Tech Over Tea - Improving Fedora Linux From The Inside | Neal Gompa

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Today we have the one and only Neal Gompa on the show, if you've done been involved in Fedora or OpenSUSE SIGs you've almost certainly heard the name, in fact he runs some of the major SIGs like the Asahi Linux and KDE SIGs and has a big focus on doing things upstream. ==========Guest Links========== Github Sponsor: https://github.com/sponsors/Conan-Kudo Github: https://github.com/Conan-Kudo Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/Conan_Kudo Twitter: https://twitter.com/Det_Conan_Kudo Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@Conan_Kudo ==========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.

We are recording. Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to episode, I don't know, 180-something, six, seven, something like that. I don't know. I've lost track at this point. There's a number somewhere. Yeah, it's in the 180s. I know that. Welcome to the show, Neil Gompa. How's it going? I know that you've been, like, involved in Flock, but I imagine a lot of people just didn't realize that you've shown your face before, because I've only ever seen the Detective Conan picture. Yeah, so, yeah, it's an interesting morning. It's the, you know, the beginning of September. Technically, it's the Labor Day over here in the US, where I live. i live um it's a it's a nice it's a nice day i'll probably like after this go outside for a nice walk and and you know chillax a little bit it is 12 15 in the morning um i'm going to go to sleep did you agree to this time i've done way worse than this i have gone to sleep and woken up at four in the morning before to do podcasts with some people i so okay here's the thing right i have a so i don't just do the youtube thing full time i also have a uh job in

a supermarket doing like night filling work like nothing important is just whatever um i get home about 30 minutes before this so for me like i'm still awake it's not really a big deal oh so you're a night shift over yeah you do a night shift over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do a night shift thing. Okay. So you've already switched your sleeping rhythms around for this. Well. For the most part. Look, I try to get up at like eight, nine in the morning.

So I'm going to get up. What is wrong with you? Look. I realized you're an Australian. I'm just like, this is why I was like, I don't know how we're, how we're like, I was totally okay with like doing this in my evening, which would be your morning. And that would be way more legit.

We're here now. We're here now. So it's fine. I thought, oh, well, maybe Brody's just an Australian that happens to live somewhere closer. So he was okay with this. I was like, all right, sure, that's great. But no, you're an Australian in Australia talking to me at midnight.

I was like, oh my God. Yeah, it's fine. Look, as I said, I've done way worse than this. Yeah, that's all I'll say. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, I'll say. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, I'm sorry. It's fine.

It's fine. I'm just going to sleep in tomorrow. It's fine. Not a big deal. So Neil, explain who you are and what you do for anyone who doesn't happen to know. I don't know if there's a simple answer for that question. I don't think there is. I've looked at your LinkedIn.

Yeah. So I, for I guess the focus of your audience, I've kind of styled myself as a professional technologist. I'm also an open sourcer or whatever title you want to use for that. I've been involved in Linux and open source source in some former fashion for 20 years or longer and that by the way means that i've been doing this since i was a kid so wow i'm not old and sometimes though i feel it when i talk to some of the people that get in and they're like, what is, you know, you know, they've never heard of some of the references I make or like a floppy disk or Windows 95. And I'm like, oh, I, I heard because like I first used Windows 3.1. Anyway, you know, there are some of those like disk maintainers like 15 years old.

Like some of them are my disk or like are you a distro maintainer already like i mean to be fair i got started when i was uh when i i started making fedora remixes when i was 14 wow uh yep so i i've done that i i've done that as a kid um but no i've so I've done that I've done that as a kid But no, so I've been doing Open source, Linux and open source stuff For like 20 plus years I actually got started I think in like I want to say 2000 2001

Yeah, it was 2001, it was right after Windows XP Became a thing That's how This is how you date me I remember windows XP. I think, um, I think my first computer we had was XP as well. Yeah. Yeah.

So the first computer I had that my family had was actually an IBM PC XT running DOS. Uh, and that was cause like when my dad, uh, was, um, worked from home for a while after my mom had me, they sent him a computer to work from home. Right. And that was what he had. And then like my first experience with the computer. So my dad was a math professor at an Indiana University, Kokomo. And like I remember in my early birthdays, like he would get his office computer upgraded. I think it was like my sixth or seventh birthday.

I forget which. He got the computer outfitted with a CD-ROM drive and a sound card and a 2.1 sound speaker set. And put on things like Reader Rabbit and whatever with multimedia. And I was like, oh, wow. And that eventually, when the university upgraded his computer again, um, they got that, um, they moved from gateway to Dell. So they got a Dell OptiPlex to replace his gateway 2000 machine. He bought the gateway 2000 machine from the university for like nothing and then, uh, gave it to me and it was my first computer and I promptly tore it apart did my own

upgrades and did my own things it's like it came with Windows NT 4.0 on it I wiped it and put Windows 95 on it then later I put I did a multi-boot with Windows NT in 98 which by the way is really hard because Windows NT doesn't know how to read FAT32. And then later on, like, I started experimenting with Linux, and this is where, like, Red Hat Linux 6.2 out of a library book. The library book was actually for a different version of Red Hat Linux that didn't match the book. So, because the librarians obviously don't know what CD is what, and so they put the

wrong ones in and and thankfully they were the right they were a full collection so i wound up installing it and i broke my computer and that's how i got started with linux so that's the release from 2000 then so i think red hat linux 6.2 was like 98 or 99 but again i did this in like 2000 yeah i'm looking at the release list six if it is 6.2 that's 6.2 zoot in april 3rd 2000 it may have been another one or you may just be getting the timeline wrong no yeah no if that's right then it still fits within the window of like hey this is when i did stuff right right um uh and i I started with Red Hat Linux and broke my computer multiple times, upgraded through that all the way to nine. And then Fedora, you know, the Fedora,

when Red Hat Linux 10 was canceled, then went to Fedora Core, you know, I followed on that chain. But anyway, like I started all the way back then as a user using this stuff, following into Fedora and actually even, you know even going to Ubuntu. Like Ubuntu in like, I think my first version of Ubuntu

was Ubuntu 5.04 Breezy Badger. For a long time, I could actually say all the ones in sequence. I could remember all the code names and actually say them. I don't know if I could pull that off right now, but that was definitely a thing for a long time that i could do um but yeah so then i was i was dual ubuntu fedora for a long time all

the way up until until college when i stopped using ubuntu because um in about 2011 or so, then they introduced Unity and it was kind of a mess. Like the experience was good and I wound up actually using it for like family computers and whatever. And especially it was great because it was the only 10 foot-ish UI that was available on Linux out of the box. And so we would use it for the family computer connect, the TV.

But I wound up having problems like maintaining ubuntu systems back then and it was just and at the at the time it was also like really difficult to talk to canonical folks and ubuntu folks to get things to be improved and so i kind of shipped moved away from it back to like being full-time fedora and this kind of coincided with me graduating from college and then getting into my into my professional career which cemented me just using fedora day-to-day for everything and contributing to it a few years later i started contributing to open i started contributing to open suza my first usage of suza distributions

actually dates all the way back to around the same time i started trying to use ubuntu uh helpfully the installer crashed i think it was susa linux 9.1 i want to say it's either 8.0 or 9.1 i forget which one but it it helpfully crashed from english into german and it was like this yellow on red yellow on red that i couldn't read and it's just like well okay clearly this doesn't work and i tried a few times i think even all the way up until i finally gave up with 10.0 it's like okay clearly suze is not made for me because this keeps happening and um but like yeah um so that's like i've used um debianish redish, SUSE-ish distributions for almost 20 years now. And I started contributing them about 15-ish years ago to Fedora. And I pretty much haven't stopped.

It's just grown in scope and whatever. And then for OpenSUSE, I started poking at it, like, I think it was 10, 11, 12 years ago, and then started actually contributing to it about 10 years ago. And I've kind of kept doing it ever since. And in that time frame, I've jumped from many different distributions. I've used Red Hat-ish, SUSE, Debian-ish, as I said. I've also used things like Gentoo, Arch, Mandriva, and that's how I kind of got into Magia as well many years ago, and OpenMandriva as well, and some of their offshoots. So I've

kind of been a little bit all over the place, partly because of stuff that I've used, but also like I genuinely feel excited about open source and being involved in it and helping people like I look at open source as my way of leveraging the skills and knowledge and capabilities I have to help benefit the world. So I have a very altruistic streak when it comes to how I look at, at open source software. So part of that means that like, I try to help people, which means I wind up doing things that I wouldn't actually, I work on things that I don't use a lot, which it makes me a weirdo because in most cases in open source, people only really work on things that they use or are compelled to deal with. I just do all the things all the time. all the things all the time. I don't know how many people that you've talked to about how

they got into Linux, but with people from your era, whatever generation, whatever term you want to use for it, it's always a very similar story. It's like, okay, I started on Red Hat Linux. I eventually started using Ubuntu. It wasn't something because Ubuntu was

offering a more desktop- friendly experience, better for the hardware you're using something along those lines, I would assume. And then when Unity comes out, it's like, well, well,

okay. So like, it's not that I disliked the Unity experience. I think that there was, it was a major step forward. When the GNOME experience came out, it was actually my point of adapt basically like the the um when when the gnome experience and the unity experience came up it was very

obvious that they were comparable there were some similarities there the difference between the two was that it felt like unity was actually like targeting a real person um like i felt like when i was using it was like oh there's there's things here people are thinking about what i want to use things feel slightly integrated it's it's like a thing gnome has for a long time felt to me like just somebody's vision of how people think they should use it like in some respects very close to the apple-esque approach right without the without the um the pull to make them make them uh really uh something people wanted all the and like everyone wanted but i've bounced back and forth between for example kde xfc mate gnome cinnamon um eventually

settled on to katie plasma withasma towards the end of Plasma 4 and then into Plasma 5 I actually joined the Fedora KD just shortly after we started shipping Plasma 5 and sort of kind of by default took over the SIG

because I was the last man standing on a lot of the stuff so that sort of happened yeah um but like I used to use gnome 2 and I really liked that experience back then and when they moved when Ubuntu moved to Unity and fedora moved to gnome 3 um well gnome didn't stay on my computers for very long and because it was it was really not it was not complete right and it was a very painful experience but Unity while the the reason I essentially stopped using Ubuntu over it wasn't because I disliked the Unity experience per se I thought it was great the problem was that

Ubuntu was horribly unstable all the time like I was actually having failed distribution upgrades package updates going wrong applications getting forked because of patches and gtk and stuff like that to make it all work like it wasn't it superficially was looked integrated and was very a very clean experience but when you started putting things into it it started like falling apart very quickly and it was just not something i wanted to tolerate all the time so i i moved away from it and for a while i used cinnamon and then um mate and then eventually i landed on kd plasma i guess it kind of makes sense why ubuntu was really weird during the era because they they were very much trying to work

out like can we not just be a computer operating system but can we be something in the smartphone space they had like the whole ubuntu phone there was the ubuntu tv stuff which hardly anybody remembers there was the ubuntu tablet as well which was separate from the phone thing they're doing all of these things at the exact same time and i backed the phone oh you did? Wow. I did. Why? Because that phone was nonsense. I've read the specs. The specs are literally nonsense. They don't make any sense. I backed the phone because back then I was actually in,

I was a telecom wonk back then. I was really in the cellular, in mobile space. But I also wanted to see something more aligned to what I cared about. Yeah. And Ubuntu touch was something that I was excited about. And Mark Shuttleworth put up that, I think it was an Indiegogo. Yeah.

Yeah. It was Indiegogo. Yes. Yeah. And I backed it. No, I get it. It sounds really cool.

Yeah. I backed it and then they didn't, but they gave me my money back, which was actually, it was like, oh, okay, well, this is, that's fine. I mean, this is in contrast with another one that I backed a few years later, where I still haven't gotten my money back, and I have no anything, and I just,

oh, man, and I backed way more money for that one. I've talked about this before, but I just need to remind people just how ridiculous the Ubuntu Edge phone was. It was such a cool concept. Oh, yeah. So, the iPhone 5, 1GB of RAM, Samsung Galaxy S4, 2GB,

Ubuntu Edge, 4GB. Okay. Galaxy S4, 16GB of storage, iPhone 5, 64GB, Ubuntu Edge, 128GB. Those are not crazy today, but 10 years ago, they were nuts. Yeah, that's the 128 gig internal storage.

The screen wasn't that crazy. The screen was actually a lower res than what the S4 had at the time. That was a 1080p screen. This was only going to be 720. Well, to be fair, Samsung manufacturers had their own displays, and they were keeping all the best stuff for themselves back then. That is absolutely fair, yes. The rest of it is all totally normal stereo speaker though i wish more i still don't i still don't know a phone that has a stereo speaker there was a couple of hdc phones that came out uh like years back but i don't know why it never became standard it i guess it's because it's really difficult to do it properly like auditorily like you know having special audio on a phone means that essentially you've got to have speakers in two places.

Right. Aside from the circuitry nightmare that that's going to create. How does it make a phone call sound? How does it make, like there's a lot of times they reuse the speaker that's used for phone calls. I would assume you just swap it into mono for a phone call. You just cut off one of the speakers. That would make sense, but, you know, some people

would be crazy. That's true. There are people that walk around with speakers glued to their chest. That is weird. I hate those people. Stop it. Just get earphones. Go to any store and there'll be earphones there for

like a couple of dollars and also nowadays headphones and earphones and earbuds especially are now so good at spatial audio that you don't need a jukebox strapped to your back and chest you really don't know also no one needs to hear it. No. No, really don't. If you want it to be like, you know, you don't want to have something in your ear, you can get bone conductive earphones. They just, like, stick on your face. Those are so interesting. I haven't used one of those. I've not used them.

But they look cool. I want to. I don't think they're that expensive anymore, either. Yeah, they used to be, like, thousands of dollars. They must... Yeah. Let's see bone conductor bone conduction headphones let's see uh the best bone conduction headphones of 2023 thank you tech radar uh what do you the you can give me a price no okay we'll just click this one 200 oh so that's like right in line with high-end headphones. Yeah. Oh, that's actually, that's $200 Australian, so that's

I don't know what that is in real money. In real money? That's probably like, what, maybe $180 or something like that? I think our dollar's way worse, and that's only $150. Wow. I was being generous. Yeah, our dollar's not great. Our dollar's definitely not great.

How did we get here? We're talking about Unity, being generous yeah our dollar's not great our dollar's definitely not great um how did how did we get here we'll talk about unity and then ubuntu you got to the phone yeah and then you they also had the ubuntu tv stuff which that was really cool i never saw anything i never saw anything but it was very cool but also the ubuntu tv is like essentially scaling up the unity ui television and and that always made sense to me because that's, I actually did that. Like my personal, like I used to own a 55 inch television when I,

before I moved to where I live now, you know, I, you know, when I was in college and whatever, I had a big TV and whatever, but I connected it to a computer and I used the unity UI for it because it made sense.

So like, to me, that whole concept always made sense, but I never saw anything come out of it well i don't know if anything ever did there was a ces demo god i don't 2012 2011 whenever they first like showed it off um then there was a bunch of news stories that came out after that people like hey this is so cool this is exciting open source TVs a year later like and Canonical still

doesn't have system integrators yeah okay this is going nowhere yup that's the problem they have because by that point Android TV was in like early stages but still existed Apple TV was in early stages but still existed apple tv was in early stages

but still existed and then canonical comes along doing their thing so it's like okay but how do you compete with google and apple who already got something established in this market and already had partners like that was going to be so difficult to overcome i think it would have been less difficult to overcome than people realize because the actual key problem, and this is always dogged, even desktop Linux, is that multimedia consumption on Linux is a pain. And if you, like an Ubuntu TV, for it to be actually usable, would need to have partnerships with media providers to provide integration so that those services would work.

We were at the beginnings of the streaming content era. And not having a Netflix and a YouTube app built into Ubuntu TV and not having some of the other burgeoning content things all worked out, that probably made it difficult for them to get partnerships with TV makers. It's not like the TV makers want to make their own software if they don't have to.

Yeah, for sure. With the app, one of the things I think did act as a barrier to entry for that is they wanted the unity ui to be like the the i guess the single ui for accessing the content they didn't want to have like you know you load into the netflix app it's its own ui you load into the youtube app it's right ui and i think that level of killed it you're taking that kind of control away from those companies they just didn't really have that interest yeah nobody has that interest like it makes obviously it makes sense in the

open source space but trying to convince netflix to do it it just wasn't gonna happen it makes sense in every space but commercially it wasn't gonna happen yeah no that makes because right because like the reason you would do that is so that you have a pattern. You maximize Fitts' Law. You're able to give people something to work with and understand what's going on. That's incredibly important. But companies don't want to. They would like to have distinct interfaces, distinct experiences.

They want to be memorable. They want to be memorable. They want to be sticky. And so everybody tries to do something a little different so that they can be distinct. Yeah. No, that definitely makes sense. That definitely makes sense. One of the things you mentioned along your early journey

was doorbooting Ubuntu and Fedora at the same time. Why were you doing that rather than just sticking with one or the other? If you happen to remember? I do. I'm trying to think about how to phrase this. Ubuntu was great for the consumption side

of things. Because it was... You've got to remember the context of this. At this time, Wi-Fi was still difficult on linux so it was great for consumption it was an easy mode that i needed if i needed to get quickly into my computer and do stuff but my passion and my my interest in actually like doing stuff for real was always in fedora and so i kept both because I wanted to, I wanted to see if I could make it so I could

use one fully. And so Ubuntu was a distribution that I really couldn't get involved in and I couldn't really get engaged in. And there was, it was very closed off from for me as someone who exists outside of the purview of the core of Ubuntu team right and that is still kind of true even today although they're a little bit more open now than they used to be it's ultimately still canonical decisions about what goes on and everything even the community flavors are subject to that yeah right the the excising of flat pack from all the flavors recently was an example of this right so um the model that Fedora has is more forgiving and more community-ric. There's this, again, this kind of boils down to the philosophies between canonical and Red Hat. So if you look at Red Hat's philosophy, there's this distinction of a project and a product. And this distinction manifests in

several key ways. The most important key way is that projects are not tightly coupled to the company decisions. Products are. And so you see projects taking lives of their own and getting more stakeholders and becoming more neutral over time. They don't start out that way, but they grow to be more neutral over time. And Red Hat in some respects is essentially a dispassionate investor that essentially keeps a project afloat. And that model maximizes community engagement and participation and support. And then you look at things like,

you know, the different spins and remixes and stuff like that, right? Most recently I did the Fedora Asahi remix. But, you know... things like, you know, the different spins and remixes and stuff like that, right? Most recently, I did the Fedora Asahi remix. But, you know... Oh, were you involved? Right, I know you're in the SIG now, but were you... I made the SIG. Oh, you made the SIG?

Oh, you just forgot to list it. Okay. I forgot to list it until a couple weeks ago. Oh, so you're the guy to thank for that. I didn't realize that. Well, so in the Asahi Linux announcement, they mention me by name, which probably is still a weird feeling.

I forgot to read it. I'm sure I heard about it. Yeah, so I created it. I created the SIG, and I helped create, I helped with a friend of mine, Davide Calvika. You know,

we, we got all the software pulled into Fedora and getting it integrated. And then I helped, I made the, the image descriptions and I work on the tooling along with Davida and a few others to actually build it out. But like, that's something that is super easy to do in Fedora because all the tooling is open, all the infrastructure is open, all the possibilities are open.

Like whereas and like this is also like all the different spins that exist, the Fedora KDE spin, Fedora Kinoite. You see the Cinnamon XFC, the LXQ, all the labs python classroom um astronomy um games lab these if you try to listen while you're here all night we'll be here all night yes there's a lot of them i think it's like i think we're up to like almost 30 deliverables i don't know man there's a lot there's a lot i'm not even talking about like the containers and the cloud images and all the variants. There's a lot going on there. But because of that product split. So Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very, very small compared to Fedora.

There's like, I think, a 20th of the packages, 10th or 20th of the packages. The deliverables are considerably smaller. RHEL doesn't provide live images. RHEL doesn't provide other desktops anymore. They used to have KDM. Super sad that they got rid of it. I would love to see it come back again someday. They don't have ButterFS.

ButterFS is amazing. Again, I hope it comes back someday. But they make choices of their own. And Fedora is not required to follow Red Hat in that respect. There are obviously a few guardrails. But again, Red Hat acts more as a dispassionate investor in the project, sponsored by Red Hat. And that's a very important thing. Whereas if you look at Ubuntu, it is a canonical product that also manifests itself as a project. But because they are one in the same brand, they are one in the same community, one in the same thing. Canonical ultimately has to exert tremendous influence and control because that's the thing that they're pitching.

That's the thing that they're selling. That's the thing that they're building their business on directly. And this strategy also makes sense because ultimately Ubuntu is derived from Debian. In the early days, in the very beginning, and I think it's still true even now, if you go look at contributing Ubuntu stuff, they will tell you, go to

Debian. I've contributed to Debian. That is a whole process in itself. In regards to that, I don't think a lot of people realize how much of Debian nowadays is canonical employees actually contributing upstream to Debian. Well, so, and again, this comes back to the project product split thing. Because Ubuntu's input is exclusively Debian, with some exceptions.

The way that even canonical employees do stuff, like, so for example, the Gnome stack and Debian is essentially maintained by canonical employees. So Gnome gets upgraded on Ubuntu schedule in Debian and then imported from Debian back into Ubuntu. Right. So things like that, things that they care about in Ubuntu that they, that they as a team maintain, like,

I believe, I think, I don't know this for certain. It's been a while since i've last checked but i believe one of the kernel maintainers for debian is actually a canonical employee who happens to also maintain the ubuntu kernel and so they do some work shared between the two um there's other stuff like this like some packages of course that are things that like net plan and whatever like they maintain those in ubuntu but to do that they also have to maintain

it in debian and like even though there's a you know they're maintaining their own packaging for ubuntu they're required to have a package in debian so they have a very uh they don't consider ubuntu at least in their actions i don't know if that's how they feel about it like in words or say but i don't think they consider Ubuntu distinctly a project in its own right it's more of a productization of Debian which I think is a fair characterization of it um but the problem is the Debian's toolings is pretty antiquated and it's really um if you think like it's I know some people have made the comment of Fedora's infrastructure is all loosely coupled

and kind of arcane and difficult to follow. Man, it can be so much worse. It can be so much worse. It could be better but it could also be worse. And in my view

seeing how things work in Debian I feel like Debian is and I in my view like seeing how things work in Debian I feel like Debian is worse because the way that Debian does things is that each individual maintainer has essentially total control of how that package is maintained

they can choose to not use source control they don't have to use git or svn or mcgurl or whatever. They can just upload stuff right into what they call the archive, and the FTP masters, which is a team that manages uploads from Debian developers and maintainers,

checks it over and then imports it into the repositories. They don't care how it's produced, as long as they give them the required inputs, the required artifacts. So I've had to deal with Debian packages that have no version control. I've had to deal with Debian packages that have weird version control because, because it's just not,

there's no consistency requirements for Debian. It's, it's, that is, that's how worse you can get. Anyway, so Ubuntu, I think, doesn't feel as... And because of this distinction of Ubuntu versus Fedora, I've always felt like I've had more ownership of my platform in Fedora than Ubuntu. And so I've always leaned a little bit more towards Fedora, but I'm also a pragmatist in the sense that if something is going to work in a particular context or environment, and I really can't use what I prefer there, I will use the other thing instead.

And so for a long time, I wound up using Ubuntu for stuff where nothing else worked because that was what worked. I always tried to use it as an opportunity to learn to see if I can fix my thing too. And that's kind of how we got started doing all those things in multiple distributions. Eventually, one of the things that I came to figure out was that if I wanted to do something well, if I wanted to do something right, I have to provide the maximally useful, minimal viable solution. And the way that that works is I have to think about the different distributions that I use and work with and interface with. And I think about the solutions I'm making and see what the requirements of all the different ones are before I make something. And then I go make something and put it in all of them. Because if I don't do it that

way, what winds up happening is you create these little islands of inconsistency and you create these different, you get these different ways of solving the problem in different thought processes, not necessarily in a way that multiple, like the whole community can benefit, but only some communities can benefit. And so like, for example, Fedora's multimedia stuff, that's actually, I like, I took a good chunk of what I did in Fedora from OpenSUSE. And then the improvements I did in Fedora from, I ported back to OpenSUSE. And so like, for me, it's not about making just one platform better than the other. It's about making the whole community benefit from all the stuff.

And so whenever I try to make something, like, I'm not going to go out super crazy and go do it for everybody. Like, there's just too much Linux for that. It shows 30 so much time in the day. Yeah. But I will try to at least have more than one. But I will try to at least have more than one that like so I try to make something I try to make things that work for Fedora and OpenSUSE at least and see if I can extend it further or at least I'll talk to other people and say like, hey, this is something I did across more than one distribution. Do you think this could help for you and whatever? And as it turns out, when you build something that's in more than one distribution already, if it's in two, it's easier to get it to three, to then four, to then eight, to then all of them. Right.

So you can accelerate that snowball effect and that network effect. An example of this was, gosh, I think it was like almost six, I want to say six years ago or something like that. I made the change in Fedora from the old package config implementation. So the package config is a tool that you use in development to be able to find out compiler flags for using a library or a module or something for building a project. We use this all the time all over the place in Linux land. There are multiple implementations of package config. So the one that Fedora was using was some old version that was originally made by Debian and then part of GNOME and then part of pre-desktop.

It's all over the place. Wasn't super actively maintained. Kind of a pain to work with and customize. And at the time, I was looking at, like, how can I make it easier for me to support more features and more capabilities and also to be able to bootstrap into new architectural platforms? Package config had a recursive bootstrap problem, which was not great. And so taking that out was important. Well, there was this implementation,

another implementation of package config called package comp, P-K-G-C-O-N-F. And I met the maintainer, the developer of it. So that was from 2017-ish? Yeah. Okay, I found the wiki page. Yep. And the maintainer, who now is Ariadne, the

lead of Alpine. Yeah, so she created back then she hadn't transitioned and I knew her by a different name. That's not important. So if you find references to an old name in there, it's because well, I'm trying not to dead name,

but if you look up the history and go through it, you will be confused. Six years ago, yeah, yeah. But Ariadne, who created Alpine and APK and also created PackageCon. And so I worked with her to address any things that I felt that we needed for Fedora. And then we swapped the implementation. Then I introduced it in OpenSUSEa and i got them to swap the implementation then i did it in magia and got them to swap the implementation and after three essentially all the major distributions had swapped and we've gotten to a point now that people were just in

on their own switching so then open mandriva did it and then um and then debian finally i think it was like a couple years ago they they finally pulled the trigger on that there was a whole there's a whole other set of background reasons for why it took so long for debian not going to get into it but uh but they did it finally and so package conference essentially replaced package config uh it's also started replacing it in BSDs too. Because it's not... I'm a copyleft guy. Ariadne is not so much. So she wrote it and licensed it in a permissive license.

BSD people like permissive licenses. So it was an easy win for them. So that's kind of like... That was my first real experience doing that i was like oh this works and so i just started doing it for everything um and like the butter fs stuff that we did and that i've done in fedora with a bunch of other people um like several years later in 2020 for fedora, was very much inspired by not only the experiences I had during my day job at the time from dealing with ZFS and Butterfest, but also from using OpenSUSE, doing my own experiments, working with Butterfest, and coming up with the right way to adopt it

and building on that to put it in. Obviously, the implementation of Butterfest and Fedora is different from OpenSUSE, because there's a number of things that I left out on purpose. Things like the automatic snapshotting and whatever, because figuring out the schemes for doing that is highly distro-specific. And so the SUSE implementation of this

doesn't work on Fedora, not completely. So there's adaptations and other stuff you have to deal with. But it's always been a goal to be able to get to a point where we can have full system snapshotting and stuff like that. But you have to start somewhere. And so that was the starting somewhere. And again, every solution I've worked on so far has been like, let's try to reduce the differences.

Let's try to improve things. I introduced DNF as an alternative package manager in Magia in like 2015, 2016. And I also introduced it in OpenSUSE, I think a few years after that. On all of my OpenSUSE and Magia systems, I use DNF instead of in the case of open suza zipper in the case of magia your pmi i actually from that experience was able to help the open mandriva guys move from your pmi to dnf which then led to rosa moving to dnf and a bunch of other distributions moving to i think like open mamba moved to dnf there was a few others like i apparently wound up becoming the de facto guy of like how do you move an rpm package distribution to dnf and it's happened a lot like i also helped the yachto folks move from smart which was an old unmaintained

package manager i've written by the guy who created snaps yeah so gustavo niemeyer when he was at um connectiva later mandryfa he made the, he made a successor to AptRPM called Smart. And the reason why was because AptRPM was a pain in the butt to develop and maintain. And at the time, this was like 17 years ago or something like that, the Debian people refused, out of principle, to consider having an RPM backend for apt.

Just flat out just said no. Right. There was all kinds of weird, funky politics. I think most of it's not written down. I got fun stories from the people that were involved in it over the years. It's always fun when stuff like that is just, it's just littered over the mail list. It's not written down like that. That takes away all my fun.

Yeah, but they just straight up wouldn't consider it. They didn't want it. And so like app RPM wound up being a very difficult to maintain fork. And so Gustav and Emeier then went and tried to solve the problem by making a brand new package manager that supported multiple different repo sources, different package manager types. Like I think back in the beginning, it was like Slackware and RPM and Debian. And I think now it supports, I want to say it supports Arch packages.

It's still a very dead project now, but like at some point, somebody added Arch packages, I think, to the mix. I don't remember anymore. It's still a very dead project now but like at some point somebody added Arch packages I think to the mix um I don't remember anymore it's been a long time but anyway Gustavo Niemeyer made that and and that was what brought him to canonical eventually and though Ubuntu was originally planning on adopting smart there was a kind of a revolt about it and so they didn't do it I don't know more details about that but i assume that's related to the debian stuff in some way probably um but uh so they didn't adopt smart but gustavo stayed at canonical and eventually i think it's like i don't know it's like a few years later he made clicks and snaps and now the the dude's a CTO of Canonical.

Oh, wait. I thought I'd heard that name. Yeah. Gustavo Niemeyer. I remember the few Canonical employees I've known at the time that used to call him the Mark Whisperer. And I guess, oh, that's very true. He's now the CTO, so he gets to work with them all day. Yeah, I knew that name.

Yeah, okay. Wow. Jeez. I've been all over, man. I used to be involved very early on in the Snap project. It was a Snap format oversight board, which we didn't really do much. I think the only thing we actually managed to do was get them to use SPDX notation for license tags. I think that was it. We got them to do license tags and we got them to be AppStream compatible, sort of. I think that was it. We didn't get to do much else.

But I was involved in the Snap project. I helped make SnapD work on Fedora. I was effectively the maintainer of the Snap system in Fedora for many, many years. I still technically am nominally the maintainer of it. I still occasionally do stuff for it but it's it's a lot of it kind of goes on its own kind of thing now is there even like that many people interested in snap d on fedora in the first

place in the beginning there was a lot of it and also there was a big part of like you don't know which horse to bet on and you don't want to be on the losing horse and you also want to always have some influence on but on every horse that's involved in the race right so there were always there was obviously a lot of people who were interested in flat pack because it was a red hat project and red hatters control the workstation working group which drive that part so of course this whole thing it's also gnome associated part so of course this whole thing it's also gnome associated whole other set of things right but canonical did something that made snaps more viable that was that they reached out to commercial entities and got them to put their snaps in the snap store so at that point in time i was a little worried that we were going to get locked out if we didn't have something in place and it's not like

the snap system is all bad like there's there are things i don't like about it but one of the things i do like about it is that the developer experience is way nicer than any other universal packaging format snapcraft is a pretty good experience compared to say flat pack builder or the app image builder and all those other things um they really put some thought into that um but because they were building these professional you know these professional snaps that are available in the snap store it's like well we got to be able to access them like we have to have access to that yeah we have serious projects in here like slack and spotify and the uh the jet brain stuff is in here as well.

And all of these other big things people recognize. Right. And I've been to a couple of those sprints where representatives of those companies were working with Canonical hand-in-hand to make and maintain them. Right? So I don't think that that was a wrong choice for me to make sure that snaps worked well in Fedora because I didn't know then which one was going to win out. And more importantly, Flatpak still hasn't won.

None of those companies that are making snaps now are making Flatpaks for whatever reason. They're not doing it. So I think it was still the right choice to do that and it makes sense for us to be in that space to make sure that we are able to do that um i i certainly i was going to sorry i was gonna say i totally get like having it be in this space i was more curious about like because i'm not involved like in much of the showroom community i'm sort of watching it from the outside like how much of the like user interest there is in snaps in the first place i think in the

beginning there was a lot more of it it kind of died down over time as the continued pressure and marketing attention like somebody finally figured out that flat pack needed to be marketed sure sure and and and flat hub too and so that eventually started, I think that started, you know, defaults matter. And, and Fedora workstation had with, with flat pack out of the box, and easy button to activate flat hub was a big deal. And that that and then like there were spats with people who are maintaining gnome software, there were spats with people upstream, there was just the whole mess that made you know, my life as the snap system maintainer in Fedora a little bit more difficult

than it needed to be. But you know, I still know people who use snaps in Fedora. Like, I mean, some of my, you know, colleagues in, in, in the past, like they use Fedora, but they also use snaps because that's the way to get those things. Right. It is what it is.

Like from the flat pack side, I think red hat making a long-term stable flat pack runtime, making that available for people to build software freely on it and making the available, say, on Flathub, getting the desktop software that's included in RHEL into their universal base image stuff, that will make a big difference if they decide to do it.

Like I know there's been hints and rumors about it for years. I don't know if they'll actually pull it off at some point. If they do, I think it'll be the tipping point that'll make companies want to build commercial Flatpaks. Because the problem with Flatpaks right now is long-term support for an application. A commercial application is required. Just flat out required. You can't not have that. But the flat hub community

just isn't equipped to do that they don't have and the free desktop runtime is not aimed for that it is just not so you've got to have something for that red hat makes a flat pack runtime they build flat pack apps on that runtime it's in the red hat catalog and if you are a rel subscriber whether you have a free one or a paid one you have access to those apps but i haven't seen much beyond you know red hat produce stuff we'll see how that goes um maybe they'll make a big push with rel 10 which is coming in a couple of years. Um, but who knows? Who knows? Maybe look,

maybe look, it could happen. Uh, it would be cool. I hope they do because like, I want, I want red hat to, I want red hat to,

to do something more engaging in the desktop space. And in the professional desktop space, there's a lot on that pie that they're not slicing up and taking on. So there's definitely some stuff that they could do.

Yeah, the professional desktop space, it's really weird because you've got like this massive amount of systems that it's focused on like just you know hobby individual stuff and then you got red hat you got so you got all of that doing like the big serious stuff but nobody's really targeting that middle point there. Yeah. Well, I think SUSE is probably the closest.

They have SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Right. Which is essentially, or SLED, as they like to call it. That's what they call it. Yep. Don't call it that. It's not a good name. You're sledding on Linux.

It's fine. Sure. I guess, you know, Penguin, all that stuff. Yep, sure. So SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is an offering that they have. You can go to their website, SUSE.com slash shop, and it actually shows up there. You can buy it.

I think it's like 150 bucks a year for it it's not a lot um and you get a desktop that is supported and you can do stuff with it I hope you can do stuff with it too. But like it exists on there. Red Hat used to have an equivalent called Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop. They took it out. They killed it in RHEL 8. And they moved more high end. But SUSE still has a mid-range product as well as a high end one.

And I think like I wish the awareness for these, like, you know, if you go to redhead.com slash store or suza.com slash shop, you actually can purchase subscriptions for paid Linux desktop offerings or Linux workstation or whatever you want to call it, right? And that gives you an opportunity

to not only use a supported platform, you know, in a professional context, that can be important, but you're also essentially funding and supporting the stuff that they're already doing and you're also telling with your dollars that this matters I mean it's it like gnome you know if you like gnome sure you can donate to the gnome Foundation gnome Foundation don't pay for anybody to develop anything that's mostly done by Red Hat and Sousa engineers with collabura and purism also on the side there so yeah like that's there there's a lot going on there and it's it's just so hidden and we don't talk about it a lot because we're always excited about the community free Linux stuff

because community Linux stuff is where all the cool stuff happens. And there's just so much to go on about. And the enterprise space is supposed to be boring. I don't know if boring is the way I would describe the past three years of enterprise Linux. But, like, it's supposed to be. Three months, really? Oh, man. The last three months have been horrible.

Yeah. Yeah. But, no no you are but like you are ever since ever since the centaur stuff that's from it's it's been fun times fun times yes it's been a very exciting time and i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing at least people now know it exists. Yeah, that's true. You know, any publicity is good publicity. Anyone who says that's stupid. Yeah, I don't think that that's a true statement. It's definitely not, no.

But yeah, like the... But this kind of goes back to the thing. It's like the desktop space is very interesting. And when I was, and I've always been very mindful that this is a space that is undervalued and under worked on. So I've increasingly put a lot of effort towards it because my belief is that with open source, you have two choices. You can either pay with effort and knowledge and contribution, or you can pay with money. I do both.

both. And but where I can, where I have the capability to do something meaningful, I pay with effort and contract and, and time and contributions. But where I can't, I'm happy to give money to worthy projects that I use and love and want to support. And I encourage other people to take the same tack, that's the only way that this world gets any better. Like, we talk a lot about sustainability in open source. And, like, for all the screw-ups in Red Hat's messaging around CentOS, I think it's important to note that, like, to note that like if red hat enterprise linux as a product was not being eaten away by um rel derivatives that are freely available

it is quite likely they'd be doing a whole lot more in this space than they are now because they would have the revenue and the justification to do stuff in there there's a whole long series of of events that i've heard from many people because at one point one of my in one of my previous jobs one of my coworkers was the former GM of SUSE. I got to hear all kinds of stories. Like, it is a wild, wild world in the early 2000s. And it's just like, I think I'm glad I was ignorant of most of this, because I don't think that this would have made me a very sad person if I knew this during that time. But yeah, like I look at what's going on in there and I'm just like, yeah, I love free Linux. But I also like put my heart and soul into the community operating systems and do a lot in there because that's how I make that's how I give back. And that's how I support those communities. I think people need to understand that, that like nothing comes for free. And, and that's really, really difficult for some people to grasp,

especially now that we've been 20 years of open source, open source hasn't won, but it's certainly everywhere and that and that might actually be the saddest fact of all i think the only concern like the not the only the the major concern people had with all like all the centaur stuff and then the recent uh the recent stuff that happened with red hat is the fact that it just happened like it I'm sure they had like a lot of conversation internally but to the what it was

shown to the public it just happened suddenly it's not okay so until like there's like a six month grace period like a next release grace period like that it's just like this goes back to what you were saying with the messaging around it was

a bit rough. Obviously people are going to be angry no matter what happens, but if there's some sort of grace period there, I'm sure it would have gone over a lot less aggressively. Well, you know, the Red Hatters were surprised too, so...

Yeah, okay. You are right about the other messaging then. Like, if you... Many Red Hatters talking in social media or in IRC or in Matrix or wherever, they're up front about the fact that they didn't know either. And they've all got their own opinions about it, but everyone is

surprised. The other thing is, you've got to remember that Red Hat's made of a lot of people. And while Red Hat is not this big faceless blob, it's a lot of blobs with faces and then some small group of faceless blobs yeah so it's it's hard well i always try to make it clear whenever i do talk about the red hat stuff the engineers the people out there that are doing like the that work on projects, they are not the ones making these decisions in corporate.

Like I've recently had Gloria Seger on the show. I've had Matthew Miller on the show. I'm sure there are other Red Hat people that I'm blanking on right now that I've had on the show. You're not at Red Hat right now, so you don't technically count, but you were at Red Hat. But I try to make it very clear that when i talk about the red hat

stuff the people in enterprise the people who are making those financial decisions those are not the people that are in the gnome project that are in the fedora project they're in all of these projects doing awesome things they're just trying to make really cool code and really cool projects. Don't blame them for the decisions that corporate either needs to make or feels like they need to be making. But it also comes back to the other part of this, which is, you know, I mentioned earlier, but, you know, you either pay with effort or you pay with money. A lot of people choose to do neither. Right. And that's a problem yeah that that's a real problem it's it's a huge huge problem that

users don't like users of open source software just don't get they don't understand it because because they look at it like any other formal U.S. government term. I worked in the defense adjacent thing, so I know this term is COTS, commercial off-the-shelf software. They look at it like it's for a lot of companies, they define open source and proprietary vendors in the same bucket. It just happens to be the cost for an open source solution is often zero. And maybe there's a preference for an open source system, but they don't truly understand what that means. And they don't, it's very complicated stuff, but like they don't choose to do it, put anything back into supporting the things that support them. Right. And it's a very big problem that has led to a ton of challenges

in various spaces in open source. But it's the biggest place that I think it hurts the most is in the desktop Linux space, where it's more labor of love than it is some kind of commercial venture. While it's true that a huge chunk of desktop Linux developers are paid, even more of them are not. Yeah.

I can't speak on any specific cases on desktop Linux, but I know there have been cases of developers of massive JavaScript libraries who, like, some of these libraries being used by, like, Amazon, eBay, like, some of these libraries being used by like amazon ebay like some of these massive massive platforms and i'm sure you've heard some of the stories of people that just like you know what i'm just i'm just sick i'm just done with this i'm not gonna i'm not gonna support this anymore if if these companies are gonna use this and not do anything like not support no send anything upstream not donate like small amount

like anything at all like why like i and i get it i i get the hot the doing the everything is a labor of love but at the end of the day you need to pay your rent and if you need food yeah if you can't pay your bills like it's all well and good to say that it's it would be look it would be great if everybody could just do this like out of love and just enjoy every moment of what they're doing but that's just not the world we live in like at the end of the day you have bills you have to pay i want that world so bad though i imagine it like, yeah, no, I've never been paid in my, like, outside of some very brief spurts where like, open source and professional day job work has like, overlapped a little bit. I've actually never paid for my open source work. All of the open source work I do,

nights and weekends, side contributions, nothing, nothing for like most of my jobs, just nope. Sometimes they align a few times, but the majority of it, it doesn't. And, and it's been that way for me ever since I started doing this. I have never found that magical moment. Like there have been people that are super lucky and they've got this magical moment where the thing that they enjoy doing, they get to get paid to do it. And it just supercharges their success. I'm so happy for them. I have never been that fortunate.

And a lot of people are even less fortunate than I am. It is really, really difficult. And it's a topic I care a lot about. And if we don't have people change their attitudes around how we talk about sustainability and how we actually do sustainability, we ain't going to have a lot left. The JavaScript world is a very extreme version of what we have in the desktop Linux world. They are our endgame if something doesn't change. I hope something changes because I don't want that endgame.

With all that being said, I do think there is still a place there for... I don't want to see a world where everything in the open source world becomes, it has to be monetized to use. Like, I still think there is a place, because there are, for people out there who are, you know, in developing nations, they don't have that much time or money, but they need some sort of computing system.

need some sort of computing system and i think there is absolutely a place for those people to get a good computing experience entirely for free where otherwise they just simply wouldn't be able to have one well sure look i would just love for us to get to the 80 20 rule when it comes to for when it comes to being able to pay things things. If 20% of the people that actually use this stuff pay for it, that's amazing. Right now, that is not the case. I think it's less than 1%, maybe. Yeah, I'd be surprised if it was even 1% for a lot of things. Yeah.

You have standout projects, for sure, but your general projects, definitely. Right. standout projects for sure but like the your general projects definitely no right like if if we approach the if we got to like the 80 20 rules started applying to to open source stuff that would be fantastic i like i agree with you like as a kid like there was no way i was going to be able to afford any of this stuff that i'm doing like but if i had the free access to a compiler the free access to emacs and open source software and linux that changed my life uh and and i know that it changes the lives of other people all over the world otherwise i wouldn't be doing this right so because like the reason i'm doing this is to pay it forward it changed my life it made my career i became very successful for a long time, you know, and I want other people to have the opportunity

for that success. And so I want to pay it forward. And that's, that's how I do it. So I like, I don't want to say that it should be 100% monetized for all the things that if you can't afford it, then you're, you're, you're SOL. No, but there should always be affordable tier contribution options with money there should always be high-end tier contribution options with money and there should always be freely available tier where you have the opportunity to contribute with effort time advocacy all this other stuff i think one of the problems that a lot of projects face is finding a way to, like, obviously the development side, that's easy. Like, have a repo there, people can swap with code. But I find a lot of projects just don't really know how to bring the money.

Like, they'll usually have, like, you know, we have GitHub sponsors, we have a Patreon, we have this, we have github sponsors we have a patreon we have this we have that but like you don't you know if you just download something from your repos you're probably not going to go check out the github or check out anything else it's like you need some maybe like you know something in your about section in the app just a lot of projects just simply don't have a clear way on how you can support the project in the app itself i think it's because we don't have a clear way on how you can support the project in the app itself. I think it's because we don't have a normalized pattern of how to introduce an application to people. So one of the things that I'm happy that both Gnome and Plasma started doing is having these welcome wizards for their desktops. Now, I don't know if you've seen it recently for KDPlasma. In Fedora KDE, this is enabled if you've seen it recently for for for kd plus but in fedora kd this is enabled and you can check it out now as you go through it it actually tells you about kdev

gives you a link to donate and and to be and and things like that like conky is shown they have a fun message about it and everything gnome doesn't have an equivalent in GNOME Tour, although admittedly, I don't know if it would even help because, again, GNOME Foundation didn't pay for anything other than the infrastructure. But they could do stuff like that. It's always possible. Most applications, at least from GNOME and KDE, they're about dialogues, include that information. If they have a wizard of some kind, they'll often have a little sponsor link or whatever. Some bigger applications like OBS Studio have these as well where they mention it. But we haven't really normalized a pattern that everyone can adopt

that users are expected to see where they're introduced to the funding side of the house right um the current shtick going on right now is like oh let's put this into flat hub let's have the software centers handle this whatever this is super complicated this is incredibly difficult to do right and it can actually very easily go wrong so i mean at least flat hub's now moving to its own legal entity and all that other stuff. But, like, payment processing is a mess. If you're going to be a publisher and a mediator, it's a whole

new set of problems. You also have a whole new set of liabilities. Because now you have to actually, like, audit the content. You have to make sure there's a whole lot of extra things. Let me tell you right now, some of the people that are running this stuff, they feel that they don't need to do any of that sort of thing.

And I promise you, they definitely do. See, look, this is what YouTube thought, what Twitch thought in the early days. You know, go back to like 2007 YouTube, where it's like music videos, re-upload, whatever. Do whatever you want. Movies, fine. All it took was a few lawsuits and everything changed yeah yeah you get away with it until you get a little bit too big then you stop getting away with it yep it's like it it's it's a challenging problem, but it's also one that like so it's my gut feel about it is that Flathub and Gnome aren't motivated

to really solve this problem because most of their developers are paid and most of their developers work for large companies that could not care. Right. Or if they do care, they care in a very specific way that doesn't really matter for the general case in the kde side it's a bit of a mixed bag right like there's a lot of people that do volunteer stuff there's a lot there's a mix a bigger mix of volunteer versus paid but there's also also a coherency problem. How do we have a defined vision for how we want to handle this?

And ultimately, for better or worse, some of the stuff that we're doing in KU, like around Flatpaks and stuff like that, we're totally dependent on what Gnome chooses to do too. Because Flathub is effectively run by gnome so is the flat pack project app stream while the app stream project is kind to kde the main folks who work on that project are all gnome people and so there's all like the set of concerns and there's really not that many people outside of the Gnome and KDE camps, even doing anything at all in this space to figure this out.

And so that makes things even more difficult. Like for example, I don't know what the heck's up with Mate. I don't know what, like I know Clem's doing his, his shtick with cinnamon, but I don't know where that's going to go either. What do you mean? Like, what do you mean about that? Well, so Clem's shtick with Cinnamon is like Linux Mint. Right, right.

It lives off of sponsorships and donations from people. And they've got a lot of it because they've been doing it for so long. So they've got their own funding thing going on based on that. Mate, I have no idea what they're doing. I also haven't seen anything come out of them in a while and I'm a little worried about them. I know Mate was like

I know they're working on Wayland stuff, so clearly they're doing something. Yeah, they're working on something. I think the goal is that XFC 4.20 is going to ship with a Weyland session. That's their blocker right now. I've read the writing. I know what you're thinking.

Look, I'm sure that was... It's coincidence. Oh, I didn't even notice that. There you go. You get to break down properly now. God damn it. No, I didn't know. Look, I'll be impressed if XFC ships a Weyland compositor.

So they're like halfway through a port of XFWM4 to be back based on WLW. I thought they were. Yeah, so like all the other stuff's done. Like they ported all the panels and the file manager and all that stuff to run on Wayland.

They just don't have a compositor. And they've been working on it for a couple of years now. I think Mate's in a similar position. Like all of their apps work on Wayland. They're done. They just don't have a compositor. Well, no, Mate mate they haven't ported the panel yet to um to wayland yet but all the other stuff is done yes uh so xfc is slightly further ahead but they just haven't got um they haven't

gotten their xfwm4 i think it's what's called the xfc window manager um that thing is like halfway through a port weyland um they're using w roots for it and and they've just been reworking it so that it can also run in as a wayland compositor um for for mate gosh a long time ago their strategy was to adopt mir and then the guy who was like running that effort like left canonical and so i don't know what's going on oh what a i always forget the mirror existed what a fun time well i mean mate adopting mirror is the reason why i have it in fedora because i put it there for them so that they would be able to have a composter because their rule is that they want to work on

they want to use something that supported multiple distributions right I like them here guys they're nice people um and so I packaged up their software for Fedora and it's been in Fedora since I think like 27 or something like that it's been there for a while nobody knows it's there I guess but it's been there for a while it was there so that the mate people would be okay with adopting it because they were because um Martin winpress that was it he was the ubuntu monte guy um he was working with the mirror team to develop a wayland composter um for ubuntu mate and that was going to be part of the mate project using mirror unfortunately i don't know what happened after he left canonical so i don't know what they're going to do.

RPM's mirror created five years ago, maintained by Ngonfa. Yeah. Well, hey, if for some reason someone wants to use that, it's there. It's on Fedora 40. Yeah, it's there.

It's been there for a while. It's even mentioned in the official mirror documentation that i think nobody reads oh i don't want to be too mean to me but like they look they look there was a world where mia was going to be important and then it stopped being important. They're nice people. And they actually participate in the Wayland community directly a little bit. Not as much as I would like,

but they do it. So I give props to them. They're at least trying. I think the only of the not major desktops that have, like, have a clear vision for Weyland is Budgie. Like, Budgie is very much on the way to getting Weyland ready. Yes, well, that's, yeah, I know. I sit in their stand-ups every week.

Of course you do. Of course you do. I helped Josh Estrobel make Fedora Bunchy in the first place. Why am I not... I just bring up anything in this phase. I started it.

I'm there from the start. What are you... I can't talk about anything with you without you just already being involved in some way. Look, I'm not involved in any Debian things as far as I know right now, anything with you without you just already being involved in some way. Look, I'm not involved in any Debian things as far as I know right now. So there you go.

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. You're involved in Debian by... What do you call it? Rule of transitivity. You're involved in Gnome stuff that's in Debian. There you go. Well, not Gnome stuff so much. KDE stuff.

KDE stuff, yeah. that's in debbie there you go you're well not going to know so much katie stuff yeah you will occasionally you'll comment on an issue on the canoe issue tracker yes yes i am i do that i i exist as a comment in there i have a couple of i have upstreamed a couple of patches to gnome before but i i personally find engaging with the gnome project broadly i mean there are specific people where i'm okay with but like broadly speaking i find engaging with gnome frustrating so um sometimes it's just you know like the way i view how computers should uh you know how computing and open source computing should be thought about and the way that several gnome folks think about it is

they don't necessarily fully align right i'm happy to help them out when i need to or or support them in the context of fedora workstation it's just the broader way that gnome thinks about things and the way i think about things just don't match up um and so it's just hard for me on that front i've but katie katie and i we get along great so i do a lot there i certainly hear people often mentioning this about gnome and don't there's no need to mention any like specific names but do you have any examples of like things that are like that don't align in that regard for you not particularly off the bat that would not point to someone specifically so i don't really want to go there. But I will say this.

I feel like GNOME as a project is commercially successful, but not community successful. They've got... I would like to see the GNOME Foundation take community engagement and support much more seriously. And I would like to see GNOME Foundation

reports at Quadec start including community engagement and perception metrics and measuring the general attitude people have in GNOME and people outside of GNOME towards it. Because I feel like whether it's perception or reality about how whether gnome is um a good or bad or whatever project there is clearly a huge mismatch and that's not okay like sure and katie's looked at like a darling i mean katie's not perfect either and i think they'll be first to admit that they're not perfect but gnome gnome's reputation is not in a place that I would be proud of. I would not be happy with that. And if I was a community manager, I would be like, this needs to be fixed. This needs to improve. We can't have people saying that things like Gnome is all about taking away features and

making life difficult for everyone and changing everything all the time or calling people rejects and stuff like that. You can't. That's not okay. None of that is okay. Officially, GNOME has a code of conduct which doesn't allow any of this. So why do people keep saying that this is a thing and this is a problem and whether it's perception or reality it the perception is reality and it needs to improve i would really like to see gnome do something about it well even with the kotakonda i don't think most of it is like

gnome people just being straight up mean i I think it's more like... GNOME has a... They have an approach they want to take. And that is the approach they are taking. A recent example I saw was... For an entire year... The accent color portal was completely stalled. Because there was this discussion about... Should we have arbitrary colors in the portal or named colors and

there was a GNOME member involved in the thread who was basically just saying like GNOME is not doing arbitrary, it's just not gonna happen. Like we are doing named colors or we're just, it's just not gonna happen on GNOME and the thread basically just completely stalled arguments about like how it should be done and eventually eventually did get merged before it got merged like someone just came in was like like why are you letting gnome dictate what the other desktops are going to be doing like if gnome wants to have a restrictive environment like they should be allowed to do it like they they're making their desktop but that shouldn't be limiting like what all these other desktops are doing like just screw gnome like we're just gonna do this and they're gonna play ball or they're just

we don't care so like nobody nobody wants a repeat of the status notifier item situation. That's why. I don't happen to know that one. You might know it by the commercial name that Canonical gave it, which was App Indicators. Right. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Every desktop implements the SNI spec, except for GNOME. Every one. Guess what? This sucks. Because people are writing applications that don't work on GNOME at all. And like,

applications using SNI is only increasing because people are now writing Electron apps or they're writing Flutter apps. And these things are cross-platform. And guess what? Every platform except for GNOME, Linux, Windows, Mac, have an equivalent to that thing. And they all use it, sometimes for very critical functions. So we're in this situation now where the dominant desktop, by virtue of it being on the Enterprise Linuxes and on Ubuntu, doesn't implement a core feature that a lot of application developers actually need for their apps to work. Nobody wants a repeat of that situation ever again so and gnome knows this

like the gnome community people that are engaging on this they know they have the upper hand in that regard and that is why they like they can talk that way because they know that ultimately something isn't going to land if gnome doesn't agree to it because gnome is the dominant desktop right like yes it's a dominant desktop in a small market share by an inside of an even smaller market share inside of an even smaller market share but in the space of the tiniest of puddles it is a big fish in it so they are very big yes they're very big plankton yep Yes, they're very big plankton. Yeah. But, you know, like speaking of the app indicator stuff, right?

Like with Infidora Workstation, I kind of got fed up about the fact that like, so two jobs ago, I was in a workplace where like we had core applications that are required on our computers that only function through app indicators. Like they don't have a window. They run as background applications. wired on our computers that only function through app indicators. Like they don't have a window. They don't, they run as background applications, not having support for that meant that the desktop was effectively unusable. So I got fed up and I was like, we have to fix this in Fedora workstation. And I outlined this and I said,

these are the core things that people depend on. They have to use it. They don't have a choice that only fully work when you have SNI support. And eventually, you know, Logic wins eventually. And they tacitly agreed that they were going to put it in there. But they didn't want to do the existing spec. They wanted a new one and so there's a free desktop thing about a replacement for um status notifier item status notifier

under the sdg specs yeah so update the status notifier i um item system tray spec so update the status notifier item system tray spec on the free desktop GitLab. Notifier. Yeah, okay. Okay, cool. It is also stalled for basically because of... Of course it is. Yes, it's stalled because of of course it is yes it's stalled because of yeah you can look through it yourself

and see but it is stalled why is the thread so long it is I'm just saying it is stalled the thread gets longer if you go to the merge request that's linked to it okay this is such a mess 189 comments the first one and

it's a lot eight months ago oh aura is here wow or is it yeah yeah yeah i don't know quite what's up with dallas but she shows up everywhere so yeah everywhere gnome centric anyway yeah or is one of my uh i i actually didn't realize but like yeah or is one of the discord mods um i didn't really picture everywhere else as well this is a this is i might have to go read this thread afterwards this just just special just seeing how long you scroll which always indicates it's going to be a fun thread yeah i mean the fact that it kicks in firefox's nice smooth scrolling tells you that this is going to be a long one. So,

what exactly is the deal here, then? Just in a TLDR. TLDR. Gnome wants the specification to be restricted to what Gnome Shell already does, which is not a lot. Yep, that sounds about right. Okay.

And everyone else needs it to do just slightly more. Right. Yeah, that's typically how it goes. Yeah, okay. There were actually some points that they brought up that were quite reasonable, and there were some points that even I brought up. Like, there was one person who was like,

we want to support Rastrum, and I'm like, no. No, no. We have worked 20 years to get out of using XPMs and PNGs and GIFs in these things. We are not, it has to be SVG. I am very sorry you are not getting raster stuff because we need this to scale with high DPI and all these other things.

It's just all kinds of stuff like that. It's like, oh, we want to be able to draw our own widgets and stuff like I know. Just know. We're not replicating X embed here. There's like a whole host of not going to do it here. So it's been interesting in that that front but like it's it's stalled i'm not happy about the fact that it's stalled i wanted this fixed a year ago and i

really didn't feel like this needed to go through this kind of uh mess but here we are stalled and everyone is unhappy because it is stalled. Oh, my God. So, like, if you look at the loose desktop just, like, casually, it all looks like it all flows together really well. But when you start... No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't.

If you just look at it, at it with your eyes half open, it looks like it works. I think it needs to be quarter open. It needs to be quarter open. But the further you look into this, I think the big part of it is the fact that it is just individuals doing what individuals want to do. There are these big entities that have this

like their their specific goals but it's not like okay windows right if microsoft wants to get something done they're gonna get it done like they're gonna have a plan there's gonna be managers telling people what to do here it's like you know here's 12 different factions that are all trying to get their own little slight difference one of them's a lot bigger than everyone else's that has a completely different opinion but nobody can just agree on even some of the most basic like this is as dumb as the accent color thing. Like, it's such a basic thing. I don't understand why we can't agree on this. I was going to say that,

and then I realized that you were frozen when I was going to say it. It's like, oh, crap. I was going to say it. It's like, oh, crap. I was going to say that Gnome's incentive structure around this is interesting because, remember I said that they were commercially successful, but not

necessarily community successful? Right, right, right. So the commercial successful is interesting because everyone that's paying them doesn't care what Gnome does. Which leads to a very weird set of incentives they can do almost whatever they want with some degree of impunity when it comes to this they're going to get paid like that like because the like for example in both rel and sled and and sled there's not a um a direct driver of like this has to be a certain ux experience we

don't really they don't really care enough to drive that from a product perspective so that they're not using that input to do anything meaningful so the developers basically get to do what they feel like and then they're paid and the the companies just accept whatever it is and they continue to ship it there's on one hand that looks great that's generally trust but on the other hand it also means there's no accountability right right so um because of that uh you get to these kinds of deadlock situations, and there is not a super strong incentive for them to do something about it, not positively. Unless something else, some other factor happens that changes the dynamics there,

nothing changes. And that's really why I would like like to see gnome foundation to step up as like someone who oh like as an overseer of the gnome project shouldn't actually do something in that respect so as it stands right now sort of the only way that something like status notifier whatever it was the only way something like that changes if you have like corporate pressure trying to like make that happen then someone's possibly going to be like hey we actually need this now like it doesn't really matter like what you guys want as a project this is this needs to happen well so it's more like the incentives have to align so that they care. I think it's fine that GNOME's vision of how it should work should be part of the discussion.

That absolutely makes sense. I think 99% of the things, that's fine. Yeah. The problem is that if they're ultimately not interested or incentivized to care about making this land, even within something that fits within gnome as well as the rest of the desktops then it doesn't go anywhere um i i'm not necessarily saying that like okay company like red hat or suez is like we need this in our thing so you got to go get represent our interests and make us you know do the you know the xyz thing that's not what i mean what i mean is that they should have people

recognize you know that this is important to us we will accept a solution we we will accept any solution for this that you guys can come up with but it's got to be something that everyone agrees on that application developers can adopt because if you can do that, then this is no good to us either. And that's the parameters I want them to have. And to be fair, right, like that is essentially the parameters that this spec is operating under. The condition for this to even work is that both GNOME and KDE have to agree to adopt it.

If both are willing to agree to adopt it, then everybody else will and the ecosystem will adapt quickly. Gnome and KD have to agree to adopt it. If both are willing to agree to adopt it, then everybody else will, and the ecosystem will adapt quickly. But if we can't get that, then the status quo is effectively going to carry forward, and there's no point in developing a new spec.

So, that's why I'm real sad about this being stalled. Because, in principle, the Gnome shell developers have agreed to implementing a new spec they just won't implement the old one the current one but getting that spec in the first place right yeah yeah yeah Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Man, it's been two years at this point for me. It's like, I'm still, I will die on this hill. I want applications to actually work. Oh, what a crazy hill to die on. You'd be surprised. You'd be very surprised. There are some people who say,

I would rather certain apps just be broken and and and not look good and not functional because i don't like the the i don't like their mere existence because a choice they made in life and i'm like no i've i've had as youtube's top wayland propagandist as defined by boycott wayland i've? Yes. Wow, that's a thing? Wait, have you never heard of Boycott Wayland? No. Okay. So you know who Probono is, right?

The app image developer. Oh, okay. Now I know. I'm done. I got it. I got it. I know. I know.

I met him in person. I know. Yeah. I'm done. He has a GitHub gist is what it's called. I don't know. I met him in person. I know. I'm done. Here's a GitHub gist. I don't know. He's got a thing on GitHub called Boycott Waylon. It's this giant list of a lot

of outdated information. And it's his nitpick. My favorite thing. So I've got two favorite things. One, screen capture doesn't work. It's worked for years. We've got Pipe things. One, screen capture doesn't work. It's worked for years. We've got Pipewire. My second favorite thing is all of the tools on there.

It's like, this tool doesn't work. And it's like an X configuration tool. Like, X render doesn't work. X clip doesn't work. Do you know what the X means in its name? No. No, I don't. Like, what are you...

Yeah. No shit, it doesn't... If you go to a Volkswagen, it's not going to open the Subaru. Like, yeah, that's the point. They're not the same thing. I'm very glad that somebody decided to not call this X-12

That would have made this so much worse I wish they did That would have been so great No I am very happy they picked a different name for this Honestly it would have Honestly half the arguments I see It's not even an argument

The merits of it It's like oh This is not like how do I even describe it half the arguments I see for why Wayland is bad are so stupid

but I feel like some of them at least would be alleviated if there's a clear continuation because I've made it clear to people that a lot of the people working on waylon today used to work on x but no it's waylon so it's a different thing if it was called x12 at least there would be like that clear continuation of the line obviously here's the flip side of that argument. Okay. The total protocol breakage and

everything being completely different and nothing being compatible would have made X12 an even worse name. Because everyone would have expected it to be a backwards compatible upgrade. Okay. That's fair. I guess because we've had X11

for 30 years and there were like X8, X9, X10 but they exist there's an old library that was only retired a few years ago that was archived that was literally putting X10 applications on top of X11 there hasn't been an

X10 application released in 30 years X10 didn't even it didn't become like a public widespread project until X11. Why did that exist? There were earlier versions

of the X protocol. There were, yeah. I know. They existed over the span of like two years though. At this stage, I don't use Waylon on my system just because I've had I've had issues

with video most of my problems with Weyland are related to video production-y stuff like, Weyland the way I like to describe, sort of the state of Weyland now, is Weyland is great if you can ignore the giant gaping The way I like to describe the state of Wayland now is Wayland is great.

If you can ignore the giant gaping holes, and a regular person is going to go down the middle of the road, and they're not going to see any of the holes, they're not going to be doing any of the weird edge cases where things do still break. I do. That's the problem. I want to use Wayland. The experience I've had is great for my normal computing experience. But there are those edge cases where it is still a problem. But I think a lot of people see those edge cases being a problem and then assume that's going to be applying to most of their experience.

If you've not used Wayland in three, like, whether it's Gnome, whether it's KDE, you've not used it in, like, three or four years, try it out. I guarantee the experience is going to be so much better than you've heard it's going to be. Like, there are issues with NVIDIA, absolutely. There are issues with certain,

especially if you start getting into, like, the more window-managing environments, there are issues with certain um with especially if you start getting to like the the more window manager environments there's certainly issues there but if you're using gnome or kde the experience is going to be mostly good enough maybe you have some issues with accessibility stuff that's a totally different issue and that is something that does definitely need to be addressed but if that's not the case try it out just see what it's like yeah yeah i'll say though that i vastly prefer the kd plasma experience on Wayland than I do the GNOME one. Okay. Because there is more protocol implementation.

The Quinn Compostor seems to do stuff a lot better. It is. There is a lot of collaboration between WLRoots and Quinn. Oh, I know. At every step of the way it's like hey look kde is working with the community gnome's doing their thing every single step of the way i mean to be fair right the gnome people also they propose protocols They do the process and stuff. It's, and they are participating in discussions and stuff. It's just, yeah.

Well, and they're doing important things too, right? Like the red hat folks are working on HDR protocols and they're largely leading that effort. And that's going to own people, you know, but they are working with Katie people.

They're working with W roots people. Like the important stuff is definitely being worked out by everyone. But you know how we talked about stalling. That happens a lot in the Wayland protocol stuff too. And it's not, I don't know if it's necessarily gnome people, but it, there's a lot of stalling that goes on.

Like there are protocols here. I'm looking at the, the get lab project right now. There's merge requests for new protocols that are years old it's it makes me sad yeah but look what are you gonna do yeah but look what are you gonna do i try to pretend it's not a thing until i have to deal with it that's pretty much the only way to be happy here oh look your your effort is rather than getting in these threads that are just stalled forever your effort is a lot better spent on things where you can actually get the ball moving, where you can

actually make a difference, where nobody there's no complaints about the direction it's going, there's no issue with fixing this problem, it's just, okay, it's a problem, we fix it good, it's upstreamed and now we can propagate it out

everyone's day is better now i want that to be happening more often though yeah there's so it's it's it's again it's just it's just you know i'm gonna use the word it's basically politics right it's just open source politics it's a lot of politicking it's a lot of dealing with, figuring out how to do compromises and stuff like that. It's not glamorous. It's not cool. It's necessary. Yeah.

Well, whenever you have people together, like you're always going to run into politics like that. Like you're always going to have different groups trying to struggle over power, different people trying to struggle over power different people trying to you know trying to show off their leadership skills like no matter what happens like we can always think we're better in the open source space but we're not it's no we're really not it's just it's just the only difference is you can see it all yeah i guess that's a good point rather than

happening with like you know we have weird middle managers fighting over who's gonna run this project here it's just hey it's all on the mailing list it's all on the git lab it's all on the matrix whatever communication platform is being used and it's just it's just all available to see and I guess you would hope that that was, that'd be used as like a learning experience for others so it's not repeated again and again and again and again

but well, yeah it's not what happens yeah it takes a hot minute we just got lots of examples of uh of it just happening um

you know what let's be let's be positive let's be positive about the false world what's what's some uh what's some some happy things we can talk about well plasma 6 is coming it is yeah i'm very excited about Well, Plasma 6 is coming. It is, yeah.

I'm very excited about getting Plasma 6. From the Fedora perspective, I am crossing my fingers that I can make Fedora be the first distribution to ship it. I really want to be that. I like being first. But also, I'm just genuinely excited about what's been going on with with kd plasma this is like this is not a let's break everything and change all the stuff this is very much a refinement release um you know we're taking porting everything to q6 but we're also're also looking at the whole experience and doing things to align more and make it so that things fit better.

It's a lot of spit shine and polish and that sort of thing. And I'm very happy that that's what we're doing because we don't need to break everything and change everything all over again. We already did that once with Plasma 4 and that didn't go so well and plasma 5 was a step in the right direction and i think continuing on that path with plasma 6 is going to be great i'm super excited about the massive improvements to plasma whalen that are going to come with plasma 6 it's a big big part of it and i'm super excited about the massive improvements to Plasma Wayland that are going to come with Plasma 6. It's a big, big part of it, and I'm very excited. And as you're probably aware, Fedora KDE is the first distribution to use Plasma Wayland by default. And it's been using it for two-ish years now.

I actually wasn't aware of that. Okay. Yeah, no, if you go look it up, Plasma Whalen by default, Fedora 34. Hmm. Well, I'm not surprised they're using it by default. I just didn't realize they were the first. Yeah. Wow. Huh.

That's really cool. Whalen by default. Go 20 from now on... Offhand, I think in... Your name is on the thing! Why is your name on every single Fedora change? It's not on every single Fedora change,

but I will say that I have my name on at least one Fedora change every release since Fedora 26. Okay. Okay. To be fair, you are directly in places so it does make sense that you're involved in the change um okay maybe there's yeah some obvious yeah that okay you know i'll i'll let that obvious obvious is obvious yes yeah i'll let that one pass but like um Yeah, I'll let that one pass.

But, like... Let's see here. For... Oh, I lost my train of thought. That's all right. That's fine. I thought I... What is the big improvement that's happening on the Weyland-KD side with Plasma 6? Well, really, just the upgrade to Qt 6

is going to be enough in itself because the KD folks have done a lot of work in Qt upstream to make it better on Wayland environments. Wayland has become a bigger focus for the Qt group as well as for KDE. You know, automotive stuff, embedded stuff, a lot of this that does it on linux they're doing it with weston with ivi shell but they're also sometimes making their own compositors or they're doing

their own thing but they're also running they want to run wayland applications well so there's a lot going on there and and we're going to benefit from that, from Cute. And I'm very excited about that. Well, I've talked about maybe, because I've never actually properly sat down and daily drove Katie in. I've been thinking about maybe I'll have to try it out when Six comes out. Come on with Fedora, Katie. Come on with Fedora.

Come on with Fedora, Katie. Come on with Fedora. Yeah, but I like my broken as hell arch system. It's content. Whenever it breaks, it's content. I need a system that's not stable. Fine. Whatever. I've said before that if I... You could definitely

have a broken system by running Fedora Rawhide. If you'd like that, that's your way to do it. You're going to get everything as it comes, and good luck with that. That's probably the way to go i've said before that when i eventually whenever it happens eventually set up my capture pc i'll probably just throw fedora on it because i just i'm not gonna install arch on a capture pc that's stupid i have no people do

crazy things but like um so actually now I remember what I was going to say. It's like, so Fedora was the first to do Plasma Wayland. And a year later, Chaos Linux, K-A-O-S, they're a KDE only distribution. They actually switched to Plasma Wayland by default too. Wow. And then earlier this year, Fedora, with Fedora 38, we are now Wayland all the way from login to shutdown because we changed the display manager SDDM to Wayland.

So we are now not using X for anything in Fedora KDE other than to run X11 applications on a whaling session so that's uh at this point we're actually comparable to gnome on that front so that's awesome to hear yeah we're the only distro that's at that level but and and i'm not resting on our laurels i I want us to push forward faster, further. And I intend to do a lot more around that as much as I can. What are the big areas to be focused on right now? So really multimedia has been my thing right now. Like dealing with multimedia stuff. Like Fedora, Linux distributions in general have a very poor multimedia story, and improving that has been something that I've been poking at for the past few years. I helped bring FFmpeg into Fedora, which has unlocked a huge trove of applications to be able to bring into the distribution. OBS Studio, which I've started

contributing to the OBS project as well uh because that and a bunch of other things related uh on that front like being able to make it better for like my personal goal is to make it better for game devs and other creatives um and and that's like where i'm seeing the the the you know if you talk about product market fit and all those kinds of businessy terms that's kind of where i'm going with this. So I started a couple of years ago working on game dev stuff with SDL and having to improve things on that front, getting everything shipped over, shifting over to Wayland by default for games on Linux is also an aspect that I'm going to do, because we don't want kind of like the most important visual thing to be stuck on the

legacy technology. And so that's, that's a bit of what I've been doing. And then the adjacent to that, it's like, Oh, how do we deal with content creation and media production? And now that I do a podcast with the pseudo show and,

and, and all that other stuff, like, and I need to be able to do that stuff too. Yeah. And so like, I am focusing a lot. I'm focusing a lot on that trying to get the creatives the creative stuff in place like caden live is now in fedora open shot is now in

fedora we're looking through like getting all these other things and tools and stuff like because the multimedia situation is improving so rapidly in Fedora we're getting to a point where maybe some point in the near future there might be even a Fedora creators lab and that would just be like pre-loaded with or like an equivalent uh like Fedora like something more like what um Fedora Jam does for audio, except for video. And then maybe another one for game creation and game development. Like I want to enable people to build these like opinionated collections to promote open source technologies for doing real things in not just IT

spaces, because when you get the enthusiasts and you get the gamers and you get the professional creatives, that's the next stage. cases because when you get the enthusiasts and you get the gamers and you get the the professional creatives that's the next stage that's like how you get the next step of growth and and success both for Community and professional Linux like I want to see that happen because I think that's how you get to the next stage of growth and adoption. Because we've already got the developer types. The developers love Linux. We've got to get everyone else too.

And we've got to take that step by step. What sounds like that's. That's coming along well then. I wasn't aware of what was being done. On Fedora in that regard. As I look at Fedora a lot from the outside, so when there's, like, some big change on the wiki, there's some, like, big threat,

like, that's something I'll usually see, but these, like, day-to-day operational changes and introduction of new packages, like, this is something I've not been aware of happening on that front, but it is awesome to hear that like everything is getting better there yep i mean i i do fedora changes for a lot of the bigger things but also like i'm not shy about the stuff that we're doing on this front i talk about it whenever i give talks at the Fedora release parties or at flock or whatever, right. Fedora, Sahi remix is another step towards that.

The creative types tend to own max. Either they've had them historically or they've had them because their job or whatever, giving them an opportunity to use Linux on that hardware is a big deal. And it gives them, it gives them an opening. And so I look at it from that perspective, like what is there to enable here?

And what this is to enable is to bring in a new set of people. Like either people who have, you know, I fully expect that Apple is going to EOL the first generation Apple Silicon Macs within the next few years. It's been a while. It's been a hot minute now.

How long has it been? Well, they launched at the end of november 2020 i think so we're like two years into it and like you know a couple more years we definitely don't have hours yeah like when the m3 chip comes out do you think that they're gonna still hold on to m1 anymore i don't know i mean they've gotten a lot more aggressive about you know dropping old apple uh macs like intel max are dropping like fries and i i don't know what their strategy is going to be for our max um but like i want to give people the opportunity to have a platform they can use that in the event that mac os can't be updated anymore for their platform

and also you know people who have Macs that are being updated, they want to use that hardware with Linux too. I want to give them that opportunity. And I think it's also a great way to just make it so that Linux is available. A good Linux platform is available everywhere. What is, we'll be ending up soon-ish, but what is the state as a top level view

what's Asahi like right now because once again this is another thing where I look at a lot from the outside I see these big changes that are being added but I don't really see how much it's really improving to actually use it

well my Apple Silicon Mac is in the other room so i can't really bring it to you to show you but it basically works like if you don't as long as you're not dealing with sound or hardware accelerated video or the ai or the neural engine everything works Everything works. And it gets like eight hours of battery life. It's surprisingly not very exciting. It works like you would expect on any other platform. It just happens to run on ARM instead of x86. And Apple Silicon is a weird platform to boot from. So there's goofiness there. But otherwise, it's just, you know, if you've used Fedora in a VM

or if you've used Fedora on real hardware on x86, it could be a similar experience on an Apple Silicon Mac. I think that's the best spot to be in. It's boring. Yeah. The exciting part is that it's boring. Yeah. Because if boring means it's working,

like, if it's not working like hey that's at least some excitement like you know yeah well that's that's honestly like really good to hear then like because i i i saw the project come along very early on i was like this this is i i was very hopeful like i i know there's a lot of people out there who are like, oh, it's never going to happen. People are being really skeptical of it. I don't know why. You can look at the history that Hector's had in this space. Hector's not new.

I've known Hector for years. I used to be involved in homebrew communities and the Sonic scene and Nintendo scenes for making hacked ROMs and Boot and, and, you know, boot me and all that other stuff, the homebrew set. Cause I had a Wii that I eventually, you know, when I got a Wii U and moved playing games to the Wii U, I hacked my Wii cause why the hell not? And so like, you know,

I knew about Hector, like in the PlayStation three efforts and all this other stuff. So I've, I've known his track record personally although before this he and i hadn't really interacted all that much but like i knew him i'd interacted with him briefly from time to time as like like some guy who's like saying stuff in an irc channel or whatever but like i had all the confidence in him and his team because I've seen him do make magic happen before. Also the man's a bleeding genius. He's like, he's actually good at what he does.

And he says things that I don't understand. And I have to go look stuff up. And then I realized, Oh, okay. Got it. Like, so when you're at that level,

anything is possible. Absolutely. And he's also a nice guy, which is rare for geniuses at least in my experience i'm no genius let's end off the show all right then um where do you want to direct people to i know you mentioned pseudo show before but do you have a website or a place where you would find it um so i don't have a website right now i probably should make one at some point

but uh i think you do you just don't have a website man i used to have a website with a blog a long time ago. And then I moved it to Blogger because I didn't want to keep the infrastructure up anymore. And I stopped doing blogs because of Twitter. And now Twitter's gone because it's gone into a weird, weird place. So now I'm on the Fediverse. So I'm on Fostedon'm on the Fediverse. So I'm on, uh, fostered on.org slash, um, Conan underscore Kudo. Um, I'm also on GitHub as Conan dash Kudo, get lab as Conan underscore

Kudo and Gompon on Fedora, Faro Tim on open Sousa, there's a bunch of places all over the place you can find me. Um, and I think that's like the primary place you can get in touch with me is on, on the Fediverse. I think that's pretty much place people can get in touch with me is on the Fediverse. I think that's pretty much the way to go. Where can people find Pseudo Show? You skipped over that part.

Right. So I think it I need to double check to make sure this URL works because we just got this. I think if you go to tuxdigital.com slash pseudo show, that should work. Yes, it does. Sweet. tuxdigital.com slash pseudo show will redirect

you to the website, to the webpage. So there you go. We also have a youtube channel um if you want to subscribe we post to youtube as well we have all kinds of other fun video content there i think if i do youtube.com slash sudo show you will you will see it all there awesome awesome um like and subscribe yeah do that do that stuff uh those the only things you want to mention or is there anything else you want to plug i think that's it for now i don't have anything else okay awesome um do my stuff then so the main channel is brody robson i do linux videos there six days a week i have no idea what will be out by now, because I am way ahead of my

schedule. Yeah. No. Schedule for this one. That's not good. This will be out in like two or three weeks. And I have another... Why do I keep doing... I keep saying, oh, I'm going to take a break. And then I record two podcasts

in a week. Why do I keep doing this? I don't think that counts as a break and then i record two podcasts in a week why do i keep doing this i don't think that counts as a break no it doesn't my my my backlog just keeps getting bigger what i don't know why i'm doing this whatever um i've got the gaming channel that is brady on games on youtube and twitch also kick i guess because i'm there. Because why not? Also, DLive. If, for some reason, you still use DLive. I'm probably still playing through Final Fantasy XVI and Armored Core. So, that's fun. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at TechOverT.

And if you want to listen to the audio version, pretty much any podcast platform out there, there is an RSS feed as well. Just search Tech Over Tea and you will find it. I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say? Linux and open source is great. Go check out.

If you've not really tried Fedora, give it a shot again. Fedora KD is awesome. Fedora Workstation is great too. Give it a shot and enjoy. Have fun. Awesome. It was a pleasure to have you on. Definitely see this again sometime. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Well, see you guys later.