Today it's 5%. It's two and a half times greater.
And I think that we're reaching a tipping point. So
to meet that tipping point, we also need to match the
expectations of people who are coming from commercial software and
quite frankly, up the game and up the support
mechanisms and provide the capabilities the proprietary users
are really looking for. And that is stability and reliability
and validation. Hey, Frank here. I just want to give a little bit of
context for today's episode. It's basically not really a
data or AI talk per se, but it is something
that I think that the community in general needs to start thinking
about. The Windows that we know and love
isn't really a thing anymore. And increasingly I'm seeing
a lot of workloads and developers and AI
engineers shift away from Windows into
the Mac or Linux ecosystems.
Now, what this means for you practically is. I get it, Linux can
be a little intimidating at first, particularly on the desktop, but
we have the opportunity to speak with someone who is
really alleviating that. So listen with an open mind and keep
in mind that the future may not have a start menu on it.
Hello and welcome back to Data Driven, the podcast. We explore the emerging field of
data, AI and data engineering. Now,
Andy couldn't make it today, so with me, I have the most
quantum curious person I know. But today we'll be talking about AI and data
and hardware. So who do we have talking to us today? Candace?
Today we're going to be speaking with Michael Makowski, and
he is a really fascinating guest because he sits at the
intersection of user experience, open
source development, Linux and the evolution of web
applications. He is an author of single web
applications and a longtime advocate for SPA
architecture. And I'm really, really excited to dig in
deep about what he's doing now. Very cool. Well, welcome to the
show, Mike. Hey, thanks. I appreciate it. No problem.
Spa. So you like to spend time at the spa? Well,
I did back in the day, although recently
with the introduction of AI exploitation
tools. They're very popular in Hollywood, from what I understand,
although maybe they're applied a different way there. But as far
as websites are concerned, the more active your website
is today, the more likely it is to get
exploited, especially if you're using something like WordPress. I
spent some time in the security space,
actually about four years in Silicon Valley, and
the number one attack vector for a
lot of companies was WordPress.
So our website actually is all static these
days. So after writing an spa book, and there are great
things you can do with an spa, basically Having a web application as
opposed to a website. But for
what we're doing today, which is selling validated
Linux systems with a fully fleshed out
web infrastructure, we don't have a need
for having a web application. So
you don't have a need for it and you value
privacy and security then. I'm a big fan of
doing static web pages, which is what we're doing now.
Interesting. So you, you make and ship
Linux laptops. Is that high performance Linux laptops? Is that a
correct statement? Yes, we actually do arrange.
We're launching this week. Hopefully we'll get everything
pulled together. Major initiative which we've
actually had under the way. We're now going into our second month on that
and then we're launching, at least depending on
how you want to count it, six new or refresh
models. So with the latest
2.26.04
Kubuntu operating system, which we
provided stipends for the developers and then directly help
develop and also we provide hardware and then
we're a patron for kde, so we get to pay a lot of
different ways to help make sure that we've got a really
reliable system. And then the
other way that we are moving the needle forward
for validated Linux systems is by
announcing a bulletproof KDE
initiative. That's our working title. We don't know exactly if that's
going to be what sticks for the actual press releases, but
that's a $100,000 plus commitment
to KDE for the next three years to ensure that we
have a stable long term support release on
KDE the desktop. And this is going to
benefit lots of companies and organizations that
use kde. A great example. You'll see that if
you look around NASA that the desktop they offer now running is KDE.
And of course we have Fortune 500 companies
that use our systems and AI companies
and all those folks are going to benefit. But basically anybody
that uses KDE and wants to use the LTS
release will get a big boost. And then of course
we do have a little, what is it, enlightened self
interest involved with this because you know, we're funding that. So hopefully it's going to
drive interest to the systems we produce
and so that we can build a virtuous cycle so that
we can continue to build an ecosystem that
meets or exceeds the best proprietary systems
available, but without all the spyware and without
all the surveillance and all the phoning home and
the age verification APIs that are basically
a thinly veiled attempt to have a
national ID system in place. You know, a lot of people
are really recoiling against all the Big Brother activities
that are occurring currently. And we
have recoiled against that for a long time. But
it's getting so overbearing these days that we're seeing
an extreme amount of interest. Linux usage just a few years
ago was 2% on the desktop, today it's 5%,
it's two and a half times greater. And I think that we're reaching
a tipping point. So to meet
that tipping point, we also need to match the expectations of people
who are coming from commercial software and quite frankly up the
game and up the support mechanisms and provide the
capabilities the proprietary users are really looking for.
And that is stability and reliability and validation.
And so Candice has been involved with me on this for a
seven year journey and she knows that we've been beating that drum
for a long time. But I think that sometimes you just keep on doing
what you're doing and then, you know, the whole world shifts
and you're there to take advantage of it. So I get a
feeling that we're around that zone right now. No, 100%.
And I think that, you know, the privacy story as you look at, you know,
and most of our listeners are Windows users, I would say
with some Linux experience. So KDE is the desktop environment,
is that. Yes, that runs on top of any distro
Linux or just Ubuntu or just certain ones.
It runs on virtually any build
of Linux. Okay. But the.
It's one of those things that's in a certain extent like
Windows in that it doesn't like to
share the OS with other desktops.
Right. Actually, that's kind of the wrong term. It's more like the other way around.
Certain desktops don't play well with other desktops. So like certain
kernels don't play along with certain desktop
experiences. No, kernel is very lower
level. Yeah, well, not lower level. It's. But it
is very
generic in the respect that it's a component
that everybody works with. What you run into trouble with
is, you'll remember back in the day when they had
ZR dos, you know, I'm going way back here, so
that's a lot goes way back. Yeah, yeah. We're losing about three quarters of your
audience right now. But bear with me, back in the day,
Gary Kildall from Digital Research created
ZR dos, which was dos but with stability
and performance. And it was better than
Ms. DOS by almost any
measurable factor. And it gained a lot of
popularity. The problem was that Microsoft
didn't like it. So what Billy and his friends did
was they decided to make it incompatible
for their Windows program. Windows 95
ran perfect on it until they decided to make it not run perfect.
And so it's. Now, not everybody
is so nefarious as that. But if
you don't build your desktop system to work with
the underlying layers, you're going to have problems or if
you create like services that conflict. And
that's what indeed can happen with
certain other desktop systems in Linux.
So the most notorious one, and I'm not saying that this is
an example of any sort of
malfeasance, it's just that the GNOME
desktop environment has a lot of services
that are required by GNOME that
don't play well with other desktop systems.
And I'm certain it goes with other ways as
well. But. So that's the reason why you see distributions that, that only
ship one or two desktop environments. Instead of
giving you 20 to choose from if you want to like go out and play
with a bunch of them, it's because they conflict. And
again not because people have malfeasance in their heart, but
because of the fact that nobody actually tests to make
sure that the interplay actually is going to
work out the way you want it to. I think we've probably done
a lot more than the average bear in that respect where we've actually identified
the conflicting services, but nobody's paying us,
quite frankly, to make those
conflicts go away. Or nobody's paying Gnome or
KDE to make sure those conflicts go away. There's really not
much of an incentive to change that because people who
use a certain desktop tend to stick with it. It's kind of like they
choose a type of cigarette and they stick with it too. Maybe not, maybe not.
The best example, they picked a favorite type of soda. How about
that? Yeah, there we go. Exactly. Pepsi or Coke? There we go. Pepsi or
Coke or Dr. Pepper. Yeah, so
what? I think you're absolutely right. I think there's a.
Something is rotten in the state of Windows land. We have a lot of folks
here who are Microsoft centric, who do listen. And
if they've been following me, they know that I've kind of gone. I've gone
rogue, right? Because Windows 11
has really pushed me over the edge in terms of the decisions that were made,
the usability and when you start peeling back the
curtain behind the privacy story on Windows 11, certainly the home version
Pro is not as bad. Enterprise is a little bit less bad. It's
painting a picture. I really don't like. Right. My, my beef was, you
know, if you look at my office, I got a lot of equipment and
you know, because of an arbitrary decision made in Redmond,
most of this will not run Windows 11. And
that really made me mad. I was going to use other words, but
I think Windows 11. And again, I used to be a Microsoft
MVP. I used to be a Microsoft employee twice
and I doubt that I'll be reinvited for the MVP program
anytime soon. But I just take issues with
some of the decisions that were made with Windows. Now I haven't seen what
they announced at build this week but or last week,
but I'm just very much annoyed and
I think that Windows choices,
be they what they are, I think has really driven Linux
adoption. You mentioned Linux on the desktop has
doubled. I don't think it's a coincidence that Windows 11 has drove
away a lot of hardcore Windows users like me. Right. Like, I mean I,
for me to, you know, obviously I, you know, my day job is at Red
Hat now. You can see the fedora there. Right. But you know, for the longest
time I was the only person on my team that had a Windows laptop.
Right. But with the rise of AI development tools
being fairly agnostic in terms of what
platform they're on, almost to the point now where they're, they recommend
Mac or Linux and if you have a Windows device they
actually say you probably should run this inside WSL or Windows subsystem for
Linux. I think that you're right. I think we are on the cusp
of an inflection point of Windows.
Certainly in the AI field, if you're an AI developer, it's almost
exclusively Macintosh, I would say.
Well, we have a lot of companies
that develop for AI that use our systems.
Right. There's a saying in Silicon Valley
which is nobody deploys to Mac.
So when you really think about it, the
tools have to first and foremost be
Linux compatible and Linux proven and
Linux battle tested. Right. Mac is popular because
got a trophy status and they also are
popular now because of the unified memory mechanism. They
have relatively weak GPUs compared to the
top end Nvidia GPUs obviously. But because
they have unified memory that can overcome that
disadvantage and for certain models can actually run faster.
Now with the advent of AMD processors as
well as now the latest Panther Lake intel
processors, Those now have BPIGPUs in them as
well. Again, they don't touch the Nvidia in
terms of the level of performance
available. But again for certain models, say
running llama from my understanding, and I'm not an expert here, so if
I sound foolish, it's because I am.
But the. For certain
models, Llama, for example, will work better because you can
have a memory window of 128
gigabytes, for example, instead of being limited to 16 or 24
gigabytes on an Nvidia system. On the other hand, you know when you got a
5090 and you want to start swapping stuff out, if your model is
the right structure, that 59 is going to decimate anything
else. But I think the reason why you're seeing people developing
on Mac for models that will eventually be
deployed, typically on Linux Nvidia
systems, is because of the fact that they,
they can have a
proprietary quality,
user experience and reliability and
then also have reasonable performance when working with their
model. Sometimes better performance working with their model,
although again, I don't think that tends to be deployed. But I'm
not an expert in the deployment arena. I just know what our customers
buy and what they tell me. Well, no, I mean,
so as someone who is in AI space, I will say that
unified memory, I think is what makes the Apple Silicon really appealing.
And I also have a DGX Spark, which that's also. It's kind of claim to
fame is that it's unified memory, right? Oh yeah. And you're right, like depending on
the actual chip you can get more done,
but very often the VRAM that's
available to you or the RAM that's available to the video card
is also a blocker too. Right. So the fact that you can have a unified
memory space I think is a huge deal. And you're even seeing Microsoft follow
suit with this with their new I think RTX Spark. I think that's what it's
called. Yeah, I think that's kind of the future.
But yeah. So tell me about some of the AI specific hardware.
You have me curious. Well, I can show you what we have that
people. Yeah. And then we'll let Candace ask, ask questions because I'm hogging away. We
have lots of companies that buy hardware
that. And I'll show you the heavyweight stuff.
Let's see. Yeah, we're actually, like I said,
going to be launching new versions of these systems. But
I'll, I'll see if I can share a.
Let's go to our website, be able to share your screen and I'll,
I'll talk through it for those that are listening.
Yeah, you just go, ooh, wow, you can do
that. Take my money. Yeah, that's my recommendation.
Yeah, take my money. Yeah, you can keep doing that.
Let's see. Share and let's try
a home tab. There we go. And there we go.
If those who are listening and they want to see this, we are on YouTube.
Just check the show notes. I always link the YouTube version. Sorry, cut you
off. That's it. No, no, you didn't cut me off. Interesting thing about doing
these web pages, by the way, is that I
think it's a pretty fascinating thing here. But if you look at these
graphics here, right? And then I'm going to change this to a
dark theme right now. So the OS is changing to the dark theme
and. Oh, that's on a local host. Let's do it. Let's go to the actual.
I was showing the development model. That's the reason why that broke.
So here's the actual production site. But what's pretty
fascinating about this that you never think about is that these are
mostly black, you know, very dark machines, right. But
if you now switch over to a light view, you
may not notice it. But these, the chassis here just bumped up
about two levels of lightness in the gray area.
And it's a kind of funny thing because the, you
put something in a white room and it makes the whole thing lighter.
Those things you don't just run into unless you're, I
guess, selling black computers on the Internet. So let's take a
look at a couple of the products that we have and the ones that are
popular for AI. So this is the, this is
the beast. And it is a 5090
with 24 gigabytes of video RAM. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And then it's got up to 192 gigabytes of
RAM. So I guess 2000, $2500 of RAM
at wholesale these days that you put into that. It's got an 18 inch
screen, 2560 by 1600, which is a beautiful
screen. It's DCIP3, 100% and
it's just a beast. It's got a subwoofer in it for, you know. Oh, wow.
Crying out loud. There we go. I almost slipped up there.
So. And the, the subwoofer does sound good. So
you can get your jam on when you're loading up
your, oh, I don't know what 30 billion
parameter model. See, I might be sounding ignorant here now too,
but yeah, while you're loading up your model and this one's real popular
with ML. What's the,
what's the 5090 vram?
24 gigabytes. Oh yeah, you can do, you can do some serious damage with
that. Yeah. So.
And it's got the 24 core. The new version coming
out is the. And this was actually recommended
by Wired magazine as the best Linux
laptop for performance. And the next generation is
the 2090 HX which gets it about a 6 to
15% bump in single and multi core
performance. The GPU remains the same,
but that gives incredible performance as well. So pardon
my ignorance, but one of the, one of the screenshots that kind of cycled
through was a game. Yes, obviously,
obviously anyone buying this would buy it for serious business purposes. But what
is the state of gaming on Linux these days? I've
heard things kind of mixed and is Kubuntu also what is
based on the Stream Deck or Steam Deck is
not what the Steam deck is based on. Steam Deck is
a custom version of Arch
Linux that uses a non
mutable version. It's designed to be
an appliance, not a general purpose computer.
And there are some alluring aspects of that.
Obviously if it's designed to be an appliance, that means that the end user
is unable to easily break it. The
downside to that is that the end user is
unable to easily add system level services
to the system. So. So if you want to run a database for example,
and have a multi user system, well, you're probably kind of out of luck. But
then again you're running a Steam Deck. You're not. It's something that you hold in
your hands. Well, it's like an Xbox, right? Like a PlayStation.
Yeah. They by the way run KDE Linux and
I'm sorry, KDE Linux, they're running the KDE desktop on that as well.
Gotcha. Okay. That's where I saw it because in case people are wondering what's Frank
talking about? And again I'm not a Linux guru. I, one of my
co workers said I speak Linux with a Windows accent. The. When you
go to kde.org, one of the devices on there is. You're, you're on that
page and. But next to your logo,
a couple of items down is, is the Steam deck. So I
noticed that like. And I noticed that Linux gaming has really taken
off. Right. It used to be like good luck with that.
I think it used to be. Now it's. Now I would say again this is
just based on conjecture and I may sound like an idiot now, but I would
say if you want to play a triple A game, it's probably a
5050 shot that it will run on Linux. I
think it's better than that even really. At least if it's a. If
it's a triple. If it's a triple a game
like if you want to run something like Grand
Theft Auto, one of my favorite Grand Theft Auto 5.
So almost certainly you can run that.
Okay. The biggest challenge right now with
gaming on Linux is not a technical issue
because because
of Steam's investment
in that aspect, they've created a
runtime environment that is not a
translator, but is an
API layer that Windows programs can run
and say, I want to make this video call. And it
works the same on the Linux system as it does on
Windows. So it's not running through a
like Rosetta Stone translation layer. It's
running in a virtual environment that then makes
calls out to local
resources and they just work. So
if you can imagine you in Windows, and
this is a very simple example of this, and if any
of your readers want to pick apart my explanation, have at it. But
I think in a grand sense this is correct.
When you're on Windows and you want
to list the files in a directory, you type in dir. Correct.
And when you're on Linux and you want to type or list files in a
directory, you use ls. And the layer
which is called WINE that is used by
Steam, it basically aliases
LS for dir. And so. So that's what WINE is.
Okay. In fact, WINE is something along like
Wine is not an emulator. It's one of those recursive
acronyms, I believe, that plague us to this day.
Find is not elm. Yeah, yeah, stuff like that.
The whole point is that it's a layer that instead of
creating a whole new emulation environment and having to recompile
stuff, it just takes the executable and allows it to run.
And then when it asks for a DirectX call, there
is a. Actually a repointer that occurs
that allows that to work. I think DirectX
has fallen out of favor in for a lot of
games they just go right to Vulcan. And Vulcan is native to
Linux, so there doesn't even have to be a translation. There are
a number of AAA games that actually run faster on Linux than they do on
Windows. Especially now that you have all those background services running
on Windows 11 to take snapshots and send them to Lord knows
where or to drive, you know, you have to have that background service so that
you can get advertisements in your system settings
configuration or get advertisements in your Start menu
and you know those are important. So you can't turn Those off. No,
yeah, yeah, people. And that's actually driving
Linux to be more power efficient. We're able to get longer
battery lives on Linux, then you are able to get on
Windows, even though Windows has such
fantastic cross device driver support.
You can't bring the CPU necessarily
down to the sleep level that you want it to if it's
constantly calling all these background services. So
through some tweaks we're able to be competitive or even better than
Windows as far as battery usage and battery life on
a number of our systems. So you've already
listed a couple of the truly competitive advantages
for someone who's considering gaming the gaming
platform they want to use. That's exciting. It's
actually very exciting. What else do you think would surprise people the most
about the current state of game compatibility, performance and
overall user experience when considering
Linux as their primary gaming platform? Well, I do want
to answer one thing that is a negative
for Linux and it's not because of Linux, it's because of the game companies
and the Sweeneys of the world. And that is
what's a Sweeney? Sweeney runs
the company, I believe, that creates Fortnite.
Oh, okay, okay. So you've got on one hand
the Steam team that
wants to get out from under the yoke of Microsoft and they
went and did something amazingly
proactive with releasing their Steam deck running Linux,
not Windows, you have
that side of it and then the other side you have game companies that want
to make sure that their intellectual property
locked down and the weather locking that down is by using
kernel level anti cheat mechanisms.
And from my understanding what that means is that
they're actually running in kernel space
code that is meant to prevent people from
cheating on massively multiplayer
games. So mm pgs,
you can tell I'm a real gamer, but that is a downside that
MMPGs are not always as well
supported or not supported officially by the game studios.
And the on the flip side,
the fact that you're running code at the kernel level on
your Windows system is going to be an
incredible vector for somebody probably real
soon to own a lot
of Windows systems. Right? Because
people who just want a game are going to download whatever, they're not
going to go and review the source code
for the kernel code that's running in Windows. And
Lord knows you probably couldn't do that if you wanted to because it's certainly
protected under 3 NDAs and a couple of
licenses that have been created for that
purpose. And so you're just
basically adding mystery code on top of a system
that is built for surveillance. And so now
what's going to happen when you get into that and then what's going to happen
when commercial OSes are going to be
required to effectively tap into a national
ID database for the save the Children
effort for age verification? That's their vector.
Now you're going to have somebody running so they can play their
favorite mmpg. They're going to have running kernel level
code that somebody with Claude code is going
to be able to dissect and find a backdoor for.
Once they get into the kernel level they own the system. Now
you have all these wonderful tools and APIs available at
the the kernel level and the user space level that allow
you to go in and basically docs anybody
And I don't want to be part of that. So I guess the
short or the long answer because I've made this long
is that you can't game everything because
of these kernel level anti cheat as well as other anti
cheat mechanisms that you can't get anything but Windows.
But you have to ask yourself do you really want to be
putting those things on your system because of the security
implementation. Sorry,
implications, Implications. There we go. My
mind was trying to throw in an extra syllable there but the security
implications that you're exposing
yourself to so sounds dangerous.
Yeah, you're right.
I think the whole national ID thing is a
whole other can of fish can of worms to open.
But you're right just from an operational security point of view, if these
things are running in kernel mode. For those who don't know kernel mode an error
in kernel node is what caused the crowdstrike issue. That was
two summers ago and there are very good reasons
to run things in kernel mode. But I have a hard time thinking that the
risk of
cheat prevention. I don't know if it raises to that level in my
opinion. Right. And I think.
Do gamers. Are gamers aware of this or. And I know I don't want to
make this all about gamers because even though it's cool but these are high performance
systems. Right. But so sorry about that but do gamers
know the risks involved? I
don't think all of them do. Certainly some do.
Right. I would say that people that have
been ardent Windows users
for a long time like Linus Text tips. Right, right. Right
out of Canada they just did their Linux challenge which seems to
be like a yearly thing for them now or once every few years anyway.
I've done a few of them now and maybe
three. I don't follow that closely but
this last Time around, you know, he had his typical, I'm
moving to a different platform problems. And
in previous challenges, if
he ran to a wall, he was. And he's actually on the record saying this.
He said, when I ran to the wall, I just threw my hands up and
said, well, I'm just going back to Windows. He said, but now with all the
trouble that I'm having with Windows right now with security and
root level anti cheat and stuff like that, he knows what's going
on there. And he's like, now I am
motivated to put in the effort to migrate
to something else because this is.
This is just getting to be too much of a pain point. So.
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, here's, by the way, the page that you mentioned
on kde. So they do ship these around to be fair to people.
So sometimes we're at the very top, sometimes we're near the bottom
here. So I guess we. I mean, next time around
we'll be at the top again. So we'll see.
Maybe they're just trying to get more money from you. Who knows?
We're a big contributor. I think we're one of the. I
wouldn't say we're the largest contributor to kde, but I think we're
now moving towards the upper echelon because. Okay, we're a patreon. I'm just
joking. I'm just joking. I don't want to. I don't want to start any fights.
I don't want to start any trouble. Oh, no, no, no. The initiative that I
was talking about, though, is the bulletproof KDE initiative that.
Yeah, working title. That's where we're basically
freezing KDE at a specific version and then
we are pro providing them. And I won't get into all the
details, but we're setting up a continuous
integration environment and where we're able to
do automated tests within the data center. It's in
Finland. And then we work with an international team
for identifying. We manage the list
of key paper cuts and. And then
we pay them to help shepherd getting
those things fixed. And we work with a Kubuntu team, which we also provide
stipends for, to make sure that those get backported to
the release. So if you buy one of our systems, not only do we continually
test things like kernels and drivers before you
ever see it, to make sure that it always works. So we're kind of
like your remote IT department. Right? You know how, like, with your IT
department, you don't get an image until they verified it? Well, we
verify that we. Oh, that's pretty cool.
Yeah. So we actually, if you want to take a look at
what we verify, I'll share this tab instead. If you get a.
This is probably a good way to put it, but here let's just go to
support and you can look at the
system support and it walks
through everything that we do from hardware selection to
making sure. Like making sure that the dual ethernet
on the ZR Gen 2 which is coming up,
or the big beast we just looked at, making sure those work,
making sure three monitors work on sleep and
resume etc, we make sure that's there. We make sure the
kernel updates always work and that we have about 150
major KPCs that we go through. We make sure
that the Nvidia machine learning language, sorry,
machine learning libraries are available
and all these, which for non Linux people that's a
massive pain point. I will say making sure you get that
working like. No, that part of the reason why I
chose to get the Nvidia, the gtx, the DGX Spark.
Yep. Was that it was made by Nvidia and Nvidia
would be on the hook to supply those drivers.
So hold that thought because I want to. I want to come back to Nvidia
and Linux in a few minutes, but go ahead. Sorry. Well, it's all right. We
just. We spent the last. On the ZR Gen 1
and the M2 Gen 7. We
spent about 150 hours of development time on
creating and packaging everything for those
Nvidia drivers and the machine learning libraries.
It was a. That. That is not normally the amount that we
spend, but because we do support the machine
learning libraries and this was with Ubuntu
24.04. There were a lot of challenges
this time around. I think it's partially due to the newness
of the hardware and also due to the fact that there's more of an
emphasis on commercial hardware than they
used to have versus consumer hardware.
But in any event, setting all those things up, adding the
right repositories from Nvidia and then pinning to the right
machine learning and inference libraries is
a lot of work. And if you buy from us, you
outsource that. So we test that
before every kernel upgrade and we test that for every major
upgrade. For the Nvidias we actually have an
Nvidia meta package that we create that's validated for your
hardware. We also have a kernel which is spun
off of the mainline Ubuntu kernel, but
we will advance patch stuff that
we then upstream to the mainline kernel or to the Ubuntu
kernel that allows say proper hardware
integration or sound routing and stuff like that. So when you get
the system, you open it up, you turn it on
and everything works. And then it continues to work for the
entire support window. And the standard support window is three years.
So we keep bench models and we validate every
single model that's been released and last sold in the last three
years. So when you buy a system, you typically get three and a
half to four years of support
in basically IT team support for your system.
And then by the time you go off of that support, generally
everything is upstreamed anyway. So. But
it's. That's the reason why companies buy from us for
this purpose. So the other thing we do here,
and I'll change the sharing here because you'll. Is there's a lot of
integration that we do that is
people ask us are we a hardware company or a software company?
We're really a software company that does hardware because we have
to. Interesting.
Yeah. The best way to describe that, I would say is that when you buy
a Mac you get a full ecosystem
and you have a few key pieces of hardware
that they continuously integrate for. And so I
don't think anyone's going to argue that Macs are more reliable than Windows
systems because of the. And it's because of the limited hardware
and the fact that Apple does continue
for a number of years to do basically what we're doing, which
is they have a limited amount of hardware and they have
a limited amount of software. It's a vast support
surface, but it's manageable. And we're
doing the same thing for Linux is that that Apple is doing for their
proprietary os. But we have the advantage of being Linux native.
That is very valuable if you're deploying to Linux
as opposed to deploying to macOS. Yeah, that's
our philosophy. The other thing that you'll see and we're in
kind of transition here, so. And I'm actually gonna. This is the 26
out of 4 development. I'm in an alpha system. So if something
breaks here, don't go around and point say, hey look, they're
shipping broken stuff. This stuff isn't shipping for another. We're planning on
two to three weeks. Two weeks would be the very minimum. Probably three
weeks we'll be shipping once all the bugs are worked out. But
here's an example though of if you go to like support here,
we have all of these. Pretty much anything that you want to do
that's a workflow, but. And
so if you look at like Linux help, you can go to Chat
GDP and have it lie to you for six or seven iterations
on a question, or you can go to a forum
or a bug report and try to figure out how to get something done.
And we've all had the experience where it's kind of similar to Chat
gdp where it'll lie to you numerous times and hallucinate
until you kind of have to know where you're going to get the correct
answer. Or you could just go here and get a correct answer right off
the bat. Because it's tested for your system, so
it's tested for the OS for your system. So if you want to connect to
a phone, you can see that this is tested for a
previous operating system that's still supported. It's also verified
on the current one because we actually have people to go and test the
entire procedure on the OS
with the drivers that are in place. So
interesting. You can, you know, let's say I want to set up a
vpn. So you just go here, press VPN and
oh, look, I can connect to a VPN. And there you are,
VPNs everywhere. There's Taylor Swift. I was wondering when she was going
to show up. And this will actually walk you through setting
up a VPN completely for your system. And this
is a amalgamation of
over here running a Wireguard server
or installing OpenVPN and configuring everything
in an optimal fashion for your system
if you want to know how to do things right. And it's a
common workflow, we probably already have it here and
it's been tested for you. One of the things
that we do that our customers really like
is we make sure that they don't have Franken systems.
So you see that with a lot of people that are using Chat GDP
or using forms and stuff like that, they end up finding
suboptimal solutions after
maybe breaking their system a couple of times. Then they copy and
paste something to a configuration file somewhere and it works kind
of well enough and they limp along with it and they're afraid to touch it
because I might break it again. And then they have to reinstall the OS
for one reason or another or move to a different machine and they have no
idea what they did. If you contrast that to what we
do is that we end up finding those solutions
and we'll create them into this documentation. But
the way that we run the company is we actually push those
changes up into software so that you just
update your packages and. And those configurations are
done for you in a repeatable fashion, again, like an IT
department. So we even have
a pitch deck that actually shows how we do that. And
so our goal is always to move everything up the stack. Because
if you look at compliance, people doing the
right thing, if you put the stuff into the packages
that people update, their compliance is 100%.
If you put it in documentation, if you're lucky,
you might get 50% compliance or 30% compliance.
Right? And we're always pushing to get
100% compliance so that people don't have to worry about that.
One thing that's also interesting here is like, if you look at. Let's take
a look at image editing, for example, and we have a whole
subsystem that's in place here for,
we call Curated Apps. And this allows you to
like, say, start an application directly from the
documentation. And if the application isn't installed,
it'll actually add the cryptographic keys and
then add the repository and then download the program
and then install the program if necessary.
So you don't have to step out and do five or six different steps and
say, what was I doing? You just click on something and if
it's installed, it'll launch it like you see here.
And if it's not installed, it'll go all the way back as necessary.
It'll even encourage you to
even step you through, for example, installing,
say, Docker, which
requires service setups and adding
yourself to groups so that you can run as a regular user and stuff like
that. It'll actually walk you right through that.
So if I go to support, let's say, let's go to Curated
Apps right here. Now, I haven't checked this out on here.
We're still in alpha, but I believe this is actually already in
place. So let's take a look for Docker. So click
on Docker and there it's not installed. So do I want to
install it? Yes. Now I'm asked for my password
and away we go. And now it's actually downloading the system. It's
added the repository for the official Docker release.
It's added the cryptographic keys for the actual Docker release.
It's installing it right now. And then it's going to guide me through changing
the groups again. We're just really
focused on making sure that people are
prepped for success. Here you go. It
says Dockers installed, but the user dev must be added to the Docker group to
run as normal user. Do you want to add to the group. Now
say yes, now I have to do that as
root. Now it's been added,
Docker's installed. But you got to log out and log back in if you want
to use it as a user.
It's fantastic. That's amazing because this does. I know a lot of people that
are very, very lost right now in terms
of Windows isn't what it used to be. And
there's a lot of people that are looking for a new place to land with
high performance hardware. And I can only assume that you
could probably run this as the base operating system and kick off as many
VMs, particularly if you have enough RAM, kick off as many VMs as
you need for Windows. Right. If you really absolutely needed a Windows like
a pure Windows machine. Oh, absolutely. In fact, if you.
That sounds like a common workflow. Let's see if we have something that fits that
category. Oh, here's how you stall
virtual 11. Right. And by the way, all of these right
here have, are available
in blow up format, if you will.
So we can just walk right through these and it'll just go through all the
steps for you. This has been validated for Windows 11
on the latest OS. You can see over here that it's already applied
to this os. I mean this is brilliant because
there's so many times when there's no instruction manual, there's no
instructions anywhere. You kind of have to just,
you know, Svengali it yourself. But to have these guided solutions
is just. Is really, I think
reduce anxiety. Especially with Linux.
Right? Linux, you're kind of, you know, good luck
is kind of like the. You're kind of
left to your own devices and your own skills, which for some people is perfectly
fine. But not for everyone. Oh yeah, and even
the people that. There's a bit of a dunning Kruger effect out there.
Yes, smidgen of that. Especially people that get behind
chat gtp. Right. And you know, I used it just the other day and
I was trying to solve a problem where I knew already what the answer was.
It was actually the answer was
looking to pull down the latest Jetbrains toolbox
and install it. So one of the curated apps here that
is not finished for this version of the release is
installing the Jetbrains toolbox. So I knew that I had to go out and
pull a web API and make a request to
get the current version and then build a
URL to create a download poll.
Being a developer for three or four years at
least. Yeah, multiply that by a
bit. But I knew that that's where we needed to be. Right.
And so I went and used GTP and asked,
how do I do this? And I had to ask literally six times.
And it kept giving me the wrong URL to go and make the request on
it. And I was like, you know, I could have just looked up for the
Jetbrains API and I would have gotten there in
a search and then a quick query. But the
problem with those answers were they were all
extremely confident. Oh, yeah, you just need to
do this and this and this here, cut and paste this. It won't hurt.
We're seeing an uptick in people breaking their systems because they're using chat
gdp. Why doesn't that surprise me? Yeah,
we're actually been talking about creating a local
LLM that will basically consume all of these
documents that you see and use these as the primary source
instead of going out to the web and scraping that. And
that way people will have an interface that will be available
directly from their toolbar and
that they're. They will be just as confident. But
unlike the confidence of chat gdp, most
of the time, in my experience, it'll be right.
Bonus. Another thing here is you
can see that we have service guides for all of our systems that.
And we have the same structure for every one of them, including what the bio
settings should be for any one of the systems,
so. Oh, very cool. Yeah, you click on the show you how to swap out
your ram and we don't void the
warranty if somebody opens up their case, so.
Interesting. Yeah, I.
Where can folks find out more and get their hands on one of these sweet
systems? Well, I just go to our website, which is
the. There's our. That's the.
That's the new interface you're seeing there. I shouldn't say
new. That's an overview. So we have different
things here. Oh, very cool. Yeah, so
it's a beautiful interface. It's just.
Kfocus.org is our website. Okay. We used to have
kfocus. Com, but we had somebody steal it
from us and to give it back. Yeah, I
won't go into all the details on that one, but watch your backs, people.
Yeah, just go here. And I think it's pretty straightforward.
And yeah, we'll be. I
wouldn't recommend buying it right now because in the next couple of days.
So if you're watching this in the next couple of days, then yeah, buy right
now. But we'll be updating all these
models to 26.04 and we don't expect to
release any or ship any other models with the
earlier version of the os. So we're basically on a little bit of a
pause as we finalize that and finalize the validation
for all the new hardware. It's a big hard push right now that we're
going through, but it's going to be pretty awesome.
It's our again, Candace was there at the
beginning from 2019 and
this will be our fourth major or
fifth major OS upgrade. And fourth actually.
Fourth and
yeah, it's better than ever. Well, there's one thing that I do want to show
you that I think that you would very much appreciate
and let me put it here. One of the things you run into
with immutable systems. Immutable systems are great
until you don't want them to be immutable anymore and then you're stuck.
We put about 1200 engineering hours
into a thing called
rollback. Oh, very
cool. So you can, it's. That could be very
useful. What system rollback
does is it takes a snapshot of your root system and
boot system and then it is immutable.
People that are creating immutable file systems or immutable
systems are basically doing the same sort of thing.
But here you're doing it at your
leisure or you can have it done automatically. You
can see up here we have automatic snapshots on here and I'd give you
a demo on it, but it's not on this system because it's a development system.
But there's people that you'll see post recently there was
on Twitter where one of the guys said the best system you can get is
Kubuntu Focus because they're amazing rollback system.
And this is what he was referring to. This allows you to take
snapshots, roll them back and every time you upgrade your system
it takes a snapshot before the upgrade. So it
causes problems. You can roll back. So not only are we pre
checking all the major updates, like all the kernel updates etc and all
the Nvidia driver updates, but even if a minor
update causes a problem, let's say an app update, you can just go
over here and roll back to the previous one version. That's
fantastic. We also wrote an event driven
monitor. It's a throttled and
debounced event driven system.
So it doesn't have a major
impact in performance. It's a very tiny impact of performance.
But if you end up pushing this copy on
write file system to the point where you don't have enough space,
it will actually pop up and warn you immediately and
it will also turn off the automatic snapshots until you
fix it. And it also guides you on how does turn off the
snapshots until it's fixed. Interesting. Yeah, that was a
part of the reason why it was 1200 hours is because we have the
whole solution. Also, unlike a lot of
software, this was accelerated tested. I come from
automotive design background so like when if we screwed up,
people died and you lose your job. We use a lot of
spec driven development techniques that have been around
for probably 50 years or longer in automotive that have been
proven out. And so we use design for
design failure mode effect analysis with RPMs
and KPCs and then we also use accelerated
testing. So we actually had laptops set up for this where
they ran through multiple three year cycles
of taking snapshots, installing packages, rolling
back, taking more snapshots and that was all automated. So we just had
systems that were like 125 watt light bulbs burning up
constantly doing all of that. But we wanted to make sure that it
was reliable for users. And so. And then we
also did the same thing like with. Or we do a
related thing which is make sure the BTRFS file system that
this is based on has appropriate performance and we tune that
as well. Basically it's like again it's like you're going into a big
company, you've got an IT department that looks after you
and make sure that everything just works and keeps working.
That's cool. Yeah. All you got to do is update. Awesome.
We'll make sure that we put the shit linked here and you got me,
got me. You got my attention. Good. So very
cool. And I think it's a good alternative for people that.
I think it's a great alternative for people who want to get into Linux but
maybe don't are afraid of it. And all these things you put in in place,
I think remove a lot of that fear and I think that's great.