 Ah, yes, I have to press, my god, YouTube changed the interface recently, now everything is different. I'm just really awkward. Now it should be... Yeah, it looks... Yeah. Let's see. Why not Arch? Oh, I don't know. Oh! I think it's going. It's going? It's going? Do you see the live stream? Yeah. You're on the YouTube studio. I can hear it all, right? I just had to mute it, because I could hear it all talking. Nice, nice. So, as I was saying earlier, this time, given that now everything should be working correctly, I'm really sorry about that. As soon as people connect, please tell me in the chat if everything is going correctly, and if you do hear the volume of both me and people correctly, or if that should be... should change, I can tune the volume. With that said, yes, as I was saying before, if you could each introduce shortly who you are and what you do for the project. Yeah, I guess I'll go first. So I'm AJ, I'm the desktop lead, and I also manage all the PR for Rhino Linux. So that includes setting up this team interview with Nico, aside from that, I manage the user interface and the desktop of Rhino Linux, and try to basically build the vision that I've had for a long while. I guess I'll go. I'm Elsie. I am in charge of Packstall, which is an AUR-like package manager for Ubuntu that Rhino uses. So I'm in charge of making sure that everything works smoothly, fixing bugs that happen in Rhino because of Packstall and also helping with maintaining some of the core packages that we use. And I'm Oren. I'm the newest to the project, but I also maintain some of the most crucial pieces being the systems and like OS building. So all of the images that ship out, I'm in charge of constructing as well as the core packaging that Elsie mentioned. I'm in charge of getting that stuff upstream and together. And then I work with Elsie to fix all the bugs that happen with it. I'm also the design, so all of our logos and wallpapers have been made by me, and a lot of the integration is where my job is. I would also like to mention there are a few members of our team which could not be present today. Xenia, you may have seen her on the vanilla OS team interview. She created the, like, your system application, which is used to update your system graphically. And then there's also Wizard, who is currently away. He made the set-up Wizard, and then there's Catmaster, which helped with the early development of Rhino Linux. They definitely helped a lot with trying to get the builder done and the installer and then, or an expanded upon that, and added different architectures and devices to be able to work with the operating system. Okay, thanks, everybody. And of course, just for the beginning, can you also briefly explain to those who haven't followed what Rhino Linux itself is? Yes, so I would happily love to talk about that. Rhino Linux is a rolling-release Ubuntu-based distribution. Now, the two of them don't seem like they work well together, but we've found that a lot of developers actually wanted that kind of distribution, its community maintained. And so all of us were not affiliated with Canonical or Red Hat or another Linux company. For example, we are just members of the Ubuntu and Linux community, and we're entirely free and open source. Packstall is at the core of our operating system, and we also use a modified version of Xfce called the Unicorn Desktop. And why is that? So where did you choose to do your own desktop and not ship what was already existing? Okay, that's a really good question. So originally, we did plan to just use a slightly modified version of Xfce, make it look a bit more similar to Windows, and then the idea kind of snowballed from there. I used my girlfriend's MacBook and I was blown away with the user interface. I hadn't used macOS at this point for around 10 years. I was blown away with the user interface and the user experience of it. And then I looked more into other desktop environments, which existed like Qtfish, and saw where they failed. And Qtfish has not been maintained for roughly about a year now. And I had my eyes on that project for a long while, and I was really excited to see it come to Linux because it was a beautiful desktop. It would get a lot of users in, but it just didn't work. And so I looked over to Pantheon, saw what they did, and kind of got the idea from there. The difference is I want to make the user experience like really cohesive, similar to Apple in the sense that everything just works well with each other. And with our collection of devices that we can actually have Rhino Linux installed on, some of our applications came from that like Rhino Drop will allow you to send devices from one Rhino device to another. It also works sending like from Rhino Linux to an iPhone or any device really. It helps build a good ecosystem. Okay, and being obviously the kiddie guy, you know, my question would also be, you do use, if I so correctly, XFC as a base for the desktop, right? Yeah, we do. So why did you choose XFC in the first place? Did you compare the desktops? Yeah, we did originally. So I can speak about this a little more. Yeah, go ahead. I personally use a custom modified Rhino and GNOME experience. And I can say assuredly that the develop branch for Ubuntu, especially with desktop environments, is never stable. Plasma in particular constantly has dependency breaks and uninstalls itself. Likewise, GNOME has dependency issues and freezes up. So we went with the one that we found was the most stable foundation when working on a develop base. I'd like to expand on that a little bit. So with someone asked here, yeah, someone asked, why don't we ship over flavors? And a big reason of that is we have a specific vision for the desktop that we want to put. And we was based with the most foundation to provide a non-breaking experience on the development branch of Ubuntu. The other good reason is that bug fixing every issue that occurs with every single desktop environment is quite a big job for such a small development team. Okay, so and regarding that, why switching Ubuntu to a rolling kind of distribution, especially, I'm sorry, all these parties are still asking why not do something else instead, but I'm trying to understand exactly what's the design goal, right? Why not work on distribution that was already rolling by itself? I can talk about this. So a lot of people like to use Ubuntu, not necessarily something else. A lot of people have just used Ubuntu for their entire time using Linux. And I think we found that it's just a lot more familiar for a lot of people. And if you know they're used apt for a long time, you just know how to just generally get around your system and fix issues like that. So we also found that no other distribution was really trying to do what we did. And we all agreed that we didn't want to just start replicating stuff that already exists. Like if you want a rolling release that isn't Ubuntu, you can just go to like Arch or open SUSE tumbleweed or something like that. So we really wanted to try to make something unique that hadn't been done before and not try to just break the Linux ecosystem into smaller and smaller bits that we didn't feel was required or needed. Yeah. Expanding on that as well, a lot of developers love to use Ubuntu. And that could be for a variety of reasons, like their packages, their package manager, stuff like that. Or just the fact that they target Ubuntu. And I saw this in another podcast, but they talked about how a lot of canonical employees use Arch because they still want a rolling release. And canonical is trying to force one to use Ubuntu. And I found that quite funny. And they said that Rhino Linux could be the bridge between that. And I definitely could see that. But a lot of developers love to use Ubuntu. And we do kind of target ourselves towards developers. Rhino Linux can certainly be used for home use. It's a great operating system for just using your laptop or your computer, for example, or even your phone. But we do brand ourselves towards developers primarily because of our Ubuntu base. I do actually quite agree on that because now that I've been the person that keeps on criticizing the project, I am quite interested in the idea. So if I can share a little bit how I do use Ubuntu. If I can share a little bit, my main issue with Ubuntu is that I develop a lot for KDE, obviously. And very often to actually build KDE, you need the latest packages and such. And very often Ubuntu doesn't have them or they're in the next version. And I usually do always add the repositories of the work in progress next version of Ubuntu, which obviously leads to breakages everywhere. So having a rolling distribution with Ubuntu would actually quite improve my workflow a lot. So I did want to say that I do see the appeal in the project. And obviously the thing is, rolling Rhino had the same concept. What's the exact relationship between this project and rolling Rhino? Is it same developers? What changed? Yeah, so Rhino Linux came is the successor to Rolling Rhino remix. I actually started that project in March 2022. I saw the Rolling Rhino script which turned Ubuntu into a rolling release that was published by Martin Winprex, the desktop lead for Ubuntu, or former desktop lead for Ubuntu. He's not affiliated with Canonical anymore as far as I'm concerned. And so I made Rolling Rhino remix which turned it into a proper distribution. Now the problem with that was I did it for fun. I didn't really realize people would use it or actually wanted this. I did it for a laugh just because I was bored. And then I was still maintaining something that I made for fun and did not hold it very well. Had a lot of stability issues. And so I kind of killed that project in favor of Rhino Linux which is kind of the culmination of everything I learned developing for Linux. And I brought on people to the team such as Oren and Elsie who certainly know what they're doing. And I believe we managed to kind of execute vision that I should have had in 2022. That's quite interesting. Also, let me say sorry for calling Rhino Rhino. So pronunciation is tough for as poor non-English native speakers. So have pity on me. Now I do know the correct pronunciation. And... Don't worry about that. I grew up speaking two languages. And so... Yeah, I'm still trying to learn all the correct English pronunciation. I did see that you do have... I was trying to fetch them very quickly but I can't right now. You do also, apart from Rhino, have a lot of other personal projects and another desktop I did see. Is that correct? Yeah, I made all the cool desktop environment. It's nowhere near ready for release. It's just kind of something I've been hacking away at for a bit of fun. It's based on a, like, window manager framework which helps you build a tiny window manager. And it's made in Rust. It's buggy to say the best. Honestly, it's not usable. I'm just doing it for a bit of fun, expanding what I know. That was one of my first bigger projects in Rust. And since I started developing heavily for Rhino Linux, that's kind of taken a backseat. Yeah, I can see that happening. Lots of projects. Because I do also recall a window manager and a programming language. Are you very much into, like, rewriting things from scratch to try something new? Yeah, so sometimes I just code out of boredom, to be honest. That's the best way I can explain it. So the window manager actually works towards the desktop environment that I've been slowly building for a bit of fun. But it's not, I'm not ever going to release it as something that I should say people should use. Rhino Linux is my first major project, which I'm actually proud to show off and tell people, yeah, this is something that you should use. Whereas the orbital desktop environment is just made for fun, the programming language I made. I just wanted a deeper understanding with Python. And so I was like, why not write a programming language in Python? It will be funny. Yeah, and that's pretty much. Yeah, and I can attest that, as I also do have in my personal GitHub app programming language written in Python, which does almost work, but not quite. So I can attest that it's quite an interesting overtake. I can may also ask you if there's like any sort of history on how the logo for this distribution was made, like who did it and how? That would be entirely me. And I mostly made it for fun. The logo is actually how I joined the team. I saw the register article about the Rhino Linux team back in October. And I was intrigued and joined the Discord and noticed that the logo was a little lacking. And I felt that we could have a Firefox-like logo that also displayed a rolling Rhino. And so I took the circular shape and the animal style that Firefox does and used a little bit of help from some AI artwork to get some inspiration. And once I had a good vision of it, it's only a few pieces that I just threw into Illustrator and was quite simple to actually put together once I had enough concepts that I had meshed together in my head. OK, so that is actually how we joined the project. So how did you then go on and creating? Because I also see you worked with the installer. Is that correct? Yes. So I also work on Ubuntu Touch. I maintain all of the Pine 64 devices on Ubuntu Touch right now. So the Pine phone, the Pine phone Pro, and the Pine tab, as well as the Pine tab too. And so I came into the project with some experience prior. And I saw that there was a cat master was struggling to build the ISO. There was some sizing issues that I had run into myself when I was building my own Ubuntu Touch images. And so very quickly that developed into me making our 64 images for the ISO as well. And then with my Pine 64 experience moving Rhino Linux to there as well so that we could also have a good development platform for those mobile Linux devices. OK, thank you. And did you also do something in a project that I haven't mentioned yet that you would like to cover? I mean, in some big task that is quite user-worthy, something like that? Is this a question for me or for all of us? No, no, I was asking you because after a logo installer I was wondering if there's anything to complete the list if I have been missing something. I'm not omniscient, so. I'm mostly maintain the kernel stuff as well. I'm sure that we have integration there. We don't use directly Ubuntu's kernels, but we use their mainline kernels, which means that we can have the always up-to-date versions of it, which I've noticed a lot of articles have been pointing out. It's great that we have Linux 6.4, which I think all distributions should be shipping the latest stable kernel, especially because that is what Linus's vision is and what I have found has provided the most stable experience. But it also is blocked a lot by how many different unique devices that people have. And so there's a lot of rectifying that I have to do between people's machines and making sure that everything works everywhere. So there's a lot of behind-the-scenes maintenance that's constantly going on. OK, thank you. My next set of questions would be about packages and such. Firstly, I would like to ask you to explain a little bit what Pakistan is, because I'm not sure I quite get the idea behind it. So Arch has the AUR, where you have a repository full of files that describe how to build a package that a tool like Make Package can ingest and then spit out a built package at the end. So I created Pakistan long before I joined Rhino Linux or even rolling Rhino remix. And it has the same concept where we have a community style repository full of scripts that people can add, update, remove, stuff like that. And Pakistan itself functions kind of like an AUR helper like Paru or Yeh, where it's just a nice wrapper that can download the package and then do everything else, like building it and installing it, stuff like that. OK, thank you. I see. OK, so sorry, I'm trying to wrap my head around that correctly. And so the next question would be what is instead Rhino PKG? So that's a script that I made that takes all of the package managers that you have installed like Flatpak, Snap, Apped, and Packstall and turns it into just one program that you can use. So you could do Rhino package install steam. And it would show all the different packages relating to steam from all the different repositories that exist. And you can just type in the number that a package corresponds to, and it'll install it from that specific package format. And it can also search and update all those packages in one go. OK, is there any chance I always wonder about this as more of a designer than a developer when I have to deal with Flatpaks and other ways to install the application when you actually present that to the user who doesn't necessarily know what the difference between each one is? How do you not avoid choice overload and such? Or is that not a goal in this context? It really depends on what package is being searched. We do have a nice little UI that goes through, and it'll print out an index number for each package. And then in parentheses, it'll show where the package is coming from. If there's two packages, one on apps and one in PaXTOL that are both steam and just steam, it will tell you the difference between where it's getting the package from. But as of right now, we don't really have a, I guess, there's no solution that we have so far for just overloading the user. It kind of is what you search. Something important to also remember is that because we are on the develop branch, we are not meant for the first Linux user. We are meant for a more experienced Linux user, someone who kind of already knows what we are talking about. Yeah, that totally makes sense and is why I had that. Or is that not important in this context at the end of the question? Because I do see how that. So I think, sorry, go ahead. I mean, I don't know. Rolling Blazer should be used by someone who has at least experienced the stable Linux distribution first and understands how to use it correctly before they dip their feet into a rolling release. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So I think we're roughly half an hour in. I think it's a good moment to step back a little and get some time to answer the questions that have popped up in the chat. So the latest one, I can very quickly reply to why use XFC instead of GNOME. I think this was covered early on. So it's one of the first things I asked. I also see that. Sorry. I mean, I'll just quickly go over that again. But the main reasons are we have a specific vision for the desktop we want to push. And with such a small development team, it is difficult to manage that. And I know some said that they're basically a one-man distro maintainer and they have different additions for their distribution. And that's really good. But I also see that your distribution is arch-based. We're trying to turn Ubuntu into something that it's not. It doesn't really want to be a rolling release. And to add that extra stability, we've got quite a handful of users already. And we want to give them the most stable version possible. And so to add that extra stability, we're only supporting one desktop environment and making sure that it is as bug-free as we can possibly make it rather than giving a bunch of different additions and spreading our development team to fin. But along with that, you also said that why are we making XFC look like GNOME? GNOME wasn't actually the main part of our design choice. I'd say we're more similar to Cosmic by PopOS or MacOS. MacOS was definitely a big inspiration for the design of Unicorn. Do you also want to take a second to reply, see that you wanted to the comments of Xerrolinux? Yeah, so he also mentioned why we chose Ubuntu rather than Debian as a base. There's a good few reasons for that. I'm sure Oren could answer that a lot more eloquently than I can put it. So most simply, Debian is very not easy for a user to set up and doesn't have nearly as many optimizations to their kernel nor to their packages that provide better user experience fixes. While you can technically install Debian packages on Ubuntu, there is often a lot of patches that Ubuntu stacks on top of that. And we felt that we would rather go with the secure and user-friendly packaging than the most untested version of it. So because Debian already is a rolling release, it has SID, but Ubuntu doesn't have that version. So we are making our own version of Debian SID but on Ubuntu. And another thing to add to that is, well, so like Arch and rolling Rhino, and I guess SID are technically what you would call a rolling release, SID is really unstable. Like I used to use it for a year and I did not like it at all because they basically threw the newest package at you and if it didn't have, and if dependencies were missing that weren't the repos yet, then that's just your problem and it's up to you to fix it. And that really would not have been our goal, which is to be, I guess, more of what Arch considers a rolling release where if a package comes in, it's the latest and greatest, but its dependencies are also in the repos when you add them. So yeah. Also, I'm sure Nico would definitely agree with me, but when you've been developing for such a long time, you don't care about tinkering with your system, you just wanna set it up and let it exist. You don't wanna be fixing broken installs or tweaking this and that to have a desktop that you want. And it's part of the reason why I daily drive a MacBook and I know it sounds ridiculous, but as a university student, I crave that reliability right now. And I do also use Rhino Linux, but I also use Windows and I know Oren also uses all three OSs interchangeably, but for a lot of my development work and university work, I'm using a MacBook just because it's so damn reliable that I don't have to ever worry about it. And that's kind of what I wanna bring to Linux. I've spent three years daily driving it with no other OSs installed. And at a certain point, you just get tired of it, breaking or having issues. And I just want to make Rhino Linux or one, like you set it up and once it's done, it's fine. And I actually wanna use that time to talk about a new feature we're bringing to Rhino Linux in the future. I'm not sure when it will be complete, but it's called Rhino deploy. And the essence is it will index the packages you've got installed and the customizations and modifications you made to your system and then put it into a shell file and you can just go to go install Rhino Linux again, run Rhino deploy import and it will read that file and have your system set up immediately from another system. Think of it a lot like a Nix Flake. And this is gonna be, this is not in the near future. By the way, this is kind of on the horizon for us. Yep, that is quite interesting. And I do have to ask, is there anything else you would share about, you would like to share about the future of the project and other things you're planning, maybe not just on the horizon, but even on the shorter time period? Yeah, I could definitely speak a lot about this. We're currently in the works of publishing a document, which is entitled Unicorn Desktop and the Future. And it basically outlines our vision for Unicorn Desktop, the current state of it and where we want to end up with it as a wholly finished product, even though as a rolling place it's gonna be constantly evolving over time. So one thing that we've got planned in the distant future is podiums. It will work a lot like Mac OS stage manager. I've not seen it implemented in Linux yet and that's kind of bugged me as someone who uses stage manager daily. I definitely want this feature added onto the Linux desktop in some way, shape or form. And since no one else has done it, I suppose we should be the ones to do it. Another small thing would be a replacement for the XFC pop-ups. They look quite jarring when compared to the rest of the Unicorn Desktop and the GTK applications that we ship. And so I'd like to kind of replace them and make them look kind of more similar to the ones you'd find on elementary OS, for example. And I'm sure Oren can definitely talk a lot more about future plans that he's got as well. Yeah, in particular, we've been looking a lot at and we recognize the problem of being X11 and not Wayland because Wayland is definitely the preference of Linux users right now. And I also believe Wayland to be the ultimate concluding future of Linux desktops, particularly with mobile integration with Plasma Mobile and with Fosh. Wayland has been working excellently. Rotation looks really smooth. Scaling works great. Frame rate drop is not there versus with X11. I experienced all of those issues. And so we have an ultimate goal of moving to Wayland, but the problem we have there is that XFC is not ready for Wayland yet. And so we've investigated using XFWM for Wayland as our compositor, as well as the updated versions of XFC components that are at 4.19 instead of 4.18 that do have some Wayland support, but I found that it's breaking in a lot of ways. So we have to wait for 4.20 of XFC, which they have promised will bring full Wayland support. And by that point, we can probably move to Wayland, like everyone else, which will hopefully smooth out a lot of issues that we see right now. Another thing I do want to mention is a lot of the components we use for Unicorn Desktop right now are likely never going to get Wayland support. And so when XFC 4.20 drops, we do need to retroactively fork them and implement Wayland support. And so what my basic rule now is, any new thing that we create will should automatically have Wayland support. And then when we have time, work on like PlankDoc forking that and then making a Wayland version of that instead. And another thing in our future for Unicorn would be to replace XF dashboard immediately entirely, just because it's not necessarily easy to integrate into our system and it doesn't have the look and feel that we want to provide. And we've done some modifications to that and already shipped that out to users. And it looks a bit more coherent with Unicorn Desktop, but I wouldn't say it's 100% there yet. And so we will be making our own replacement for XF dashboard. And one of the first things I will say is make it Wayland compatible so that we can just have it work and not have to backport so many things into our new Wayland version of Unicorn, for example. Okay, thank you so much. That was quite a throughout and we're getting very much close to the 40 minutes mark, so I wouldn't want to go too much past that, but I do have to ask the same question that I asked to end the previous interview and that is, could you please tell me, each of you, your favorite dish? By dish, do you mean like food? That is correct. For me, it would likely... Oh, that's such a difficult question. Right, because you can answer very quickly something about the distribution you're working on, but favorite dish, much harder. I'll take the start here. I love myself, a pastrami in Swiss on Marbled Rye with the side of a nice dill pickle. That was so in-depth. That's quite... You knew exactly how much you wanted. A third of a pound. A third of a pound with two tablespoons of something. A third of a pound of pastrami on Marbled Rye with extra Swiss and the side of a dill pickle. I could have waved at exactly 274.5 degrees for five minutes, no more, no less. For me, I'd say I'm quite a big fan of Chinese food and so when I say Chinese food, I mean British cheese takeout, not American Chinese takeout, there is a distinct difference that I remember about blowing up on TikTok at one point. But yeah, I'd have to say crispy chili beef with chips. And when I say chips, I mean fries. I'd have to go with maybe a Smash burger. There's a really good place where I live that makes the best burger that I've ever had. I'm on a quest to find the best burger. You should come here. I've not found it yet. Well, it's here. I do have plans to visit you at some point. It's just expensive getting to America from England. This sound very good. And I will admit that here it's 9 p.m. and I haven't had dinner yet. So that was probably a very risky question to ask. That said, thanks everybody for joining and do let me say again, I'm really sorry about all the technical issues. I promise usually I don't have them, but apparently today was the day my computer decided to give me issues. I was really happy. Thank you for having us. Yeah, I was really happy to have you here and be able to better understand the project. I didn't see enough articles and explanations around about how everything worked together. It was nice to see a coherent explanation. Yeah, thank you for taking the time. Thanks. Yeah, exactly. Thanks for having us. I mean, I'm definitely thankful we're getting the word out here or answering people's questions publicly. I'm very glad it happened on the live stream. We can't edit anything out or change our answers. It has all manufactured PR. Like this is definitely something that a lot of people don't know, but Linux is a very divisive subject and anyone who talks out about it is quite shunned in the Linux community, but the community at times can be quite toxic. And I found quite a bit of support for what we're doing at the same time and it's really refreshing to see that. And I am grateful for everyone's questions. There are a lot of them are quite obvious like why we didn't base on Debbie instead of Ubuntu. And it's a very good question to answer. And I want to thank everyone for their questions and thank you for the time that you've given us. Yep, that was my pleasure. And obviously, since this is very much audio focused content, I will extract the audio and insert it also as a podcast kind of content for anybody who would be interested in hearing all about this whilst, I don't know taking the bus in the mornings or such. So I will now end the live stream and I will thank everybody who joined to listen to this project. If you have any more questions, feel free to join our matrix or Discord flow. I'm sorry we couldn't get round to everyone. Yeah, please join the Discord or the matrix. We'd be happy to answer any questions. And Niko, thank you so much for having us. We'll just leave it in the comment section down below. Give Niko more YouTube recommendations. My pleasure. And of course, if you send me the link, I can also put that.