 Hey everybody, welcome to the Linuxcast. I'm your host, Matt. I'm joined by Martin. How you doing, Martin? Good, thanks, Matt. I have things for you today. We're not talking about that. All right, so we got a little bit of a story. We have now tried to do this podcast at least three times, once in Jitsi, once on Skype. Skype just restarted for no apparent reason and not even restarted, just completely crashed. So if it does it again, I don't even know what's healthy. We will try Jitsi again. And now we're doing our third time. So my whole day has just been utter crap. So Martin, regale us with your tales of what you've done on Linux this week. All I've been doing is playing Cyberpunk 2020 using Google Chrome. So it just streams it through. I paid 50 pounds for the game, but I mean it was on offer. So I've got a controller and a ChromeCrust ultra free, which usually costs about 19 pounds. So it's well worth it, just to save on no downloads and updates, which it's going to have because it's quite buggy at the moment. So it's quite a reasonable experience streaming. It's obviously nice and easy because I could just stream it to my phone or tell it whenever I want. How about yourself, what you've been up to, Matt? Well, I've been trying to get my microphone set up to work pretty much all week to varying success. I've pretty much got it down OK when I'm making a video like a local video, but I have not succeeded when it comes to any type of conference call. You know, Skype, Jitsie, I tried Zoom with somebody else. It's just not working. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. I'm probably going to end up either switching back to my other microphone, which is a USB mic. And if I have to do that, I'm going to be very disappointed. But what am I going to do? I mean, this is what I use a microphone for, and it won't do it. It's just it's not good. I've also been playing around with Xmonad, which is a different window manager. DT likes that quite a lot. So I've been trying to play around with it mostly and successfully, because that's just the way my life has been going lately. It's just one thing after another. Like I can't get for the longest time, I couldn't get a bar or anything. So it's just it's been a painful week in Linux for the most part. So yes, that's my that's my tales of woe. So that's just up into the contact information. So in other words, if I start a rant on anything, just know that that's the reason why. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so on Twitter. I'm at MTWB Martin's Martin Twitter to you. You can find these links in the show description or in the description on YouTube. You can also follow the show itself at the Linux Cast on Twitter. You can follow us and subscribe to all of our feeds and such at thelinuxcast.org. That just transfers you to our anchor page because I'm much too lazy to have an actual website. Maybe someday you can contact us via email at thelinuxcast at gmail.com and like us on Facebook at facebook.com slash the next cast. And also ensure you're subscribed to us on YouTube where you'll find that I do almost daily episodes, daily videos on mostly nonsense. But they're fun to watch. If you can get past the fact that I don't know actually anything about Linux apparently. It's funny. I've been using Linux for three and a half, almost four years now full time. And just when I think I'm pretty good at this Linux thing, something like this audio stuff for the X-monet stuff I've been going through or any number of things this week is just, oh, I'm still a complete noob. Oh, that's something to surprise you definitely. I must admit, I'll just stick to USB on my mic. Yeah, I probably will end up doing that too. But whatever. That'll just make me more angry. So jumping into the news of the week, we both kind of chose the same kind of thing because one's kind of a result of the other. So I'm going to go first. Yeah. This past week, Red Hat announced that they were basically abandoning straight up CentOS Linux and to focus on the rolling release version of CentOS, CentOS Steam. Now, for normal Linux users, this is not a big, huge deal. No. Because if you're just a regular Linux user, chances are rolling release isn't that big a deal or you just used Ubuntu. But CentOS is like the second biggest Linux distribution in the enterprise. And that's a big deal there because they don't like to do upgrades in the enterprise. So this has pissed a lot of people off this week. Some of the groups I'm on on Facebook have just been going crazy on it. There's a couple Discord servers and a couple IRC chats that I've been following. They're just not really happy. Apparently Red Hat, which is not owned by IBM now, has done this because they're, I mean, they say they want to do it because being on the bleeding edge of updates or whatever is appropriate for cloud computing. But really, I think what most people think that this is really about is the money because CentOS is not a supported distro. You can't buy support for it. But it's based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is completely paid support. So what they, I think, what most people think is that they have abandoned the stable version of CentOS so that these corporations move from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is probably not what's going to happen because they'll either go to Ubuntu or they'll move to the things that Martin's going to talk about. So Martin, why don't you tell us about your link because it's directly related to this? Yeah, of course. I mean, it's just a shame, especially for people that set up their own web servers recently. And they've just realized that they haven't got much life left in it. Yeah, so out of the fire comes a phoenix, so to speak. So Gregory M. Kurtzer, who was one of the creators of CentOS, said, well, it doesn't seem to have the shift in direction, which was announced by Red Hat. So Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug for bug compatible with Red Hat Linux, now that so CentOS has shifted direction. CentOS being upstream to Red Hat Enterprise, many will be forced to, like you said, switch to SUS, Ubuntu, or even Enterprise if they don't like it. So I mean, that's good. I mean, obviously people are going to be forked, but this is good news ahead for people who are totally just worried or just don't want to pay for the support. Again, I mean, you can use Ubuntu, which I think it's relatively, I'd like to think it's even serve as friendly as it is for the desktop environment. So that's good news. But yeah, I've saw a lot of the grief and comments at people. It's mainly, let's face it, it's cash grab, isn't it? Which is why you look at it. Well, I mean, we kind of had to know that this was coming because of when IBM bought Red Hat, IBM's going to do whatever they can to make our, you know, roll up, you know, as big a moneymaker as possible. Right? So I mean, there were always going to, there was always worries that CentOS was just going to be completely abandoned or shoved off onto the community or whatever. So I don't think it's all that surprise. I don't think it's personally surprising, but I can understand why it makes so many people, you know, angry about it because I mean it just, especially, so like they just came out with CentOS 8, I think, and they originally promised updates to that till like 2029. Yeah, yeah. And they've reneged on that and it's only going to be till like January or something. Yeah, 31st to December 21. Oh, so next year. But still, that's a big difference between that and 2029. Yeah. And especially when you're like, I mean, chances are they would have just upgrade. I mean, a lot of businesses wouldn't have upgraded it to it yet anyways, but some of them have. And the fact that now they've went through this upgrade process, you know, which is, you know, a big deal. Yeah. And they're only going to get support until, you know, the end of next year is just, I mean, it would make me angry too if, you know, I wasn't on a rolling release already and dealt with servers all the time. So. Yeah, I think as well, the anger, it's just literally come out the blue. By the way, we're doing this, this support lending, 21 instead of 29. I mean, there's a lot of people, businesses and your normal user, it's put a lot of money into this to get it up and running. And suddenly they just, so I can understand the anger. I mean, like you say, doesn't affect the normal desktop user unless they have got servers and things like that in the house. But yeah, I think it's minded that the time, I mean, it was just, there you go, right? Cut off now. I like Merry Christmas, right? And then my son, they just released the news on Christmas Day to hopefully. Right. Well, I mean, at least they did it this year because I mean, it's 2020. So I mean, they should have expected it to go wrong because it's, you know, 2020. Well, yeah. Have you ever used Sentos on like a desktop? Cause I've never used it. No, no, it's the middle heavens. I've used Red Hat, but that's been, man. Probably close to 20 years ago when I was dabbled in Linux right out of high school. Like I got like one of those books, she'd find at Barnes and Noble or whatever that, you know, Red Hat Linux like version 7.6 or something. I still have the book. It's over on my dresser. It's hilarious. Anyways, so that's interesting. All right. So that's the news. Let's move into the main topic for the week, which is Martin. Martin, why don't you tell us what we're talking about? Yep. So it's System76 and Linux hardware vendors. Martin, you still there? Yep. Sorry. That's okay. I just assumed that Skyped quit again. So I mean. No, I had a message on WhatsApp and I'm using the same things. I think it just muted me. So it's sorry. System76 and Linux hardware vendors. I think you're muted again. Am I back? I've transferred my bad whatever over to you. Yeah. You're horrible. Am I back now, Matt? Sorry. You are back, yes. Oh, bloody heck. Here we go. You've sent me all your bad news virus. Right. System76 and Linux hardware vendors. It seems to mute you right after you say that sentence. So don't say that sentence again, because you're still muted. It's weird. It does not. Let me see if it works for me. System76 and Linux hardware vendors. Am I muted now? No, you're fine. That's really weird. You say that sentence and then all of a sudden it just goes completely blank. So we're going to talk about System76 and Linux hardware vendors. Expensive laptops, expensive computers, but really cool, awesome computers. So are you going to buy one of these, Martin? I wish, but no. I would like one. They're beautiful pieces of kit, but yeah, unfortunately, I'm just not. I just could not warrant it. I really could not warrant the hefty price tag. I mean, they're all gorgeous, lovely things, but let's face it, you could get a lot more bang for your book going to maybe Dell, perhaps, or also Tixedo, tixedocomputers.com. They seem to have some reasonable price ones. I mean, obviously, you haven't got the top spec of System76 and obviously the, but yeah, I'm looking at one called a, sorry, I can't even see. Oh, Tixedo book XP 14, Generation 12. But yeah, I mean, would you buy a System76 if you had 10 grand spare? No, mostly because then I would just build my own computer, which I've done. It just would make more sense to me, but I guess if you didn't wanna build your own computer, you could spend that kind of money. When I was looking around for a new computer, I looked at the System76 stuff because they do have some stuff around $1,000, 1,200 bucks, but it's always, it's all, it's pretty low end and you pay a pretty hefty price on top of like the actual parts for just having them put it together or whatever their fees are. And I mean, that kind of, I mean, it really kind of brings up a good point is that there seems to be a really big gap in the middle of the market, you know, the price market. You know, yeah, in the low end, you have like the Pinebook Pro or whatever and that's like, it's like 200 bucks. And then you have nothing for ages and ages until you get to like $900 and $1,000 and then $10,000. There's not a really good option at things like $500 or, you know, $600. Those are the kind of, there's a reason why Windows laptops rule everything is because you can go to Best Buy or whatever and buy, you know, a $600 laptop and it'll last you for, you know, six or seven years, you know? Yeah. So I mean, I think that's the biggest problem with System76 is just that they're too expensive. I also understand, I mean, it's really hard to be a small business like that because you don't have the margins of like an Apple or an HP or something. So you kind of have to charge those things but that also kind of, you know, turns so many people away because most people, the vast majority of people don't spend $1,000 on their computer. They've spent $600 or $300 or something, you know? Yeah, like you say, if you've got like a grand or so to spare, I mean, and you've got the know how you just start upgrading it yourself bit by bit. I mean, as soft as it sounds, I've had this computer since what? 1993, it's obviously not the same computer but I've just changed this, changed the power supply, motherboard, things like this on my main rig. But I can do that and like, you know, from doing your own PC, when you know something's wrong, it's, oh, well this wasn't sitting right or I've got this there. But yeah, I mean, it turns a laptop. I mean, I've gone to the Dell.com. You've got the option to sort it by operating systems, Linux for the laptops unless I've clicked something wrong and it's just not showing me anything. Everything's just Windows 10. But yeah, I mean, lovely computers, things like that. One thing to mention is, did you hear about that? That's the reason it was an independent supplier. Oh, the one in California that shut down? Yeah, that was a right shame. I heard some really good news about it there, but yeah, just store closing, got a thing on the site or warranties avoid. I mean, the question there is like, was that because of, you know, nobody's ever heard of them or more because, you know, it's 2020 and the pandemic, you know, it's shutting down a lot of businesses. Everyone's having a hard time, but at the end of the day, and things like these happen, people concentrate on the comforts. They're gonna get a decent telly and they'll get themselves a decent laptop. So did that they're gonna carry on with. But yeah, I mean, I obviously hope, they're quite upfront about it. So they've put it all down to COVID and slow down in the market. I'm guessing it's like getting parts over and things like that. So yeah, it's a shame for those, but yeah, System76, the Galaga Pro is another lovely laptop, which I can't afford. I should just recall this same stuff we can't afford or would not pay. But like you say, yeah, Pinebook Pro, I'd recommend that. All right, so the laptops from System76 really bother me. Because, well, they don't like design or build their own laptops yet. I mean, they're planning on it, but they're not there yet. These are all just like, there's like a company in China that does like, they don't sell directly to consumers. They sell to these, you know, computer makers. Right, and that's what these are. So you could get this exact same computer with the Windows on it, with a different brand name on it. And if I'm not gonna get something that's unique and built for, you know, like Linux or whatever, these prices just kind of a little too expensive. It's just, I mean, I know we keep coming back to the same argument, like this is too expensive, this is too expensive or just, I mean. To be fair, with the prices and the laptops, I literally did think there was obviously hand assembled, but not like on a batch or things like that. I thought there was literally in the System76 factory and worked on by the team there, not just essentially rebadged as a different chassis. Yeah, their desktop ones are like that. They've designed those themselves. And I know that they're working on a laptop that they've designed, but it's not out yet. These are all just like, you know, like you said, rebadged laptops. And that's, I mean, that's okay, but they're cheapest laptops, $949. And it's not like you, and that's okay. I mean, if you went to like a window, if you went to your local electronics store and bought a windows with these specs on it, maybe you'd pay around the same thing, but you'd also get the backing and support of a huge, huge company. You probably have a longer warranty that you don't have to pay for. And you'd probably be able to take it like into the store or something and have them do service on it, whereas like with anything you buy from 67 systems, 76, I'm sure they have great support, but you'd have to ship that out, you know? And who knows if you're even shipping it to them, you might ship it to that, you know, company in China or wherever. So it'd be the price of it. It just adds to the weight in time, doesn't it? Yeah. They're just gonna do them in batches. They're not just gonna order 10, they're gonna order 50. Some people went crazy on it. They wouldn't meet demand. I mean, ideally as time goes on and more Linux adopters, there's then, like you say, building them in their own factory and getting a bit more mass production, even though these are mass produced, but just in batches. Have you got a laptop yourself? Sorry, I'll just use your... I have a couple. I have a old Dell 7500 or something inspired on. I use that on my standing desk. That never moves. And then the one that I do when I go about and about is like a really old IBM ThinkPad T400 or something. I got it on eBay for like 80 bucks. So that's the one I use. It's just running an Arch installed. I usually use it to test distros. Most of the time, the keyboard's crap and I need to replace the keyboard. But yeah, I have a laptop. Like my mom and dad, they have... I can't get them to switch to Linux. I've tried. But they have their big Dell fans. So we always buy the... When we do a new computer in the house for them, they always get a Dell. Oh man, I wish... We should do an episode when we come back next year on getting your relatives to switch to Linux because it's a painful process. But I mean, with the ThinkPads, I would love one to be fair because they're easy to get to, easy to upgrade the older models. I would like one. I have got a Dell Inspiron, which I bought and I just literally cracked that open. Stuck an SSD in and got a new chip for 40 quid. And it's brilliant. No, the ThinkPads tend to last forever, though. I mean... That's why a lot of business is used, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, just... When you buy a Dell, their hinges... I've never had a Dell laptop that the hinges didn't go bad on. I mean, it doesn't matter. And it's even worse on the ones that are like two-in-ones. The ones that like fold over and become a tablet or whatever. Those hinges like always die like within a couple of years. Like the one I have, it will open, but it sounds painful when it does. And my mother has the exact same computers. Her, the hinges on hers like crack all the time. It's horrible. And you can't get replacement parts for those things either. It's really disappointing. There'd be another thing that would worry me about... If I were gonna pay these prices on System 76, just to get back to the topic, if I was gonna pay those prices, I'd wanna be able to do some upgrades on my own. So I think you can probably change the memory and stuff, but you're not gonna be changing the CPU on any of those things, because that's just not the way that stuff's gonna work. And you're not gonna... I mean, you'd think because it's kind of really niche, you're not gonna be able to go on eBay or whatever and say, you know, I need a new keyboard for this thing. I mean, you're probably not gonna be able to do that. I mean, especially in the Linux community, I mean, we're very much do-it-yourselfers, you know? So I mean, if something goes wrong and this stuff, chances are you're gonna wanna do the service yourself and finding parts is probably gonna be a pain in the rear. Yeah, true. I didn't even think about that. Hopefully System 76 doesn't do all the solder in the memory and things like that and making it super hard to get to. I'm not sure. I wouldn't know if they did that or not. I mean, the real question would be was, I mean, cause let's say you buy one of these, say you spend $2,500 on a laptop, you want that thing to last a long time, you know? And when something goes wrong, you're either, so you're either gonna have to pay them for support, which is, you know, that's not unusual for a computer company, but you know, you'd wanna be able to know that if you wanted to do that service yourself or take it to like a local computer shop or something, that they'd be able to get the parts. And that would really, buying from someplace niche like this would really worry me about being able to get those parts even if you went somewhere to have it done for you. So, I mean, that's one thing that I just, it's always kind of been in the back of my head. Like, you know, because these are so expensive, I wanna have this option and I'm not sure I'm gonna have this option. So if I were going to buy a computer with Linux installed on it, I would buy from Dell or Lenovo or whatever. Yeah. Because I know it could get, Dell just sells a Windows PC with Linux on it. You know, that's basically all that is. If you need a part from them, you just call Dell up and you can get a part. Or you can buy, you know, any months of parts on, like eBay or whatever, because they're popular computers. Yeah. And you've got third party vendors. So I picked up a keyboard for my Dell. I think it was something like 10 pound, 50 brand new. It's like, it's crazy. Yeah. But like you say, you're not gonna get that from system 76. You're gonna have to get that shipped over to you at a good cost as well. You're gonna be paying about 50 quid, I'd say, easily. But, and again, it depends how much you do use it. But like you say, your long term, you wanna get out of it as much as possible. Again, get that used. If you're gonna spend a lot of money on a laptop, you wanna last in a good five, six years and squeeze past that a bit more as well. Yeah. I think we both would love one at the end of the day. Not cause we cheat, we just couldn't justify that price. Yeah. I mean, if we had unlimited money, you know, it'd be nice just to, you know, even though you have those worries, you'd still wanna, cause I mean, you wanna support these small places that, you know, sell Linux computers cause you want Linux and Linux on hardware to succeed. But it's just, Yeah. I mean, it'd be really cool as if System76 had a laptop that was like 499, you know. Well, maybe off the back of the point book pro, maybe they're just thinking, you know what, maybe we could do a little of this. Just your budget end and the popularity of the new Raspberry Pi with the keyboard and everything in, things like that. Maybe that they might just think, let's just give it a try, do it at 500 and see what we get. And who knows, another five, 10 years, the prices should be dropping down and using on more. So yeah, it's looking good, definitely. All right. Well, that was an interesting conversation. Let's go ahead and jump into our apps of the week. Martin, what was your app of the week? Right, if you bear with me. Two seconds, sorry. Yep. Gotta get it right. O2, O20 Word, which is available on FlatHub. Link in the show notes. It's basically a word processor that's a clone of Word. Well, I'll say clone, it literally is the same looks and everything like that, obviously in-depth features and stuff like that you can't use. So you can do all your creating your Word documents. The good thing I like is, it's got an auto-save straight away so you can pick up from what you was last typing. And it even has a syntax highlighting for developers. So if you're doing your code and things like that, you can use it on that. But it's quite a good little word clone to be fair. And like I said, the best thing is just open it up. You've got your recent documents as most things, but it brings you up to full screen for the current document you're working on. So that's more app of the week about yourself, right? All right, so I mentioned mine last week a little bit when I was talking about what I'd been doing. I've been trying to kind of divorce my things that I use cross-browser so everything's kind of independent. And one of those things is obviously bookmarks. And I could have went through and wrote like a script or whatever for D-Menu or Rofi or whatever to get into my bookmarks. But there's actually a program called Buku, B-U-K-U, B-U-K-U. The link is also in the show notes. And basically what this does is it just allows you to create a database of your bookmarks. And you can go through and put tags and descriptions and comments and everything right in the database with them. And then you can assign those things to a, you want an app launcher like D-Menu or Rofi or U-Launcher or Alfred, I think it's Alfred. Or Albert, whichever one's the one on Linux. This would also work on like, I think on Windows and Mac as well. And it's just really easy. You just assign it to whatever launcher you wanna use or you can do it in the terminal or whatever. And you can, with a key binding, just access all of your bookmarks and they will go through and then open up in your default browser. So you can, if you want to switch browsers all the time, like I seem to be doing all the, you know, because I get to, like my bank website won't work on Firefox at all because banks apparently are still trying to do their websites in GeoCities or something. It's just horrible. Possibly. Well, their ITMs run on Windows, I mean, XP still, so. Yeah, it really makes you wanna trust putting your financial information in one of those things, right? I mean, those things have definitely not been updated in a while. Definitely not. It's too costly for them. Well, yeah. All right, come on, man. Just hire me. I'll put some Linux on it. Maybe you won't wanna hire me because the way I've been working with Linux lately you probably don't want to because everything would go wrong. What do you? All right. So that was a, you know, we made it to a half an hour. I was kind of concerned that we'd, like Skype would close or crash or something. Again, not gonna work because we're not done yet. Anyways, it's been a long day. So I, so this is either it's gonna be this week, this episode here or next week will be our last episode of the year. If this is our last episode, make sure everybody has a safe and happy holiday and all those things. We may end up, because we may end up doing another one. We'll talk about that all the way. If you wanna get in contact with us, you can find all the information at the top of the episode. You can also make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube because the YouTube channel is actually kind of, I mean, I wouldn't say we're going viral or anything, but we got, you know, we're getting new subscribers every day and lots of views. And so it's kind of cool. Anyways, we'll see you next week. Excellent. See you later, guys. Take care. Yep. Sorted. He's still there, Matt. I thought I'd lost you just at the end then.