607: Ubuntu's Rusty Roadmap

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Brent's on the road this week, and he's joining us from Spain.
And so we assume you have learned the language and are speaking like a local at this point.
Yeah, I've been working all weekend on a particular phrase and trying to get
the different, I don't know, tips and tricks on how to pronounce this thing
throughout the land here. Okay.
Lay it on us. Let's see how you're doing.

(00:21):
Linux no es chufado es muy bueno.
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.

(00:41):
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, Canonical's VP of engineering
for Ubuntu will reveal why they're considering swapping out the core utils for Rust-built tools.
And then we're going to break down everything you really need to know about
the new GNOME 48 which we'll be shipping in the next fedora and ubuntu before
you even know it and then we're gonna round out the show with some great boosts

(01:05):
some pics and a lot more so before we get any further i want to say a hello
and a big time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug hello mumble room hello.
Oh my god my voice is still broken oh.
No we're nice we're glad to have you it's nice to have all of you actually and
also shout out to those of you up in the quiet listening Our Mumble Room is

(01:27):
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That Mumble Room's up and getting a live, low-latency Opus stream right off the mixer.
And you're always welcome to join us with a free software stack from top to
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And a big good morning to our friends at TailScale, tailscale.com slash unplugged.

(01:47):
Go there and get it free for up to 100 devices and three user accounts,
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(03:17):
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So I have been trying to sign a lot of documents recently, and I've used Sterling
PDF for this, but I'm putting the question out there right now, right here.

(03:39):
What are you using on Linux to natively sign PDFs? I just want to sign and date PDFs quickly.
Like I had this eight-page thing. I had to sign every single page. How are you doing that?
Boost it and tell me how you're doing it or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Because I just envy every time I look over at one of my Mac-using friends and

(04:00):
they just have the built-in preview tool and it just has a signature function.
Yeah, it's very useful.
I'm like, come on, come on, let's get that on Plasma. Let's get that.
Or, you know, I don't know, like a flat pack that just boots up macOS with the
interface to read your PDFs from a directory that's shared.
That's hilarious. That's hilarious. That's too much, Wes. That's too much. No way.

(04:20):
But do let me know if you have a way to do this natively on Linux because I
feel inadequate right now.
Canonical has made quite a bit of news recently. They've been discussing swapping
out some of the GNU core utils with Rust versions.
And this is a big topic, and there's probably a lot of reasons behind it,

(04:42):
so we thought the best thing to do would be to have John Seeger on the show.
He's the VP of Engineering for Ubuntu at Canonical, and he's joining us right now.
And so to really dig into this, John is joining us now, and this is all coming
within about the 20-year milestone of Ubuntu.

(05:05):
So I think it's a perfect time to reflect on all of this and hear about it right
from the horse's mouth. John, welcome to the Unplugged program.
Hey.
Hello. So you made two really great posts. First, it was engineering Ubuntu
for the next 20 years, which was interesting, right?
You really touched on upgrading communication, focusing on automation,

(05:27):
simplifying process, maybe even embracing new languages, which you expand on
in your second post recently, which is carefully but purposefully oxidizing Ubuntu.
And in this post, you talk about starting with Ubuntu 25.10 and potentially
maybe making them default in 2604 LTS, if everything works out.
Some of the core utils that people are used to would get replaced with a Rust version.

(05:53):
So something like LS or CP or MV would be swapped out with a Rust implementation of a similar tool.
And I wondered if you wouldn't mind kind of talking about some of the rationale
behind this idea and where it's at and kind of any of the coloring you think we might need.
Yeah, so the first post I made about three days after taking on the appointment

(06:15):
kind of officially internally at Canonical.
Congratulations.
Thank you. My new role seems to be looking after the desktop team,
the foundations team, and the server team.
And one of the things I would really like to reinvigorate about
Ubuntu is this idea that it is a it's
based on this very stable very dependable community project that is Debian but

(06:36):
that we have a bit more freedom to kind of ship later things maybe take a few
more risks like Ubuntu was always about taking the very latest and greatest
of open source we could find and shipping it in a way that perhaps Debian didn't
want to, or maybe shouldn't.
And what happened is Ubuntu became very successful. And I think over time,

(06:57):
those interim releases that kind of come between the LTSs got maybe a little bit less bold.
It was a little bit more sort of turning the handle. And I would like to bring
back a bit more experimentation and think about what are the things we want
to introduce? What are the practices?
Who are the sorts of people we want to bring along for the next 20 years of

(07:18):
Ubuntu, noting the extraordinary success that we as a community have enjoyed over the past 20 years.
So CoreUtils is an interesting change to me because it is a very foundational
part of the distribution. It's part of the Debian Essentials sort of package set.
And something we use all the time and basically never talk about.

(07:38):
Right. It's in all your scripts. It's LS, it's CP, it's a whole bunch of stuff.
And there's this wonderful project under the name of
you utils who are writing modern implementations of
core utils and find utils and diff utils and my
understanding having spoken to the lead developer is it it started out kind
of as a hobby project to learn a bit of rust but has gained quite a lot of momentum
and one of the things that really struck me about the project is right from

(08:03):
the very start they've been measuring themselves against the GNU test suite
and they're not doing it in spite of the GNU call utils,
they actually work with the GNU folks at times,
and when they discover interesting behaviors or undocumented behaviors,
they collaborate with them to either submit fixes or clarify documentation.
But fundamentally, it is a complete re-implementation. Mostly,

(08:24):
not huge numbers of changes.
They can't be, right? They're supposed to be 100% compatible.
There are places where it's a little faster. There are places where you get
nice little features like an interactive progress bar on the copy command, for example.
There's an example of that in the FOSDEM talk that I linked in my post.
And so this is an experiment. It's an experiment to see if we can integrate

(08:45):
a really interesting new project in at the heart of the distribution which has
a really active community around it who are interested in memory safety and
resilience and kind of see how that goes.
So, John, when I heard about this, my first thought was this must be a calculation
for the long term, right?
Your next, say, 2604, which is going to get supported for more than a decade.

(09:10):
Is this about making this a more sustainable long-term support distribution?
Is that sort of the high-level goal here?
It's one of the considerations, yes. But it's also about our ability to grow
the contributor base to Ubuntu.
We grew really steadily, in my understanding. I wasn't a part of the project
back then, but the community grew really steadily for years.
But in the last five to six years, we have not seen the levels of contribution

(09:34):
perhaps we were used to, and it certainly hasn't been growing the way we would like.
And I don't have hard facts here, but coming to Linux distribution development
as more of a kind of cloud-oriented developer, my feeling is that a lot of the
tooling feels its age a little bit.
If you compare to the craft tooling for building things like snaps and charms,
you compare to the tooling for building flatbacks, you compare to the contribution process for Nix.

(09:59):
We've also seen Silverblue and the uBlue project coming along trying to introduce
more of those workflows too.
Right, and they have absolutely nailed it, in my opinion. Like this,
okay, you've learned all these skills for building Dockerfiles,
what if you could use those exact same skills to build your OS? And so...
Part of the deal with this Rust Core Utils thing is I want to attract developers,

(10:19):
you know, the next generation of developers who are interested in becoming Ubuntu
developers, Ubuntu maintainers. And so that's absolutely part of it.
Am I right in picking up here that there's both the specifics of what you're
swapping out and why, but then it kind of sounded like, too,
it was maybe an exercise in your new role of seeing what it is like to try to
be able to swap out things, kind of regardless of how this goes,

(10:40):
to be able to go through the workflow and see how the community and contributors respond?
Yeah, exactly. And I want to say I'm absolutely committed to making this change in 25.10.
So on the day that the archive opens in 25.10, this change will have happened.
The default core utils implementation for 25.10 is going to be the utils thing from the start.
But that said, I don't want to be reckless about it. We will do our absolute

(11:02):
best at Canonical with our community. And we're also going to work very closely
with the upstream to resolve bugs.
But I'm not going to ultimately stand on principle and jeopardize the stability
and reliability of Ubuntu. If this doesn't work out, we would, of course, roll it back.
But I'm pretty hopeful that it's going to from what I've seen so far.
Well, that brings up then, what are you looking for to be able to slot it into a future LTS?

(11:24):
So I guess the first thing is we will change it in the archive and see what breaks.
We're going to have a big rebuild going on. It'll be interesting to see which of our scripts break.
I have personally run into one interesting bug, which is the CP and move and
LS commands don't currently respect the kind of dash capital Z command flag
for respecting SE Linux contexts.
We have a plan already with the upstream on how we will help them get that implemented.

(11:48):
And there's a few other things. So it's really about in those first few weeks,
understanding where the delta is.
And from there, the other one is locales. So currently things like the support
command, if you use a different locale other than the kind of C locales, it won't respect it.
So if you're in France and you use a French locale and you sort,
it won't respect your locale. So again, we clearly have to fix that before we ship it.

(12:11):
So those are the two big ones that I know about at the moment.
We'll see. I've been running it on my machine for the last three,
four weeks, and so have a bunch of my colleagues.
And from what I can tell, apart from the SE Linux thing, pretty good so far.
Is this where Oxidizer comes in to let you test and swap between the different versions?
Yeah. So Oxidizer is, I just want to stress, not a canonical project.

(12:31):
Oxidizer is a utility i wrote to satisfy my own curiosity
so it it is a blatant abuse
in some regards of the way debian switches packages out
and the the kind of unix file system hierarchy that kind of thing all it really
does is it installs the new core utils package it runs which against each of
the binaries core utils provides and essentially backs up the old one and then

(12:53):
sim links over the top of it with the new one it's it's a bit of a hack but
i wanted to see rather than something like the alternative system,
I wanted to see what would happen to my system if really the only implementation
that it could find was the UUtils one, right?
Sure.
Do you think that might ship in 2510 for users to be able to test?
No, in 2510, it's going to be the UUTILs thing.

(13:15):
It's going to be the Rust.
Yeah, so you'll be able to install GNUK or UUTILs still. It may be that the
commands are prefixed or something like that.
But by default, people in 2510 are going to get the new one.
When you type LS, you'll be getting the Rust UUTILs LS command.
Wow.
I mean, that, I got to be honest, makes me want to try out 2510 just right there.

(13:36):
So it's doing something, John.
Maybe we should, okay, so there's CoreUtil, in Oxidizer right now,
there's, what, four experiments?
CoreUtils, FindUtils, DiffUtils, and then also Pseudo-RS. Maybe you could touch
on why or how you picked the set?
Yeah, so CoreUtils, I was initially what kind of piqued my interest,
and that seems like one of the most mature.

(13:58):
I'm not planning right now, we're not planning right now on making FindUtils
or DiffUtils default for 2510. I am seriously considering, and I've been meeting
with the maintainers of sudo-rs, that's another consideration.
So there's a good chance, it's not for sure, but there's a good chance that
sudo-rs will be the default sudo implementation in 2510 if we can work out a

(14:20):
plan with the upstream maintainers on how we implement a couple of little missing
features that we would like to make sure are present.
So again, you may well, when you type sudo in 2510, if the plan goes well,
you will be getting this nice new equivalent. And that's another project where
they test very rigorously, and they're in constant communication with the kind
of OG pseudo developer, right?

(14:40):
It's very much collaborative, right, which is really nice to see.
Okay, so we've kind of touched on some of the meta reasons around why we might want to do this.
But especially talking about pseudo makes me think, well, security and some
of the specifics around rewrites in Rust might also be pretty relevant.
I guess the important thing to highlight here is with both of these projects,

(15:01):
with Core Utils and with sudo RS, there will be bugs.
Sure as night follows day, it's software, we will find bugs.
We're very committed to fixing those bugs, working with the maintainers and
making sure the maintainers have the resources they need to do that.
The sudo RS implementation has had a formal security audit of which they have
posted the results, and it was very positive.
And there is a, you know, while it's not impossible to write unsafe code in

(15:23):
Rust, you know, the compiler makes you work much harder to do the wrong thing.
And this is, again, back to the kind of community-building aspect.
If a new developer or a young and experienced developer wants to be part of this,
While learning the BorrowChecker can be hard, it also means you're much less
likely to accidentally do something that could be very fatal, right?
And so it will allow, I think, a community of people to contribute with confidence

(15:47):
and allow us to ship it with confidence knowing that that guardrail is in place.
Right. You kind of have built-in help for the review. And as you touch on,
maybe it allows folks to be a little more ambitious in what their contributions can be.
Yeah, I hope so. And that's not to say, you know, Sudo and the original GNU
core utils are very stable.
They've got a very great track record for security. You know,
this is not a reaction. It's just a, it's an experiment to see what we can achieve.

(16:09):
John, I want to talk about a couple of the criticisms in a moment,
but just to kind of clarify, will Canonical be contributing back upstream to
projects like Sudo RS and these other projects that get incorporated into Ubuntu?
Yeah so we yeah we'll certainly
be submitting patches where we can we may also
contribute some funding in some cases for certain things if we've got

(16:30):
particular features or things that we want to to land
so we're this isn't just we're gonna
absorb their work and wave at them from a you know
you know wish them well we're i'm speaking with both of them both projects um
frequently over the last couple of weeks and we're we're working on kind of
agreement about how we might do this in a way that makes them comfortable and
confident and doesn't what i didn't want to do was ship something surprise them

(16:53):
and then be like oh my god we weren't ready what are you doing kind of thing
so it's it's a bit of a team effort.
It seems like it could have some potential to really make these tools better
and make the adoption by by you know other distributions or other operating
systems uh even more likely i mean this could be better for everybody which
gets me to probably what i've seen is the top concern and it echoes some previous debates of yore,

(17:17):
and that is that, you know, this is essentially a perceived change to the established
GNU slash Linux ecosystem and the GNU core utilities.
It's the way we've always done things, John, and replacing them with Rust alternatives
is seen by some as sort of a shift to kind of change away from a GNU slash Linux
identity and, you know, maybe less GPL software.

(17:40):
I think that's like the number one bit of pushback I've seen,
and I'm sure you've processed that i'm sure you guys have thought a lot about
that so i'd like to hear just what you're thinking there.
Yeah so i think firstly i absolutely recognize
the importance of gnu and the gpl license throughout
kind of open source history and in fact canonical in general licenses is software
gpl and agpl depending on what the code is right like we we absolutely believe

(18:03):
in that this change is not motivated by license and it absolutely shouldn't
be seen as indicative of a broader move away from gnu utilities we're not making
some statement that we're no longer going to use GNU things,
this is, it is, in many ways, it's kind of a surface level as it looks.
And I've heard some people have concerns about, okay, well, what happens if.

(18:27):
Canonical were to somehow commercialize core utils, was very much not the plan.
Like I say, we may make some contributions, but I don't see the benefit for
anybody in doing that, let alone Canonical.
And I also think people have expressed some discomfort, I suppose,
in something that is MIT license being so core in the distribution they use.

(18:47):
And to that, I would answer, in reality, as the distributors,
as the creators of Ubuntu,
we didn't create this software we have found
a project we think is interesting their beliefs and their their
motives appear to align very well with our own project and
we're willing to give them a shot like i'm excited to do it but at the end of

(19:09):
the day if if that community turns out not to have motives that are aligned
with the goals of ubuntu or we believe it not to be in the best interest of
our users we'll stop shipping it um you know it's not like we are the authors
of core utils in the first place right like we were still only shipping the
canoe stuff we're not we may have contributed in places,
but we're certainly not a core contributor to that toolset, right?
That makes sense.
And so ultimately it comes down to, do you trust Canonical to make the choice

(19:35):
about what runs on your machine?
And if you don't, I mean, you probably shouldn't run Ubuntu,
right? Like I would, that hopefully goes without saying.
I really hope people can see past that. This is not a politically motivated move.
This is an interesting technical experiment that I hope will stimulate some
activity from some corners of the Linux ecosystem that we perhaps have yet to interact with so much.

(19:57):
Now, on the subject of portability, I think this is the other thing I've seen
is, you know, pretty portable right now.
These tools work on just about everything, including low-end ARM IoT devices,
you know, older hardware, maybe stuff that isn't supported by the latest Linux,
but still you can get older Ubuntu's working on.
Right, with Rust comes LLVM, and then maybe there's some platforms or other

(20:17):
specifics that aren't well supported, at least in theory.
We've seen this come up with the Rust and the Linux kernel debate as well, right?
So i guess on architecture support in general
when canonical commits to an architecture we commit to an architecture so
there is absolutely no way this change will persist if you
know suddenly the experience with core utils is subpar on mhf or on power pc64

(20:39):
or s390x or any of the other you know slightly less well-known architectures
that we support so and that would be a deal breaker for me if this can't be
the default in a stable reliable and performant manner on all of the architectures,
then it shouldn't be the default on any of them.
And that's what we're about to find out, right? I don't have a mainframe in
my house, so it's been hard for me to test that so far.
But, you know, maybe it will draw community members in that are motivated to

(21:03):
help test that. I mean, that could be a pleasant result.
Exactly, and we do a bunch of work with IBM every year to make sure that this
works. And I would imagine we'll be doing the same here.
One of the concerns I've heard is that the UUtils project ships a kind of single
unified binary at user bin core utils, which you kind of simlink to a little
bit like BusyBox, right?
So you would simlink userbinls to userbin coreutils, and it would pick that

(21:26):
up and invoke it. So you end up with this one kind of big binary.
I don't foresee that being an issue, even on kind of low performance hardware.
I've run it on an original Raspberry Pi, like the OG V1 Raspberry Pi, and it was fine.
People have different use cases, though. I'm sure things will get shaken out
in the wash, and we'll address that when we come to it.

(21:47):
So, I mean, full disclosure, I'm all here for it, but you're moving quick with this now.
Yeah.
In a way, this is a big change, but then on top of that, there's discussion
about moving from IRC and mailing lists to Matrix and Discourse.
There's a lot of changes beyond just this happening.
This comes back to how the community and Ubuntu, the project,

(22:10):
has become a little fragmented, sort of naturally, right?
Like, in the time that Ubuntu has been around, a lot has changed on the internet.
And I want to make the process of contributing as enjoyable and as understandable
and as relatable as possible.
And so, you know, having three different places where you have to check for
instant messages and two different discussion forums and a mailing list,

(22:30):
it's complicated, right? And the same story is true of packaging.
There are four or five different routes to packaging a dev that,
you know, you might upload or have someone sponsor for you into Ubuntu.
And I want very much to collapse that down. I want the process to be A,
very understandable, B, to have as many kind of modern, nice kind of ergonomic

(22:52):
tools to use, and C, be as enjoyable as possible.
Like my own personal journey in contributing to Linux distributions has been
in Arch Linux and in NixOS mostly.
And one of the things that got me so excited about NixOS was how simple it was
to become a NixOS contributor.
There are benefits and drawbacks to one huge repository that has thousands of

(23:14):
packages, but one of the benefits is it's a huge pile of text files that anyone
can fork and edit and get feedback on.
And so while we're not going to go there with ubuntu as
such what i would like to do is is try and think about what that
journey looks like for a new contributor and for an
existing contributor and make it as enjoyable and as efficient as
possible and so getting the communications channels agreed

(23:35):
and and sorted feels to me like a really important thing
to do up front if you don't know where to go to get help you're always
going to stumble right and so next cycle in addition to these changes one
of the things i'm going to do is have our ubuntu focused technical
authors at canonical focus on what i'm calling the ubuntu project
documentation so this is centralizing all of

(23:56):
the documentation about the mir process the stable
release updates process what it means to do a proposed migration what it means
to do a phased upgrade what it do i mean all of these things that the community
knows collectively in its conscience that perhaps the documentation for has
been kind of scattered around a bit in the past and we're going to have a really
concentrated effort to get that into a really nice modern searchable kind of indexed

(24:18):
professional-looking page where people can really understand how they might play into this project.
Okay, well, that's a lot to look forward to.
I do want to note, you mentioned NixOS, and if folks are curious,
you know, I was playing around with Oxidizer myself.
Of course.
And you've got some great docs, speaking of, here about how you can,

(24:39):
you know, download a pre-compiled binary, probably the easiest way,
or, you know, you can compile it with Cargo, because it is itself written in
Rust, which is neat, and we can talk about it if you want.
But i will say i was playing around with the upcoming 2504 nightly build and
i'll also say it runs really nice uh just with nyx because i see you've got a flake in there nice.

(25:01):
Yeah so i did that because um i have been an xos user for some time i'm using
ubuntu everywhere on my machines at the moment but i one of the features i really
like about nyx is the kind of development shells and so when i was developing
oxidizer i was using a nyx development shell to get you know pin the version
of Rust and get clippy and all those kind of things.
Oh, yeah, that's great.

(25:22):
Makes sense. Well, so John, is there anything else that you want to touch on
or some aspects that you feel like needed a little more air or attention?
I don't think so. I am super excited about this whole thing, right?
Like it's a huge honor, I suppose, to be given this opportunity.
And what I will say is that things are going to change.
And with all change will come a little discomfort for some folks.

(25:45):
But I am really confident that we can make an impact and kind of,
I listened to this conference talk years ago from a very famous security researcher called Haroon Mir.
And the title of the talk was, what got us here won't get us there.
And to me, that sentence is really kind of key in how I think about how do we
make Ubuntu, how do we continue Ubuntu's success for the next 20 years?

(26:07):
And I'd like to think really carefully about that and work with the community to kind of realize it.
I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, John, it's actually pretty exciting to hear,
and I'd absolutely be down to have you on when 2510 ships, maybe not the first
day, but whenever you have time afterwards, and we can kind of discuss how it's
going and how it's been received.
Yeah, let's absolutely do it. And by then, I hope there'll be a little bit more
details on how the core utility stuff is going, maybe some developments on sudo RS.

(26:32):
I've also had a really interesting conversation with Mitchell Hashimoto about
Ghosty, his new terminal emulator, and what part that might be able to do in
the future. So, yeah, some exciting stuff in the works.
All right. Well, I look forward to chatting soon. Thanks for coming on, John.
Thank you very much.
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(26:57):
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That's 1Password Extended Access Management. And it's just solving problems
that traditional IAMs and MDMs weren't built to touch.
It's security for the way we actually work today. And yeah, it's generally available
for companies with Okta and Microsoft entry, and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers.
Could you imagine just the difference this makes? And then you bring it all
together under one central dashboard.

(28:21):
This to me is just a beautiful extension of how 1Password started by just making
these things a little bit more addressable in the real world.
Now they've taken it to the next level with Extended Access Management.
They are the award-winning password manager creator, trusted by millions,
and now they're securing more than just passwords with 1Password Extended Access Management.
So secure every app, every device, and every identity, even the unmanaged ones.

(28:45):
You go to 1Password.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase.
It's number 1Password.com slash unplugged. Support the show and check it out.
That's 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Well, last Wednesday, we saw GNOME 48 come to us, and this one is going to be a big one.

(29:07):
It's going to be in Fedora and also Ubuntu.
And I think you boys have some favorite features in this particular release.
This is an impressive one. I mean, it's been a while since we've really stopped
and talked about an individual GNOME release, but this one I think really merits it.
And I have been low key using Gnome 47 since it came out on my homework station.

(29:31):
Yeah, you've become a secret Gnome user on the sneaky side.
After about two years of Plasma everywhere, right? It's been about two years at least.
But this has been really nice. And then to see 48 come out, it really completes
this pattern of Gnome sometimes takes a step back as far as we're concerned,
like with the text editor changes.
But then you give them a release or two and they've taken two or three steps forward.

(29:54):
And a lot of it is stuff that, I don't think this is hyperbole at all,
with GNOME 48 comes together, and it is now, just out-of-the-box stock,
more polished, more consistent,
easier to use, more intuitive than anything that may be macOS 6 and 7.

(30:19):
I mean, it's, it's remarkably how much better it is than the commercial platforms.
And yet maybe it doesn't have like every gosh darn like tool that I, I want from plasma.
When you bring it up, here's just, here's, here's, I'll make my case.
Simple things. Let's start with simple things.
Notification stacking by group now is so much better when you're somebody who

(30:40):
gets a lot of messages inbound or something like this. Now they'll all stack under an element.
Yes, I love this.
But the thing that we have been waiting for, for five years, has landed in GNOME 48.
And it's going to make it a better experience on those of you that have an Intel
video card or maybe like me, you know, you've got a graphics card from way back

(31:03):
in the day where they're actually affordable.
Well, now we have dynamic triple buffering, smoother animations,
fewer skipped frames, perceived improved performance, and also with this,
reduced CPU and memory usage.
And this has been just the yeoman's work of Daniel from Canonical for so long
as they have iterated on this and made changes.

(31:24):
And there's perceivable improvements, like 5x faster load for Windows,
10 times faster scrolling in like a thumbnail-heavy folder.
I mean, real, actual, visible improvements in performance.
Yeah, it's quite nice, either on my Intel ThinkPad here or in a virtual machine with a virtual setup.
And it's neat because previously, right, Canonical had been shipping this,

(31:46):
but it wasn't upstream, or hadn't been shipped in an upstream release.
So it was fun. i was playing both in the fedora 42 beta and a nightly build
of uh the upcoming ubuntu release and they're just they're now just both so
smooth so fast kind of regardless of where you're using it.
The other thing that I initially sort of thought, oh, I'm never going to use

(32:07):
that, probably because I don't want to know what it would tell me.
But I was talking to my wife, and she actually thought this new feature was really useful.
It's digital well-being is now being introduced to GNOME. So we see this on our phones.
And, you know, screen time tracking. You can set screen limits for daily limits.
Break reminders, so that way maybe get up, move, take an eye break.

(32:29):
And it comes with little bar graphs to tell you how much you've been using your computer.
It's not super detailed. you don't get per app or anything. But yeah, it's nice to see.
And it seems like, you know, probably especially in the Wayland world,
it makes sense for Gnome to implement these kinds of things that are in the
best place to do so stack-wise.
And especially some of those like, okay, like the total time and all that,

(32:51):
but I like having integrated break reminders, especially maybe for like a work
machine. You kind of just build it in.
It's there in the background. You get up, you take your breaks,
you come back, get more stuff done.
I definitely get lost in tasks sometimes. I might try it. There's also,
depending on your machine, it has to be supported.
I would imagine a lot of ThinkPads are going to work with this.
It's nice to see an option now to limit battery charge to 80% built into the UI.

(33:13):
Yes. Yes, definitely. I'm already using this on Plasma, and it's been something
I've been looking forward to.
And I think all three of us use it on our Pixels now on GrapheneOS.
True.
They recently added this. You know, the idea is that you just extend your battery life.
These lithium-ion batteries really don't benefit from being held at 100% charge.
And if you're primarily using it at a desk and keeping your laptop plugged in,

(33:34):
this can help extend the battery life.
And it won't work on everything as far as I know. And there are other obvious,
obviously there are other ways to do this. Like we're already doing it on Plasma
and of course you can do it with other utilities.
But it's great now to just have it built in right here, a checkbox in a straightforward
way that users have access to.
We also have some new apps in GNOME 48. There's a new minimalist audio playback

(33:56):
tool. And this is exactly what I wanted.
This is where I think the minimalist approach really works.
It opens up any audio file that's supported, it displays a waveform,
and it has a play button with adjustable playback speed.
So it's great for like listening to a downloaded podcast or a clip or an audio file.
It doesn't play. It's not a library tool. It's not meant to like do a bunch

(34:18):
of sophisticated stuff. It just is a quick, simple UI that looks good and is
very actually useful to use to play audio files, single audio files.
I get both perspectives here, right? On one hand, you're like,
okay, this tool is never going to do it a lot.
Why do we need it? There's like a whole bunch of, you know, there's a thousand
options in the archive for better or more sophisticated or earlier tools.

(34:40):
But on the flip side, yeah, right. If you can just have a reasonable scope and
execute well and just be there, then it becomes a platform feature that you
can just kind of expect and like, right.
Shouldn't I be able to just look at this file on my hard drive real quick without
needing to be like a professional?
Yeah. I don't need to load Audacity or VLC just to listen to this quick thing.

(35:00):
We also saw initial support for HDR land. I haven't been able to test that yet.
No, me either, but I'm curious.
This is, okay, earlier I said, you know, sometimes we see Gnome take a step back.
You know, they remove a feature, everybody reacts. And then if you give them
two releases, they take two or three steps forward.
And I think this is the case with the text editor. I was initially critical
of replacing G-Edit with a new, brand new text editor.

(35:23):
G-Edit has been great for a long time.
You know, it's one of those I've been able to run for a week.
With a machine that just had all my notes and it never failed me and it was
really simple and it was fast.
Ah, so this is what you do instead of keeping tabs, I see.
Yeah, that is true, actually. They updated it with a rebuilt text editor that
had less capabilities, but a nicer interface and, you know, a little bit more

(35:47):
up-to-date on GNOME design language.
But with GNOME 48, they have added features back in that were missing and they've
done it in a way that is honestly a better implementation.
So they took it away for a bit, but now they take it and now they give it.
And they give it probably in a better way than it was originally.

(36:08):
I think when you really dig into it, Gnome has a lot to offer if you haven't
looked at it in the last couple of years.
It is surprisingly refined now. It does not have every whistle and every bell
that my Plasma desktops have.
But if you build a Linux system, I think around the idea of using the GNOME

(36:28):
desktop, like Mac users,
you know, buy Macs and they have a limited set of Macs they can buy and Apple
has built Mac OS to work in those scenarios.
I think Gnome is a great desktop environment, especially for single and laptop screens.
Like at home, I have, I don't know, it's like a 34 inch ultra wide or whatever

(36:49):
it is. It's not a crazy big one, but it's decently wide.
It is just a dream to use with Gnome 47.
But when I try to go to my workstation where I have, you know,
four or five monitors at different refresh rates and different rotations.
Plasma is a lot stronger there.
But if I were to redo my workstation and I were to put a ultra-wide screen in

(37:13):
there, maybe one other monitor,
and really focus around the GNOME workflow, I feel like I could land on something
that could be really, really, really special. It could last me a decade.
It's very well done, especially if they keep making these small improvements
with each release, improving the performance, improving the features,

(37:34):
but making it easier to use.
You have to, I think, be a little more selective in your hardware and screen
choices, in my opinion, if you're going to really build a system around GNOME.
But if you're building one anyways and you can make some of those decisions,
it is really great. It is really first class, in my opinion.
I think when you get a little more into the weeds, like I tend to,

(37:57):
and you need more specific things, like this application always opens on this
monitor at this size, on this virtual desktop, that's where Plasma is really
going to, you know, be more of your jam, which is typically where I'm at.
But some systems, I really enjoy, it's, I know this sounds weird and please
let me know if anyone out there has ever felt this way.
But when I use Gnome, still to this day, even though all of the great work that's

(38:20):
in Plasma, especially with 6.4 that just came out, it's like the noise floor
is a little bit lower in Gnome.
It's just a little bit lower noise floor. And for some reason,
I'm a little more focused on the work at hand often.
It's not always a problem on Plasma, but there is some sort of difference to
my attention level between Gnome and Plasma.

(38:42):
And I genuinely am not sure what that is. And I'd be really curious if anybody
else has experienced that.
So I know you and I were both playing around with Gnome OS, which is their development OS for testing.
It's a way to get your hand on this right away. Definitely should not be used in production.
Did a little digging there, and yeah, it's not ready for production.
It's literally not safe to run in production, but it is a great way to try out

(39:02):
the latest builds of Gnome.
What'd you think, Wes kicking the tires, giving a look now that you've been
in the plasma land for so long, what were your impressions?
Yeah, I've been keeping up in just trying new releases with Gnome,
but I have not been daily driving it now for, I don't know, a year or two.
So it was kind of nice to spend a, you know, the better part of a week.
Uh, I tried Gnome OS, I tried, uh, Fedora 42 beta. I tried Ubuntu,

(39:26):
Yeah, there's a lot to like. And there's checking up with it after a while.
You can appreciate the work that they have been doing, right?
So like these days in GNOME, there's a weather app that gets you hourly weather updates.
That wasn't there the last time I used it. And I think it fits in that class
of like platform type features that you would expect, especially on something like a Mac.
And if you're coming, if your primary computing experience maybe is more phone

(39:50):
oriented, that's also something you might expect.
I have to say, I also really appreciate just the support for different world
clocks now in that menu as well because you know we have friends all around
the world and so it's really nice to put four or five time zones.
And friends co-hosts you know whatever yeah there's also
some fun nerdier stuff i think in gnome 48
like global shortcuts this has been something oft missed

(40:11):
in wayland the consequence of not letting every program be a
key logger is uh global shortcuts don't
really work and we have to kind of solve it in different ways so it's nice
to see that uh also i think for machines that
have like hybrid graphics there's some performance improvements there
like maybe you've got like a integrated and discreet and
before maybe you can almost doing a great job of copying all

(40:31):
the buffers and frames where they needed to go so that's better if
you don't or can't go the single display lifestyle also
on the path to things like hdr support i noticed that there's now a gdctl which
is a cool little gnome display control and you know there's all kinds of stuff
that had sort of evolved for some of these things in the x world and now it's

(40:54):
going to hit or miss depending on what Wayland implementation you're using, when and why,
and so it's just neat because I can see what monitors are there,
you can adjust stuff like how much luminance, how bright the monitor is and
you can probably enable HDR stuff maybe this way.
Shown in a cool little unicode tree layout
that makes it very clear so i don't know small but big

(41:17):
if you want to do weird stuff with your linux desktop or have find
control or automate or script things oh yeah
and also maybe small but uh appreciated
in terms of i really like how far you can get
with vanilla you know maybe
let's say under five extensions usually like one or two for me but like let's

(41:37):
say under five just to be more reasonable about it and maybe include chris or
have a chance of including chris in this so having a new font i i really like
that so long cantarelle um yep it served us.
Well it's not a huge change but it's nice to see.
Yeah i i think it just for me especially with like the improved text editing
and stuff it means like i'm not opining for swapping in a bunch of custom stuff

(42:01):
to have like a decent coding experience anymore and that's one more one fewer
change i don't have to make if i just wanted to get up and going with a linux system.
The default experience especially for you
know friends and family that don't need all the bells
and whistles that you get through extensions or that you get through just features
built into plasma i know i'm hitting this point but i i have to say i think

(42:24):
it's it's a better experience than you can get from the store if you give the
machine that runs linux with gnome 48 they get a system that updates incrementally
and it's always updating and it's always getting a little bit better.
And I mean that at the whole OS level. Think about the macOS experience today
compared to a lean, mean GNOME 48 Fedora system, for example, or Ubuntu.

(42:50):
You get a Mac. First of all, you're going to get slammed about signing into
iCloud and all of this kind of stuff.
And then it's going to be syncing in the background. They don't even know what syncs and doesn't sync.
But then as you go to use the Mac over time, you end up with a bunch of applications,
all of which have their own individual self-updaters, all of which prompt at
their own individual times. It doesn't matter what you're doing.
Then you'll also discover if you fired up after a few days of not using it,

(43:14):
the system just consumes a ton of resources, syncing your photos,
scanning faces, indexing the hard drive.
Uploading or downloading changes from iCloud, all of which it does without any
of your permission, all of which consumes resources and power and it slows down the system.
And then God forbid you want to have a screenshot app because you're going to
have to reauthorize that thing every 30 days.

(43:34):
And they made UAC look like it was an experiment because they've turned up the
Vista experience to an 11 on recent Mac OS and now you're getting hit in the
face with every little thing for permissions to everything.
And sometimes you've got to go in the system thing and go into the settings
and go into the privacy area and add something there.
And who even knows why they have users doing that? They simply just don't want you doing it.
And it is not a good, consistent experience, and it is user hostile.

(43:59):
Where GNOME 48 is this lean, mean, fast performance system that continuously
updates in small increments versus macOS, which has the smacky in the face big updates.
Oh, and by the way, you've got to update all your third-party apps,
and 90% of them are going to charge you something to update them.
And if you don't, they're just simply not going to work, or you're not going
to be able to run the new version anymore, which won't support the thing you need.

(44:20):
And that's the story on macOS these days.
That's the reality of it. Yeah, they're lean, mean systems.
Sure, they can get 18 hours of battery life, but that's your experience during
that 18 hours. Who wants it?
This it's an aggravation you do not need.
And none of that exists because this all the software on the system is centrally

(44:41):
updated by the package manager or by Flatpak.
And all of that is just is handled by Gnome software, mostly in the background.
So the end user doesn't even have to think about it.
Then major updates come along, but they're not like swapping out the sound system.
Right. That happens once a decade
in Linux. We make a once-in-a-decade transition to a new display server.

(45:03):
We make a once-in-a-decade transition to Rust tooling.
These things happen, and then we incrementally adopt them. Not in macOS.
Not in Windows. It's smacky in the face with tons of changes all at once,
and you better just take it.
And if you don't, we're going to nag you constantly for years to update your system.

(45:23):
And that's the experience. None of that. It's serene. It's peaceful.
You're focused on your work and your updates, like security improvements and
new features, they come in slow and they come in incrementally and they come
in at your pace in one place.
The system isn't updating to some sort of cloud service that they need because

(45:45):
they can't sell any more devices and now they need a new way to grift off their
users so that way the stock price goes up cloud service.
It's whatever you choose to use. And maybe it's nothing. Maybe you just want everything local.
That is fine. It's not going to force you to log into a cloud service when you first start it up.
We didn't even mention any AI features in our review.
Right. I mean, it really is. It's dramatic.

(46:08):
It reminds me now of it's not quite the right analogy, but you know how I always
strive for a car analogy.
It makes me think about these cars that all have the capacitive touch surfaces
and it's all screens and no stocks and end users keep saying,
hey, man, I just want a few buttons and dials back.
I just want to keep it simple. Like, it doesn't all have to be analog,
but I would like some buttons and dials back.

(46:29):
I would like a few controls, and I just need somebody that makes a decent, balanced choice.
And sometimes maybe they err a little bit too far on the capacitive touch, but bring it back.
And that's where GNOME is, is they're recognizing where the user's at.
They have a vision, and they strive for that vision, but they walk it back in
certain areas to meet the users where they're actually at.

(46:50):
And I think long term, when you look at the trajectory since GNOME 13 and GNOME
12, where this real identity has emerged, they sometimes they err on the side
of vision, but then they find a compromise spot.
And what's what's come out of this is one of the absolute first in class desktop
experiences for any desktop commercial or free software. It's not necessarily

(47:14):
for everybody, but man, is it really good.
And I just think that's going to make the next distros, the next Fedoras,
the next Ubuntus, Arches, and everything else that ship these desktops,
they're just going to be really some of the best releases.
Well, are you thinking about stack and sats? Maybe you want to boost the show
just to have fun with the boost.

(47:36):
There's a lot of ways online to get into Bitcoin, and I don't think you want to use most of them.
That's really the big problem Bitcoin has is there's just a lot of crap out
there and there's a lot of crap coins, too. So the way you solve for this is
you tune out the noise and you focus on a Bitcoin only company. They got one stack.
They got one thing they do. They're not screwing around with meme coins.

(47:58):
They're not playing around with, you know, technological blockchain projects.
You don't get emails about the latest airdrop.
No, you do not. And that's River. And if you go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash
River, that is our affiliate ID.
They make it easy to get started with Bitcoin in three simple steps.
And they are on the Lightning Network, too. So then you can send it over to
a podcasting 2.0 app and boost, or you can move it around however you like.

(48:22):
They have a lot of really great features too. They have free auto stacking.
So then you can just sort of average out the volatility by just auto stacking
when price goes up, when the price goes down.
They allow you to set up account beneficiaries should something happen to you.
They automatically have tax and performance reporting that they generate for you.
They have target price orders. So you can set a price and say,

(48:43):
when it gets to that, you just automatically buy.
And zero fees for withdrawing. And then a feature that I know Wes loves and
I can't wait till they bring to business accounts is 3.8% Bitcoin interest on
your cash that you hold there.
Yeah, that's pretty great.
And that cash is FDIC insured.
Yep, have a bank account, but it lets you turn interest to sats. Why not? Yeah.
So we really like River. We use it. And if you want to play around with this

(49:07):
or even if you want to start sacking sats for yourself, I think it's the way to go.
JupiterBroadcasting.com slash River.
Well, every week we get boosts into the show from all over the world,
and we wanted to say a thank you this week and have one of your hosts be on
the other side of the world to say thanks by reading some of them.

(49:32):
And this week's baller booster, the dude abides, 42,000 satoshis.
The dude comes in and says hey hope this makes it into today's boost pool i
have nothing specific to note but just wanted to say thanks for the company.

(49:53):
Well thank you the dudipides i just watched um the big lebowski for the first
time on my trip back from planet nix what yep yep wow uh i enjoyed it quite
a bit and had never seen it.
And I thought, well, uh, an airplane flight is the best time to watch it.
And so, uh, now I get the reference to do to bides and appreciate the support.

(50:15):
Thank you for being our baller booster.
You are a top supporter for episode four. Nope. Wow.
Six hundred and seven. It all blurs together, I guess. Well,
there is derivation dingus and he comes in with 21,000 sats.
He says, I really enjoyed the eBPF episode and wouldn't mind more like it.

(50:35):
I would love to do a TUI challenge as well. Oh, boy. All right,
I'm going to start writing these down.
You better.
All right, that's a one plus one for the TUI challenge.
Wait, why aren't you using a TUI to record that?
Because we're not doing the challenge yet.
Oh, right.
Not yet. He says, there's so many good TUI applications written in... Rust these days.

(50:56):
I was worried you were about to say Golang.
Another variant could be the no mouse challenge.
Jeez, you guys.
That's good. The idea is you have one week to design your perfect keyboard-driven
tiling desktop window manager setup.
And then the following week, you have to use it on your main PC.
Points are awarded based on keyboard friendliness and terminal 2E apps.

(51:18):
Hey, do you remember how we beat those System76 folks at Lasertag and they promised
us some really nice keyboards in exchange for beating them? I think that would
be a perfect match for this.
Oh, yeah, and don't they have, like, a kind of a tiling-focused desktop, too?
Mm-hmm.
They do.
I should be shooting something there, I guess. I do like that.
He says, if you break down and use a mouse, though, say, three times over the

(51:39):
course of the week, the punishment is you have to adjust your .bash RC to pipe
all terminal output through lolcat for a month.
A month. Oof.
That's pretty great.
Brutal.
That's pretty great.
Tony, I'm just going to throw the mouse away.
Oh, man.
Electrician boosted with 10,000 cents,

(52:01):
I just wanted to take a minute to tell my favorite podcasters about my favorite version of Linux.
Project Bluefin is awesome. It's all the best parts of Linux and none of the suck. Rock on.
Love that. Project Bluefin does seem like it's really carving out a very special
place in the Linux space bringing something unique and helping Often people leverage a, I guess,

(52:25):
cloud-first, I hate that word, but I think it is the right word,
a cloud-first workflow to build their own private distribution.
Hey, hey, I think it's cloud-native.
Oh, yeah, that is it. Right. I just, for some reason, can't bring myself to say it.
Oh, and our electrical magician friend here was Boostin from Podverse. Great.
Hey, nice to see. Thank you for the boost. User 47's here with a row of ducks. That's 2,222 sats.

(52:49):
I'm excited for the TUI Challenge. Potential episode name. Some variation of a Hawk Tui joke. Oh, man.
All right, putting down a number, a number two. So it's now two,
I guess, plus two for the Tui challenge. I feel like this is happening, boys.
It's happening.
Well, adversary has sent in 10,000 Satoshis.

(53:14):
I tried learning Nix in the past, but got distracted. Gonna try again,
though, and use it with my coding projects.
Hey, you know, one way to always get started is just to use it on the distro
you already have. You don't have to switch to NixOS to enjoy Nix.
And feel free to hop into the Nix nerds room if you want some help.
Yeah, totally.
Shy Fox boosts in with 10,000 cents.

(53:38):
Oh gosh, it's another plus one for the Dewey challenge.
My dream would be to have a mainframe terminal inspired station running only 2e or cli apps oh.
Man and wouldn't it be awesome if you could have like old retro terminals around
the house to interface with it.
Yes it would okay see shy fox is helping us out though because uh they include

(53:59):
a link to a github awesome 2e's page with a whole bunch of other links to 2e
projects that we should probably go look through i.
Think i knew about this but forgot so i really appreciate this this really great timing.
Yeah, here's a 2E for Podman containers. Great, great. Already, see?
See, we're done.
I have a question for the audience here. How many people are doing the full-time 2E thing as is?
Is this challenge just not going to be a challenge for you? If you do that,

(54:22):
I want to know about it. You can teach me a few things.
Yeah, let us hear about it. Alright, so that's a total of plus three now for
the 2E challenge. Thank you, Shy Fox.
Magnolia Mayhem's here with a wonderful 11,700 700 sats.
Well, if I were Linus for a day, I'd do what Slackware did, and I'd rev to 7.1.

(54:45):
For no reason but to make people just ask questions.
That's nice. I think that's what he does anyways, though.
Also, I loved the architecture of
BlackBerry's QNX OS, which was an Android-compatible Unix microkernel OS.
I used it on their tablet and their BB Passport. I just have to start working
on a microkernel with Linux for one-to-one binary support.

(55:08):
It shouldn't be that hard, since Linux is already kind of a hybrid OS,
but that base kernel is already stupidly bloated.
Also, it just tickles the tisms for me if it goes the right way.
You know, I think, although I'm not positive, but I think my Volkswagen GTI
is still using QNX for the infotainment system.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Yeah, and I think it's still just as good and responsive as some of the stuff

(55:30):
in cars that are new, brand new cars.
You know okay this might be heresy but mayhem's got me thinking with this whole
version number stuff right like um why don't we get more nerdy and go instead
of semver we go complex numbers.
Yeah i got the.
Real part you know for the major versions in the complex and the imaginary part for the minor.
We could just do hex oh yeah mix that in also another plus one all right we're

(55:52):
up to four now for the tui challenge boys and another plus one for regular deep
dives he says overall he got 16 points on the BST challenge,
very nice thank you very much for the boost appreciate it mayhem you're always
great to hear from also I'll get hybrid too because he's another guy that's
always great to hear from hybrid sarcasms here with 10,000 sats,

(56:17):
The musical section in the members bootleg is always just a chef's kiss.
Here's appreciation for one of the many reasons to be a JB party member.
Thank you for that shout out. We have, um, we've been having a little bit of
fun in the member stream.
And if you haven't gotten a subscription yet and you want to,
you might check it out. Linux unplugged.com slash membership.
We, uh, we make a lot of content for the members, a whole lot of show in there. We're about an hour.

(56:40):
We're clocking in about an hour 42 for the members version of the show right
now. There's a lot. It's not dead air. It's not dead air.
Look at Hybrid paying us to advertise our members feed.
He really is a champ. I really appreciate that. Thank you, everybody, for the boost.
That's all of them above the 2,000 sat cutoff. And, of course,
thank you to our sat streamers.
You came in like champs, 35 of you streaming those sats. As you listened to

(57:02):
the podcast, you stacked 56,243 sats.
When we combine that with our total senders, all right, I'm, uh...
I'm not feeling too bad, though. I mean, we had a pretty good week last week.
It's a total of 182,942 sats.

(57:25):
That, of course, is split between the three of us. Editor Drew,
a little bit goes to the podcast index, and a little bit goes to the podcast
developer that you boosted.
And we appreciate everybody at least boosting and sending some support our way
or as a member because it matters more than ever right now.
And if you want to participate, it's pretty simple. You could use something
like River, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River, or the Strike app,

(57:49):
or Bitcoin Well. Those are like my three places to get sats.
And then you send them over to a podcasting 2.0 app, and you start boosting away.
And it will read your message in a future show. And it means a lot to us to
support the show directly. We're an independent show.
You know, we're not trying to pump the advertisers by going to YouTube and doing video live streams.
And we're not going the dynamic ad insertion route other than for jokes from time to time.

(58:11):
We're trying to do it the right way and keep you our most important and biggest
customer so thank you everybody who participates either as a member or as a
booster, it really means a lot.
So one of the things that I've decided to do on Gnome is embrace ULauncher.
And we haven't talked about ULauncher in ages on this show.
So I thought it was worth a check-in because it's interesting in the Wayland

(58:32):
world now how this all works.
Now, Gnome's been making specific strides on making the launcher when you hit the meta key faster.
So you really could just get by using that and it would be just fine for launching and finding stuff.
The reason why I'm not a huge fan of it is it zooms out the desktop and it changes
the whole UI. and it's a big visual change.

(58:53):
Yeah, versus just like a separate launcher that stacks right on top.
And that's really the only reason I decided to start looking into Ulauncher again.
And I'm really pleased to see with the direction this has gone.
I'll have a guide linked in the show notes.
Right now, although this may be changing in 48, but right now there is a little
bit of a workaround to get it to actually fire off in Wayland.

(59:14):
You basically have to go set up a custom hotkey. Pretty simple.
It's like two, three steps.
Ulauncher is GPL3. which is
great to see but what really made it stick for me surprise
surprise is it has extension support and there's
a few that are just handy to have if you are in
work chats it is useful to have emojis so i can hit control space which brings

(59:37):
up u launcher instantly and then if i hit gm that goes into emoji mode and i
can type the name of any emoji like fire or whatever and then it will immediately
copy it to my clipboard and i can alt you know i go right back because i don't even have,
I'm right back in the chat I'm in and I can just hit paste.
Also, I've fallen back on using Todoist. It has brilliant integration,

(59:59):
several different extensions for Todoist.
So you can manage and add your tasks right from your launcher as you think of it.
Another small thing. I add an extension, just turns off my screen.
I start typing the words turn.
By the time I get to turn, there's an option to turn off my screen.
I hit enter, my screen sleeps.
That's pretty nice.
And I've really found the Obsidian extension very handy.

(01:00:23):
And additionally the home assistant extension very handy i type ha and then
turn off living room lamp and it connects to my home assistant instance and
turns off my lights right from my desktop launcher brilliant yeah it's nice so.
You didn't consider just running k runner on you know.
You know i love k runner but it for me it sometimes fires up a little too slow

(01:00:45):
like let's try it right here ready so i'll do it right now okay that was pretty
fast actually every now and then i get like Like,
I don't know, like maybe the process has just been like, you know,
nice. I don't know what's happened.
But it just takes, it's chunky before it comes up.
They're not having that problem with you, Launcher.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then you add these extensions and it's just
really handy. And it's not that GNOME has to have it.

(01:01:08):
But if you, like me, don't like the whole zoom out, zoom in thing every time
you hit the meta key to launch an application, it is pretty nice.
And then you have these extensions.
It's part of great. And it's nice to, you know, check in with an app that I used way back in the day.
And it's still going, still proceeding. The community is still building extensions today.
Tons of LLM plugins. Like if you have a local llama instance or open AI or Claude
stuff too. So you can, or perplexity, a couple of extensions.

(01:01:32):
So you can just ask perplexity a question in the launcher and then it comes back with the results.
Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff to play around with if you are so inclined.
It looks like at least from the couple of extensions I peaked at,
they're written in Python. So that should be pretty approachable too.
If someone wants to write their own.
Okay. Yeah. That does sound right. Checks out. The poll thing is probably mostly
Python, to be honest with you. That's okay.

(01:01:53):
That's fine by us. It's not a big deal, Wes. Stop getting angry.
No, I'm a snake fan.
All right, we want to know what you think about John's proposed changes for
the next Ubuntu, especially shipping the Rust utilities.
And if you are concerned about it for some reason that we didn't touch on,
we'd like to hear that feedback or if you support what they're doing.
Go try it out.

(01:02:14):
Yeah, I'm really curious to know what our community in particular thinks of these changes.
Also, I'm looking for your tips to natively sign and date PDFs on Linux with
a desktop application if possible.
Please boost that in as well. And
you're always welcome to join us on a Sunday. We do the show at 10 a.m.
Pacific, which is like what, noon Eastern?

(01:02:34):
I don't know. We have it at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
I think 1 p.m., right?
Okay, that sounds right.
Either way, links to what we talked about today are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 607.
You'll also find information about our Mumble, our Matrix, which are always
going, as well as our membership page.

(01:02:55):
And of course, you can find our back catalog and a bunch of great shows over
at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
The launch has a phone and we want you to call it now.
Yeah, details in the launch. You can call in and leave us your voicemails.
And we're going to have a special phone line for our members that I'll be announcing soon as well.
Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program.

(01:03:16):
And we'll see you back here next Tuesday. As in Sunday!

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