 Welcome to the Fedora podcast. This is episode 24. This is a podcast where we teach you Sorry my I had a script. It was awesome and The script moved on me. So this is the podcast where we teach you all about how the Fedora community works We bring you news interviews and so much more on today's episode We'll be talking to our guest Matthew Miller the Fedora project lead and we're going to be talking about this little thing that happened just a few weeks ago called The the Fedora Linux release maybe some of y'all have heard about that but without further ado here is my here is my Friend and co-host mr. Matthew Miller. Welcome to the Fedora podcast. Hey, glad to be here It does feel like longer than a few weeks ago, but I think I still remember some of it So yeah, we had the release and then we had some shuffling and some schedule changes and it's it was just all kinds of crazy But we are here. We are live and really excited to bring a podcast to you on this Tuesday afternoon so I gotta admit I had to go back and look at the show notes because I've actually been running Fedora Linux workstation 38 for probably close to two months now and And that's just because I kind of I kind of took on the the beta Yeah, I tend to upgrade right around like beta freeze time as well at least one of my systems like Being a huge nerd. I have more than one computer to upgrade So I kind of kind of stage things out and keep one one safe just in case So I will not be cut off from the world if I mess up my own OS, but Yeah, it's it generally kind of adds all that attention around getting the release together and When things get into the frozen state tend to be pretty good and you know interesting if you if you if you like to live on the Leading edge of things. It's a nice way to do it But we also do put a lot of working making sure that the final release has the polish and lives up to the expectations and Kind of the drama going down to the wire each time of will we be able to bring everything together? And it shows how much the QA team takes that seriously and how much that really does make sure each release is really nice And we'll we'll talk about release a little bit the the release process a little bit later in the episode because We kind of had a milestone this this last time So we'll we'll circle back to that but first for those that are new to the podcast new to the community Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do? Yeah, so I am the Fedora project leader and I've done that for I guess Nine years now almost nine years next month. I think it's the thing which has been been a while I've been involved in Fedora since even longer before that I it's a project that I really love and it's my my family in a lot of ways. I I Am a distinguished engineer at Red Hat. That's what this fancy top hat here is for That's actually from some of y'all When I got that promotion people thought that the normal Red Hat Fedora doesn't didn't quite sound Distinguished enough so I don't know I got that. So I'm pretty happy about that As for our project leader kind of job is to try and keep everything on track and to make sure that The project sort of the natural state of any open-source project is to go in every direction at once Which is which is cool because it lets you let's you explore a lot of different areas and ideas And we we want to make room for that, but also if we want to have a big impact We want to make sure that we're actually Being relevant to people other than ourselves. We're going to make sure that we are You know kind of leading the world in Linux distros We need to talk about where we want to go and agree on Strategy so trying to get those conversations to be useful and functional is a lot of my job Also, basically everything that goes wrong is ultimately my problem. So I try to make sure that Few things go wrong as possible So in in most communities I'd say that it's like hurting cats, but that's that's not how you see your role Yeah, I mean well, you can't hurt cats anyways, but That's I was part of that metaphor is about you know the futility of doing that people people are here because they they want to do something they're interested in the community interested and we're doing and You know telling them that they are now part of a herd that is going to be shuffled in a certain direction It's just not going to work. So it's more of a you got to listen to people and you know, I have my own ideas But listen to what people are interested in collectively and try and make sure people are empowered to do those In the best way possible So I don't know it's I Don't know if I've got a cat-based metaphor for this Yeah, I'm not sure that that metaphor survives the the transition and into the fedora community, but I like how I Like how you you present yourself as you know, I am I am the chief point of contact not the not the lead I am I'm the person you go to when all else has failed kind of a kind of an approach Yeah, although that you can come to me at other times, too. It's not limited to that in fact It's nice if it's not when it's a problem, you know, I do try to help us, you know There's some things I try to push on things that I think are important or things that I see, you know Collectively seem to be important that I try to push forward So there's there's some amount of Leadership there I guess I hope but it really does come down to you know, making sure the community has the power Yeah, that's awesome So I know we've I know that the fedora podcast has on had you on a few times And we'll we'll probably have you on again here in the near future because we kind of want to talk about This this one's more retrospective, but moving forward. We want to talk a little bit about where's the fedora project going? obviously, there's a lot of big plans with with the fedora project and and Not to mention just the fedora community is growing like crazy So we definitely want to have you back on in the near future to kind of talk about future state about about your vision I guess the community vision would be more accurate But but today we're talking a little bit about our release here and and forgive me I'm having a look down to check the chat So if you are joining us live feel free to put in your questions and your comments We'll address those as we go through the conversation today because this is a conversation and not a presentation So that's why we choose YouTube. I see someone there has accused me of not being Matthew Miller There are a lot of people with this name Yeah, so there you probably probably saw someone else. It's a good way. I guess to hide if I if I need to Of the Matthew Millers, I am this one I guess The top hat wearing fedora project lead version of Matthew Miller, I suppose top hat owning I don't actually wear it because it seems a little I don't know Not not quite on my my humble brand As Matthew and I have learned doing a few of these streams together We can derail ourselves fairly easily like the conversation about having an IOT powered Roomba for monitors What was part of our pre-show conversation? We should have recorded that that was there's great ideas for the future of microprocessors and So how about how about release? Yeah, so this was a nice smooth release and as you said there was an interesting milestone. So one of the things that is a constant For a while was really an annoyance with the tech press our release process is all in the public We publish our schedule and we you can watch what's going on You can see you the go-no go meeting is is there in public. It's not like a secret thing in the back room We try to have no back rooms as much as possible. And so people seeing that process Often would say this release is delayed again late. Yep. That's fedora always late And there were sometimes where we were actually really kind of off schedule And it was you know several months later than we intended to but often what people were just seeing is that process Happening in public that if this were a in you know closed-source internal project or even an open-source project that was still You know developed inside a company and then you released to die here. We made it for you with that basically all the stuff happens Inside and secretly you might not even know what the release date is so it might meet Miss you know targets by it two months and you'd never know excuse me There's a cat walking right here. That is yes. She wants attention. This is Izzy. She Wondering why I am not done with meetings for the day. Hello attention. Okay, um the release process Internally like even read that Enterprise Linux doesn't publish release dates for that very reason Yeah, I kind of have an idea of when it's going to when it's going to land But you know there's no published date So it's it's very it's very counter-cultural to have that entire process out in the public Right, so we kept got tired of getting dinged for that all the time So we are actually holding more closely to our published schedule because one of the changes we made is if we do slip On a one release that doesn't reschedule the following release We used to be we used to like add six months from whatever it came out to the next one Which made it a little bit unpredictable and so now we have a fairly predictable, you know May or April May October November like that that time frame you can expect it which is a good for planning But also we made our schedule have a internal early target date or target number one and then the target date We tell people and we always strive to hit the first one But until now we actually never have we've only we've hit We've hit the the on-time date several times, but that early target has never been quite ready And so this time when it there were a few outstanding bugs at the last minute, but everybody was so excited That for the possibility that QA team people like stayed up late and released engineering put things all together so we could have this early early release Yeah, I was I was sitting on that. I was kind of idling in the room on on that go-no-go event just gash a couple of months ago now and It it was kind of funny because The the question came up like did we did we do it? Are we done? I mean do we do we push the big green button now? I mean Yeah Almost almost unexpected so that's right but it was it was really cool to see and and with with for the Fedora 39 planning already well and Underway I don't I'd encourage all of you if you're interested to just sit in and kind of watch the process It's it's amazing the amount of effort that goes into into an operating system release of this scale Yeah, and we can always We can always use help finding bugs of finding There's so much hardware out in the world and it's amazing that Linux runs in so many different weird laptops and everything We can't possibly test them all in some sort of formal way So having everybody's tests and feedback helps us get a good idea of you know if there is a problem with you know some Some laptops aren't resuming from suspend that happens all the time and It's important to know you know is that widespread is it a big regression? What how like can we fix this thing because we should we block the release for this? If we block the release you know what else what are the consequences for other bugs and problems So we want to like the more feedback we have the better right So let's let's talk a little bit about it because I mentioned that you know for a Linux 38 just came out a few weeks ago And now we're already talking Fedora Linux 39 even some ideations around Fedora Linux 40 So I imagine a lot of our audience having just moved into a video platform I imagine a lot of our audience is fairly new to Fedora Could you kind of describe a little bit what that release cycle looks like? Yeah, so we do put out a new release every every six months, which is fairly aggressive Our goal is to integrate as much of the upstream software we can that's you know ready for consumption into something that's available for you to use and To get it all working nicely together and that's kind of where that's where a QA process goes So Fedora in Fedora, we don't do very much development of the software yourself We're we know we're bringing Genome from the Genome project KDE from KDE and you know Linux kernel all those things So the upstream projects we bring them all together and integrate them and we found that six months cadence is kind of a nice Way of working we put out a nice solid release and then the QA and release engineering teams and everybody has a little bit of a Breather we can kind of work on the tooling and the processes things for a while and then back to make putting the release together Then each release has about a 13 month lifecycle. So you can actually if you Six months sounds intimidating you can skip the next release and to stay on land for basically a year Or and then do an upgrade and we've worked really hard to make those upgrades really Seamless they're basically just like a big update that has you know This time it's got a couple gigabytes of updates and there but then you should be on the next release. So That's basically the cycle and then we try to make it so our updates policy is basically Big changes should go in those release boundaries for some type reasons and because a lot of people doing the work here are volunteers we don't have a lot of Backporting fix security fixes and bug fixes to software is a lot of work You can often introduce new problems doing it. It's expensive. So that's our preferred thing But if it's not possible and there's a security issue will sometimes put a bigger update out during the release But we try to make it so the big changes are really on those release boundaries So that you don't have a thing where you wake up one Tuesday and discover that you know Your desktop is totally rearranged because the software is Okay but one one of the things you mentioned was being able to skip releases and Honestly, that's not been my experience with with Fedora Linux either in my home server lab or on my laptop Like this this device that that we're streaming from today. It's running Fedora Linux 38 I was I even ran it on the beta for a few weeks But the in-place upgrade process has been fantastic for you for a few years Yeah, you shouldn't need to but if you want if you want to you we make that an option for people And you know, there's everybody has kind of a different tolerance and taste for these kind of things. So I we often get asked, you know, where's the LTS and so, you know We've got that we've got the year there which I think is a pretty good balance for a lot of people Mm-hmm. Yeah And and the the last few releases have definitely been kind of that well, this is just a big update So I need to plan on not being on my laptop for you know, 20 25 minutes But I mean, it's it's been fantastic And and Conan in our in our chat kind of voiced what I was thinking But wasn't sure if I should say or not so someone else said it But yeah, if you want an LTS of Fedora, we call that red hat enterprise Linux I'm admittedly a little bit biased being a technical marketer for Ralph, but you know Yeah, and and that's you know, that's that's how I know that that is an expensive proposition right right and Yeah, the amount of work to make that actually be Maintained in a real way and for a long term rather than just okay now. We stopped updating it. Good luck which is another approach to that but Yeah, I know I one thing It does seem like from the desktop point of view It's sometimes a little bit like things are getting pretty nice and polished and there's not dramatic change It even when you know, I said we want to make sure that things don't surprise you along the way But often, you know when we're going to new GNOME releases now in infidora workstation Like you see a few things moved around but it's not dramatically different because kind of the polish is is there And so sometimes it's a little bit hard to generate some excitement about the release But we actually have a lot of like I was looking back through that the changes list features We have in this last release and there's actually some really interesting like under the hood things. I want to highlight That that aren't visible but are going to make things better One of them there's their steps towards what we call a unified kernel where right now This is getting into the geekiness of booting your system But we have a thing called initial RAM disk that loads with some it's basically like a kind of a minimal boot-up operating system that is initially loaded has some basic drivers and stuff and then then the kernels loaded Everything's loaded from there and then sorry kernel loads Anyways from there the real operating system eventually gets loaded the problem with this is that is is basically a Vulnerability point because we don't sign that and it kind of breaks the whole secure boot process So we're moving to a thing where we have a unified kernel that I'll put together on one without initial RAM disk No, and that are D and everything will be built and signed in infrastructure that will then Have a much more secure chain from boot to actually running. So that's like some steps are in place for that There's also On a security it's like supply chain security thing work towards reproducible builds Reproducible build basically means if you make a package if I if we build a package in our build system You can build that same package, you know at home or wherever else and you'll get a bite for bite Identical output Getting so excited. I'm talking faster than I can talk So like Dabian has been working on this for a while and we've been in some ways behind And The importance of that is you could basically if we can show that you can trust us I think you should should know you can trust us But previously, you know, this this lets you this is what trust would verify I guess this let's do the verify part of that right. That's it. That's a neat thing It's something where In some ways like like I'm Debian is ahead on this because they were able to leapfrog because they're We we have a central build system where all packages are built from get trees and built in our you know in our server rooms in our data center and Kind of a system under our control. So we have some basic trust in that and then can You can extend that trust you we sign the packages there. It's a Whereas it like in Debian historically, there was no central build system everybody built their packages, however, they wanted and then uploaded them which Yeah, there's like who knows what's going on. Is that person's machine compromised is all these things So having those be reproducible was a pretty important step for them because they didn't have that But it's something that would benefit us as well. We just didn't quite feel the urgency, but you know as these things Get easier for us to do because maybe the work work a lot of the work that Debian has done has made it easier for us We can bring that kind of security Features to Fedora as well, which is nice to see well, I'm thinking about the the downstream effects of that being able to run Fedora at work station across an enterprise or Being able to Being able for those changes to filter their way down into rel. I'm thinking of Large enterprises that have literally tens of thousands of servers, but to have that that unified build or I'm starting to Conflate terms here Having that having that identical build capability is is amazing to be able to know that whether I'm sending this little Little, you know pizza box size device out to to a telephone pole somewhere Or if I have thousands of these little 2u boxes that are running in data centers across the world It'd be good to know that everything is exactly identical on every single build Yeah, and so so we have some other things like that the OS tree stuff that is you Core OS IOT silver blue, you know, white those things and then some other File system verification like things that kind of do the similar kind of thing across the whole the whole image As well that are in progress Yeah, it's Some of these things seem like they're like big big fancy enterprise see those 10,000 servers or whatever use cases But they're also pretty useful for the home as well where you you know Well, you may be running, you know an IOT thing and you want to make sure there's no malware in there That's you know running crypto mining on your thermostat Or just on your own desktop like being able to verify that you know the system is what you expect it to be has that It's nice to be able to trust your own machine. That's right. Well, and and you mentioned the home I mean here in in our house. We've got a mix of Apple products. We've got I Think I've successfully eliminated all the windows partitions with the exception of I've got a couple of like triple-a titles That absolutely don't work with proton that that I still boot into from time to time But you know as my kids are getting older our youngest is getting ready to start kindergarten this fall And I'm looking at an age where I have things like a Chromebook or iPads in the house. It's like I don't really have much control over that so instead we could buy a whole bunch of of low-end, you know like netbook Capacity type laptops and using things like Ansible system roles and some of these other tools that come naturally in fedora I can make sure that all of my kids have the same build And they have all the tools that they need and then inevitably when someone breaks their their build because like my son's Showing an interest in technology curious what dad does Probably more the YouTube side of what I do, but interested in technology nonetheless And it goes and break something I can easily just Rewroll that image out and have all the all the data all the user data off on a on like a server and in our in our Furnace room Yeah, actually that's that's a really powerful thing. It's actually one of the things that got me like to where I am in my career I had a early early mentor I guess one of my parents friends who had we couldn't afford a PC in our house But they he was a programmer for a bank. He had a PC and you know, I could come over and play with it after school and He told me, you know, you can do whatever you want You can edit the config sys change the auto exact that you can't break anything so badly that I can't fix it It's gonna be okay I just go ahead and do whatever you want and like that freedom to do that was very powerful in being able to learn and I think Yeah, really like Given that being given that permission and encouragement go ahead break it right is like Essential to people, you know really getting to understand and knowing, you know how to work with computers people who are Hesitant to change things that kind of afraid. I what if I click that button and now it won't work That that could really hold back learning so I think the more we can Deliver an environment which makes it feel safe the better we are at in making people people feeling in control of their computing For sure So that that was really deep technical nerdy, which is where you and I spend most of our time Why don't why don't we zoom out a little bit and and and help some of the less Crazy among us maybe Okay, one of the we were talking about how This release didn't really have any new shiny features Which as someone who spends a lot of time doing marketing and content creation is just maddening because it's like This is this is what rel looks like nowadays. I've been on the last several releases on that front And it's like what do we talk about because it's just better improvements better better processes And then I can look at the fedora and it's like it's the same thing. It's the same problem except Except with Fedora Linux 38. We had a few new spins. We had one that was kind of promoted into an official spin You want to kind of talk us through I guess first. Let's let's level set and what what defines a spin and what What is the difference between something that is supported but not like a spin? Yeah, so we've got several levels of things and it is I'm sorry somewhat confusing But we have basically a spin is a install media variant of Fedora And so something like I think was it the budgie desktop is that the one right was so that was available You could install it, but there wasn't like a live CD media to run and test it and You know Basically have a budgie first experience and so now there is so that's that's what having a spin is it was actually one of the things that I Think we need to you know some of this is for the future, but part part of the problem is We should separate the install media from the delivery and like the what software you're running what a Lot of the teams you're running are like making a spin is is an elevation And we should have a way to elevate those things that isn't just now you have install media because the install media isn't it's only Used once it isn't really that exciting So and that but it requires a lot of work and process and so on to do that Well, so we need to rethink that a little bit, but yeah, that's a whole nother whole nother topic it's because they you and I could have an interesting conversation about image builder and And letting people run basically compile their own spins Compile yeah, good word. That's that's already used assemble a symbol. Yeah So yeah, the the budgie desktop and I had to look this up was was first packaged for fedora 37 But now is a fedora linux 38 Cat tail fedora linux 38. It's now one of the official spins and then The other one and I'm going to completely butcher this but sericea Yeah, actually if someone else says that out loud I would Anyone I want to type it phonetically in the But it's it's it's kind of interesting because it's it's rpm OS tree meets sway Which is a tiling window manager so rpm OS tree is is something that's rapidly gaining ground in the technology space being able to do upgrades of your operating system separate of like There we go. We have and I'm not even going to try There you go. That's phonetic Actually now that you say that I think I've heard other people call it that's Russia so yeah, so it's it's it's a tiling window manager and an rpm OS tree so There's there's some community. There's some conversation going on in the chat about OS tree and an rpm OS tree being Being a future topic and and I definitely agree that we'll we'll address that in a future episode but That I the tiling window manager people Wow that it is A different way of thinking about the world. I I appreciate you all It's a Windows 1.0. That's who got the UI right? That's that's that's the movement And I appreciate that we can make room for those things if you would like to try out a Different way of working with your windows and your desktop. We have that available easily to you now Yeah, I wish I could say more but you're you're absolutely right because I know several people that are I3 fanatics Oh, and it's just like I tried it for like a week and The people who love it a thing I made it a week and just like I cannot comprehend this The people who love it really love it. So if you haven't tried it, you may find out that wow This is suddenly your native language. I guess right No One of the things the names are fun, but kind of getting out of hand I Think we need to figure out a way to I would like to use the fedora atomic desktop brand for all of these to kind of put them together because Yeah, OS tree isn't really a great. I don't know it Not not that exciting of a brand and it doesn't quite it's not very descriptive from the the top level point of view It's not really immutable. So calling immutable images immutable like that's not that's not really what they are So I but I need to check with the brand people at red hat to see if I can Revive that I've got a really nice project atomic t-shirt over there already and everything so Let let me know let me know how that works out for you from from what I understand That's a fairly charged term now. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see yeah. No code names are fun, but like code names When they when code names then become something you have to decode in order to make a decision about what you were going to go On a website that becomes the wrong kind of code Here we found the tiling window manager fan pure productivity says the comment. Yes, exactly Yeah, that's a That that may be worth dragging you into writing a blog post there, Eric Maybe maybe show me the error of my ways because I've I've been a GNOME user for quite some time I've tried KDE and there's things I like about it. There's things I like about gonna more and I It's been a while, but I usually go back and forth the GNOME is is kind of where I live but I'm kind of a Walmart user of of technology. Anyway, it's like about 80% of the defaults work fine for me I'll tweak the other few the other few things and and have a happy life In the comments are talking about code names in general release code names and Mo Duffy from the design team points out that we still do have the door release code names, but they're behind the scenes as code names and they're used as the Sometimes a little bit far removed, but sometimes more direct inspiration for the wallpaper designs each release so and the wallpaper designs are like That's a really awesome community process where people work together to you go from these ideas inspired by the code names to You know the really awesome wallpapers we have in every release Yeah behind our pictures in the video here Yeah, and it's almost as the some most as if the Fedora podcast producer had had an idea to put the Fedora Linux 38 wallpaper is the background for a Fedora Linux 38 conversation but So the other the other spin that that garnered some news in the Fedora Linux 38 is a fosh, which Admittedly, I didn't really know was was still going. Do you do you have sorry to throw you under the bus here? But you have much to say on the mobile one, right? Yep I'm glad to see that there is starting to be like usable hardware that people can play around with these kind of things on you know, it's I Neals going to be in the chat like looking carefully at what I say because I was pretty pessimistic about Fedora on mobile for a long time and You know, it's like it's it's a hard market You it's a hard thing where you know, Microsoft couldn't succeed. They backed out, but hopefully I know it's starting to be enough It's one of the things where just like your computers like the first in the 80s or whatever in 90s Like every new computer was like 20 times better than your previous computer And and so like just the jumps were so much and phones and everything were that way for a long time And so it was basically impossible to make something that was maybe Workable at a hacker level and so now I think the technologies gotten to the point where it's you know You know the pine phone and whatever devices don't have to be the top of the line Google whatever Apple thing to still be pretty amazing and be a functional thing that you can do So I'm glad to see that happening I'm glad to see Fedora Linux running on there because it's a nice place where you can take you control back of Your life and your privacy and I have that all owned by big companies Yeah, I think you I think you struck a nerve with Conan there Was that was that nice enough for you there? Yeah, Ray bring brings up a good point on that front to just I remember the the old jokes about buying a computer and it's out of date before Before you even open the box. I think that was a weird Al song at 1.2 Yeah, and you know there was time where you know like You couldn't you wouldn't buy the latest generation of laptops if you wanted to run Linux because it probably wouldn't you know Probably wouldn't you had to buy last year's laptops. So that happened there too in some ways Yeah, and nowadays I mean We we've got a partnership between Fedora and Lenovo and you can Literally buy Fedora pre-installed on a laptop now. I mean, it's it's an amazing world Yeah, and we should we should get a mark from Lenovo on on this at some point Lenovo is is one of the episodes on on my backlog list. So I'm so glad you mentioned that So if if If you haven't noticed we're kind of finding our footing again with the photo or Linux podcast or the Fedora podcast Sorry, just put Fedora in front of anything and there's probably a project or community inside the larger community about it, but You know, it's we've got a lot of ideas always open to more so pre free public service announcement We've got a podcast room on the mid-matrix space. We've got we've got a Category on the Fedora discussions page There's there's stuff everywhere. So feel free to feel free to join in and submit some content ideas Volunteer yourself as a guest or as as a guest host either way While I love doing live streams while I I'm I'm very honored to be the host of the Fedora podcast right now It shouldn't just be my mug on on on this podcast. So, you know, definitely definitely feel free to get involved Free public service announcement there in between the the Fedora release talks So you mentioned getting things from upstream and there's There's been a lot of talk about about the GNOME foundation and the GNOME project since the move from GNOME 3.x to GNOME 40 and Fedora Linux 38 came pre-installed with GNOME 44 Excuse me And and kind of like Fedora Linux itself there There wasn't much in the way of of changes there. There's a lot of Updated updated looks some some rehabbed settings panel any anything really stick out to you. Well, I really like the The podcast of audio is important. I like the thing where you can easily switch between sound outputs and inputs on the quick menu I think that's really nicely done. That's all come together pretty well. I use that quite a lot but And yeah, I think it's some of the things that I've been doing I think some of the settings are a little more slick now, but yeah, it's really like not a lot of big change here I don't know. I think Sometimes soon, I think they're probably going to have a dock option. It's very controversial in the GNOME world But most distros ship with that by default For Fedora Linux, if you like that, there's extensions you can add we don't have that configured by default But we've done some user research and it's pretty popular. So It'll be interesting to see that'll probably be the next big UI change to see in GNOME but I I'm not even going to bet when that could possibly be Yeah, I mean the the the top right menu is Fantastic pretty much everything that I need to make changes to is right there as a quick access drop-down now Even some of the add-ons like I use the the caffeine add-on so that my system doesn't go to sleep Like if I'm on a meeting or something and I get up and pace around and I'm not there at the keyboard I don't want it to go to sleep in the middle of a meeting So like caffeine is one of the plugins that I always use and having all of that right there to be able to Even if I wanted to tether my laptop to my to my iPhone, it's it's right there It's easy to get to the menus are all there the settings are all there and and you can drop it down to To make changes is needed Especially as a content producer like you said the the audio input output changes is fantastic It's nice to have it right there easy to get to Yeah, it's one of the things where it's taken like that that menu's changed a lot over the releases It's one of the things that's subtle and it's gotten better and better and better. I think mm-hmm some of the Small small changes that you don't quite notice at the time But then if you go back and look from several years ago, okay Yeah, this has really gotten a lot of you know improvement based on actual use and input so I I noticed a comment a while back about bugs and bug tracking and bug reporting Yeah, I think it's a tough thing to talk about Yeah, you can stick in there So I the comment was basically that bug reporting is a hurdle and a hassle and are there any plans to streamline the process? Yes, loosely I would say and we have a forcing function coming up here Which is actually that so the bugzilla instance that we use for tracking all of our bugs in in fedora Is shared with us by red hat. It's the bugzilla red hat calm instance And that's actually like a big it's big slow and a lot of work to maintain that and For whatever out of my control reasons Red Hat is switching everything to JIRA internally for all the rel development Which is kind of a crisis because we're not going to switch to JIRA for fedora for Not merely because I personally don't like it, but that's that is true But also, you know, it's not open source. That doesn't feel right and also It is a very heavyweight tool that actually if you want to use it effectively You basically need someone on every team who is like your JIRA expert and configuration person or Or else you will end up not being very productive and I don't that doesn't seem right for fedora Bugzilla is nominally not going away, but on the other hand No resources are really going to be put into it and if the you know Dedicated cranky sysadmins not cranky there But you know old-school sysadmin people who are keeping bugzilla running. I think you know As kind of a passion project almost like that's that's not a quick We shouldn't be depending on that so we're going to need to find another Solution for bug tracking and I think that's a good time for us to kind of think about the overall process overall because There's It can be very good because as I said like we're an integration project We're not doing a lot of the development, but we want to be kind of the first responders to people's problems Yet also people doing the packaging are often Volunteers people who are you not necessarily there all the time. They don't have a lot of time for helping ever diagnose everything We kind of get a where should I have asked this question? Where should I put this bug kind of thing and It is also the case that filing a good bug report is a Skill or maybe even an art that not everybody has and then getting the information Needed to actually solve things is difficult. So This is a long way of saying I actually think we need some different layers to things and my main The main thing I want to do is Actually looked at we had a page about when should I file a bug that was written? I don't know 2004 2005 or something like that very early on and it basically said all the time if you see anything if you see something File a bug like that's TSA kind of level of Actually like that's exactly that's that's not what we really need because a bunch of bugs that need to be triaged and May not get answered that ends up with this you know frustrating thing we have where when we we automatically close all the bugs we The things we don't get to we say oops sorry we didn't get to that and then people who Feel ignored and it's frustrating all around So we want to send people to ask fedora to the forum Q&A site first when you have a problem you talk about it there and People can help you solve your problem can help figure out, you know where is this something that is fedora specific is something that that is maybe Something we can address in fedora or should this be taken, you know to KDE should this be taken to Canome Should that be taken to Firefox rather than to to you know fedora tracker somewhere And then when appropriate, you know find or file a bug, you know in in fedora packaging Space in you know bugzilla or whatever we end up with but make the the end user experience be really centered around that kind of forum Based help approach rather than about filing a bug kind of like how I don't know if you are a customer of a Linux Company like you could you can file a bug in bugzilla, but you're More direct approaches to you know talk to your support people and they can can hook things up And so we kind of have our community driven support Where we went users to come to and then hopefully you know become maybe contributors and More confident in it and filing bugs and you know knowing where things go But if you're kind of in that I don't know what to do state go to ask that's that's true today That's that's the best thing to do and I think we'll make that more and more centered in the future That's a yeah And and Mo Duffy pointed out what about GitLab, which is a former GitLab Or I can say yeah, we should we should look at GitLab and not Jira All the real real engineering looked at me and just was like no Yeah, right get GitLab is kind it's high on on the list of possibilities I can get into some technical details, but it's probably too boring for the podcast, but Yeah, I think that's that's that that's the frontrunner really But we have to work out, you know, actually how to get it running in our own instance things like that And get that to be supported So in the in the in the light of being Open and transparent doesn't necessarily have to be negative, but had a question that I wanted to surface for you You know, what's what's something that could have gone better in the development of for Linux 38? That's it excellent question Actually, I think this would really did go really smoothly we Haven't done a right. We're in a little practice of doing retrospectives for a while and we are not this time But I think it's a good thing to do. I things really did go so smoothly this time that I don't quite feel like There was a problem, but I'm probably jinxing it But some of it really is also, you know that release I'm I'm already thinking 39 and 40 and so I Don't remember the specific things. There are definitely things we could always do better But I think there's I think there comes a time where you do have to take a take a step back and celebrate that I mean releases and like like Conan Kudo mentioned Like Fedora Linux 37 hit some hit some some pretty substantial roadblocks and you know, that's that's been It's been kind of an issue in the past where things have have really derailed the release process And so you're you're looking at missing missing targets or or or at least, you know Mentally thinking man, we should have been ready for this. We should have we should have been there So I think there comes a time where you do have to take a step back and go, you know what? We did a really good job Could we have done better always but you know Fedora Linux 38 should now be the new bar at which each release should try and hit Yeah, and I think everybody again like going back to back to the beginning like you know It's everybody working so hard to make this happen that made that happen So I think we as a collectively everybody just did such a great job in this that Thank you everybody. Congratulations. All of those things all together. There you go Let's see So but the only thing left we'd had to talk about was some of the some of the deeper stuff like In Fedora Linux 38 micro DNF was replaced by DNF version 5 It's really quick. I can I can I can say yeah and uses a lot less memory Which is actually this is timely because I know there were we were starting to actually get complaints like there's some Some updates that like people couldn't upgrade their systems because the memory consumption of DNF was so high That they actually couldn't do the upgrade all at once So and it wasn't even like a super low-memory machine. So that Couldn't you couldn't come soon enough I just wish they'd be excited to rewrite it in rust and I'm only half-getting I could say thanks about that, but I'm I'm not I'm too tired. It's it's too late in the day Yes, we were a week early Well, we talked about that earlier, but Yeah, so everybody give Mo a hard time because I think she'll be our next guest Because as mentioned in the comments a little bit earlier the new website was also released the same day And so we we were gonna have Mo and maybe a couple of members of her team on to talk about the The big website refresh projects that's been going on for well over a year See the only other thing that The only other thing I'm sorry if you wanted to comment I was just gonna comment that that's a really amazing like community building success story because all the people who came together To make this we kind of were in a period there where we Didn't have a functional team and then yeah people Ashlyn A whole bunch of people came together to design and build and you know run this thing and has we have a Really great functional team of a lot of like new faces in fedora and some old You know people who've been around for a while who are more energized about it and it's it's a very cool thing Yeah, I Hesitant to start listing people because I know I'll forget some fun, but I'll do it here And I figure if I put her on the spot, then I'll find the the people that want to be interviewed on a video podcast The only other thing that I had on my list was some stricter compiler flags I know that's super into the weeds, but it kind of filters into what you're saying earlier about having a little bit better security being able to trust what it is that you're installing Yeah, this is I mean one of the things the compiler flags basically when when you're you know building the source code into binary machine code This there are certain new features that they're always being developed Either in the CPUs or just in the compilers themselves that Make it harder to Exploit if there's a bug you can make it harder to Hack the system and get around Think you find you turn turn those bugs into exploits that let you get rude access and do bad things So we tend to be pretty aggressive in turning on those new features as they come out which is actually one of the things that is Part of Fedora's function as a distro in the world. I think that the doing that Helps us find problems with those and find cases where those more strict flags actually caught cause bugs Or they interact badly with something that a program was expecting to do We help identify those and then we work with the projects the upstream projects to you know fix them and make sure that Their code works in a way that if we weren't doing that You would have a whole haphazard mix of software that was or wasn't using all these features and so by Working on that across the board. We really elevate the security of software in Linux overall in general So we're getting close to the top of the hour. We've pretty well addressed the conversations and going on in chat Is there anything you want to mention about Fedora Linux 39 or just just any closing thoughts in general? Oh See, I should have had a footer 39 thing prepared But now you know, it's it's in progress. We are work. We're working on it You know if you're feeling really brave you can upgrade to the the rawhide release that will become Like 39 in a little bit Yeah, I'm not sure what's what's in store there one of the things You know, we don't tend to have a year ahead road map So we'll see what people bring to it and see what improvements end up making it I'm sure it's going to be yet again our best release ever. So that's That's trajectory run I could make a year at the Linux desktop joke right about there, you know We're getting there. We're getting there. It's all it's already here if you some of us, right, right? Well, I gotta say thank you Matthew for all that you do for the Fedora community Thank you to the folks in the audience and to those who listen after the fact for all the hard work The Fedora community is is an amazing place to hang out and I'm really really excited to to finally be a Bigger part of that it took me a while to figure out where I could hang out in the photo or community and kind of contribute back But you know for years Fedora has been my my go-to if I'm not running rel then then it's usually Fedora So it's really really an honor and really a lot of fun to be a part of this community to be bouncing ideas back and forth And as I mentioned a little bit earlier Really appreciate all the ideas for episode content what I could really use right now is Victims I mean volunteers to to jump on the stream and and and to have about an hour-long conversation So if that's something you're interested in please reach out to myself or the the Fedora podcast matrix channel really appreciate everybody and Congratulations on Fedora Linux 38. I mean it's it has been amazing The only thing I might do is do a fresh install and try butter FS, but we'll That'll have to be for quieter season I'm in the midst of kicking this podcast back off red hat summits rel releases imminent and and So So definitely definitely a lot to be excited about in the community Yeah, I agree and thank you very much for having me. This has been fun Yeah, glad to glad to have you I was gonna say kick it back off, but Joseph had to had to jump in in front of that bullet last minutes and Thank you Well, we had fun we chatted and we joked around for an hour. It was a great time Well, thank you for joining us This was episode 24 of the Fedora podcast make sure to check out the show notes for links and additional resources pertaining to this Episode I give me give me a couple of hours to get that done I do have another presentation after this But check the show notes a few hours if you're catching this after the fact should be chapter markers additional resources And whatnot in the show notes will be alive Actually, we won't be alive in two weeks. I didn't update that in the episode guide in two weeks I will be at Red Hat Summit and Matthew, I think you'll be there. So if you're not gonna do it live from Red Hat Summit I mean we could try I mean I'm I'll have recording gear there We could try it It'll be at a different time than then than this time slot, but hey I'm I am more than happy to to throw something together. Let's do it So that's great about two weeks will be live possibly from the floor of Red Hat Summit But for sure the next the next kind of typical episode will be in oh my gosh And in a month in four weeks and we'll be discussing the website Property refresh So with that said see you all live from summit be sure to connect with both Matthew at Matt DM just about everywhere And I'm at IT guy Eric and in pretty much everywhere as well So if you if you want to reach out to either of us definitely definitely come and check us out On behalf of Matthew Miller my guest today myself Eric the IT guy Hendricks and the entire Fedora project community We will see you next time