FLOSS-798

Jonathan: Hey folks, this week Rob joins me and we talk with Carl Richel, the head honcho over at System76. We chat about their new desktop, Cosmic, we talk Rust, we talk System76 hardware, and even a little bit about Intel and AMD. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 798, recorded Tuesday, August 27th.

It is time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we have a treat today. I know I'm excited about our guests most of the time, but I'm extra excited today because we're talking with Carl Richel about System76, about Cosmic, about.

All kinds of stuff. I'm sure we're gonna talk Russ. We're gonna talk Wayland. We're going to talk the new cosmic desktop, which the alpha is out. It's great. Before we get him, let's talk with our co host. And today we have, we have Rob, we have the, the cereal desktop, the, the, the distro hopper, which is why Rob is on the show today, because I, I was, I was pretty confident that I could talk him into hopping, at least in a virtual machine over to the new cosmic alpha, Rob, welcome.

Hello, hello. Hey! We've been watching Cosmic for a long time now, haven't we?

Rob: We have. Been all curiously interested in all the places they've been going.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think so they they made it's oh, it's been like a year ago now carl will be able to tell us I'm sure exactly how long it's been but it's been like a year ago now They made their initial announcement and the things that that really caught my attention right away are one They're getting away from gnome, which i'm I I like the pop os desktop, but i'm not a huge gnome fan two they were going to rust base, which I think rust is just cool and three they're like And because we're doing Wayland and we're building it from the ground up, we're going to do HDR.

And I'm like, Oh, HDR is cool too. So like from the initial announcement, they had me hooked. And I've just been kind of eagerly awaiting the whole time. Like, Oh, when's it going to be ready? When's it going to be ready? Oh, now you, you gave it a

Rob: test drive, didn't you? I have I've given a test drive on a VM. I, I was really hoping to try it out on bare metal before the show, but you know, time flies and it gets away from me.

Jonathan: Yes, day job and family and all kinds of other stuff going on. And then there's that other show that we keep you busy with too. So we have a lot, but it looks really good. It looks really good. And even in a VM, it does. All right, let's, let's let's go ahead and bring, bring Carl on. Obviously the guy that knows what's really going on.

Carl, welcome to the show.

Carl: Thanks for having

Jonathan: me. Yeah, thanks for being here. This is, oh, this is going to be fun. I, we, we had Carl on back when we were still on the Twit Network. And Leo was so, so excited to be able to talk that he's like, Oh, I want to co host too. And so, you know, it was Doc and me and Leo all co hosting.

Well, I mean, Doc was the main host and then Leo was kind of the main host because it's Leo. But it's, it's great to have you back. And it's great. It's great to chat about, you know. First off, what's happened since then, but I think mainly what everybody's curious about what I'm curious about. So let's talk cosmic and let's

Carl: Yeah, I love to talk cosmic.

So Thanks for having me on to chat about it. I was thinking about the last show We were on together too with that with Leo and I remember distinctly he has he has a one of our darted pro laptops And he, he apologized for running Linux Mint on it, I think. Oh, that's But we're just happy, we're just happy when Linux works that way.

We, we're here to make Linux work on our products, whether it's Pop or Mint or, or Bootery or, or Arch.

Jonathan: Yeah. So I'm actually, I do the show on an HP Dev1, which is not quite your hardware, but it's also pretty much your hardware from what I understand, but running Pop! OS on it still. And I've had a Yeah. Yeah.

99 percent great experience with it. There's something weird with the power charge circuitry, but we work around that we make it work anyways

Carl: Yeah, that was a great product and a great collaboration of the folks at HP. You were really great to work with.

Jonathan: Yeah

Carl: They're very professional. I think Working with them on dev one Also helped us refine POP 2204, because that was coming out at that time.

And so we had just more people with different perspectives looking at what we were building and, and really helped, helped sharpen that, that operating system release.

Jonathan: Yeah. Okay. I didn't expect to get to this question so early, but it, it really leads into it. You did the collaboration with HP and there's, there's another company out there that I think might be really interesting to do a collaboration with.

And that's framework. And I'm, I'm just curious, like, do you, do you have opinions on framework? You consider them a competitor and have you ever thought about that? Like, I wonder if we could do something similar with the framework laptop.

Carl: Oh, I've been, having been in the hardware business for now.

Almost 19 years. I know I know how challenging it is and I, I think it's really admirable how well they've done getting into the market and doing a lot of creative work around right to repair. We have, we have that. But very much in common since day six and, and, and framework both care a lot about their about a user's right to repair, but their ownership over their products.

So so I think I congratulate them on, on doing something that I know very well, how hard it is to do, and they've done a fantastic job. So, so good for them.

Jonathan: Yeah. I, I, I kind of, I can envision a future where it's like either, you know, system 76 makes. One of the embedded main boards that people can put into a framework laptop or framework sells a system 76 version or maybe even makes cosmic, you know, maybe as simple as making cosmic a ship option that you can buy one of our laptops, you can put system 76 cosmic on it.

And everybody wins. Like it just, it, there, there seems like there's gotta be, there's gotta be some way that the cross pollination and that can happen.

Carl: I think that would be possible. There's, I'm very interested in modular mobile devices. So perhaps at a level, A little bit further than where framework currently goes, but very similar in that we have a main board that can be used across a number of different devices.

And you essentially connect daughter boards to that main board for your port layouts, and that might be used for a desktop or a laptop or any other kind of device. I think it takes a lot of creative engineering to kind of compete at a very high level and do that with really good thermals in a mobile platform.

But I mean, doing hard things is the kind of stuff we're interested in.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So let's, let's shift gears a little bit. Let's talk Cosmic. What was, what was the point where you guys realized, okay, we need to, you have, you have Pop! OS, which is a very, very heavily, heavily customized.

Ubuntu, and it's a very heavily customized GNOME. And at some point you guys made the decision that GNOME is just not cutting it anymore. I'm curious what, what that looked like. What was, what was the point where this, this harebrained scheme as it were, popped up where it's like, we need to, we need to start from scratch on this.

Yeah, why? Yes.

Carl: Yeah. Why? Okay. Well, it's a long, it's a long story, so I guess I have to decide where to even start, but at the best place is probably with why we decided to make the changes we wanted to make to gnome in the first place. We were. All of our engineers that were working on the Pop OS were using i3 at the time.

When they were using i3, I got became interested in it. And so I started using Sway. Then we were getting calls in our tech support department. I said, Hey, does I3 and Sway run on, on Pop OS or how do I set up I3 on Pop OS? And this was not just a one or two requests. This was extremely common. It was, it was coming in regularly.

Then I went to a, A firmware conference at Google for Open Firmware, which we do a lot of work in that area. And so we were giving a talk at the conference and everyone at the conference was using a tiling window. It became clear to us at that point that what we were providing at PopOS out of the box was not what our customers needed.

So in response to that, we decided to build the extensions we built into Gnome, which, which added auto tiling added a different UX in general with a launcher and application library and a doc. And we were adapting for some things we're writing new, new software for others. We were adapting extensions like dash to doc to provide the user experience that we wanted.

Then we found our users were craving and our customers were craving. So it all started with just the desire to. Respond to what our customers want and build something that they wanted. The next. Step was to try to make that more official. And we wanted to prove what we were doing and know, and then see if we can make more official.

We, we had a, a UX architects or a UX architect. Maria was on the design team. I had gone to a number of quad X and. And over time, it just became clear that our vision for the desktop, and we pitched the idea that you could take, we could kind of separate the idea that the UX is what we And in reality, it's a whole bunch of different pieces that you put together to create a holistic experience.

And we thought that Noam could perhaps take the, take the perspective that SimCity 6 cou...