Tech Over Tea - Creator Of uBlue Linux | Jorge Castro

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Today we have a really interesting guest, right now he's focused on Universal Blue Linux otherwise just called uBlue but he's been around in the Linux world for years now and has worn many different fun hats. ==========Guest Links========== Ypsidanger: https://www.ypsidanger.com/ Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@jorge Twitter: https://twitter.com/castrojo Github: https://github.com/castrojo Universal Blue: https://ublue.it/ ==========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 back to Tech of a T. This is episode 167, probably? Close enough. And today, we have a very interesting guest. Welcome to the show, George Castro. How's it going? Hello, everyone. This is someone who... You guys probably know a lot of the work that he's done,

but you may not know the face because i didn't realize this is something i was gonna say before i didn't realize how much of your stuff i already knew about and didn't realize it was you that was doing it yeah invisibility it's the number one so number one way to stay sane and open source you can't flame me if you don't know who i am like i didn't realize that um uh yipsy danger was your site even though it says who the author is on like the blog post i just never clicked with me and then like i typed your name and linux and it's like ah you've authored some stuff on omg ubuntu then you sent me the flat hub thing where it's like oh de facto community

manager or whatever it's like you just you actually review one of my blog posts or one of your videos once and you're like i can't understand what this guy's saying because his grammar is just so horrible i was like yeah dude yeah that guilty that does yeah that sounds like something i would have said yeah uh i feel like it's okay i'm not a master of the english language no no you read the documentation i write yeah english is the only language i speak but you know i can i can speak it well enough i'm not good at it i yeah i agree i agree i i get these people my comments section every so often and like they have english as like a second language and they write this perfect paragraph,

nothing wrong with it whatsoever. And they're like, sorry about my English. Like what? Yeah. What do you, I know that you're like worried about it. Maybe you have like issues, you know, speaking English, but don't worry about the type. Yeah. I never say that. Cause I guarantee I cannot speak your language at all. But before we go completely sidetracked off of that, why don't you explain a bit about what you do? What I do now or what I've been doing this whole time? Whichever one you want to go with. We're probably going to do a bit of everything. Oh, I don't know.

So, yeah, I have been around a while. I'm an open source community manager since oh god 2006 2008 something like that i forget when my first like real job well my first real job was at canonical on ubuntu in open source because i was a i was a administrator at a university before and i'd been using ubuntu since the very first this is the warty warthog uh see here's where i'll give your readers i'll give you the nice little tidbits everyone forgets about is when it first came out i didn't have a it didn't have a name okay you app got update app got when you type the app get update it would say no name yet.com

right and that that was the repositories because it wasn't called Ubuntu yet. Oh, okay. Yeah, and then one day I upgraded and there was that name Ubuntu. I'd never heard of it before. And there was like naked people on the wallpaper. Back then they were like very risque because they were kind of going for the united colors of benetton or whatever look at that like i'm not making no i know you i know you're not joking here i did get sent an article about this age back with like a link to the mailing list with this giant discussion like

with some angry people like why are there naked people here kids are going to use ubuntu you can't have this here yeah and they would put the logo like strategically over people's part it was like man yeah see when people tell you ubuntu's an ancient word that means you can't assault debian the more positive way i like to think about it is naked debian for the masses right like this is the yeah so it was brown i was you know i was there through the brown period, I guess. I guess what they call. Yeah, Wally Warhawk was not a pretty. It had the styling of modern Gano, but it was not pretty. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so pop quiz.

What do you think the major selling feature of 4.10 was? It was the most mind-boggling thing um that like linux users up to that point was just like the biggest pain in the ass pre-installed drivers no this is before then this is before then yeah um everyone forgets this which is why i've been thinking about it yeah i yeah drivers was the only one i could think of if yeah because the driver manager thing and all that stuff that came way later yeah okay okay this was basic stuff like auto detecting when you stick the usb key in

oh that was a big thing because back then um the folks at novell slash Zimian were working. It was called Project Utopia. That's what they called it. And that was auto detecting everything that you plugged in. See, being an Arch Linux user... And then the Nautilus window would pop up. We thought that was the coolest thing ever. And up until the cube and all that stuff,

that probably was the coolest thing ever. Being an Arch Linux user, you still have to set that up manually. So like all your other devices, like webcams and stuff, that's fine. But there's no auto mounting. You got to install something to auto mount stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I always tell people it's hard, it's hard to set things up for yourself. Right. You think that's hard. Try setting it up to work for everybody else. That's like, that sucks. Like, you know, that's one thing I think a lot of like the kind of elite Linux users forget.

It's like, oh, cool. You typed a bunch of stuff and it worked on your computer. Now do that 50,000 times. Then let me know how awesome you are. You know, then it becomes really hard. Yeah, yeah. Like just as we were saying before, like, just before we started recording, for some reason, I don't know why, I've got no idea,

my GPU's just not being detected by OBS. I don't know why. Something happened. Like, little things like this, where some random person is going to have some problem, and nobody knows why that problem is happening. Like, that is is happening like that is why like doing the distro management stuff the building stuff for the masses is really difficult

because you may understand you know a small subset of systems incredibly well and i'm sure a lot of people do but wait until someone comes along and they're like, yeah, I'm using this weird esoteric system that nobody in their right mind is using and your software doesn't work properly. Yeah. What do you do? Because snowflakes are bad. Remember when you got to the one part you were explaining on my cloud mumbo jumbo? Oh, yeah. That's one of the tenets, right?

Snowflakes are bad, right? You don't want pets. You want cattle, right? You want to stay within the lines that have been colored for you you always have the freedom to go outside the lines but then the expectations that something's going to blow up in your face now i'm confused what are we talking about here is this one of your blog posts that i did a video on no the video that you did on ublue because you're reading my web page and i called it a cloud native desktop and

then you're like whoa yeah i i'd never heard that word yeah yeah um yeah well that's actually a good place to start because i saw a lot of people in my comment section got very confused by the term cloud native uh yeah so just give a brief yeah we'll we'll tie it into my little story okay sure okay all right so uh so i did ubuntu for a while um uh sometimes people say what the worst ubuntu release was uh my candidate for that for those of you that are listening i'd love to hear your commenters say what they thought their worst one was uh and i think by far it was 904 because intel was in the process of rewriting their intel driver uh and back then at like uh especially like there was no system 76 there was no sputnik there was no hp dev one and all that stuff like you had to buy that think pad yeah matthew garrett had or you're

gonna have a shitty time you know so um intel was in the middle of like rewriting their driver and it became 965 965 i think i don't remember and um things were already not good because netbooks had come out earlier before and they use these chips called the polsbo graphics that would someone should do a video on that nightmare um and um yeah the driver was being rewritten upstream and like, we had to ship a certain one of the one, it was just a bad cycle for everybody. And I just remember being like, man, at the time that the Jesse Barnes had just started at Intel at the time. And he was like, oh man, I'm really stressing out.

I was like, I'm sorry, man. It sucks. Um, but then 10 Oh four, I consider our best release because at the time a lot of people were working really hard with uh a lot a lot of debian and ubuntu maintainers wear the same hat so there's actually been a lot of collaboration there over the years like and you know to this day and uh they managed to time it so like uh they were binary compatible like they use the same compiler they had the same compiler. They have the same major version of glibc.

And just for a while, that was just, you know, and that was like the last major release of gnome two before the new, you know, the new thing. So it's almost kind of like, you know, this is saying goodbye to the old way, you know, it was, and it was, it was an amazing, probably 10 Oh four is one of the coolest ask anybody who was involved in both debbie and nabuntu at that time and it was just i felt like though you know when people say they miss the good old days that it's it's that's what they're talking about

um and after that we did unity and just like i took a shotgun to the face um but now there's people that like you know because unity was there for so long there's there is a bunch of people that are like you know unity was great and we want unity back and now there's the um the the this the the flavor the unity flavor yeah yeah so the first thing we did with unity was the ayatana indicators or the little black ones that went in the top right corner and then after that after the team got set up and they figured out how to release stuff and work with gnome and all that stuff um so uh that that was that was fun and interesting definitely some heated heated

arguments way back in the day um i've worked on the indicators for a while if you're still suffering with those man i'm sorry i didn't know this i didn't know it was gonna last i was gonna last that long you know like man someday someone's gonna figure this out and man if you're working on that i'm sorry um yeah but that was a hard one especially you know it's interesting because back then you had to make a lot of compromises for the Windows system tray and back then this is before proton um and that system tray was the only way wine apps there's certain wine apps they wouldn't work properly without a system tray like their instructions would say right click on the system tray and stuff and to make that thing work plus all the stuff that you know you wanted to do on a Linux desktop this is a lot of compromises and stuff that ended up you wanted to do on a linux desktop there's a lot of compromises and

stuff that ended up you know and a lot of smart people work really hard not me you know to like try to make that work you know you didn't work very hard yeah i mean you got to remember the stuff we didn't have back there like you know uh distributed version control wasn't nearly as i mean it was around but it's not like as ubiquitous as today ci testing all the like we had to figure that out by hand and like in order to find bugs you had to wait for someone to like install it in their ppa and then like that the feedback cycle was just so crap back then you know but it's the best that that people had um so uh we we did that and then um i had transitioned actually over to cloud. I went over to juju. I was like, man, I did my bit for queen and country.

I'm done with that stuff for a bit. Uh, you, oh, I, I did. Um, there was a tool back in the day called the compass settings manager. And if you used it, it would crash your, your desktop. Oh, and this infuriated me. So one day I send a message to the list. I was like, this thing's got to go right and everybody on the internet hated me that day because they love their bling right

they love their cube and little did i know that that would prepare me for the stuff that i get today right where it's like it works for me if you didn't read the man page and you're an idiot i don't know people kind of want the bling yeah i i i get these people my comments as well i'm not even like managing something for a community and i still get these comments when i do like a video on some random piece of software like oh this thing didn't work go tell the developer yeah yeah it's man yeah so that that was an interesting time and around that time oh another thing i'm also really proud of is i helped start the nvidia dpa and that's actually the beginning of linux gaming and around what year was that man the first when the first shadow of mordor came out for for for

linux whenever that came out and i think was that was a native yeah i bought every native port so um and every distro had the driver except ubuntu and i was so mad i was like this sucks so i i sent i sent a mail to the list i was like hey man can we like figure out drivers this game's out and cool and stuff like that it ends up there was a bunch of engineers just waiting for someone to say hey man we should set up a side thing um so they did i asked a video for money and gpus they didn't give us any we had to use money from linux users to buy gpus and this is this is an important lesson i want everyone listening here to to understand right i got no money no gpus volunteers did all the work i was fortunate enough to let me work work let me work on it and then obviously the other engineers that reviewed all that work and made sure it shipped and then

boom to it didn't explode on people's computers and stuff so like it was like a genuine like community effort right and then years later all thesePAs and all these drivers are being used to run the cloud. And they are all generating millions and millions and millions of dollars for value. And those volunteers that did all the work, they don't get jacked. And that's crappy.

And no matter what you say about Canonical, they deserve a cut. Everybody gets a cut except the distro. That sucks. That's hard. I've talked about this issue tons of times. You've had cases like ColorsJS about canonical they deserve a cut no everybody gets a cut except the distro that sucks i've talked about this issue like tons of times like you've had um cases like colors js and faker js you've had left pad you had recently with core js like there have been these massive situations where developers are just like they want to make something great and they want people to use it and they know that if they charge money for it like yeah they know that developers won't use it but at the same time they put all this time

into it and these massive companies like netflix like amazon like google are not giving even a dollar back to support the project yeah but they do give back in other ways certain certain companies do all the ones that you listed do the problem is is that uh it's not distributed evenly yeah yeah no like there are definitely standouts but and they'll get involved in certain like big projects like you know all these companies are involved in the linux kernel for example but right they're not supporting the individual you know like they're using hundreds and thousands of javascript libraries but yeah you know there's no mention of that there's no support of that yeah i think the web people get it get it the worst right because how many web frameworks are there right but like all the large companies understand

you know ssl is important with the web They'll definitely invest in that, right? Codex, Netflix and Codex and all that open, you know, they'll definitely invest in that, but like a random Node.js library? Yeah. Yeah, the other problem with the web though is it's this giant dependency tree. So even if they're using like, let's say React on their front end, React is going to have, you know, a hundred dependencies. Those dependencies are going to have other dependencies.

And it just, it trickles all the way down to these tiny little libraries, like LeftPad. LeftPad, so many projects were reliant on. For anyone who didn't know, there was a time when in JavaScript, you couldn't pad the left side of a string.

So you couldn't put like spaces there. So what LeftPad would do is pad the left side of a string with a number of characters. Now there is like a function building a javascript for it but there were so many libraries that were reliant on this little thing it was like five lines of code and when the dev pulled it it broke so many so many projects like you could argue the internet was broken that day yeah yeah amazing isn't it i do like so some some organizations are trying to fix it so like tidelift is one that's doing it i have some people that work there it's pretty cool github has a cool thing where you turn on sponsors it will figure

out the dependencies and let you split it and stuff oh that's cool so yeah there's definitely work in that area i think but you know there's always always improvements that could be made yeah for sure for sure everything yeah so i did cloud for a little bit then i went to the cloud native space because i really wanted to do kubernetes at canonical and i kind of want to do kubernetes and i was like nope this is in the like if you talk to cloud nerds the first time they saw kubernetes like everyone remembers and i had the opportunity to work at heptio for the co-founders of co-creators of kubernetes two of them uh so i did that for a few years and that

was a huge community right and it was massive and i did that for two or three years we got bought out by vmware helped them do that stuff. And that's where I got like my, that's where I learned all the cloud stuff, right? Like automation, like you just automate the hell out of everything, right? Pets, not pets, not cattle. Cattle, not pets is what one I'll go through because there's a lot of this stuff that I feel now that I kind of coming back to the desktop i'm like no this is what we need right so like the api driven self-serve model right the kind of composability which is like building you know you build basic lego kits and then you put them together right which you can do today right but it's nicer when you have a

guarantee that like the hole and the peg are the same right you know that that kind of stuff so as um uh i i left that i did i did vc for a bit uh that wasn't for me um and then i did cloud governance for a while so learning a lot of uh you know when people ask like for example we made a tool that makes sure hey if if someone checks in a secret into git delete it uh that kind of stuff which github does automatically if you up if you check in your stuff yeah i don't i don't think they do obs streaming keys but definitely your aws creds amazon will automatically kill your will disable that yeah i definitely uploaded some api keys for different things throughout i think i was I think I was doing... Happens to everyone, man. Don't be ashamed.

I think I was doing a... Yeah, no, I think also the project I was doing for the CSIRO, I think it was years back, and I was building some front-end for their... They wanted some farming data

monitoring tool, and i think i uploaded something for that it was it wasn't a live system so it was it was still like yeah you know in development so luckily you know but even so it's still probably something that should be there yeah so i did that and i'm currently i kind of took a break i quit my job i wanted to decompress for a little bit you know i'm'm privileged enough to have some runway there. Then I started UBlue. Actually, on the side, I've been doing this over two years, but it was kind of like the side thing, and it wasn't, like, very cool.

It was very impaired, very, you know, oh, a community manager is trying to make a distro. Ha-ha. It looked exactly what you would think if you were to hear that. But over time, I started to hanging out in the Fedora Discord and people were like, you know, if we did this, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this. So we started to tease it apart, make

it more composable. That's why it's a kit now. Right before, it was basically what Bluefin is now, which is like George's vision of a desktop, right? It looks like freaking Ubuntu, right? Like, yeah, of course, right? Metallica is going to sound like metallica too so um but over time but i didn't know how to split stuff up because i was i'm not that you know i'm not an engineer right um but as people started to show up they're like dude you could do it this way you could do it

this way i was like cool do a pr let's see what it looks like and then one day josh and alex who are the people who figured out the nvidia images right because it's the project is pretty cool right like fedora is going to support this like they have this we're just going a little bit early you know it's like everyone's going to have one of these um but we would sit there and say you know theoretically if we built the nvidia images and ci your computer would only get the working one. You'd never have to build a stupid driver and get that black screen. Or there was an update and you didn't reboot and you launched the game. Actually, I think you'd know you wouldn't need to reboot because you wouldn't get the new image until you got to the root.

So you don't even have reboot because you wouldn't get the new image until you got to the root. So you don't even have, you even fix that accidentally. And when, when Josh was talking about it, I was like, Hey man, I've been down this road. Like if you, you know,

this'll be pretty cool, but I am telling you inserting yourself as the place for people to report Nvidia driver issue, not a, not a good, not a good plan for long-term mental health. Let me tell you about that. Which is why we're very

careful. I say alpha, even though just by its very nature, it tends to be more stable than pretty much anything else. So we had to think about it and stuff, but at the same time, it was so cool. I had assembled an NVIDIA machine because as a good Linux user, I've, you know, I've got all the open source now and I had this old 2080 and I slapped it in and I was tried rebooting secure boot work like right away. I was like, there's, that's absurd. There's no way. And at that point, that's when you know, you have to make an open source because I didn't want to make an open source project. It's hard. You got to make governance and trust and all the stuff I'm doing now.

That's why I'm all tired. Like I didn't want to do any of that. But if someone figured out a better way to do NVIDIA and that can hold you off until MVK comes out, you got to do it, you know? So I was like, hey, if we're going to do this, you want to do it? Let's do it. You know, but we're going to have to do it right. We can't, you know, because it is an opera, like it's an operating system on your computer.

We can't, you know, what happens when people don't trust their distros and the distros do bad things. Right. So, you know, I was like, Hey, we got to make sure any secret, any certificate that we has accounted for everything's in version control. any secret, any certificate that we has accounted for. Everything's in version control. And that's one of the nice things about also getting to go

fresh is you don't have to deal with any old infrastructure or migration of stuff or any of that. So I was sitting there with my friends and I was like, man, I think I can run this thing out of GitHub. I think we could run this thing out of GitHub and it

would totally, totally work. The only limit is they keep 90 days of your artifacts so we can only keep 90 days of image backups for you right um but that's actually not that bad because usually if you reboot and something's broken you go back a day maybe you'll go back a week yeah yeah no that's not that big of a deal because when you like when you update silver blue like locally don't you have like you have like three or four you can like roll back it keeps two two okay yeah and then whatever you say keep this one you can keep as many as you want well assuming you have the hard drive space yeah yeah but i mean there's d duplicate it's doing a bunch of yeah yeah there's papers on that even so you're gonna there's gonna be a limit at some point no there's yes there's definitely like you don't want especially if you're like a laptop user for

example and you have like a 500 gig hard drive right right what you want is the last working image that you have right maybe one that's a week or a month and then you always want to keep the one the day you installed it because that's like a free it's like a free power wash thing, which I want to do eventually. So yeah, it was like, you know, the free tier is fine. The builders are fine. The first cut, it takes about two minutes for a free GitHub runner to build the entire OS, which is like really fast. And then we started adding NVIDIA. The NVIDIA images take, you know any 13 to 20 minutes

each so and then that's one for each desktop and then one for 37 and one for 38 and then once 39 comes the nice thing about fedora is they only support three versions right so when 39 comes out we won't be growing the image space like we'll we'll know exactly how much disk space you need right because i don't want to go shopping around for resources until you know exactly how much shit you're using right so yeah that's that's the plan well this sort of leads me into one of the the questions that showed up you're doing everything with github and i had some people being like is github like okay with you just basically running effectively a distro out of github's infrastructure we turned github like okay with you just basically running effectively a distro out of github's infrastructure we turn github into a operating system generator yeah so again with

the cloud native part is i went and added them up we've built 600 some images in the course of this month because they only give me 30 days of metrics um that that doesn't even register that doesn't even register anywhere right it just shows you the immense scale of open source where like when someone's like oh no a 600 meg iso you build it every day geez are they gonna call you i was like no they're not gonna call me the githubbers i have talked to about i think it's great though like um because we're using in a way that wasn't like who knew that you could just run your entire computer just right out of there right um so just you know that's pretty cool briefly explain i applied for a beta program

for open source stuff get us nicer builders so can you just briefly explain to people who are like not super involved in that side like what you're actually doing with GitHub here? Yeah, so what we do is we keep all of the container files and all of that stuff in Git. So we say, take normal Fedora Silverblue and then make these changes, right? And that happens over a bunch of repos, but that's not important right now. And then in GitHub, there are things called actions, right?

And what that does is says, every day I want you to build this OS, sign it, and then shove it into the GitHub package registry, which is when you type that rebase command on your terminal, you're saying, I want to get the image from GitHub. And that happens every 24 hours. We timed it. So the main images build an hour after Fedora does. And then the NVIDIA image build an hour after that.

You're building on top of the other thing. We're not remaking the NVIDIA ones from scratch. We're saying use the stuff we already did and then just add the NVIDIA drivers on top. That way, when a new game controller comes out and you have that UDEV rule, we stick that way earlier in the process, and that day everything just gets it all all the way down yeah that's so that's that's dope yeah one of the cool things

that um i did see with you blue is like the way that your like image infrastructure works where you have like the the main so you have like the fedora stuff at the top and then your main image and that like branches out and i'll see if we can find do you remember where on the website it is yeah uh if you go to the website and in the search just type architecture ah yes this was an important thing for me you got to have that full text search on your website folks when you start an open source project tip number one if i can spell text search is not going to help with that there we go okay now we got it yeah so you've got your upstream fedora images where everything is like

all the the hard stuff is being done right now remember fedora does not consider these images final right they're not doing this until fedora 39 so these aren't official upstream fedora images they are fedora images run on fedora's git lab by the guy who works on the official fedora stuff but this is like this is like his setup so that's one of the reasons like this cycle even though it's basically ready we call it beta you know because we're not building off the official image and there's actually been some users that someone found that their printer worked on the official image but not our image and i was so confused because that shouldn't be. And then eventually we figured that out,

you know, cause I do know some people on the team, but we also wanted to figure out stuff on our own unless we get really stuck, you know, and then, then we'll ask for help because, you know,

we need them to like do the hard stuff so that we can do our bling. So I just want to make sure that people understand you know um the fedora project does not officially endorse any of this and we're just we're playing you know we're playing in a sandbox so yes that's where we start so and then you want to move on to the next one so yeah this takes us into the the main images so what is UBlue? To someone who has no idea what this project is, just let them know. Yeah.

We take all the annoying things in Fedora that they can't fix, and we fix those. Like, if you go to YouTube and you say, like, the most annoying things of Fedora, they're going to list a thing that we attempt to fix. Attempt to fix. That's the important part. Yeah, I mean, try it. Like it like you know uh yeah and then so before main there's actually another layer that we call config and that's where we can view dev rules that's why you're um if you install the steam flat pack

you won't get the window that says steam device is missing because we just include that um wounding keyboards we added a bunch of stuff and there's a whole repo by someone at collabra i think it caught i don't i don't know maybe i'd have to check on that there's a person that i've trusted i've seen their name before that maintains a gitlab repo of like every udev rule for every game controller so i was like we gotta have that so we actually pull from that every day um but we do we do have a gate in there so you know if something bad gets in there like we we always kind of have to check before that gets automatic um it's in there i

could follow up i can follow up in that there's there's a few of them i picked the one the person's name that i know yeah i was trying to find the specific GitLab The first one I find searching for is on Codeberg If you look in the container file in the config it should be there Actually no, that might be a mirror No, it is a mirror

Yeah, I was confused If someone knows what I'm supposed to be using that one looks pretty good Fabian Bornchen? Sheen? Is that the same person? No. It doesn't matter. There's a bunch of them.

I'll investigate. We'll look into that. That container ends up being about 270 kilobytes of Uweb rules. It's gold, those 270 kilobytes. then the main repo is where um we basically say okay we want to build 37 38 of silver blue kinoite i say i've never heard anyone say i don't know the correct way to say i just say it differently every time you know why

because i used to have the same problem oh yes i just i fixed the problem by just say it differently every time you know why because i used to have the same problem yes i just i fixed the problem by just saying it differently every time so yes exactly yes i've i've i've gone i've gone through that uh sarasia which i don't know if i'm saying that right but that's sway because in fedora they have to have different names because that's what they decided to do sure so they're just they're just rolling with it um and then there's a there's two that uh oh and then vox site which is xfce yep yeah um and that one was actually when i saw that yeah that one was done by um uh by someone who had been doing them on their own i was like hey you want to join forces and they because it's easier when you share all the github actions right um and then actually uh timothy from fedora was like hey do you want to pr that in into my upstream you know more upstream thing and then that way when it's ready to go that's less work because they're gonna have to do one anyway right

i was like cool maybe one of the things our project could do is be that kind of testing ground you know for stuff like that which is why i just finished budgie last night and i stayed up until like 4 a.m to finish budgie because josh was like it'd be pretty cool if you make one of these i was like man you're right um so he is gonna do it that way um but i busted out a ublue image in like three hours just so like we could try it and play with it and rebase to it and all that kind of stuff so um so voxite started off as one of those and then we have alex cute and mate which aren't in fedora's uh composed thing and we're actually building those with os tree and those builds take probably 40 to 50 minutes to show you the difference between building something from scratch with os tree like how a distro does it versus just like modifying a

container which is like way faster yeah so um but there's a reason that distros have to do it that way because they have a whole bunch of stuff that they would get in trouble with that i don't get what they're doing right like they have to have all that all that distro stuff yeah yeah um yeah so then that's what we call the main images so if you have an intel or amd gpu this is what you want to roll this is what you want to roll with and there's very limited there's some opinions that we take but we try to keep them stocked there's a few things we change automatic updates have to be on by default that's like the only hill i'll die on because the pipeline has to work like it just has to work um plus you have the rollback and the resilience and reliability you know it's once you get used to it it's actually it's it's the way to go uh

and anything with hardware enablement that sucks you You know, like part of the reason I was telling you earlier before we started, I want to get that OBS camera loopback working because that's like AK mod. I want to get wireless Xbox controllers working, right? Because it doesn't take long. It's an out of tree thing you have to build, right? But we figured that out already. We just add more.

So I want to do that. I have an Xbox Pro here. I can't reach it. Whatever. I always use wired. You're right because wired is just normal, right? That wireless thing is like the man, that thing's a pain in the ass, right? But I was like, man, if we can do it, let's do it.

No, definitely cool. It could be done. And then then NVIDIA is the one that's after now this this is actually um it started off as 134 lines because in my blog post my title was originally 134 lines of container file just save the linux desktop you know yeah hey i learned something from you youtubers man you got to be a little bit you got to be oh yeah saucy yeah you know i got to compete with your Hawaiian shirts. It's not 134 lines now.

That thing's a monster, man. But hey, better to have one place to do it. So what's cool about the NVIDIA thing is, so we build it for you and then we have different streams. So we have, what are the latest versions? Before we go too far down that um sure uh what were you missing that lets you only have 134 lines initially i'd have to look okay well we definitely we weren't doing multiple versions uh-huh um there were multiple things like do we

do rpm fusion there was another repo we tried to uh for a while we were trying to just build it ourselves right um because you could do anything you want in the container files or whatever so i mean that wasn't me that was that was the people with engineering i'm fortunate because a lot of people that that work on you blue like do engineering as their job right so josh works at red hat alex works at amazon uh brian works at amazon um but we have a lot of people who also don't work in the industry so it's like a great mix of yeah yeah you know can we do this crazy stuff i was like oh man i don't think that kid just realized just realized what he's asking for and then the next day someone's like hey

i did this and i was like wow that totally unlocks the possibility to do with that. I mean, you never, you never know. Right. So then, so, and the thing is once you figured it, it's like, Hey man, we just got to get the thing building and then we're good to go. Right. But then later it's like, well, if we totally redo it, then we'll be able to do multiple driver streams. And at first I was like, I don't know, man, don't you always kind of want to be on current? Um, but actually around that time, from gaming on Linux tweeted because he's on Fedora He was like my shit was working perfectly on Friday and it doesn't today and I was like dude if you could rebase back to that image I Think I can help fix that right like

So we actually build all the supported NVIDIA ones. So if you want to go back to 470, hold on, let me see. We actually build so many versions of the tags that they don't show up in the display on GitHub. Like we have to figure that out, right? Because what we do is we tag everything with a major version, the version of the driver, right? And aliases for those.

So if you always want to be on the current NVIDIA driver, you stay on 38 dash current right right um but it also has to have 38-570 or whatever the major releases so if you want to stay locked to that you can right additionally we have to we put a day a date tag on it right so if you want to go back to what 470 looked like on fedora 37 two thursdays ago you could totally go there right um see why this is cool yeah see why this is cool yeah so like i was like hey man if we just have all the supportive versions of all the stuff and you could go but it's like having a time machine right and the nice part is your apps and all that stuff is decoupled that's why flat packs are key to this thing right like a lot of people we could have all of this why do we need sandboxing and

blah blah blah that's exactly why it has to be a separate layer that's a cloud native thing man you got to decompose and eventually get new layer stuff you could swap stuff out and as long as the lego holes and pegs are the same size you don't't care what brick is in there. Know what I'm saying? So like, yes, we can totally do that, but will it actually work in practice? That's why we've been taking our time, right? That's this entire, like we got this working actually a while ago, right? But you have to set people's expectations, right? And remember, our job is to make the pipeline resilient and, and make that work. Right. If you were destined to get an NVIDIA Wayland bug that day,

you're going to get an NVIDIA Wayland bug that day. I just make sure it got to you and you didn't break your package man. It, or we, I mean, this is all, this is a lot bigger than me. You know,

like the initial people were like five or six people, but they're cloud people so very efficient so we spent actually more more time on the automation itself than the actual product that's why the images are so kind of rough right they're basically they're not as like if you load bluefin like there's a lot of polish and stuff that you need that's because we're concentrating on the you know like if you put bluefin next to Vanilla OS, Vanilla OS any day of the week, like wallpapers are amazing, the workflow's

nice, they know how to write GNOME apps. Ours is like, my friend Marco literally learned GTK in like a weekend. You know, and you can like, you know, because we're automation, we want to be the DevOps teams for a desktop, you know?

So that's why we have all these images. And at some point, someone says, I want to take that. I'm going to make that the most awesome tiling window manager experience available. That's why we're making the toolkit part so someone else can go that last. Because at that point, we know what we got to do. Like our scope. We actually went back and we wrote this down uh important if you ever start your own open source project write down your scope and your

mission that way you don't get any crazy any bright ideas the next thing you know this is uh is our entire mission like no this is not just an open source thing this is also um going back to that project i was mentioning earlier where i was doing some stuff for the csiro uh i was the i was the lead dev and the project manager and the client didn't know what they wanted so be make sure you you set what your goals are because it will get really bad if you don't. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for sure. Right. And like at some point, like we're getting enough people now, like I don't want, like I'm looking forward to removing my access from the repos.

Like I shouldn't be checking code like at all, you know? But luckily it's, it's cloud tech. So you can kind of understand a Docker file. I know enough bash scripting, you know? And when there is something you don't know, that's why you have a community for, you know, like, hey, who knows Python? I do. Does this make sense? Cool.

You're a maintainer now. What? Sorry. Be careful with that. Yeah. Like if you're like, I want to get into open source, you want to be good. You don't want to be too good because then you get stuck maintaining something. You want to be you want to be too good because then you'll get stuck maintaining something you want to be you want to be a healthy driver and then three years later you write a blog post being like i hate all of

these corporations stealing my code yeah or if you're lucky you get to work for one of them which is cool i've done both i've done both you know get yours that's one of the reasons i wanted to bring this cloud stuff kind of back um you know irrespective of the economy today is uh cloud developers just enjoy so much more professional and personal success you know generally speaking than desktop people i've worked with both sets are both brilliant right open source is taking over the world it kind of sucks right that like if you really want to succeed as an open source developer you kind of have to move to cloud or some, some place that is they're fortunate people, right? Like I'm sure some of you had, yeah, I want to run the desktop team at Red Hat.

That's freaking cool. Right? Like, you know, but when you look at the math and the numbers, right, it's like most, most people have to, that's where I'm actually running into more Debian developers than I ever have. It's at cloud conferences. You know, but like, so, you know, in a way having started off in Linux desktop, done the cloud thing and kind of, yeah, I'm still doing the cloud thing, but kind of be more interested in the desktop. It's like, how do we break ourselves out of this loop?

You know? So I'm like, well, I'm going to, you know, I know this model works in cloud and mobile, so let's give it a shot, you know? And then like, uh, a lot of it is rough edges and I get that, right. Like, but you know, at some point it becomes easier to fix the rough edges than to like, no one should be using PP man. I was there when PPAs are made. Like you don't want to be using those anymore please trust me so we got very uh very sidetracked from oh yeah yeah cut all that out i don't know what your time no no i've got that we can uh i i've i don't know if i mentioned before i just i just go wherever um the the podcast is tech over tea but i don't i've gone on rants about things that don't matter whatsoever

it's all if as long as it's entertaining uh are you even drinking tea i don't even see uh i've got an empty tea cup here okay and I've got some empty vodka cans here. But no, no, I'm not. I've got water. Amazing. Anyway, so we got to the NVIDIA images. And then under that, so theoretically, there could be other images. There could.

The reason we put Rock M there is like, what if someone wants this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think we should sign up for that. But if someone shows up, absolutely. If someone wants to maintain it yeah that you know that sounds great um and then after that actually we should change this there's a separate repo called starting point right and that's what where we want okay so there's the images that's cool but you also have to have the kit right because part of the reason i started i got annoyed by everyone saying you can't customize

immutable linux distros i've heard this a lot of times that's the same thing you know so i was like fine nerds we'll have to make you a thing so you know so so i can actually uh move on with my life so uh so we started this and it's kind of more of a stripped down because main and nvidia are doing complicated stuff there's like a matrix of images to build and generally speaking you just want to take that thing add the three or four things that you need and then move on so you clone that and then that brings all the actions and all of that stuff over to your github repo you have to change the private key because we want you to sign your images uh otherwise that won't work uh and then you change you know i want emacs instead of vim or micro instead of vim and And then, boom, you're publishing your own images.

And there are people doing that now. It's just a matter of getting the docs into shape and better tooling. And like Cosign broke for a little while for people. We were trying to figure it out. So it's still kind of early days on that. But ideally, like starting point is going to be the thing that, you know, all of that toolkit part is going to be the thing. Or someone else is not going to be me. I'm hoping to be retired by then.

That will go and actually take and actually make a cool... I'm hoping someone makes a cosmic one. Because I did Budgie, so someone has to go make cosmic, right? That would be cool. Yeah, and just do it. It's still relatively difficult for some people but it is way easier than making your own distro and you don't fall into the distro mistakes yeah so ever since i've been talking about things like silver blue like kino white like any of these other uh i don't know how

you feel about the term immutable distro but we'll get into that in a bit because i don't know i don't like the term immutable with that yeah actually if you look on my website we don't say it yeah i did notice you tweet about that. Oh, yeah. But ever since I first started talking about this, I've had people in my comments section be like, these are bad because they're locked down. You can't customize them.

Why would you ever want to go and use that? Why did I just go and use Debian or something like that? Or straight Fedora? But it is definitely... I think you could argue it's definitely harder to customize these images but maybe you'd also say just different because it's it's not the same way that you would do on you know like arch or something you're doing it at runtime instead of build time that's exactly that to people right and i just say look pretend that you're doing all your customization right remember when

you're when you very first started out it's like i've customized my george boone to you right or whatever and then there was that tool that would make an iso out of it for you so that you could like do the thing it's like that conceptually except we're getting github to do all the work right so when you're like i'm ready for doing upgrade and your nvidia rpm fusion thing breaks or whatever third-party thing or you know the i know arch never breaks but maybe in case you do an upgrade this morning you know like this you sure you know um pretend you're doing that i just have github doing here's here's what i tell the hardcore linux nerds microsoft is doing this for me i am costing them money

that's the ultimate own right there so you can do all the customization do they bandwidth the builders the ci testing is a great deal i'm i'm getting a great deal. I'm getting a great deal. I didn't think you would love that. Yeah, you can do that. It's just the tooling isn't, like it's way easier for you to like do it at runtime than to like set up a CI system. Like I get, like someone was like, you've made the Linux desktop as complicated as Kubernetes.

A Kubernetes nerd actually turned, you know, and I was like yeah dude yeah you know however it's also a tooling issue right like like ublue is going to be the worst thing like this is the worst it's ever going to be at some point someone's going to make a thing and you're going to put in brody's cool thing you're going to drop down select your packages you're going to click subscribe and packages you're gonna click subscribe and then you're gonna paste that into your gooey thing and you'll be done right like that's the potential that fedora has made right it's just someone had to figure out how to make the tooling and how to

explain it and like at the time like linus broke his computer and everyone's flaming him for all the wrong reasons and i was like no man i'm gonna have to build this stupid thing to tell people that the technology exists we just gotta get we have to get people there and it's a good thing that the steam deck is immutable because people didn't know and everyone who works in computers knew of course that's gonna be immutable like no you know what happened to you this? I don't want that happening on your Steam deck. I don't care. Like, the thing is it's a function of money, right? Like, we could QA every single package in Debian and Ubuntu, right?

We'd have to charge you $5,000 per CPU to support that, right? And some of you out there are paying your rail bills you know how expensive it is to support a lot of that stuff right like you know engineering we all know open open source engineers top tier in their profession right they cost money are you going to lose them so you know we could do that or we could try to find as many ways to automate the hell out of everything right and to remove as much jank and and complexity on the client as we can right that's what like so i've been doing a lot of research and i'm fortunate that i know a lot of people so i sat down with tim pepper who did who he had worked on clear linux's update tool uh swap d that's how you pronounce that by the way um and at the time I was really into clear Linux because they updated a lot man like they were they were shredding it

and he was like a lot of the design principles just make that client as stupid as possible right its job is to ping a remote server splat that thing on disk do the least amount of math possible I mean I'm sure I'm sure there's complicated stuff in there. Don't get me wrong, right? But what it's not, a lot of that complexity, they shifted to the server side, right? And that way it kind of solves it for everyone. And then you just splat the thing as fast

and as dumb as possible to the client, right? Like when you're apt installing something or whatever package manager you have, more than likely it's taking all the stuff that you've added, all the PPL. And it's trying to do the math to make your computer boot that day. Right. And sometimes the bear just gets you right. Like, um, now this also does not lead to total resilience. It removes a lot of the jank. Right. But someone was like, this thing is stupid stupid i i pseudoed myself to root and i rmf'd my my root partition this is stupid you said this was reliable i was like dude you're still an administrator my main man you're still an administrator yeah yeah yeah like it it simplifies your backups a lot,

but you still got to do them. I back up my Etsy still, but I don't really back up anything else. It's reproducible data. It's a one download. My home directories, I use DejaDup, although there's another Pika backup,

I guess. You tell me, what are the kids using these days? I don't know what the kids are using i'm real i am really bad at episode that would be cool that would be i am so bad at doing data backups i literally did a video a couple months back where i lost like a week of videos because i just my Hydra was failing, it started deleting things oh man yeah, so I just copy things from one drive to another yeah, I mean I have everything in cloud or in github

I absolutely should do way better than what I do yeah there's a saying here's another cloud native saying you're ready i don't have time to automate that but then if you actually think about it in your head all you're doing is like wasting time you know yeah that's not meant as a dunk that's just like something to think about that's that because that's what that's part of the sometimes people are like well you know rpm this is my favorite one is rpm ostree is slow

right it's like if you're using rpm ostree interactively yes it's slow because it's it's like it's like git for your entire file system like it's doing stuff it's doing math right and but i think rpm ostree is fast right because when someone says i want to add controller support for this thing and i hit accepting github 10 minutes later they reboot their computer and they have it you know that is fast to me right it's just a different model though right so if i the way i try to encourage people they're like well i find myself layering all the time or the same thing with vanilla or whatever thing you're using it's such a pain in the ass to put things in root or whatever what i what i try to tell them is like pause for a second try to have a think you know

and like how do i remove this from my life oh well if i find myself adding this to every computer where does this belong in git the single source of truth right so then so if you think about it if i rpm os tree emacs on this thing it's slow and whatever but if i do it in git it doesn't 10 minutes and let's not forget all of the machines in this house are also fixed so you you add up 30 seconds here, 30 seconds there. This is the kind of, this is how automation cloud nerds think about everything. Like if you think I'm the extreme one, the actual engineers, like they will,

they will work on a thing for eight hours a day for two weeks. If it saves someone a minute in a build time, because when everybody thinks like that, you have to think long-term. That's also something, some advice for some people who don't understand or maybe in the comments are confused. They're like, well, what's wrong with my system the way I have it today, right? So first of all, if your system is running great and you're a good system administrator, thumbs up, you know, not taking your thing away, right?

But also you have to recognize that sometimes configuration drift like happens, you know, like if I fresh installed 2204 today and your perfectly upgraded system from 1004, they're not going to be the same. No. Right. And like, we kind of know that. same no right and like we kind of know that um so like i i we try to think of things as long-term i i always found it strange we were writing down our values like so we just added it you know the long-term maintenance of this thing is what we care about right like i plan on never reinstalling

on any machines ever again. Like they're just going to have it because of that model. And it's like, well, and I would tell people, you know, if you're thinking about it long term and whatever you're doing with now, if you can put up with it, you know, like flat pack overrides, God, what a pain in the ass, man. You, you, you get a new drive and you put it in and then you're like why is it not showing up in my in my steam thing right so the way i think about it is when you get a new drive you do what we call day zero stuff right which is i put it in my fs tab or if you're elite you make

a system d mount unit because you want separate file for each drive trust me on that um right that flat pack override just becomes another step in that checklist on i bought a new drive and i need to add it to linux right and then you add it there and then you never have to worry about it again it's difficult for new users who are switching to this they've never had to do that before right because they're like oh man first of all it really sucks unless you don't it's really hard to figure out what's happening there um which is why we try to document it but there's only so much it can do uh so what i like to think about it is you know hey look we're kind of saving you from the long term thing uh because that that whatever the portal thing that's supposed to make that magically

work is not done yet you know what i do want to do is get you on a thing and get you mostly working enough. And then like, you know, your Linux users, you can suck it, you know, you can suck it up for a little bit and figure out flat pack overrides and

flat seal. But that also means in like two years when, when that thing is ready, it's just going to show up one day, you know, and you don't have to reinstall. And when MVK is ready and you're on an NVIDIA image, you'll be able to rebase. Hopefully.

It's all very tough still, you know, but like, you know, every, all testing we've seen so far just shows and it'll get even more reliable once you have that unified kernel image. And there's some bootsy stuff happening that I can't explain right now, but like, it know it's like well you kind of you kind of take your licks in the beginning right you just spend more time figuring it out but once you get it and by now silver blue and get it can you know you know tay have been around long enough where people are starting to understand you know you have to go through a distribution upgrade to really understand that the machine that day the reboot and the upgrade was actually the same the machine doesn't care right you give me stuff i put it on disk you know it was 37 yesterday it's 38 today there's no in-place upgrade you don't sit there watching packages

upgrade individually github did that for you you know there's no spinner i haven't seen that thing there is no spinner on on systems like this my phone doesn't even do that and it has basically conceptually the same kind of system you know it's it doesn't care right it's every single day i'm getting a fresh os it's like that fresh feeling every single day there's no configuration drift and that i think is appealing to people i just think some people they get caught up around the but you know i read i read you someone was like i read you can't change your host name on these things i said come on man hostname on these things. I was like, come on, man. So it's, so for me, it's all about, okay, yeah, I get it. I'm a Linux nerd too. I want, you know, because for me, this allows me to experiment with stuff. I've never tried budgie before, for example, because I don't, I don't like to do

things in VM. I like to experience it the way it was intended with my graphical stuff. Right. And you know what, you got to install the distro. And if it's a normal one, then you got to install this. And now you have two separate desktops. It's worse if you're installing it on the same distro because now you have this mix and match of distro packages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So I can never try KDE because in Ubuntu, for the longest time if you install kabuntu and then you went back into gnome like the folder icons were kde's colors or like it would have little little things like that back and forth right but then one thing you know especially once i used to be a lot like your commenters right when i was like i was there every day break you're supposed to break your computer. No, I was low. The second you start getting paid to work on this stuff,

like you ain't got time. You ain't got time. Like I would always wonder this because people would argue about the default wallpaper for Ubuntu, right? And it was like these community ones and all that kind of stuff. And people would, you know, argue about the different wallpapers that should be included and shouldn't be

included, but you go anywhere. Every time you see a picture, especially when it fails on a kiosk or whatever, it's all, it's always the same default wallpaper. I tell people, I was like,

you think sometimes where people are like, Linux is about choice. Right. And I was like, if you think people are changing default wallpapers, I've got news for you, but people do do it. It's I was like, if you think people are changing default wallpapers, I've got news for you. But people do do it. It's just that small, but you have to

keep those people happy because they're the experienced ones that are actually the ones out there installing it for friends and helping them out and stuff. So you want to serve that audience, but you also have to understand that you're making a thing that's supposed to be for everybody right and at some

point you have to say the flex isn't that you're being limited you know i layer stuff on some of my personal systems because bluefin is a default image right i'm not gonna advert manager to it even though it did have it for a while because it brings in all the stuff nobody wants yeah so fine you know sorry i get rambly no no that's totally fine absolutely fine with me uh uh what were you talking about i don't know that went on for like 20 minutes um to me a lot well i guess we can jump back to one thing we skipped over which is immutability ah yeah that's what we're talking about i i've spoken to i believe the maintainer of vanilla os has a problem with the term a bunch of immutable distro maintainers are a problem with the term immutable distro right you're not really you know you don't call ubloo a distro but even so you're still working in this immutable

distro space it definitely competes with this yeah yeah what do you what do you think of the term immutable and if you don't like the term do you think there's something better that could you know fit in that place i use image based um the actually the person that colin walters the one of the authors of rpm os3 how this happened is i had known him for a long time this is a cool story so i have to tell it um and he was a debian maintainer a very long time ago and i was a debian in ubuntu user or whatever so he had been in a boon to maintainer um indirectly i think he had a few uploads i'm not sure but he was a he was a debian maintainer um and then he ended up at some point

uh working for red hat and then fedora core os and stuff eventually so he's in that two comma club that's like you know ubuntu debian and fedora right like very few people in that club right open source is large right but it's not that large there are people who've worked for all the distros right that's why um users tend to think of it as a competition. And when you flame, when my friends work, even though they work for another company, like we get kind of upset about it, right? That's why I'm allowed to flame canonical, but you're not. So, so what was I saying?

Oh, so this past October, he was coming to his first cube con the kubernetes conference which was in detroit because i live in ann arbor and we went to breakfast and i had started using silver blue and i had you blue right yeah yeah but it was like the crappy one um i hadn't i didn't know about this oci thing or whatever and i always thought that was the best gonna be whatever it works for me you know and then i sat there and he had sent me some spec nine months before and i just didn't understand any of it you know but what that was is the thing that would this helps us that's the booting off the oci container thing that's like literally the thing that started this project so we sat there and he's explaining all this to me and I'm just like, mind blown. I don't think I even ate my omelet. I'm, you know,

I just like listened to him or whatever. And so he's explaining to it at the very end. Um, I was like, Oh, I can't wait to redo my, my Ubuntu image. I used to call it Ubuntu. Uh, but once it started working, I was like, someone's going to want to use this. I know this. So I can't call it a boon too. So I renamed it to blue fin, which is the name of the office building canonicals office building in London. So I had to, all my stuff has to have little Easter eggs because open source. That's what it's about. And blue fins like a cool name, blue, silver, blue, you know, the domain's expensive.

I know. Cause I'm trying to get it. Um, and then he, I was like, man, I'm'm gonna redo my thing i was like hey colin if you're just serving things out of a registry and all you need is pod man you don't you don't think i can build and host this whole thing on github do you and he leaned over and all my machines have been like this for the past two months and as soon as he left i went you know i went back to my booth duty or whatever and in my brain i was figuring out how i'm gonna do this uh and then later that weekend um i hung out with my friends marco chepi him and i started askabuntu together one of the cooler thing projects i helped i helped work on and wing witzel and we kind of planned it out you know they kind of conceptually told

me what to do and then i went on fedora discord said hey i think this might work right so he has a paper roundabout way to answer your question he has a paper on on terms uh terms, but he's really – he's like a nerd, man. So like his term is anti-history systems. Oh, no, I have read this. Yeah. Yeah, no. So that paper, if you look at the – there's a list called Awesome-Immutable. That's how I started actually.

I was like, look, I'm not smart enough to make any of this, but at least I can write stuff down because I know Richard Brown as well. I got stuck. So this all ties in back to Kubernetes. Two years ago, I got stuck in the back of a bus going to the kubernetes party and we were just in the back of the bus and he's explaining all of this stuff to me because he's like kind of a god he's been preaching about this stuff for so long that people forget a mutable reprovisionable anti-hystericist. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a little heady on that. It is fully managed, image-based, reprovisionable, and has anti-hystericist properties and links to a Wikipedia article about hystericist because nobody reading this knows what the word means. You end up in distributed systems papers. It's all sorts of games. I ended up on Game Theory today. I mean, I've had some wikipedia spelunky but geez you know i'm just trying to get my host name change on my immutable how do i end up here uh so he goes with the image

base sounds good to me yeah right because for a few reasons especially with this method specifically is um it's a container image like that is a common term that people understand so when i go back to people that don't even run linux desktops and i say yeah we boot off a we boot off a docker image they kind of know exactly what we're talking about they they go directly to cool i didn't know people were doing that you know marco hasn't run a linux desktop in eight years or something, right? But he was able to work on a lot of the stuff in UBlue because same stuff, you know?

And that's part of that economic argument that I'm trying to make, right? The more your Linux desktop looks like just another generic cloud payload, what does payload need? Graphics, network storage, same as everything else. There's special cases there right which is why it took so long to get here you know but now once it's here

you know if you're sharing think about think about how sucky it is when your favorite distro has a mirror problem because they have to go around to universities and be like hey can you set up a r-sync mirror for me it's got to be a two phaser at least 24 hours a day if you can find if you can find anyone running their infrastructure on that fat pipe that me, it's gotta be a two phaser, at least 24 hours a day. If you can find, if you can find anyone running their infrastructure on that fat pipe, that's why it's always universities. Check it out next time. There's a reason for that. Right. Um, but registries are some of the most important infrastructure in computing right now. Right. You are, you are definitely closer to a GitHub mirror, mirror which is an azure than probably a lot of the distros you try right um because there's financial incentive for all of those

registry you know so even if it's linode or whatever one of the smaller ones right they want to be fast so they have regional stuff they don't have to set up anything special to help your distro out right it's just another container that gets hosted on a thing and you know whatever so i like that commonality of it that's why you know image base is cool but this other part about the cloud native i am purposely inserting that you know there's in case you can't tell i have a motive i have an agenda right and my agenda is to make the lin Linux desktop payload to be the same as a cloud payload. Because now that I've been around the block, I understand the economics.

I saw layoffs at Canonical. Same thing, right? If System76 has to readjust or SUSE or any one one of these companies that make stuff the stuff that all of your your flaming in the YouTube comments at the end of the day, open source code is open source code. And we want as much of that as possible. Right? We want that competition. We want that. That's why I tell people they're like, Would you please tell me what's better OS tree or foot or, or open sources micro OS,

right? Hey, that's up to you. Obviously, I prefer the OS tree approach, but I'm a container nerd, so I'm biased. Yeah. Right? But to me, I tell people, don't focus on that part. I think people, that's the video you made, over-rotating on immutability.

That's the video that you made. I just remembered. That sounds like a video. Yeah, look. Yeah. I've said this before. I've made too many videos. People remind me of things I said. Like, yeah, this sounds like something bit yeah look yeah i've said this before i've made too many videos people remind me about things i said like yeah this sounds like something i said out man you crank them out yeah i put out little ones in my channel explaining all it's basically

this all the time and uh i do them in one take because i don't like to video edit that's why there's arms and well you can see it now i just spurt out stuff it doesn't matter yeah i'm the same though like i i don't do it in one take i i like i do cut things because i do speak the way i speak in the podcast is usually the way i speak in a video so it goes like down some tangent like wait no that's nonsense get rid of that cut it because i have i have notes um i usually like will note i i don't do a full script, like note out the entire video, get the dot points in.

But when I go to record, sometimes I realize like the ordering of things makes no sense. Like, wait, no, take this thing, put it here, put this here, put this here. So it takes me, I would say about, usually about an hour to record a video, I would say. Yeah. Something like that.

Do you write scripts? Do you write scripts? Do you write scripts? Yeah, well, it's noted out. I do that while I'm doing my research, but the actual recording part for each video is about an hour. A 15 minute video takes about an hour to record. Because you got

pretty much a Yublu right away. My concern, because I've been mailing all the YouTubers. Jay, hook me up. it's not really got much coverage in youtube has it no it hasn't you know that's actually something we should talk about because so many people are sleeping on this technology first of all remember i didn't invent any of this right like like as you can see if you look in the like there's people waste if you look in the get to get logs wait am i the only one besides you that's more sophisticated um but it does fly

under the radar right like um especially it's interesting for fedora so i have a lot of i'm hoping to give a talk at a fedora conference at some point you know like lots of cool places where we want to help each other out that kind of thing and you know in a lot of ways if fedora were to do this right now and you had your little website and stuff people would be like cool i don't get it immutable systems suck blah blah blah blah blah right but if you've been struggling with an nvidia driver right maybe a flat pack override might not be as bad you know um and and like i said long term right i know there's people i know that will probably never switch i know poppy probably won't ever switch right uh because at first i started i was like alan i'm gonna i'm gonna change you over. But like at some point you're like, well, I can't do any worse.

We're already sitting at a single digit percentage. So like, you know, someone else think of an idea better or give me a bunch of money like valve has, and then maybe someone will figure something out. But, um, so yeah, like, you know, in a lot of ways we had to do what Fedora couldn't do. And we know, cause you don't want to compete with Fedora either. If it was just better Fedora, it's just someone, there's nothing worse than a distro that takes high quality stuff and then breaks it. Um, which technically we're doing, but you know, we're also like ensuring that we have that separation and we're putting a lot of careful thought into it, you know?

Uh, but of course software bugs are going to happen, right? What we don't want is to flood Fedora's bug tracker with like a bunch of people running custom crazy stuff or whatever. So we're purposely figuring out ways and like I have a page, how to figure out how to report a thing to Fedora, you know, in a lot of cases i prefer to run interference for you right you know so that we can figure that out and once we do that a few thousand times um then we can hopefully not a thousand times you know but like for example with the making the budgie thing right like we can't have 10 people flooding fedora at once

trying to get their stuff in right but if you figure out the first one and then timothy wrote it he actually wrote the steps right because uh an automation engineer told me this once there's like when you get a new piece of technology you do three things first time you build it from source you spend as much time as you need you get that thing you figure out that build system backwards and forwards you know whatever the second time is a more nuanced approach where you're figuring out the real hard problems with that technology and by the third time it better be automated right and that's something i've carried with me you know so like he already had all the steps right so it took me about three or four hours to make budgie, the budgie image, obviously.

And the next one better be an hour or less, right? Because we found all the little things and we fixed the bugs and we did the thing, right? Because some people are like, you should go invite every desktop in Linux to go make one of these, right? Of course I want that, like, duh. But, you know, it can't be a show of the worst kind.

So, you know, sometimes you got to, Marco reminds me of this constantly. He's like, take off your foot off the gas. Let the situation develop a little bit. Let the tools mature. Yeah, you don't want to take on too much too quickly, especially with early tooling. Yeah, yeah.

But we're also stubbing out open source project maintenance tip number 36 or whatever you want to stub out stuff so even if you don't do anything you leave a thing there that says read me it'd be amazing if someone would fix this i would do it this way and then you put like five things and then you come back later and someone's like hey i tried it and then they pr that's how the iso generator got built we didn't make isos right you had to install fedora and rebase to it and that sucks um it's cool but you know it's not gonna win you any points on the adoption category well that was when you had the the iso comment that's when like stuff really started like pick up i think up didn't it yeah we're we just hit

we're about to hit 2 000 downloads on the iso and and the the polls are well over 150 000 by now those are like a bad cloud nerd we didn't get our charts up in time compared to when the thing is so i can't show you a graph but eventually we will because i i want to make everything public it annoys me that you can't see how many downloads the Firefox snap has. That sucks. I don't like that. We can do that on Flat. Do we do that on FlatHub for Firefox?

Because I know the binary sits on there. We definitely do. Now the new website's live. Yeah, it is nice. At least it was there yesterday, unless someone broke something overnight. Here we go. Installs over time. Firefox.

8,674? In the past day, yeah. 8,674, past day, yes. Yeah. What happened in December. Yes spike Yeah Yes, the cut that's the kind of stuff nerds me out Yeah, what?

December Wait, let me just go check another package. You know, I wonder if Chrome that's the day they announced it was a fish. No because it's been official for a long time now. No, Chrome has the same thing around the same time. What's another popular package? Kdenlive. Kdenlive. No, Kdenlive doesn't have a spike there. No, OBS can't be a spot.

No, the spike exists there on Firefox. Spotify. It exists there on Firefox and Chrome. It's not there on Spotify. What the hell happened on that? What? Maybe something got fixed on the back end and it was an adjustment. Maybe.

If someone knows, leave a comment. Don't forget to like and subscribe. There's a bunch of people that watch this that I know are more involved in the dev side of Blackhublly yeah skelly kelly if you're listening yeah tell me what happened i don't i got no idea that's that's really weird because it'd be weird if it was just like it was just one project like that's fine maybe something weird happened but the fact that it's

both major browsers yeah yeah so i want to put all our metrics and stuff. You can go in the actions. You can actually watch it build and you can do all that. I want to show growth. I want to have a little competition graph, the leaderboard, that will show... Because right now, Kinoite... Kinoite, by far, is our...

It has always been the second it came out. It has always been. the second it came out like okay it's always been it passed it passed silver blue um way that's that's curious i have many theories about this um because i do know kde people use it so timothy the person i've been talking about coro west is involved in like the kde team you know right um so you know there's a chance he might have said hey check this out the person I've been talking about, Coro West, is involved in the KDE team. Right. There's a chance he might have said, hey, check this out in a KDE channel, and I didn't know. That's what I choose to believe.

But I also have other theories. If you have an NVIDIA machine, and you see how cool the Steam Deck is, this is pretty much the quote the model it's different right it's a flat pack seam or whatever but it's a pretty close approximation that you can you can get right and the same tools that you can get on your steam deck that's that's the it's interesting because people were like look at all the cool stuff that you'll be able to run on

your steam deck uh because it comes with flat hub enabled right but it's also awesome because now on all my desktops all that stuff like proton up we know that thing is solid all the emulator stuff just works you know i mean yeah the occasional thing like it's really nice that game scope just works out of the box on the deck and on my desktop you got stuff and that sucks um but you know generally speaking it's also nice because when people target steam deck i get that on my linux desktop you know and it's interesting because we always talk about the other way right because someone's gonna run libre office on their steam deck and it'll be a cool thing right like we knew

we knew people were gonna do that to be fair there are people that are using their steam deck is like their actual computer which is so crazy to them yeah it's a powerful little machine yeah like if if uh like my dad if he needed a computer i could hook it up with a dock behind his monitor and he probably wouldn't he probably wouldn't tell right because he's going to use his junky windows machine because he's a dad so he's installing all the stuff right so yeah steam deck is going to be way more powerful than his two thousand dollar computer yeah that's why immutability is the future see that that was a real example you know um because that stuff happens all the time one thing we've uh we one thing you mentioned a lot of times is cloud native but we're not actually defined the term yet. It's,

it's literally just these tentative ideas, right? Cloud native is software. Who, how do I do this while going in the weeds? So when cloud came out, my explanation, my,

I actually tell you exactly what I said when I heard Amazon. So Amazon web services is considered kind of the big one that, that started this. 2008. And Ubuntu contributor, by the way, named Eric Hammond did the first EC2 images for Ubuntu. And that's why when you're on cloud, Ubuntu is everywhere. Like the cloud images. And that's why when people try to like, do you think people are going to stop using Ubuntu? I was like, no.

That was done by a contributor, Eric Hammond. Eric Hammond is the one that, and of course others, but Eric Hammond was the one who kind of like led that charge. And that was, that was really awesome. But back then it was like, hey, wait a minute. This is just a Linode with an API on top of it. What's the big deal? You know, cause I'm SSHing into server still. I have, I have no idea. Right. What happened is once people realized they had an AP and of course the first

cuts were like, you know, they were very primitive and now there's like 75 billion Amazon services. Right. Like back then you didn't have the database. You didn't have the load balance. Like it was just like compute only, you know,

it was like very raw. But people caught on to that API driven approach. Right. The second one would be self-service. Right. So if you're at a company and you say, boss, I need a server. Right. You like fill out a form.

Maybe three months later, you'll get a server or whatever. Here, any department manager with a credit card can get infrastructure. Right. And when you need to scale, you just click, click, click. As long with a credit card can get infrastructure, right? And when you need to scale, you just click, click, click, as long as the credit card works. That's where the term shadow IT comes from. Because what happened is a bunch of people are like, internal IT sucks. Let's just whatever. And then the CIOs are like, wait a minute, our entire company's running off of everyone's expense credit cards. And like, we got to figure that out. And that's a process the entire industry went through.

And I'm sure it's a problem for people today. But that kind of self-service approach, like you want software right now. And no matter how awesome you are, you can't rack faster than Amazon could turn on a server. So there's that approach. And then the cloud,

the kind of API driven self service, there's probably a lot of other fundamentals. But let me let me just talk about those two, because that'll make the point and then someone else can correct me or fill me in later is applications need to be used to that model, right? So the example I like to use when I say cloud native is back then, if your application, if the database changed its IP address, your application would stop working. Right.

And some of you are like, that still happens to me at work, right? And you have what people would say, copying and pasting your problems into cloud. You would grab your VMware VM and you would just shove it in Amazon, right? And then you would say, why is this so expensive? Cloud is stupid. People still say that.

Sure, man. However, the people that started looking at the API driven stuff said, hey, look, if we write the applications to be, this is kind of where microservices came into right so instead of one app that does stuff apps should not care whether the ip address change underneath them or not right so what does that mean dns has to be solid right that's why at the end of the day it's always dns that breaks everything that's a joke but also true um you know it's just things could work way could break way worse in addition to d breaking. So what happened is people started to figure out how to scale and all the stuff that it needs to do with the cash and data, all that stuff, you know, all of a sudden you can go from one to a thousand of them. Right.

And reasonably, as long as this architecture, this is okay. I'm oversimplifying a lot of things here, but like assuming you're doing all this stuff, right. That's how net, like you can't make Netflix. assuming you're doing all this stuff right that's how net like you can't make netflix like netflix you can like with a traditional server model you can make netflix but it will be so it would have been expensive right netflix born out of amazon that kind of model right and then of course once everyone figured it out everyone's like oh that's the way to go it's kind of this like everything is split now. So Google, Microsoft, everybody, everybody has a thing now that's, you know, and that was like the first wave of cloud native. The second wave was Docker,

right? Where they put a pretty UX on it, right? You've been able to do containers before Lexi, you know, BSD people have been talking about jails for how long right um but docker gave it that ux and importantly it gave it that ux for front-end people who write the apps right because they're the ones that need that right it became so hard that literally it was like well it works on my computer someone was like we have to make that go that problem has to go away or it's not going to work right so that's why when people joke a container is literally everybody else's computer yeah that's the best we got right now so you ship that and then you try to slim that down as much as possible right which is why container images are getting really really small now right but it's

still possible someone out there i don't know if you've seen a windows container they are not small so like it's like you can make yeah i'm shipping we're shipping a whole operating system in this in the thing right um so that second wave is that container right now becomes orchestrating these containers and them talking to each other so then they need logical groupings and it needs to be an abstraction layer above the cloud right and then so that unlocks a bunch of stuff but also makes things complicated like kubernetes is as simple as it can be so this kind of dynamic dynamicness right your app your database might not be there when you ping it next time your app has to account for that and it never did they would just error out right um so apps had to you had to build in that resilience right they had to kind of be self and independent and there's

more technical terms they're way smarter people than me by the way that explain i'm trying to i'm trying to understand it you know the way i figured it out as that relates to the desktop right um so that kind of dynamicness right the and the declarative config is another one right i have a file that says my computer should look like this yeah and then something else goes and tries it and then the next day it does it again if something is missing it adds it right if something extra is, it adds it, right? If something extra is there, it takes it away, right? And its entire job is to normalize that system. And that's literally what RPMOS tree when running CI, similar to UBlue, because other people are going to do it.

I hope other people do it, right? Is you are saying, I want my desktop to look like this right and you are going to build it from scratch every day so because i want the update from fedora that's important right you can't gate updates that's why distros that are like it's like arch but we wait a week i get why you do that because you you're right you have to hire people to do that correctly that's hard man like you know i'm doing it and as you can tell that doesn't look easy to me no um and they're doing image based so they've at least got that advantage exactly like sometimes i wish i could see what that dashboard looks like how broken it is every day and then when it's green are they like rebase

today like i want to know that so bad um so yeah, that kind of model. Right. And then I talked a little bit about the economics and things like that. And these were just things that I had learned because a lot of the people, so I've been shopping around this idea a lot, you know, and Colin is an old gnome guy too. And he's like, oh man,

yeah, you're right. This would apply the desktop, you know? And I would go and ask people, you know, they're like, what do you think?

Right. And then the smart ones get it. The ones that have been around in automation, get it people, they're like, what do you think? And then the smart ones get it. The ones that have been around in automation get it because they're like, labs. Remember how much it sucks to run labs at universities? Because I've done that job and it sucks. Like OEMs, think about it. If you had a ThinkPad image for your ThinkPad, right? And there was one issue that they had that they couldn't get in Fedora on time,

or it's not in the kernel or whatever right like my first dell sputnik came with a ppa enabled on it no what if that came with an image right that had gone through that qa process and you have it right and then someday it just gets upgraded to the official thing a little bit after it gets to the kernel and some some smart engineer who's made his whole career on testing stuff, her career on testing stuff can let me know when it's safe to put it on my laptop kind of thing. Can you imagine if you reported a bug and the developer, can you imagine if there was a GNOME VRR image attached to that PR this entire time? Wouldn't that be cool? I bet you get a lot more testing because you could just reboot into it.

And then when you're like, oh, no, this is kind of janky on this one game, you could switch back. None of this exists, by the way, but it's totally possible. And, of course, everyone's been talking about it because cloud has been doing this for a very long time already. That's what that's why I'm talking about those economics. Right. If if this kind of workflow can save Lenovo. Whatever. A tiny percentage system 76, a tiny percentage.

Right. That's why I want to accelerate this. Fedora is like, we think we can do this in five years. I was like, five years? That's an entire Star Wars trilogy. I'm not waiting. I am not waiting for that. So that's why I grabbed my friends.

I was like, you know what? If we could solve NVIDIA, there are people who literally will quit Linux because of NVIDIA, right? And I was like, I tell you what, if people are quitting because of that and instead they flame they flame flat packs instead or you know they get called the new because they don't know how to arch okay sounds good to me you know so that's that's kind of what we're doing and I think what's important I think what's different that what's different about this is i've gone through this for so long i've seen unity's greatest day and worst day ever you know i've seen debbie and at its best

debbie in the day that open ssh key thing happened and everyone was like really really sad um you know and sometimes sometimes the bear gets you, right? But man, what if I, we can avoid a lot of it. We can invest in the automation. And that's why I'm really glad that we have people who do this as their job, professional people helping me on this, because if it was just me doing it, the quality, it would not be good. I say this, the worst image is probably better than most distros people are running today. The people running the small distros, but that's also not true. Cause I can mess up some stuff, but there's a reasonable chance that like it, it can be better, but it has to pass the technical muster.

Right. Right. And even though the technology this is based on is amazing. Right. Like, you know, that's why we turn on things. You have to have an approval for merger.

That's why I wrote open source governance. Like who does that for fun? This guy, I'm sure the someone like you, you have to earn that trust and you have to, you know, it's just not enough to say, Josh works at red hat.

Cool. You know, I don't, I don't even see, i don't think if he works on the coral west parts i think he works on something totally different so i i don't know like we could say that we could say built brought to you by you know because those people use no because they're like that guy works at red hat he must be pretty good and i agree yeah well people use nabara because they know the name uh what. And he has a proven track record.

That's true. Yeah. And, and we don't. So that's, that's kind of like why I've been kind of very passionate about getting the word out because I hear you. We see the things or say,

I don't like one distros run by one person because there's all these things. So now we know, okay, all right. I filled out the thing on GitHub. If I die, where the repos go to, it's kind of dark. You have to go in there and say, if I pass away, you know, and I'm looking at ways for us to have escrow of the secrets and all the kind of stuff that you expect in a professionally run cloud product.

Cause I've done that for a long time right so if i can bring a little bit of that of how kubernetes is run to this open source project and show people that we mean it and that way when you make a mistake right if you see someone make a mistake and then they write a post-mortem on it right you know that they're taking that knowledge to good use you know what i mean um so like people are going to make mistakes and I think it's important that those are documented. Right. But then you also have expectations of,

I expect you to not put yourself in a position to do this. Right. So we got to be very, we're very careful about infrastructure that we spin up. Right. Like, sure. We have a github

dependency but if github goes down a lot of projects more important than us are affected so cool uh but like setting up our own infrastructure all of that kind of stuff i'm very hesitant to do and we'll do it at the last minute but that long-term thinking is what we're thinking about theoretically we only have to make two changes every six months, and that's add the new version of Fedora and remove the unmaintained version of Fedora every six months.

The people that maintain in the NVIDIA repo signed up for that mess. So good luck, Josh and Alex. Right, because they have to, right? NVIDIA comes out, all the users come in. When do I get this, right? That's like the first open source thing right we're waiting for rpm fusion because it's easier to eventually work

there than to do it yourself from scratch right so you have to wait for them you know and then we enable it and we're we're always building with fedora 38 it's easier because you can that's open source so you're always building it whether people use it or not and if it's easier because you can that's open source so you're always building it whether people use it or not and if it's broken for three days we didn't care as much right because it eventually fixes itself because your client never sees the broken image that's that's awesome yeah um so you know but when the nvidia drivers work it was coming up to release and nvidia still wasn't building on Fedora 38. And our image was getting old.

And I was like, man, we got to get the security updates in. And you know what? They're going to have to stay on the old version. Let's start writing this down because we know there's lessons to be learned here, that kind of thing. And after 38, RPM Fusion was still busted for nvidia for two or three days um but once it enabled it and everything went green and we sat there hitting f5 just like everybody else um you know we we knew the exact repo and it was empty and we would hit f5 on it

i had i had notifications on my phone and stuff and the minute minute it went now, what's cool is the automation would have ran it eventually. So I just wanted to get a fix as fast as possible. And then as soon as it went live, boom, all the builders were green and we had automated generating ISOs. So we just clicked the button, we waited and then boom, they were done. Now what we're hoping for is, at some point, figure out a way to work with the RPM Fusion people to keep more older versions in an archive so that we can, it would be nice to continue to build the older drivers

for as long as possible. So if you're in that weird situation where you still need your security updates, right? But that latest version of the driver has a bug that's just killing your favorite game or something right and right now we can't offer that right if if rpm fusion doesn't hold a thing you know we we gotta drop support for it you know and a lot of it is like best effort the best we can do wouldn't it be great if you just had a stream of all the business

um but we're not there right now and well i just saw the other day someone got a game running on mvk and it wasn't three frames a second i've been paying attention mvk like i someone mentioned a while back i just didn't really properly like follow it that's cool yeah i saw a picture from the the HDR hack fest too that's happening The open source Nvidia Vulcan drive UK begins to run games Was definitely not that one it's definitely been doing that for a while. Okay. Well, this is from January. Oh No, no. No, this was within the last month. I yeah, I didn't realize it was that far along Yeah, Liam would know. Look on... Hold on. I'll know.

Games. Wait. This is from Pharonix in March. That sounds right. David Early today shot a video of running the game Talos Principle, which was the original Vulcan API launch title. Before getting

too excited, it's running at a mere 13 FPS. Yeah. But it's running. Yeah. Which is good. Like, that's really cool. Yeah. So at first I was like, you know, it has to work until MVK lands yeah but you know

there's going to be a ton of CUDA stuff in there as well that's one of the things I've been debating about making making a like a an image for like AI ML folks that has all the CUDA stuff because that's gigs and gigs of stuff I don't want to put

you want a gaming machine you shouldn't have to do that definitely not like because you end up making a ton of images and a lot of people will be like, well, now that's confusing. And it's like, yes. Um, but no one's made a GUI, right? If you had a GUI that said switch desktop and KDE, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he just did all that. You wouldn't have to keep track of that stuff. Right. So I like to think about it that way. We're enabling that to be built someday. So it's kind of sucks that you have to type a rebase command right now. Wouldn't it be awesome? Like I told you rebasing back, you know, wouldn't that be cool if that was a calendar widget and you had that NVIDIA driver series and a date at the bottom and you click, click, boom, and you reboot

into it. That would be really cool. Yeah yeah you could totally do that we can't do that today no you're gonna have to you're gonna have to type a few commands it wouldn't be that difficult like to make a good looking ui yeah but like to make something basic that would be pretty easy to spin up it's just a matter of someone would exact out and run the commands but what you really want to do is talk to the OS tree API or whatever, whatever thing to make it cool. And yeah, yeah.

You know that thing. The other thing I want to make is I've been shopping. This around is I want a new terminal. I want a terminal. That's just distro box native. That just talks to pod man. Cause the problem is, is people have their,

I hate that. I have to go into my toolboxes and then out of my toolboxes and now i have too many of them and stuff right if you're if you had a terminal you would keep your host terminal that part's key right and you just had another terminal that just went into your boon to let's say your arch let's say you're running silver blue right now but it went into your arch distroBox automatically and you had your favorite package. So like the way the new Windows terminal works with WSL. Yes.

Yes. Interesting. For anyone who hasn't, has never seen that. So you can like open up like a Linux tab. You can open up a, what's PowerShell tab. That's cool.

You can just like open up these different tabs. It just auto-does everything for you. Yeah, and it puts the logo of the distro you have on there and stuff. It's really nice. So I want a Linux version of that because this is something I've always wanted to say to people who are like, God, containers. Now it's too complicated. I get it if you don't understand containers.

But also, think about it this way. This feature was so fundamental in the last decade. Like people will argue now that maybe wasm or AI or something is even more profound or whatever. That's not my story to tell, but this, you know, in the past decade or whatever,

in the heady days, um, cause I don't think we've reached peak container yet. I don't think we're close, right? Like, um, Kubernetes runs a lot of workloads in the heady days um because i don't think we've reached peak container yet i don't think we're close right like um kubernetes runs a lot of workloads in the world but i don't think it's over 20 percent um like micro so macs are stuck they have to use virtual machines if you want linux right another thing people don't like i tell them that the majority of ubuntu's users are mac users right Mac users, right? Because they're, right?

I used to tell people, what do you care more about, that one laptop or the 10,000 instances that that person has to maintain? I kind of have to care about the 10,000 right now. You know, and there's that economics again. But what if it was the same? That's, hopefully you're starting to understand how I got to this. Right. This line of thinking, right. The container was so profound that Microsoft literally paid millions and millions of dollars to make WSL. Right.

And the first one was cool. Right. And then the second one, they realized, Hey, we just have to make that VM layer a little bit, you know, faster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then people got used to that workflow like if this is an unfortunate thing you go to you go to linux conferences especially cloud conferences everyone's everyone's running mac and windows yep everyone everyone is running max including the microsoft people but the microsoft people have a surface tablet that they bring along

with them also they can double flex you know and then there's like the four of us on linux desktop it's like me and the one guy from red hat josh burkus i even know his name because there's only one you know um so like i tell people like that's why i kind of sound like a desperate madman all the time right like act like an endangered species you know you walk around you feel like an endangered species but these people are so passionate about open source right that's why it's kind of that tragedy of the desktop i was like man i'm gonna i'm gonna i think i can do this that was a mistake um you know but but microsoft paid a lot of money with a lot of smart people to make that experience and they hooked it up to visual studio code and you know,

like people can dunk all they want, but like that experience, like it resonates with people. Yeah. Especially the ones who love Linux. There are people out there, you know, like who love Linux,

but they just ran out of patience. You know, they're just like, look, work, work gives me a choice. And I, I picked the Mac, you know, um, it's's a it's a different vibe now when vmware bought us i was like oh no they're

gonna make they're gonna take my linux laptop away the startups don't care that's why you want to work in startups um and they were like linux ssop is okay but if you have a mac you have to have all that managed software if you pick windows you could choose all three if you have a Mac, you have to have all that managed software. If you pick windows, you could choose all three. If you choose windows, it has to have all this managed software. Linux people, you can run your own stuff, but it has to be full disk encrypted. And like, you have to, you know, talk to someone in the open source programs office to make sure you're not being a total crazy person about it. You know, cause we, you know, we have a business to run here, right? So the windows, I don't know how many of you have ever run a window, a corporate managed

windows, like the boot time is just like 45 minutes or whatever. And that's what people think is normal. And the Macs are getting worse and worse. In that regard. Also, like I said, I would see what people are doing, you know, people have very, very large companies, like the fan companies you because you see in the conferences, and everyone, nobody can get the projector to work. It's not just Linux and Mac. That's not working for anybody.

So you see all the managed BS that people have to do that, right? But developers love their efficiency. And now, especially, companies realize the value of having very, very efficient developers. They will spend so much money to take care of that person that works eight hours a day to save that company one minute of a thing. That one minute doesn't seem like a lot until you have to run it on 50,000 instances. And you're paying for that, right? That adds up, you know, people, that's a science, you know?

And so for me, I'm like, if you're a Linux nerd and you're averse to this, this is a feature that was born out of Linux. This did not happen. You know, like a lot of smart people helped to make this happen. And Microsoft had to play for once. They had to play catch up to that. Right. And then people are like, oh no, they want to put their direct X thing into vulcan or whatever they're putting something in a mesa but it only helps windows

and people are like this is awful i'm like spend that money baby you know um but it's good because it's going to be open source and whatever there are people who it i i think being around long enough i don't get mad that or upset when a friend of mine doesn't use Linux, right? I feel disappointed that we blew it. We all blew it, right? Like there was a chance with netbooks. And then there was a really bummer of an Intel graphics card that kind of ruined that, right? And then six months later, iPads came out and that was that.

Now netbooks are kind of cool again, right? Those small little form factors. And you have things like frameworks and system 76 can exist and thrive, you know, like the market's way different now. Right. And we never had the tools to do that. And now this is one of those tools, right? This kind of model of running this stuff. So if Microsoft is spending all this money, you know, developers love it are competitive. Now we need to bring that model back to the Linux desktop. Except we have one killer feature. We don't need the virtual machine.

That's why when you launch DistroBox and it's instant, right? That thing is instant. The first time. The first time. The first time, always, right? Because you've got to start it, right? But, you know, if you're in a terminal as much as i am every day like that one time or whatever that's a tax you'll pay right um and that's generally gonna be fixed because in

the next version of distro box you can declare what you want it to have and it will just automatically create it for you in the background and that will go away because that's how you do it in cloud hey ding this box is such a cool project i the coolest thing ever i was there for that thing too see because there was a thing called toolbox and i was actually afraid of this because there was a time i was like red hat had gone and fedora and red hat together had gone in on this atomic thing right they had atomic workstations it like it feels like they pushed way harder than they do with silver blue and kinote today even though these are so much better.

I wish we could take the money they spent on marketing back then and have that now for Fedora, you know, and then, um, but like, it didn't really catch on. It was that weird thing, you know, and like, oh no, you know, whatever. And, and that, that was kind of a bummer. Right. And now, so I was kind of afraid that these things were on the chopping block, you know, like toolbox was clearly being, um, I found out the story was like assigned to a half person to sort of work it, but it wasn't their real job. And not that many people were

using it compared to all the other stuff red hat makes, right. Like, like sometimes you got to do the math. Right. And so toolbox just wasn't getting the development that it needed. Right. And then Lucas showed up at distro box. Right. He did. He did. It's interesting because he did it.

Initially people thought he did it the wrong way. Right. They're like, well, this is a proper Golang program. It's like a proper program. This is just a bunch of bash scripts. Right. But Luca gets it. Right.

He knew that he had to be on as many systems as possible right so he was like i'm gonna write this in bash and there are people today who are very they have principle in their titles and they look at luca's bash code and they're like i can't believe someone did this in bash it's it's like it's like insane and he added those features that would have been out of scope for Toolbox at the time, right? A separate home directory, you got to have it, right? That makes so many things install in your home directory. So it's nice to have that little separation.

And you should be able to click a thing that turns that on and off for whatever DistroBox you make. And that's what I want to do with the terminal. I call it Project XO. If any of you want to build that for me, prototype. You take VTE, the same thing Gnome Terminal has, you wrap it in a small wrapper, and then you just embed DistroBox, just to prove to see if the model works.

And then later, some kid can rewrite it in Rust and accelerate it and do all the business. Because it's got to look good. It's got to have emojis and stuff. That's a thing we learned. Yeah, you got to have emojis and stuff. That's a thing we learned. You've got to have the hipster stuff. I feel like I'm rambling, so if you have any other specific questions, I could do that too.

No, no. When Distrobox came out, obviously Distrobox is not this original concept. It's building on top of what was already there with Toolbox. Directly building on top of Podman and Docker. For anyone, I'm sick of these comments distro box can use docker stop telling me it can't i don't care about your dumb comment go read the documentation say to use the cloud native term

distro box consumes your container runtime yeah yeah because i had like three or four people on that video on you've been like um actually docker uses uh distrox uses podman not docker like yeah shut up there's a reason people make fun of like linux people right there's a reason that well actually meme exists it's fine hey i'm one too dude it's fine to be well actually when you're right but like yeah when you're not shut up i know that it uses podman on like yeah actually if you're in a boon to use docker if you're in a boon to use docker with this robot i think it's a podman podman's in universe i think and at least docker isn't in main or anything like that but but you know that that repo, everybody's using it,

right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, so, um, but that's what I recommend. I had an Ubuntu work machine.

Uh, and that's the, I, I, once you have Distrobox, you can't, can't go back. So,

and what Luca also did, he also did a few other things, right? I know this, um, but not a lot, a lot of people miss it. He built a community. He built a community. Like it doesn't matter what you do. He built other things, right? I know this, but not a lot of people miss it. He built a community.

He built a community. Like, it doesn't matter what you do. He built a community, right? Yeah. And the way he responded to bug count, even if he couldn't get to something, he'd be like, yeah, I'd love to do this. I can't, right? As opposed to, so you see issues and you see abandonment stuff and then a bot closes the issue and you're like, nobody's going to care. Yeah.

Right. But it's the thing that bothers you, but you don't't want to you don't want to be the person to be like someone actually still fixes because then you know someone's gonna come back and now you have a thing you know and i sure so when distrobox came out i was like i could keep whining because you know i know everybody so i'm calling people at red house like hey man uh my friend um mark mark russell he's i think he works on podman somewhere at red hat he worked at canonical for a long time i was like hey man you gotta find some headcount for this toolbox thing because i'm telling you it's amazing he's like yeah well and then he was like okay cool cool cool fine fine but it's on your radar right

he's like it's on my backlog which is the same as it's good to talk to you, George. I'll see you at QCon. You know, I'm, but you know, hey, I don't have to staff a bunch of open source projects. I don't know what those complications are. I'm just trying to look the case for the thing, you know? So when Luca comes around, right? It's just an individual open source

and he just takes off with it, you know? And so the community was number one, documentation, man. That guy just literally, that is the key to the whole thing. And I'm glad I got the help because I made a video. I think it's still one of my most popular videos is how, and I didn't even say this is the best way to, this is just how I use it. And this is why I think it's badass, right?

And I knew that there'd be some people who you know especially if you've been around the block or whatever they're like look i want a stable distro right um but i gotta have my bling i have to have that python library that i need at work yep or whatever and i started the day with my boss assigned me a new project and i'm, and halfway through I'm just upgrading. Ain't nobody want to do that. You know what I mean? So like Distrobox is the way to do that.

And I think it helped energize toolbox, right? Like I, if, if you, if you go back after Distrobox, I wish five people showed up someday, you know, but they, they have made progress. And, and more importantly i think it proves that that's a class i call toolboxes a class of software now um that's why i think distros are going to make a tool there'll be a colon toolbox one for your favorite distro that's perfect and if you're interested in doing that um they actually started a separate repo just for DistroBox images

that has all those packages built in. That's where I get all my tips because I know someone at Calabra. That's where I got the name Calabra in my brain. Put a certain Flatpak package in the Debian images, and I hadn't heard of it before, XDG something something. And I maintained the Alpine images in there, and I was like, what do I need that package for in my toolbox? I better go find out. So, uh, yeah, like I know some people and I know, you know, one of my PRS on one of my things was like by endless and stuff

like that. And I was like, you know, it kind of proves the model and whether you use toolbox or distro box, those images are available for anybody and you can modify them and they'll be perfect like it's someday like i what i really want to see is someone say you know the nvidia cuda enabled uh pie torch toolkit blah thing that's like 35 gigs but at least it works you know and and if someone uses that to accelerate a thing at work then then good for them and then our job there is to make sure that a remember the nvidia equals one flag in your distro box and b that the drivers are actually there on the base image right that's kind of our job but it's the kind of where i was going with bringing up distro box is it it's one of those things

that like, it alleviates one of the biggest problems that exists with using one of these image based systems where there is software that obviously if you make your own custom image you can just go put whatever you want into it but if you're using Silverblue or you're using Steam Deck for example

there are certain things that are not going to be in FlatHub. These are not there. Oh, yeah. So having something like DistroBox, having something like Toolbox, opens up that ability to just, for those cases, install anything you want.

Yeah. It's like an extra goalie. Yeah. You know, like, why not have that? And especially, too, remember, there's a lot of old stuff that runs only on Ubuntu 18.04 or whatever. And sometimes you got to run the thing. Your only other option is to stay on an old distro.

Don't want to do that. Yeah, that sucks. You know, like, why can't I have both things? Surely we can have both things, right? Like, that's why when people say, well, I have a rolling release. I have Arch. It's way better than your dumb thing, you know? have both things right like that's why when people say well i have a rolling release i have i have arch is way better than your dumb thing you know and it's like first first of all you're you know the arch god that you all pray to is called steam os now right so like that has proven that this

model is legit you know uh we just got to figure out the customization part. There are a few Arch distros that do this, like people that add it. Another one I was involved with, Chimera OS. That's the one that kept the Steam OS dream alive. Alcazar, I've been involved with that project for a long time. I still run it. Like when people are like, where's, you know, I want a Steam machine with this on it. And I literally have it. I had the new UI and everything because it's an AMD system and it works perfectly.

And Chimera OS, they're doing all the work to bundle all the emulators and all that. I don't even have to set up anything. It just comes that way. Great project. That project is run correctly. If that helps. Because some people are like, that's a weird name.

Or it used to be called Gamer OS. That's a much worse name. Yeah, I know. But naming things is hard, man. Yeah. So if you actually want that SteamOS lifestyle, now, again, like with us, if you run that on the NVIDIA machine with the new UI,

it's going to be janky, right? But if you have an AMD machine, that thing runs legit. I run mine at 4K. I run mine at 4k i run mine at 4k um and then i have another machine with an rx 580 and i turn on the fsr and i output it 4k but you're sitting nine feet away so it looks amazing and it's like locked at 60 frames a second friends come over they have no idea that's an RX 580. Wow. It's like amazing. Yeah. Like, uh, because FSR you want FSR too, obviously when you're sitting in front of the thing, right. But you're sitting nine feet away. You don't, you don't care. You care that you have

four controllers and a wireless thing that works. So your friends can have a good time, right? That's, that's another thing I tell, I tell people were like, but I like to customize my things and all that stuff. Get that out of, we all go through that phase. Once you get out of that phase, you're going to start to find the fun things that you want to do in Linux. You know, like when you hang out with actual kernel engineers, like I, sometimes you're like, oh man, I'm sorry. I forgot how to, I forgot how to compile a kernel.

They're happy. That is the happiest. That is the best thing someone's going to tell them that day because everything else they're going to hear that day is going to be that something is broken. You know? So like when someone else has a thing like that, that they're very happy. So I don't like that gatekeepy of like, well, this is, you know, if you would have read the documentation and maintained your system properly, like a system administrator, the reason I'm doing this is because I was assistant administrator for over a decade. Right. And eventually the flex becomes I'm automating it. So if D package breaks once, twice, three times, you know, what was, what was the thing I said? You better automate it.

Right. So our stuff is breaking. Now it's breaking remotely and our stuff will break on the client at some point. Of course it will um but i i kind of liken it to playing dungeons of dragons right you want to add as many things to your saving throw as many buffs if you play video like in destiny right you want that buff you don't want debuffs you know that timer that says when you're gonna want to die like i'm here to play dark souls not live it with my linux machine um you know like that's cool but you know i'm i'm like chill out farming farming simulator dad now uh so like you know a lot of it is is kind of changing that model changing that mindset you know now some of you are

going to be like this is hardcore whatever cool you are going to be like, this is hardcore, whatever. Cool. You are going to be the next generation of distribution developer. Like you're going to be the, like, like these skills and stuff that you have, you're still going to have them. You're still going to need them.

I actually use my package manager as much as I ever did before. And I'm in a boot to toolboxes and Alpine one. So I don't even, I don't even know RPM. I have to have someone help me even though I run Fedora. Right. But I'm doing the package thing. You know, man, there's a program I got to get to.

This test is failing when I, you know, I'm doing all that stuff. I'm just not doing it on the host. And it's recognizing that I need that part. I ain't got time for that one right now you know um but virtualization and other machines exist so if you did we all do it you know it's like time to go hard on arch and then you do that you know uh we all do the and even if you don't do arch you do it i still know people myself included every year it's like you know what it's time to bust out my old MUT config. Right. And then you modernize it and then you run MUT for like a week. Right. And then you're like, yeah, I remember that whole enabling IMAP in your GI. I forgot how to do that. Do I have to generate

a token? Like all this stuff and you're going back and you're doing all the nerd stuff and you're like, well, if I'm going to do MUT, I might as well just have VIM embedded. Right. Oh, but it can't be normal vim i gotta try this neil vim all the kids are talking about right and then you end up you end up you know making a thing like you blue but it's something else right that's the thing like this started off in a home lab that's that home lab geek linux culture man that's that's where all the stuff comes from um and then you run a few days you're like cool see you next year and then i switch back to gmail because i have a job to do yeah yeah you know or more likely you say wow i'm

glad i don't have to use email anymore as much you know and then it's back to slack how that's a different sort of pain same thing right it's like oh i wonder how that we chat slack plugin is going right and then you find yourself in the terminal doing doing the business so like if you have those itches absolutely do that you know uh you're a content creator so you have to run i can turn these you have no choice you have no choice but to try it all i could go and use like you know i could go and use ubloo and have all that be nice but it's like having this stuff just break randomly assuming it doesn't get in the way of the content is like i can turn that your content would suffer if you didn't know if you were only running silver blue and you had an opinion on arch no one's gonna care right um but what you can do is

when you get that second machine you want that machine to be as boring as possible and like never well yeah when i set up at some point i'll set up a capture pc it's probably gonna be running silver blue or something i don't know just it just works well if you need something special i know a guy hook you up with your own custom image make brody linux i'm hoping one of your content creators could like run with this once it's like amazing and like whatever thing you reviewed that week you add it to the image and you you know you make people use it and then they have to do the thing and then the next week that goes away right and you have your brody's uh default wallpaper of the week which is relatively easy to do compared to like being a you know setting up

your ppa with your stuff in it you know uh so like you could do all like somebody's gonna do something something nuts you know and like we haven't even really really thought about it right like i think of stuff like uh because i worked as a network administrator at a university right michigan state spartan linux it's gonna have all the right stuff and when you log in it's gonna have uh all the rss feeds subscribe to everything on campus and the calendar is going to be hooked up. And when you double click, it'll Kerberos auto off to all the stuff that you want in a lab. And when we beat Michigan, the wallpaper is going to be different that Monday. You're thinking of

all the things that universities and schools would do. If you look at the amount of work, especially in the US, I don't know how it is um in australia in the u.s the high school robotics teams are they super professionalized not even remotely here oh man i guess it's like this crazy there's a lot of effort that goes into that stuff and i was like man why don't these schools like where's your computer club at where's their varsity sport that could be the cool thing that they're proud of? But you want to set that up in a toolkit for them in a way that's, if you were to be like, every school is going to have a Linux distro, I mean, you wouldn't have any signups, you know? did as a hobby while you're learning this stuff because one of the nice things i like about this cloud native model is everything you're learning like when you're learning podman and things like that you're learning a skill that people pay money for like people will like you will learn that skill and sure there are people who make money packaging and things like that but right now in the market

right now knowing how docker slash Podman works is a skill that if you're playing around with a Linux desktop, right? And then you're, you know, if your parents are like, what are you doing? And your friends, why are you wasting your time on that thing? Being like, yeah, I just deployed my first Kubernetes cluster, you know, deal with it.

You know, like at the end of like, if you have a friend that's like, you know, why do you use Linux and they make fun have a friend that's like, you're actually like building, you know, why do you Linux? And they make fun of you. It's like, good luck watching Netflix tonight. If Linux didn't exist or your TV even working. Right.

So like, you know, like the desktop thing is a thing that we got to fix. Right. And like, that's why I'm so keen on bringing those concepts. Right. Cause we know mobile work.

People are like, you just want to turn my desktop into android uh-huh right think about the payload we're talking about the model not the payload right so like if i gave if you gave it you know and android has that special thing where they have you have to have the image for that specific hardware right and that's right so like but if you could have that you reboot into a thing and remember cyanogen mod back in the day how cool that was like and those images were relative even though there were some crazy stuff in there they were relatively safe compared to like you imagine if you had to have an arch based thing on all of

those phone people would have like that we know that model works with the images yeah right so like what if we could have that cool customization that? That's my answer to people like you can't customize it is the tools aren't here yet. This is rough cut with one community manager and five people who knew what they were doing. Right. At some point, there's going to be people way smarter than us that we either take our stuff or throw it away and start over or whatever. And that's what I've been saying this entire time since Linus broke that computer. Right.

I was so disappointed that the discourse was this person's an idiot for typing that in. Yeah. And how dare they not be a W administrator, right? First of all, every dummy administrator, you know,

has typed that command in and sometimes it does work that's why you know i i don't know if i would have tried it on a video in youtube but he they also knew what they were doing everybody knows linux has this problem right so i was like thank god someone finally is like talking about this we need to fix it and i think people were dunking on him and i do want to say this because it's important right um people were dunking on system 76 right and if you notice except for some rare exceptions people who worked in distros didn't say anything because they were busy checking their stuff and then maybe after right they're like whoa wait would that affect us hold up okay everything's green hold on okay me test that, you know, because it happens to everybody and it was just their turn, right? It was just their turn.

And in cloud, when there's an outage, they have this thing called hug ops, right? Like when that intern messed up that email and sent a template, if you're on HBO max, you've got an email that was like a template and it had all the variables in it instead. And, uh, someone figured out it was like an intern that did that and they trended, you know, hug up for the intern, you know, and then you had really experienced people saying, let me tell you about the time I knocked out a region of Amazon us East one or people are, let me tell you about the time I brought down a production database at Netflixflix you know and there was like the supportive thing there's always going to be people that are slam dunking you know on on on other people but like at the same time i was i was disappointed

that that wasn't the rattling cry to to fix this thing so one of my very first tweets and you know if people they're like this guy's wrong or whatever, I could probably be wrong, but I'm also bringing a lot of data. Um, uh, I went through askabuntu.com. I had helped start the sites. I was on it so much. People thought I was a bot. There's literally a question that says, is George Castro a bot? I had touched over 10% of, I looked that up.

Um, I had touched so many questions. And so I knew exactly what had happened, right? Because this happens to everybody. This happens to everybody who's used an app system or a deep package system, you know? And it's not just Ubuntu. Before that, I was running Debian for like way longer, you know? And so I was like really disappointed because silver blue was around you know and i was i was on the horn with christian schaller the actual boss at the on the redhead desktop team i was like man dude now's now's our

chance you know like it's all it's almost like uh you're in the trench right and then like that last x-wing gets shot and you're like dude it's coming up And then like that last X wing gets shot and you're like, dude, it's coming up. You know, we got to take the shot. So now's the chance to show because we know the model works. But inertia is hard, man. You know, and that's why I've been so adamantly

about the model way more than the images. Like some people are going to be like i don't like this image they made the wrong choice this is you know that's not that's not what we're we're talking about here like what we're talking about and this is also why i don't recommend a single one if you like vanilla if you like micro os if you like endless os y'all gonna have the same pain points you need more flat hub and flat pack portals. You need more apps on flat hub, right? The distro box toolbox experience needs to be better.

People get confused with IDEs and they don't know what dev containers are. And there's plugins that you need to install to figure all that out. Right. But if you install Gnome builder, which is flat pack native, like the thing works amazing in, in flat pack, right? Cause it's designed that way. So we have to make that model transition right and no matter which of these that you choose those are going to be your pain points so don't don't be afraid that you pick the wrong one like open susan micro os is amazing like if there's one that you that because vanilla is in the middle of a transition

they're rebasing so you got to give them a little bit to figure it out and you know um they're going to be round two you know but if if my dad wanted to switch to linux right now the only choice is is open susan micro os in my opinion unless if you're donating a machine because it comes with educational content and stuff and and that's cool. But like micro West, it takes care of the codex. It has the flat pack stuff. A lot of the stuff in my image is literally just ripping off what open

Sousa, like the very first image of blue fin when it was called the boon to was that same Zenity script that open Sousa micro West uses that janky. No one is ported Zenity to gtk4 lib eduada i did not know this because i was like oh man we'll find a pretty one and then just make that it didn't exist so that's why we had to make a thing called the afty which looks better than zenity and it's declarative so you can say I want these flap hacks instead of like hacking a bash script. And I'm hoping to get where we are hoping.

Mark Marco, my friend, is the one who's kind of leading that. And he's adding in all the tests and everything because I was like, wouldn't it be great if OpenSUSE looked at this someday? And, you know, hey, you don't have to choose us, but put us in the running.

Tell us. You know, it's cool when you're a finalist in a, you know, I's cool when you're a finalist in a show, in a, you know, I wouldn't complain if I was number two in an F1 race. Like if I lost a max, oh man, that sucks. I'm only number two, you know? So like you, you kind of, you want to make these things open and you want, you want people to use your stuff, like, especially when you're, when you're doing that. And I think there's a lot of what I'm hoping for is that those pain points that people are struggling with are now obvious. So we know that we need a graphical thing at some point. But in order to do that, we're going to

need a few things. Someone's going to have to hack one up so we can test the model and that should be okay. But then long-term, someone's going to have to engage with Fedora and core OS, OS3 upstream and do it the right way with tests in a real programming language. That's all CI and doing all that stuff. But in the meantime, what you blue can do is be that prototype. Like worst case, I think what we can do is provide Fedora. Hey, here are the things that people found out they actually want in a base image and things that they don't. Because we won't put everything on a base image. We have a process.

We wrote it down. Otherwise, we'd end up putting everyone's text editor in there, right? So there's certain places where we say we purposely don't deviate from Fedora in this case. We will for hardware enablement, right? Because you don't want to set up that OBS virtual can. That's a nightmare for normal people. But wouldn't it be great if more people could use it? That would at least

give you an idea, especially since we are measuring all of the pulls. If I come back and say these images are... And ultimately, I did say that I had an agenda, you know, at some point I want red hat to come back hard on desktop, right? Like, yeah, they

have enterprise desktops and all that stuff, you know, and, uh, you know, I have not said nice things about snap recently, but you know, I have worked at canonical for a long time. And even if you don't like anything that they do, you want Ubuntu Core Desktop. That exists. That is a thing. You just had to find it in James SH's little personal build thing. But I know where to look.

See, I know where all the bodies are buried. So they have it. You just need to tell them that you want it. And you have to be OK with a thing. Sure. There's things I don't like about snaps, but they have to work on portals to make that work. Right. So if, if, you know, if canonical wants to spend a bunch of money to make a steam snap, which is basically solved already in the flat pack for steam, that's your money to spend. Cool. As long as I don't know, man man as long as it's open you know like who cares if if that helps if even even if you don't like ubuntu if ppas go away for end users because the ppas need to stick around that's another thing right because you have to we're using all that stuff some people like to conflate it they turn it into packagers versus flat pack and snap right they're like respect your packagers and stuff i people like to conflate it they turn it into packagers versus flat pack and snap right they're like respect your packagers and stuff i was like i do that's why i have you talking to

the metal that's why you are talking to the metal right like i don't want to bash flat pack you don't need it there's nothing you need in there you know that's like d cup you want that to be in the distro model yeah discos follow the pace of the kernel, right? They release. There's a reason that distros release in April and October. Robbie Williamson taught me this because we were trying to figure out the best release model for Ubuntu. If you look at all the countries in the world, all of their major holidays, the amount of engineers you can have in every time zone, because these are worldwide projects,

you end April and October pretty much are only choices, right? In a lot of places or the least worst ones. So that's how Gnome is, is spring, fall, right? This time Fedora and Ubuntu were two days, two days apart. Wow. Yeah. where two days two days apart wow yeah and yeah fedora 38 and 23 2304 because that one shouldn't have been difficult for you yeah yeah the only the only do you know what the only late ubuntu release was 606 the first lts okay it should have been 604 yeah Yeah. It wasn't. Yeah. I think translations needed to bake. I don't remember the reasons,

but if you do. Dappage rate comment below after you smash that like and subscribe button. I do. I do try to learn a lot from YouTubers for sure. Yeah. Because y'all know how to, you all know how to summarize something that's very technical, but are willing to take the risk

to get flamed by a bunch of nerds because you know that your analogy is like making the point right right like like you don't care the gnome used to be the new network object model environment right like what was that yeah that's that was gnOME's first name, the GNOME network object. Sure. Model environment, yeah. Okay. Around some concepts called Corba. Look that up.

You don't want to look that up, dude. Don't look that up. Yeah, but people would nitpick at you, right? They'll be like, hey, you know, the pronunciation ones especially. Right? Because that's how you know when someone works on a thing, right? They call it GNOME, right right so it's like hi talks yeah whenever i mention um whenever i mention anything related to linux to someone who's not involved in linux and i say gnome there's always like a weird look on their face like what do you just say yeah i don't tell them anything

yeah i don't really i only tell them anything i don't talk to people about linux unless they ask something i don't if someone has an old computer and i know they just need anything. I don't talk to people about Linux unless they ask something. I don't. If someone has an old computer and I know they just need a browser, I just tell them, here you go. Yeah, that's fair. And then I SSH into it every once in a while to do that. But I'm not even going to do that anymore. What we're going to do is I'm going to set up a slow rolling tag called

a GTS for Bluefin. It's Grand Touring support. So newer than an LTSts but not fedora 38 so what i'm gonna do is just it's just fedora minus one because i found out from a bunch of buddies that worked at canonical i was like man how do you use fedora at work because that thing does move fast you know i mean it's high quality you know but things are way more automated now and And, you know, Fedora and Ubuntu used to be way worse, man. They used to be way worse. And I was like, oh, that's a little bit aggressive. Oh, my second day, the Linux people told you, you want to run Fedora minus one,

right? Because RHEL is a bit too old, right? And Fedora, you want, that's cool, whatever. And then they explained the model back to me and they're like, you want that's cool whatever and then they explain the model back to me and they're like you're still getting something new every six months but your extensions are already ported and they always bring the kernel and the mesa stuff back to the minus one so what are you missing out on except i i call that the throttle with these image-based systems, right? Because you can go from Rawhide and, you know, Enterprise Linux's Alma and Rocky. I think Rocky, I shouldn't have mentioned which one. One of them has an OS tree image

because obviously for server and edge, that makes sense. And I was like, what about desktop? And they're like, no one's asking for that. I was like, I am, I am now, right? Because if if i gave you bluefin but it was based on centos stream or whatever that's a boon to lts you know but you see something cool on omg abuntu you can rebase up latest bling right and then like that's pretty cool oh this is pretty stable i think i'll stick here if not you switch back see that that's one thing I also want your audience to understand is it is so frustrating to see and know the hard work that these people put in this software.

And then when there's an upgrade to see that work, there's nothing that broke my heart more than like Joey was like the nicest person in the world. I would write the most amazing article about a cool app that we never know about these things, man. You have to, especially now in FlatHub, I see stuff that I never even heard of. And someone tells me about it. And I was like, man. And then at the very end, they have that PPA instructions, knowing that a certain percentage of those people in six months are in trouble. Yep. Yep. You know, and sure, for the longest time we did, we did it. instructions knowing that a certain percentage of those people in six months are in trouble.

Yep. Yep. You know, and sure. For the longest time we did, we did it. We tried to fix a symptom, right? Ask a boon to was a great resource because now it's just writing Google and people dunk on the Amazon lens for unity. Right. But they forget the ask a boon to lens that we made that you could just hit super and type your problem in and we would auto sort them for you and prune them and you would get the results and we took that information from the ask a boon to api or whatever and we took all that crowdsource stuff that the community had given and used those tools to filter back to them right um that's why i know it sucks that you didn't like the amazon thing but now every youtuber has an affiliate link at the bottom which i think is hilarious um i think you know the wikipedia one would have been i think the issue with the lens is that it was just

there and it yeah it was just auto innate like if you have like an affiliate link in the bottom video like you can choose not to use that but if you have like an affiliate link in the bottom of your video like you can choose not to use that but if you're using your your search on those versions of ubuntu it was just there by default and you would have to like go out of your way to get rid of it yeah and it's always the issue right right now i would have done it differently now right because i think now people understand the economics of what it takes to fund having a cool desktop right so if i were to do it if i were to do unity today let's say we're adding a lens or whatever i would say check it out we're going to do these unity lenses they're going to be they're going to be

open source because to this day right it can only be in ubuntu unless it's like open source um exceptions are made for hardware but you got to do that, right? Some distros don't. That's why Fedora is the way it is. And that's why I have to make this thing. Right. And I would say, so here's the first one is going to be Ask Ubuntu, right? We're going to filter that good stuff that you have.

And we'll add Wikipedia, maybe a cool few sound ones. There will be commercial ones. And when you have those, they're going to fund the development for all of this stuff. So we need your help to make that classy because I think now it took a while because back then it did seem really bad.

Yeah. Now, man, compared to what your Chromebook does, like your average, not even a pixel, man, like the really crappy android phones where that thing is only malware you know um i was like surely we can all figure out a classy way to have it right and how would you do it today right you would you would leave a thing for an affiliate link right so for youtubers say hey put your code in the unity lens if you like my content

and then we can figure it out right or like you could plug into your favorite thing. Like think about all of the cool stuff that could have been happening by having that API search thing. It didn't really work out. Right. Um, I think technically it was also janky. It wasn't as fun to use as like you think it should be. And also when you look back even when they do it right like in windows like when i'm opening that menu so like that's not that's not what i'm looking for at this current time i was looking for this stuff i would be opening a browser yeah doing these things but if you had a dedicated key let's let's separate it from the super key right separate it from the windows key and then it was like a cool spotlight thing that

came down it kind of gave you information and did all that stuff and all the stuff that these productivity tools it also had the issue where amazon's api at the time was a little bit jank and uh you couldn't properly filter out adult products. Yeah. Yeah. That was a problem. Yeah. There's a lot of, but hey, you,

you've already shipped naked people. Especially if you're, you know, a fan of like Dungeons and Dragons, you type in dungeon and you know, not, not, not what you're looking for.

No, no. Hey, but if you're into that, I want to cut. Yeah. I mean, also at the,

at, at that time, right. You have to have those kind of conversations right but if you started with something like wikipedia or someone else who has done that filtering for you and you don't have to be the one to do that you know yeah like what if the you know what if what if the unity lens was the arch wiki? The little section that had the thing you wanted and you can make that really slick to update your system. That's the stuff I was hoping we would get. Unfortunately, everyone got bent around the axle around the whole thing.

And it didn't work. The first versions of Unity were not performant. They were not up to the level. 1104, I think, in was was was not good at all but you also have to remember like it was one of those things where you had to wait fgl rx was around back then right and they would sort of kind of help us out and give you a pre-release driver a little bit ahead but not nearly enough for what it takes an engineer to make it work so you're shipping the thing hoping amd ships it when they say they're

going to are they i don't i don't know you know but you got to go into it you know assuming that because you can't wait you know they're making money you're not so uh you know things were harder back then as far as drivers are so much better now man like drivers are just so much better that if they if you wanted to you could do it and that's why i think it's cool that cosmic could start off as a prototype as a gnome extension right and then they can go do their thing right a lot of people they get upset i remember one of the very first bugs people filed please don't do this. I went in there. That down vote was... You've earned it.

I was like... It's their money to spend. Cool. Do a good job. Hell yeah. You never know. One thing I learned from someone who worked on the Chrome project before they launched Chrome, they were talking internally internally and if you're the person that told me this story and it's secret sorry um they had hired a bunch of browser people because you can't launch a browser without hiring sure sure sure they had a bunch of

nutscape was gone by then i think right and um and they were like you don't want to make a browser like you really don't want to make a browser it Like you really don't want to make a browser. It's like so hard or whatever. So there were, there were a lot of people on that team that knew browsers, but there were also a lot of people. I wasn't there, but this is how it was explained to me. Um, but it makes the point. Right. And there are a lot of people who had never worked on a browser before. Right. And they had no preconceptions on how to do it. You know? And I remember when chrome first came out they had that comic book and it had all your favorite open source nerds on it like chris de bona was in there and because they had worked on this and like all that kind of stuff and it was like

the cool thing right and chromium i mean things are a little not as awesome now it's but i mean the product is better but back those days we like to look back at those days as the good old days, right? And it was cool. And I remember having discussions at UDS. I really wanted to switch Chromium to Chromium by default. Like back in the day, anyone can make a session at an Ubuntu developer summit, and you'd have to write out why and go. And I would always come with the same apps chromium and banshee which was the

music player that i was really into but it was mono so everybody had to hate on it you know um and like we had someone from the chromium team speak and they talked about how they set it all up and that engineers are doing the engineering business you know and things like that and you get you kind of get to see all of that, but I think it's also important because everyone thought IE had won and why would you even try? That's ridiculous. That's absurd.

But they were looking at it the longer picture. They were like, all our money comes from the web. Therefore, we need to own the web no matter how much it costs. Now we're in the IE situation all over again. Hey, you also have choices now. You know, like

even though it's like, it's all just Chromium underneath. But I have a Chromium browser and then I have Firefox. It's what I rock every day. Well, on that note i'm sorry i could go all day by the way i didn't even like bore you to death we can do this whenever you want man

usually i would end the show like half an hour ago but like you just kept yelling i was like i'm not man dude i met a lot of cool people and you know like they bust their ass on the stuff every day that's why i get into it and that's why i'm like trying to bring that positivity you know get the thing yeah you know let's let's do this we know what it takes a village to solve this problem so i'm like let's go man let's fix linus's problem yeah not torvalds i think his computer works yeah probably i'm at the other one well let people know uh where they let people know where they can find you, where they can find your work, all that fun stuff.

Yeah, go to ublue.it. Like, ublue it. Like, you point at a laptop. I love that name. It's so good. But universal blue, like, totally makes sense. Right? So, and like I said, you know, it's fun to, like,

make a funny little joke, but then, like, be serious about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm using ubuntu every day on the thing uh so yeah go to ublue.it and then at the bottom there's links to our discord and i think my hacky derm and on twitter i'm at george at hackyderm.io that is the cool mastodon server i'm on so i'll leave all that stuff in the uh description down below if anyone wants to go check it out yeah and smash that like and subscribe button yeah all that um as to me the main channel is brodie robertson i do videos there six days a week something like that um go check it out links videos all fun stuff uh the gaming channel brodie on games i stream on youtube and twitch

twice a week i really, really? Yeah. Been playing some Yakuza recently, which is very fun. I'm playing Division 2, man. That game has hours. Hours. It's worth the Uplay, Cenk. And if you're listening to the

audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. And the... Wait. If you're watching the video, the audio version, RSS feed, iTunes, other things, just go to

a podcast platform. You'll find it there. There's also clips. So if you don't want to watch the entire thing, I know there were clips. A lot of fun stuff. Did I give you good clips? I hope you have good clips. I will find stuff. Usually I go back through... I don't know there were clips you know a lot of fun stuff did I give you good clips? I hope you have good clips I will find stuff I don't like time stamp stuff I just go back through and like

jump back through topics I think it was a good idea if you've not seen it yet go back and watch last week's episode with Sick Codes he is the guy who hacked the John Deere tractors and played Doom on them among many other ridiculous things. The repercussions

that that has. John Deere is really determined to find out what his name and address is and he refuses to give it to them. It's amazing. I'm a fan. Right to repair you have to have it. Absolutely.

Yeah, that should be pretty much everything. So I'll give you the final word. What do you want to have it absolutely yeah that should be pretty much everything so I'll give you the final word what do you want to say try it try it if you can I think of this as like a rocket ship we're going on exploring where no person has been before if you go on my YouTube channel I have a video of Captain Kirk's

opinion on immutable systems and yeah it's you know sometimes you might get stranded on a planet. We might have to come back for you, but you know, the adventure is there. And once you get used to it, like there are people, once they get it and they get it, that's it for them. And we're building it together. We're not taking away anything from you except pain if you choose to opt in, but we're definitely going for it right all flat packs zero trust go for it you know you have to have whaling for this so the security works so x ain't coming

with sorry it'll be around for a while but that day someday that is going to be removed from the image and we will celebrate that day so yeah i'm looking for people who really, really want to flex their Linux skills. Like if you want to learn how to do server cloud stuff, if you think all of this stuff I'm talking about is interesting to you, you could do a lot worse than trying to bring that cloud native model to the desktop, because then you're going to want to bring that to you for work because the benefit, I could do a whole video on that. Just like making it rock. Sorry.

You said last word and I just, try it. You're going to edit it to just say, just try it. No, I'll leave it all in there. Um, yeah.

Yeah. But check it out. If I've got hours of YouTube videos on my channel, uh, just me kind of blabbing about this stuff and we're always happy to answer questions so like no one's gonna yell no one's gonna yell at you unless you come come swinging at me or something i don't know like we don't have to take anyone off the discord yet you know the guy you uh replied to my comments uh terry who's always you know terry

the guy the the guy who was like uh actually i'm gonna going to find the exact. Show me. Yeah, I'll be like, show me your GitHub repo. Show me what you got. Flex, show me what you can do. Let's see, Terry. That's my challenge to like the system administrators out there. It was the immutable. You know, if you,

if you maintain your systems like this and you probably have the Linux skills to fix the thing that you hate the most, but you have to get the model. That model, you have to, Linux skills to fix the thing that you hate the most. But you have to get the model. That model, you have to... That's the thing you have to give up. You can't compromise on that design because the entire thing is based on that design.

The commenter question was, immutable, I don't trust myself using Linux. And a problem solved by simply getting off your backside, doing proper backups, not understanding how Linux works better. There, fix that for you. You can thank me later. Every single person that I know that works on very, very large systems that have millions and millions of dollars going through them, they will say, yes, I don't trust myself. I don't trust anybody at all. There are systems out there where after you SSH to it it it's considered dirty it gets cleaned like the automated like

humans we don't want them you only want them there to make that decision like for a restore from backup you definitely want a human to be there right like there's there's certain things but for a lot of it if it's toil stop celebrating toil that's my last message stop celebrating toil and let's move on to the real problem this is your your pps your ppps your ppp yes yes okay yeah you're on another tangent um cool uh that should be it then and i'm out