Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show this week, it was a race against time
Chris: to leave Texas Linux Fest.
Chris: We had a date at System76 to get the inside scoop on the Cosmic Desktop and its future.
Chris: And then we had a chance to chat with John Seeger, the VP of Engineering at
Chris: Canonical, fresh off the 2510 release.
Chris: But we had to make it back to the studio in time for our live chat.
Chris: We'll tell you all about that and how it went and play those chats.
Chris: And then we'll round out the show with some great booths, some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our live virtual
Chris: log. Hello, Mumble Room. Hey, Chris. Hello, Brent. Hello, hello, hello.
Chris: Hola, bienvenidos. Hello. You know, if you want to join our Mumble Room,
Chris: if you're listening out there, it's pretty fun.
Chris: It's got a live vibe. Details are jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Chris: It's an open invite. We'll have a conversation with anyone. We have an open
Chris: mumble room. We just check your mic to make sure everything's sounding good enough to go on air.
Chris: And then you can come and chat with us during the show even or during the pre
Chris: and post show, which is generally when the mumble room is really going.
Chris: And it's a lot of fun. That's jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
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Wes: Oh, yeah.
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Wes: Watch out, Moose.
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Chris: Well, we have made it back from
Chris: our escape from Texas, So I guess not to spoil it, but we did make it.
Chris: And it was such a great trip. And before we get into the story and our trip
Chris: to Denver to chat with the System 76 crew, I want to just share the team's gratitude
Chris: to our audience who made this possible.
Chris: You got us down there and you got us back. And we didn't have any incidents.
Chris: Nobody blew out a tire. Nobody got a ticket. There was no fender bender.
Chris: I mean, do you know the numbers, Wes? That's what we drove collectively.
Chris: I mean, we drove collectively a ton of miles.
Wes: Oh, yeah. Oh, here. Well, we've got them live up there if you just want the miles on the tracker.
Chris: Oh, yeah, right. Texas tracker is still live because Brent's actually still on the road.
Wes: That's right. So you and I, Team Bigfoot, we drove a total path distance of 4,732 miles.
Wes: And Moose there, who's not done yet, is at 3,416.
Chris: It's really awesome. We had a chance to connect with a great community down
Chris: there, but then it wasn't even initially on our plan, but because we were working
Chris: for the audience and not a particular sponsor,
Chris: we were able to do a last-minute schedule with System76 to swing by and get
Chris: a hands-on demonstration of the latest and greatest with Cosmic.
Chris: I just want to underscore, not only did it mean that our entire intention was
Chris: always just to create great content for you, but we had a kind of flexibility
Chris: that I just don't think would have been there.
Chris: And so we got to do something really special. And it meant we were on a very tight timeline.
Clips: Okay, so the goal was to be out by 9.30. It's 9.29 a.m. Oh, we're doing pretty
Clips: good. What are you doing right now?
Clips: Well, I got to unplug the van and put the solar panel in the bag.
Clips: I noticed your bags aren't loaded either.
Clips: Well, I staged them beside the van. Probably got to feed the kitties a little bit of food.
Clips: Well, they are jumping around like they want some food. Uh-huh.
Clips: Yeah. I don't know about you, Wes, but I'm kind of ready to go.
Clips: Yeah, let's hit the road. We got miles to go today.
Chris: You and i had it down at this point yeah.
Wes: Well practiced i think.
Chris: Yeah and and to be fair brent has a little bit more to take care of oh yeah.
Wes: We were doing lean and mean and that was definitely an advantage for us.
Chris: Brent's got animals to take care of a van to take care of and a brent to take care of.
Brent: It was clear in that moment uh the difference between the types of trips we
Brent: had had up to this point because i was you know let's say meandering my way
Brent: to texas and uh very happily so and you guys were just jetting down there and
Brent: this is the collision of those two uh philosophies and it was clear that we
Brent: were going to have to figure it out.
Chris: And just as we're ready to go, I mean really ready to go, Brent informs us that
Chris: he's had a little issue that he hasn't told us about.
Clips: You got all those belts? I think so. Maybe.
Clips: I don't hear anything. No, it's only when I really give it gas.
Clips: When you give it the onions? Yeah, like if I'm pulling out of a parking lot or trying to pass you.
Clips: So maybe. Since when the engine's really red? Yeah, maybe I'll go in there and give a couple of kicks.
Clips: Well, if I were to guess, I would say alternator. Because it's coming from the bottom corner.
Chris: This was a theme for the day. This should have been our indication of how the
Chris: day was going to go because we didn't want to push the van too hard.
Chris: We weren't in a particular time crunch for that day because we just had to get
Chris: from Austin to Amarillo. So we had, you know, only a seven hour drive day.
Chris: So we thought maybe we would make it in decent time, get to Amarillo,
Chris: do some grocery shopping, stock the Airbnb. That's not exactly how things went.
Clips: Yeah, we just hit 80,000 miles on the car.
Clips: All right, so we've been driving for 395 miles, 6 hours and 44 minutes.
Clips: We're at the fourth O'Reilly of the day. Hey, one of those was an AutoZone.
Clips: We're going to go with Brent and we're going to get an alternator that he doesn't need.
Clips: And then we'll be on our way to the Airbnb. Definitely moving a bit slower today.
Chris: We did ultimately get there and Brent did get his alternator.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Which I'm kind of in favor of now.
Brent: Well, okay, because you never express in real time that I certainly didn't need
Brent: it. It was like community voting, you know, all of us, but you seem to just
Brent: go with the crazy Brent plans.
Chris: Well, I was, you know, I was like, it's a belt. I think it's a belt first and foremost.
Chris: And if there's another issue because of, you know, that, then we'll deal with
Chris: that. But I was like, it's really, it's just a belt problem.
Chris: But, you know, you got a better unit. So when you do get it installed,
Chris: I actually think you're going to be better off.
Chris: And we did get to our Airbnb. Nothing really stands out to me about that one.
Chris: They all kind of have, I don't know about you guys, but they all kind of just
Chris: merged together as one meta Airbnb. well.
Wes: There was one i don't think we could forget.
Chris: Well yeah yeah the one where we had somebody else the stuff in there oh no no okay.
Wes: Too no the one where you um didn't really fit in the shower.
Chris: Oh that was this airbnb wasn't no.
Brent: No it was uh the denver one.
Chris: It was multiple oh yeah oh right it was
Chris: multiple guys not one of our airbnbs had
Chris: a functional bathroom for me not one of them they all had something weird
Chris: i don't know what's going on with airbnbs and bathrooms but we
Chris: got there the next morning it was time to set off because we needed to get
Chris: to denver this is where the timeline got tight because carl
Chris: had a carl the ceo of system 76
Chris: had scheduled himself a work from home week
Chris: and he came in gracefully because we were coming into town as well as so had
Chris: jeremy soller and so they both came in and scheduled to come into the office
Chris: because we were going to be there to help you know give this presentation and
Chris: so we really wanted to make it on time because we were kind of taking from their
Chris: plan to work from home week and i i didn't intend for that to happen No.
Wes: We just thought, oh, we happen to be here. Maybe something will work out,
Wes: and that was very gracious of them.
Chris: We're like, okay, we're in Amarillo, but we need to be there tomorrow by 10 a.m.
Clips: I wouldn't call it fixed. No. I'd call it...
Clips: Mildly improved? Not even?
Clips: No. But we may have fixed on a leak on the radiator. Yeah, that was easy. Unrelated.
Clips: So that's a win. We'll stack that. Let me get down the road a little bit because
Clips: we've got to get the hell out of this Airbnb and see how it does. We'll check on her.
Clips: I'm worried I'm,
Clips: Well, this is the ultimate test. I mean, you're really pushing all the components,
Clips: long duration, driving, heat, miles and miles.
Clips: I mean, this is it, right? This is if things are going to break or crack.
Clips: You're talking about just getting it over to O'Reilly's?
Chris: Oh, man. We did it. And I do remember this. So we have a process,
Chris: right? We get to an Airbnb.
Chris: And within minutes, we try to get the Wi-Fi set up. We try to get streaming
Chris: set up. We try to get Star Trek going on the main screen.
Wes: Yeah, time to Star Trek. That's our standard Airbnb metric.
Chris: Yeah, and it is an interesting one because it's like, you got to get the network
Chris: stood up. You got to get a device working. You got to get a client device paired with that.
Wes: And what's the TV setup, right? Can you use the tech that's there?
Wes: Do you have to inject your own? How accessible is it?
Chris: And every time we do this, we kind of like refine this idea of this ultimate
Chris: tiny Linux box that has HDMI that boots right into a Kodi that just immediately
Chris: starts randomly playing Star Trek and sets up an AP that all our devices connect to.
Chris: Like we've been, we have been iterating on this idea.
Chris: So if you have any suggestions for a device like that, please do boost them
Chris: in or send us an email at linuxunplugged.com slash contact because we want to
Chris: build something when we get to an Airbnb that's like a little Linux router slash
Chris: Kodi box slash Wi-Fi AP repeater.
Chris: Also Nebula device. That's what we're going for.
Chris: So that's, but it is, this Airbnb we arrived at turned out to be in somebody's
Chris: basement, which we didn't expect.
Chris: And so I also did not fit in that. I'm not a particularly tall guy.
Chris: I'm, I think 5'11", if that's, you know, It's not that unusual,
Chris: but yeah, it wasn't ideal, but we made it to System 76 on time.
Clips: Wes and I are just outside the System 76 office, waiting for Brent to feed his
Clips: cats and get the audio interface that he forgot in the van somewhere.
Clips: So, we're kind of on time. We're on Brent time, that's for sure.
Clips: There's no escape in Brent time, but his cat's.
Clips: Hey. Hey, what? What are you guys doing over here? Nothing. Just waiting for
Clips: you, buddy. Yeah? Yeah. Okay.
Chris: And we got there and, you know, we show up. Every time we go,
Chris: they've changed so much. They've expanded.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Rearranged the office. So it's a new entrance.
Wes: Bunch of new tech. Bunch of new people. It just changes all the time.
Chris: A lot more lasers. There's a whole lot of lasers now.
Chris: We got there. It was great to see Carl. He gave us a tour of all the new stuff
Chris: and some things they're working on.
Chris: And it was also the day they were releasing the new Oryx. So that was kind of exciting.
Chris: And then we sat down with him and Jeremy in an office space to try to just get
Chris: the state of Cosmic because they're getting really close right now.
Chris: But there's still some things that are missing. But there's also a lot of stuff
Chris: regarding Cosmic that people have not discussed, including some features that
Chris: have recently been added that they touch on in our chat here that are just blow away cool.
Clips: We just had a great tour. Carl gave us a tour of the factory to kind of get
Clips: an update on everything. but we're really here to get an update on Cosmic because
Clips: the last time we chatted about it, it was early alpha.
Clips: It must have been like at a Linux Fest or something. It was a while ago.
Clips: And I think things have come a lot further.
Clips: Yeah, I think that was Linux Fest Northwest. And is it Big Bertha?
Clips: In Bellingham. But no, it was in the RV. Oh, Joops. Joops.
Clips: Right, you came in Lady Joops and gave us a demo. Yeah. Right.
Clips: Right. So, yeah, at that point, I think we were talking about where Cosmic was.
Clips: The talk I was giving was on apps because it's my second time around at LinuxFest Northwest.
Clips: I wanted to do some new content. So Jeremy actually did a lot of the work on
Clips: the apps and wanted to highlight how unique they are because there's a lot of
Clips: features that you just don't get in a lot of desktop apps on Linux.
Clips: So we've been kind of looking at a couple of things just before we started recording. but,
Clips: And things like fancy background switching for users at creators,
Clips: and it looks like we're getting to the polish aspect of Cosmic now.
Clips: Yeah, there's a long gap between Alpha 7, which was in April,
Clips: and our beta release at the end of September.
Clips: I guess that's, whatever, six months or something like that, five months.
Clips: And after the Alpha 7, one of the reasons that we did alphas frequently was
Clips: because we kept getting the same bugs over and over again, even though they had been resolved.
Clips: So unless we were tagging releases and those were being adopted,
Clips: that's because Cosmic is packaged for Arch and Fedora and Open Suicide and things like that.
Clips: So unless we were tagging frequently, just the triage and the amount of effort
Clips: to go through things that had already been solved was pretty high.
Clips: But Alpha 7 was kind of a point where things improved considerably at that point.
Clips: And so we didn't get a lot of issues afterwards.
Clips: And there were unique ones that came after that.
Clips: So the beta release marked that point where all the features,
Clips: or by and large, all the features are in.
Clips: And now we're working on smaller bug fixes and polish for the final release.
Clips: Jeremy's here, too. And I wonder, Jeremy, if you have any comments on sort of
Clips: just the state of the system and where it's at from a code development standpoint,
Clips: stability, things like that.
Clips: Yeah, sure. So as Carl said, we nailed down most of the new features already,
Clips: except for a whole bunch of things that we're adding.
Clips: Like the Cosmic Store needs to have Flatpak add-ons. We're doing printing support
Clips: in Cosmic Edit, which is more nuts than I thought it would be.
Clips: But in general, the system's pretty stable, and we're just working through the
Clips: backlog of issues that people have reported during the alpha and beta phase
Clips: and trying to fix them all before RC.
Clips: And we actually started shipping a unit with the Cosmic Beta.
Clips: So the Oryx Pro with the codename Oryp 13 is an AMD and NVIDIA hybrid system.
Clips: And it turns out that it works best in Cosmic because of the way that Cosmic
Clips: handles hybrid graphics.
Clips: Right. So the Oryx Pro has just been released today. It's October 8th.
Clips: So it's a brand new product with Strix Point CPU, NVIDIA 5070 graphics.
Clips: And what's really unique about Strix's point is that the VGA or the controller,
Clips: the integrated GPU, is not VGA compatible, meaning that it's...
Clips: It requires Wayland because it will not work with X11 because it's not a VGA-compatible GPU.
Clips: So as we were working through the products, like Ubuntu 24.04,
Clips: if you write it on X11, the discrete GPU is always on because the X11 can't use the integrated GPU.
Clips: In Wayland, that does work correctly. And so when we're shipping Ubuntu 24.04,
Clips: we're also shipping that with Wayland on that product.
Clips: And we weren't going to go back to 2204 for POP and find out what the Wayland
Clips: State was there when we have this brand new desktop that's really close and
Clips: frankly at this point a better product than what we're shipping with 2204.
Clips: So the Oryx becomes our first product to ship with Cosmic, one by necessity
Clips: and also because we think we're shipping a better product to our customers.
Clips: That's a pretty big milestone.
Clips: So we're going to kind of play with things off mic, but I'm curious,
Clips: because you guys have been kind of running this the longest out of almost anybody
Clips: on the internet, what are people missing when it comes to what's great about using Cosmic?
Clips: Like when you hear people discussing Cosmic and arguing Plasma versus Gnome
Clips: and Cosmic, what's the thing that people are missing?
Clips: The highlight of Cosmic is that it adapts to whatever your workflow happens
Clips: to be, and it has all this ability to do that, but none of it feels overwhelming. It all feels natural.
Clips: It's really – it's easy to get in the weeds. Sometimes I think people use cosmic
Clips: and they say, well, there's not like a lot of new things in here.
Clips: I think it's because the design is just so good.
Clips: That when you get to using it and moving things around, it just all works,
Clips: and it just feels so simple and natural that the innovation is taking all these
Clips: advanced concepts and making them that approachable to every single user.
Clips: So you don't have to be an engineer to take advantage of tiling or to theme
Clips: your system and make it look exactly the way you want it to look.
Clips: You can go in and, without being overwhelmed by a whole bunch of settings,
Clips: click a few things, and then you have a dramatically different workflow or experience,
Clips: based on what feels right to you.
Clips: And it's so easy to switch between different styles of using Cosmic,
Clips: whether you want to launch apps with the launcher and switch between them,
Clips: or if you want to use the application library, or if you prefer to use workspaces
Clips: or not use workspaces or use tiling or use a hybrid tiling and some,
Clips: you know, maybe tiling on your external display and floating on your laptop display.
Clips: Whatever fits right for you. It's just very easy and natural to set it up and
Clips: to try different things.
Clips: And to me, there's kind of three things in addition to that.
Clips: We're trying to make, or what Cosmic does is make computing fun and productive and personal.
Clips: And it kind of takes some effort to make computing fun.
Clips: We spend so much time on our computers. They should be fun to spend time at.
Clips: We're at them for hours. And so for me, fun is customizing my theme,
Clips: changing my layout, trying different things. I enjoy doing that stuff.
Clips: For other people, it's gaming. So we want to make sure gaming is fantastic.
Clips: For other people, what might matter the most is I don't have to click four things to log out.
Clips: In Cosmic, you just click the button, click log out.
Clips: Everything is a shorter path to what you need in Cosmic than a lot of other
Clips: operating system experiences.
Clips: Jeremy, I'm curious if you have anything to add on what people are missing when
Clips: they're comparing the different desktop environments today and they're thinking
Clips: about Cosmic or they're comparing Cosmic to Plasma or GNOME or things like that.
Clips: Well, one thing I think I see as missing is people judge, often they judge Cosmic
Clips: based on its current state, when they should be looking forwards to the future.
Clips: Every release that we do, we will have a feature cycle where we build up a large
Clips: number of features. And I don't think we've ever told anybody no.
Clips: We just say, no, this is not how we want to do it, but we will try to adjust to that use case.
Clips: And there's so many cases where, like when I think about all the accessibility work we did,
Clips: that was really one where we had to toe the line between how do we make sure
Clips: everything is there for every person who could potentially use this product
Clips: and every potential issue they may have with the product,
Clips: but still make the default experience good for the largest number of people.
Clips: And yeah, that's what I wish people would consider is how would you see this
Clips: modular desktop environment evolve
Clips: into the future rather rather than judging it by how it is right now.
Clips: Also add to that, when you have an established customer base and user base like
Clips: Pop! OS has and System76 has.
Clips: It's not like starting from scratch with no users and building something new.
Clips: You have a responsibility to what their experience already has been and what
Clips: their experience is going to be when you deliver something new to them.
Clips: And so when we're building Cosmic, we're building a platform that's going to be familiar to them.
Clips: But once you get into Cosmic, you realize that this platform,
Clips: because of the way it can be composed and the way it's modular,
Clips: it can actually become anything that you want it to be.
Clips: And that's, I think, what will be its key feature and what people will really
Clips: appreciate long term is I see folks say, it looks like Mac.
Clips: It looks like GNOME. It looks like KDE. It looks like this.
Clips: Exactly. It does. It can look like any one of those.
Clips: And to get that layout that you really enjoy and that you prefer to use,
Clips: it's just so simple that you can just lay it out the way you want.
Clips: So, yeah, it's unique in that way.
Clips: I guess I'm sort of surprised we've been talking and the architecture hasn't
Clips: come up, Rust hasn't come up, the way the system settings are stored,
Clips: which is kind of different and unique, hasn't come up.
Clips: Jeremy, can you touch on some of that for us? Yeah, absolutely.
Clips: So we try as much as possible to keep things modular.
Clips: And this is another thing where I want to see it evolve over time.
Clips: Like we just added third-party applets into the Cosmic Store. So you can go in.
Clips: These are things that anybody can make, and they're securely added to the panel
Clips: because they're flat packs and they're sandboxed.
Clips: So every applet that you get from the applet store, you can add to the panel.
Clips: You can create docks and panels anywhere you want on the system,
Clips: on any display, any number. and Carl is laughing right now.
Clips: I would definitely have too many. I'll be that guy. I admit it.
Clips: You'd have the like 1990s browser toolbar kind of look.
Clips: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so the ability to have every single one of those be a separate
Clips: process and be in its own sandbox means that they can be written in any language.
Clips: So the Rust aspect of Cosmic actually doesn't matter as much as people want
Clips: it to be, especially now that Rust has become like a political statement somehow.
Clips: I don't care, I have my own politics, but Rust is just a programming language,
Clips: and the purpose of it is to drive memory safety.
Clips: And the reason we're using it is because it allows us to say these types of
Clips: bugs cannot exist in safe Rust code.
Clips: And so long as we're writing safe Rust code, then we eliminate those bugs or
Clips: at least reduce the prevalence of bugs overall in the entire desktop environment. This...
Clips: The config mechanism is another interesting part of it.
Clips: It's one that was driven by portability and modularity.
Clips: It's how can we make it so that the same config mechanism could be used by Cosmic
Clips: apps, regardless of what operating system they're running on.
Clips: So they're running on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, it doesn't matter.
Clips: They don't need a third-party service to exist. They don't need a daemon setup.
Clips: They don't need dconf to exist.
Clips: They just need to be able to write to files and so we have a flat file format
Clips: where they just write out in the Rust object notation format,
Clips: to those files and you can manage those files in a Git repository if you'd like
Clips: to or in any way you want to sync files between systems.
Clips: And you can diff those files very easily they're all plain text and another
Clips: thing that we've done is to ensure that all the state is separated out from
Clips: the config and what I mean by state is if you're in KDE and you're trying to
Clips: manage your config files, you might,
Clips: for instance, notice that the size of every console window is stored.
Clips: The last window size is stored in the same config file that saves things like
Clips: your keyboard shortcuts for the console application.
Clips: So we've separated those kinds of things out.
Clips: Recent files would be stored in state versus the theme settings would be stored in config.
Clips: And that ensures that you're able to sync those config settings without bringing
Clips: over state that doesn't necessarily apply between computers.
Clips: Yeah, I think that extends to our lack of requirement for system D as well.
Clips: The portability means that Cosmic will be a great desktop for BSDs. It works on Redox.
Clips: And so we try to make decisions that don't eliminate its use in other platforms. Yeah, I'm just curious.
Clips: How's it been? It seems like Cosmic's spreading its wings to a lot of other
Clips: platforms and distributions. Have you gotten good feedback from people trying to package it?
Clips: I've gotten feedback and it may be anecdotal that this is the easiest desktop
Clips: environment to port to package overall. Yeah.
Clips: There were a few hiccups with Rust in the start, like Fedora wanted to bundle
Clips: all the Rust, take all the Rust dependencies and turn them into dynamic libraries.
Clips: But then they changed their mind, and now they're allowing those to be compiled
Clips: by Cargo, just the native Rust build system.
Clips: And so, yeah, it's spread across to Arch, to OpenSUSE, Nix, to Alpine,
Clips: to Fedora, and onwards because it is very easy to port and it has very limited
Clips: dependencies on the system.
Clips: All right, well, I'm just looking forward to playing around with it. Thanks, guys.
Chris: Yeah, really, a big thank you to everyone over at System76 for making time on
Chris: our last-minute scheduled stop.
Chris: And I'm going to give it a go. I walked away pretty impressed.
Chris: One of the things that impressed me the most is the way they've implemented applets.
Chris: And that's, to me, a massive innovation in the desktop space is essentially
Chris: any Flatpak app with the right dimensions. It's a Wayland application.
Wes: Yeah, as long as you can draw a window on the screen and, you know,
Wes: it has the right interfaces. It'll work.
Chris: You can make it an applet. And the massive ramification of that is all the dependencies,
Chris: your language, all of that's handled by, you know, the Flatpak.
Chris: But it also means if the desktop updates, your extensions are,
Chris: unless something changes in the XTG portals, your extensions aren't going to break.
Chris: It's a brilliant, genius way to do extensions on a desktop that works with a
Chris: desktop that might be quasi-rolling on some systems.
Wes: Yeah, stay tuned. We'll see if we can get Chris to Vibecode in a little extension.
Chris: So I've been running Plasma and Aurora here on my main machine in the studio,
Chris: and I think we're going to nix Cosmic it up, and I'm going to give Cosmic a
Chris: go on this, see if I can kind of replicate a workflow I really like in the studio
Chris: with it. I was just really impressed.
Chris: Anything stand out to you gentlemen about cosmic.
Wes: Yeah i mean i still really want to sit and live with it for
Wes: a while to give it a proper test of course um but yeah just
Wes: you know watching carl use his cosmic watching him kind of live tweak it and
Wes: change it in front of us with i mean he wasn't even really sitting in front
Wes: in front of a proper workstation environment he's kind of having to you know
Wes: show us the screen and tweak things as part of the presentation so if you can
Wes: do it in that environment,
Wes: it seems like now we have this lean,
Wes: mean, portable, flexible environment.
Wes: So even if it doesn't end up maybe being your daily driver on every machine,
Wes: it seems like a very useful tool that you can kind of take with you.
Brent: For me, I was really impressed by their dedication to like the design of the
Brent: architecture on the backend.
Brent: And they specifically said, you know, we're trying to make production software.
Brent: And so we want to do it right, even if it takes longer.
Brent: And I think that philosophy is really playing out in a nice way now with Cosmic
Brent: coming into beta and us getting that behind the scenes look of how it's built.
Brent: And that also means they've been working really closely with a bunch of upstream that,
Brent: found really impressive and is just making our linux ecosystem better overall
Brent: so i was really impressed by all of that.
Chris: I think too one of the things that i took away from it is there's components
Chris: that people might end up using even if they don't use the entire cosmic desktop
Chris: of so on hyperland you don't really have a file manager you get to pick and
Chris: choose and one of the things i experimented with is i installed the cosmic file
Chris: manager because it It doesn't require nearly as much as, say,
Chris: Dolphin or Files does from GNOME.
Chris: And it worked really well. So there's components they're working on here that
Chris: are pretty portable. But as you also heard Carl say, they don't have a system
Chris: D dependency, not as a political statement, but just as a function of how they've built it.
Chris: Which means perhaps this will be available for desktops that want a modern desktop
Chris: that don't have system D in the distro.
Chris: Or maybe one of the BSDs out there that obviously won't have system D.
Chris: And so it has that's kind of encouraging that way because it has some potential
Chris: audience that maybe modern gnome and plasma are are leaving behind.
Brent: I have to say i was also really quite impressed by
Brent: just how many resources they're putting to the
Brent: desktop they mentioned 10 people working on cosmic
Brent: full-time including qa of course and i
Brent: specifically carl said well we actually like
Brent: that to be like three or four times that size in the
Brent: future and so they're really dedicating to this
Brent: desktop which is yeah really impressive
Brent: yeah and i love too that uh
Brent: their philosophy towards a rolling release desktop he mentioned that a couple
Brent: times and the idea that the desktop can be decoupled from the distro and that's
Brent: the way they're building it even for pop os was a really interesting concept
Brent: and i think has a lot of really interesting benefits so.
Chris: I'll give it a go and report back in the future after I've had some time with Cosmic.
Chris: And before we even got out of the parking lot at System 76, our good buddy,
Chris: Editor Drew, showed up for a quick reunite while we were in town.
Chris: And, well, I think we'll get into what happened afterwards later.
Clips: Look who it is, boys! Hey, is that Drew? It's that guy who makes us knock down like shit. Hey!
Clips: Hello! Hello! Good to see you.
Clips: It's been like two years, three years, eight years? We saw him for...
Clips: No, it's less for you because we were here for Denver like two years.
Clips: Oh, right, yeah, for the red hats. We didn't see you much. Still looking handsome as ever.
Clips: What do you got there? That's for you, right? Oh, it's a DC to DC charger.
Clips: That sounds like one. After you're alternating, you got a whole new project.
Clips: Should we open it? That's very exciting. He needs this.
Clips: Just to get you to stop bugging him and buy it. It looks great, Brent. Huh? Yeah.
Clips: It looks like it's in great shape. Oh, I know how it does. Yeah,
Clips: yeah, that's great. Has this thing even been used? No, it looks beautiful.
Clips: Yeah, it's half the price of everything else.
Clips: Assuming it works, I think it might be okay. Yeah, good. There you go. I'm going blue.
Clips: I mean, look how clean it is. Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
Clips: Yeah, seriously, that looks like that's never been used. I mean, look at the labels.
Clips: The person selling it only had
Clips: one other eBay item, which was like a Louis Vuitton super high-end purse.
Clips: So I was banging on the back, I didn't know what they were doing. Yeah, no kidding.
Clips: Well, what do you think of the van? This is your first time seeing it in person,
Clips: right? It is, yeah. What do you think? It's a van.
Clips: Can we get more descriptors? A little bit of rust. Yeah.
Clips: It's a vibe no i mean you know it's it's it's it's.
Chris: An old ram you know it's an old ram he says um you know so just a quick side
Chris: again i'm so grateful to the audience for making this trip possible gave us
Chris: a chance to reunite with drew which is always really good to just reconnect,
Chris: and brent then began to work his magic he gave drew the tour of the van so we
Chris: captured editor drew's post van tour impressions to see if they improved so.
Clips: Now that you've had the full tour Or what's the refined opinion?
Clips: Dude, it's awesome. Really? You get them. Yes. You got them to come around.
Clips: I mean, you know, I kind of figured it would be one of those things where,
Clips: like, you're looking at it from the outside, and it doesn't look like much.
Clips: It looks like a 30-year-old van.
Clips: But then you get inside, and it's like, hey, look at this.
Clips: This thing's cool. This thing's cool. This thing's cool. Every direction you
Clips: look, there's something cool. There's something weird. It's just, yeah, it's awesome.
Chris: So you got them. You turned them around, Brent. Good job.
Brent: Well, thank you. Yeah, I was a little, I got to say, underwhelmed by his initial
Brent: reaction. I was like, this won't do. We got to work harder here.
Brent: And sure enough, I got him with the home assistant in the cover there.
Brent: He's like, how do you fit that in there? And he's really impressed. So thanks, Drew.
Chris: Yes, it was really great to see you, Drew. Wes and I, however, we had to roll.
Chris: We still had 22 hours to get it back to the studio, which meant driving through
Chris: most of Montana, most of Wyoming, and of course, all of Idaho and Washington.
Chris: We really had to put down, like, significant miles.
Chris: And when we left, it was a little sad.
Clips: Okay, Wes and I are in my car. We are leaving Brent behind with Drew. So I...
Clips: We'll be out of Denver probably in the next two hours or so because traffic's
Clips: pretty bad. So an hour or so. How long do you think until Brent's out of Denver?
Clips: Well, he's about to go to lunch or really dinner at this point with Drew.
Clips: Is he going to leave Denver at like 8 p.m. at night? Probably not.
Clips: So that's at least tomorrow.
Clips: But, you know, we ended up fixing on his brakes instead of fixing on his belts
Clips: or his alternator, which he also has a new one.
Clips: And, you know. Maybe he gets working on that. Maybe he gets working on that.
Clips: I think he doesn't leave till tomorrow. I'm betting, I'm betting Friday.
Chris: Okay, Brent's survey says.
Brent: Well, yeah, Drew and I had an amazing time together and we might have had sushi
Brent: and sake and like lots of chats and stuff.
Brent: And then I was like, I may as well just stay overnight. But I didn't really have a plan for that.
Brent: So I have to say thank you to System76 for letting me sleep in their parking lot.
Brent: Really nice parking lot. I gotta say nice and quiet other than the loudspeaker
Brent: that comes on at 5.30 in the morning and says, Hey, you're being recorded on video.
Brent: So highly recommended. They were kind enough to not bother me in the morning.
Brent: And so I got going in the morning, but, you know, I forgot some of my stuff in Drew's car.
Brent: So I had to, you know, see Drew again. And he had a whole beautiful,
Brent: like, care package for me of, like, van supplies. things he thought would be
Brent: helpful, including a giant bundle of rope.
Brent: And it was really sweet. Yeah.
Chris: Wow. She was so great. Wow. Well, so we were putting down miles.
Chris: Wes and I on the route home totally leaned in to take advantage of tactical wife planning.
Chris: She was great because she was watching us on the tracker. And so she was constantly
Chris: looking into, okay, there's an Airbnb about an hour out or two hours out from you.
Chris: You have these options. And then we would say, yeah, we'll make it this far.
Chris: Then she'd book it for us.
Chris: And all the details would just be handled for us. And we'd just show up and crash.
Wes: Yeah, we got a message with the door code and the Wi-Fi. Incredible.
Chris: Yeah, so we were able to move pretty quick because we had to.
Chris: We wanted to make it back here in time for John.
Clips: It's the final push of the trip. Wes and I are in Washington State,
Clips: in eastern Washington State.
Clips: We stopped at Wes's absolute favorite restaurant.
Clips: Burger King. When the king tells you to get breakfast, you stop, you listen.
Clips: So we filled up with gas, ordered some fully loaded croissant-wiches. Our way.
Clips: Yeah, always our way, and we're waiting on some,
Clips: I assume the syrup's really good, and I wanted to get that.
Clips: Oh, Wes is grabbing the French toast sticks. So we have about five hours or so on the road.
Clips: I probably have another six or seven after I drop Wes off. I'll have another
Clips: couple hours. So six or seven hours total for me.
Clips: And then the trip's all done. No idea where Brent's headed right now.
Clips: He's going in the opposite direction of home, so we'll figure that out at some point.
Clips: But hopefully he's having a good time.
Chris: It was a great time. And so Brent's total hours on the trip driving,
Chris: you put in a massive 59.44 hours of continuous drive time.
Brent: That's like active motion time, right?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And Wes and I put in a total drive time of 75.4 hours.
Chris: Which actually, I turned off the tracker in Seattle. So I continued to drive
Chris: for another couple hours after that.
Wes: Yeah, that means you ended up driving for probably over eight hours that last day. Sorry.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Really amazing that there was really no incidents or any problems
Chris: and that it went so smoothly and that we got to do the meetups.
Chris: We just want to do more of it next time.
Chris: We want to do more meetups on the route, maybe different routes and things like
Chris: that because it was great and everything worked out. We made it back here just in time.
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Brent: While we were on the road, Ubuntu 25.10 was released, and we had a chance to
Brent: sit down with John Seeger, VP of Engineering at Canonical, and get the inside scoop.
Chris: John's back on the program. It's been just since the beginning of the year we
Chris: were talking and it's a big week because Ubuntu 25.10 is out.
Chris: And John, in your release, you say Ubuntu 25.10 is a statement on the intent
Chris: for the next Ubuntu LTS in 2026.
Chris: It sounds like a big deal. Welcome back to the program, sir.
Jon: Thanks very much for having me. It's good to be back.
Chris: So what do you mean when you say it's a statement of intent?
Chris: Are we to say, is that to say like what's in this release today is what we should
Chris: expect in the LTS? Or what do we mean by that?
Jon: I think it's two things, right? So yes, indeed, the things that you see in this
Jon: release, some of which are a little more testy, and the plan is to get those
Jon: stable and kind of well understood in the hope that we can ship them for the LTS.
Jon: But it also marks, I think, hopefully what I think will be a change in Ubuntu
Jon: where we try to have slightly more exciting releases going forward.
Jon: So we have to dial back that excitement a little bit for the LTS and go a little
Jon: bit harder on the kind of reliability and stability that our LTS customers expect.
Jon: But my observation when I came into sort of looking after Ubuntu at Canonical
Jon: was that the interim releases have kind of stopped being so crazy.
Jon: And I'd like to make them crazy again, because I think we're in a position where
Jon: we can use our extraordinary user base and, you know,
Jon: rather excellent community to push certain things that might actually have an
Jon: impact beyond just ubuntu right like it's not just about ubuntu it's about uh
Jon: trying to advance linux in general whether that be on the server or the desktop
Jon: or devices or whatever that might be.
Chris: So how does that manifest then because one of the things that i know you've
Chris: been focusing on is sort of a faster release cadence i think monthly snapshots
Chris: do you view it as you put those contributions into ubuntu and hope that the
Chris: wider linux community takes them upstream,
Chris: or is it is it more fundamental like the tooling you're choosing and you're
Chris: hoping to have an impact there like can you expand on what you mean by that.
Jon: Yeah, so the two are somewhat different. The monthly releasing is based on some
Jon: wisdom that I have picked up over the years working with software teams,
Jon: which is, if releasing is hard, you should do it more. And releasing was hard.
Jon: Releasing Ubuntu was something we only did every six months.
Jon: It was a relatively dated process.
Jon: And I wanted to modernize that process. And
Jon: only getting a chance to think about that process every
Jon: six months is not necessarily very conducive to us
Jon: making it any better so the monthly releases was really
Jon: a tool for the release management team that may not have felt like
Jon: that for them the first time it was a tool for them to understand their own
Jon: process better and improve their understanding and it really shows so this time
Jon: we have a release sprint when we release them to we we get together a few of
Jon: us in our london office and this time we were all done like hours early just
Jon: waiting to release the press release at the time we said we would release and
Jon: that has basically never happened as far as i can tell,
Jon: the tooling side of things is more where i want to push so this is things like
Jon: the rust core utils and the rust sudo implementation and potentially some of
Jon: the work we're doing around tpm full disk encryption and a few other initiatives like that.
Chris: I see so i would
Chris: not i don't i don't really know but to me it would seem like what
Chris: you're trying to do is push on processes that were designed to improve stability
Chris: and reliability of the release so have you gotten pushback saying john you're
Chris: changing things that we put in place on purpose like we have lessons learned
Chris: and that's why we do it this way and you want to change it so we can release
Chris: faster has that been a problem.
Jon: Um a little but i would i would temper that with i am asking questions and pushing
Jon: but not not being reckless like i uh i've been asked i've been accused of trying
Jon: to turn ubuntu into various these other things, like maybe Nixos,
Jon: you'll have heard me waxing lyrical about that before.
Jon: And that's not the purpose. The purpose is to try and understand.
Jon: How we could evolve Ubuntu to give ourselves and our customers,
Jon: be those, you know, tinkerers at home or our paid customers,
Jon: the assurance they need that Ubuntu is the stable platform, the reliable platform,
Jon: the resilient platform they want, but also delivers on the mission that Ubuntu
Jon: was started with, right, which is all about delivering the very best of open
Jon: source to a really wide audience.
Jon: So back in the day, I wasn't around in the Linux soon then, but when Ubuntu
Jon: first kind of forked off from Debian or became a downstream of Debian,
Jon: the whole point was to provide an area where we could ship newer,
Jon: more exciting software that perhaps was more complicated in Debian because of
Jon: licensing or policy or process.
Jon: And I think that's fine. I think the two should exist.
Jon: I don't think Debian should do what we do. And I don't think we should do what
Jon: Debian does in the same way. I don't think we should do what Arch or Next do.
Jon: But that doesn't mean that the processes that we have used for the last 20 years are unchangeable.
Jon: A lot has changed in software engineering in 20 years, and I would like our
Jon: processes to reflect that where possible.
Jon: So it's mostly about more automated testing, more automation in the release
Jon: process, which should, if we do it well,
Jon: enable us to have more trust in that release process, not less,
Jon: I think, and spend less time on the mechanics of releasing and more time on
Jon: polishing what it is that we're releasing.
Jon: The release process should not be the exciting part about an Ubuntu release.
Jon: The features that we ship and the tools that we ship should be the exciting piece.
Wes: Amen to that.
Chris: Well put. Okay, so kind of along the same lines of herding cats a little bit.
Chris: I feel like there's more communication along the development process,
Chris: in part from you, but others on the team were more on the form, blogging.
Chris: Has that been, I don't know if mandate's the right word, has there been encouragement there?
Chris: What's that communication like to people that are busy working on Ubuntu and
Chris: focused on actually doing the development or doing the QA?
Chris: How do you convince them we need you to be more public about what you're working
Chris: on? And How's that gone over?
Jon: Yeah. So I'll be honest, it kind of was a mandate to start with.
Jon: I think what happened is Canonical, as it grew and became more grown up as a
Jon: company, we adopted things like Google Workplace and Mattermost.
Jon: And a lot of the communication that would previously have been public in IRC
Jon: and on forums kind of naturally ended up in Mattermost and on Google Docs.
Jon: That's where we were all hanging out as Canonical employees, right?
Jon: And so I think lots of the process, lots of the discussion around Ubuntu suddenly
Jon: became quite opaque. And one of my hopes was that I could change that a little bit.
Jon: And so I did actually essentially mandate that every team that I look after,
Jon: so that's the Ubuntu Desktop Server Foundations and more recently the DebCrafters team.
Jon: I mandated essentially there should be at least a post every week from one of us.
Jon: And to start with, I just did like a round robin. So I said,
Jon: I'll go this week. You know, Foundation's the following week,
Jon: Server the next week, DevCraft is the next week, and we'll just go on a rotation.
Jon: And I think that was quite tough for the team. And I'm really proud of how they rose to that.
Jon: But what's been interesting is that other people on those teams have seen the
Jon: engagement that those posts were getting and the interest that it drives to
Jon: the project and started following suit without me asking, right?
Jon: And now I think it is quite clear that we have a group of developers in Ubuntu
Jon: Engineering who want to talk about what they're doing because they find it interesting
Jon: and they like it when people ask them questions about it and give discussion
Jon: and thoughts for improvement and things like that. So it started out as a mandate.
Jon: I do put my hand up. There is still a bit of a mandate.
Jon: I do expect there to be something every week from Ubuntu Engineering,
Jon: but there's much more than that happening, which I'm really pleased to see.
Chris: Well, it's great to see from the outside. It feels like life.
Wes: Yeah, I mean, it's good for us, just, you know, for our business.
Wes: But it feels good for the community too, right? There's more to pay attention
Wes: to, more to keep Ubuntu fresh in your mind.
Chris: Yeah. All right, so let's talk about 2510. We've got a new GNOME 49 in there,
Chris: right? So that means we're going to get a lot of nice stuff like HDR.
Chris: What should we talk about with 2510? What's the big thing on your mind?
Jon: The big controversial thing, perhaps controversial, I don't know,
Jon: is the Rust utilities, right?
Jon: So we replaced GNU Core Utils with the UUtils implementation and we replaced Sulu with Sulu RS.
Jon: And they to varying degrees represent the most risk, I suppose,
Jon: but I feel comfortable about it, particularly Sulu RS, which is a much tighter
Jon: in scope and therefore it's easier for us to kind of reason about the impact it's likely to have.
Jon: But the relationship that we've got with the UU Tools Project and the Trifecta
Jon: Tech Foundation has been phenomenal.
Jon: We've been speaking with them pretty much weekly, if not more regularly throughout
Jon: the entire cycle. They've been super responsive to bugs and feedback.
Jon: And so really I see 2510 as a bit of a proving ground.
Jon: There are still a handful of utilities that we have diverted back to the GNU
Jon: implementations where we see that there are issues still.
Jon: Because at the end of the day, as much as I would love to push this, I don't,
Jon: I'm not going to do it irresponsibly and just push broken stuff to people's machines, right?
Jon: So the idea is that we would iron out all of those issues throughout this cycle,
Jon: and for 2604, be as close to a full replacement as we possibly can.
Chris: What do you consider to be a major issue with the REST tooling right now?
Jon: So we have an issue that I think was reported on Pheronics, where there is a
Jon: slight discrepancy between how the MD5 checksum tool behaves in certain cases,
Jon: which impacts MakeSelf archives, which is used as part of the Pheronics test suite.
Jon: There was an issue with directory traversal so
Jon: some of the code for the tools that have the ability
Jon: to recurse through directories maybe that is um trying to
Jon: be an example anything like ls or cp or move or anything like that the
Jon: directory traversal code uh was written quite naively and could could be left
Jon: vulnerable so we kind of waited for that to be fixed before we moved across
Jon: there's been a handful of issues some of them really tiny some of them less
Jon: tiny there was one that bit us where the date command output the date in a slightly
Jon: wrong format and broke a huge number of the package builds in the archive.
Wes: That's a classic programming thing, right? I mean, who wants to work with dates?
Jon: There is a link. I wrote a blog post last week saying kind of a retrospective
Jon: about this. And there's a link which shows the list of all the utilities that we've diverted back.
Jon: And the bug tracker is really active. And the maintainer is in there helping
Jon: us out, along with what appears to be a really nice, vibrant,
Jon: active community around that project.
Wes: You mentioned your relationship with Upstream. And when you were here last time, I think you're,
Wes: pretty hopeful about how this could be good, not only for pushing Ubuntu and
Wes: the Linux desktop forward, but also for these upstream projects. How has that been going?
Jon: Yeah, I mean, from my opinion, it's great. So the way this sort of unfolded
Jon: is I had the idea that I would like to do it.
Jon: I reached out to Sylvester, who's the kind of project leader for utils and said
Jon: that I was interested in doing this.
Jon: And did he think the project was ready? And would he need some funding to help
Jon: out, which we agreed and kind of move forward.
Jon: And similarly for sudo right i reached out to the folks there and
Jon: said i'm interested in doing this what do you think both responded with
Jon: huge enthusiasm we did a bit of back and forth on some
Jon: feature work that we would need doing or some some targeted effort on
Jon: bugs and yeah i think they're certainly
Jon: getting increased interest we don't
Jon: know exactly how many ubuntu users there are because we
Jon: have very limited telemetry anyway and anyone who has kind of behind a corporate
Jon: firewall or opts out of it we don't get it so we don't know exactly how many
Jon: there are but it's there's definitely more than 10 million desktop users alone
Jon: i shudder to think how many server users there are so you've got to imagine
Jon: a pretty enormous increase in their daily users as a result of this and.
Wes: I mean i think it's showing right like one way to view this is maybe okay it's
Wes: not fully ready if we're still finding these issues but another is okay the
Wes: massive scale that ubuntu brings means you actually finally do find a lot of
Wes: these edge cases and can really iron out your software to make it you know robust.
Jon: And hopefully they then have some funding like if
Jon: they can't fix the issue themselves they have some funding to pay
Jon: other developers to help them out right like pay bounties a lot
Jon: of the issues have been performance issues so that i found an issue with word
Jon: count which made it 10 slower than the gnu
Jon: implementation i found an issue someone found that interesting two days later
Jon: it was 11 faster than the gnu one right like so there definitely are going to
Jon: be places where there are rough edges we we won't we certainly haven't exhausted
Jon: every code path right but actually overall i'm surprised at how surface level
Jon: much of the problems we found have been yeah.
Chris: That's my takeaway,
Chris: Before we move completely off of Rust, one last question is,
Chris: it seems like some people that are building on Rust find themselves in this
Chris: contentious spot where it's a hot topic online.
Chris: People love debating sort of like these hot button issues in the Linux community,
Chris: and Rust has become one of them.
Chris: And it seems like, oh, you want to push this forward at the same time,
Chris: not really engage in that. How do you walk that? Is that a challenge?
Chris: You know, is it a brand risk association at all? Those types of things.
Jon: I have tried to steer clear of those sorts of conversations,
Jon: not to not address it here.
Jon: So one of the biggest criticisms that we got for this, or I got for this,
Jon: was the change in license of the core utils package.
Jon: There were lots of people that
Jon: were very concerned that the Rust implementation is not GPL, it's MIT.
Jon: The opinion I've come to is that, as far as I can tell, the values of the utils
Jon: project are very well aligned with that of Ubuntu.
Jon: And so in reality, anybody who installs Ubuntu
Jon: on a machine is entering a sort of trust relationship with canonical right
Jon: like every time you run app we root on your machine that's how apt works you
Jon: kind of have to trust us and so i think
Jon: my view is that it's not
Jon: like we wrote the core utils code in the first place we were shipping canoes core
Jon: utils their values aligned with ours the code was you
Jon: know provided something we needed and now we're shipping a different
Jon: implementation and if something were to change and i felt like or we felt like
Jon: the utils project was not representative of the values of ubuntu or was not
Jon: servicing our community well either we'd ship the canoe one again or we'd ship
Jon: something else do you know i mean like we're a we're a distribution we're curating
Jon: what we think is the best for our users and i think particularly in the case of core utils,
Jon: i don't see it as a huge money maker for anyone in a sense like i think for
Jon: things like elastic search is one of these famous cases where the licensing
Jon: put them in a complicated position commercially and they've changed their licensing
Jon: terms and that's that's gone how that's gone.
Jon: I don't see as much of a risk with core utils personally like canonical is certainly
Jon: not making a move to try and monetize core utils.
Jon: We're just shipping something that we think is going to be a bit faster and
Jon: it's safer in the long term, right? And a bit easier for us to maintain in the
Jon: long term. And that's really all there is to it.
Chris: I've heard you talk about building with a 20-year mindset.
Chris: And that's where this plays in, right? It's maintaining software that enterprises
Chris: run for just a bonkers long amount of time.
Jon: Yeah, I mean, we do 12 years extended support at the moment.
Jon: There's talk of possibly extending that.
Jon: And in reality, I want us to be maintaining code that's as easy for us to build,
Jon: test, find contributors to as we possibly can. Obviously, we want to do that.
Jon: We want to make that task as easy as possible, not only so we can get the fixes
Jon: out sooner, but the easier each piece of software is for us to maintain,
Jon: the more pieces of software we can maintain at the end of the day.
Chris: Okay, I want to ask you one other thing that sounds pretty neat.
Chris: I believe this is the release where initRAMFS tools has been replaced.
Jon: Yes, on the desktop. So in 2510, we're using Draycut. I don't know how to pronounce
Jon: that. I think it's Draycut.
Jon: So we're using that on 2510 for desktop.
Jon: Work is underway to do that for the server, but there were a few use cases where
Jon: we hadn't quite ironed things out. So we haven't rolled it out to server just yet.
Jon: Work is ongoing. My hope is that we would do that for 2604 but again not if
Jon: we can't be very sure the difficulty there is in,
Jon: cases where people need to load kind of weird drivers early on in server boot
Jon: perhaps for like a fancy networking card or whatever it might be we just haven't
Jon: quite got there yet but yes on if you install questing from for your desktop
Jon: you'll be using trade cut not the nitro mfs tools that.
Wes: Seems exciting yeah i'm curious uh just um firstly what was the motivation you know to make the switch.
Wes: And then secondly, I believe this is just an Ubuntu layer switch.
Wes: This isn't something Debian was also doing, right?
Jon: Yeah. So the motivation there is, I think, stability of kind of boot.
Jon: I mean, it's a few less bash scripts in the boot path. It also enables us to
Jon: use the system DNIT scripts, which theoretically gives us a slight performance advantage.
Jon: And the regeneration of the kernel image at kind of apt, if you apt upgrade and you get a new kernel,
Jon: the regeneration of the kernel image should be slightly faster but broadly it
Jon: was seen as a way of getting more bash out of the boot essentially um so just
Jon: a slightly more robust way to boot a system yeah.
Wes: And less bash to maintain hopefully.
Chris: So the next question i have for you and i imagine this probably really won't
Chris: be much of a story a couple of days after release but uh what's going on around
Chris: release day with flat packs and 2510 are there problems there right now are those being resolved.
Jon: Yeah indeed there was a problem there so you're aware that we use snap
Jon: packaging mostly on ubuntu and the security confinement
Jon: for snap packages is provided by app armor and but app
Jon: armor doesn't only work for snaps right so app armor is a
Jon: generic Linux security module in lieu of se linux
Jon: or anything else and part of an effort that's been going on
Jon: in canonical for the last kind of year or so is an
Jon: effort to just ship way more app armor profiles for everything in the archive
Jon: so that that you know increasingly as you install things from the archive they
Jon: can only access the things on your system they're supposed to access right so
Jon: if you ship i don't know uh pdf reader should that thing be able to automatically
Jon: get access to your camera,
Jon: probably not right like so that's a maybe a contrived
Jon: example but the idea is we will ship more and more app armor profiles to
Jon: make sure that every piece of software you get from the ubuntu archive can
Jon: only read file system paths and devices that it should be
Jon: able to read and in this case i believe the root
Jon: cause of the issue was we shipped an app armor profile for i want to say fuse
Jon: and we got something wrong and essentially that stopped flatpak from functioning
Jon: correctly there is a fix underway if it's not already complete it was almost
Jon: finished on friday and so that will get kind of backported backend or SIU'd
Jon: back into crusting as soon as it's ready.
Chris: We have been really impressed with the fact that you stuck to the plan of shipping
Chris: really recent kernels, hot kernels, the fresh stuff.
Chris: We love that. And I mean, 6.17.
Wes: Right in 25.10 as it's released. That's great.
Jon: Yeah. We have a policy with both GNOME and kernel. The policy is basically just ship it, right?
Jon: Like even if it's in RC, there's a motivation behind this.
Jon: So our kernel team is big it's one of the biggest engineering teams at canonical and
Jon: in the desktop it's important right people want things like hdr support they
Jon: want better accessibility we're a little bit beholden to
Jon: other people's release cadence except that our releases are
Jon: literally named after a month we release it and so we we can't really
Jon: delay them and so the deal
Jon: that we have done with our kernel team and the agreement we
Jon: have in the desktop team is basically we will always ship the latest
Jon: gnome or the latest kernel even if it's in release
Jon: candidate when we release and then as soon as the thing is out we will make
Jon: sure that the fully released version is in and the reason is in
Jon: reality we have to maintain the thing for 12 years anyway it may as well be
Jon: the latest most modern thing we possibly can and there's nothing to say just
Jon: because it's an rc there's going to be a bad kernel like in the past we've picked
Jon: kernels that have been stable and they've still been horrifying to maintain
Jon: for whatever reason rather we picked a bad kernel to
Jon: choose and so the the view is basically well we may as well just ship the very
Jon: latest we can It's most likely to have the most fixes, the most hardware support,
Jon: the most features, and we're going to have to maintain it either way. So why not?
Chris: Yeah, it just makes so much sense to me. Okay, I want to shift gears and ask
Chris: you if there's anything you're kind of taking as observations or lessons from
Chris: the relative popularity that a new meta distro or distribution called Oma Archie
Chris: has gotten in the last six months.
Chris: My rough you know napkin math puts them around 30 to 40 000 users so you know let's put it.
Jon: In perspective.
Chris: For the ubuntu desktop but i'm curious if you're noticing anything there trends
Chris: of the types of users or what seems to be appealing to people.
Jon: I think what's interesting about that is
Jon: precisely what you're saying is perhaps because
Jon: of the the people who make it and their background it is capturing a certain
Jon: kind of audience right there certainly i'm sure ruby developers rails developers
Jon: but there's a whole bunch of people who have been using Macs for a certain kind
Jon: of development who are now trying out Linux because people in their circles
Jon: are trying out Linux and finding it,
Jon: And I would honestly love to make Ubuntu a place where those people could have
Jon: a great life. I think the mythical new user story is important.
Jon: I care about new users. I care about inexperienced people using computers.
Jon: But I actually think for Ubuntu, I do believe that for the desktop,
Jon: a huge part of our market has to be developers, right?
Jon: It has to be people who are either developing professionally.
Jon: So we see huge growth in our WSL numbers, like monumental growth in WSL,
Jon: the number of people who are using Ubuntu on Windows to do their development
Jon: work. or maybe it's just people messing around with the SP home or whatever
Jon: it is, right, tinkering at home.
Jon: And so we actually have a whole toolchains team, which has grown a lot in the
Jon: last year, focused on trying to make the development experience on Ubuntu as
Jon: good as we possibly can, whether you're a Rust developer, a Java developer.
Jon: And I think Omachi and others are kind of proving the point that even if you've
Jon: been a Mac user for 10 years, at this point, there's probably enough maturity
Jon: on Linux for those people to have a great experience developing on Linux too.
Chris: Yeah, it seems to me one of the things that's appealing, although it's not something
Chris: that hasn't been tried before, is an opinionated, ready-to-go setup that makes
Chris: starting for developers easy.
Chris: That's one of the things I see on social media a lot is, oh,
Chris: I was able to just get going.
Chris: And we've seen Ubuntu take cracks at this. We've seen a lot of distributions
Chris: take one or two commands to set up an entire development environment.
Chris: So that's not necessarily a new idea, but yet it's resonating this time.
Chris: Do you think it's a desktop environment aspect as well, or do you think it's
Chris: just a matter of Windows 10 is going away, Windows 11 isn't satisfying people,
Chris: or the requirements are too high, and the Mac desktop seems to be ignoring developers?
Chris: Do you think it's just the proprietary platforms are blowing it right now,
Chris: or is there something that Omar Archie has nailed in the presentation that maybe
Chris: the other distributions have missed, even though they've taken a stab at an
Chris: opinionated, out-of-the-box setup?
Jon: I think it's both. My experience with macOS is it maybe hasn't got the attention
Jon: it used to get from Apple.
Jon: I was a macOS user for years, and I remember very proudly telling people that
Jon: it was the best computer I'd ever had, and I would be very surprised if someone
Jon: convinced me otherwise.
Jon: And my feeling of that over time, this was many years ago now,
Jon: but was that it started to go a bit stale.
Jon: And I think we see that a lot with the focus on iOS and iPadOS.
Jon: I don't think there's the same level of investment there, personally.
Jon: I also think what's interesting about Omachi to me is that they chose something
Jon: like Hyperland, they chose Arch, and I wonder how many developers are experienced
Jon: technical people who have always been curious about Arch but have heard how hard it is to install.
Jon: They're curious about Hyperland because they see these amazing screenshots on the internet.
Jon: And this is just a really, really nice way to get going, right?
Jon: Even just in a VM, like you install it, oh wow, that was really easy,
Jon: I can now play with it right away.
Jon: So it's just made a whole collection of,
Jon: quite niche ultimately technologies really accessible and they are interesting
Jon: right they're exciting things to play with so i think it's a combination of factors.
Chris: I wonder if it's not the trend but an
Chris: indication of a trend that we're going to see like
Chris: this could be the leading edge ultimately i
Chris: think if you're going to maintain an arch box it's probably
Chris: good that you understand how that arch box is
Chris: set up long term for sure i wonder if this
Chris: isn't a leading edge and if you aren't
Chris: getting that puck skating if you'll excuse this really horrible metaphor if
Chris: you aren't beginning to get that puck skating for the ubuntu desktop where this
Chris: trend might be going we may be just seeing the very beginning of this and is
Chris: this kind of idea been in the back of your head as you've been pushing to make
Chris: the interim releases more interesting and engage more with the community is
Chris: that sort of the strategy here yeah.
Jon: What i would like is that for people on ubuntu or people who are on Linux for
Jon: work, and it happens to be Ubuntu, for example, that when they hear about something
Jon: new or exciting or useful, it is available to them in an up-to-date and well-maintained form.
Jon: Now, some of those are going to be snaps, sorry. You know, like the people who,
Jon: there's lots of people have opinions about those and that's fine.
Jon: But snaps give us this superpower, basically, to ship software to all manner
Jon: of different Ubuntu releases over a really long period of time and keep backporting
Jon: features to those releases, right?
Jon: So we have some work upcoming on kind of like portable developer environments
Jon: that will come out next year.
Jon: But also our tool chain teams are working on things like they have these things
Jon: called DevPacks. There's a DevPack for Spring.
Jon: So if you're a Spring boot developer, you can get like the latest Java development
Jon: kits and the Graal VM compiler and all these like shiny things that Java developers
Jon: would want by installing a single snap.
Jon: And the environment is completely set up for you to just get on with your work and work in Spring.
Jon: And we're doing the same for Go. We're doing the same for Rust,
Jon: for .NET. And so I would like for,
Jon: not just the tool chain to be up to date in the archive, which is kind of necessary
Jon: for us to build the software we ship,
Jon: but also for developers to be able to get all of the LSPs and static analyzers
Jon: and formaters that they hear about really, really easily on their Ubuntu machine
Jon: without having to like curl to bash, add some GPG keys to your machine.
Jon: Like that's an odd trust relationship at the end of the day.
Jon: You see a piece of software, add a PPA to your machine, and then you run the
Jon: maintainer scripts and that thing as root every time you update the package.
Chris: Until it's no longer available.
Jon: Until it's no longer available and you know
Jon: sure you're giving root to canonical when you run apt but
Jon: like i say if you you kind of have to trust canonical if you go to
Jon: run ubuntu right in a sense um and so it would be in my
Jon: view if you're going to have to give that ultimate trust to somebody you want
Jon: to limit the number of people you give it to right and so we can publish you
Jon: know security maintained kind of verified snaps on the store and we can push
Jon: things into the archive but there are some kinds of software that it's much
Jon: simpler for us to ship to a much higher number of users with something like
Jon: Snaps, for example, or as a container image, perhaps.
Wes: Yeah, it seems like, I mean, Snaps are kind of, at least for the dev stuff you
Wes: were talking about, Snaps are allowing you to bring containerized development
Wes: and deployment workflows, but in a, I guess, you know, a different flavor than
Wes: you see in tools like Docker and Podman.
Jon: Right.
Chris: John, I could ask you thousands of more questions. We should probably,
Chris: we should check in again in a few months.
Jon: Yeah, for sure.
Chris: Is there anything we didn't touch on that you want to touch on before we wrap up?
Jon: There is a really nice step towards a better TPM full disk encryption setup.
Jon: So this is essentially where you want to have an encrypted disk,
Jon: but you don't want to enter your password twice when you boot up.
Jon: So it basically allows you to store that disk encryption key in the TPM.
Jon: And assuming that the kernel hasn't been tampered with and the command hasn't
Jon: been changed and the machine hasn't been messed with, it should unlock the disk automatically.
Jon: We've had that as an option, an experimental option in our installer for some
Jon: time, and I'm pushing really hard for us to have that not as experimental for 2604.
Jon: It's in better shape than it's ever been. There's been a huge amount of work
Jon: on it, which you can read a bit about on our discourse or in my blog.
Jon: But I'd really encourage people to give that a go, particularly on machines
Jon: with slightly simpler partitioning setups.
Jon: At the moment, it's kind of single root partition kind of thing.
Jon: But I'm really proud of the way the team have come together.
Jon: That is an effort across Snapd and kernel and desktop. It's a huge effort to
Jon: bring that across the line, and the more feedback we can get on it, the better.
Jon: So I think that's a really interesting piece of work that is a genuine win, right?
Jon: You get better security and better usability, like we don't often get to have,
Jon: both of those things at the same time.
Wes: Yeah, I'm curious, is that kind of what was driving it as an effort for just
Wes: the general experience? Or is this something that you've also seen maybe asks
Wes: from, you know, people doing enterprise desktop deployments, that kind of thing?
Jon: Yeah, I mean, firstly, as a user of it myself, I would like this.
Jon: And secondly, for sure, if you look at things like the macOS FileVault or Windows
Jon: BitLocker, like these are features that people have come to expect in operating
Jon: systems in an enterprise environment, and we also play in that space.
Jon: So I think it's important for us to provide that.
Chris: Okay, one last pet question. just because I want to be able to pick your brain on this.
Chris: What are your thoughts, maybe after the LTS,
Chris: I don't know, but down the road, so no time commitments, but what are your thoughts
Chris: on integration of a BcacheFS DKMS module or giving BcacheFS access to users
Chris: during the install of one of the interim releases sometime in the future?
Chris: Is that on your radar at all, John?
Jon: I haven't got it planned, but I'm not against it. I've been following the whole
Jon: BcacheFS story quite closely.
Jon: We obviously did some work on zfs a
Jon: few years ago which still exists so you can still install zfs on
Jon: root and things like zsys which is our tooling around it still exists we are
Jon: actually working um so subiquity which is the the kind of installer that sits
Jon: beneath the graphical installer for desktop and in fact the actual installer
Jon: you interact with on a server can support all kinds of different partitioning
Jon: schemes it's quite limited at the moment but we're doing some work this cycle,
Jon: specifically to enable a couple
Jon: of the ubuntu flavors to have a slightly different partitioning layout.
Jon: So that would open the door for more complex partitioning schemes,
Jon: sort of guided partitioning schemes rather than manual partitioning where people wanted that.
Jon: As for BcacheFS itself, I am not against it. It's not planned work right now.
Jon: I don't see it as super high priority at the moment, but equally,
Jon: like we ship our own kernel, right?
Jon: So we have always chosen what goes into that kernel and what doesn't,
Jon: which drivers we ship, which fast systems we ship, and this would just be another
Jon: variable there right i don't think it's a particularly controversial decision for us at least.
Chris: Right famously.
Jon: For example we ship zfs where lots of distros have shied away from that.
Chris: And seemingly has worked out great so far and many users
Chris: appreciate the fact that you do right so john thank
Chris: you so much for spending a little time with us i'd love to do it again maybe
Chris: in april if you're available and uh pick your brain again then absolutely well
Chris: thank you so much and congrats on the release we'll link to uh your post about
Chris: it and as well as some of the community discussions and of course the downloads
Chris: and any other links you want to send our way, we'll throw in the show notes
Chris: and come back real soon, sir.
Chris: Linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Go there to support the show and you get
Chris: access to the bootleg feed, which is clocking in at one hour and 58 minutes
Chris: right now as we record lots of extra content, discussion, news that didn't fit
Chris: into the topic of the week.
Chris: All that stuff is there and it's a great way to support the show directly.
Chris: You just put your support on autopilot.
Chris: And one of the things that our members made possible, just our community in
Chris: general has been really supportive over this last year.
Chris: We didn't talk about it on this trip, but once again, the headsets that you
Chris: helped us fundraise for LinuxFest Northwest, I think it was,
Chris: or it was for scale maybe, because we use them at LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: We use them at scale. We've used them at Texas LinuxFest.
Chris: Unbelievably how great they are. I mean, right, right. It totally has been fantastic.
Wes: Yeah, absolutely. I was able to use one when I went to NixVegas.
Chris: Right.
Wes: I mean, they're just so much more portable than our previous setup.
Chris: Everything we need fits in one backpack.
Brent: I think we use them on the van rescue too, Chris. Didn't we use them in the van?
Chris: Oh, we did. We did. This is an example of how our funds can be allocated to
Chris: make the show better, make the trips possible and the gear we use.
Chris: And we try to do it very wisely. We've been, you know, the show turned 12 and
Chris: we want to be here for another 12 years. So we try to be very careful about how we do this.
Chris: And your direct support, either via a boost or from a membership at linuxonplug.com
Chris: slash membership makes all the difference. And thank you for your support.
Brent: Well, while we were on the road, the boost machine was still pumping.
Brent: And a lot of you figured we probably needed to get home with some boosts, so we've got a baller.
Chris: Black Host is our baller this week with 399,998 sets.
Chris: All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate that, Black Host.
Chris: They write, sending you some digital gas and wishing you a safe trip back home.
Chris: Thank you for the amazing coverage on Texas Linux Fest. P.S. Drew's note's failing.
Chris: Hopefully this one gets accepted. Ah, we'll look into that. We'll definitely look into that.
Wes: And thank you for the digital gas. It worked just as expected.
Chris: Thank you. We made it. We are back. Thank you, Black Host. I really appreciate that.
Wes: Outdoor Geek comes in with 100,000 cents.
Chris: Not bad. Thank you, Outdoor Geek.
Wes: Late Texas Linux fast boost. I wasn't able to get Breeze to send a fountain,
Wes: so I ended up using River instead.
Wes: I was messing with Breeze, and eventually
Wes: it told me I needed to enter an on-chain address to get my sats.
Wes: I think my Breeze wallet had gone dormant because I didn't open the app for months.
Wes: And yeah, I think that's pretty much the behavior they do. So you don't lose
Wes: your sats, but you do kind of have to go through a recovery process after your channels get closed.
Chris: I see. They close the channels. Yeah. River is great. I really like River.
Chris: I think we have a jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river affiliate URL.
Chris: By the way, I think it's one of the best ways to stack sats.
Chris: In the U.S., it's all they do, and they have a great infrastructure.
Chris: And that is a great boost. Thank you, Outdoor Geek. Thanks for going through
Chris: and trying it and then sending in your report. Appreciate that.
Brent: Well, we've got two boosts here from Daja for a total of 86,247 sats.
Chris: Hey.
Brent: Latex sats to help with the return gas. this
Brent: is also a zip code boost if you guys see this in time you're more than welcome
Brent: to take a pit stop at our office just off of the interstate i'll be there pretty
Brent: much all day and we've got free soda so he sent in a geohash 9x23j and a little
Brent: matrix connection so thank you oh my.
Wes: Gosh thankfully i have my um yeah my well-tested map from our trip which we
Wes: brought along of course and this would be a postal code in davis county utah oh.
Chris: Okay well brent never know.
Wes: You'll be on your way back next trip we're keeping our boost dashboard open that.
Chris: Is the way to go we should have thought of that i will note that that is an error we will correct.
Wes: So thank you daja yeah.
Chris: And thank you for the boost daja.
Brent: Now the second boost here is actually a row of ducks with a little message,
Brent: Anyway, I forgot to mention that I was curious if you guys have ever messed
Brent: around with getting MeshTastic hooked into Home Assistant.
Brent: I've been toying around with getting sensor data passed over MQTT for a mesh
Brent: of buildings with no internet to one that does, that will bridge to the outside world.
Brent: Super random and probably won't work as nice as I'm hoping, but initial tests seem promising.
Chris: All right. Keep us posted, I suppose. I've always been curious.
Chris: I've not looked at connecting MeshTastic to HA, but very, very interested in doing so.
Chris: I'd say top tier interested, if that's such a thing. You know what I mean?
Chris: Wes and I were literally talking about it on the drive. We had a lot of time
Chris: to talk about things, but that was one of the things we talked about on the drive.
Chris: GooseGuy comes in with 44,444 sats. Woo!
Chris: That's a big old duck. Here's a late boost for your travels to and from Texas LinuxFest.
Chris: The Texas tracker is awesome. I'm glad you got to check on my favorite barbecue
Chris: spot in Austin. Enjoy the sads.
Wes: Hey, we're glad too.
Chris: We are very glad we did. And thank you. We appreciate it.
Chris: You know, the trip, as far as all the accounting, I'm still,
Chris: of course, going through everything.
Chris: And we'll have to figure all that out because also PayPal is still holding some
Chris: of the funds. So very much appreciate that, Goose Guy.
Brent: Also note that the Texas Tracker will still be up because I'm not home yet.
Brent: So if you want to follow the crazy journey that a Brent takes on his way home, please do.
Brent: Probably be for the next, I don't know, At least a week. I have no idea, actually.
Wes: Where even is home for you at this point?
Brent: Yeah, who knows.
Wes: Not the one who's in with 20,000 sats. Sorry, I forgot to send this to help with costs for Texas.
Wes: Hey, no need to apologize. We just appreciate it.
Wes: Still struggling to work out how to properly set up Nix OS? Need to read more?
Wes: Any tips would help. Well, one thing, I mean, maybe depend on,
Wes: you know, are you struggling with the initial install?
Wes: Are you struggling just to, like, really get a config you like?
Wes: It might depend a bit on exactly where you are in the journey.
Wes: But if you would like some inspiration, maybe check out episode 634.
Wes: There should be a bunch of links to various user and audience member configs.
Wes: There's a lot to be inspired by there.
Chris: And if you dig around on the downloads page for NixOS, there is a graphical
Chris: installer you can grab and they will set you up with a base config.
Chris: Always a good place to start from.
Wes: Yeah, maybe even in a VM.
Chris: Yeah, you're not going to go wrong there, I don't think. Good question.
Chris: And do keep us posted. And if you have any specific questions,
Chris: please do feel free. Send those in to us.
Brent: Well, Kiwi Bitcoin Guide boosted in four, five, six, seven sats.
Brent: Well, I've been listening and following live from New Zealand.
Brent: May the force be with you.
Chris: Ah, thank you, Kiwi. Thanks for the New Zealand check-in. That is so cool. Love that.
Chris: Jordan Bravo is in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats.
Chris: Plus one to do another episode with the RateMyConfig. All right, that's two votes.
Wes: Mm, votes are climbing.
Chris: I don't know if that was a super well-received episode, the config confessions.
Chris: Would like more feedback on
Chris: that because we enjoyed it and we have a couple of configs in the kitty.
Chris: It's a fun thing to do. So let us know. And thank you, Jordan.
Chris: We will register your plus one on this matter.
Wes: Byte Bitten comes in with 2,000 sets. I like Android to be called Google's Android
Wes: and the AOSP to be Google's Android source project.
Chris: Oh!
Wes: Gasp. As it doesn't feel open when everything needs to be registered and it makes devs gasp for air.
Brent: Oof.
Chris: That's, that's, uh... That's good.
Chris: Fire i'm gonna i'm gonna try to remember that that's a good one bite thank you.
Brent: Ed broughton boosted in 5 000 sets,
Brent: i really enjoyed the road trip stories and i'm looking forward to next week's
Brent: episode that's this one where i hope to hear about the return trip thanks for
Brent: the coverage of the texas linux fest and for the effort the team puts into this show well.
Chris: Thank you ed thank you for the boost really appreciate that.
Chris: Hybrid Sarcasms back with 10,000 sats.
Chris: Okay, so Hybrid's got an app pick for us. It's NCSpot. He's got a Flathub linked
Chris: here. It's a Spotify Tui.
Chris: It has a nice N-Curses interface, and as one who likes to avoid electron apps,
Chris: if I can find that, it helps.
Chris: You know a Tui via Flathub, or I mean, I'm sorry, Flatpak, that's different, and kind Kind of neat.
Wes: Thank you, Mr. Sarcasm. This is great.
Chris: That's a bonus pick right there. Thank you, Hybrid. Appreciate that. It's NC Spot.
Chris: I'm sure you can find it in all kinds of places. It's a cross-platform and cursive Spotify client.
Chris: I mean, if you're going to use Spotify.
Wes: That's the way to do it.
Chris: That's probably the way to do it. Although friends don't necessarily let friends
Chris: use Spotify. There is that. But if you're going to, that's probably the way to do it.
Chris: Thank you, Hybrid. And please, send more boost picks. Appreciate that.
Wes: Anonymous boosts in with 5,555 sands.
Wes: First time Booster here, finally took the dive and set up Albie Hub.
Chris: Hey, really?
Brent: Nice.
Wes: Also, it was fantastic meeting y'all at Texas Linux Fest.
Chris: Right on. Nicely done.
Wes: I'd also like to give a special shout out to a standout member of the community, TechDev.
Wes: While at the conference, I noticed how deliberately he reached out to everyone,
Wes: especially those who seemed alone or were looking for a group to join.
Wes: TechDev, your inclusive spirit is truly rare and deeply appreciated.
Chris: I will plus one that one.
Brent: I will plus two that one.
Chris: Yeah. TechDev, I think, made it a little extra special, and I was really glad
Chris: that he could make it to the event.
Chris: And I noticed the same. I noticed the same. So I'm glad he got a shout out here
Chris: in this boost. And congratulations on getting your own AlbiHub going.
Wes: Yeah, thank you for taking the deep dev to do it.
Chris: How fun is it, right? I mean, it's a little challenging, right?
Chris: But it's such an unlock, too.
Brent: Well, Autobrain boosted in 3,500 sets. Thanks for the coverage of the Linux
Brent: Fest. It was fun watching you guys crisscross the content.
Wes: Well, thanks for following along.
Chris: Yeah, we do appreciate that. It was fun for us. We used the crap out of that
Chris: tracker. Let me tell you, we really did.
Chris: Begus Mascus comes in, probably, probably not right, with a Spaceballs boost.
Chris: One, two, three, four, five sats.
Chris: Hey, it's Brian from Boise. We were just talking about Brian.
Chris: This is my first real boost.
Chris: I was the guy who rolled up at the gas station, slid to your bit chat,
Chris: and then crept up on your car in the dark while it was pouring rain.
Chris: Thanks for taking a few minutes to chat. I was a bit nervous,
Chris: probably because of the whole stalker vibe thing.
Chris: But it's not every day you get to meet one of your heroes. Oh,
Chris: Wes. Oh, Wes is pretty great, I will say.
Wes: No, it's all Brent.
Chris: Keep up the amazing content. I'll be boosting it regularly. Awesome!
Chris: And hopefully my own new Albie build soon. Wow.
Chris: Thank you for... I was hoping we would hear from you, Brian.
Wes: Yes, it was great to get to meet you. Thank you for putting in the effort,
Wes: especially in the pouring rain.
Chris: It was a hell of a storm. We did not expect anyone to come out.
Chris: And we were stopped there at that gas station for a minute. So we must have
Chris: wondered what was going on, because we were like looking at the storm routing, trying to figure out.
Wes: Debating how far could we make it in this? Where do we sleep?
Chris: The traction was low. I mean, there was just so much standing water.
Chris: So we didn't want to drive in that all night.
Chris: But we were totally happy that Brian stopped by and we had like,
Chris: you know, the quick, hey, how you doing moment and thanks for saying hi kind of thing.
Chris: So we do hope to hear from you more big and keep on boosting in.
Wes: Well, Brad at Team Toronto, boosts in with 7,500 sats.
Wes: Plus one for more Nix confessions. Okay, that's three.
Chris: All right.
Wes: We have a smart audience. Yeah, amen to that. And it's great to hear and see
Wes: via Git what everyone is doing.
Wes: Would love to see more around Nix as well. Or even other topics like home assistant,
Wes: utilities, scripts, etc.
Wes: Leverage the community for more content.
Chris: Love it. I would definitely love to see some more community contributions around
Chris: their home assistant setups.
Wes: I'm sure there's some stellar stuff.
Chris: I am in a bad way with my home assistant. Right before I left for the trip,
Chris: my Zigbee radio just seems to have gone offline.
Brent: Oh, no.
Chris: And, yeah. And so Home Assistant can't talk to my Zigbee radio.
Chris: None of my Zigbee devices are working. And it's just totally busted.
Chris: And it was, like, the day I left. And I haven't had a chance to look at it because,
Chris: well, we got right back to the studio and did the show. So I haven't even really
Chris: dug in yet and looked at the logs.
Chris: But, man, is it a sucky thing. Because that kind of thing never happens to me
Chris: on this. It's been so solid.
Chris: And it's the built-in Home Assistant yellow radio, too. Oh.
Chris: If anybody has any tips please let me know i am not looking forward to troubleshooting
Chris: that one and thank you brad i will take those notes those are good ones appreciate that.
Brent: Our last boost here is from magnolia mayhem 3 210 sats yeah.
Wes: I think for context uh this is a live boost from uh our live stream earlier
Wes: in the day during our um interview with john nice.
Brent: In our interview there's a quote here accused of making ubuntu more like nix
Brent: uh well magnolia mayhem says I fail to see the problem here.
Chris: There could be some nice things to learn, right? You got to keep Ubuntu Ubuntu.
Chris: I do agree there. People depend on that.
Chris: But there's a lot to learn from all the great projects out there.
Chris: I had so many more questions for John. I mean, so many more questions.
Wes: Oh, yeah, same.
Chris: So we'll try to get them back on soon. Thank you, everybody who supported the
Chris: show with a boost or a membership.
Chris: And thank you, everybody who also streamed Sats as you listen. 24 of you did that.
Chris: And collectively, you Sat streamers stacked 39,018 Sats for the show.
Chris: When you combine that with our boosters, we stacked a really very,
Chris: very, very great 745,839 sats.
Chris: And we are putting that towards the Texas Linux Fest trip. We did have a little
Chris: extra travel going to Denver.
Wes: And that's from almost 40 unique people out there. Isn't that crazy?
Chris: That's great. Thank you, everybody. If you'd like to boost the show,
Chris: Fountain.fm makes it real easy. That's a podcasting 2.0 client that just hosts all that.
Chris: But you could keep your client, set up an Albi Hub, and use the podcast index
Chris: or whatever you like. There's a lot of options there.
Chris: Check it out at podcastapps.com. Fountain has been getting really,
Chris: really good, too. They've been making some fantastic, fantastic improvements.
Chris: And thank you to our members, linuxunplugged.com slash membership for putting
Chris: that support on autopilot. We very much appreciate it.
Chris: Now, our pick this week, this is the only the kind of thing that people that
Chris: are absolutely exhausted and have been driving across the country would come up with.
Chris: This would never make it into the show. Otherwise, I am aghast that we have this in here.
Wes: Yeah. What do you what's your problem? It's the performance optimizer observation platform.
Chris: Yeah. Poop for short. But and I love their tagline. Stop flushing your performance down the drain.
Chris: You see what they did there?
Wes: I think you'll like this, though. We don't have a sound effect yet, but it's 100% zig.
Chris: Really?
Wes: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: And it uses Linux's built-in perf event open functionality to compare the performance
Wes: of multiple commands with a colorful terminal user interface.
Chris: That's the part I like. So you're just building on some stuff that's existing
Chris: in Linux to give you some really great comparisons in a very readable way.
Chris: The name's silly, but the utility is there.
Wes: Yeah, and folks might be familiar with Hyperfine, which is sort of a more mature
Wes: project in this space, which bills itself as a command line benchmarking tool.
Wes: So that's kind of where this thing is aimed, is you can, you know,
Wes: maybe you've got different versions of something with different tweaks or comparing
Wes: programs, doing the same kind of work.
Chris: But how much Zig is that one written in?
Wes: Well, that one's written in a combination of Rust and Python.
Chris: You see?
Wes: Yeah, 0% Zig.
Chris: I asked Zig, that's 0% Zig. Yeah, right. This is 100% Zig.
Wes: 100% Zig native pick this week.
Chris: You're welcome everybody and it is mit licensed so have at it as you will like
Chris: or whatnot and we will have poop linked in the show notes like okay there you
Chris: go see you could tell we're a little we're a little uh tipsy from the road we
Chris: wouldn't have put that in there otherwise it was probably brent's idea gonna
Chris: just go ahead and blame him on that one you know what i mean just go ahead and play,
Chris: all right we will be live back at our regular time of course we'd love it if
Chris: you join us over jblive.tv on a Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
Chris: Eastern. Links to what we talked about are at linuxunplugged.com slash 636.
Chris: And there's some good ones this week for Cosmic and, of course, the new Ubuntu release.
Chris: Wes, if they are in a super power user podcasting app, we have some great,
Chris: I don't know, features for them?
Wes: Oh, yeah, we do. Well, we have cloud chapters so they can jump right to the
Wes: content they like or listen to the show in whatever order.
Chris: What else do we have?
Wes: Well, if you want to take an even deeper dive into the show,
Wes: check out our transcripts.
Chris: We got transcripts now.
Wes: Yeah, plenty of apps. And some of them even show our speaker diarization so
Wes: you can tell which of us said the dumb thing.
Chris: I love it. All right. We'll have a big show for you. So join us right back here next week.