Tech Over Tea - Co-founder Of Elementary OS | Cassidy James

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Today we have the one and only Cassidy James on the show, the co-founder of Elementary OS and now a Partner Success Engineer at Endless OS foundation. He's been in the FOSS world for a very long time and has a lot of things to say. ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://cassidyjames.com/ Blog: https://cassidyjames.com/blog/ Elementary OS: https://elementary.io/ Endless OS: https://www.endlessos.org/ ==========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 183, I think, yeah, that sounds right, of Tech of a T. Welcome to the show. Today, we have Cassidy James-Blade on the show. Welcome. Some people probably know about the projects you've been involved in, but they may not recognize your name. They probably recognize your face if they've seen your profile picture,

because it's the same picture on every single platform. But let people know who you are and what you do. Yeah, sure. So I'm Cassidy James. I am the partner success engineer at NLSOS Foundation. But people probably know me from, if you know me, you probably know me from a lot of other things in the past. Like I've worked a lot with the GNOME design team. I've had blog posts talking about free desktop standards kind of stuff. I obviously worked for quite a while, like a decade, on elementary. I was at System76 for a while. Back in the really early days, if you know me from a long time ago,

I was the super ambitious high school kid who wanted to do Ubuntu advertising because I was like nobody's doing advertising for Ubuntu so I'll do that that's how I got into open source. It's a weird weird thing. Yeah so you probably know me from one of those things. Well I guess we can sort of start there then like how I presume that you got involved like you were at least interested in some sense before you wanted to do advertising. So how did you even discover Linux in the first place? Yeah, so the origin story. Yeah, I think I feel like I hear this exact story or some variant of it a lot of times, especially on Tech Over Teeth.

But like, I think it started with Windows 95. windows 95 or 98 one of those and uh so i had i'm the youngest of four kids and so i had a hand-me-down hand-me-down computer i think from like it was my mom's computer it was like the computer we had and then it was my older brother's computer and then it was mom so it was like running windows 95 it wasn't in 1995 you know right that's just what it was running uh and you know it was an old computer it wasn't connected to the internet at the time i think and i i uh was just kind of poking around on it and i started i discovered the world of themes so it's kind of hilarious looking at where i am now right but i discovered the world of theming windows okay uh And I frequently would break Windows

because you had to, like, patch DLLs and stuff. Like, it was a bad, bad time. It may have been 98, Windows 98. It was one of those. There were all kinds of stuff. You would get these, like, shady, like... I guess we did have the internet then because I would download stuff.

Maybe not, like, the system connection connection or maybe you're like really yeah connection yeah i mean we definitely had dial-up at the time right right got that ingrained in my brain of course right but yeah you would download these like shady exes off the internet and like they would probably have a virus but they would give you a cool dock at the bottom of your screen right you're just gonna go docking your web browser as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. 17 toolbars, and yeah, you can't, your internet browser's like this tall, because you've got all the toolbars. Yeah, oh yeah, been there. And then it evolved, like, I think it kept breaking, my mom got mad, she was like, she would reinstall it,

we upgraded it, eventually, I think we had Windows XP on there eventually and of course like my mom had you know an administrator account I had a non privileged. Oh wow to install so you might actually like operate like she was actually taking some interest in Oh, yeah, the computer. Oh Yeah, she was legit. She was she's she she's who got me into tech like a really smart and engineering But more on the like like building Engineering math. Yeah that side of so my mom is like super tech nerd oh awesome yeah because it's the exact opposite my um my my mom yeah literally i had to teach her well i think i was like 15 or 16 or something like how to send an email uh because her all of a sudden her her job required her to

send in like her like what do you call it like a time sheet like the hour she worked like yeah over email and she had no idea how to do it like previously she would like take it in on like a piece of paper to the office and she understood that that was fine she could print something but email was not gonna happen for her oh yeah no my mom was my mom was the tech nerd which is cool i think it's cool like it was her computer she It was her computer. She had more of an office job. She did a lot of typing and stuff. She, for a time, had a small business that she would actually do word processing and layout stuff as a business from home. That was really cool because she was some random business dude at the time who wouldn't know how to use a computer, which is weird to think about these days, right?

A business person doesn't know how to use a computer, which is weird to think about these days, right? Like a business person doesn't know how to use a computer. But I guess that was a thing. Or like who didn't like to type. Like she would design their resume or whatever, like type it up for them. And it was pretty cool. So she actually got like pretty good computers at the time. And then we would get them as hand-me-downs eventually.

And they were like, you know, garbage for the time. But it was the only computer I ever had. So it was awesome, right? Yeah, my first computer actually ran Windows 3.1.1 and DOS. And so I learned the DOS command line to be able to play games. Right. That makes sense. Pop in the floppy drive and got to navigate to the A drive. Yeah. So that was, that was my first experience with computers really was like,

was DOS. And then like, you had to boot, you had to like load the windows.exe program to like get your windows and stuff but I still I had that computer around for a while because that was the one that was allowed to be in my room because it had no internet connection whatsoever so my mom was like whatever you and I don't care for breaks like you can just pop it floppy drive to reinstall whatever but now so I used this one was like it was more of like a shared computer that I used more than anybody else because I was around a lot, whatever. But yeah, eventually, I don't know what OS it had.

Eventually, I had Windows XP on it at some point. We had an internet connection. I would download these like patched EXEs or patched DLLs of these random EXEs. Stardock was a thing. I don't remember. There was a theming like engine you could install. Right, right. I don't remember. There was a theming, like, engine you could install. Right, right.

And, like, oh, so we didn't have the Windows XP Media Center Edition, but you could download a hacked version of the Media Center theme, which was different. And so you got, like, the shinier. It was, like, instead of, like, the dull Windows XP, it was, like, a shiny. It was, like, Vista

before Vista. Oh, okay. It was really interesting, actually. Hmm. Because it was, like, XP was around for, like, forever, right? Yeah it was like, XP was around for forever, right? It was almost like the Microsoft designers were experimenting with these new visual styles but they didn't give them to everybody. It was weird. There was a Zune theme

that was dark gray and orange. Anyway, that was how I got into theming. My mom got sick of me breaking it. She told me I couldn't do do that anymore and so i had to figure out something else to do and that around this time i heard of this thing called linux okay specifically this thing called knoppix k-n-o-p-p-i-x the name rings a bell k-d-e i don't even remember like the origin i don't even i couldn't even tell you like what it was based on but it was i just remember that was the first that was my first notflix live cd it still is this idea today

apparently at least based on debian oh no i've definitely seen this thing i've seen this logo before but yeah it's great uh so it is what it has now apparently but i'm oh interesting i would have thought it was kde which is what the not notebooks was from yeah well it probably was KDE back then I don't think LXDE was around back then. When did LXDE come out? Ohhhhh 2006. Maybe it would have been around. Whatever. Probably KDE. But the uh the important thing for me at the time right was like the live CD part so we had a CD drive like it'll pop out the CD drive by the way I downloaded a virus one time that would pop out the CD drive at random times.

It was a Coca-Cola email attachment. And it was like, enjoy your free cup holder. And you clicked a button and it popped out. It's like, why could a random app downloaded from an email access your hardware in that way? Like we've come so far. But anyway, so yeah, I'm almost sick of those viruses so i had to find something that wouldn't mess up the system and so the whole idea of not fix or the idea of why i was attracted to that idea was the live cd so i could put the cd in i would not install it i ran it all off the cd and ram and that's how i used my computer i turned turned the computer off, everything I did was gone.

If I broke it, I rebooted it and it was all back. It was actually, thinking now, this is the first time I've ever had this thought, it was kind of like having an image-based OS before image-based OSes were a thing. Yeah, minus the persistent storage at least. The persistent storage is kind of important, but sure, yeah.

I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, you could probably do something with a, yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could probably do something with flash drive. Oh, no, you definitely can. You could be like, run the OS off a flash drive and put your files on a flash drive. Run the OS off a CD. I don't know how to do it with any Linux tool, but I know with Rufus, you can just like automatically, like there's like a slider.

You can just be like, persistent storage, this much space on it. And it just does it. Yeah. So, I mean, in a way, it was like my first experience of Linux was basically an image-based OS. Okay. Maybe that's why I like it now. But after that, I don't know.

I think this was around, I think my first Ubuntu was 7.04. Okay. Hardy Heron, or is that 7? Feisty Fawn is what it is feisty fawn yeah that's a good one that's a good one yep 704 that was my first open so that dates it it was probably relatively new it was you know 2007 we all love the brown and that's when all the browns and tans and yeah it's good stuff yeah i think they're definitely look but uh people can who can meme on what a bunch who does nowadays with gnome but like they've come a long way from

the brown yeah you may not like the way it looks now but can we just admit the brown was not good like it was i mean that was one of the first things i always did of course coming from the idea right it was like so i found this abut Ubuntu thing and I liked, I think I liked the default GNOME interface better. Like, that's really, and like, honestly the installer and stuff, I think at this time maybe I got my own computer or like, my mom was like, fine, we got a new computer, you can have that old one

and do whatever you want with it. So I put Ubuntu on it. Okay. And, but the first thing I'd go do is like, go find like, on the top menu, go to appearance, go to themes, whatever, like, and change out to like, one of the Clearlooks themes. It was different. GTK2 stuff, good stuff. Well, just adding themes up for Ubuntu would have been so much easier than whatever you were doing over on Windows. Yeah, oh, right.

And you'd make your own themes you wanted to do. This is incredible. I just could click a button. Yeah, yeah. And it's built in. Were any of the... Yeah. Nowadays, there are websites that have giant lists lists of GTK themes were any of those around back then

gnomelook.org oh yeah gnomelook.org and it's still around oh yeah I know it's still around I wasn't sure it was around back then yeah

it was definitely around back then and it looked pretty much the same I found it the other day I was like I was doing a weird I was looking for a specific

like screenshot of a mockup and like I found the user other day. I was like, I was doing a weird, I was looking for a specific like screenshot of a mock-up and like, I found the user, an old elementary designer who I haven't seen for years. And like, I found their gnome look, I found their deviant art account and their gnome look account. Cause it was the same username. And that, that reminded me of what their actual name was.

And I was like, yeah, but gnome look, yeah, it looks exactly the same as it, as it did. That's where we put the first elementary theme. It was like, it was on gnome look and deviant art that was that those are the places you would go deviant art man wait i didn't know it's still around too no it is still around yeah i didn't know who put it looks totally different yeah it absolutely does um i didn't know who put themes at like on deviant art i didn't know it was a thing yeah this was like i i think it's this weird like i don't want to call it generational because it's like it's shorter than like you know an actual

generation but it kind of was this like generational thing where like there was this group of like younger kids basically i mean at the time i was kid like who were really getting into this theming thing getting into this linux thing had zero technical knowledge, or at least in my case and a lot of our cases, had zero technical knowledge. But we loved the whole post a cool mock-up and throw together terribly Photoshopped or Gimp'd or Inkscaped together mock-up of an app, cut off parts of the app and paste them back.

We would do all that stuff, and eventually people would create these SVG templates you could open an inkscape and like do all these cool things and that community at least the the bubble i was kind of in was on deviant art that was like it's more similar to this is probably like not the cool hit place these days anyway but like dribble kind of became that of like for like apple what in the world is dribble it's dribble with three b's drippable uh-huh um you know it i haven't been there for a long time either right it was it was kind of like it's what like i feel like the ui artists people went to after deviantart kind of uh-huh like now it's probably like uh product honed and like i don't know somewhere else. That's not a space I've ever personally been involved in.

I know it. Yeah. But it was like, I think the idea is like, it really was these people who kind of had this idea for designing something cool or designing something that looked different. And Linux was like an implementation detail for us at the time. It was like, that's what just lets us do what we wanted to do. Right. Like if I could have done what I wanted to do on Windows at the time. That's what just lets us do what we wanted to do. If I could have done what I wanted to do

on Windows, at the time, I didn't have any philosophical reason I wanted to do it on Linux. I wasn't there for the philosophical thing. I watched your video recently about the almost shift in perceptions in the open source community. There are some people these days who don't

have that hard, like, I'm here for the capital f free software yeah and like that's that's kind of when i talk about that generational thing it was almost that like you know i'm not a one of the young scrappy kids now but like i feel like i'm of that kind of era of open source creators i hadn't even really thought of it but like i guess it kind of is a repeat because you know you were saying that you weren't really there for the philosophical reason. You were there because it was the thing that did the thing you wanted to do, and that's sort of what's happening now with the Steam Deck, where people are using Linux without thinking, like, it doesn't matter if it's Linux, it could be running Windows, it could be running Mac OS. They just care about the fact

that it's running their games, and it's doing it games and it's, you know, doing it well. And then, you know, what's really cool about that, and what, like, kind of echoes my story, too, is, like, then they stay around, right? Like, they are attracted to this thing. It's like, oh, I can play my games. It's a cool piece of hardware. It lets me do what I want to do. And they're like, oh, what's this desktop mode thing? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, this is cool. Oh, there's a whole app store here? Oh, what are these apps? These are actually pretty nice. Oh, wow, I could install a different OS on my Steam Deck? That's crazy. They kind of go down the rabbit hole, right? And so, I love this idea of

oh no, free meeting will end in 10 minutes. That's on me. I Zoom. I love Zoom so much. That's great. That's great. This is great. I think we could just create a new meeting and then just pick the conversation. That's terrible.

I guess we could do that. Sure. Why not? Wow. Do you, do you have a zoom pro account by chance? No, I don't have a zoom pro.

Okay. I don't either. I didn't know this was a thing. No, I didn't either. I'm so sorry for the post editing you have to do for this too. I'm so sorry for the post-editing you have to do for this too. I'm so sorry. This is going to be fun. It's content.

We have two options. We could use Jitsi or do you have a Discord account? I can use either one. Which is your preference? If Discord is easier for you. Jitsi tends to be a bit weird on camera quality. Discord is probably going to be the least bad thing um okay just yeah we will pause for a minute and we'll fix this up and we are back now okay i didn't know about the the free thing either i don't i don't use

zoom the only time i use zoom is when i have, like, business-y people on here. Like, when I had the... Yeah, yeah. Some people from, like, the Cody project, they were like, let's use Zoom. I was like, sure. Oh, interesting. We'll use Zoom. And I don't ever choose to use Zoom.

I don't either. So, I think I sent you the, like, original calendar link thing. And, like, it's just a feature that it says like Google meet or zoom. And there's like the two things it supports by default. And so like, that's just what he used. And I literally never actually used unless I have, like you said, like there's some random like partner from an organization or whatever. That's like, ah, join the zoom link. And I'm always like, ah, fine. Uh, but it's usually not more than an hour call or they hosted the meeting. And so I don't have the magical pro I paid for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess. I don't know. Well, yeah. Whatever. It's fine. So we're talking about, like, new people joining the FOSS world and then sort of building up the, I guess,

what do you call it? Like the, how would you say it the the like the philosophical stuff comes later that's right yeah yeah yeah so yeah yeah yeah with the steam deck i think it's cool because it's yeah i do think it's like i have a lot of friends who are not linux i wouldn't call them linux users but it's like I have a lot of friends who are not Linux, I wouldn't call them Linux users. But it's like, well, technically, they are right. Yeah, like, they're using Linux on a Steam back. Like, that's awesome. To me, that's so cool. Because it's it demonstrates that like, this is like, obviously, valve knew what they wanted to do for that they could have done some like custom OS, they could have done some BSD thing, they could,

you know, the switch the playstation like they all have these their custom os's and whatnot but no they knew they wanted to do linux and like that's actually really good for linux just the engineering work that's going into that um but then it like it's so cool that it's like an on-ramp for those linux users right well that's always been a really like ever since what when did the Steam Machines happen? Whenever that was, like 2013 or something? Yeah, that was a while back, yeah. Ever since that point, they've been really...

Strangely focused on Linux for a company that does what they do. But does Windows games, basically, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They sell Windows games for the majority of things. From my understanding, the reason whyux became an interest for them was when windows 8 introduced the app store i believe and they were worried it would become a system sort of similar to the apple ecosystem where they would have to go through that and you know valve wants their cut they don't want microsoft to get their cut so yeah it's sort of a contingency

plan but nowadays they've actually got it to the point where it's like when they did the steam machines i've talked about this a ton of times we're not going to get into it again i it was just a badly developed plan like the steam machines they if if proton was a thing when the steam machines happened i don't think it would have been as much of a failure. Yeah, yeah. Like, this is, obviously the Steam Deck is a very different kind of device, but if the Steam Deck was just Linux native games, it would have failed, like, just as much. But now they actually have this system where you can play pretty much everything,

with the exception of a couple of, um, a couple of Atlus games a couple of Atlus games are a bit weird, like Catherine doesn't play properly for cutscene reasons, I don't know, there's some reason it doesn't play properly, uh, and the malware made by Riot like, the anti-cheat system they use for Valorant League

things like that, because it's basically a rootkit yep, and they were like, well, it can't run the rootkit it's like, well, what if we containerize a rootkit yeah and they're like well i can't run the rootkit it's like well what if we containerize the rootkit they're like no no no yeah because then there could be cheaters you can't have cheaters yeah yeah i've got thoughts about that i i for a long time i played without getting too too down that rebel a long time i played destiny uh i played the alpha when it came out on the ps3 we got i didn't know it was a lot i didn't realize it was that long ago until i actually like thought it out loud ps3 alpha of destiny and then played the beta played destiny for a long time and like what they originally pitched loved the idea of

this game it looked like almost like a single player rpg but your friends could jump in at any time and just like first of all over the years it just has totally turned into an mmo rpg like with all the loot crate stuff and like, whatever. Yeah. I get that there are people who like that. I just don't have time for that. Also, I had two kids in the time from Destiny 1 to now. So like, I definitely don't have time for that now.

Like, so yeah. And then, but I was like, man, if I could play it on Linux, I think I'd play it more often. Like I've got a PlayStation. That's my like, go sit on the couch and play machine. I can play it every once in a while on a laptop or something, or on something like a Steam Deck. I think I would play it, but I just can't, because they

don't want me to. That's okay. I played it on Stadia a lot, and I loved Stadia. Spicy take there. Stadia was amazing. Was it? Are you actually being serious i'm actually being serious okay i want to hear you defend so here's okay so i will not defend google's decision making because nobody can do okay but i will say the technology of stadia

to this day has been a better experience at least least for me, on my connections than any other remote play thing. Whether, up to including playing from a gaming computer or console on the same network to, like, an Android device or another computer. Okay. Like, Stadia

was lower latency for me on my, like, not even, like, gigabit connection, just, like, my 100 megabits or whatever that we had. Like, it was lower latency to play a game on Stadia than it was to stream it from my PS4 or PS5. And, like, to me, that's incredible. And they clearly, I mean, it's probably because they have YouTube Edge servers. Like, that's the whole thing, right? It ran through the YouTube Edge server, so there's probably a server down the block with the youtube data center or whatever and like but to me that

was amazing and i could see the vision the idea of like oh wow we all thought netflix streaming was a joke because nobody has all that bandwidth and now look everything's streaming right so i kind of saw i was like oh i can see this vision of we're all laughing at the streaming idea because yes not everybody has good internet. Obviously what we do at Endless, that's a huge part. A lot of people don't have any internet or have unreliable internet or expensive internet. Clearly it's not the only solution

for gaming. But at the same time, the technology was incredible. I played, before I could buy a PS5, I paid for Stadia Pro because i could get like next gen graphics on my current hardware for not that much money and and the experience was really good for me so i i'm bummed that they canceled it i also think like the tech press kind of like

sort of like was a self-fulfilling prophecy there like from day one they were like well it's really cool technically, but I wouldn't get too invested because Google might kill it, which scared everybody off, which meant that Google killed it. Like, that's my opinion. I don't know.

With Google killing a service, like, you could definitely make that argument, but we've all seen killedbygoogle.com. Yeah, they have this terrible track record, obviously. But I'm not going to sit here and, like, defend going to sit here and defend Google's decision-making organization. But the spicy take, the summary is, I actually really love Stadia, and I was really sad when they failed it, because that was my next-gen console. And then I got a PS5, and I love it.

But there are times when I'm over at my in-laws house or got decent internet and just have my phone and it's like, I wish I could just bang out a Stadia or whatever now. And I tried it with GeForce Now and it was not a good experience for me. It worked, but it had way more hiccups and latency. Even trying it on my local network, my PS5 with my multi-gigabit LAN, wired. I don't know if I was doing it to another wired device, but wired to wireless, at least 300 megabits, whatever. And it was just not a great experience.

So, I don't know. That could be something with my network, but I was just always blown away by Stadia. I think the biggest problem that Stadia had was the way they did their their game sales the fact that like the state your stadia games were like a whole separate thing so yeah i can see it both ways like i can see the idea of like someone like me who doesn't have like a massive steam library like i was fine that's what you thought library was a big advantage like you it was just your games yeah and seeForce Now library was a big advantage. It was just your games.

Yeah. I don't have a big library existing. If Sony... I mean, they do have their streaming service, but it works differently. If I could play all my games I've ever bought on PlayStation anywhere, then that would be cool. That's not quite what their streaming thing does yet,

but I feel like they're kind of going that way. Maybe they'll save me for my random whatever. Hey, they're coming out with the two halves of a PlayStation controller bolted onto the side of an Android tablet, so that's exciting. I'm actually really curious to see what they do with that. Because I might get one. We'll see.

When I first heard about it, i was i was streaming at the time and my mod was like hey did you see the new sony handhelds like is this like it looks like a is this like a joke yeah no it's like is this a sequel to the vita and i saw what it was like wait so it's doing what your phone already does with their streaming app. Yep. Okay. I have a theory, though. Eh? I have a theory. Yes. If, so they've advertised this,

or they only talked about the streaming capabilities so far. Right. So they've talked about, oh, you can remote play. And I get, like, why they want to lean into that, like, ecosystem stuff. But Sony also has a massive back catalog of PS1, PS2, PS3 games that could probably run pretty well on a halfway

decent Android device. No, that's fair. Yeah. If they actually shipped the PlayStation Store on the phone, on the phone, whatever they call it, the device, and you could actually

run natively, or emulate it offline, and play the backlog of PS1, or emulated, but offline, and play the backlog of PS1, PS2, maybe even PS3 games. You're not doing PS3 games. And you can stream. Yeah, probably not PS3. You know, right now, obviously they'd be able to do the emulation or whatever they're trying to do. They could do streaming for PS3, definitely.

Yeah, yeah. Or maybe PS1 and PS2, even. Definitely PS1, without a doubt. You can absolutely ps1 yeah ps2 i think you you're at the point where it's it's good enough on assuming it's like a high enough games they could port right yeah yeah you know like if they could actually port them and have them run um rather than just emulating the whole thing but like that's my like if they do that i will probably buy one because i have a lot of PS1 and PS2 games. I really loved.

And like, until recently you couldn't even play them on the newer PlayStation consoles without, you know, just emulating. So that's, I don't know. I'm holding out.

I think it's like, it looks ridiculous and I think it could be a total flop and total failure, but I'm like, there's a little bit of me that hopes it's actually cool. Cause I've always been a, I've always been a PlayStation player. Just like, that's just what we had as a kid whatever so like like it could be cool it could be cool with the uh with the PS3 stuff obviously they'd be able to do like the emulation stuff better they'd like you know hopefully have documentation how the hardware

works um but at least going by what like emulators right now are capable of doing, the main one being RPCS3, you need a, let's see, at least a Zen 2 or newer CPU, a RX 400 series AMD or a GTX 900 series or newer, 8 gigabytes of RAM. Yeah, they're not throwing that into a little Android handheld. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so it'll probably stream for PS3, right? But yeah. But still still it's kind of interesting to me if they fix their streaming game like maybe that'll be my successor to my my stadia loves that i had for a while uh anyway back yeah steam deck it's got way off the rails it's fine that's why i love these i love these uh so that idea of people coming into the ecosystem, right? And not they're not, they don't come here for the philosophical stuff, right? Like I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who hate the fact that I'm like, Oh, I play I use a PlayStation.

Oh, it's proprietary, whatever. Like, it's what has my games, right? But it's when you can, like take that and turn it into a Linux user or somebody who like you can introduce them not through the like I'm going to show you a wall of text about the you know gpl y gpl is god or whatever like but like kind of you know nudge them in that direction I think it can be effective um you know now these days I am like super passionate about free and open source software and like that like I'm I

don't think I'm ever gonna write of my own will any software that's not open source like that's just not because I've had that I've been exposed to this I've like had that that kind of slow burn of introduction to the philosophy and like why it's so powerful and then yeah I mean back in the day the theming stuff turned into I found this community of people building this theme called Elementary, the Elementary theme. And like, I joined them because like, ah, cool. Like, I like, it's pretty. I actually started using the Elementary theme on Ubuntu. Because that was what Elementary was in like 2007, 8, 9, whatever.

Like, it was a theme. It's an icon theme. The Ubuntu icons, the humanity theme, was based on the elementary theme. They actually contracted Danny to do that for Ubuntu. Canonical paid Danny to do the humanity icon theme, which is pretty cool.

But then once you start designing a theme and icons, then you're like like yeah but like it's just a skin on top of these apps i'm like what if we made the apps actually better and so then like that's where we started getting involved in making like we made a patched version of nautilus that was called it's called nautilus elementary it may have been called nautilus elementary or something it was like a forward patched version of nautilus and we didn't know what we're doing like the code quality i'm sure it was terrible and like we dumped this patch on gnome

and we're like behold we have done it better than you like please accept the dream because we knew you know obviously we were better and they were like oh wait like this is terrible it's not how you do things and we're like oh they're. They don't, they don't see progress. Like we were those young, annoying people how the world worked. And like a hundred percent, we were those people at elementary. Like, and we learned, right? Like we, we lived and learned and we had, we did the same thing with GTK at some point. We were like, oh, well, if we're going to make, we're going to start making our own

apps. And it was like in Python at the time, I think, because that's what somebody knew. own apps. And it was like in Python at the time, I think, because that's what somebody knew. So like, we made our own apps. And we made the simple like, calendar or contacts app and like, all these simple little desktop apps, because we're gonna make our own apps because all the apps that are there were better. And, you know, it's like that hubris of a designer and we 100% had that. How old were you at the time uh i mean this was high school for me so okay that's that's fine then i was gonna say 2010 i would have been graduating high school

um which was like when we were really in the thick of like i guess when we decided we were gonna make an operating system because obviously that's the next step that you do right you're like well we're making all these apps we want to put all these apps together and we were gonna make an operating system. Yeah, obviously, that's the next step that you're right, you're like, well, we're making all these apps, we want to put all these apps together. And we were like, we could ship on a boon tube. But the story for shipping apps was bad. Like shipping apps on an OS was bad, unless you like, wanted to get them into Debian and have Debian package them and then they trickle into boon to and then a boon to pack like that whole world.

We're outsiders to that world. And we're like, we just want to make an app and give it to people. And the only way you could do that in 2010 was to make an operating system. Like the only reasonable way. So we made an operating system. So we made elementary OS and it came out in like 2011, I think was the first version. And I mean, it was right. We like, yeah.

Yep. Yep. Remember that April Fool's has always been like a a fun date for elementary oh yeah i guess time zone yeah this could have yeah that makes sense i think i think it technically was march 31st but it was one of those where like then people heard about it on april right okay that makes sense those elementary kids are making an os and we were like i think we're like our slogan is like it's gonna be huge we were like we're like, our slogan is like, it's gonna be huge. We were like, we're so... It was great.

It was great. Like, I'm so glad we did it. But looking back, I'm like, secondhand, I guess it's firsthand. I'm like, secondhand embarrassed for past me. If that's a thing that can be... Was the Elementary OS website a thing back then? Because there might be some stuff on the wayback machine. Archive.org probably has it, yeah.

Is it elementaryos.com? What's the website? So it's elementary.io now, but at the time it would have been Archive.org probably has it, yeah. Is it elementaryos.org? What's the website? So it's elementary.io now, but at the time it would have been elementaryos.org. Okay, let's see. I have a shirt somewhere in my closet that has that on the back. Elementaryos.org.

Circa, yeah, March 31st, 2011. I'd be like, it's going to be huge. It was like a picture of Jupiter because that was the name. I actually saw- so if you go on DeviantArt, you can find mock-ups of the website that we posted on DeviantArt. Because that was the whole world then, it was so weird. Oh, that's what- But yeah, we were like-

That's one thing I was gonna talk about. With the whole DeviantArt thing you're saying, Yeah. There's still that sort of culture that exists now, but a lot of it has sort of shifted over to places like Unixporn where I don't even actually, are they still there? Because a lot of people left Reddit after the whole Reddit stuff at least up until like six months ago that's where all of that sort of

custom desktop stuff was really being done Yeah, it's probably shifted I would say a lot to Reddit Yeah, I don't know i i kind of exited that scene i guess i'd say like after i because it's like i basically what i was trying to make at the time was basically elementary and so elementary was a thing and so i just like did elementary for my mom okay some of the images aren't loading sadly

um it's gonna be huge dexter the only address book you'll ever need Yeah In the list it's like the image they have here for like the address. It's Obi-Wan Kenobi Amazing incredible. I love this. This is great. We at one point the website said rock out with your dock out Because we were we were talking about the box bomb scream This is great. At one point, the website said, rock out with your doc out. Because we were talking about the doc at the bottom of the screen. We used the word sexy way too much. Nobody should use the word sexy as much as we used it.

But we were like, ooh, we're edgy. We can say sexy. Oh, my God. It was so embarrassing. It was so good. It was good times. But, yeah, from there, the evolution is actually pretty cool of elementary from there.

We had those early interactions with GNOME people and at the time, I think our opinion was like, oh, they're just these old farts who don't know, whatever. They don't know what good design is, but slapped them in the face because we tried to drop our 5,000 line patch on them for their app and they just rejected it. Was it like a thousand line patch one commit did you guys even know how to use it probably no i bet not like i mean at the time to be fair gnome was probably like still patch

files or something weird but i don't know i don't know but i'm sure it was like we didn't follow any of the right ways to do it yeah like so it was like probably for like three four or five years until about 2015 like we kind of had that like almost contentious relationship with gnome for for quite a while we're like i wouldn't say like we disliked gnome but like we'd had in retrospect this very very like twisted idea of what our interactions with no more but like in our minds as kids we were like oh they're a bunch of jerks and in 2015 i'll never forget uh shri shri shri ram ram kushna is uh he's a gnome a gnome guy if you know shri this is his username pretty much everywhere um he invited elementary to a GTK hack fest.

Okay. Interestingly, at the Endless headquarters in San Francisco in 2015. Okay. So Endless at the time had just kickstarted the Endless mission, whatever their first computer was. They just kickstarted an Endless computer.

It was this weird alien not quite the little orb one, but it was one that went up and was funky. It kind of had some old iMac vibes. Mission 1? I'm seeing videos from 2017 so that might be a bit newer. Yeah. Endless...

It could have been the Endless 1, Endless Mission or Endless... They used a lot of the same names a lot. Endless 1, 20... It could have been the endless one, endless mission, or endless. They use the same names a lot, which is very hard to find. Endless one 2015. I don't know. It's hard to find. But yeah, whatever the weird alien, like not orb, but like taller one was, and it was like, I think it was like an ARM processor.

And this is like before Raspberry Pi either was a thing or at least was popular. And like the whole, the whole idea was really cool, because they're they were like, we're gonna, we're gonna make like commodity hardware with highly performance software, which was known Linux known on and and like, it's gonna be you can plug it into a tv and so if you're in like a developing nation that you don't have like you know a computer lab you can go to like you can actually get a computer for a very affordable price in your home uh it was really cool uh anyway so they were having they had hired a bunch of people they had like i think they had some vc funding or something and they had also done the kickstarter and so they hired a bunch of people to work on gtk and gnome and so they were having a gtk hack fest at the endless offices and they

tree was like hey elementary should come because i think he knew that we had had like some like poor impressions of gnome over the years or whatever and he's like i think if you meet the people you'll have a good time and like I'm like, okay, sure, whatever. I don't remember if Gnome paid for it, if they sponsored it, or I don't remember. But regardless, we made it happen. It was really cool. We met people. I met...

Oh man, now I'm blanking on all of their names. I met all the cool people there. Christian Hergert was there. Emanuele, I think, was there. Emanuele Bassi. And Cosimo. Sri was there. Emanuele, I think, was there. Emanuele Bassi. And Cosimo. Sri was there. There were a lot of people. Jasper St. Pierre was there.

There were a lot of people that were pretty big at Nome. And meeting them in person kind of changed, I think, my... Honestly, I'll say it changed my life for the better. But also, I think, changed elementary and it changed my life for the better but also like i think changed elementary and gnome's relationship for the better and she sort of put like a a face to these

developers it's just it's not just a repo anymore it's these are the people working on it i'm pretty sure uh matthias classen was there and i'm pretty sure alexander larson was there because we were also introduced to this idea. So in 2015, elementary was like, we're going to have an app store, which is funny because it goes back to like, remember, like, we were like, Oh, we want to we want to put apps on Linux. And that was a hard thing. That was an impossible thing in 2010 when we started. So five years later, we're like, we're gonna build an app store, we have an OS, we've had a couple releases now, like we're gonna build an app store. So we were

doing this thing called elementary App Center. And the whole idea we were like, the technology doesn't really matter. Like we can build it on Debian packages. And it's fine. Like a lot of people are like, Oh, you don't do that. You don't do it. It failed. It wasn't good. Like, no, see, the whole thing is you could do better. We're gonna do it better than Ubuntu did it, right? Because we've got that sweet, sweet space money. did but yeah so we but I mean honestly like looking back we've gotten so much like elementary got so much good press and good like I don't even know the right word but like kudos whatever from from like gnome and flatpak people because they were like, you guys did it. Like you saw that you needed an app store

before anybody else was actually doing it. Like Ubuntu had their thing and it was bad and like payment methods were hard and like packaging was bad and like it was just this whole thing. And we found a way kind of to work around that. But interestingly, so we were just about to launch App Center, we're working

on App Center. And there is that this talk at this summit, this, this hackfest, whatever, about this thing called xdg app. And I was like, that's xdg is like cross desktop group, whatever. Yeah, just kind of like free desktop. It's this weird, like, not really a thing. But yeah, xdg app is this thing. So we got a demo of XTG app. And we got this demo of this thing called OS tree in 2015. And we're like, Oh, that's cool. I don't know about it seems pretty far out like I don't know that'll be I don't know, maybe it'll be whatever we're shooting do our thing. But like we got the demo, right? Yeah. And so XTG app became flat pack. And OS tree is what endless OS uses and is what Fedora silver blue uses and is

what normal s uses are used until very recently. I'm not sure they might be changing that or they changed it recently. I'm not sure. But uh, yeah, like OS trees a big thing and flat packs a big thing now and like, we saw it early and it was cool. Like, it was cool to be there. But the people who are like, you know, I built this thing. It's called XTG app. Like, I think it's pretty nice. Like it containerizes everything and like it keeps your host safe.

It's like, yeah, okay, whatever, who needs that? Like, and now looking back, it's like, I think the idea of portals existed at the time. So they were like, yeah, you'll have these portals interface. And so you can have more like permissions, more like we have a mobile OSs. And we're like, yeah, I mean, that sounds nice, whatever.

I think one of the problems we do have on Linux is there's a lot of really cool things being done, but developers are really bad at talking about it. Like- They are, yeah, yeah, I mean, that sounds nice, whatever. I think one of the problems we do have on Linux is there's a lot of really cool things being done, but developers are really bad at talking about it. They are, yeah. You're an exceptionally actually good at talking to people, but most people in this space are like, you know, I'm doing this thing, it's cool. I mean, you look back to like,

that's how Linux itself was announced, right? Which, I mean, there's a flip side of it. You don't want the hubris. Yeah like i think elementary like dipped too far into the hubris sometimes right where we were like it's the best thing ever yeah yeah i think we understood that like you gotta sell it like even if you're making a free thing you gotta sell it like you really gotta gotta show it off but i think that people are like they don't want to like think too highly of themselves which i also respect that but the thing with that with linux at the time though like it made sense why

why tallboards was so like you know i'm just doing this hobby thing because at the time everyone thought that um gnu's uh project that failed while linking on it heard but everyone thought that heard was gonna be like heard's gonna be here in a couple of years guys it's gonna be here and then linux took over as soon as it came out like linux is here and that's the thing oh cool you can actually use it oh cool we have a kernel that's actually working and we also have this yeah exactly together made sense right yeah sometimes that happens right but but yeah it's so it was really cool being being at that like that's one of the most like pivotal moments i think in my life because 2015 so that would have been oh man i'm thinking back timeline i can't even my brain doesn't even work but it was it was early enough that's like when I think elementary got really serious about a lot of things like there was there was also

when was this? Wow, my brain is so fuzzy about these things. At some point, you went to a developer summit or two. And that would have been earlier because they would have been I was like 2012 or something. have been earlier because they would have been I was like 2012 or something. Yeah, a little fuzzy on that. But like unity, I think was a thing or was about to be it's a thing. I think it was a thing. It was going to be the default. So it may have been the late 2011. Because it was going to be the default for 12 before I think. So actually, that was quite a while before that. So that was another I would say the Boots developer summit in 2011. So Orlando, that was another one of those like pivotal moments for me, I think where, like we got invited canonical sponsored elementary to come out to this thing. And like they recognized the value in what we were doing, which was really cool. And like, we sat in the same room as like the designers working

on Ubuntu and the developers working on Ubuntu and a bunch of the gnome people and GTK people were there because they got sponsored to come out because they were building Ubuntu like they were building the gnome stack gnome's release cycle was based on the gnome release cycle like Ubuntu's release cycle is based on the gnome release cycle and like they worked much you know pretty closely together there and so it was really cool to be like in the room there and like talking to all those people and just like meeting all these people again um but yeah and then i said 20 25 so that's when we met a lot of ubuntu people that were really pivotal and like that's when somebody told us a developer we respected told us straight to our face like you guys have great ideas your code is crap like may have been even may have been even

harsher than that i don't remember but it was like it was basically you guys are great you make great looking stuff and your code is terrible. And that was that was super pivotal for us because we're like, really? And he was like, you need to have code reviews. You need to have people who understand like, object oriented programming and like some basics of programming because that wasn't our background at the time like, and that, like we instituted code reviews we like we really cleaned up um so that was really pivotal too of like for a while we were just throwing whatever like if it worked it worked and we didn't care about the code quality right and like there's something nice about that like you can experiment and do whatever but like at some point like you have to you know grow up a bit

um so that was pivotal and then yeah 2015 meeting a bunch of the no man's dk people and flatback people now uh that was really pivotal and like then i think the next pivotal thing was the first guadic conference i went to so in person i went to to 20 oh gosh when was this it was 2017 I'm literally pulling up my own blog because I'm like surely I wrote about this right I did the same thing in my video someone's like hey how long have you been

using likes for I don't know check check on my other video it was yeah we went in 2018 but I feel like we went maybe it was 2018 that seems like more recent but then i have to remember that was you know what five years ago but it still seems like seems like it was a long time ago anyway it was it's either that or we went to a different conference or something but uh i walked in the door and it was like the registration you know

like go pick up your badge whatever and like i didn't know anybody there i think I was there before anybody else from elementary was there. So I was kind of like a little nervous. And Matthias, who I believe I saw at in 2015 at the GTK hack fest, he walked up to me and he goes, Hey, how are you doing? How's elementary going? What what's your how are you liking the latest GTK three stuff that we've been working on? Like, is that working better for you? How, how do you, are you, is Granite adapting to some of this stuff?

Like super knowledgeable about what we were doing. Like knew who I was super inviting, immediately started a conversation with me and was extremely friendly. And like that, that totally shifted my perception of gnome forever from then it was just like, Oh, there's somebody who actually is a really cool person who really cares who like i can tell doesn't just care about

being like i'm gonna go be friendly but it's like no i want to make sure that what i'm working on what i'm spending my time working on is actually serving you and your group of people who are doing this thing and that like like i literally just got goosebumps again like that like that totally And that like, like, I literally just got goosebumps again. Like that, like that totally shifted my whole perception of gnome. And it was, it was literally day one of me being at a gnome event. And it was like, oh, okay. And then that kind of thing kept happening. Like I kept meeting the people who were working on the thing.

And they're like, oh, you're from elementary. Oh, cool. Like, hey, like literally multiple times. They're like, oh, you're the celebrity on here. I'm like, what? Like, yeah, we love what you, we love the work you do. Like, we love your design stuff. And it's like, this is so crazy. Like, that was really cool. That was so cool to see that like, Oh, these people are real people. And these people are like super friendly and they, they care about their passion about the technology and what they do, but like,

they also care about the people behind it. like now ever since i've gotten several guatics and like that's my favorite part like you get a lot done you get really inspired you see really cool technology but the best part is the people like it's so cool it's like my group of friends from around the world that i get to meet up with you know every year like so it's like that's the coolest part to me and that changed my mind i think elementary's perception of gnome of like then our relationship from there was more much more like collaborative so it was like i started working with gnome design on some things like i even though i was doing elementary it was like well we have some design thoughts that we've put into this from the

elementary side like i'll share i'll share what we think you know for gnome and like they would be like oh that's really interesting oh that's really cool and like more and more you saw i think you saw some of that reflected in gnome's design over time of like something's got a lot more elementary like over the years and like that's pretty cool that there's that cross-pollination and like at the same time you can still have your own open source project that's your own thing it's your baby that's your vision and you can still work really closely with those these other people and like the people who are building their own vision but they're also building like the stack on which it's all built like there's so much of gnome that is under the hood of you know ubuntu and elementary os and endless os and i mean pop os and like all these even if they're not even shipping gnome

the desktop like elementary doesn't ship gnome we don not even shipping GNOME, the desktop, like, elementary, it doesn't ship GNOME. We don't even ship the GNOME apps. Like, it's, there's, like, one or two GNOME apps that ship on elementary OS. But it uses the GNOME stack. It uses GTK. It uses all the libraries. It uses all the investment and time and work that's gone into GNOME. And so it's still, like, a really important relationship to have.

So I think that's, like, part of the beauty of of what i what i discovered actually going to guadalcan meeting with people um it's a lot of cool people so obviously now like that's a big part of the reason why you're so invested in this side of it but long before this like obviously you used nopic to start and then you used aopic the Star and then you used Ubuntu like why was it that you sort of stuck with that Gnome stack side rather than

going back to KDE or trying out I guess you know at the time there wasn't really that many options but like why is it

that the Gnome side is what you've sort of stuck with over the years that's a good good question I would say honestly like

so I did play with Enlightenment that was a thing at one point i played with like very briefly because it was like flashy and i did a lot of fun compass stuff at times but that was like compass and gnome yeah yeah yeah yeah um you know flaming windows fold it up into a paper airplane and throw it and like yeah you can still get some of that stuff as extensions on gnome shell and it's it's it's terrible and it's great and i love it i saw one that was like a rick and morty, it's like when a window opens.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, there's great stuff like that. But no, so I mean, I played around with that. Actually, I think the first version of elementary OS actually used Compiz because it let us do our like fancy like when you minimize a window or whatever it was like, it let us do the things we wanted to do. But I don't know why I stuck with the gnome stack i honestly it's probably just a consequence of like um i use i had used ubuntu and been using ubuntu for several years at that point and like elementary started as an ubuntu skin or spin or whatever you want to call it to start you know we we would have been very offended in 2010 if you called it that. That's how it started.

We were never a flavor. That's how it started. It was a skin. It was a theme. It was an icon theme and a GTK theme. Then it was the apps. Then it was an OS. But it was Ubuntu. As soon as you stopped touching the user interface, it was Ubuntu. As soon as you opened the terminal, it was Ubuntu. As soon as you stopped touching the user interface, it was Ubuntu.

As soon as you opened the terminal, it was Ubuntu. It was just Ubuntu. People would ask us, I love elementary OS. I want a server OS. What would you recommend? And we were like, you should make a server OS is what they tell us.

And we're like, somebody already does that. It's called Ubuntu server. Literally, you take the user interface off of it, and it's just Ubuntu server. So just use that like it's fine. But yeah, so I don't know. That's probably part of it is just like we came from the Ubuntu world. We built on Ubuntu and GNOME technologies. So we just used GNOME technologies at the time and then and then it then it was when I started meeting people making GNOME,

it just made sense to be staying in that world. And I did play every once in a while. I got a Pinebook Pro and I used Manjaro with KDE, I think, was the default for a while. I don't know if it still is. But I used KDE for a while on that. And I was like, it's always interesting because it's like, oh, wow, this is almost like the first time I used Linux because for a while on that. And I was like, it's always interesting because it's like, oh, wow, this is almost like

the first time I used Linux because everything's different. And then, you know, it's like, okay, well, I kind of miss the thing that I'm used to. So I just go back to what I wanted. That's GNOME or elementary. Yeah, I think it's just a consequence of where the elementary people came from and then where my interest stayed and then meeting the people.

At System76, when Ubuntu actually announced that they were ceasing Unity development and that they were going to switch back to GNOME. So this was 2018? That sounds right. Somewhere around then. I was working at System76, and I think at the time I was working as a web developer, or maybe just recently moved over to UX at System76. And that kind of shocked System76,

because System76, at least at the time, was the biggest Ubuntu-only OEM, if that makes sense. Which is like, caveat, caveat, whatever. But they were the only company who just sold Ubuntu at the time. That's all they did. And they did 100% Ubuntu. And so it was kind of shocking to be like, oh, I guess Canonical is completely changing what Ubuntu is and that's going to change the user interface for all of our customers at System76.

So there was this impromptu meeting at the bar, the floor below the System76 headquarters, where we were like, what are we going to do about this? And- That would have been around Popos then. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know,

you know where Popos came from now. So at the time it was, what do we do? Do we ship Ubuntu? You know, is somebody going to fork unity and keep it going? Are we going to ship that? Because that's what our customers are used to.

Are we going to keep shipping unity? Are we going to ship, you know, Ubuntu gnome, but style it? Cause at the time we thought they were going to ship we going to ship you know ubuntu gnome but style it because at the time we thought they were going to ship it exactly like gnome like stock no um that's kind of what it sounded like so like should we use gnome to build a unity like interface which ironically is what you know cop ended up doing with the boon to desktop but should

we and we talked should we switch to fedora should we switch to this like there were talks about should we switch to elementary os like should we switch to this? Like there were talks about, should we switch to elementary OS? Like should we switch to elementary OS and invest in its development? Like there was, there were interesting talks being had. And eventually the idea was like, well, let's- I wonder who tried to start those talks about elementary. Not me. Honestly, not me.

I'll say, no, Carl, Carl is a big fan of elementary. I think Carl probably still is a big fan of what we did at elementary. Like he let me, I mean, I worked at System 76 full time and he let me spend a lot of time in there for doing elementary stuff. So he, I think he had a lot of respect for what we did at elementary, but I mean, it was an idea that was floated, right? Like at one point the imaging servers at system 76, usually it could be Ubuntu LTS or Ubuntu Latest. Those were two options on the imaging server because that was in production.

At some point, there was Ubuntu Latest, Ubuntu LTS, Fedora, Elementary OS, Debian, and probably two other things. But Elementary OS was on that list, and it was considered. But at the time, it was actually, I think the main factor, at least what I was made aware of, was that we were... Elementary was based on the LTS release cycle, which at the time would mean that it was too old for new hardware, basically. That's since gotten better since they do the hardware enablement backport stuff. But at the time, it was kind of like, oh, well, we can't really do that.

But yeah, Pop! OS was born. But it made sense. I think with my experience working on elementary OS and the GNOME stack there, plus engineers at System76 who had worked on Ubuntu stuff, like it made sense to be Ubuntu based, it made sense to be GNOME based, like that all that was the legacy, right? Like that was where we came from. And so I think that's I think it's similar with a lot of these projects that you see that are, that come out and they're Ubuntu based or Norton based and like, and it's like, well, that's Ubuntu was

a lot of people's first real Linux OS, right? Like, so you get a lot of these people are like, well, I want Ubuntu, but I want to, I want to tweak how it works or I want to, I want to change something about it. And so you start with Ubuntu. Right, right, right. It makes sense. Like, yeah, but and then, yeah, I definitely think the right the reason I stuck around in the gnome community even after leaving elementary

and like it's because I had formed these relationships and was I had gotten involved in gnome design. And so like actually I'm way more involved in gnome design these days, which is really cool. And endless OS is gnome based these days which is really cool uh and endless os is gnome based which was a huge driving factor for me too so yeah it's just kind of like where the people i knew were and and what what kept me around and i also like i think like five years ago i don't know if i would have you know five years ago i was probably using elementary os

and like i don't know that i would have liked switching to just stock gnome. I probably would have switched to gnome and then trying to make it work like elementary OS. And luckily gnome has done all that work for me over the last five years. Like you look at gnome today and it's remarkably more elementary, like than it was five years ago. Right. Like there's the, the dash move from the left to the bottom and like the,

the visual style is a little bit i mean it's actually maybe even like it's more flat than elementary these days but like has gotten a lot more modern a lot a lot more like i would say what's the word uh opinionated i guess in the design in a lot of ways of like not not just like the design of like options and things but like the design of the actual like the visual design is a bit more opinionated it's a bit more stylized but like a lot of that reminds me of elementary right like we were always very opinionated opinionated from the elementary side um so yeah i think it was like five years ago i don't know that it would have been using stock gnome and then these days it's really great i really i really love the experience of stock gnome i think there's like one

change i would make that i'm pushing for within the gnome design team constantly but i don't want to i don't want to talk too much about no fair enough uh it's a very nuanced topic and nuance is hard on the internet uh i have thoughts did you know? Did you know nuance is hard on the internet? Oh, man. I've read my comments before. I have so many things I could say. I'm going to keep my mouth shut on those topics. However, I think there is room to explore the idea of why so many OSs have a dock at the bottom of the of the screen at all times. And don't make you go into like an overview to have a doc. I'm not saying that no one

should ship dash to dock or whatever. But like, there's that nuance, right? I'm like, I'm not saying like, a doc solves all problems. I'm like, I think no one should have a doc. But I in user studies that we do with different things, like it, it comes up often enough. I'm like, maybe, maybe it's,

maybe a doc solves things that the dash in its current state doesn't. And like, maybe we can do interesting things there. And like, I don't know. Well, I was, that's my one secret.

Your GitHub. I did notice the, you blew beyond thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's got dashed yeah it doesn't that's like the one change i make to stock or that it's not not even the one because i make a couple other changes that like are gnome design things that we've talked about so every week we have a a call with like people who are working on design within the gnome community and one of these like i was inspired one

day um george castro who yeah yeah george he's like hey like i don't even know no i post i'm like you know what i would love i would love if i could just make like my own vision for gnome as an operating system but like i don't want to get into making an operating system because that's way too much work i've been there done, done that, don't undo it. And George is like, you know, there's this thing I've been working on called UBlue. You should come check it out. And so he basically roped me into making an operating system without calling it an operating system.

So that's what Beyond is. But yeah, so we have these weekly calls. And so my idea with Beyond was like, what if we take these things we're talking about and saying, could that work? Would that be interesting? And I just shipped with beyond was like, what if we take these things we're like talking about and saying like, could that work? Would that be interesting?

And I just like shipped them just like warts and all, but I have to ship them as is. And, and the idea is get a few of my friends using it. Like I'll use it. And then we'll, we'll just like bang on it and figure out what works and what doesn't work. And like, it'll be yet another data,

right. It's not like the solution for user testing, like it's a terrible idea, but like, it's just another data point to be like, Hey, what'd you think of that? Like, did you get that update today? What did you think about those little, you know, circles in the top left corner? Like, like, oh yeah, I was really confused by that. Or like, oh yeah, I thought it was really slick or, oh, I didn't even notice it. Like, that's just more data points that are just helpful. What are these circles in the top left corner?

Like, that's just more data points that are just helpful in those design sessions. What are these things in the top left corner? I don't have any clue. I just noticed. So, I think the screenshots of Beyond or Out data. Okay, okay. That was, I think, an extension that I had configured to try to make it look like what ended up what is likely maybe what we're currently testing i'll put it that way right what we're currently testing for upstream gnome white screen on my screen it's like blasting my face out here uh so there's the activities indicator so i don't

know if you've seen anything about that i think i saw that i think it was mentioned a bit in the in one of Tobias' talks during WADAC yes possibly he talks about like yeah he may have talked about it or there's a blog post about it too I think like OMG picked it up too it's out there

this indicator could just make Gnome's activities out of... Wait, that's a terrible title. Whatever. Here we go. omglinux.com has GnomeDevs and they replace activities label with this indicator. And it's got a little bit of a write-up there. But yeah, the idea is it's basically

a workspace indicator to replace the word activities. Because I don't think anybody has to replace the word activities. Okay. Because I don't think anybody has ever loved the word activities. And like in the original gnome3 designs, the overview actually did a lot more than it does today. I don't know if you remember or if you've seen original gnome3 designs, but it was like, there was this whole concept of this like document oriented workflow. And then the people, like like it was like we're gonna tap into all the apis of all the things and we're gonna have like your chat list in the overview and

we're gonna have your recent documents in the overview it was this whole thing like that was gnome 3 the original idea and it was radical and kind of crazy and then it has kind of like been scaled back over the years because we've realized maybe actually this app centric model makes sense instead of this document centric model. And so we've actually like the design has changed over the years, especially like Gnome 40 and beyond. But that word activities is a legacy from, I think, the original Gnome 3 designs. Right. Because it was all of your activities. It was all your activities, all the things you want to do on your computer. It had all your documents. It had all your people. It had all your your activities it was all your activities all the things you want

to do on your computer it had all your documents it had all your people it had all your conversations it had all your activities but now it basically serves as a workspace indicator it's your workspace overview like right and then it's also how you get to your app launcher right so like it does basically those two things it's so this little three button here's your workspaces here's your apps so the dot thing is basically your what the indicator for whatever workspace you're currently on yeah so the idea is it shows like if you've got if you have you know a a fresh clean uh session would have the little pill as the current workspace you're on plus it'll have one dot to the right because that's you always have an empty workspace to your right so you can swipe over use your keyboard shortcuts and you go over that one and then the little pill

like blobs over and then you have a dot on the left to show that there's a workspace over there. And then as you add workspaces dynamically, more little dots show up. And so it kind of gives you this, like, persistent reminder of where you are. I mean, it's not a new concept. We've had, like, workspace features forever, right?

I have a window manager right now. It just has numbers for each of the workspaces. Yeah, the little numbers and little squares or whatever. Like, that's a thing. But, like, this is a way to make it almost, like, almost, like, on boards, people who don't use workspaces, to the idea of workspaces,

it gives them a persistent place to see, like, oh, I see. I mean, a lot of people are used to that, like, pager, that pager-type interface where, like, you swipe through things and you've got little dots where you are. And so it's, like, what if we took that idea've got little dots where you are. And so it's like, what if we took that idea for the whole system?

I don't know. It's an experiment. It may like, we've done a small amount of like pretty informal user testing and it was like, I would say it was inconclusive, but it wasn't negative. It was from that informal user testing we did of like,

it performed no better or it performed no worse and maybe slightly better than the activities label. But also, I think there's a lot of excitement around what we could do interesting dynamic things up there. With the previous system, was there an indicator of which workspace you're on just like at a glance or is it just. Nope. I think this. Oh, yeah. Having some sort of indicator is definitely.

Yeah. It definitely an improvement. The question is. Right. Yeah. Is this the best way to do that indicator right and then also is it does it also serve the purpose of you know to go there to get to all your stuff yeah right like because we've we've tried different icons over time of like do you do like the little grid of like apps there do you do like what kind of do you search icon but like, nothing really felt like it really conveyed? Because like part of it is you can you can click that and then you can just start typing. So like search in a way would be a good thing there. But

like, it doesn't make sense to have a search class when like or magnifying glass when it like goes into your overview of apps. So So the idea was like, what if we did something? I mean, you look at like modern, you know, smartphone interfaces and like the thing to get to all your places is this little line, right? Like that's what gives you like your overview and that's how you get home is like this little line. It's really symbolic. It doesn't really mean anything.

It's just sort of like a marker to grab onto, I guess. Yeah. And so that's kind of the idea of why it's like a pill. We had some ideas where it could be a wider pill. There's crazier ideas out there where what if we moved it to the bottom? Or like if you look at the phone, the phone, uh, gnome on a phone type UI stuff, like there is a line on the bottom. So like there is some ideas of like could that be on a desktop?

Could it be up there? Could it be in the middle could be the bottom but like the first step is we know the word activities is terrible does this perform at least no worse than activities and if so it's probably we should probably do it if we because we have this idea of a longer term vision of like more interesting things we could be doing so yeah that's the that that that's what little dots on that. And so I think my screenshot on Beyond is outdated because I think it uses an old extension that didn't quite work as well. But

that's the idea, is that it could be and it could also be more dynamic and more interesting over time if we actually go down that route. It could be like, I don't know. We've had lots of random thoughts. I don't want to promise anything out there, but it could be more interesting interesting put it that way um i definitely think it's like a cool concept for sure like i i i don't run ganoe myself like i it's it's not my thing i like the

whole throw everything together with window manager nonsense it's my my if my desktop is a mess like you don't know how much it's just pieced together and held together with tape um but it works but legos are fun right like that's the reason we like legos you build something out of lego blocks and you have a sense of accomplishment that you built yourself too so like i think there's perfectly like that's totally a valid way to to use a computer that's fine yeah i'm not personally a fan of like the extra stuff that ubuntu does on top of gnome like i don't like the side like it's just yeah i i don't like i don't particularly yeah whatever i i do like the what vanilla gnome is doing it seems like

it's coming along like oh you know really well and i saw the whole i did a video on the talk where tabasco talking about the whole new i new concept for window management that i think is actually really neat i don't know how it's going to really play out in the real world it's going to be yeah there's a lot of really neat ideas that i don't know how you implement in a way that is consistent and actually operates like a user would expect it to but yeah there's a lot of risk of unexpected animation or movements and you gotta balance that yeah for sure but and i did see people like being like oh if you're gonna do tiling just do you know just do what pop show is doing but i i don't think the idea of tiling is like a solved problem like there are absolutely

problems with it and i think if you want to experiment with trying to solve them in a slightly different way like this is how we make progress like you know with the the pill menu here like we try it out if it doesn't work we try something different and then yeah you know maybe like maybe what pop shell is doing with tiling is just the optimal way that tiling works or maybe it's not maybe there's something that like that could learn from it and we start seeing this new development of tiling that introduced this more you know i guess the way i i sort of looked at it was it's sort of respecting the size the windows want to be at rather than forcing

a size upon the window yeah exactly yeah so it the whole idea is that you would have which mobile actually has this and does pretty well because mobile used to have only you know one size the window could be and then as it scaled up to tablets like and use those hints but the idea of like yeah an app this app can work well at these sizes or these dimensions and so naturally when you open up another app next to that one like it might not make sense to say that should be a 50 50 split you might be like my chat window with like a really long chat conversation that could be like a tiny little thing off to the side so maybe by default you open a window that has a big document in it and you already have a little chat window open like maybe it should just move that chat

window over instead of being like yes split it 50 and so that's yeah that's the idea is like we should explore that and it's going to require like a lot of work and a lot of buy-in from apps uh luckily like gnome has a really cool app ecosystem these days like again that's something else i couldn't really say like five years ago um so it's really cool to see that we're in like kind of a perfect storm of having a lot of really good progress on the desktop itself with performance and design-wise. We're having a lot of really good results with the GNOME Circle initiatives where we have these independent developers writing apps for GNOME. We have FlatHub where you can distribute these apps. It's kind of this perfect storm of now we have an ecosystem. I don't know if you've been paying attention.

GNOME is an ecosystem. It wasn't five years ago. It wasn't really. That's one of the biggest things I've heard from GNOME people about how they're inspired by elementary too. It's like, you guys get it. And you go back and look at blog posts from several years ago from GNOME designers, developers, and they're like, elementary is building this thing, and they're doing it smart.

Tobias, I think actually several years ago, had a blog post that's like, there are no operating systems, there are ecosystems. And he's like, elementary is the only one that's doing it right, and this is several years ago. I would now say, now there's at least two doing it right. GNOME is doing it right too, I think. Building all those puzzle pieces and bringing them together.

It means that you can do these more exciting things. This is why Apple can do whatever they want. They know that developers will just fall in line. Developers and users will just put up with it. And put it in a nicer way. I follow a lot of

iOS developers and iPad os developers on social media and like they are genuinely excited when apple does something cool and new and exciting like to them they're like oh this is so cool like this is i have a new thing i can do in my app and like we're getting that in gnome now like we're getting like when we do a new thing in eduada or in gnome developers like oh this is so cool they like rush to implement it and that's that's super powerful that means you can do things like more interesting things with window management and you'll actually have apps that actually do it um you can do more interesting things with like a dark style like that just works on like all the gnome apps now and and

people in the ecosystem are like jumping on board which is really powerful so you have like this well how much do you think what am i saying how much do you actually like read about some like the negativity about gnome like do Do you pay that any attention or do you just focus on we're doing cool things here? There's always going to be people that Gnome is forcing this on users, they're doing this. Live at weight are bad.

Do you put any weight into that or do you just disregard it as people just not really seeing where GNOME's trying to go? I have this, like, I have this problem, where I am, like, a... what's the word? I'm a terminal optimist.

Becky! My wife says this about me. She's like, you're terminally happy, and you terminally happy. You're terminally an optimist. And like, it actually can be a problem. Because like, I think if I was more cynical, I could be like, I'm just going to ignore everything. Ignore every comment section. And like, I hear that from a lot of like GNOME developers or anybody putting things on the internet. She's like, don't read the comments.

You know, it's like people hear that on YouTube. Like, just don't read the comments. And I'm like, oh, I think every time I'm like, don't read the comments. You know, it's like people hear that on YouTube. Like don't just don't read the comments. I'm like, Oh, I think every time I'm like, maybe there's good stuff there. And sometimes there is. And that's what's like,

that's what the problem is. Like sometimes there's like genuinely cool things in the comments and in, in between all the cesspool of everything else. And so, yeah, I would say I, I try not to put too much weight on the the tired arguments. When it's like, if somebody says gnome hates users. I don't have time for that. Like, that's demonstrably false. Like, I, I think it's really sad that people get that impression because i i see

the people working every day and how much passion they have on like making a really cool system for people and so like it makes me a little sad but i also i'm like i don't have time for that right when i see people saying things like uh gnome takes away options to me i'm like okay i also dealt with this from the elementary side for years. I totally understand where you're coming from. But there's additional context. At the same time, adding every option to everything is unmaintainable. Or you will end up with a system that is so complex that it's just bad. It is really hard to add lots of options to everything.

It's an exponential increase in complexity. really hard to add lots of options to everything. It's an exponential increase in complexity. And so, and then at the same time, I would also point to over the last like three, four releases, like the GNOME settings app has gotten new additional settings every release. Like there are like, and one of the primary people working on GNOME from a design perspective,

like who's designing a lot of the setting stuff has told me, like, my goal. It's funny, because, again, nuances are my goal is to kill tweaks, gnome tweaks, or gnome tweak tool. And it's like, ah, no developers hate gnome tweak tool. And it's like, No, my goal is to kill it by pulling all of those settings into the into the app, all of all of the settings that make sense to live in the in the OS should just be in the OS. And so that's, if you look at the last several weeks of no, all the new settings are things that came from tweaks that are now integrated into no. And like, that idea is like, no, there are when it comes to if it's like hardware compatibility stuff, accessibility stuff, like there are really valid reasons why somebody has a strong opinion

about how that thing works yeah it's harder when it's like i want my whole desktop to be like hot pink all the time everywhere and it's like okay that's the thing you can do with some things but like is that a thing we want to have you know as an option and drop down in the in the settings like no probably because that's just to make that work really well and have the standards of design that we want to have, it would be impossible. If you can accent color, you can have hot pink accent. I have a very long blog post about accent colors. And yes, I would love to have a hot pink accent color in GNOME. That would be cool.

I think that'd be cool. Elementary has accent colors. They have a bubblegum accent color in gnome. That would be cool. I think that'd be cool. Elementary has accent colors. They have a bubblegum accent color, and it's very cute. But yeah, so that's that. Again, we're actually thinking about this really hard. It's not like I threw out that silly idea, but honestly, if you love pink and you are like, I want my desktop to reflect how I feel

and how I want my thing to look. Like, yeah, we know that. Like, we're working on it. But we have this ecosystem of apps that we have to, like, pull along with us. We have user expectations that we have to pull along with us. We have, like, the corporate distros that are shipping GNOME, who we have to convince that this is a thing that they should invest development time into. Like, there are a lot of complicated stakeholders here.

And so that's why like no needs users. I don't have time for that. Cause it's, it's demonstrably false, but I also see where people are coming from when it comes to some of these ideas. Like, yeah,

no, has had an opinionated look at design and, and, and what options are worth shipping because it's, we know the reality of building an ecosystem and how complex it is and yeah then there's people who are like no matter what you do they'll just hate

on you and it's like that I don't have time for it's just there's a spectrum of like what I will tolerate or like listen to or try to respond to like I probably respond to too much I'll see something on like Mastodon or like listen to or try to respond to like i probably respond to too much i'll see something on like mastodon or like hashtag gnome sucks like it won't let me do this i'll be like

well actually you can do that also have a nice day like please don't hate me like i probably shouldn't do that my favorite people say something like this can't like there's no way to do this and you're like did you like did you i here's a page told you how to do it did you look at the setting that says the words that you just said you can't do yeah yeah yeah yeah and so like it's a mixture it it comes back to i think a bit of what we were talking about earlier of like i think a lot of people in our space have a problem with like marketing or showing off their work or like the community communication skills are hard like

it's really easy it's really easy to be like I thought about this a lot longer than you so you're stupid and I'm gonna listen to you like that mentality is really easy to have in your head but when you're representing a project on the internet you should probably keep that mentality

in your head and use your words differently. Put it that way. Alan actually had a really great talk at Guadic, which right now you have to scrub through the Guadic timeline to find. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a moment. Share a link to that. But he had a great talk about managing online communication. a great talk about managing online communication. There's this, and then actually Dylan McCall, one of my colleagues from MLSOS, has had a great talk about managing upstream and downstream

relationships. That was another great one that also touched on this idea. There's this idea of wearing hats that we talk about a lot in the open source world. You have to be able to put on your hat. When you're working for a corporate sponsor whatever sponsor, or working for a company who's investing in open source, you have to put on your corporate hat sometimes and be like, okay, well, according to what my boss says, I should be saying this, but take that hat off and put my gnome hat on, I should be saying this. Take that hat off and put the end user hat on.

So I think the most successful people there like it's a difficult communication style but like you mentally put on the different hats and so sometimes like if you're wearing a grumpy old old developer hat like maybe you shouldn't wear that hat when you talk to people on the internet like maybe you should put on the like public relations hat which is hard to do or maybe just don't talk to those people but it's hard it's it's really hard because it's i think this social media world we've we've grown into or had had built around us whatever how you want to look at it like it it it can make for very toxic discourse and like but also it can be really cool yeah it's like it's really easy to just dismiss it as like don't read the comments they're terrible but then when i have like a really genuine so it can be really cool. Yeah. It's like, it's really easy to just dismiss it as like,

don't read the comments, they're terrible. But then when I have like a really genuine full interaction on the internet with somebody, like, it just brings me back. It's just like, it's just like, I keep going back for,

for those little interactions. Social media is a really powerful tool that's, it's allowed, like, just, just in my case, for example, like,

there are so many people I've brought into this show that I didn't ever think I would have a chance to talk to. Actually, this one's not confirmed yet. I'm talking to him, so we'll see if he can come on. I'm talking to Daniel Stenberg, the developer of Curl. I'm probably going to bring him on at some point. I've got Glorious Eggroll coming on at some point. We'll deal with that.

These are people that without this ability to connect with all these people I would never really have a chance to talk to them this is the power that it has but because you have this certain level of anonymity and this goes back

to the whole like you guys acting like dumb kids to a repo where there's not really a there's not really a a person you're talking to like in your head at least like you're talking it's an avatar yeah exactly yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah we we hear that a lot in like i think alan talks about that a bit in his talk. And that's, you know, remember the people behind the project, right? Like, no matter if you use the project, an open source project, no matter if you like what the direction of project is going,

like, full disclosure, like, I've used KDE a handful of times. And like, personally, I've never stuck with it, just because I'm like, oh, this is just different from what I'm used to. But like, when I met somebody working on KDE, I'd be like, oh, cool. How's it going? What are you guys working on? So we were doing all this. So neat. Like,

like I can separate the, like, I personally don't use this thing or like, I personally don't like, that's not my vision from, this is a person who's pouring their like passion into doing this thing for other people, especially at open source when it's for free and like giving it away.

Like they're doing it because they believe it's right. And they're doing it because they believe it's right. And they're doing it because they believe it's good. And like, yeah, it's just, to me, just like hating on any developer of anything just doesn't make sense. It just doesn't like click in my brain.

But I think it is when you're like, ah, those developers, you know, with that username and that avatar, they suck because they didn't listen to my own thing. I think it is easy to fall into that trap. So that's why like, I think why I think video chat is so cool

that is such a cool thing we're doing right now across the world across time zones, across seasons across hemispheres it's crazy and then at the same time those events where you can be physically in person are so incredibly powerful

the bandwidth you have that your brain has connecting to another person's brain is like unreproducible. Like that's just like the only way you can get that amount of bandwidth of communication is by like being in a room with somebody and talking to them and like that

is hard with like there's climate considerations for traveling and stuff like we're talking about that with Guadaluag is coming to denver next year by the way i'm based out of denver and guadag is coming here next year which is really i'm really excited about but like there's just like constant nagging back and forth ahead of like paddle over there yeah it's like it's so there's so many people in the americas in north north south america that haven't been able to go to or it's been very expensive or very carbon intensive for them to go to Europe for Guadalcanal.

And so having it in somewhere more accessible to them is really cool and powerful. But it also means all these people in Europe who've been able to take a train either aren't going to be able to come or they have to get on a flight. And that's like, it's hard, but it's like, I think it's important to like balance the two

because it is so powerful. Every time I've met people in person it's really strengthened the like relationships and that like the camaraderie is not even like a good word for it, but it's just like that like That just that connection with the real the person the people It's I think it's way too easy to forget that when you're buying just an avatar and username I like there's all there's like other considerations when you're behind just an avatar and username. And there's other considerations there, too, of people have social anxiety or people don't feel good about their body or whatever. Or have health reasons they can't travel.

So you have to keep that in mind, too. So it's really complicated. But I'm definitely of the opinion that if it's at all possible to make it happen, to get people in person get them in person but if you can't like if you can do some sort of real-time communication like this it's just it's such a different thing than just like hating on an avatar yeah yeah yeah yeah for me no matter where gwadak is uh it's a bit difficult because it's good like over a thousand dollars to fly there pretty much everywhere i want to fly to from austral's like $1000 plus, $2000 $3000 like you know that's not going to happen for me just find

we just need to find like a university in Australia or New Zealand or somewhere over in that neck of the woods a university that could sponsor it there's a PyConf that happens in Sydney so there's that there you go. But so for me, like, and for a lot of people,

especially like, you know, if it is going to move to another continent, there's a lot of people that obviously will still want to watch that content. But the way that Gwadek is set up, this isn't just a Gwadek thing. This is a thing with every single Linux comp. It's a thing with a lot of conferences. I really don't like the way that a lot of them handle their their recordings

like obviously doing a stream and having all of you the the talks recorded is great the problem is now you have you know what let's go how much how much oh yeah how many hours is it like eight hours or something ridiculous. It's crazy. I mean, across all of it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's three days of talks that for like... So six hours, seven hours, five... Six hours, seven hours.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Three days of talks with two tracks. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just say something close to like 40 or 50 hours. It's probably close enough for that. Yeah. Let's just say something close to, like, 40 or 50 hours. It's probably close enough for that. Yeah.

I think the thing that really needs to be done is cutting out each of the talks into individual videos. Because each of the talks... How long are each of the talks usually? Like, either... I think it was a 20-minute slot or a 40-minute slot. Okay. So, yeah, 20 or 40 minutes.

So, after everything is done, like, cutting them out into individual things because that makes it a lot easier not only for people to you know who are gonna like maybe do like a some sort of follow-up video like i would probably do or but it makes it a lot easier to share those interesting talks with people link to that talk yeah exactly yeah because you can always link to a time stamp in a seven hour live stream but that's a bad experience for everybody yeah but so you'll notice if you look on the guadag like channel so there's a guadag youtube channel yeah you'll notice that there is

a wait is it ways of dedicated started playing loudly oh it's on the youtube oh yeah yeah because there's also a channel oh is there yeah so maybe that's part of the issue so there's like oh yeah because that's not where the guadag 2023 stuff is interesting i have i will let people know about that oh wait so there have been eclipse in at some point yeah so. So I think 2020, 2020, they, somebody spent the time of like cutting the stream up into and like uploading them all and like tagging them all. And without promising it for sure, I, there was a discussion about this at Guadic. I mentioned it in the, in the matrix, I was like, Hey, so how are we going to put these on YouTube? Right? Like, how are we going to share to share these like are we going to cut them up individually and

and there was like oh yeah yeah we're working on it so the thing to remember is like one guadic is like 100 volunteer right right so the people there's like a local team who live in around that area who do it and then there's like a lot of times there's like a university who's doing it and then like you may have paid like the company who did the recording for the day of but like oftentimes it's not included in that contract to be like okay and you will also cut up all the videos later right so a lot of times it's like somebody's just like i'm sick of this i'm gonna like download it with youtube dl and like slice it in whatever app and like share them somewhere that then can be uploaded to YouTube. And like, uh, I feel like that's something like that may happen with,

with the 2023 talks, but it would be nice if it was like day of, or, or like part of the process. Right. So something we did with, um, the elementary developer summit that I,

I basically organized and ran, it was a weekend, uh, elementary developer weekend. It was a two day, um, pretty short, like little online only conference and it was you know happening in the midst of covid and everything um but it actually

it was really nice to be like a first like dip your toes in the water of organizing a conference because we pre-recorded the talks and that meant we could just upload them ahead of time and then we like we like live debuted them which was really cool it was actually a really cool way to do it that's hard to do when you also have an in-person audience but maybe you could do like i know a streaming software you can like you could have it start a stream a new stream for each one and then i think you can do the thing where it says it'll actually bump you over into the other stream after that one ends like i think you could do it i think it'd be a lot of setup but you could do it obs does it does it is gonna be a bit of setup but obs does

have a thing to like stop record like keep the stream going and then yeah i guess create clips from it like you can set up a hotkey to like this stop uh stop this recording start another one straight away oh cool yeah that'd be like automatically just like restarts it up for you. So it jumps over to a new video. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, we should just do that.

I will, if you can share me, share the beauty of open source. If you can share that with me, uh, in a chat sometime, I will share it with people who end up doing the recording for Denver, I think it's just called split recording file, but I'll have to have a look at it. I also know, um, George S, George Strakas,

who's, uh, is usually, I don't know how to pronounce it right. It's something like Feneron in a lot of places. He's, he's a long time gnome, gnome shell contributor,

gnome design contributor. Um, I know he also has been working closely with OBS over, over time. Like he, I think he maintains the OBS flat pack or something Here's a big reason why OBS is usable on Wayland Yeah, exactly

The guy who got all the portal stuff like LinkedIn, did the upstreaming stuff that's the reason why it's even useful on Wayland This is where these in-person conferences are incredible I had met him in person or whatever at different things but it happened that on Wayland. This is where these in-person conferences are incredible. So, I met him in person or whatever at different things,

but, like, it happened that one evening after Guadec, we had, like, a three-hour heart-to-heart talk on a couch because that's just a thing that happens sometimes at these conferences. So, like, he's one of my favorite people. I just want everybody to know that. George is amazing.

He's wonderful. But, yeah, it's just, like, he's so cool anyway so i'm like i'll talk to george just about this and like you can send me that and like i part of so i'm on the local organizing team for for guadag 2024 for in denver um and part of that's going to be you know figuring out who's going to do the actual recording and streaming and everything so like like they did, they used OBS at the university in Latvia, which is really cool. So it's like, it's not that big of a stretch to be like,

yeah, we could probably try it. Like, let's do it. So that'd be nice. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's one of those it's always hard, like streaming it is, you know, takes a lot of hurdles in the first place to get like good quality cameras and all that stuff and and reliable bandwidth and so i think some people are like oh we streamed it

it's up there it's out there we're done it's like it would be good to make it better though so i agree yeah 100 of those like certainly good there's already some thoughts being done about it like it's i'm happy that i'm not the first person to mention that this is a problem yeah absolutely i think we all know that it's like, because I think what happens is everyone who gives a talk, like the day after their talk is like, or the week after when they write a blog post, they want to link or embed their video in their blog post.

And they're like, oh, I have to embed a seven hour video and create a timestamp and that. I wish I could just do like, so I think everybody kind of knows it in the back of their minds and so I think it's one of those things where we'll we'll make it better um yeah it's good to know if you could like just like jump over to a new clip and if that actually is pretty easily usable on the on the stream side that'd be nice well and just like to there's always like the breaks between talks isn't there as well like there's like a

like as you have like the talks you have like the transition between the two talks is like a break thing like during that segment like if something goes wrong you have like time to fix stuff up so if it doesn't like restart it straight up again you can be like oh okay like do this do this and just keep going

but and also if something does go really wrong because the splitting the recording file is separate from the streaming, there's always going to be that stream backup anyway. Yeah, that's true. You can record locally and have it backup.

Yeah, I think it just requires knowing what the requirements are from the start. So we'll talk about it for 2024. Hopefully we can make it better. And hopefully I do think like at some point, whether it's like literally me just downloading the videos and splicing them up myself or crowdsourcing to a handful of people.

Like, I think, I think we, we could probably get that done. You know, it's, it's a lot of bandwidth to be like, or a lot of bandwidth and storage to be like,

I'm going to download this whole video and then splice it up and then like re-upload them somewhere on gnome infrastructure and like there's like the logistics of that but like i know one guadic it was either 2018 or 2019 that was one of the boffs so these things called birds of a feather workshops that are usually it's like the first three days of of guadag are like talks and the the second the next two days are workshops or boffs because it's like it's not like a an educational workshop usually it can be that's it's why they're called boffs and not like something more specific it's where people birds of a feather flock together you know that whole whatever i think it's kind of a terrible name but it's kind of cute at the same time so gtk for example always has a buff they like it's where the people who are

the actual like core maintainers and developers of gtk get in a room every six months or every year and just talk about the stuff when you're in a room you can talk about in person more easily but then there's also a newcomers workshop where it's people new to the community can come and learn how to get involved. And so it's kind of amorphous and it's kind of intentionally that way. One year, I think it was 2019,

there was a like, let's cut up the videos buff. We're like, hey, we have an external drive with all the video footage. We're going to pass it around. Everybody copy it onto their computer. You take day one, track one. You take day one, track two. You take day two, track one.

You take, you know, like, and they did it. And that's why those videos were on YouTube. It was like, they just did it that week. And so I think that's also like, maybe we should build that in. Maybe we should put that on the schedule for Gwadot 2020 Warriors. Like, let's have a room full of people who have a halfway decent computer and can splice up a handful of videos and upload them and you know get the titles and the descriptions copy pasted from the event site and like youtube auto-generated captions are not perfect but

they're better than nothing like you don't because that's i think people think oh it has to be perfect we have to caption it all it's like yes ideally yes everything would be perfectly captioned but having it up with auto-generated captions is 100 times better than not having it about so yeah i think there's like i think there's ways you can do it in a crowdsource like kind of almost gorilla fashion i'm just like everybody just take it take a thing and just chop it up and do it if If you wanted to actually do proper captioning, you would either need to pay some people or you would

need to accept that it's going to take like a week or so. Depending on how many people are doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the idea is just like, while seven hours of footage sounds like a lot, because you have those clear breaks

between cutting it into like into actual sections that would probably take like i could do that myself in like an hour maybe at most it's then right rendering it out again then doing the titling that's the part that's going to take a bit of time but the actual cutting like that's not that big of a deal really yeah exactly and yeah people are talking about oh are we gonna edit the audio it's like no no no no no no like yes ideally sure that would be wonderful but no like we're not gonna we're not no like we're gonna slice up what was there and we're gonna put it up on the internet and that's yeah yeah i think i think doing it like said like doing it like live where you can actually just switch to a new stream each time.

Like if that, if that works out nicely. That would streamline it a lot, definitely. That would be awesome because then it would just be there. And then you can trim up the edges if you need to at the, you know, after the fact. But like that would at least have everything would have their own video, I'd be honest. But even if you can't do that, like having the footage, you know, like during those buff days and just slicing it up would be would be another way to do it yeah I've the conversations there I I think somebody's working on it I'll check in on it too for forgot at 2023

but definitely for 2024 we're talking about how we're gonna do it so should be good it's so it's it's really hard to follow I mean I found this even so I would the last aquatic I went to in person was 2019. Okay. And then 2019, I think was online only. And then I think, or sorry, 2019, 2020 was online only. 2021, I think, I don't remember if they had, if it was also online only. And then 2022, they had the first like in-person one again.

And I didn't go to that one because I had just had a kid. And so I'm not leaving a newborn baby and a three-year-old at home alone with my wife. That makes sense. So I tried to attend remotely and like, I still haven't watched all the videos that I want to, because it's just, it's so hard when you're not there in person. Like when you're there in person,

you can be like, Oh, I kind of want to see this talk. Like let's, let's you're having conversation in the hallway or whatever You're like let's continue this talk after this conversation after this talk and like you go you walk into the room when you're there And you're a captive audience and like but when you're like, oh I have to take time out of my day to go find the the time stamp and like sit down and watch it like you're never gonna watch it or if It's hard to find you never but if somebody shared it on social media and it, like you're never going to watch it. Or if it's hard to find, you're never going to watch it. But if somebody shared it on social media and it was like, Hey, this talk was great. And here's like the exact video. Yeah. I'll spend 20 minutes watching that video. So yeah, I think it's, it's a solvable problem, but it's also like, you have to think of it from the start. I think you can't, it's harder to do it if you do

it afterwards. There's one last thing I want to talk about about but I'll be back in just a moment every so often we mention you going from elementary over to endless but and I don't want to get into why you left elementary that doesn't really matter

but why is it that endless is the place you ended up at what was it about endless that made you want to go and join them? Yeah, that's a great question. Like, say, like, originally, so I had, so back in 2015, I had met, I had a really cool experience at the Endless offices.

You know, it wasn't the fact that it was Endless that made it a cool experience there, but, like, that's what I first heard about Endless was then. And then over the years,'ve just like i've interacted with and met and hung out with a lot of people who worked at endless and so um i mean rob mcqueen like i remember at one of the guadags we sat on a bus driving up when we thought he might the bus might have gotten stuck uh driving up into the mountains to a picnic at one of the after-event things that I chartered buses for or whatever.

And we sat on the bus and talked about Flatpack for an hour or however long we were stuck on the bus waiting for them to clear the road for us or whatever it was. So I sat next to Robbie Queen. He's the CEO of the Endless Noise Foundation and also president of the Gnome Board, which is cool. Also just a friend of mine from the open source world um you know will will thompson and i

had hung out and talked in over you know just random different times and like um and he he ended up being my manager at endless when i joined and so like i think that was a big part of it was like i just knew people i knew a lot of the people um and like i knew them from their work in the gnome gnome world um i also have this like it's like slightly sarcastic but there's like some truth to it of like like endless is secretly behind everything you love about gnome that's what i tell people like and then like they start looking at like actually you're kind of not wrong um but endless has poured a lot of like development effort i mean so a lot of core no maintainers sorry a lot of endless engineers are core no maintainers for things like gnome calendar gnome

shell uh like glib and like really low level stuff and like or contribute a lot to just lots of things like Philip Withnell, George Stavrakos, uh, uh, our brain is totally blanking here, Will Thompson. And like, they, they've worked on a lot of GNOME stuff over the years and are really integral in GNOME. And so like, I knew them, but then like, it's like, yeah, I want to be where those people are. Like they, they are, not only are they doing good work, they're, they're pushing gnome in the right way, not like forcing them, but like, like they're helping guide, I guess would be the way I'd say. They're guiding gnome into like into a direction I think is,

is a really positive direction. So a lot like the, the gnome 40 changes, which like people thought was going to be super contentious and then was almost completely universally loved by everybody. We're like, Hey, what if we had like a nice like workspace overview and like, you know,

switched from vertical to horizontal and all this stuff like that was driven by user research and development from endless. Endless has poured tons of time, both development and money, into Flatpak and Flathub, into GTK, into what has become

some of the core pieces of Edwada. A lot of the things that are making up this ecosystem that we have now in GNOME, again, not to discount any work that anybody else has done. There's other companies, other people, individuals that have done incredible work here, too. Purism is another one that comes to mind. The focus

on mobile that they've actually been pushing GNOME into a really nice place now, too. But Endless has been there a lot, too. Endless was the platinum sponsor of WADEC this year and possibly the last several years. Endless is frequently on that like sponsorship list.

Endless has been on the GNOME advisory board, which is like a place where people come and like help shape Endless and help like or help shape GNOME from our individual perspectives and like talk to other distros and things. Like Endless has kind of been behind a lot of that stuff. Again, not some secret cabal with some crazy secret scheme, but more just like Endless sees Gnome as the obvious choice for building what we want to build. And that attracted me

to Endless too. I had seen that happening behind the scenes and really respected that approach to the work of like rather than just endless because endless was in the past and and today they could like in the past they had basically their own completely custom distro with its own ui it was technically it was built on gnome technologies but it was like a hard fork super like super hard work from what gnome is shipping but over the years like especially now like it's very close to upstream there's like one extension that ships on the

gnome desktop and then other than that it's stock gnome and that extension reuses as much actual stuff from gnome shell as it can and like it moves some things around like it's as close as possible to upstream while while delivering on the design vision that's It's as close as possible to upstream while delivering on the design vision that's there. But as far as all the investment, if possible, it's all being done upstream. The end goal for Endless OS is that it's just stocking up. The idea is shape GNOME in the direction that Endless wants it, and also just endless's uh ideas too in that direction too uh so i think i like saw that happening and respected that work and it was really exciting to be working directly with directly and with gnome um the gnome community and no design uh yeah that that's the big thing i think that and then like will will who i followed

on social media because i knew him from the internet, he posted a job posting. And this is when at elementary, we were talking about, what if we didn't take a salary anymore so we could pay some developers to work full time on these very specific initiatives. And in the midst of those talks, Will posted a job posting and I was like, Will, did you write this for me because like haven't told anybody that we're thinking about doing from the elementary side that we're thinking about like Taking a job elsewhere working on this in our free time again

I mean, that's how we did it for years and years, right? like we did a we did all the tree like that for a long time it was very successful, but Yeah, it was like did you write this job posting for me? Because it kind of sounds perfect. And I talked to him a little bit. He's like, no, no, but you should apply. It'd be great. And so we just hit it off really well there. So I think that's twofold.

I knew Endless. I knew the people behind Endless. And I saw what they were doing. And then just also the time. The timing lined up perfectly. Yeah, it just happened to be like perfect so yeah yeah and it's it's it's really cool because it's like i had also been to thinking i think i've been to one gnome another gnome hackfest uh over the years like representing system 76 you know on working on pop, it was actually the Gnome

Shell design hackfest, which I would say is like the initial seeds of what became Gnome40. And there were people from Endless there, there were people from Purism there, there were people from Red Hat there, there were people from System76 there, and consequently people from elementary there as well, because I was kind of wearing both hats, right? And so like, again, going to those things and seeing and meeting people in person and kind of being part of that, like, I met Georges, I met some of the design people working on Endless

OS, and, like, so I saw, irrespective of what they were doing. Another one I went to, it was the Parental Controls and Meter Data Hackfest. Super terrible name, but exactly to the point right of like there are two features that that endless os had that they were like we want to just upstream

these because first of all that means we don't have to maintain them ourselves and second of all like it's it's more useful if more people use it right that that spreads the impact as a non-profit like endless is a non-profit and so they're like if we do this work upstream it actually has a wider impact than if we just're like if we do this work upstream it actually has a wider impact than if we just did it in mlsos so obviously upstream is where it go so uh project controls so in like gnome software throughout the flatback everything like all the and in gnome shell itself and then in gnome settings like all the way through the stack you have to support this idea of content

ratings. And that's where like the ORS content ratings come from. And so enforcing that on a technical level throughout the stack. And elementary had actually done some interesting earlier work on that. And so we were interested in like collaborating with GNOME on like, hey, if we're both doing the same thing, let's work together on it. So then I saw Endless had done all the engineering work on the actual thing that elementary ended up using so there was that there and then same with meter data so like when you connect if you like tether to an android phone or if you have like a sim card

in your actual device whether it's a phone or a laptop whatever like gnome has this idea of knowing that your connection is metered right and so it can do smart things with that. So like it won't do auto updates over metered data or maybe it'll reduce video call bandwidth over metered data or whatever. And that, again, that came from Endless. The whole idea of Endless OS is like, you know, expensive or, you know, low quality or slow internet connections or no internet.

And so maybe you only have internet certain hours, but it's really expensive. And so you want to make sure your computer doesn't just go like go wild when it has internet. And so now that's in Gnome and like Gnome has that. And I saw that that came from Endless. And so like, I think just being exposed to that, like, oh, and this is like, how's their fingers and all the really important places that are really cool, made it really natural,

natural transition for me. One last thing. What in the world is a partner success engineer? Because that sounds like a made-up job title. If you figure it out, let me know, because I have no idea. So, yeah, the gist

is, like, I like to call it the bridge between the engineering team at Endless. There's a bunch of engineers at Endless that do the engineering stuff. And then there's these partner organizations who are out there in the world who might be like nonprofits, there might be school districts,

there might be governments that are like putting Endless OS in the ground. So they're actually the ones who get a bunch of computers donated to them or they buy them or whatever and then they put Endless OS on them. And so I'm the bridge between those people and our engineers.

That's the simplest way to put it. And so the bridge part, it's a two-way communication thing, right? Like I have quite a bit of a technical background and I can speak engineer with the engineers. And so I can understand what they're talking about. Most of the time, sometimes I have to ask them clarifying questions,

but I can usually understand what they're talking about. And then I can kind of translate it into like what the totally non-engineering people on the other side would understand. And then, or if like the people on the other side are like, oh, we really needed to do this. This is almost where the user experience background comes in. It's like, well, they're saying they want this,

but the problem they're actually having is this. So I'm going to tell the engineers this. So it's like this two-way translation between what the engineers are doing and what the what the partners need. So as a nonprofit, we have a bunch of partners all around the world who are deploying endless OS and other endless stuff that we do to like tens of thousands of people. And so we the only way that's scalable is like if we don't do it all ourselves, we're a relatively small company or nonprofit. And like, we rely on those people who are on the ground to be competent and both competent, but also like well-resourced. So if they have a question about like,

Oh, Hey, I'm having a problem installing endless OS. Like, it's not really like a normal tech support question. It's like, I'm maybe they're the 90 person at a school district and they have a very technical question so like it's kind of fielded through me and if i don't know the answer i'll

find the right engineer who does know the answer and so it's really that bridge between and so it's like that's where it comes back to the partnership so it's my job is to make our partners successful while working with the engineering team so i was like all the words make sense but it is it's not a normal thing. Sometimes people hear like developer advocate and like, I also don't love that because it's super amorphous, but like that's similar to that.

There's an aspect of like community management to it too, because I'm interacting with like, I'm representing the Endless OS Foundation when working with outside people and organizations and stuff, but it's not quite that. So yeah, it's kind of a customer success is a thing but that usually kind of is coded to mean support so like it's somewhere in between all of those things um but yeah that's that's generally what it is when you said describing what the customer wants of

the engineer i i just think of this image you've probably seen a version of it of the um what the customer described they described like a version of it of the, um, yeah. What the customer described, they described like a rope swing. They were designed. And it's like this rope swing where like it's tied between the two trees, but it doesn't actually move. And what the customer actually wanted. They saw off the tree in the middle of the tree.

And what they actually wanted was a tire swing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. And so that's, it requires that translation, right?

Like you have to not just take what the person says at face value and you, you can't let the engineers have go to their own, you know, be in their own whatever devices. Like you, you have to be, there has to be somebody in the middle who can like put the pieces together and be like,

they say they want this. I think what they actually want is this. Don't build that. Like this is what they actually need. And so, yeah, it's a lot of that. Like it is this weird,

like overlap. This again, this is why I like when we'll, we'll post the original job posting. I was like, did you write this for me? Because this is weird combination of like, like customer interaction,

technical background, like Linux background, like some, like communication stuff. It was like this, all these pieces. I'm like, this,

this is weirdly specific. I swear as it wasn't written. Well, I've taken up a lot of your time. It's probably getting pretty late there, isn't it? It is getting a little bit late. Yeah.

Well, I guess we'll, we'll end it up so let people know where do you want to direct people did you want to direct them to your your website you want to direct me to your own project like yeah people somewhere yeah so i mean the easiest place to find me and everything that i do and everything related to me is cassidyjames.com so that's that links everywhere else. But yeah, I mean, if you want to learn more about EndlessOS, EndlessOS.org. You can find everything about the EndlessOS Foundation and the stuff we do.

And then, yeah, Gnome.org if you want to learn about Gnome and everything that's going on in that world. I'm going to say, your website looks really good. Thank you. I need to remake mine. I realized I wanted to do this one. I have two friends in open source who have both because my source code for my sites are out there. Like I have two friends who have taken my website and use it as a template for their own website. So it's there.

It's possible. Actually, it's maybe a little complicated, but I tried to make it kind of a template. But yes, yeah, I love Yeah, that's, that's where like, my website is where I get to, like, play in my own sandbox of design where nobody can tell me no. So I do things that I'm like, this may be terrible. Like, maybe the letter spacing is too small, but I love it. So it's my own sandbox. So I'm glad that people like it. I have no idea about design.

Look, people have seen my desktop before. They'll be like, wow, you have a great theme. Like, do I? It's, I have a great theme like do i it's i have a blue border around my windows that's my entire thing hey sometimes simplicity is good that's true that's true um is there anything else you want to direct people to or is that uh that about it i think that about covers it yeah yeah again like my website is where like you can launch out there and find social media and all that other stuff I'm gonna read out a Mastodon handle

on the screen but castedjames.com you'll find it easy um awesome as for me

uh if you want to check out my gaming stuff that is over on Brody on Games on YouTube I stream on Twitch

and Kick as well go check them out if you want to it's all linked on my site uh there's really nice useful links

where it's just like BrodyRapidSundayXYZ slash whatever service you want to go to that was a you know very simple thing to do but it's made made linking people places a lot easier than giving them ridiculous links with a bunch of random numbers in it um right now i should be playing through final fantasy 16 and i think i'm still doing portal 2

co-op with ren but i this comes out in the future. I don't know if that's still going to be happening. We might have finished it by now. The main channel, Brodie Robertson, I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I don't know what will be coming out. Probably something. Hopefully, look, hopefully it's not another Red Hat video, but there probably will be. I don't know.

And this channel, if you're watching the video version, you can find the audio version over on pretty much any audio podcast platform. There is an RSS feed. Put it in your favorite app. If you want to see the video version, it is over on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. So I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say?

Oh, man, I wasn't prepared for that. I never tell anyone. It's always fun when someone actually knows that I'm giving them a final word yeah and see i've watched so many of these videos i should have known should i throw out a spicy another spicy take is that a good ending note because i really have a terrible idea sure go right ahead um so nuance on the internet is hard that's a preface and it turns out that uh privacy respecting metrics are actually a good thing we didn't talk about that did we we didn't talk about that and i'm like i can't start that conversation now we'll be here another three hours yeah we'll have to we'll have to do another one of

these then we we will we can uh i will just for the tiny bit of context again not trying to like go any longer but the tiny bit of context of like the perfect venue for these conversations is guadec at the end of the day at a bar and you know sipping a drink of your choice where you're just like all right what do we what do we actually think about this everybody like come on let's just let's just like open the can of worms let's talk about it and we actually had some super super cool valuable conversations there about it and uh i'm actually feeling good about things and like i i think i think all the people that that are actually involved in things deeply respect privacy and like deeply understand that and like they wouldn't run something on their own computer if

it didn't respect their privacy and at the same time there are a lot of places where like you're flying blind when you're trying to design something and you just literally can't know know certain things so i think you can i think there's a path to mesh those two two needs it's good i like i like stoking the flames it's fun it's fun see you guys later all right it's been great see ya