Michael:
[0:00] Welcome to Destination Linux, the TARDIS of open-source adventure, zipping through time and space and the time-space continuum of code. I’m your Time Lord this week, Michael, piling this big blue box of geekery with my brilliant companion steering us through the vortex of tech. Jill is our Romana, a code-regenerating genius who can refactor a bash script faster than you can say geronimo her creed open source or bust proprietary is just a cyber man’s trap our rory dependable server saving tech medic always ready to reboot the universe with his sonic screwdriver this week’s adventure we’re materializing for an interview with carl ritual of system 76 diving into their latest hardware and pop os innovations so grab your psychic paper sync your repos and remember in open source bow ties are cool but proprietary software is not this is destination linux.

Ryan:
[1:20] Incredible opening incredible i loved it i loved it oh it’s so good dr who fans all around are gonna love us.

Michael:
[1:27] I know.

Jill:
[1:28] I love that you made me romana.

Michael:
[1:30] That’s cool she.

Jill:
[1:31] Was one of my favorite characters from classic who i.

Ryan:
[1:34] Knew that jill of course.

Michael:
[1:35] Of course yeah i’m glad i said it right I know everything about you.

Ryan:
[1:41] Jill. There’s nothing I don’t know. That’s why your village will be susceptible.

Michael:
[1:52] It’s like such a great compliment. Just so I can take down your village.

Jill:
[1:57] And then she goes.

Ryan:
[1:58] Aw.

Ryan:
[2:02] All right. In our community feedback this week, we have Paul who writes us about episode 413. 413. I said that weird. 413. That’s a, what is with us making mistakes?

Michael:
[2:13] That sounded weird.

Ryan:
[2:15] Is it? Well, so people know we just had the most incredible interview and we record that first. Then we go back and do this stuff. So I think.

Michael:
[2:22] Are you going to throw me under the bus for the thing I messed up?

Jill:
[2:24] It’s Michael’s fault.

Ryan:
[2:25] Okay, everyone. It’s Michael’s fault. I want you to know.

Michael:
[2:28] So he couldn’t say 13. Earlier, I was trying to talk about that basically, you know, Carl is a pioneer in the Linux community because System76 is a huge thing. But in the interview, I couldn’t say the word pioneer. Or I said it, but then in my head, it sounded wrong. Like somehow I said it wrong. I didn’t say it wrong. For some reason, I felt it. So it just threw me off so much. So maybe that’s because when you said 13, I was like, that sounds like 13, man. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Ryan:
[2:54] Back to Paul for 13, 13, 13. All right. All right, Paul. So Paul goes on to say, hi, guys. I love the show. I mean, that’s thank you. I don’t know why.

Michael:
[3:04] Thank you for dealing with all of this.

Ryan:
[3:07] It was meant to email as soon as I hear the show, but got busy. Totally get that for sure. I think the movie with all the Tesla cars crashing into each other was Leave the World Behind. It was a Netflix movie from 2023.

Ryan:
[3:20] So we were talking about during this conversation the fear one of the fears of all of this kind of AI electronics robotics I think we were discussing in that episode and one of the fears I mentioned was seeing the scene in the movie where all these self-driving cars get hacked and just start crashing into each other and I remembered the scene one way when I went and watched it it was even scarier I feel like the second time I watched it seeing this person try to get away as all these cars are firing like missiles down the highway at them trying to crash it’s a crazy scene so now that you know that everyone should go check it out it’s about a minute five seconds on youtube leave the world behind or go watch the movie i think it was a pretty good movie um because it’s just it’s a very interesting concept that i think when you think about security uh of and being able to hack something the damage that could be done with you know a two to five thousand pound vehicle is astounding. So there are also… Our cases uh that are there was a book an audio book that was talking about different hacks and things that have already happened with this or people have been able to hack not just like teslas but you know different vehicles that have a lot electronic systems i mean it’s the amount of computers in cars these.

Michael:
[4:40] Days is like there’s like there was you know that’s like back in a few years ago and the in the the before times we had the the supply you know the before the simple for time When we had the supply chain issues and all this stuff, like the microcontrollers were all inaccessible for so long and everything was super expensive. And y’all remember that time. And that period of time, I found out that the amount of cars that have 100 plus microcontrollers in there or like just embedded computers inside of them is crazy. Even not even just like electric cars but like just regular combustion cars had hundreds of different microcontrollers so if you could just control one or two of those things like that that sounds awful you know so thanks for sharing that uh movie with us ryan and thanks uh to you very much for uh confirming what it was paul so we now know that we can go, watch this and terrify ourselves. Thanks.

Ryan:
[5:45] And terrify everybody. And if you want to send in your feedback, like this is awesome. Try not to terrify us though, please. They’re helping us fill in the gaps. You can go to destinationlinux.net slash comments or destinationlinux.net slash

Ryan:
[5:57] forum and post on the forum and it may be used on the show. You know, as Linux users, we know what’s up. Security is non-negotiable. We just talked about the importance of having security all around. And these threats are getting smarter. Your security tools have to keep pace with all of these technological changes that are happening, but without dragging your systems down. Traditional agents, they slow you down and leave blind spots, but it’s time for a smarter approach. That’s why Destination Linux is proud to be sponsored by Sandfly Security. This is a revolutionary agentless platform designed for Linux.

Ryan:
[6:37] Go to destinationlinux.net slash SandFly and see how SandFly can transform your security strategy. SandFly doesn’t just detect and respond. It revolutionizes security with SSH key tracking, password auditing, drift detection, covering threats from every single angle. Whether your systems are in the cloud or on premises or in embedded devices, SandFly ensures they’re all secure without the headaches of an agent-based solution. Listen to what Ken Kleiner, a senior security engineer at the University of Massachusetts, has to say. Sandfly is the first product that they’ve seen accurately and quickly detect thousands of signs of compromise on the Linux platform. Its unique method automates tasks which would be manually impossible.

Ryan:
[7:30] Automation is key with detection, and SandFly completely fits this and other requirements. If your organization is using Linux, this should be part of your cybersecurity tool set. Experience security that’s not just effective, but gives you peace of mind. No agents, no downtime, just cutting edge protection.

Michael:
[7:53] And also, if you haven’t checked out the episode where we interviewed the CEO, Craig Roland of Sandfly, then go do it. It’s DestinationLinux.net slash 409. Fantastic episode. Wonderful interview. And on that interview, he also gave a discount to our viewers for the Home Edition that they just launched and announced on the show. So go to DestinationLinux.net slash SandFly and put in Destination50 for 50% off the Home Edition. So awesome. So like Ryan said, dive into the future of Linux security at DestinationLinux.net slash SandFly and see how SandFly can transform your security strategy.

Michael:
[8:34] Today, we’re thrilled to have a true pioneer with us, Carl Richel, the founder and CEO of System76. Carl started with a bold idea in 2003 to bring Linux-powered hardware to the masses, but it’s not just about the hardware. Carl and his team are working on a new Linux desktop as well, and they make their own distribution. Carl’s here to take us from his humble beginnings to the exciting future of System76. Carl, welcome to the show.

Carl:
[9:03] Thank you for having me.

Ryan:
[9:04] So, Carl, I want you to take us back to 2003. What inspired you to start System76? And then thinking about some of those early experiences that you had with open source software and those things, how did that shape wanting to start this company?

Carl:
[9:22] It was actually 2005.

Ryan:
[9:24] 2005. Okay. 2005 works too.

Carl:
[9:26] Yep. But, oh gosh, it’s been 20 years now. So November of this year will be 20 years. So sometimes it feels like it’s been so long, it’s hard to even reflect back on those early days. But I guess to kind of start to tell how it started, a friend of mine had a registered domain called System76, and this was in 2003. So in 2003, he’s like, you know, I’ve got this domain, System76, you know, I’m not sure what to do with it. And we were close friends, and, you know, time went on. And, you know, we thought there seems to be like we loved open source and, you know, we used RHEL and SUSE. And there’s a around 2005, there’s this small distribution called Yoper that I thought was really cool.

Carl:
[10:21] But then we thought there was something missing in the marketplace. It wasn’t really a hardware OEM shipping Linux, providing support, and really representing Linux well. And at that point, I thought Linux had reached the point where it was even better than Windows. And even though it was a long time ago, going from Windows and using Mac and using Linux, It didn’t feel like anything was being taken away by switching between these desktops. And so there was a… So we felt like it was such a great operating system and such a great ethos. And just the value of open source and how it empowers people was – it was missing this piece where people couldn’t just order something online and then use it without tinkering with – especially then, we had dial-up modems then. So dial-up modems and Wi-Fi drivers and hotkeys and graphics drivers and all of these – there were certainly rough edges. especially when it came to hardware support. That’s the gap as a company and as an enthusiast for open source that we wanted to fill. So that’s why we started at CISM76. Eventually, I was finishing up projects.

Carl:
[11:44] I worked in IT before, and we were kind of wrapping those up in 2005, and then we decided, okay, well, let’s go for this. But we were also broke. So we started System76 with $1,500 in my basement.

Michael:
[12:04] Classic tech story of making it a garage or a basement or something. That’s awesome.

Jill:
[12:09] You’re like Apple, Carl.

Carl:
[12:13] Except really we’re full and we care about people.

Ryan:
[12:18] Besides things, not having $2 trillion, but besides those things.

Carl:
[12:23] Yeah, besides all that. There was a, yeah, we started kind of the classic way of starting with nothing and I think that’s one of the exciting things about technology too is because it enables you to start like really from the ground and build things and we get caught up a lot of times in tech about tech crunch and VC and all those kind of things, but I think there’s a really special place for just the opportunity that open source and technology gives you to build things from the ground up without going that route, which is kind of unique in System76’s case.

Ryan:
[13:00] Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting to me that you started with the domain in 2003. So you’ve got this domain.

Michael:
[13:05] Yeah, so we were technically right about the domain because System76 started because the domain started.

Ryan:
[13:11] Yes, I feel I’ve vindicated a little bit there in the research, But the 2005 is when you officially launched the company. So the domain existed before the company even had an idea of what it was going to be, which is kind of fascinating, right?

Carl:
[13:25] Yeah, in a way. And it fit together really well because – and at that time, it was kind of a silly time because people were buying just domains. Squatting on them because I’ve got an idea. Maybe I want to do this. Maybe I want to do that.

Michael:
[13:37] I may have been a part of that process.

Carl:
[13:40] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s what we did. It was such a vibrant time with the internet coming around and things you could do. It was an exciting time. So System76 just happened to be the domain that fit perfectly with the ethos of what we were building and wanting to build as a hardware company. The 76 is a reference to the American Revolution. So it’s independence for proprietary software. And so, so that domain that we were squatting on for a while, how it’s the perfect name for the company that we wanted to build around the open source ethos.

Carl:
[14:17] And in the beginning, uh, what made system series six possible, um, at that time Intel, um, their desktop sales were still high, uh, but laptops were coming along and started to take over more of the desktop market. And Intel was concerned that, uh, that, They have all these customers that are system integrators that are building desktops. And it’s not just tier one OEMs, but about thousands of companies that are building desktops. So they have lots and lots of customers. They’re concerned that laptops weren’t going to be approachable by all these companies. So they started a program called the White Book Program, where they worked with original design manufacturers, Foxconn and some of them are Compal and some others like that. And they would have these laptops that system integrators could go and choose between and offer a laptop. And they would do their own customization to make it their unique proposition, the same way they did desktops. And that was Intel’s attempt to keep their customer base broad and keep a lot of people engaged in the hardware business.

Carl:
[15:28] And that’s actually the only reason I think we were really able to get off the ground is thanks to that Intel program. Because, like I said, we had $1,500. We couldn’t go and meet the MOQs from the huge ODMs. So it helped us get off the ground. And we would pick the laptops we wanted, make the customization, and then we did all the work to make Linux work well on them. And it turns out that laptops were the thing that was most important. We had laptops and we had desktops, but we sold far more laptops because that’s what people were really looking for. Ultimately, the white book projects didn’t work out, but out of it came a few companies that were successful. And System76 happens to be one of them.

Ryan:
[16:15] I love that.

Michael:
[16:16] That’s awesome.

Ryan:
[16:17] That is so neat.

Michael:
[16:18] Yeah, that’s awesome. Good job, Intel.

Carl:
[16:20] I think it’s a great story for like now, I think we’ll probably talk about this, But now we want to be in the position where we empower other people. And that’s some of the things that we’re working on is to empower other people in the way that Intel helped us with their program. I want to see people be able to take the things that we make and build businesses and ideas and things out of what we make, too.

Michael:
[16:50] Yeah, that’s fantastic. Like paying it forward and everything. That’s awesome.

Carl:
[16:53] Right.

Michael:
[16:54] But also looking back, you’ve kind of talked about it a little bit, but looking back at your formative moments of making System76, what early challenges did you face and how do those experiences influence the company’s approach to innovation?

Carl:
[17:06] When we first started, it was a terrible hack. Because we didn’t have much, we would get the hardware. We would do all the work on that hardware within a few days. And then we would create an image from that work. And then we would ship the product and then we’d be able to image every other order that came after it. And that’s how we started. It was not the way you’d want to do it, but it worked. And we were able to go off the ground and it meant lots of really long nights over time. But I think that also kind of shaped who we were as a company. We weren’t afraid to do risky things, challenging things. We felt like we could, you know, If you could do that successfully, then you could take on other things that are really challenging successfully. So I think that really set the tone for what our culture is long term and that nothing is insurmountable.

Ryan:
[17:58] Yeah, you’re not afraid to put in the hard work, the long hours, all of that stuff. It is interesting because when you tell these stories, Carl and I were talking before the show, my dad ran a small computer company as well. And I just think about the imaging through tape backups of systems we would do as they would come in and we’d have them lined up and they would be being imaged with our image and all the stuff that we wanted on them. And a lot of long nights there as well when we were launching that. So it’s very interesting. It takes a lot of work, a lot of dedication. But the fact you’re able to do it with $1,500 is pretty awesome. I mean, thanks to part to Intel and stuff. But that takes innovation as well to figure out a way to leverage that $1,500 to get the most out of it, which is pretty awesome.

Carl:
[18:37] In the beginning, you take a sales phone call, you’re chatting, you’re exchanging email, you’re doing the engineering, you’re shipping the product out, and when they need help, you’re answering the phone again, and you’re exchanging emails. I still remember our first customer. I remember our first return and how much that broke my heart.

Jill:
[19:01] Yeah.

Carl:
[19:03] Yeah. And I remember our first kind of crazy customer. Oh, yeah. I thought we were going to talk about that.

Michael:
[19:17] Carl.

Carl:
[19:18] This guy, Michael, is so crazy.

Ryan:
[19:23] He ate everything.

Carl:
[19:26] But it was uh i mean it was these experiences because when you’re starting organically you get to go through all of them and then as you grow you get to you get to share the knowledge that you learned through all those experiences with the people that you that you ultimately bring on yeah i can relate to everything that my support team goes through uh the good the bad the ugly I can relate to it and I can help them through that because I’ve been through it too. And it’s one of the, I think one of the unique things, one of the things that you really gain by doing it the organic way.

Michael:
[20:04] Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the whole idea of like the founder being also, you know, they talk about now where people want to get into any kind of entrepreneurship, any kind of business, and then, you know, just hire people out of it, but they don’t actually know how to do it themselves. That’s the best way to do it. Because if a company, if the person who is the founder is the person who is doing all the stuff in the first place, they know how to take care of everything. And they know how to provide support to the teams and everything. So that’s just fantastic.

Ryan:
[20:30] You know, the only thing I think about in this, too, though, is like, how many companies do you know once the founder retires and leaves the company and other people go downhill? Because they didn’t have, the person who takes it over doesn’t have that same story. They don’t remember fighting for every sale. They don’t remember doing sales calls, tech support, engineering, ordering supplies, cleaning the windows out in the front of the store. All at the same time. They didn’t have that. And so quickly can fall apart.

Michael:
[20:58] No pressure, Carl.

Jill:
[21:00] Yeah. Oh, well, the point is they didn’t have the passion. You know, once you hire from outside, it’s, yeah, to keep that business going.

Ryan:
[21:11] Probably not every case, but there’s just a lot where you think back like, eh, the company can have a lot.

Jill:
[21:16] Yeah, definitely.

Carl:
[21:16] I found in open source, one of the things that makes open source special is that there are a lot of passionate people.

Jill:
[21:22] Yes.

Carl:
[21:23] And so when it comes to, you know, the people that joined CISM76, they really care about the mission that we’re trying to achieve and what we’re working on. So it’s – we don’t have a lot of, like, cogs in the machine. It’s people that are passionate and care.

Ryan:
[21:40] That’s awesome.

Carl:
[21:44] So I guess the point is, is someone coming in from outside, it’s really someone that isn’t like, I want Linux on the desktop to be the dominant force on the computer. That’s what we all want. That’s what we all care about. And that’s also why we hire from the open source community, less so from outside, because we all share that care and that passion.

Ryan:
[22:08] Absolutely.

Jill:
[22:10] Going on to hardware, Carl, you’ve gone from assembling PCs to designing your own hardware, like the awesome Thelio desktops and the upcoming Virgo laptop. What’s been the most rewarding part of bringing manufacturing in-house? I can’t wait to hear this story.

Carl:
[22:31] Building things is special. It doesn’t matter if it’s software or hardware or whatever it happens to be, but just making things is a, is a special experience. I think it’s uniquely special when you go from, we have this picture at Sims 36, that’s us in the factory floor and it’s nothing but a concrete floor. There’s nothing in the building and it’s, we’re having a meeting. And so we’re sitting on the floor with nine of us in a circle. And that’s, that’s how it, that’s how it started that’s i love the fact that you have.

Michael:
[23:04] The photo of it and everything like that.

Carl:
[23:05] Yeah most.

Michael:
[23:06] People wouldn’t even consider doing that so you kind of you can see the comparison between the before and the after yeah.

Carl:
[23:11] Yeah i don’t even know who snapped the photo but but here it is you know having our uh our meeting in a circle on on a concrete floor and uh and we we did um we built the factory organically too like it was um okay we we’d never built a factory before of course, i didn’t hire someone that had built a factory before to build it i didn’t i didn’t do the things you’re supposed to do i know we we got a smart team that likes to work hard likes to make things and we figured out how um uh you know how to paint metal we figured out how you know what kind of machines we need to cut metal what kind of machines we need for for bending and sanding and all these things and we started really small so we had hand brakes so now we have these big brakes which a brake is a a machine that bends metal to a certain radius or shape and so we have, so we had hand brakes where we had to do specific things in the design itself to to accommodate the hand brake because it didn’t it wasn’t like software ran so we’d have little pegs and little marks and all these other little things, that we would use so when we bent the metal we could get in the right place and do it the right way but it was.

Carl:
[24:30] Slow and challenging but it got us off the ground, And like sanding parts, once you cut them, there’s a burrs on the outside of the metal. And so we had sanders, DeWalt sanders from Home Depot. Nice. That we would use. And I did a lot of it myself. We would sand for hours because of these parts. And I remember my arm buzzing afterwards because we had been sanding for so long with these hand sanders.

Carl:
[25:00] And this sound, it sounded like Flight of the Beast. There’s just this humming sound throughout the building while we’re sanding metal. But now we have a big industrial sand machine with a vacuum table that’s quiet. Yeah, it sucks it all out. It sucks it all out. All of it, I mean, it all was just piece by piece. As the desktop line was successful, we were able to add more machinery, improve tolerances, improve quality. And thanks to our customers for being along with us in the journeys. The first Thalia, great product, worked really well. Nothing compared to what we build today. Now these are just really spectacular machines that have gone through years of iteration. And all the machinery that builds them is far more accurate. And perfection is much higher. But everything about it was a learning process from –, empty warehouse to what it is today where flash sheets of metal come in and a week later they’re built and shipped out to a customer.

Ryan:
[26:10] And lasers. Let’s not forget lasers, Carl. You’ve got freaking lasers.

Carl:
[26:15] We’ve got three lasers. Three lasers and we have a fiber laser. We have two fiber lasers and a CO2 laser. Interesting thing about lasers is fiber lasers can’t cut they’re they can cut metal and steel and um you know extremely hard material but because of the wavelength they can’t cut acrylic or wood and so for those materials we have a co2 laser that cuts like the the walnut that’s on thaleo is actual walnut sheets that we we bring in and we cut and then we put on the laser it cuts them all out and they’re finished on a table they’re hand finished and and um you know eventually incorporated into the accent that goes on the machine but but it requires different kind of lasers for that and another little thing that’s interesting about walnut is you have to buy it a certain time of the year or the color changes oh yeah yeah so you really want to buy walnut you want to buy it in the summer when the sap is flowing because that’s that’s when you get the deepest color it’s lighter if you buy sheets in the winter so there’s there’s a thousand things you have to learn just like that humidity during seasons changes uh changes how you manufacture lots of little things that we got to learn over time that uh that kind of resulted in it now we’re now we’re really good manufacturing we’re good at this i feel like you.

Ryan:
[27:37] Should start a book like how to start a factory for dummies yeah there we go You know.

Carl:
[27:42] If I had the patience to sit and write, I would, I would love, I would absolutely love to share it all because it’s, it’s, I think it’s a cool thing. Here’s all the mistakes I made, all the things that went wrong and all the things I learned. And here, you hopefully can skip over the rough stuff and, and, and build a factory.

Ryan:
[28:01] You all are so bold to, you know, not only from the start of this company, but thinking of sitting there and like, I’m going to start a factory. Anybody know how to start a factory? No. Okay. We’re going to do it anyways. Like your boldness is, is your success. Like that, that is what makes you guys so successful is you just keep pushing and you do the crazy thing that everyone would tell you you’re nuts. Don’t go start a factory, hire somebody who knows what they’re doing. They’ll, they’ll consult on all the equipment you need and all this. Nope. I’m just going to do it on my own. I mean, that’s crazy. I love it. I love that kind of crazy.

Carl:
[28:40] I had a consultant come in once, and they’re very nice people. They’re there to help you lay out a factory floor. And they said, okay, we can help you lay out this factory floor. We don’t really understand what you’re doing, but, you know, we can help with that. And then they said, they sent us a quote. It was going to be $6,000. I can lay out a factory floor. Let me get some Linux CAD software up. I think I used Inkscape, actually.

Jill:
[29:10] Yeah.

Carl:
[29:11] I laid out our factory floor in Inkscape. And sure enough, it worked out. But, yeah, I mean, you’re right. It’s kind of crazy stuff.

Ryan:
[29:21] It’s great crazy. I love it.

Carl:
[29:23] Not exactly what you want to do, but not maybe the best route.

Michael:
[29:27] I mean, it’s fantastic in many ways, but also it’s a great story too.

Ryan:
[29:32] Yeah.

Carl:
[29:34] It’s all worth the story.

Ryan:
[29:36] That’s right. It’s definitely about the journey. So as if hardware wasn’t crazy enough, starting your own factory wasn’t crazy enough, y’all decided, you know what, I’m going to start our own distro and let’s create our own desktop as well because why not? So Cosmic recently hit Alpha 6 release. I want to know, you know, I have my theories, right? And I love that you’re doing this, but I want to know why did you all decide, hey, it’s time that we develop our own desktop and how do you feel you’re going to make this stand out from all the other desktop options out there?

Carl:
[30:12] We started Cosmic for the exact same reasons that we started System 76. We felt there was a gap in the ecosystem where there wasn’t really a desktop environment that was built with the intention that people can use it to build things with.

Carl:
[30:30] So we have Gnome, and Gnome has their ethos, and KDE has the ethos, and XFCE, and they’re fantastic projects. But the general idea of the projects, we’re going to build a desktop platform for people to consume. And that’s fantastic for the Linux ecosystem. It makes a lot of sense, and it’s really, really important. Cosmic is unique in that it is a desktop platform that you can install and use like any other desktop distribution but it’s also modular and composable meaning that every component in cosmic is a separate application so if you look at our repos there’s no like single monolith for everything there’s cosmic launcher there’s cosmic app library there’s cosmic files there’s cosmic comp. Everything is an independent component that when you put them together, you create a desktop environment.

Carl:
[31:32] And it creates an extremely versatile environment that you can create experiences with. You can stack panels on top of each other and make certain panels auto-hide and others not hide. And you can put them in any orientation that you want. You can put separate applications on each one of those panels. So you can think about like an easy example might be like an exercise bike or something, right?

Carl:
[32:01] It might have a status bar at the top, and then it maybe has another bar with classes in it that you click on and, and maybe one of them hides and then you have a main content area, where you can build that with cosmic. Wow cosmic is also responsive so you can take uh you can take what cosmic is and um it’ll all fit down into a phone screen or a tablet or any other device you can think of it could be a car infotainment system like uh and and on side on those panels like the exercise bike example, we have applets and for us for a desktop environment you have things like the app tray where all the apps are visible and you can pin apps to it. You can minimize apps to the tray or to a panel or you have a clock. That’s a separate application. The user menu, the volume menu, all of them are separate applications running on top of the panel, and you can organize them in any way you want. That means you can write an application that does anything you want and you can embed it in a panel. So you can create very unique interfaces that are of your own creation and just use Cosmic as that base to see your vision through.

Michael:
[33:16] Sounds like that’d be a great solution for like a kiosk system.

Carl:
[33:20] Precisely, yes. You can build a kiosk with it. You can build car infotainment systems. You can build anything with a screen.

Ryan:
[33:29] Exercise bike interface.

Carl:
[33:31] You can build any interface that you see that’s missing in the world. And instead of, if you think about Linux at large, the things that make, I think, Linux really successful and important and valuable, and you think about the most successful Linux projects, it’s things like Apache, Linux kernel, Linux kernel. Of projects like Ubuntu where a lot of people build on top of it and all of the infrastructure for networking and drive support and everything else, all of this infrastructure I think is really valuable and successful because people can use it to build things with. But that didn’t exist in the desktop environment space. The thing we were missing out of all of this, we had everything that we could build. We could build thermostats. We could build alarms. We could build anything with Linux. But what was missing was that top UI layer where you could build anything with. That’s what Cosmic fills in. So along with the rest of the Linux ecosystem, with Cosmic, we now have the UI layer where you can build any experience. And it’s, like I said, composable and modular in a way that you just take the things that you need. You write the specific things that make your product or your experience unique. And you have a product. without all the hard work that goes into building the platform all the way up to that point.

Ryan:
[35:00] So I want to understand that that’s genius. I love the concept and that’s kind of a new thought on it. I always looked at Cosmic as, you know, something that was being built for builders to get the operating system out of their way, but without all of the details of the modularity and things in there, which makes it that much cooler to me. But whose idea was it on your team to do this? Because I imagine you’re sitting here trying to sell laptops, you’re trying to sell desktops, you’ve got mini computers, you’ve got servers, you’ve got a factory you’ve built, and somebody, whether it’s you or somebody else, decided, let’s build a desktop too, because this is needed to finish this out. Whose idea was it to start this project?

Carl:
[35:41] In a way, we were, in all honesty, we were kind of pushed into the idea. It was our experience over time attempting to deliver for our customers what we found that they needed, but trying to do it on top of other desktops, on top of GNOME specifically. And we found that it was because what we were doing wasn’t what Upstream necessarily felt was right for them. It meant that we were kind of going against the grain. Whatever we were building, we need to rebase it every six months on a new release. And so we were spending a lot of time, a lot of engineering, just getting back to par what we were delivering to our customers before instead of constantly adding value. And our experience there kind of drove us to the kind of the understanding that there gave us the.

Carl:
[36:40] I gave us the vision that there’s probably a better way to do this. There’s a way to do this where if we’ve built Cosmic right, we don’t all have to agree. That’s the point. We don’t have to be this upstream, us as Cosmic. We don’t have to agree with what you build because Cosmic is explicitly built so that we don’t have to. It’s not important. You can build what you want and what’s important to your customers and scratch the is that they have, and it’s no skin off our back. That’s exactly what its purpose is. And it required, I think, a totally different architecture to do so and a different approach to building the software. So our experience over the years is what kind of brought this together. And it was kind of right there in front of us the whole time. By the time we got to the point where we were like, okay, this is not working. We’ve got to do something different. And it was for everyone on the team this was a no-brainer approach to.

Ryan:
[37:41] One last kind of question around that is did you hire like desktop experts or did you sit in a circle again in a blank room and decide to create a desktop environment from scratch in Rust?

Carl:
[37:56] At that point we already we had for years already standardized on developing with Rust and we had an engineering team already uh working on pop os uh we our development at that point was all the way from firmware all the way up through that desktop environment so we had the expertise uh in-house but there were certain gaps yeah and we knew one of the big things we were missing was um well we’re gonna have to build a toolkit and we’re gonna have to build uh and we didn’t have a compositor and compositor was a really important part and so we did um uh you know once we made the decision that this is what we’re going to do. We went out and I worked on hiring great people for those gaps in our team’s knowledge.

Ryan:
[38:39] Amazing. I just imagine the employees, when they walk in and they see Carl sitting on the floor, they’re like, oh, gosh, what are we about to do now?

Jill:
[38:49] Carl, I wanted to tell you, after I got to see your awesome talk at the Southern California Linux Expo, and I was so impressed by all the customizing ability in Cosmic. And I remember when I walked out, I was thinking, you know what’s awesome about this? And you’re talking about it being modular, is it’s combining elements of all my favorite desktop environments. And that’s that’s the beauty of cosmic that you’re you’re bringing this whole customization to the table that you could make it look like you know your favorite window manager or your favorite desktop like for me one of my favorite classic desktop is is window maker and you even on on the, bottom launch bar, you even showed off the apps, you know, running in the bar. And that’s like dock apps from Windowmaker.

Carl:
[39:53] You can run Doom in a cosmic panel.

Jill:
[39:57] Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I love, the other thing I love is that even though this is not Gnome, you’ve still took, you still have the UX and UI integration like Gnome. So all your customers will have a smooth experience transitioning. And I could tell that was really important as you wanted to keep that ease of use of the desktop, but make it much more customizable. Yeah.

Carl:
[40:34] Yeah. We were able to build in the flexibility that we know our customers like.

Jill:
[40:40] Yeah.

Carl:
[40:40] But it’s not going to be a jarring experience moving over to Cosmic. And one of the things that’s kind of interesting about the timeline is when we actually designed the Cosmic user experience before we built the Cosmic desktop. So Gnome had decided to make a pretty dramatic change a few years ago where vertical workspace are going to go away and we’re going to shift to horizontal workspaces. And the UI layout was quite a bit different. And we had some concerns about that approach in particular because we survey our customers a lot and we have an understanding of how they use their computers. And a lot of our customers use multiple displays. And in our view, horizontal workspaces and multiple displays next to each other can be disorienting. Because if a workspace is on one display, then on the next display, then the next display, but you want to move amongst those displays as well.

Michael:
[41:47] So in Cosmic, we have- You have a massive effect of them all moving at once.

Carl:
[41:51] Right. It feels dry, but we know that multi-monitor experience is really important for our customers.

Jill:
[42:00] Yes.

Carl:
[42:00] So we were concerned about that change. And that’s when we started writing. It really started with PopShell when we brought tiling into knowing PopShell because that was the first big step. But then when that change was about to come, we were pretty concerned about the experience for Cosmic. So we created the full Cosmic, the Cosmic UX that you kind of experience today, which is driven by a launcher, which makes it really fast to launch applications and switch between applications. We kept the vertical workspaces concept. With Cosmic, we add horizontal workspaces. So if you’re on a single display or you like horizontal workspaces, you can have either one. You don’t have to pick between the two. You can have workspaces per display. So that’s how I prefer to use them because on my display on the left, you can scroll through different workspaces. On the right, you can scroll through different workspaces, or you can combine them and scroll both at the same time. But it’s all about what your best workflow is. It’s not that hard for us to provide the customization without it being overwhelming for you to build your workflow, the workflow that works best for you.

Ryan:
[43:14] All right, Carl, I got to make or break it kind of fast. Thing for you here. Cosmic, is it going to have app indicators? Because everybody kind of got rid of those too. So just curious if we can have a module for that.

Carl:
[43:32] Desktop icons, yes, has desktop icons now. App indicators, we call it the notification tray, I think. But yes, it does have app indicators. Those things, I’ll tell you, are they are truly a pain in the ass uh just because there’s no real standards around it but um so i so they’re difficult difficult to implement but that’s um that’s there and been there for a while uh so yeah thank you for.

Ryan:
[44:02] Taking it on no matter how painful because it’s more painful to not have them in a desktop.

Michael:
[44:06] Or it’s more painful to have applications that are expecting you to have them and then you have no idea that they’re still running and you know it something thing is better than nothing implications.

Ryan:
[44:17] Of it are just astounding like you know because a lot of apps they they keep themselves discord other things in the background like.

Michael:
[44:24] Oh yeah yeah close it and it didn’t close because reasons but you would never know so it’s awesome that you have app indicators and everything but we were talking about customizations and i just have to know something it’s it’s prying on my mind so there’s all this talk about how awesome that the cosmic is going to be with customization and all that sort of stuff does it make you sad to know that ryan just changes his wallpaper but.

Ryan:
[44:49] It’s a batman wallpaper carl and it’s a very nice batman wallpaper.

Carl:
[44:52] I i guarantee when when ryan gets on cosmic he’s going to change more than his wallpaper because here’s and here’s the reason there’s there’s three things that i’m trying to do like if i like, my bullet points trying to make computing fun because computers should be fun we spend a lot of time on them i don’t want to just be a consumer i you know i want it to be fun i want to be personal i don’t want it again just to be a consumer i want to personalize it for for the things that i like and i want to be productive and so we’re we think about those three things when we think about new features or how customers use them and when it comes to fun and personalization i i think we’ve i think we’ve really nailed it because it’s very very easy to take that batman wallpaper and then make your windows all black with yellow accents oh nice and you’re gonna do it because it’ll look gorgeous and it’ll feel good and it’ll feel like it’s yours and then what you’re gonna do is go out and download 30 batman wallpapers put them in a folder and then click a button and it’s going to slideshow every five minutes so it changes each every five minutes in the background see.

Ryan:
[46:10] I i’m i’m with you now i think i’ll be.

Carl:
[46:13] The customization king.

Ryan:
[46:14] When i get on cosmic.

Carl:
[46:15] Michael like.

Ryan:
[46:15] You’re gonna eat those words man.

Michael:
[46:17] I mean i actually try to convince him all the time to do customization they’re like when he comes to my.

Ryan:
[46:23] House he does customize my desktop for me.

Michael:
[46:25] I love all the changes i can’t stand it i can’t.

Carl:
[46:27] Stand but then he’ll then.

Michael:
[46:28] He’ll completely uh he’ll be like i’m gonna distro hop and it’s like so you’re gonna lose all the customer yes i’m gonna lose all the customers.

Carl:
[46:33] But so.

Michael:
[46:35] It’s like it’s just it’s a waste of my time every time but i still do it i still do it but the worst time is that i went to his house i went to his house once and he had the vanilla arch version of xfce and i i was like how how do you look at this and it be okay oh man.

Carl:
[46:53] I don’t have a lot of time i appreciate that that’s like flexibility though. I love desktop environments. I’ve used all of them. I’ve tried all of them. Yeah. I’ve spent time on them. And, and it takes me a while before i start customizing them too because i just want to see what the out of box feel is supposed to be i guess that’s unique about cosmic is um yeah it’s going to be perfectly fine out of the box but i sure want people to get in the settings and see how powerful it really is and how fun it really is to tinker with.

Ryan:
[47:25] I love it.

Michael:
[47:27] Nice i’m looking forward to it for sure but speaking of cosmic and the development can we get like a little bit of a sneak peek so like for stuff that’s coming along like the uh the alpha was the alpha six was just released recently anyway and uh i’m assuming that they were going to be having some new ones pretty soon so you’ve been doing them like once a month it feels like and uh what’s the most exciting feature that you’ve been working on like right now for cosmic.

Carl:
[47:50] So let’s see alpha 7 will be released next week, and it’s nice it’s a huge release so we’re introducing a new concept for workspaces so we have dynamic workspaces kind of what you’re used to or when you open a open a window on a workspace, it automatically creates another workspace. If you open a window on that one, it creates another one for you. As you close windows and workspaces, the workspaces are closed too. We’re introducing a new concept called pinned workspaces. And so when you open the workspaces overview, if you always want to have three workspaces, you click a little pin icon next to them. And now those three workspaces are always open. So maybe you always put Firefox on one and Slack or Metermost or something on another one. And maybe you have development environment or something on third one. You can lay them out so that if you close a window on one of them, that workspace doesn’t go away. You can reopen other applications on it. You can also grab a workspace and you can move it to any other location between other workspaces. Or you can grab a workspace and you can move it to another monitor it’ll be on that monitor yay so lots and lots of flexibility with workspaces which has been it’s been an enormous project um it was i think i think of everything we’ve done in cosmic that’s the one where i did not grasp how big it was.

Carl:
[49:19] But um it’s really getting there and starting to feel good and so alpha 7 will have workspaces working. I would say we have some layout things that still need to be improved. So it’s not the final product, but people are going to get to experience it while our vision in a much more robust way.

Carl:
[49:38] The other work we’ve done is X11 compatibility is going to be improved in Alpha 7. We now have a compatibility mode for gaming in full screen. So Steam and Proton and all of that, especially on scaled displays, like 4K displays or 2K displays, where you’re scaling them, it’s going to work much better. There’s so much. It’s hard for me to recall. I think it’s all exciting to me. But the other thing that’s exciting right now is that we’re down to 150 issues to beta.

Ryan:
[50:15] Ooh.

Carl:
[50:16] Which is not very many. So we’ll have the Alpha 7 release next week. And then I think there are maybe 25 or so issues in Alpha 7. And so that’s going to leave us about 125 issues for our first beta release. So most of them, now the features, we’re almost entirely the feature complete. Can’t really think of a big feature that’s left. And then we have, so we’re now into bug fixes and then it’s the beta. So we’re getting really close to release. So it’s an exciting.

Ryan:
[50:52] Do you recommend people try the Alpha 7 now, but not in a production environment? Is that the general recommendation with the alpha or do you think it’s production ready as an alpha?

Carl:
[51:04] We could call alpha seven a beta and it’s, it’s absolutely beta quality. So, but then do you, you, you don’t really use a beta in production. So you probably don’t want to, but I’ve been on Cosmo for two years and my tolerance is high. So to me, it’s, you know, The difference between production and development releases is the quality control that’s necessary before a patch is released. So during alpha releases and beta releases, we merge things very quickly, and so the likelihood that something is broken is… We merge things after internal testing with the development team, but not through a full QA check. What happens after release is nothing gets merged until it also goes through the QA team. And so there’s potential for breakage. It’s pretty rare. There was a fun one this week. Was it this week? Yeah. A fun one this week where volume control and hotkeys got swapped. So you do volume up and your volume would go down. And you go volume down and your volume would go up. It was like a four-hour issue.

Michael:
[52:18] Carl, that’s just natural scrolling for your volume.

Carl:
[52:21] Yes, exactly. So that’s kind of things that might slip through during the alpha release, but it’s extremely stable. And so if you’ve got a machine, you have a little bit of tolerance for something like that, then I’d go for it, especially next week. Alpha 7 is really solid.

Ryan:
[52:39] Very cool.

Jill:
[52:40] Yay. Well, Carl, System76 has always been so close to the Linux community and with its development, with all the feedback you must get on the software and hardware side, how do you decide what feedback to prioritize?

Carl:
[52:59] So our customers keep the roof over our head. So that is, so we, we get feedback from the tech support team about whatever issues our customers are having. And our, and we survey, when we send surveys out, we send them to both system. Six customers and pop OS users that aren’t system. Six customers. And then there are some interesting things that are, you know, unique among the two. And then there’s a lot of overlap, of course, as well. But one example is multi-monitors. Our 76 customers are more likely to use two or three monitors than a general Pop! OS user. And so for us, that means we’re not going to take away from a single monitor use, but we’re going to put a lot of thought and time into multi-monitor use because these people that keep the roof over our head really care about it. So we’re going to spend our time thinking about that. So, yes, we prioritize, you know, customers with Sim36 hardware and the things that they see or the problems they have. And then, but most of the time, you know, a lot of the, there’s a lot of synergy between the needs of our customers and making a great product for the community.

Ryan:
[54:15] Kind of looking at the future here, both almost in the hardware and the software side, you could use this. I’m curious, like, how is AI going to play a part in your mind in System76’s future? You know, it could be, like I said, from even manufacturing standpoint, all the way to software, maybe already you’re using some of it or maybe you don’t want to ever use it. But how do you how do you envision AI becoming a part of System76?

Carl:
[54:41] I think it’s a really interesting question because AI has a lot of excitement around it, but also a lot of detractors as well. And I think sometimes when we think about our experience with AI, it’s with LLMs and they make mistakes and things of that nature. But I think some of the most exciting work in AI is what our customers are using it for. A lot of our customers work in computer science. They work in medical fields, and they’re solving really challenging issues. And they’re helping our customers achieve more rapid innovation and discovery in medicines. They’re helping us discover more planets that might be able to harbor life. Of AI models that are specifically tuned for finding cancer cells in tissue or helping us find cancer that a radiologist might have missed on an image. The impact, I think, will be profound, particularly in computer science fields, where we’re going to be able to advance the state of medicine and the state of healthcare. That expands really broadly. With LLMs and things like ChatGPT or Gemini, I think of them not very different than the internet.

Carl:
[56:11] When you search on the internet, you get a lot of different links and a lot of different information. But as you’re browsing through those, and they’ll be authoritative as you’re browsing through them, you have to use your foundation that you have to apply a weight to how much you agree with what’s being said. And have that skepticism, no matter what the source is, is really important. And I think skepticism for answers from LLM is very, very similar. Um it’s it’s really important not just to trust it on its face and that sounds funny, that’s a hard thing to do it’s a hard thing to do on the internet but um it’s still doesn’t negate uh the this kind of the research and the speed with which you can do things that were uh you know that are much much faster using these tools wait are you.

Michael:
[56:58] Saying that everything on the internet That is not true.

Carl:
[57:01] I know. I know. It’s shocking.

Jill:
[57:06] No, I thought cats ruled the internet.

Ryan:
[57:09] Yeah, exactly. I think that…

Carl:
[57:11] My algorithm clearly knows I like cats because I get a lot of idiots.

Jill:
[57:15] Me too.

Ryan:
[57:18] You know, I think you bring up a really good point there that AI has become… I mean, it’s part of my day-to-day life. It’s become so important to me in so many different ways. Um, but in a lot of ways, those are creative ways. And, um, then it’s more fun to explore with AI when you start asking it serious things as far as code or other stuff, that’s where, um, it hallucinates a lot or it can make mistakes or it doesn’t quite understand. And that’s where prompt, you know, prompting properly. And then of course, just the limitations of AI as it is today, but it’s going to get better. Um, yeah. But do you foresee a chance that we’ll have an AI assistant built into, you know, a version, not necessarily you build yourself, but like PyGPT or something like that? It’s already built into the desktop with Cosmic or an ability to turn on an integration like that in the future?

Carl:
[58:10] It’s actually already a Lama LLM applet that a community member had built.

Michael:
[58:16] I was about to just assume that that was a thing already.

Carl:
[58:20] Yeah, you build the applet and apply it to the panel. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. It’s not something right now where it’s, it’s all about getting to release. And then we get the whole team together and talk about what we want to build for the next release. I don’t, I, you know, I don’t have a clear vision about what, you know, what kind of integration. I’ve started using the integration in Firefox with, with chat. And it actually is something I just discovered in the last couple of weeks and now I’ve found this really useful to have it as kind of another tool that’s there for me, I use MidJourney to do product concepts, so I’ll do prompts for desktop design concepts and laptop concepts, mini desktop concepts things like that because you can kind of just iterate through ideas really quickly The creative side.

Michael:
[59:10] Yeah.

Carl:
[59:10] You get really super weird stuff. And so it takes a lot of time to do it. You know, I say time, but it’s actually exceptionally rapid when you think about I did this a couple of weeks ago and I had 200, 200 design concepts in like a couple of hours playing around. And I had one that I liked. But, you know, but, you know, out of out of those, I got one that I liked and a lot of different things that were pretty interesting and still influence my ideas thinking about product design. So I think it’s a great tool and it’s useful and fun. And I’m excited to see where it goes.

Ryan:
[59:48] So does this mean we’re not going to get Windows Recall inside of Cosmic? Because that would be a huge disappointment, you know?

Carl:
[59:57] Yeah, I am quite certain we will not be saving screenshots on a user’s desktop.

Ryan:
[1:00:05] You know, the hackers are going to be so disappointed. They won’t be able to steal everyone’s information in Cosmic like they can in Windows. Darn.

Carl:
[1:00:15] But yeah it’s a i think it’ll be a really fun thing to think through how it could be um useful like there’s um uh you know perhaps we should have an llm built into or llm llm back ends for the launcher yeah so i already got carl.

Ryan:
[1:00:31] Thinking tomorrow he’s going to be sitting on the floor the employees are going to come in and go.

Carl:
[1:00:34] Oh crap we’re going to be building i’m not adding anything at this point.

Michael:
[1:00:40] One thing I thought of is like having an AI system where if someone has a bug, then they could go through the process of talking to an AI to kind of figure out and make a more a full fledged bug report that they could send rather than just, you know, hey, this happened.

Ryan:
[1:00:56] The keyboard stopped working. That’s all you get. Like, okay, where do I start with that?

Carl:
[1:01:01] You know, another one I think would be really interesting is accessibility. Because the computer vision capabilities of AI are screen readers. Orc is okay, but it’s not great. Right. And it can’t, it’s not like it can describe, it’ll describe the tag on an image. But that doesn’t mean it’s describing that. but a lot of times.

Michael:
[1:01:23] As long as the alt tag is correct you know if it’s like a good actual metadata then and great but most of the time when people put in metadata on websites there’s even like rules in the web development world it used to be just put something there that it describes sort of but now you’re supposed to describe it in a way that you would tell someone who can’t see it and most people don’t do that so like for those who are curious about seo stuff that’s a tip change your images to do that and you’ll get some better seo yeah.

Carl:
[1:01:54] That’s a great point it’s not actually that easy to take an image and really describe it well as much as it.

Michael:
[1:01:59] Seems like.

Carl:
[1:02:00] It should be um and what’s what’s the most important points of this this image and and uh and ai seem to do that pretty well so i think there’s a cool opportunity and accessibility to improve it i think it would be a cool thing to work on you know something.

Michael:
[1:02:14] Yeah that’s awesome so uh let’s go back to the whole uh business side of things because i’m very interested uh what are in fact we have some listeners and a lot of people are in businesses or thinking about doing their own businesses um like they said they’re dreaming to starting their own what would you what would your advice be to give them based on your two decades with system 76 i.

Carl:
[1:02:35] Think the first thing is find something that you really love to do you’re interested in doing um it doesn’t matter if it existed before there’s everything that we use and everything we have today is an nih or not in-house or of something else that was there before. So go out and create something. You never know, You never know what will happen if you make something. People will respond to it positively or not. They’ll care about it or they won’t. You never know until you go out and build it. But you’ll never find out unless you go build it.

Michael:
[1:03:08] That’s right. So as a marketer, I have a phrase that I like to tell people. It’s like the answer is always no if you don’t ask the question.

Carl:
[1:03:14] Yeah. And oftentimes the question is the hardest thing to ask. The answer is sometimes being the easy thing.

Michael:
[1:03:21] Thank you for adding on to my original phrase.

Carl:
[1:03:25] Yeah.

Michael:
[1:03:26] I’m going to take that now.

Carl:
[1:03:29] Yeah. Building things is really, really satisfying. Whether it hits it big or not, it doesn’t really matter. I think you learn from that experience and you take that in. There’s that old thing with the apple fell on Newton’s head and gravity, right? Well, that’s nonsense. That’s it does it yeah intuition doesn’t doesn’t come just out of the out of thin air it came from all of your life experiences over time and they kind of accumulate and they add up in there and they’re they’re back in the back of your mind uh when some inspiration comes it came from all those experiences so you know a life well lived i think is a life with a lot of experience because you can you can draw on all of that for the choices and the things and the decisions the things you create and make.

Michael:
[1:04:22] Yeah, that’s awesome.

Ryan:
[1:04:24] Well, Carl, you have officially made it through the main interview. This is part one. Part two is way longer. The question is way more difficult. We call it the lightning round. There’s lots of math. So if you have a calculator, you can get it out now. You can’t use AI. But the goal is we’re going to throw a bunch of questions at you really quickly here. It’s rapid fire. And give us the quickest answer. First thing comes to your mind in there. And so, you know, what is the square root? No, I’m kidding. If you were a superhero, what would your name and what power would you have? What would your name be and what power would you have?

Carl:
[1:05:01] I am terrible at this. Because I want to be thoughtful, you know?

Jill:
[1:05:08] Yeah.

Michael:
[1:05:09] I think the name might be too much because, you know, you’re stuck with that name once you set it up. What power would it be? What power would you put?

Carl:
[1:05:18] What power would I want? I’ve always thought it was pretty cool to have lightning bolts come out of your fingers, but it’s mostly just destructive. So I guess that’s not very good.

Ryan:
[1:05:29] Well, you can jumpstart electric cars and stuff.

Carl:
[1:05:31] Yeah. Oh, I don’t know. Okay. It would be incredible. So I still look at planes when they fly through the air. I’m like, oh, that’s awesome. So maybe the ability to fly would be really cool.

Ryan:
[1:05:46] Love it. Good one.

Jill:
[1:05:47] Okay, Carl. hard Cheetos or Cheetos Puffs what do you like best which one of those do you like best when.

Carl:
[1:05:57] I was a kid it was Puffs and now it’s hard Cheetos.

Jill:
[1:06:01] Thank goodness we almost had to end the interview if you answered that one wrong that was right up there with app indicators.

Michael:
[1:06:08] And Windows Recall, also so what app or tool would you absolutely cannot be living without.

Carl:
[1:06:19] Uh browsers today are amazing so uh absolutely i couldn’t live without a browser that’s.

Ryan:
[1:06:24] A good point i think a browser would be every now that i think about it that’s the only answer yeah you have to have internet too but browser yeah.

Carl:
[1:06:31] Yeah uh.

Ryan:
[1:06:32] Best linux or open source event that you’ve attended.

Carl:
[1:06:35] Oh jeez i don’t want to offend anyone, this.

Ryan:
[1:06:44] One that was your.

Carl:
[1:06:45] Favorite you know so far i really enjoyed um ubuntu developer summits they were nice i love them and um i got back got back to ubuntu summit for the first time last year and loved it just as much so i i like those events very.

Jill:
[1:07:03] Good if you weren’t in tech what would you be doing now.

Carl:
[1:07:13] Oh maybe i’d be making a boat.

Ryan:
[1:07:18] That’s interesting you’d start a boat factory because why.

Carl:
[1:07:21] Not you’ll.

Ryan:
[1:07:23] Just randomly do it you’ll just start building a boat.

Carl:
[1:07:25] Dang it i don’t know where by i live nowhere by big bodies of water either, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense but i uh i got into canoeing for a while and i bought a book on that with a design for a canoe and so it’s sitting on the shelf for for one day.

Michael:
[1:07:42] There you go nice all right if you can only pick one uh any any configuration it doesn’t matter just this it’s basically the form itself so cupcake or a muffin.

Carl:
[1:07:56] Muffin.

Jill:
[1:07:57] Nice.

Ryan:
[1:07:58] Nice.

Michael:
[1:07:59] Good choice.

Ryan:
[1:07:59] That’s unfortunate you’re on Team Mike. One word that captures the spirit of System76.

Carl:
[1:08:06] Freedom.

Ryan:
[1:08:08] Yes.

Jill:
[1:08:08] Yay.

Ryan:
[1:08:09] I love it. Well, Carl, I guess I forgot to put the math questions in there, but congratulations. You have made it through the lightning round.

Carl:
[1:08:17] I’m relieved.

Ryan:
[1:08:18] Yeah, you’ve done it.

Michael:
[1:08:20] Thank you so much for joining us, Carl, today and sharing your incredible journey with System76. You and your team’s dedication to open source innovation is just incredible. We’re grateful for the work you and System76 do to empower the community, to provide great hardware, but also all the stuff you’re doing with PopOS and Cosmic. It’s just fantastic. And we hope for many more milestones to come. So thanks again, Carl, for joining us. It’s been fantastic.

Carl:
[1:08:47] Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Jill:
[1:08:49] Aw, we love you, Carl.

Carl:
[1:08:51] Thanks, Joe.

Ryan:
[1:08:54] What an incredible interview. Thank you, Carl, for coming on this show. Absolutely amazing. There’s nothing more we want to add to this show. There’s nothing more you can add to the show. It’s perfect as is. Wrap it up, put a bow on it, send it out. We’re shipping it. We want to thank you, each and every one of you, for supporting us by watching or listening to Destination Linux. It’s because of you, we get to have awesome people like Carl on. Because if nobody listened to the show, Carl wouldn’t probably come on the show because who’s listening. but because you call and people come on this show and we get to hear these amazing stories and thank you. We love your faces for it. And you come join us in our discord at tuxdigital.com slash discord to continue the discussion. If you heard something really fascinating that you want to talk to the community about, that’s your chance. That’s the place to be tuxdigital.com slash discord.

Michael:
[1:09:41] And if you appreciate this show and want to support it, you can become a patron and go to tuxdizzle.com slash membership, and you get a bunch of cool perks. We have like the ability to watch the show live, unedited episodes of the show, merch discounts, so much more, tons of stuff, tuxdizzle.com slash membership. And yeah, I said merch discounts. That means we have a store. You can go to tuxdizzle.com slash store and check out all the cool stuff we have. We have hats, mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, and so much more. And wow, people, I can’t believe it. Ryan is actually wearing something from the store.

Jill:
[1:10:15] Yes, he is.

Michael:
[1:10:17] It’s crazy. If you are an audio only listener and you know that he never shows, wears the shirt and he never holds up anything that actually is in the store, you need to just stop right now, open the video and see for yourself that he actually did it once.

Ryan:
[1:10:32] It’s true. You know why I did it, Michael? Because I was listening back quality control of our last episode. And you know there was a lot of great moments in that show but there was one moment where i literally bust out laughing like i legit laughed out loud and it was at the moment where i was holding up random crap and you go ryan apparently thinks we’re your target and i lost it at that line that was such a good line because i was holding up like 3m stickies and all this oh my gosh that was so good so yeah that’s so i was like you know what i’m gonna reward michael by actually wearing something.

Michael:
[1:11:08] Thank you so much. And if you want to reward me, people, you could go to text digital.com store and pick up some awesome merch.

Jill:
[1:11:16] And make sure to check out all the incredible shows here on text digital. That’s right. We have an entire network of shows to fill your whole week with geeky, cool goodness. Head to text digital.com to keep those Linux penguins marching.

Michael:
[1:11:32] Everybody have a great week and remember the journey itself is just as important as the destination.

Ryan:
[1:11:38] And by the way, I proved another point. Carl liked the hard Cheetos, right?

Michael:
[1:11:43] That’s true.

Ryan:
[1:11:44] He’s smart. The dude can start a whole factory just because he wills it.

Michael:
[1:11:49] He also, he also mentioned that he let it as a kid, he liked the puffy ones, which makes sense. Kids would like all dumb as kids.

Ryan:
[1:11:56] And then we grow up. Well, some of us stay dumb, but most of us get smarter, but you know, That’s how it works. Just another point. Another little check mark in Ryan’s science project.

Michael:
[1:12:07] And he also picked muffins, which shows that he does make best decisions, obviously.

Ryan:
[1:12:12] Get rekt, Ryan.

Jill:
[1:12:13] No, cupcakes are yummier.

Michael:
[1:12:16] How dare you, Jill? On that note, people, thanks for watching. We’ll see you next week. Today, we are thrilled to have a true pioneer. I don’t know why. Okay, funny. A pioneer sounded wrong in my head. Like, I just sound like the wrong word. You ever have that where you just say the word and it’s like, that’s not the right word. Wait, it is. Anyway.

Ryan:
[1:12:39] All right.

Michael:
[1:12:39] Let’s start again.

Ryan:
[1:12:41] And Michael, take two. And you got this, buddy. You got this.

Michael:
[1:12:46] I do have this. It’s just like, for some reason, the word pioneer did not sound right. I don’t know why.

Carl:
[1:12:51] Anyway. Radios or something?

Michael:
[1:12:53] Exactly. I meant to say Panasonic. That’s what it was.

Ryan:
[1:12:58] Panasonic.

Carl:
[1:12:59] Yeah.

Michael:
[1:13:00] All right.

Ryan:
[1:13:01] Three, two, one…