636: Engineering the Future

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:11):
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show this week, it was a race against time
to leave Texas Linux Fest.
We had a date at System76 to get the inside scoop on the Cosmic Desktop and its future.
And then we had a chance to chat with John Seeger, the VP of Engineering at

(00:33):
Canonical, fresh off the 2510 release.
But we had to make it back to the studio in time for our live chat.
We'll tell you all about that and how it went and play those chats.
And then we'll round out the show with some great booths, some picks, and a lot more.
So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our live virtual
log. Hello, Mumble Room. Hey, Chris. Hello, Brent. Hello, hello, hello.

(00:55):
Hola, bienvenidos. Hello. You know, if you want to join our Mumble Room,
if you're listening out there, it's pretty fun.
It's got a live vibe. Details are jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
It's an open invite. We'll have a conversation with anyone. We have an open
mumble room. We just check your mic to make sure everything's sounding good enough to go on air.
And then you can come and chat with us during the show even or during the pre

(01:17):
and post show, which is generally when the mumble room is really going.
And it's a lot of fun. That's jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
And a big good morning to our friends at Defined Networking.
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It's a decentralized VPN built on the amazing Nebula platform that Wes and I
are huge fans of. and we're going to convert Brent soon.

(01:40):
Oh, yeah.
We're coming for you, Brent.
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(02:06):
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(02:27):
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(02:48):
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Well, we have made it back from
our escape from Texas, So I guess not to spoil it, but we did make it.
And it was such a great trip. And before we get into the story and our trip

(03:11):
to Denver to chat with the System 76 crew, I want to just share the team's gratitude
to our audience who made this possible.
You got us down there and you got us back. And we didn't have any incidents.
Nobody blew out a tire. Nobody got a ticket. There was no fender bender.
I mean, do you know the numbers, Wes? That's what we drove collectively.

(03:33):
I mean, we drove collectively a ton of miles.
Oh, yeah. Oh, here. Well, we've got them live up there if you just want the miles on the tracker.
Oh, yeah, right. Texas tracker is still live because Brent's actually still on the road.
That's right. So you and I, Team Bigfoot, we drove a total path distance of 4,732 miles.

(03:53):
And Moose there, who's not done yet, is at 3,416.
It's really awesome. We had a chance to connect with a great community down
there, but then it wasn't even initially on our plan, but because we were working
for the audience and not a particular sponsor,
we were able to do a last-minute schedule with System76 to swing by and get

(04:16):
a hands-on demonstration of the latest and greatest with Cosmic.
I just want to underscore, not only did it mean that our entire intention was
always just to create great content for you, but we had a kind of flexibility
that I just don't think would have been there.
And so we got to do something really special. And it meant we were on a very tight timeline.
Okay, so the goal was to be out by 9.30. It's 9.29 a.m. Oh, we're doing pretty

(04:38):
good. What are you doing right now?
Well, I got to unplug the van and put the solar panel in the bag.
I noticed your bags aren't loaded either.
Well, I staged them beside the van. Probably got to feed the kitties a little bit of food.
Well, they are jumping around like they want some food. Uh-huh.
Yeah. I don't know about you, Wes, but I'm kind of ready to go.
Yeah, let's hit the road. We got miles to go today.
You and i had it down at this point yeah.

(05:00):
Well practiced i think.
Yeah and and to be fair brent has a little bit more to take care of oh yeah.
We were doing lean and mean and that was definitely an advantage for us.
Brent's got animals to take care of a van to take care of and a brent to take care of.
It was clear in that moment uh the difference between the types of trips we
had had up to this point because i was you know let's say meandering my way
to texas and uh very happily so and you guys were just jetting down there and

(05:25):
this is the collision of those two uh philosophies and it was clear that we
were going to have to figure it out.
And just as we're ready to go, I mean really ready to go, Brent informs us that
he's had a little issue that he hasn't told us about.
You got all those belts? I think so. Maybe.
I don't hear anything. No, it's only when I really give it gas.

(05:48):
When you give it the onions? Yeah, like if I'm pulling out of a parking lot or trying to pass you.
So maybe. Since when the engine's really red? Yeah, maybe I'll go in there and give a couple of kicks.

(06:10):
Well, if I were to guess, I would say alternator. Because it's coming from the bottom corner.
This was a theme for the day. This should have been our indication of how the
day was going to go because we didn't want to push the van too hard.
We weren't in a particular time crunch for that day because we just had to get
from Austin to Amarillo. So we had, you know, only a seven hour drive day.

(06:34):
So we thought maybe we would make it in decent time, get to Amarillo,
do some grocery shopping, stock the Airbnb. That's not exactly how things went.
Yeah, we just hit 80,000 miles on the car.
All right, so we've been driving for 395 miles, 6 hours and 44 minutes.
We're at the fourth O'Reilly of the day. Hey, one of those was an AutoZone.

(06:55):
We're going to go with Brent and we're going to get an alternator that he doesn't need.
And then we'll be on our way to the Airbnb. Definitely moving a bit slower today.
We did ultimately get there and Brent did get his alternator.
Oh, yeah.
Which I'm kind of in favor of now.
Well, okay, because you never express in real time that I certainly didn't need
it. It was like community voting, you know, all of us, but you seem to just

(07:18):
go with the crazy Brent plans.
Well, I was, you know, I was like, it's a belt. I think it's a belt first and foremost.
And if there's another issue because of, you know, that, then we'll deal with
that. But I was like, it's really, it's just a belt problem.
But, you know, you got a better unit. So when you do get it installed,
I actually think you're going to be better off.
And we did get to our Airbnb. Nothing really stands out to me about that one.

(07:38):
They all kind of have, I don't know about you guys, but they all kind of just
merged together as one meta Airbnb. well.
There was one i don't think we could forget.
Well yeah yeah the one where we had somebody else the stuff in there oh no no okay.
Too no the one where you um didn't really fit in the shower.
Oh that was this airbnb wasn't no.
No it was uh the denver one.
It was multiple oh yeah oh right it was

(07:59):
multiple guys not one of our airbnbs had
a functional bathroom for me not one of them they all had something weird
i don't know what's going on with airbnbs and bathrooms but we
got there the next morning it was time to set off because we needed to get
to denver this is where the timeline got tight because carl
had a carl the ceo of system 76
had scheduled himself a work from home week

(08:20):
and he came in gracefully because we were coming into town as well as so had
jeremy soller and so they both came in and scheduled to come into the office
because we were going to be there to help you know give this presentation and
so we really wanted to make it on time because we were kind of taking from their
plan to work from home week and i i didn't intend for that to happen No.
We just thought, oh, we happen to be here. Maybe something will work out,

(08:42):
and that was very gracious of them.
We're like, okay, we're in Amarillo, but we need to be there tomorrow by 10 a.m.
I wouldn't call it fixed. No. I'd call it...
Mildly improved? Not even?
No. But we may have fixed on a leak on the radiator. Yeah, that was easy. Unrelated.
So that's a win. We'll stack that. Let me get down the road a little bit because

(09:05):
we've got to get the hell out of this Airbnb and see how it does. We'll check on her.
I'm worried I'm,
Well, this is the ultimate test. I mean, you're really pushing all the components,
long duration, driving, heat, miles and miles.
I mean, this is it, right? This is if things are going to break or crack.
You're talking about just getting it over to O'Reilly's?

(09:30):
Oh, man. We did it. And I do remember this. So we have a process,
right? We get to an Airbnb.
And within minutes, we try to get the Wi-Fi set up. We try to get streaming
set up. We try to get Star Trek going on the main screen.
Yeah, time to Star Trek. That's our standard Airbnb metric.
Yeah, and it is an interesting one because it's like, you got to get the network
stood up. You got to get a device working. You got to get a client device paired with that.

(09:50):
And what's the TV setup, right? Can you use the tech that's there?
Do you have to inject your own? How accessible is it?
And every time we do this, we kind of like refine this idea of this ultimate
tiny Linux box that has HDMI that boots right into a Kodi that just immediately
starts randomly playing Star Trek and sets up an AP that all our devices connect to.
Like we've been, we have been iterating on this idea.

(10:11):
So if you have any suggestions for a device like that, please do boost them
in or send us an email at linuxunplugged.com slash contact because we want to
build something when we get to an Airbnb that's like a little Linux router slash
Kodi box slash Wi-Fi AP repeater.
Also Nebula device. That's what we're going for.
So that's, but it is, this Airbnb we arrived at turned out to be in somebody's

(10:33):
basement, which we didn't expect.
And so I also did not fit in that. I'm not a particularly tall guy.
I'm, I think 5'11", if that's, you know, It's not that unusual,
but yeah, it wasn't ideal, but we made it to System 76 on time.
Wes and I are just outside the System 76 office, waiting for Brent to feed his

(10:53):
cats and get the audio interface that he forgot in the van somewhere.
So, we're kind of on time. We're on Brent time, that's for sure.
There's no escape in Brent time, but his cat's.
Hey. Hey, what? What are you guys doing over here? Nothing. Just waiting for
you, buddy. Yeah? Yeah. Okay.
And we got there and, you know, we show up. Every time we go,

(11:15):
they've changed so much. They've expanded.
Oh, yeah.
Rearranged the office. So it's a new entrance.
Bunch of new tech. Bunch of new people. It just changes all the time.
A lot more lasers. There's a whole lot of lasers now.
We got there. It was great to see Carl. He gave us a tour of all the new stuff
and some things they're working on.
And it was also the day they were releasing the new Oryx. So that was kind of exciting.

(11:38):
And then we sat down with him and Jeremy in an office space to try to just get
the state of Cosmic because they're getting really close right now.
But there's still some things that are missing. But there's also a lot of stuff
regarding Cosmic that people have not discussed, including some features that
have recently been added that they touch on in our chat here that are just blow away cool.

(12:00):
We just had a great tour. Carl gave us a tour of the factory to kind of get
an update on everything. but we're really here to get an update on Cosmic because
the last time we chatted about it, it was early alpha.
It must have been like at a Linux Fest or something. It was a while ago.
And I think things have come a lot further.
Yeah, I think that was Linux Fest Northwest. And is it Big Bertha?

(12:25):
In Bellingham. But no, it was in the RV. Oh, Joops. Joops.
Right, you came in Lady Joops and gave us a demo. Yeah. Right.
Right. So, yeah, at that point, I think we were talking about where Cosmic was.
The talk I was giving was on apps because it's my second time around at LinuxFest Northwest.

(12:46):
I wanted to do some new content. So Jeremy actually did a lot of the work on
the apps and wanted to highlight how unique they are because there's a lot of
features that you just don't get in a lot of desktop apps on Linux.
So we've been kind of looking at a couple of things just before we started recording. but,
And things like fancy background switching for users at creators,

(13:10):
and it looks like we're getting to the polish aspect of Cosmic now.
Yeah, there's a long gap between Alpha 7, which was in April,
and our beta release at the end of September.
I guess that's, whatever, six months or something like that, five months.
And after the Alpha 7, one of the reasons that we did alphas frequently was

(13:32):
because we kept getting the same bugs over and over again, even though they had been resolved.
So unless we were tagging releases and those were being adopted,
that's because Cosmic is packaged for Arch and Fedora and Open Suicide and things like that.
So unless we were tagging frequently, just the triage and the amount of effort
to go through things that had already been solved was pretty high.

(13:54):
But Alpha 7 was kind of a point where things improved considerably at that point.
And so we didn't get a lot of issues afterwards.
And there were unique ones that came after that.
So the beta release marked that point where all the features,
or by and large, all the features are in.
And now we're working on smaller bug fixes and polish for the final release.

(14:17):
Jeremy's here, too. And I wonder, Jeremy, if you have any comments on sort of
just the state of the system and where it's at from a code development standpoint,
stability, things like that.
Yeah, sure. So as Carl said, we nailed down most of the new features already,
except for a whole bunch of things that we're adding.
Like the Cosmic Store needs to have Flatpak add-ons. We're doing printing support

(14:37):
in Cosmic Edit, which is more nuts than I thought it would be.
But in general, the system's pretty stable, and we're just working through the
backlog of issues that people have reported during the alpha and beta phase
and trying to fix them all before RC.
And we actually started shipping a unit with the Cosmic Beta.

(14:58):
So the Oryx Pro with the codename Oryp 13 is an AMD and NVIDIA hybrid system.
And it turns out that it works best in Cosmic because of the way that Cosmic
handles hybrid graphics.
Right. So the Oryx Pro has just been released today. It's October 8th.
So it's a brand new product with Strix Point CPU, NVIDIA 5070 graphics.

(15:25):
And what's really unique about Strix's point is that the VGA or the controller,
the integrated GPU, is not VGA compatible, meaning that it's...
It requires Wayland because it will not work with X11 because it's not a VGA-compatible GPU.

(15:48):
So as we were working through the products, like Ubuntu 24.04,
if you write it on X11, the discrete GPU is always on because the X11 can't use the integrated GPU.
In Wayland, that does work correctly. And so when we're shipping Ubuntu 24.04,
we're also shipping that with Wayland on that product.

(16:09):
And we weren't going to go back to 2204 for POP and find out what the Wayland
State was there when we have this brand new desktop that's really close and
frankly at this point a better product than what we're shipping with 2204.
So the Oryx becomes our first product to ship with Cosmic, one by necessity

(16:33):
and also because we think we're shipping a better product to our customers.
That's a pretty big milestone.
So we're going to kind of play with things off mic, but I'm curious,
because you guys have been kind of running this the longest out of almost anybody
on the internet, what are people missing when it comes to what's great about using Cosmic?
Like when you hear people discussing Cosmic and arguing Plasma versus Gnome

(16:56):
and Cosmic, what's the thing that people are missing?
The highlight of Cosmic is that it adapts to whatever your workflow happens
to be, and it has all this ability to do that, but none of it feels overwhelming. It all feels natural.
It's really – it's easy to get in the weeds. Sometimes I think people use cosmic
and they say, well, there's not like a lot of new things in here.

(17:21):
I think it's because the design is just so good.
That when you get to using it and moving things around, it just all works,
and it just feels so simple and natural that the innovation is taking all these
advanced concepts and making them that approachable to every single user.
So you don't have to be an engineer to take advantage of tiling or to theme

(17:47):
your system and make it look exactly the way you want it to look.
You can go in and, without being overwhelmed by a whole bunch of settings,
click a few things, and then you have a dramatically different workflow or experience,
based on what feels right to you.
And it's so easy to switch between different styles of using Cosmic,
whether you want to launch apps with the launcher and switch between them,

(18:10):
or if you want to use the application library, or if you prefer to use workspaces
or not use workspaces or use tiling or use a hybrid tiling and some,
you know, maybe tiling on your external display and floating on your laptop display.
Whatever fits right for you. It's just very easy and natural to set it up and

(18:31):
to try different things.
And to me, there's kind of three things in addition to that.
We're trying to make, or what Cosmic does is make computing fun and productive and personal.
And it kind of takes some effort to make computing fun.
We spend so much time on our computers. They should be fun to spend time at.

(18:56):
We're at them for hours. And so for me, fun is customizing my theme,
changing my layout, trying different things. I enjoy doing that stuff.
For other people, it's gaming. So we want to make sure gaming is fantastic.
For other people, what might matter the most is I don't have to click four things to log out.

(19:16):
In Cosmic, you just click the button, click log out.
Everything is a shorter path to what you need in Cosmic than a lot of other
operating system experiences.
Jeremy, I'm curious if you have anything to add on what people are missing when
they're comparing the different desktop environments today and they're thinking
about Cosmic or they're comparing Cosmic to Plasma or GNOME or things like that.

(19:37):
Well, one thing I think I see as missing is people judge, often they judge Cosmic
based on its current state, when they should be looking forwards to the future.
Every release that we do, we will have a feature cycle where we build up a large
number of features. And I don't think we've ever told anybody no.
We just say, no, this is not how we want to do it, but we will try to adjust to that use case.

(20:00):
And there's so many cases where, like when I think about all the accessibility work we did,
that was really one where we had to toe the line between how do we make sure
everything is there for every person who could potentially use this product
and every potential issue they may have with the product,
but still make the default experience good for the largest number of people.

(20:24):
And yeah, that's what I wish people would consider is how would you see this
modular desktop environment evolve
into the future rather rather than judging it by how it is right now.
Also add to that, when you have an established customer base and user base like
Pop! OS has and System76 has.
It's not like starting from scratch with no users and building something new.

(20:48):
You have a responsibility to what their experience already has been and what
their experience is going to be when you deliver something new to them.
And so when we're building Cosmic, we're building a platform that's going to be familiar to them.
But once you get into Cosmic, you realize that this platform,
because of the way it can be composed and the way it's modular,
it can actually become anything that you want it to be.

(21:09):
And that's, I think, what will be its key feature and what people will really
appreciate long term is I see folks say, it looks like Mac.
It looks like GNOME. It looks like KDE. It looks like this.
Exactly. It does. It can look like any one of those.

(21:31):
And to get that layout that you really enjoy and that you prefer to use,
it's just so simple that you can just lay it out the way you want.
So, yeah, it's unique in that way.
I guess I'm sort of surprised we've been talking and the architecture hasn't
come up, Rust hasn't come up, the way the system settings are stored,

(21:53):
which is kind of different and unique, hasn't come up.
Jeremy, can you touch on some of that for us? Yeah, absolutely.
So we try as much as possible to keep things modular.
And this is another thing where I want to see it evolve over time.
Like we just added third-party applets into the Cosmic Store. So you can go in.
These are things that anybody can make, and they're securely added to the panel

(22:14):
because they're flat packs and they're sandboxed.
So every applet that you get from the applet store, you can add to the panel.
You can create docks and panels anywhere you want on the system,
on any display, any number. and Carl is laughing right now.
I would definitely have too many. I'll be that guy. I admit it.

(22:35):
You'd have the like 1990s browser toolbar kind of look.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so the ability to have every single one of those be a separate
process and be in its own sandbox means that they can be written in any language.
So the Rust aspect of Cosmic actually doesn't matter as much as people want
it to be, especially now that Rust has become like a political statement somehow.

(22:59):
I don't care, I have my own politics, but Rust is just a programming language,
and the purpose of it is to drive memory safety.
And the reason we're using it is because it allows us to say these types of
bugs cannot exist in safe Rust code.
And so long as we're writing safe Rust code, then we eliminate those bugs or

(23:19):
at least reduce the prevalence of bugs overall in the entire desktop environment. This...
The config mechanism is another interesting part of it.
It's one that was driven by portability and modularity.
It's how can we make it so that the same config mechanism could be used by Cosmic
apps, regardless of what operating system they're running on.

(23:43):
So they're running on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, it doesn't matter.
They don't need a third-party service to exist. They don't need a daemon setup.
They don't need dconf to exist.
They just need to be able to write to files and so we have a flat file format
where they just write out in the Rust object notation format,

(24:04):
to those files and you can manage those files in a Git repository if you'd like
to or in any way you want to sync files between systems.
And you can diff those files very easily they're all plain text and another
thing that we've done is to ensure that all the state is separated out from
the config and what I mean by state is if you're in KDE and you're trying to

(24:27):
manage your config files, you might,
for instance, notice that the size of every console window is stored.
The last window size is stored in the same config file that saves things like
your keyboard shortcuts for the console application.
So we've separated those kinds of things out.
Recent files would be stored in state versus the theme settings would be stored in config.

(24:53):
And that ensures that you're able to sync those config settings without bringing
over state that doesn't necessarily apply between computers.
Yeah, I think that extends to our lack of requirement for system D as well.
The portability means that Cosmic will be a great desktop for BSDs. It works on Redox.

(25:15):
And so we try to make decisions that don't eliminate its use in other platforms. Yeah, I'm just curious.
How's it been? It seems like Cosmic's spreading its wings to a lot of other
platforms and distributions. Have you gotten good feedback from people trying to package it?
I've gotten feedback and it may be anecdotal that this is the easiest desktop
environment to port to package overall. Yeah.

(25:38):
There were a few hiccups with Rust in the start, like Fedora wanted to bundle
all the Rust, take all the Rust dependencies and turn them into dynamic libraries.
But then they changed their mind, and now they're allowing those to be compiled
by Cargo, just the native Rust build system.
And so, yeah, it's spread across to Arch, to OpenSUSE, Nix, to Alpine,

(26:01):
to Fedora, and onwards because it is very easy to port and it has very limited
dependencies on the system.
All right, well, I'm just looking forward to playing around with it. Thanks, guys.
Yeah, really, a big thank you to everyone over at System76 for making time on
our last-minute scheduled stop.
And I'm going to give it a go. I walked away pretty impressed.

(26:23):
One of the things that impressed me the most is the way they've implemented applets.
And that's, to me, a massive innovation in the desktop space is essentially
any Flatpak app with the right dimensions. It's a Wayland application.
Yeah, as long as you can draw a window on the screen and, you know,
it has the right interfaces. It'll work.
You can make it an applet. And the massive ramification of that is all the dependencies,

(26:48):
your language, all of that's handled by, you know, the Flatpak.
But it also means if the desktop updates, your extensions are,
unless something changes in the XTG portals, your extensions aren't going to break.
It's a brilliant, genius way to do extensions on a desktop that works with a
desktop that might be quasi-rolling on some systems.

(27:08):
Yeah, stay tuned. We'll see if we can get Chris to Vibecode in a little extension.
So I've been running Plasma and Aurora here on my main machine in the studio,
and I think we're going to nix Cosmic it up, and I'm going to give Cosmic a
go on this, see if I can kind of replicate a workflow I really like in the studio
with it. I was just really impressed.
Anything stand out to you gentlemen about cosmic.

(27:29):
Yeah i mean i still really want to sit and live with it for
a while to give it a proper test of course um but yeah just
you know watching carl use his cosmic watching him kind of live tweak it and
change it in front of us with i mean he wasn't even really sitting in front
in front of a proper workstation environment he's kind of having to you know
show us the screen and tweak things as part of the presentation so if you can

(27:52):
do it in that environment,
it seems like now we have this lean,
mean, portable, flexible environment.
So even if it doesn't end up maybe being your daily driver on every machine,
it seems like a very useful tool that you can kind of take with you.
For me, I was really impressed by their dedication to like the design of the
architecture on the backend.

(28:13):
And they specifically said, you know, we're trying to make production software.
And so we want to do it right, even if it takes longer.
And I think that philosophy is really playing out in a nice way now with Cosmic
coming into beta and us getting that behind the scenes look of how it's built.
And that also means they've been working really closely with a bunch of upstream that,

(28:37):
found really impressive and is just making our linux ecosystem better overall
so i was really impressed by all of that.
I think too one of the things that i took away from it is there's components
that people might end up using even if they don't use the entire cosmic desktop
of so on hyperland you don't really have a file manager you get to pick and
choose and one of the things i experimented with is i installed the cosmic file

(29:00):
manager because it It doesn't require nearly as much as, say,
Dolphin or Files does from GNOME.
And it worked really well. So there's components they're working on here that
are pretty portable. But as you also heard Carl say, they don't have a system
D dependency, not as a political statement, but just as a function of how they've built it.
Which means perhaps this will be available for desktops that want a modern desktop

(29:23):
that don't have system D in the distro.
Or maybe one of the BSDs out there that obviously won't have system D.
And so it has that's kind of encouraging that way because it has some potential
audience that maybe modern gnome and plasma are are leaving behind.
I have to say i was also really quite impressed by
just how many resources they're putting to the
desktop they mentioned 10 people working on cosmic

(29:45):
full-time including qa of course and i
specifically carl said well we actually like
that to be like three or four times that size in the
future and so they're really dedicating to this
desktop which is yeah really impressive
yeah and i love too that uh
their philosophy towards a rolling release desktop he mentioned that a couple

(30:07):
times and the idea that the desktop can be decoupled from the distro and that's
the way they're building it even for pop os was a really interesting concept
and i think has a lot of really interesting benefits so.
I'll give it a go and report back in the future after I've had some time with Cosmic.
And before we even got out of the parking lot at System 76, our good buddy,

(30:30):
Editor Drew, showed up for a quick reunite while we were in town.
And, well, I think we'll get into what happened afterwards later.
Look who it is, boys! Hey, is that Drew? It's that guy who makes us knock down like shit. Hey!
Hello! Hello! Good to see you.
It's been like two years, three years, eight years? We saw him for...

(30:53):
No, it's less for you because we were here for Denver like two years.
Oh, right, yeah, for the red hats. We didn't see you much. Still looking handsome as ever.
What do you got there? That's for you, right? Oh, it's a DC to DC charger.
That sounds like one. After you're alternating, you got a whole new project.
Should we open it? That's very exciting. He needs this.

(31:14):
Just to get you to stop bugging him and buy it. It looks great, Brent. Huh? Yeah.
It looks like it's in great shape. Oh, I know how it does. Yeah,
yeah, that's great. Has this thing even been used? No, it looks beautiful.
Yeah, it's half the price of everything else.
Assuming it works, I think it might be okay. Yeah, good. There you go. I'm going blue.
I mean, look how clean it is. Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

(31:38):
Yeah, seriously, that looks like that's never been used. I mean, look at the labels.
The person selling it only had
one other eBay item, which was like a Louis Vuitton super high-end purse.
So I was banging on the back, I didn't know what they were doing. Yeah, no kidding.
Well, what do you think of the van? This is your first time seeing it in person,
right? It is, yeah. What do you think? It's a van.

(32:02):
Can we get more descriptors? A little bit of rust. Yeah.
It's a vibe no i mean you know it's it's it's it's.
An old ram you know it's an old ram he says um you know so just a quick side
again i'm so grateful to the audience for making this trip possible gave us
a chance to reunite with drew which is always really good to just reconnect,

(32:24):
and brent then began to work his magic he gave drew the tour of the van so we
captured editor drew's post van tour impressions to see if they improved so.
Now that you've had the full tour Or what's the refined opinion?
Dude, it's awesome. Really? You get them. Yes. You got them to come around.
I mean, you know, I kind of figured it would be one of those things where,

(32:45):
like, you're looking at it from the outside, and it doesn't look like much.
It looks like a 30-year-old van.
But then you get inside, and it's like, hey, look at this.
This thing's cool. This thing's cool. This thing's cool. Every direction you
look, there's something cool. There's something weird. It's just, yeah, it's awesome.
So you got them. You turned them around, Brent. Good job.
Well, thank you. Yeah, I was a little, I got to say, underwhelmed by his initial

(33:07):
reaction. I was like, this won't do. We got to work harder here.
And sure enough, I got him with the home assistant in the cover there.
He's like, how do you fit that in there? And he's really impressed. So thanks, Drew.
Yes, it was really great to see you, Drew. Wes and I, however, we had to roll.
We still had 22 hours to get it back to the studio, which meant driving through

(33:27):
most of Montana, most of Wyoming, and of course, all of Idaho and Washington.
We really had to put down, like, significant miles.
And when we left, it was a little sad.
Okay, Wes and I are in my car. We are leaving Brent behind with Drew. So I...

(33:48):
We'll be out of Denver probably in the next two hours or so because traffic's
pretty bad. So an hour or so. How long do you think until Brent's out of Denver?
Well, he's about to go to lunch or really dinner at this point with Drew.
Is he going to leave Denver at like 8 p.m. at night? Probably not.
So that's at least tomorrow.
But, you know, we ended up fixing on his brakes instead of fixing on his belts

(34:11):
or his alternator, which he also has a new one.
And, you know. Maybe he gets working on that. Maybe he gets working on that.
I think he doesn't leave till tomorrow. I'm betting, I'm betting Friday.
Okay, Brent's survey says.
Well, yeah, Drew and I had an amazing time together and we might have had sushi
and sake and like lots of chats and stuff.

(34:33):
And then I was like, I may as well just stay overnight. But I didn't really have a plan for that.
So I have to say thank you to System76 for letting me sleep in their parking lot.
Really nice parking lot. I gotta say nice and quiet other than the loudspeaker
that comes on at 5.30 in the morning and says, Hey, you're being recorded on video.
So highly recommended. They were kind enough to not bother me in the morning.

(34:58):
And so I got going in the morning, but, you know, I forgot some of my stuff in Drew's car.
So I had to, you know, see Drew again. And he had a whole beautiful,
like, care package for me of, like, van supplies. things he thought would be
helpful, including a giant bundle of rope.

(35:18):
And it was really sweet. Yeah.
Wow. She was so great. Wow. Well, so we were putting down miles.
Wes and I on the route home totally leaned in to take advantage of tactical wife planning.
She was great because she was watching us on the tracker. And so she was constantly
looking into, okay, there's an Airbnb about an hour out or two hours out from you.

(35:41):
You have these options. And then we would say, yeah, we'll make it this far.
Then she'd book it for us.
And all the details would just be handled for us. And we'd just show up and crash.
Yeah, we got a message with the door code and the Wi-Fi. Incredible.
Yeah, so we were able to move pretty quick because we had to.
We wanted to make it back here in time for John.
It's the final push of the trip. Wes and I are in Washington State,

(36:03):
in eastern Washington State.
We stopped at Wes's absolute favorite restaurant.
Burger King. When the king tells you to get breakfast, you stop, you listen.
So we filled up with gas, ordered some fully loaded croissant-wiches. Our way.
Yeah, always our way, and we're waiting on some,
I assume the syrup's really good, and I wanted to get that.

(36:27):
Oh, Wes is grabbing the French toast sticks. So we have about five hours or so on the road.
I probably have another six or seven after I drop Wes off. I'll have another
couple hours. So six or seven hours total for me.
And then the trip's all done. No idea where Brent's headed right now.
He's going in the opposite direction of home, so we'll figure that out at some point.
But hopefully he's having a good time.

(36:50):
It was a great time. And so Brent's total hours on the trip driving,
you put in a massive 59.44 hours of continuous drive time.
That's like active motion time, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And Wes and I put in a total drive time of 75.4 hours.

(37:12):
Which actually, I turned off the tracker in Seattle. So I continued to drive
for another couple hours after that.
Yeah, that means you ended up driving for probably over eight hours that last day. Sorry.
Yeah, yeah. Really amazing that there was really no incidents or any problems
and that it went so smoothly and that we got to do the meetups.
We just want to do more of it next time.
We want to do more meetups on the route, maybe different routes and things like

(37:34):
that because it was great and everything worked out. We made it back here just in time.
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While we were on the road, Ubuntu 25.10 was released, and we had a chance to

(40:12):
sit down with John Seeger, VP of Engineering at Canonical, and get the inside scoop.
John's back on the program. It's been just since the beginning of the year we
were talking and it's a big week because Ubuntu 25.10 is out.
And John, in your release, you say Ubuntu 25.10 is a statement on the intent

(40:35):
for the next Ubuntu LTS in 2026.
It sounds like a big deal. Welcome back to the program, sir.
Thanks very much for having me. It's good to be back.
So what do you mean when you say it's a statement of intent?
Are we to say, is that to say like what's in this release today is what we should
expect in the LTS? Or what do we mean by that?
I think it's two things, right? So yes, indeed, the things that you see in this

(40:56):
release, some of which are a little more testy, and the plan is to get those
stable and kind of well understood in the hope that we can ship them for the LTS.
But it also marks, I think, hopefully what I think will be a change in Ubuntu
where we try to have slightly more exciting releases going forward.
So we have to dial back that excitement a little bit for the LTS and go a little

(41:17):
bit harder on the kind of reliability and stability that our LTS customers expect.
But my observation when I came into sort of looking after Ubuntu at Canonical
was that the interim releases have kind of stopped being so crazy.
And I'd like to make them crazy again, because I think we're in a position where
we can use our extraordinary user base and, you know,

(41:37):
rather excellent community to push certain things that might actually have an
impact beyond just ubuntu right like it's not just about ubuntu it's about uh
trying to advance linux in general whether that be on the server or the desktop
or devices or whatever that might be.
So how does that manifest then because one of the things that i know you've
been focusing on is sort of a faster release cadence i think monthly snapshots

(42:01):
do you view it as you put those contributions into ubuntu and hope that the
wider linux community takes them upstream,
or is it is it more fundamental like the tooling you're choosing and you're
hoping to have an impact there like can you expand on what you mean by that.
Yeah, so the two are somewhat different. The monthly releasing is based on some

(42:22):
wisdom that I have picked up over the years working with software teams,
which is, if releasing is hard, you should do it more. And releasing was hard.
Releasing Ubuntu was something we only did every six months.
It was a relatively dated process.
And I wanted to modernize that process. And
only getting a chance to think about that process every
six months is not necessarily very conducive to us

(42:44):
making it any better so the monthly releases was really
a tool for the release management team that may not have felt like
that for them the first time it was a tool for them to understand their own
process better and improve their understanding and it really shows so this time
we have a release sprint when we release them to we we get together a few of
us in our london office and this time we were all done like hours early just

(43:05):
waiting to release the press release at the time we said we would release and
that has basically never happened as far as i can tell,
the tooling side of things is more where i want to push so this is things like
the rust core utils and the rust sudo implementation and potentially some of
the work we're doing around tpm full disk encryption and a few other initiatives like that.
I see so i would

(43:27):
not i don't i don't really know but to me it would seem like what
you're trying to do is push on processes that were designed to improve stability
and reliability of the release so have you gotten pushback saying john you're
changing things that we put in place on purpose like we have lessons learned
and that's why we do it this way and you want to change it so we can release

(43:47):
faster has that been a problem.
Um a little but i would i would temper that with i am asking questions and pushing
but not not being reckless like i uh i've been asked i've been accused of trying
to turn ubuntu into various these other things, like maybe Nixos,
you'll have heard me waxing lyrical about that before.
And that's not the purpose. The purpose is to try and understand.

(44:09):
How we could evolve Ubuntu to give ourselves and our customers,
be those, you know, tinkerers at home or our paid customers,
the assurance they need that Ubuntu is the stable platform, the reliable platform,
the resilient platform they want, but also delivers on the mission that Ubuntu
was started with, right, which is all about delivering the very best of open
source to a really wide audience.

(44:30):
So back in the day, I wasn't around in the Linux soon then, but when Ubuntu
first kind of forked off from Debian or became a downstream of Debian,
the whole point was to provide an area where we could ship newer,
more exciting software that perhaps was more complicated in Debian because of
licensing or policy or process.

(44:50):
And I think that's fine. I think the two should exist.
I don't think Debian should do what we do. And I don't think we should do what
Debian does in the same way. I don't think we should do what Arch or Next do.
But that doesn't mean that the processes that we have used for the last 20 years are unchangeable.
A lot has changed in software engineering in 20 years, and I would like our
processes to reflect that where possible.

(45:12):
So it's mostly about more automated testing, more automation in the release
process, which should, if we do it well,
enable us to have more trust in that release process, not less,
I think, and spend less time on the mechanics of releasing and more time on
polishing what it is that we're releasing.
The release process should not be the exciting part about an Ubuntu release.

(45:32):
The features that we ship and the tools that we ship should be the exciting piece.
Amen to that.
Well put. Okay, so kind of along the same lines of herding cats a little bit.
I feel like there's more communication along the development process,
in part from you, but others on the team were more on the form, blogging.
Has that been, I don't know if mandate's the right word, has there been encouragement there?
What's that communication like to people that are busy working on Ubuntu and

(45:55):
focused on actually doing the development or doing the QA?
How do you convince them we need you to be more public about what you're working
on? And How's that gone over?
Yeah. So I'll be honest, it kind of was a mandate to start with.
I think what happened is Canonical, as it grew and became more grown up as a
company, we adopted things like Google Workplace and Mattermost.

(46:15):
And a lot of the communication that would previously have been public in IRC
and on forums kind of naturally ended up in Mattermost and on Google Docs.
That's where we were all hanging out as Canonical employees, right?
And so I think lots of the process, lots of the discussion around Ubuntu suddenly
became quite opaque. And one of my hopes was that I could change that a little bit.
And so I did actually essentially mandate that every team that I look after,

(46:40):
so that's the Ubuntu Desktop Server Foundations and more recently the DebCrafters team.
I mandated essentially there should be at least a post every week from one of us.
And to start with, I just did like a round robin. So I said,
I'll go this week. You know, Foundation's the following week,
Server the next week, DevCraft is the next week, and we'll just go on a rotation.
And I think that was quite tough for the team. And I'm really proud of how they rose to that.

(47:02):
But what's been interesting is that other people on those teams have seen the
engagement that those posts were getting and the interest that it drives to
the project and started following suit without me asking, right?
And now I think it is quite clear that we have a group of developers in Ubuntu
Engineering who want to talk about what they're doing because they find it interesting
and they like it when people ask them questions about it and give discussion

(47:23):
and thoughts for improvement and things like that. So it started out as a mandate.
I do put my hand up. There is still a bit of a mandate.
I do expect there to be something every week from Ubuntu Engineering,
but there's much more than that happening, which I'm really pleased to see.
Well, it's great to see from the outside. It feels like life.
Yeah, I mean, it's good for us, just, you know, for our business.
But it feels good for the community too, right? There's more to pay attention

(47:44):
to, more to keep Ubuntu fresh in your mind.
Yeah. All right, so let's talk about 2510. We've got a new GNOME 49 in there,
right? So that means we're going to get a lot of nice stuff like HDR.
What should we talk about with 2510? What's the big thing on your mind?
The big controversial thing, perhaps controversial, I don't know,
is the Rust utilities, right?
So we replaced GNU Core Utils with the UUtils implementation and we replaced Sulu with Sulu RS.

(48:09):
And they to varying degrees represent the most risk, I suppose,
but I feel comfortable about it, particularly Sulu RS, which is a much tighter
in scope and therefore it's easier for us to kind of reason about the impact it's likely to have.
But the relationship that we've got with the UU Tools Project and the Trifecta
Tech Foundation has been phenomenal.

(48:29):
We've been speaking with them pretty much weekly, if not more regularly throughout
the entire cycle. They've been super responsive to bugs and feedback.
And so really I see 2510 as a bit of a proving ground.
There are still a handful of utilities that we have diverted back to the GNU
implementations where we see that there are issues still.
Because at the end of the day, as much as I would love to push this, I don't,

(48:49):
I'm not going to do it irresponsibly and just push broken stuff to people's machines, right?
So the idea is that we would iron out all of those issues throughout this cycle,
and for 2604, be as close to a full replacement as we possibly can.
What do you consider to be a major issue with the REST tooling right now?
So we have an issue that I think was reported on Pheronics, where there is a
slight discrepancy between how the MD5 checksum tool behaves in certain cases,

(49:11):
which impacts MakeSelf archives, which is used as part of the Pheronics test suite.
There was an issue with directory traversal so
some of the code for the tools that have the ability
to recurse through directories maybe that is um trying to
be an example anything like ls or cp or move or anything like that the
directory traversal code uh was written quite naively and could could be left

(49:33):
vulnerable so we kind of waited for that to be fixed before we moved across
there's been a handful of issues some of them really tiny some of them less
tiny there was one that bit us where the date command output the date in a slightly
wrong format and broke a huge number of the package builds in the archive.
That's a classic programming thing, right? I mean, who wants to work with dates?

(49:53):
There is a link. I wrote a blog post last week saying kind of a retrospective
about this. And there's a link which shows the list of all the utilities that we've diverted back.
And the bug tracker is really active. And the maintainer is in there helping
us out, along with what appears to be a really nice, vibrant,
active community around that project.
You mentioned your relationship with Upstream. And when you were here last time, I think you're,

(50:13):
pretty hopeful about how this could be good, not only for pushing Ubuntu and
the Linux desktop forward, but also for these upstream projects. How has that been going?
Yeah, I mean, from my opinion, it's great. So the way this sort of unfolded
is I had the idea that I would like to do it.
I reached out to Sylvester, who's the kind of project leader for utils and said
that I was interested in doing this.
And did he think the project was ready? And would he need some funding to help

(50:37):
out, which we agreed and kind of move forward.
And similarly for sudo right i reached out to the folks there and
said i'm interested in doing this what do you think both responded with
huge enthusiasm we did a bit of back and forth on some
feature work that we would need doing or some some targeted effort on
bugs and yeah i think they're certainly
getting increased interest we don't
know exactly how many ubuntu users there are because we

(51:01):
have very limited telemetry anyway and anyone who has kind of behind a corporate
firewall or opts out of it we don't get it so we don't know exactly how many
there are but it's there's definitely more than 10 million desktop users alone
i shudder to think how many server users there are so you've got to imagine
a pretty enormous increase in their daily users as a result of this and.
I mean i think it's showing right like one way to view this is maybe okay it's

(51:23):
not fully ready if we're still finding these issues but another is okay the
massive scale that ubuntu brings means you actually finally do find a lot of
these edge cases and can really iron out your software to make it you know robust.
And hopefully they then have some funding like if
they can't fix the issue themselves they have some funding to pay
other developers to help them out right like pay bounties a lot
of the issues have been performance issues so that i found an issue with word

(51:45):
count which made it 10 slower than the gnu
implementation i found an issue someone found that interesting two days later
it was 11 faster than the gnu one right like so there definitely are going to
be places where there are rough edges we we won't we certainly haven't exhausted
every code path right but actually overall i'm surprised at how surface level

(52:05):
much of the problems we found have been yeah.
That's my takeaway,
Before we move completely off of Rust, one last question is,
it seems like some people that are building on Rust find themselves in this
contentious spot where it's a hot topic online.
People love debating sort of like these hot button issues in the Linux community,
and Rust has become one of them.

(52:26):
And it seems like, oh, you want to push this forward at the same time,
not really engage in that. How do you walk that? Is that a challenge?
You know, is it a brand risk association at all? Those types of things.
I have tried to steer clear of those sorts of conversations,
not to not address it here.
So one of the biggest criticisms that we got for this, or I got for this,

(52:46):
was the change in license of the core utils package.
There were lots of people that
were very concerned that the Rust implementation is not GPL, it's MIT.
The opinion I've come to is that, as far as I can tell, the values of the utils
project are very well aligned with that of Ubuntu.
And so in reality, anybody who installs Ubuntu
on a machine is entering a sort of trust relationship with canonical right

(53:08):
like every time you run app we root on your machine that's how apt works you
kind of have to trust us and so i think
my view is that it's not
like we wrote the core utils code in the first place we were shipping canoes core
utils their values aligned with ours the code was you
know provided something we needed and now we're shipping a different
implementation and if something were to change and i felt like or we felt like

(53:30):
the utils project was not representative of the values of ubuntu or was not
servicing our community well either we'd ship the canoe one again or we'd ship
something else do you know i mean like we're a we're a distribution we're curating
what we think is the best for our users and i think particularly in the case of core utils,
i don't see it as a huge money maker for anyone in a sense like i think for
things like elastic search is one of these famous cases where the licensing

(53:53):
put them in a complicated position commercially and they've changed their licensing
terms and that's that's gone how that's gone.
I don't see as much of a risk with core utils personally like canonical is certainly
not making a move to try and monetize core utils.
We're just shipping something that we think is going to be a bit faster and
it's safer in the long term, right? And a bit easier for us to maintain in the
long term. And that's really all there is to it.

(54:13):
I've heard you talk about building with a 20-year mindset.
And that's where this plays in, right? It's maintaining software that enterprises
run for just a bonkers long amount of time.
Yeah, I mean, we do 12 years extended support at the moment.
There's talk of possibly extending that.
And in reality, I want us to be maintaining code that's as easy for us to build,
test, find contributors to as we possibly can. Obviously, we want to do that.

(54:37):
We want to make that task as easy as possible, not only so we can get the fixes
out sooner, but the easier each piece of software is for us to maintain,
the more pieces of software we can maintain at the end of the day.
Okay, I want to ask you one other thing that sounds pretty neat.
I believe this is the release where initRAMFS tools has been replaced.
Yes, on the desktop. So in 2510, we're using Draycut. I don't know how to pronounce

(55:00):
that. I think it's Draycut.
So we're using that on 2510 for desktop.
Work is underway to do that for the server, but there were a few use cases where
we hadn't quite ironed things out. So we haven't rolled it out to server just yet.
Work is ongoing. My hope is that we would do that for 2604 but again not if
we can't be very sure the difficulty there is in,
cases where people need to load kind of weird drivers early on in server boot

(55:23):
perhaps for like a fancy networking card or whatever it might be we just haven't
quite got there yet but yes on if you install questing from for your desktop
you'll be using trade cut not the nitro mfs tools that.
Seems exciting yeah i'm curious uh just um firstly what was the motivation you know to make the switch.
And then secondly, I believe this is just an Ubuntu layer switch.

(55:43):
This isn't something Debian was also doing, right?
Yeah. So the motivation there is, I think, stability of kind of boot.
I mean, it's a few less bash scripts in the boot path. It also enables us to
use the system DNIT scripts, which theoretically gives us a slight performance advantage.
And the regeneration of the kernel image at kind of apt, if you apt upgrade and you get a new kernel,

(56:04):
the regeneration of the kernel image should be slightly faster but broadly it
was seen as a way of getting more bash out of the boot essentially um so just
a slightly more robust way to boot a system yeah.
And less bash to maintain hopefully.
So the next question i have for you and i imagine this probably really won't
be much of a story a couple of days after release but uh what's going on around

(56:25):
release day with flat packs and 2510 are there problems there right now are those being resolved.
Yeah indeed there was a problem there so you're aware that we use snap
packaging mostly on ubuntu and the security confinement
for snap packages is provided by app armor and but app
armor doesn't only work for snaps right so app armor is a
generic Linux security module in lieu of se linux
or anything else and part of an effort that's been going on

(56:47):
in canonical for the last kind of year or so is an
effort to just ship way more app armor profiles for everything in the archive
so that that you know increasingly as you install things from the archive they
can only access the things on your system they're supposed to access right so
if you ship i don't know uh pdf reader should that thing be able to automatically

(57:07):
get access to your camera,
probably not right like so that's a maybe a contrived
example but the idea is we will ship more and more app armor profiles to
make sure that every piece of software you get from the ubuntu archive can
only read file system paths and devices that it should be
able to read and in this case i believe the root
cause of the issue was we shipped an app armor profile for i want to say fuse

(57:29):
and we got something wrong and essentially that stopped flatpak from functioning
correctly there is a fix underway if it's not already complete it was almost
finished on friday and so that will get kind of backported backend or SIU'd
back into crusting as soon as it's ready.
We have been really impressed with the fact that you stuck to the plan of shipping
really recent kernels, hot kernels, the fresh stuff.

(57:52):
We love that. And I mean, 6.17.
Right in 25.10 as it's released. That's great.
Yeah. We have a policy with both GNOME and kernel. The policy is basically just ship it, right?
Like even if it's in RC, there's a motivation behind this.
So our kernel team is big it's one of the biggest engineering teams at canonical and
in the desktop it's important right people want things like hdr support they
want better accessibility we're a little bit beholden to

(58:15):
other people's release cadence except that our releases are
literally named after a month we release it and so we we can't really
delay them and so the deal
that we have done with our kernel team and the agreement we
have in the desktop team is basically we will always ship the latest
gnome or the latest kernel even if it's in release
candidate when we release and then as soon as the thing is out we will make

(58:35):
sure that the fully released version is in and the reason is in
reality we have to maintain the thing for 12 years anyway it may as well be
the latest most modern thing we possibly can and there's nothing to say just
because it's an rc there's going to be a bad kernel like in the past we've picked
kernels that have been stable and they've still been horrifying to maintain
for whatever reason rather we picked a bad kernel to

(58:57):
choose and so the the view is basically well we may as well just ship the very
latest we can It's most likely to have the most fixes, the most hardware support,
the most features, and we're going to have to maintain it either way. So why not?
Yeah, it just makes so much sense to me. Okay, I want to shift gears and ask
you if there's anything you're kind of taking as observations or lessons from

(59:21):
the relative popularity that a new meta distro or distribution called Oma Archie
has gotten in the last six months.
My rough you know napkin math puts them around 30 to 40 000 users so you know let's put it.
In perspective.
For the ubuntu desktop but i'm curious if you're noticing anything there trends
of the types of users or what seems to be appealing to people.

(59:42):
I think what's interesting about that is
precisely what you're saying is perhaps because
of the the people who make it and their background it is capturing a certain
kind of audience right there certainly i'm sure ruby developers rails developers
but there's a whole bunch of people who have been using Macs for a certain kind
of development who are now trying out Linux because people in their circles

(01:00:05):
are trying out Linux and finding it,
And I would honestly love to make Ubuntu a place where those people could have
a great life. I think the mythical new user story is important.
I care about new users. I care about inexperienced people using computers.
But I actually think for Ubuntu, I do believe that for the desktop,
a huge part of our market has to be developers, right?
It has to be people who are either developing professionally.

(01:00:27):
So we see huge growth in our WSL numbers, like monumental growth in WSL,
the number of people who are using Ubuntu on Windows to do their development
work. or maybe it's just people messing around with the SP home or whatever
it is, right, tinkering at home.
And so we actually have a whole toolchains team, which has grown a lot in the
last year, focused on trying to make the development experience on Ubuntu as

(01:00:49):
good as we possibly can, whether you're a Rust developer, a Java developer.
And I think Omachi and others are kind of proving the point that even if you've
been a Mac user for 10 years, at this point, there's probably enough maturity
on Linux for those people to have a great experience developing on Linux too.
Yeah, it seems to me one of the things that's appealing, although it's not something
that hasn't been tried before, is an opinionated, ready-to-go setup that makes

(01:01:14):
starting for developers easy.
That's one of the things I see on social media a lot is, oh,
I was able to just get going.
And we've seen Ubuntu take cracks at this. We've seen a lot of distributions
take one or two commands to set up an entire development environment.
So that's not necessarily a new idea, but yet it's resonating this time.
Do you think it's a desktop environment aspect as well, or do you think it's

(01:01:36):
just a matter of Windows 10 is going away, Windows 11 isn't satisfying people,
or the requirements are too high, and the Mac desktop seems to be ignoring developers?
Do you think it's just the proprietary platforms are blowing it right now,
or is there something that Omar Archie has nailed in the presentation that maybe
the other distributions have missed, even though they've taken a stab at an
opinionated, out-of-the-box setup?

(01:01:57):
I think it's both. My experience with macOS is it maybe hasn't got the attention
it used to get from Apple.
I was a macOS user for years, and I remember very proudly telling people that
it was the best computer I'd ever had, and I would be very surprised if someone
convinced me otherwise.
And my feeling of that over time, this was many years ago now,

(01:02:17):
but was that it started to go a bit stale.
And I think we see that a lot with the focus on iOS and iPadOS.
I don't think there's the same level of investment there, personally.
I also think what's interesting about Omachi to me is that they chose something
like Hyperland, they chose Arch, and I wonder how many developers are experienced
technical people who have always been curious about Arch but have heard how hard it is to install.

(01:02:39):
They're curious about Hyperland because they see these amazing screenshots on the internet.
And this is just a really, really nice way to get going, right?
Even just in a VM, like you install it, oh wow, that was really easy,
I can now play with it right away.
So it's just made a whole collection of,
quite niche ultimately technologies really accessible and they are interesting
right they're exciting things to play with so i think it's a combination of factors.

(01:03:00):
I wonder if it's not the trend but an
indication of a trend that we're going to see like
this could be the leading edge ultimately i
think if you're going to maintain an arch box it's probably
good that you understand how that arch box is
set up long term for sure i wonder if this
isn't a leading edge and if you aren't

(01:03:21):
getting that puck skating if you'll excuse this really horrible metaphor if
you aren't beginning to get that puck skating for the ubuntu desktop where this
trend might be going we may be just seeing the very beginning of this and is
this kind of idea been in the back of your head as you've been pushing to make
the interim releases more interesting and engage more with the community is
that sort of the strategy here yeah.
What i would like is that for people on ubuntu or people who are on Linux for

(01:03:46):
work, and it happens to be Ubuntu, for example, that when they hear about something
new or exciting or useful, it is available to them in an up-to-date and well-maintained form.
Now, some of those are going to be snaps, sorry. You know, like the people who,
there's lots of people have opinions about those and that's fine.
But snaps give us this superpower, basically, to ship software to all manner

(01:04:09):
of different Ubuntu releases over a really long period of time and keep backporting
features to those releases, right?
So we have some work upcoming on kind of like portable developer environments
that will come out next year.
But also our tool chain teams are working on things like they have these things
called DevPacks. There's a DevPack for Spring.
So if you're a Spring boot developer, you can get like the latest Java development

(01:04:30):
kits and the Graal VM compiler and all these like shiny things that Java developers
would want by installing a single snap.
And the environment is completely set up for you to just get on with your work and work in Spring.
And we're doing the same for Go. We're doing the same for Rust,
for .NET. And so I would like for,
not just the tool chain to be up to date in the archive, which is kind of necessary
for us to build the software we ship,

(01:04:52):
but also for developers to be able to get all of the LSPs and static analyzers
and formaters that they hear about really, really easily on their Ubuntu machine
without having to like curl to bash, add some GPG keys to your machine.
Like that's an odd trust relationship at the end of the day.
You see a piece of software, add a PPA to your machine, and then you run the

(01:05:12):
maintainer scripts and that thing as root every time you update the package.
Until it's no longer available.
Until it's no longer available and you know
sure you're giving root to canonical when you run apt but
like i say if you you kind of have to trust canonical if you go to
run ubuntu right in a sense um and so it would be in my
view if you're going to have to give that ultimate trust to somebody you want
to limit the number of people you give it to right and so we can publish you

(01:05:35):
know security maintained kind of verified snaps on the store and we can push
things into the archive but there are some kinds of software that it's much
simpler for us to ship to a much higher number of users with something like
Snaps, for example, or as a container image, perhaps.
Yeah, it seems like, I mean, Snaps are kind of, at least for the dev stuff you
were talking about, Snaps are allowing you to bring containerized development
and deployment workflows, but in a, I guess, you know, a different flavor than

(01:05:57):
you see in tools like Docker and Podman.
Right.
John, I could ask you thousands of more questions. We should probably,
we should check in again in a few months.
Yeah, for sure.
Is there anything we didn't touch on that you want to touch on before we wrap up?
There is a really nice step towards a better TPM full disk encryption setup.
So this is essentially where you want to have an encrypted disk,

(01:06:19):
but you don't want to enter your password twice when you boot up.
So it basically allows you to store that disk encryption key in the TPM.
And assuming that the kernel hasn't been tampered with and the command hasn't
been changed and the machine hasn't been messed with, it should unlock the disk automatically.
We've had that as an option, an experimental option in our installer for some
time, and I'm pushing really hard for us to have that not as experimental for 2604.
It's in better shape than it's ever been. There's been a huge amount of work

(01:06:41):
on it, which you can read a bit about on our discourse or in my blog.
But I'd really encourage people to give that a go, particularly on machines
with slightly simpler partitioning setups.
At the moment, it's kind of single root partition kind of thing.
But I'm really proud of the way the team have come together.
That is an effort across Snapd and kernel and desktop. It's a huge effort to
bring that across the line, and the more feedback we can get on it, the better.

(01:07:05):
So I think that's a really interesting piece of work that is a genuine win, right?
You get better security and better usability, like we don't often get to have,
both of those things at the same time.
Yeah, I'm curious, is that kind of what was driving it as an effort for just
the general experience? Or is this something that you've also seen maybe asks
from, you know, people doing enterprise desktop deployments, that kind of thing?

(01:07:25):
Yeah, I mean, firstly, as a user of it myself, I would like this.
And secondly, for sure, if you look at things like the macOS FileVault or Windows
BitLocker, like these are features that people have come to expect in operating
systems in an enterprise environment, and we also play in that space.
So I think it's important for us to provide that.
Okay, one last pet question. just because I want to be able to pick your brain on this.

(01:07:46):
What are your thoughts, maybe after the LTS,
I don't know, but down the road, so no time commitments, but what are your thoughts
on integration of a BcacheFS DKMS module or giving BcacheFS access to users
during the install of one of the interim releases sometime in the future?
Is that on your radar at all, John?
I haven't got it planned, but I'm not against it. I've been following the whole

(01:08:09):
BcacheFS story quite closely.
We obviously did some work on zfs a
few years ago which still exists so you can still install zfs on
root and things like zsys which is our tooling around it still exists we are
actually working um so subiquity which is the the kind of installer that sits
beneath the graphical installer for desktop and in fact the actual installer
you interact with on a server can support all kinds of different partitioning

(01:08:33):
schemes it's quite limited at the moment but we're doing some work this cycle,
specifically to enable a couple
of the ubuntu flavors to have a slightly different partitioning layout.
So that would open the door for more complex partitioning schemes,
sort of guided partitioning schemes rather than manual partitioning where people wanted that.
As for BcacheFS itself, I am not against it. It's not planned work right now.

(01:08:54):
I don't see it as super high priority at the moment, but equally,
like we ship our own kernel, right?
So we have always chosen what goes into that kernel and what doesn't,
which drivers we ship, which fast systems we ship, and this would just be another
variable there right i don't think it's a particularly controversial decision for us at least.
Right famously.
For example we ship zfs where lots of distros have shied away from that.

(01:09:16):
And seemingly has worked out great so far and many users
appreciate the fact that you do right so john thank
you so much for spending a little time with us i'd love to do it again maybe
in april if you're available and uh pick your brain again then absolutely well
thank you so much and congrats on the release we'll link to uh your post about
it and as well as some of the community discussions and of course the downloads

(01:09:36):
and any other links you want to send our way, we'll throw in the show notes
and come back real soon, sir.
Linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Go there to support the show and you get
access to the bootleg feed, which is clocking in at one hour and 58 minutes
right now as we record lots of extra content, discussion, news that didn't fit

(01:10:00):
into the topic of the week.
All that stuff is there and it's a great way to support the show directly.
You just put your support on autopilot.
And one of the things that our members made possible, just our community in
general has been really supportive over this last year.
We didn't talk about it on this trip, but once again, the headsets that you
helped us fundraise for LinuxFest Northwest, I think it was,

(01:10:20):
or it was for scale maybe, because we use them at LinuxFest Northwest.
We use them at scale. We've used them at Texas LinuxFest.
Unbelievably how great they are. I mean, right, right. It totally has been fantastic.
Yeah, absolutely. I was able to use one when I went to NixVegas.
Right.
I mean, they're just so much more portable than our previous setup.
Everything we need fits in one backpack.
I think we use them on the van rescue too, Chris. Didn't we use them in the van?

(01:10:41):
Oh, we did. We did. This is an example of how our funds can be allocated to
make the show better, make the trips possible and the gear we use.
And we try to do it very wisely. We've been, you know, the show turned 12 and
we want to be here for another 12 years. So we try to be very careful about how we do this.
And your direct support, either via a boost or from a membership at linuxonplug.com

(01:11:05):
slash membership makes all the difference. And thank you for your support.
Well, while we were on the road, the boost machine was still pumping.
And a lot of you figured we probably needed to get home with some boosts, so we've got a baller.

(01:11:29):
Black Host is our baller this week with 399,998 sets.
All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate that, Black Host.
They write, sending you some digital gas and wishing you a safe trip back home.

(01:11:50):
Thank you for the amazing coverage on Texas Linux Fest. P.S. Drew's note's failing.
Hopefully this one gets accepted. Ah, we'll look into that. We'll definitely look into that.
And thank you for the digital gas. It worked just as expected.
Thank you. We made it. We are back. Thank you, Black Host. I really appreciate that.
Outdoor Geek comes in with 100,000 cents.

(01:12:15):
Not bad. Thank you, Outdoor Geek.
Late Texas Linux fast boost. I wasn't able to get Breeze to send a fountain,
so I ended up using River instead.
I was messing with Breeze, and eventually
it told me I needed to enter an on-chain address to get my sats.
I think my Breeze wallet had gone dormant because I didn't open the app for months.
And yeah, I think that's pretty much the behavior they do. So you don't lose

(01:12:37):
your sats, but you do kind of have to go through a recovery process after your channels get closed.
I see. They close the channels. Yeah. River is great. I really like River.
I think we have a jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river affiliate URL.
By the way, I think it's one of the best ways to stack sats.
In the U.S., it's all they do, and they have a great infrastructure.
And that is a great boost. Thank you, Outdoor Geek. Thanks for going through
and trying it and then sending in your report. Appreciate that.

(01:12:58):
Well, we've got two boosts here from Daja for a total of 86,247 sats.
Hey.
Latex sats to help with the return gas. this
is also a zip code boost if you guys see this in time you're more than welcome
to take a pit stop at our office just off of the interstate i'll be there pretty

(01:13:22):
much all day and we've got free soda so he sent in a geohash 9x23j and a little
matrix connection so thank you oh my.
Gosh thankfully i have my um yeah my well-tested map from our trip which we
brought along of course and this would be a postal code in davis county utah oh.

(01:13:44):
Okay well brent never know.
You'll be on your way back next trip we're keeping our boost dashboard open that.
Is the way to go we should have thought of that i will note that that is an error we will correct.
So thank you daja yeah.
And thank you for the boost daja.
Now the second boost here is actually a row of ducks with a little message,

(01:14:05):
Anyway, I forgot to mention that I was curious if you guys have ever messed
around with getting MeshTastic hooked into Home Assistant.
I've been toying around with getting sensor data passed over MQTT for a mesh
of buildings with no internet to one that does, that will bridge to the outside world.
Super random and probably won't work as nice as I'm hoping, but initial tests seem promising.

(01:14:27):
All right. Keep us posted, I suppose. I've always been curious.
I've not looked at connecting MeshTastic to HA, but very, very interested in doing so.
I'd say top tier interested, if that's such a thing. You know what I mean?
Wes and I were literally talking about it on the drive. We had a lot of time
to talk about things, but that was one of the things we talked about on the drive.

(01:14:49):
GooseGuy comes in with 44,444 sats. Woo!
That's a big old duck. Here's a late boost for your travels to and from Texas LinuxFest.
The Texas tracker is awesome. I'm glad you got to check on my favorite barbecue
spot in Austin. Enjoy the sads.
Hey, we're glad too.
We are very glad we did. And thank you. We appreciate it.

(01:15:09):
You know, the trip, as far as all the accounting, I'm still,
of course, going through everything.
And we'll have to figure all that out because also PayPal is still holding some
of the funds. So very much appreciate that, Goose Guy.
Also note that the Texas Tracker will still be up because I'm not home yet.
So if you want to follow the crazy journey that a Brent takes on his way home, please do.
Probably be for the next, I don't know, At least a week. I have no idea, actually.

(01:15:33):
Where even is home for you at this point?
Yeah, who knows.
Not the one who's in with 20,000 sats. Sorry, I forgot to send this to help with costs for Texas.
Hey, no need to apologize. We just appreciate it.
Still struggling to work out how to properly set up Nix OS? Need to read more?
Any tips would help. Well, one thing, I mean, maybe depend on,

(01:15:54):
you know, are you struggling with the initial install?
Are you struggling just to, like, really get a config you like?
It might depend a bit on exactly where you are in the journey.
But if you would like some inspiration, maybe check out episode 634.
There should be a bunch of links to various user and audience member configs.
There's a lot to be inspired by there.
And if you dig around on the downloads page for NixOS, there is a graphical

(01:16:15):
installer you can grab and they will set you up with a base config.
Always a good place to start from.
Yeah, maybe even in a VM.
Yeah, you're not going to go wrong there, I don't think. Good question.
And do keep us posted. And if you have any specific questions,
please do feel free. Send those in to us.
Well, Kiwi Bitcoin Guide boosted in four, five, six, seven sats.

(01:16:36):
Well, I've been listening and following live from New Zealand.
May the force be with you.
Ah, thank you, Kiwi. Thanks for the New Zealand check-in. That is so cool. Love that.
Jordan Bravo is in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats.
Plus one to do another episode with the RateMyConfig. All right, that's two votes.
Mm, votes are climbing.

(01:16:57):
I don't know if that was a super well-received episode, the config confessions.
Would like more feedback on
that because we enjoyed it and we have a couple of configs in the kitty.
It's a fun thing to do. So let us know. And thank you, Jordan.
We will register your plus one on this matter.
Byte Bitten comes in with 2,000 sets. I like Android to be called Google's Android

(01:17:19):
and the AOSP to be Google's Android source project.
Oh!
Gasp. As it doesn't feel open when everything needs to be registered and it makes devs gasp for air.
Oof.
That's, that's, uh... That's good.
Fire i'm gonna i'm gonna try to remember that that's a good one bite thank you.

(01:17:41):
Ed broughton boosted in 5 000 sets,
i really enjoyed the road trip stories and i'm looking forward to next week's
episode that's this one where i hope to hear about the return trip thanks for
the coverage of the texas linux fest and for the effort the team puts into this show well.
Thank you ed thank you for the boost really appreciate that.

(01:18:04):
Hybrid Sarcasms back with 10,000 sats.
Okay, so Hybrid's got an app pick for us. It's NCSpot. He's got a Flathub linked
here. It's a Spotify Tui.
It has a nice N-Curses interface, and as one who likes to avoid electron apps,

(01:18:24):
if I can find that, it helps.
You know a Tui via Flathub, or I mean, I'm sorry, Flatpak, that's different, and kind Kind of neat.
Thank you, Mr. Sarcasm. This is great.
That's a bonus pick right there. Thank you, Hybrid. Appreciate that. It's NC Spot.
I'm sure you can find it in all kinds of places. It's a cross-platform and cursive Spotify client.

(01:18:47):
I mean, if you're going to use Spotify.
That's the way to do it.
That's probably the way to do it. Although friends don't necessarily let friends
use Spotify. There is that. But if you're going to, that's probably the way to do it.
Thank you, Hybrid. And please, send more boost picks. Appreciate that.
Anonymous boosts in with 5,555 sands.
First time Booster here, finally took the dive and set up Albie Hub.

(01:19:10):
Hey, really?
Nice.
Also, it was fantastic meeting y'all at Texas Linux Fest.
Right on. Nicely done.
I'd also like to give a special shout out to a standout member of the community, TechDev.
While at the conference, I noticed how deliberately he reached out to everyone,
especially those who seemed alone or were looking for a group to join.
TechDev, your inclusive spirit is truly rare and deeply appreciated.

(01:19:34):
I will plus one that one.
I will plus two that one.
Yeah. TechDev, I think, made it a little extra special, and I was really glad
that he could make it to the event.
And I noticed the same. I noticed the same. So I'm glad he got a shout out here
in this boost. And congratulations on getting your own AlbiHub going.
Yeah, thank you for taking the deep dev to do it.
How fun is it, right? I mean, it's a little challenging, right?
But it's such an unlock, too.

(01:19:55):
Well, Autobrain boosted in 3,500 sets. Thanks for the coverage of the Linux
Fest. It was fun watching you guys crisscross the content.
Well, thanks for following along.
Yeah, we do appreciate that. It was fun for us. We used the crap out of that
tracker. Let me tell you, we really did.
Begus Mascus comes in, probably, probably not right, with a Spaceballs boost.

(01:20:17):
One, two, three, four, five sats.
Hey, it's Brian from Boise. We were just talking about Brian.
This is my first real boost.
I was the guy who rolled up at the gas station, slid to your bit chat,
and then crept up on your car in the dark while it was pouring rain.
Thanks for taking a few minutes to chat. I was a bit nervous,
probably because of the whole stalker vibe thing.

(01:20:37):
But it's not every day you get to meet one of your heroes. Oh,
Wes. Oh, Wes is pretty great, I will say.
No, it's all Brent.
Keep up the amazing content. I'll be boosting it regularly. Awesome!
And hopefully my own new Albie build soon. Wow.
Thank you for... I was hoping we would hear from you, Brian.
Yes, it was great to get to meet you. Thank you for putting in the effort,
especially in the pouring rain.
It was a hell of a storm. We did not expect anyone to come out.

(01:21:00):
And we were stopped there at that gas station for a minute. So we must have
wondered what was going on, because we were like looking at the storm routing, trying to figure out.
Debating how far could we make it in this? Where do we sleep?
The traction was low. I mean, there was just so much standing water.
So we didn't want to drive in that all night.
But we were totally happy that Brian stopped by and we had like,
you know, the quick, hey, how you doing moment and thanks for saying hi kind of thing.

(01:21:22):
So we do hope to hear from you more big and keep on boosting in.
Well, Brad at Team Toronto, boosts in with 7,500 sats.
Plus one for more Nix confessions. Okay, that's three.
All right.
We have a smart audience. Yeah, amen to that. And it's great to hear and see
via Git what everyone is doing.

(01:21:43):
Would love to see more around Nix as well. Or even other topics like home assistant,
utilities, scripts, etc.
Leverage the community for more content.
Love it. I would definitely love to see some more community contributions around
their home assistant setups.
I'm sure there's some stellar stuff.
I am in a bad way with my home assistant. Right before I left for the trip,
my Zigbee radio just seems to have gone offline.

(01:22:05):
Oh, no.
And, yeah. And so Home Assistant can't talk to my Zigbee radio.
None of my Zigbee devices are working. And it's just totally busted.
And it was, like, the day I left. And I haven't had a chance to look at it because,
well, we got right back to the studio and did the show. So I haven't even really
dug in yet and looked at the logs.
But, man, is it a sucky thing. Because that kind of thing never happens to me
on this. It's been so solid.

(01:22:26):
And it's the built-in Home Assistant yellow radio, too. Oh.
If anybody has any tips please let me know i am not looking forward to troubleshooting
that one and thank you brad i will take those notes those are good ones appreciate that.
Our last boost here is from magnolia mayhem 3 210 sats yeah.
I think for context uh this is a live boost from uh our live stream earlier

(01:22:50):
in the day during our um interview with john nice.
In our interview there's a quote here accused of making ubuntu more like nix
uh well magnolia mayhem says I fail to see the problem here.
There could be some nice things to learn, right? You got to keep Ubuntu Ubuntu.
I do agree there. People depend on that.
But there's a lot to learn from all the great projects out there.

(01:23:12):
I had so many more questions for John. I mean, so many more questions.
Oh, yeah, same.
So we'll try to get them back on soon. Thank you, everybody who supported the
show with a boost or a membership.
And thank you, everybody who also streamed Sats as you listen. 24 of you did that.
And collectively, you Sat streamers stacked 39,018 Sats for the show.
When you combine that with our boosters, we stacked a really very,

(01:23:34):
very, very great 745,839 sats.
And we are putting that towards the Texas Linux Fest trip. We did have a little
extra travel going to Denver.
And that's from almost 40 unique people out there. Isn't that crazy?
That's great. Thank you, everybody. If you'd like to boost the show,

(01:23:55):
Fountain.fm makes it real easy. That's a podcasting 2.0 client that just hosts all that.
But you could keep your client, set up an Albi Hub, and use the podcast index
or whatever you like. There's a lot of options there.
Check it out at podcastapps.com. Fountain has been getting really,
really good, too. They've been making some fantastic, fantastic improvements.
And thank you to our members, linuxunplugged.com slash membership for putting

(01:24:17):
that support on autopilot. We very much appreciate it.
Now, our pick this week, this is the only the kind of thing that people that
are absolutely exhausted and have been driving across the country would come up with.
This would never make it into the show. Otherwise, I am aghast that we have this in here.
Yeah. What do you what's your problem? It's the performance optimizer observation platform.

(01:24:38):
Yeah. Poop for short. But and I love their tagline. Stop flushing your performance down the drain.
You see what they did there?
I think you'll like this, though. We don't have a sound effect yet, but it's 100% zig.
Really?
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
And it uses Linux's built-in perf event open functionality to compare the performance

(01:25:01):
of multiple commands with a colorful terminal user interface.
That's the part I like. So you're just building on some stuff that's existing
in Linux to give you some really great comparisons in a very readable way.
The name's silly, but the utility is there.
Yeah, and folks might be familiar with Hyperfine, which is sort of a more mature

(01:25:23):
project in this space, which bills itself as a command line benchmarking tool.
So that's kind of where this thing is aimed, is you can, you know,
maybe you've got different versions of something with different tweaks or comparing
programs, doing the same kind of work.
But how much Zig is that one written in?
Well, that one's written in a combination of Rust and Python.
You see?
Yeah, 0% Zig.

(01:25:44):
I asked Zig, that's 0% Zig. Yeah, right. This is 100% Zig.
100% Zig native pick this week.
You're welcome everybody and it is mit licensed so have at it as you will like
or whatnot and we will have poop linked in the show notes like okay there you
go see you could tell we're a little we're a little uh tipsy from the road we
wouldn't have put that in there otherwise it was probably brent's idea gonna

(01:26:05):
just go ahead and blame him on that one you know what i mean just go ahead and play,
all right we will be live back at our regular time of course we'd love it if
you join us over jblive.tv on a Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
Eastern. Links to what we talked about are at linuxunplugged.com slash 636.

(01:26:26):
And there's some good ones this week for Cosmic and, of course, the new Ubuntu release.
Wes, if they are in a super power user podcasting app, we have some great,
I don't know, features for them?
Oh, yeah, we do. Well, we have cloud chapters so they can jump right to the
content they like or listen to the show in whatever order.
What else do we have?
Well, if you want to take an even deeper dive into the show,

(01:26:47):
check out our transcripts.
We got transcripts now.
Yeah, plenty of apps. And some of them even show our speaker diarization so
you can tell which of us said the dumb thing.
I love it. All right. We'll have a big show for you. So join us right back here next week.

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