

but I can go to someone who does know how to do it. I can pay someone who has access to those parts, just like I could if I wanted to, but I am outsourcing that work to another person who does have how to do it. I can pay someone who has access to those parts, just like I could if I wanted to, but I am outsourcing that work to another person who does have the expertise. Even in the case of a phone, let's say, I don't have the equipment to safely repair a phone, but there are people that do. They have, you know, all of like the microscopes and clean rooms and all that stuff. If the parts are available for me they're also available for that person as well who can also do that work and i i just i don't really see that as a

excuse that makes sense and um and if you wanted to learn how to do it i absolutely can and if you make a mistake and bust your thing doing it well you'll learn something along the way too yeah um mistake and bust your thing doing it well you'll learn something along the way too yeah um yeah i mean it was broken to start with so so um why not uh yeah why not give people the freedom to to tinker with their own things so i guess we should start getting close to wrapping up but what is the so you've got a bunch of device classes that are available now. You've got laptops, desktops, you've got these mini things, you've got server stuff. What is the most popular device class that you guys sell? Laptops.

Laptops. Okay, that makes sense. A lot of people... I'm not a laptop guy myself. I tend to just work from home. But I know a lot of people, you know, they have a device, they take home, they like going places when they work, it makes sense, although, you know, if, if they're a student or something and

want that, like, that, I, I get why people use laptops, it's just not for me, and it's, it's good that you guys have, like, this, this range of devices, you have these, you know, these portable devices, you have these, you know, graphical portable devices, you have these, you know, graphical intensive devices. Like there's, there's an option there that makes sense for most use cases that I could see. Yeah, the Linux, people that use Linux are very broad spectrum and they need a lot of different, uh, and they have a lot of different needs and What? Well, we lost him Why do we lose him what happened? Give me a second we'll cut back to this. He's gonna finish it like this There was like a couple minutes left. Anyway, if you will just get to see this

Hey, there we go, okay left, left okay we're good and brodie's gone now it's just me and brodie that's just me and carl no other brodie here anyway what you're saying about devices use cases linux just the the linux um folks that use linux are just across the entire spectrum you know from the you knowportable devices to the most powerful laptops that exist. The variety of the needs is really broad. We do our best to try to cover the bases for everybody. I guess, unless there's anything else you want to touch on, we can start wrapping it up there. Yeah, sounds great. I think we covered a lot of fun stuff.

Awesome. If somebody wants to go buy a System76 device, direct them to the place system76.com and everything is right there we appreciate everyone's support it's I think Linux is an open source itself is such an incredible

ecosystem where all the innovation is really happening if you like the stuff we're doing itself is such an incredible ecosystem where all the innovation is really happening and um if you like the stuff we're doing then the best way to help support us is to to grab a laptop or desktop from us but otherwise i hope you you like the software we make and like pop os and um get some good use out of it sweet um i know you a lot of devices, but pick a device to make a recommendation for. I could do two. Okay. For a laptop. Oh, that's really, that's

kind of tough. This is like choosing my favorite child. I don't feel uncomfortable doing that. Like I said, I really like open firmware, and I use the Darter. So I think the Darter's a great device for if you're going for a laptop. It's right in between. It's nice and portable, powerful, and of course, open firmware.

Oh, a desktop, it's probably Thalia Mira. It's the most versatile and it doesn't take much desk space and it's gorgeous. Yeah. Yeah, it is. That's really, the case looks really nice honestly. It is a super cool looking case. Yeah. I have the five or six accents that we offer here

and I change them out all the time. It's just fun to change the look of it. It's easy to do, and so it's nice. Is there anywhere else you want to direct people to? Do you want to send people over to your socials or not really? Sure, yeah. If you do want to follow me on Twitter, it's just at Carl Rochelle. I'm happy to always have conversations with folks interested in Linux. Sure, yeah. If you do want to follow me on Twitter, it's just at Carl Rochelle.

Happy to always have conversations with folks interested in Linux. I did see a couple. Every time I have someone on, I scroll through their feed and always go back months and months and months and months. I'll see if I can find the post in particular. I think it was last year. Because I saw that you reposted when a friend of mine bought a System76 device. Where is the post she made? I'm not gonna find it now, it's way too far ago. Come on, surely, surely I can find it where there she is okay uh this one uh i i scrolled through the list and i saw that i was like oh That's fantastic. So on that note, I guess let's end it off.

If you like this, you want to see the audio version, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you're watching the video, you can find the audio basically anywhere. Check out your favorite podcast app. There's an RSS feed as well. Chuck it in your favorite app. I like AntennaPod. It's pretty nice. If you want to see my other stuff, my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Probably maybe starting more drama. We'll see about that. Hopefully not. Depends how I feel that day. And I've got my gaming channel, Brodeon Games. I do gaming

stuff there. There are clips that come out. I don't know what we're playing. Probably more The World Ends With You and probably some Neptunia. I don't know. Check it out. I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say? Just thanks for having me. It's always awesome. Absolute pleasure. I'm more than happy to do this again anytime.

Cool. Maybe after the new laptop comes out. That would be pretty cool. I'll catch you later. All right. See you guys.