Ubuntu Update Hack Chat

Rhys Davies and Alan Pope from Canonical will host the Hack Chat on Wednesday, July 22, 2020 at noon Pacific Time.

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Everyone has their favorite brands, covering everything from the clothes they wear to the cars they drive. We see brand loyalty informing all sorts of acquisition decisions, not only in regular consumer life but in technology, too. Brand decisions sort people into broad categories like Mac versus PC, or iPhone versus Android, and can result in spirited discussions of the relative merits of one choice over the others. It's generally well-intentioned, even if it gets a bit personal sometimes.

Perhaps no choice is more personal in hacker circles than which Linux distribution to use. There are tons to choose from, each with their various features and particular pros and cons. Ubuntu has become a very popular choice for Linux aficionados, attracting more than a third of the market. Canonical is the company behind the Debian-based distro, providing editions that run on the desktop, on servers, and on a variety of IoT devices, as well as support and services for large-scale users.

To fill us in on what's new in the world of Ubuntu, Canonical product manager Rhys Davies and developer advocate Alan Pope will stop by the Hack Chat this week. They'll be ready to answer all your questions about the interesting stuff that's going on with Ubuntu, including the recently announced Ubuntu Appliances, easy to install, low maintenance images for Raspberry Pis and PCs that are built for security and simplicity. We'll also talk about snaps, desktops, and whatever else crops up.

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Hack Chat Transcript, Part 1
Dan Maloney • 07/22/2020 at 20:09 • 0 comments

OK, everyone, let's get started! I'm Dan, I'll be your mod today. Thanks everyone for dropping by, we're excited to have Rhys Davies and Alan Pope from Canonical here today to talk about Ubuntu.

Rhys and Alan, care to start us off with a little about yourselves?

Rhys Davies12:01 PM
Thanks Dan :) Hi all, my name is Rhys Davies, I am currently a product manager at Canonical, I look after the appliances, snapcraft, LXD and all of the stuff we're doing with Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi. I've not been a product manager very long, coming up on a year, before I did mechatronics and mechanical engineering stuff. Compared to the folks here I imagine I'm under leveled on the software side of things but I'm trying to learn, I'm a big fan of making things and open source, so, here I am. Aside from this part of my life I enjoy reading, writing and TTRPGs ... hi

Alan Pope12:01 PM
Hello! I'm a 1972-era human meatbag with a fancy for technical stuff. I have worked for Canonical since 2011, and before that was an active community member working on Ubuntu. I think keyboards are the pinnacle of human interface devices. :D

Human, eh? Well, I guess we can let that slide this one time...

deʃhipu12:04 PM
they do seem to become more and more common

Star Lord joined the room.12:07 PM

So while everyone else is furiously typing their questions, I'll throw one out there: can you explain a little about the Appliances concept? Am I right assuming that they're images that are optimized for Raspberry Pi and they're intended for IoT use?

Alan Pope12:08 PM
https://ubuntu.com/appliance is the home page for Ubuntu Appliances, for those following along :)

Rhys Davies12:09 PM
Sure, so yes, they're optimised for Raspberry Pi and Intel NUCs to be run as IoT devices (or appliances) at home

Alan Pope12:09 PM
(we're happy to answer hard questions as well as the soft ones too) :D

Rhys Davies12:10 PM
The idea is developers of those kinds of IoT projects can put their software on Ubuntu.com for the Ubuntu audience and the audiences of said appliances to download and get working on their Pis or NUCs

Rhys Davies12:10 PM
Which is what I imagine everyone here is doing right now afk

franksmcb12:11 PM
Question form the peanut gallery here. Can you give us an update on where the "experimental" status of ZFS and zsys is? Should we be seeing the "experimental" tag removed for 20.10?

Alan Pope12:11 PM
I'm using the Adguard-Home appliance as my home DNS server. It replaces the PiHole RPi I was previously using.

deʃhipu12:11 PM
I have a hard question: whose bright idea was it to try and forcefully shove snaps down everybody's throats?

Alan Pope12:11 PM
@franksmcb Good question. I don't think the team have decided yet on whether we want to go full-on with ZFS or keep it experimental for now.

@Alan Pope - interesting. Does it do a better job than PiHole? I've found mine to be pretty leaky.

Alan Pope12:13 PM
@Dan Maloney The main reason I prefer AdGuard + Ubuntu Core is it all auto updates on my schedule, (overnight when we're all asleep) and so it's pretty much zero maintenance for me. Nothing against PiHole at all, ran that for years.

Alan Pope12:14 PM
@deʃhipu Hah! I don't accept the premise of the question. For most users snaps vs debs is just one package format verses another, it's not a super pressingly important thing they care about. Some technical users do, for sure. Just like people have opinions about X vs Wayland and GNOME vs KDE.

Rob Anderson joined the room.12:14 PM

Alan Pope12:14 PM
There's real value to users and developers to using a snap to deliver software though. Developers can publish and update quickly, users get a diverse array of up to date software.

deʃhipu12:15 PM
@Alan Pope I think "forcefully" is the key word here

Alan Pope12:15 PM
Sure, there's bugs, no software is bug free, and we're pretty aware of what the most important ones to work on are, we're listening to users.

Alan Pope12:15 PM
@deʃhipu I'm not coming around your house and putting...
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