Hey everybody, welcome back to the links cast. I'm your host Matt And I'm Tyler. All right, so this podcast feels like it almost never happened I mean, we've just had one problem after another getting this thing to stream. Hopefully the recording actually ends up being okay I mean, I'm gonna knock on some wood there. That should make editing the podcast better But yes, we've been having some just amazing problems with OBS I mean, it's like it just completely hates us for some reason. So I think we're there I think we're there if you're watching the video version You'll notice that I turned the light down.   I mean How can one white man be so white? It's like This is ridiculous I Don't understand the I mean Is it not like a mixed ring light? Is it not like where you can change the temperature color of it? Well, you do it through cards like pieces of car like It was a $10 light on Amazon, bro It was when I first started I wasn't investing a lot of money And I'm just haven't gone through and replaced it because usually it's fine Like I can go through and make it brighter, but whoa Well, I'm even more of a vampire. Whoo. All right, I'm gonna turn that down a little bit It's all right. So the video quality is shit, but what else is new? Hey, I Believe everyone in chat can agree with a statement Edward looks great over there Believe that's the vampire from Twilight I can honestly tell you that I have never in my entire life read Twilight or watch Twilight I'm not a vampire guy.  Yeah Well, yeah, but they're way older than I am Okay, well, I mean still but like if you read the height of Twilight I mean like I was living in the house with women like I couldn't not watch Twilight was on like all the time They made you watch the notebook didn't they? God, no, I was able to wheeze a lot of that one. I was gonna say if so you poor poor man, you need dr. Phil's help Because he's obviously the only one for the situation if you had granted then we're fortunate thing didn't I think he's friends with the guy Who wrote the notebooks so chances are he's probably just gonna make you read the book Art sooner Twilight books for the vest Great All right, so anyways, this is the Linux cast We're like three minutes in or something that if you hadn't figured that out right now You must be new welcome to the podcast welcome to subscribers all over the place whether you subscribe to the audio or the video version Welcome, this is the Linux cast. We talk about Linux-y things usually We do so in a very organized fashion all the time. We're very highly organized We've never been unorganized in our entire lives Any if you believe that I have some motion from property to sell you in Arizona And That just showed you that I like country music indeed. I do I like all music But that's a really old song and probably was sung before Tyler ever actually was born. So anyways I'm sure was probably was like actually might have been the year you were born Whatever anyways, it doesn't matter. We talk about Linux-y things. So Tyler, what have you been doing this week in Linux or OpenBSD? apparently I'm glad I'm glad you put it like that man. I am in OpenBSD and I've switched over I'm using it on my Dell G5 laptop my hallway make book is actually I'm running on now and what I'll keep running on My gigabyte brick server is the only thing in the house. It's still running Linux It's still just running my next cloud Docker in it My workstation in this nil OpenBSD everything uses OpenBSD nil It's been really great. I haven't really had any problems with it I've I mean, I've thought something was broken when I just like didn't Didn't like I needed reboot after setting some kernel parameters and different stuff like that No, I just forgot about but overall it's been a great time Super great.  What you been up to? Well so me I have been Thinking about switching back to Windows Jesus that bad.  We got the OBS things started and there was zero audio being Heard from OBS on your end like it heard for me and for whatever reason And now at the time I was on fedora like I'm in the middle of a fedora long-term review and For whatever reason The desktop audio which should be an output source like it's outputting audio to speakers and being captured Midway through by OBS for whatever reason that was picking up the input from my microphone Along with the input source for my microphone. So I was getting two of me and there was zero of you And I was like well, I mean you were there obviously, but I Was like well, this is obviously a fedora problem I'm gonna log out and I'm gonna go to Geruda. Geruda had the exact same problems and We between you and me We were both pretty much convinced that my computer was broken and I was gonna need to spend thousands of dollars to replace it Or at least the motherboard But she would at least need to replace the motherboard Well, if I was the thing is at one point I had all the stuff I wanted in my car in a on Amazon like I was I was ready to pull the trigger on New hardware because I was like well if I'm gonna do this and might as well replace that cheap fucking Chinese memory Everybody goes after me about I'll get some good core share stuff because it's that memory is actually fairly decent right now It's more expensive than it used to be but it's not like horrible.  I'm gonna nuke and pave and see if that fixes I'm gonna go back to my beloved arco and Lo and behold it fixed it like I've had no problems with audio ever since so what we think happened is that both? Garuda and fedora use pipe wire as their audio source system or whatever So they most both must have just gotten a pipe wire update and It worked the system because after that I had left a message on the OBS forum and somebody said they were having exact same problems and it was a pipe wire issue and downgrading it helped so I Guess if I downgraded to pipe where I probably might not have had to nuke and pave But I'm actually kind of glad I did because I love arco a lot. He should buy the merch Yeah Yeah, so yeah, exactly. It was good. I think the the the The professionalism of the plug is diluted if you mentioned the plug after you've plugged So it's like it's like having a good transition to something and then mentioning hey, that was a good transition It completely ruins the point but anyway, I'm glad that I did go back to arco because I'm just I'm happy you're here I'm very very much a comfortable person in arco linux It just works for me and I went through and installed all the window managers like all of them Like every single one I have like 20 window managers on here, and I'm just a happy camper I can switch every single day of the week and have some left over.  I guess perfect fire just all vanilla arch linux You could have built it up from yourself. Well, you want to not first of all I Would just be using the graded installer for large Linux anyways And I always miss a package in arch Linux like there's always like packages that I miss that just cause things to break Like there's things that you just have to install in order to get things to work And I always miss them. So like for like two weeks after installing vanilla arch Things are just wonky because I still have to continue to install. I'm basically installing arch Linux for three weeks Mm-hmm. So, yeah, that's you would crack me out because you might be the type of I've seen this happen to so many people So inside of the arch like wiki doesn't tell you to install the headers For your kernel, but like most likely you're gonna need them So a lot of people just installed a kernel in the firmware and then don't install the headers for it either. Yeah Yeah, so I don't I don't do vanilla arch that often like I did it the the requisite first time and ran it for a long time With larbs out, you know, so I Have the nerd cred I installed it It's like it's there like I have the card and the t-shirt and all that stuff that says hey, I install large Linux by the way So, you know, I did that but now I'm just I prefer arco because it has all the packages that I need plus like 12,000 more, but it's okay. I'm used to it. I'm happy. I'm happy here I didn't install plasma so I'm at least without the plasma thing But it did end up in so I've been on the search for a new file manager And I'll I have the file manager that I ended up choosing as a pick of the week next week But spoiler, it's crusader. Oh, it's so good. Oh, man Yeah, it's so good. If you're a nerd, it's good Like the only thing I've come across that I don't like about right now is that there's not a good way to preview images And I think I'm just doing something wrong But every time I've come up with something that look oh, this isn't very good I found that there is a way of doing it just has a ton of different dependencies that are all that all start with a letter K weirdly enough But man, okay, so here here It's a dual pane file manager by default like there's no way to turn the second pane off dream come true I use the dual pane all the time never without that. It has tabs So you can go through and have tabs in both panes. I use the crap out of those I have more tabs in my file manager than I have workspaces on DWM. It's Amazing, it's so good And the best part and this is the reason why I was switching away from Nemo is that it remembers the tabs that you had open when it closes So when you reopen them when you reopen crusader, it remembers them It just brings it back up all of them and you can pin tabs so that they're in the same position Just in case you restart your computer and come back those tabs will open up again. It's Fantastic now. It's clunky as hell like it looks like it was designed for plasma three like It's it's pretty old looking was but it's not the oldest looking thing. I've ever seen it's good And I'm happy with it if I can figure out the image preview thing because there's supposedly an image preview thing I'm just I'm assuming that I don't have the dependency that starts with the K But anyway says so good. That's what I've been messing around with also we talked about this in the pre-show 6,000 subscribers on the channel like absolutely nuts. So thanks everybody who has subscribed. It's just that the Channels blowing up. It's fantastic. Go subscribe to his any because he's like what you're not like 30 away from a thousand No, I'm like, I'm like less than 20. I'm over 980 right now. All right. So seriously go subscribe Seriously stop watching this Go subscribe to his channel where it's like this close to a thousand subscribers I've been saying this now for like a month and a half. He's so close. Go subscribe to his channel his kind. I mean He talked about chickens yesterday for like 15 minutes. It was great If that's not really the type of content you're interested in you're more interested in the next content He does that too. He also open BSD also 080. So if you're into gaming go anyways Go subscribe to his channel a lot of stuff over there. Yeah, he has he has no niche He's just the the guy who does everything on his channel.  It's awesome.  It's great So we tried get lab We moved our show notes to get lab this week Tyler and I have to say this The dark mode on get lab is like like 10,000 times better than get get help like it's actually dark mode instead of blue I mean Who thinks that blue? I mean literally the reason why you use a dark mode is to get rid of blue light And they decided that blue is the best color for a dark mode. Who did this? Who's who's the designer?  It's just so much better Yes, so for those of you guys who don't know we use notion before this like a notion is a fine tool But it's not meant for just two people. It's not meant for People who aren't actually all that organized It just felt like we were trying to put on shoes that weren't ours Them is much more our speed So yes We've had a lot of stuff happen last week, so let's go ahead and now that we're like, I don't know 21 minutes into the Do this do the contact information you can follow us on Twitter at the Linux cash You can subscribe to all of our audio feeds and stuff like that the Linux cast org as as usual and it's tradition I promise that that is eventually going to be a website. I thought about starting it again this week But I obviously didn't think too hard about that or you can follow us or excuse me You can contact us via email email at the next cast org You can support us on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast I highly encourage you to do so if you have Any resources to spare because every once in a while you'll find that I go through and give my patrons early access to Videos that I do and also you'll get the podcast an entire day early if you don't catch the live show So patreon.com slash Linux cast you can support Zany by going to the links in the video description for Odyssey and YouTube You can also go through and check out the merch store, which is actually Zany's merch store But you can support both of us through that there The store awesome merch all designed by Tyler He's You can tell that was designed by Tyler because if it was designed by me It would have been stick figures and stuff like that. I'm not a designer At all. Anyway, they just came out good somehow. It's just Better than me We should have a design contest and you would have art you would have one before you started anyways You can also subscribe to us on YouTube at youtube.com slash Linux cast Like I said join everybody who has subscribed. We have amazing Comments in on the videos that I do been doing and just been having some really good discussions there So make sure you check that out. So every week we go through and Find news items that we find addressing that we'd like to talk about so Tyler. What is your news item of the week? Mine is that Linux is having a little security issue Now this is a Say a little bit above my head would be kind of an understatement I've read this thing about three times now and I have a basic understanding What's being said kind of? So apparently As much as 38% of DNS of the internet's DNS servers are Vulnerable to this new attack and it's The attack is essentially using It exploits the lack of entropy Excuse me so home hackers could exploit the lack of entropy by bombarding a DNS resolver with off off path responses that include each possible ID and then so essentially what happens is after that people who are connected to the DNS would be sent to some malicious destination instead and And so it's not really something that's going to be affecting like your home network But bigger corporations are definitely at risk for this Bigger, you know home-based online companies and stuff like that you definitely want to look into this and Investigate what you can do. I will go ahead and say from reading this from what I can tell either all of Cisco's devices or most Of Cisco's devices are completely safe from this.  Um, like I don't know what I've only vaguely know what entropy is. So But most of that I think that knowledge comes from like science So because that means entropy means something completely different in chemistry than it does in in computer software So I think I'm probably messing that up The interesting thing here to bring out is that Linux isn't like the most secure Thing ever and I think that sometimes people Misconstrued that Linux is like completely secure and You don't have to do anything. That's just not the case like not even a little bit the Well, I mean like an open BSD is far more secure than Linux Well, it's like BSD is like what ten thousand lines of code. I mean, I mean, it's tiny compared to Linux Like five million lines of code. So of course Linux is going to have bugs and flaws and security issues I mean, it's just it's just a fact of life now Compared to Windows Linux is more secure It's just not a hundred percent secure because no operating system is a hundred percent secure and no Operating system can be a hundred percent secure because there's always assholes out there trying to find holes now The good news about this at least from what I can tell is that we know about it now and it can be fixed so That's probably a good thing that we know about it and it's not just Some only the bad guys know about it. So that's good news But I mean this is not gonna be it's not the first time that Linux has had this kind of flaw And it's not gonna be the last So yeah Okay, so here's going completely 180 to something that really truly matters and Could you spell the ruin of a lot of computers to something that matters nothing at all? Steam Wrong scene there we go. Anyways steam has announced that steam os 3.0 will be available for everyone to download and install And I find this very cool Because this is basically an arch-based distro that is running steam OS on top of it as a distro or a desktop environment And it's built on top of KDE plasma. So that's cool Also, the supposedly the file system will be immutable. So it'd be something like silver blue I don't know if there's an arch-based distro that has an immutable File system, and I'm not sure if I'm sure there I'm sure there's one that exists. I've just never heard of one That's really cool And it's really interesting. It'll be interesting I'm definitely going to start install this on a machine Although the machine that I'd probably install it on probably wouldn't be capable of actually gaming anything But it'll be interesting to install it and see how it goes because it's it's very interesting you I'm very I'm very nervous within me deciding to use pipe wire for it. Oh God.  It's not ready for prime time We are fucked because the steam deck is really what could drive a lot of young people To start choosing Linux and get them developing for Linux a lot younger and and if it comes out and reviews are shit rough Totally agree and it pipe wire is not ready yet. It's just pipe wire is not ready yet It's it's not it's it's not there and you can't test This is not the type of distro slash hardware that you can test something. That's not ready yet on you have to have dedicated people who are I Was gonna say like me, but I'm just a nuke and pave guy if it goes wrong I'm nuke and pave in if I can't fix it But you so you need people who are actively interested in the development of pipe wire to test that stuff And that can't be done on the pipe on the on the steam back completely agree. It's just the same thing with Wayland It's just it's not ready yet but hopefully hopefully they know what they're doing, you know, but oh Wait, I'm yeah, I'm really I'm really worried about the pipe with the Seriously, though audio on Linux is horrible all the time So I mean I'm using pipe. I'm using pulse audio and we just spent like a half an hour To get my audio working. So I can't really say that pulse audio is like the best either But when pulse audio works it works very well It's just when it you know breaks then you have problems, but I don't know it's gonna The thing is about valve is they have support system. So when things go wrong, they should be able to have Somebody they've got the money behind it. So yeah What worries me though is that that support system will be in a Call center staffed by somebody who's you know earning minimum wage and has Only the technical knowledge to read the manual That's not I don't think that Linux can be supported very well out of a manual like a Not a person a person the person who's doing the sport has to have some knowledge. So hopefully they've sorted that out But I don't know Because I like when you call Microsoft The person on the other end doesn't know anything about Windows. They're just reading out of the book you know like That's why I'm always amazed by people who do call Microsoft support like why like you're Literally calling someone who doesn't know anything about the problem just like you don't like you know more about your problem than that person you're gonna have to explain it to them and The resources they have at hand are only slightly better than the ones that you can find in two minutes on Google Because what they're using is is is basically help desk that has All the problems that could possibly that they've ever had or that they have solutions to The problems are listed and then they click on a link and it takes them to the solutions to that problem If you're having a problem that's not on their list of problems that they've had before you're not gonna get a solution And I said that's the problem of the issue with kind of Supporting Linux through that way. Um, it'd be interesting. I mean, I mean very fascinated by this the stream deck and the stream OS because This is going to be Linux on the scale of something we've never really seen before like this They've sold millions. We think we've they've sold millions of these things And it's going to be sold to people who just are not Used to using Linux So the support for that is just going to be I mean, I would not want to be and I would not want to work for that support team I mean like I mean screw the support team Even if you're not going to be giving out like that type of support like shit just better work Like if you're going to choose pipe wire You better make sure that you're using your own like in your only slight like you're slightly Behind branch of pipe wire that you know works. I mean that the advantage here is it's just one piece of hardware the The only thing that changes by model is the storage size or type So On that front they're pretty it's pretty easy going you just have to make sure that things work on that piece of hardware But it has to it has to work Very good and it cannot get an update that breaks that that cannot happen Your PlayStation doesn't get an update where the audio stops working Like your hit like your gameboy advanced never got updates that broke it like that can't happen Yeah, hopefully I won't it's gonna be very interesting. All right, so that's the news for the week Usually usually we have more fun things to talk about but we chose security problems To talk about for the while so there's not much happy happy that we could talk about there So let's moving on to the main topic. So Tyler. This was your main topics our snaps and flat packs really the future So take us to take us away. Would you? Okay, yeah So I know Dylan's gonna heavily disagree with me and chat about this I'm sure most people are going to disagree with me on this But I don't think snaps and flat packs Or even app images are necessarily the future I I think app images are the best out of the three however I mean, we've talked about it before and I'm sure we're going to talk about it now in more in-depth but The actual snap daemon not necessarily snaps themselves But the snap daemon is terrible. It's just I mean if it was a person like It wouldn't have any friends literally how we go Flat packs are all right. I don't really have any problems with flat packs um They they're they're not really slow or anything but I think distributing all of these things is really kind of I think it's going to slide into obscurity after a while I think they're going to get more and more popular like snaps and flat packs I think I think they'll explode get very popular, but then they will slide into obscurity in the community Mainly due to things like rust like I've been getting more into rust Um Rust is fantastic. Uh rust has cargo and so if you write your application using rust um Like me being an open bsd user you might distribute your software and with bianaries for different distros But as long as it's written in rust using rust I can get I can use cargo and install your application for my completely separate operating system Super simply. I don't need any real technical knowledge at all as long as rust has been ported over to my os it works I don't really know that these will actually get to be That popular and on long term Okay, so I I have many many thoughts on this question so if I had the If I were in charge if I was the grand poobah of the linux You know the linux Um, I would my choice for package management would obviously be the a u r um If if we could just make it so that the a u r was distro agnostic and was on every distro That would be the best thing we could do for Package management. It's just it's so good now Obviously the a or has its own problems But if you expand it to across distros maintaining it and curating it and moderating it would be easier because there'd be more people So the a u r would be my personal choice, but That's not gonna happen. I mean it's just it's not So that's as as sad as that is we have to deal with some other things because we A universal package manager is a good idea. It just it is a good idea We have too many package managers on linux. We just do I mean We add in we have apt with pacman. We have, you know, eo package on solace We have, you know, dnf and zipper and cargo and pip and There's 12,000 different package managers out there depending on what you're installing and it's a absolutely It's an absolute mess. So a universal one that works across distros is a good idea Where we've diverged and as where we always diverge in the linux community is what the idea solution for that problem is Because everybody's has different ideas. So we've created three main Solutions to the problem snap flat packs and amp images Snaps are god awful.  That's just the way it is um I mean, I mean you're you're to me You're even taking it easy you didn't even mention the fact that it puts a shitload of loop devices in there Uh fact that it's slow But yeah, you know, I I can deal with the slow like I understand It's bad that they're slow and I think that they can fix that And I think they can fix the other problems too, but the problem is that they won't okay, it just it just That's that that putting a snap directory in your home directory has been a problem It has been a file bug Since the beginning of snap Has not been fixed. Okay. Now supposedly they're working on it, but they've been working on it for years I'm not holding my breath and I understand that that's such a No, no, no, no, no, don't you even dare try and take it easy on them Working on it bro Like where you put a folder on my hard drive There is no way that is something that is like moving earth and like Traveling to hell and back again to get done Think it would be just changing the directory paths in whatever code they're using you think that that's all it would be, right?  I care about that And and it bothers me like like why can't I Fine put it there, but allow me to move it. Anyways, it doesn't matter. I I bet you about that all the time The the main problem with snaps Overall is that the back end is proprietary. It's owned by canonical and it's not open source like at all And they don't want to open source it. They want it to be proprietary and that's not When you're talking about creating a universal package system for across distros You can't have that to be controlled by one corporation even if it's like Open source it and be the main contributor to it sure like a buntu is fine and it's mostly majority controlled by Canonical, but it's open source, you know, and people can base stuff off from it People can go in and audit the code all that stuff um So being supported by a company or one single company is not a bad thing But when that company is keeping it proprietary and controlling it For example, let's just say Replace micro replace canonical with microsoft. Let's say microsoft was the one that created the snap package or snapd Would be be okay with them keeping snapd proprietary and then offering packages to be distributed through their system Across linux like the answer to that is no we wouldn't because i mean yes We we trust canonical more than we trust microsoft But the scenario is exactly the same. We've just substituted the companies So that's the biggest problem with snaps Yes, and i do agree with you and some people like dylan and chat might say but you can now run your own snaps are most snap or not All right, most people are hosting their own snaps. Okay most people are not And that i mean that's really not even important like um It's just it's an answer just not great Yeah, and canonical also shouldn't be if we're being honest if you want any Foss company or organization to be the leader of Cross-platform applications. It's probably not canonical like out of all the ones that you would pick canonical is probably the last one I have nothing against canonical. I I just don't think that Just make it open source be good being control of it. I don't care like i'm okay with it. Just make it so it's open source The reasoning behind it has always been something like well We don't want everybody to be able to fork this because then we're just going to have a repeat of the ppa system where everybody was able to have their own ppa and nothing was maintained and there's Security problems look at that was that's the reason behind it. It's a reasonable thing But if always has felt to me that there's more behind it like there's just always has felt like there's I mean, I don't want to say it's shady. I don't think it's shady I just think that there's more behind it like they want that control that proprietary software gives them And that worries me a bit because if this was any other project, no fine But this is something that you're trying to do For distros across All all of Linux if this was just for a boon to whatever ruin your own distro I don't care, but this is something that we're the purpose behind snaps or at least The purpose I feel behind snaps is for across platform Package manager, but that's maybe that's not the way they look at it maybe they look at it like this is just for a boon to other people can just use it And we can do whatever we want with it because we're only writing it for our people You know, maybe that's the way to look at it. So before I move on I'm gonna I'm I don't know how to pronounce your name I'm gonna I'm gonna just not even try I would I butcher Tyler can you pronounce that name? No, I know I can't I I'm gonna pronounce your last name actar. Okay I just messed up your your first name and it'd be embarrassing to both of us Anyway, you say of the three app image is the best or least bad not best I think we as a community should promote universal package managers like geeks and neeks um I know distro to try those But I'm not sure if those are something that uh like a new user would be able they'd have to be more new user friendly I think right I've never used them. So I literally cannot come Like I've only I've I've only seen the videos on it. So I've never tried. I know everybody's trying to get me to do nixos Uh as a video, but I haven't got around to it yet. So um eventually I will but Like so from what I've been able to see those aren't necessarily the newest new user But that doesn't mean that they can't be, you know, if enough people got behind them um Anyway, like I don't know so snaps. I don't think I grew are the future Unless they go through and solve that open source problem. I don't think the future now flat packs on their hand I like flat packs actually. I actually do like them quite a lot, but they have the problems The user interface for flat packs isn't nearly as good um now they do have flat hub and they if you go to flat hub and you Find a random package and you scroll down and the the little command to install that pack pack is something like Flat pack flat hub install calm dot spotify dot whatever like that's not That's not great. Like yeah, like just the other great names, right just Replay I mean seriously we have aliases for a reason Just alias the name of the package that calm dot whatever to flat pack now apparently you can do that But that's not the way it appears on the website. So people just assume that that's the way you're supposed to do it and You know, so that's not great. I have flat packs do seem to be faster They don't install stupid things in your home directory and they are open source so It takes care of the three problems they had with snaps. The problem is if you're against corporate influence Um, both neither of these are going to be an option because one's canonical one's red hat. So um, if you're against those things Red flat packs aren't going to be for you either personally, I'm okay with a little bit corporate influence I'm of the mind that you can't have open source software without money and corporations have the money.  I think we'll take over the market I I truly believe they will because ubuntu will make them the standard And then there's so many ubuntu based distributions that the general Casual as we say newbie Linux community will start demanding snaps And what will just I mean just the industry standard will become snaps for Normal people. Yeah, I that's why I wish they'd make them better. Just just make them better make them open source There's a thing about open if you made them open source. Maybe somebody in the community can help make them better You know, um, so I don't it's I know the people who are behind snaps are always upset when people go after the fact that they're not open source like we have a good reason like we have a good reason like You know what people who do, you know bad things almost always think that they have good reasons And I'm not saying that canonical is doing something bad obviously, but The road to hell is always paid with good intentions Uh, and that's the reason behind open source software is that when you open source something your intentions are in In broad daylight people can go through and see what you're doing And it doesn't look like you're hiding something now. Like I said, I don't think canonical is actually hiding anything with snaps. It just It's open source or it's not open source. So how would you know, you know, how would you know? um, so Hopefully that they think now let's talk about app images because of the three that these are the most interesting And also the ones that I actually dislike the most.  You'll get while you go into the your file manager where you downloaded it from You right click on it. You change the permissions to enable execution and then you click on it and you run the application yeah for User-friendliness that's not a great experience. Um, also reminds me a lot of the downloading and .exe file from windows So i'm having flash packs every time I do it. Um, but also Does that mean every time I have to go through and run an app image that I have to go into my file manager and double click on that icon? Um, and the answer to that seems to be pretty much. Yes, unless you know how to create a desktop file and put it into your path Um, that's not a good like that's not an option for person who just came from windows and started using Linux It's just that's not an option. Nobody knows how to do that. I'm not sure I could do it. Well, I don't think I've ever done it so The funny thing is is the way that app images are supposed to work most people don't do that For one the reason I like them is exactly the reason you hate them I like them because for a lot of people when they switch over Two linux from windows app images are perfect because it's just like you exceeds.  You have to have an application That is meant to find that folder and like if you're just running rophy It's not going to find them No matter, I mean and that you have it in the applications folder in your user directory Then it will find it, but then you also have to have a desktop folder as far as i'm aware now You gotta remember Linux new appear So it's possible that i'm just doing it wrong. It's completely possible But the thing you mentioned about that exe is when you download a dot exe on windows Usually what that dot exe is it's leading to an installer Okay, almost universally so I it would be completely different if you clicked on that application and then it installed it like It Handed out like a script or something and it moved it to the where it needs to be Moved the binary where it needed to be and then you could go through and launch it just like any other program And it's fine. Like I I've installed I've downloaded app images like everybody has before but I most always It's a one purpose application. It's one time use I go in there I'm only going to use that application one time It's usually for a video or something and then I never do it again because it gets lost in my downloads folder Where I have three gigabytes worth of nonsense that I've downloaded over the last year You know what I mean wait hold on but Like my solution to that like argument would be well again like the way app app images are distributed again It's not really like there's a driving force behind distributing app images app images essentially work Or are supposed to be working under the same guides as the exe But I guess what we could do just as a community is start just writing guides and telling people to just Take your app images name them something if they come with a stupid name from the download won't shame on that software to like maker but Name them something good just drop them in Like an app images folder like a hidden dot app images folder and just add that to your path Okay, I'm I'm listening to you and as a as a user of Linux who has been using Linux for a while I knew everything you said there and how to do it Random window user doesn't know how to do that and you said well, let's write guides Well, we have written guides and they all are all are exactly what I said go into your file explorer change it to dot exe or Executable and then click on the icon. That's how you're supposed now some desktop environments do this correctly Like if you're using plasma and you or at least in some distros And you double click on a app image. You'll say do you want to install this thing? Uh, and you can click yes, and that's how it should work It moves it to where it's supposed to supposed to do it. You can then access it from the menu like you should Dylan I saw your question who's going to use rofi rofi was just an example app images don't show up in like Any menu system unless they're in in their appropriate places because it's not gonna your your menu system Doesn't know that your app image is located in your downloads folder or wherever it's supposed to be It just doesn't you have to move it to some places and that's my point is that App images require a level of user interaction that no other app package does whether it's you're talking about your standard package manager Where they're talking about snaps or flatpacks Once you've installed those things install like yes They require a certain syntax and a certain way of doing things in a certain way of learning That's true, but once you've installed them you launch that application just like you launch Whatever application you you want your web browser You go to your menu you hit firefox it launches you go to your you browse your menu system You found the app image or the package that you installed it launches with app images That's not how it works by default You've explained to me where you have to do these this step and this step and this step and maybe that that step Those steps that you have to take is kind of Analogous to installing a snap or something. It's it's yes. They all have steps or maybe those are the steps for app images but those steps just feel Dumb to me Yeah, right. I mean it's just they're they're not they're not new user friendly I think they are new user friendly as long as you don't want to keep using the app Like if you want to keep using the app for a long term Yeah It I I do agree with you. We do essentially need like either um I mean we really need the developers of app image to go a step further and essentially create like an app image Day that that's going to manage app images for you Or or literally, I mean something or maybe everyone includes a script or something that you know installs it properly or You just have it be like whatever that I think it's plasma that does that where where you click it once it's executable It offers install for you That's literally the only step that I would ask them to take is to have it be installed so that when You want to use it again? You don't have to go Belunking into your downloads folder to try to find what it is. So for example I went through and I paid for a year of deezer premium music subscription because it was a you know It was a good deal. I got it for like a you know 60 bucks or something. It was a good deal um, and so I canceled Spotify and moved to that Deezer has a or somebody created a deezer application for linux. I was like, that's great I'm going to use it problem is it's only distributed through app images Right, so I have an app image somewhere in my downloads folder For this deezer app, which I can never find and never even remember that I have And the only way for me to launch it is to go to my file explorer and launch it from there um Now I understand there are steps that I could use to Do it, but I don't want to take those steps because that would defeat the purpose of using an app image If it it feels I don't know it's weird I mean I I do agree with you. Um I mean it it it's it's also weird because these these containerize like um district Gnostic Ways of distributing software like they they are they have a lot of benefits, but they do also have their code um, a good example of this is these like the idea of sandboxing um All of your software It like for some reason it creates like this Fanatic way of looking at your system.  Why do I want to have?   I I like I like that they exist, but I don't like the idea of them becoming the standard So I I can understand the idea of wanting Most your applications like the user facing applications that you use at a daily basis to be containerized Like I can understand because from a security standpoint if the applications can't act interact with each other or the operating system all that much They become more secure right in theory The the problem with the linux community and I know we talk about this a lot is that we do things in nine different ways And you know sometimes that's a good thing Sometimes it's not a good thing and In this case, I don't think that we've done a very good job of Explaining why containers are a good thing But also we haven't done a good job of explaining why one way of containerizing something snaps Are is better or worse than you know the other another way of containerizing something like flat packs or app images and the the issue becomes When you're a new user, you've just switched away from windows and you've even you've gotten past the hard part you've burned your ISO you've Got passed UEFI and you've installed Ubuntu and you're looking at that glorious purple and orange Butt cheek right on the front of your your wallpaper, you know, it's it's glorious. There's icons along the side There's you know, it's it's great. You're you're a linux user Now you have to go through and install an application and so you go to The application store.  You're never gonna Chances are you're never gonna know what the hell those things are You're not gonna know that every time you install an application from the ubuntu store that you're actually installing a snap You're not gonna know that until you get like really technical into linux You're just installing steam or you're just installing whatever so the Answer to which one of these these things is going to win Is mostly irrelevant Because most it's mostly relevant to new users I should say because most of them are never going to interact with any of them anyways They're gonna install from a store like they install everything else um, so The real question is going to be how you make the things that those stores interface with like snaps or flat packs better um To be you know, so they aren't actually horrible things um So well, I mean like Yes, the the the method of distribution for them needs to That is essentially what makes them Good like snaps and flat packs wouldn't be nearly as good if they didn't have the solid easy method of distribution that they did they'll um but I mean Look, I don't think using a lot of snap packs or snap Flat packs or snaps you were gonna say snack packs. I know you were talking about you're gonna say snack packs I don't think it's a bad idea to use a lot of them. The bad thing about them is is we don't I mean the idea that everything should be installed as a snap pack doesn't really make sense. There's a um, I I really think a lot of people need to be educated on like What needs what needs access to things and what doesn't? um Like yeah, it's probably beneficial to have your browser containerized course because browsers are hella like unsecure And that's a method of attack like discord being containerized steam being containerized It's probably a great idea but having them or nano run as a snap is stupid Like there are just things that Being containerized doesn't make sense for and Like like gimp is a good example like sure sure Gimp might be able to do something not various behind the scenes, but let's be real it's gimp like If it is a foundational piece of software that Tons of people use tons of people in the community develop for If there was something malicious being added into gimp somebody Would notice like I mean it's not like gimp is something that barely gets updates or barely has any development behind it. Yeah So I mean again, but finding out like Where to use containers is probably just as valuable as figuring out how to make Um getting containers and Making them appealing and easy to use for everybody. All of that has to be just as important Because no no, I don't want to live in the world where most people are running system d uh in a snap like No I I don't even want to why I want to find the person who makes that possible and And just ask them how they did it because it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. All right, so What I was talking about earlier about the the whole store thing it brings up another point because Worth something I mean we can ignore all the problem the inherent problems with snap You know out of the box that they have we can just just just discount all that stuff because like I said Most people when they interact with snap on a boon to or boon You know boon to flavors They're just installing from a store But where snap and flat pack falls down is when you use that method of installing outside of the distro They were made for so like if you you install a flat pack from the fedora gnomes store You don't know you're installing anything from flat pack, but if you install flat pack from arch You know you're interacting with flat pack because you're installing it from the terminal The same thing happens with snap if you're using snap on arch There's a good chance you're installing that from a terminal interface Now there are some gooey, you know interfaces for interacting with snaps and flat packs on arch, of course but There's no longer the Like the mediator between you and the actual snap when you're using Snap or flat pack on a different distro than what it was intended to be used for so, uh I would actually have to argue with that with you on that one. I I think your point's valid, but I don't think arch is made for someone who Needs a software center or does like you know doesn't want to know where they're pulling their software from Like I was using kde neon and I could install snaps and flat packs from the software center there Yes, I did know I was installing them fine manjaro then, you know Well, manjaro you have your software center where you can pull flat packs from don't you we have a by default I believe pulls from the arch repositories not flat packs. You have to choose go in to choose In the setting is to choose to pull from flat pack or snaps Well, it may also be that thing that neon elementary was doing where you have to like Go to flat hub and like click install there and then it magically will appear and pull in all of that stuff from flat Let's say I'm so the point is Once you move away from fedora or boon to you're much closer to interacting with actual snaps and flat packs and that's where things fall down a little bit because it's not as as as a It's not as polished of a user experience for that and Maybe that's where the argument is that these aren't really meant to be cross platform cross distro package managers They're meant just to be containerized packages for boon to and for fedora or red hat You know, maybe that's what they were initially intended to be and then they kind of morph into this whole cross platform distro cross, you know Package management system that people kind of want because I mean people do want A cross platform across distro package management system It's not a great experience I mean Unless you're on arch and have they you are which is what you should use all the time Uh, if you're on like debian or something Snaps and flat packs are great whichever one you choose because sometimes the debian repo is just horrible I mean, it's it's it's doesn't have all the software. They're the Software is a lot of times out of date. I mean It has its purpose and there's a reason behind those things, but it's still true So sometimes snaps and flat packs can make that experience better Same thing if you're on something like uh solos solos doesn't have a lot of software in the repositories So having snaps or flat packs there makes a ton of sense uh The only distro that doesn't make I mean the only distro that doesn't make a lot of sense on is arch or arch based Distros because you have they you are and even on arch like I do that five top five linux apps of the month every month and Almost without question every single month. There's at least one application there. That's just not in the aor Like this time there was one called. Uh, I think it was called markets that I did Wasn't in the aor so I had to go through and install the flat pack And you know, that was fine. It made me feel kind of dirty, but you know, it's good that I had the option to install it from flat pack. What worries me Is that we're getting to a point where we have Several different places where software can be put like you're you Distribute your software in certain places like say you decide you write an application And you're distributing as a snap. That's all you're ever going to distribute it as is a snap That forces people then to use snap Like if you want that application, you're going to have to go use a snap That's the same argument I have against elementary os which always wants to have things developed for elementary os instead of four linux, you know, so What's really going to end up happening here because we have five or ten or twelve or million different package managers Is that when you want an application, you're going to have to have all these package managers on your system in order to go and find an application that you want so that means You're on arch the first thing you're going to do is search the a you are because of course you are that's what you can do And when that fails if it does fail, you're going to have to go through to the website and say hey Where can I find this application and it's going to be well? This one's going to be snap the next application That you come across that's in the same, you know scenario you're going to well all this one's from flat pack So you're going to if you do a neofetch on my system right now. It says Four thousand packages or whatever it is, you know, it says remember I installed all those window managers Yep in parentheses. This is going to say seven snaps 12 flat packs and All this is doing what? Instead of having just one cross platform package manager All it's done is made our systems Entirely too messy for my for my you know, it's just Make it if you have ocd You're in trouble because now all of a sudden you have packages from multiple different sources that you have to keep track of Uh, hopefully they all update with just your regular update things, but who knows that that will always be the case and uh Then you have to remember where certain things were installed So like if you like a year from now, you're still using the same links install and you want to install this program You have to remember What package manager you use to install it? So you have to go through the process of figuring that out. So it adds all this horrendous complexity to The package management systems, which I mean, which was already Unreasonably complex, but when it was without when we didn't have snaps flat packs or app images and all we had was the distros uh package manager At least that's all you had to worry about, you know If you're on arch all you had to worry about was pac-man if you're on devian or We went to all you had to worry about was apt and what you installed with that Now there's four or five different ones that you have to worry about and it adds a ton of you know mess That was a build also makes explaining your system Yeah, I mean it makes explaining your system to someone else Super difficult like like when you're like, oh, yeah, but I've got like four four snaps on here You're like what snaps and you're like, well, I've also got these flat packs But what's the difference between those two and it's like well And getting someone who's a new to Linux explained to all of the different complexity Of choice is always a difficult thing Hopefully though a lot of people understand like look there's a lot of shit to learn It doesn't mean you have to learn at all. Okay If you don't learn anything about snaps or anything for the rest of your life, you'll be fine. It's okay Yeah, all right, so holy shit, man, we're an hour and 12 minutes into this podcast We haven't made it to the pics of the week yet So we're gonna do that really quick and then we're gonna get out of here because I've got to get out of this chair I've been sitting here for way too long today. I got to get up and move around All right, so Tyler every single week we go through and we Scour the internet for you know interesting apps picks things that we want to share with our audience So Tyler, why don't you tell us about your pick of the week this week? My pick of the week is cargo It's a rest tool for installing rust applications and it's fantastic You're going to use cargo and it essentially is going to pull a rust package down compile it on your system and You know install it which is It's super. It's super great First time you install a package, it'll tell you hey, you need to add the cargo path or folder to your path and then I mean, it's just it's a super easy way Installing applications as long as some rust applications But it works on You know the great thing about it is it makes it's sort of like snaps and flat packs or a crack because You can install a package on open bsd like whatever a different operating system your own As long as rust is a rust and cargo are Ported over to it. You're good to go Oh good, but we needed another package manager could Exactly. Exactly. All right. So my pick of the week this week is an oldie, but he goody so something you might not know about me is that um I'm not very good at ssh I'm like the first time my ssh didn't do something was like 2009 or so When I was sshing into an iphone like 3g in order to jailbreak it And after that I didn't use ssh for ages So I had no clue how to ssh on linux until Like this last week So if you go to like github And search for how to create an ssh key and lose ssh with github their instructions are horrendous They're like really really bad and really convoluted and stuff So I hadn't like I followed those things and it just did not work So that's the reason why I sought out something like git kraken where you know Git kraken just allows you to sign into your github account And you can push pull and stuff all that stuff you need to do from there without having to deal with ssh But when we decided to use git lab this for show notes I looked up into their their, uh um Documentation for learning how to do ssh and it was god. It was so simple It was like, how did I not know how to do this? It was like, this is so easy Like, you know, it made me realize two things. First of all ssh is really easy. You should definitely Uh use it for git. Uh, it's very very simple.  I mean it's so like there's a lot of it, but it's just really bad I don't know who wrote it. It was like It's just not a good experience at all and we can't even blame microsoft because i'm pretty sure the documentation was worse Or bad when they were just a private company. So uh, yeah, uh, ssh is my pick if you're using git Use ssh because it's really actually Really good. I mean, um, wait, how are you using ssh with git?  That's it I didn't even know you had to set up anything with ssh to be able to I I didn't set up anything with ssh to get push up to uh, you're probably just using your git lab account then Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you're oh you're using ssh keys. Got you Yeah, you're not supposed because you're not supposed to like I can get let I can get hub you can't use your account anymore Uh to to to do anything with git you have to have either an api key or you have to use ssh And the the api key is like 20 or 30 digits long and so it kind of defeats the purpose for me So, uh, I always just use git lab or git cracking But with uh, now that I have ssh, I just have a regular password that I can remember And that's all you have to do. It's really good. All right So, uh, that is it for this episode Thanks everybody who has watched live if uh, so the way we record this podcast and the way that it's uploaded is a little weird I'm still working on a on a good solution for it So, uh, if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it.  It's been going on for two hours and like I said, I'm ready to get out of this chair But anyways, if you want to go through And watch this live, you can do so Once the pot once we're done recording. I immediately make the recording unlisted. So if you if You want to watch it live you have to watch it live. Unfortunately I'm one of those ocd guys that I can't stand when my views are split in two So people who watch it live don't often go through and watch the one that I upload on friday So a lot of times the views are split.  I can't help it. It's just the way it is So the the the live broadcast is almost always unlisted. I don't delete it So if you're you're watching like midway through you can just keep going it's not going to go away It's just it can't be searched by the algorithm So on fridays, then we up I upload the actual podcast to both audio and video And I edited those things and made it sound as good as I can make it anyways So if you don't catch us live, you can get it through download or through youtube on fridays So uh before I go let's take a moment to thank my current patrons. I'm glad I remember to do that Unfortunately, I can't go through and show the screen on screen because I didn't set up that scene because I'm a dumbass So um, thanks to all of my patrons. I don't have your names memorized The uh, I used to when there was like like six or you I remembered all six names But once you get past that the memory like the ram in my head is just used. It's like an amiga up there I don't have very much ram up there. So uh, thanks at all of my subscribers Uh for our all my patrons for being patrons. You guys are all awesome. Thank you for that Crazy chicken has a question real quick. Are you going to try magic for emacs? I don't know what that is probably not. I have a video coming up on emacs probably towards the end of the week um I'm gonna put this out there right now the people who love emacs are not going to love that video So um, spoil it lurt. Uh, I'm sure that doesn't surprise anybody. So thank everybody for watching We'll see you next time


Mark Langhorst is the managing consultant and chief technology evangelist at BizDesign. Mark is responsible for BizDesign's vision, market development, consulting and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture, and for spreading the word on the Archimate language for enterprise architecture modelling, something he does all over the world when he's allowed to travel there and virtually when he's not. The open group standard of which he has managed the development is of course Archimate. Mark's expertise and interests range from enterprise and business architecture to service orientation, agile methods and digital business design. Welcome from the open group or welcome back from the open group to Mark Langhorst. Right, so I'm going to speak about a new guide just published this week by the open group on agile architecture modelling using the Archimate language you need. This has been a joint effort from both the Archimate forum and the architecture forum. People from both forums have been involved in developing this. And since this day is about agile architecture, this is a fitting part of that. I'll just give you a brief introduction to that guide. It is also going to be an evolving document in the spirit of agile. We want to iterate and evolve this based on your feedback, of course. So please feel free to send us your input later on. So, well, this was basic, Steve introduced, no need to go into that in more detail. But this is the agenda of my talk for today. It's just a brief introduction to that guide. I want to start with why architecture modelling is relevant in the context of agile. Then I will show a number of ways in which you can use these models basically modelling the why, what and how that agile team or agile teams are involved in. Also using models to support communications collaboration between teams because that's one of the main reasons why architecture is so important in agile to make sure that you're all moving in the same direction. And we'll also talk about creating architecture models in an agile way itself since you don't want to do all your modelling up front, create huge big models and hand them over to your agile teams that's not the way to go. But I know I'll draw some conclusions. So let's dig in. Why did we develop this guide and why is agile modelling important? So we want to provide guidance to any architects involved in agile projects, agile software development or in a broader sense, on why these models are valuable and how you can use them. So this is the combination of these that we're going to address in this presentation and in this guide. And of course there's a lot to be said about architecture in general in an agile context and I'm not going to go in detail there. That has been addressed earlier today and in other open productions. At the end of the presentation I have a few links to those but probably you've seen some of those already. But in short, it is necessary to do architecture in an agile context as well to have this shared understanding of where you're moving as a group of collaborating teams as an enterprise. And one of the main things is that there's all the dependencies between the bits and pieces that have to move in the same direction. That could be in software, that could be in a broader sense, your business processes, your capabilities, all the bits and pieces that constitute that enterprise. How do you manage those dependencies? And the third area is balancing short and long term results. One of the criticisms against agile is often that it's focused on the short term only, what the user wants today. But of course you also have to have a longer term picture in mind and that's where architecture also comes in. And some define architecture as the stuff that is difficult and expensive to change later. The things that are very deep into the structure of your systems, the structure of your enterprise. The things that are not so easy to change later on when your focus changes, your direction changes, because you're agile and you need to change with external inputs. But if you make the wrong choice in your architecture, that could harm you later on. So you don't want to paint yourself into a corner. That's why good architecture is really important and why archimage as the language can help you there. Now the benefits of architecture models are numerous. And here I've specifically highlighted a number of things that are relevant from an agile perspective and in more general sense. But these are benefits that focus specifically on things that you see in agile companies. For example, you want to convey the vision and the business intent to agile teams so that they know where their bit fits into the grand scheme of things. You want to trace from your stakeholders to the implementation. How are certain requirements from these users from each other's stakeholders implemented? What's the prioritization of those, for instance? You want to make sure that your teams have a coherent view of what's around them. It's not just about what you're building as a team. It's also very much about how that connects to the broader world. And that relates to these dependencies as well. How do you manage these dependencies? I'll have more to say about that later on. Because that's often a large issue in agile teams. You have all these different teams building all their specific results. But then there's also spaghetti in between and you don't want that. Technical and architecture debt is also one of the things you can manage using these models. What you often see is that agile teams want to move fast. And they say, well, let's cut this corner because we need to deliver to the customer right now. And we'll fix that issue later. It might be an architecture choice that's not so great. It might be a technical problem there. But you need to keep track of that. You need to fix that later indeed. And you need to record somewhere that you did this. Well, you make this shortcut. Non-functional is also an important area that you need to address. And in agile, if you look at, for example, product owners in the natural context, they are often very much focused on the functional side of things. This application needs to do that and that for our users. But the non-functionals are equally important. And especially in agile context, the maintainability and flexibility of your solutions. So architects are very much focused on creating things that are agile. It's not just about the agile process. It's also about the agile end result. And that's part of those non-functionals. And then when you're going to deploy things in, say, the DevOps world, knowing how bits fit together and what could go wrong, how to create test scenarios above the level of unit testing that these individual agile teams do, but when you have to test a larger set of things that need to operate together and identifying root causes of issues is related to that, of course. If something goes wrong in operations, how are these things working together? So if a DevOps team needs to trace what the cause was of some problem, architecture models can also be very useful. Now moving on, I mentioned models to improve enterprise agility. The use of models to identify and reduce complexity. That's basically what that is about. Because complexity is the main enemy of agility. If things are really complicated, if everything is connected to everything else, then change is just really difficult. If you don't know what happens, if you change something, or if you have to make lots and lots of other changes because of non-local impacts of your change, then you are really not agile. Managing these dependencies, that's really what these enterprise architecture models can help with. So basically keeping the bits together, and this is not the solution. Often, if you look at larger organizations doing agile, often you see that they have more than just agile teams. They have a whole structure around that. Maybe they are using something like the scaled agile framework with their PI meetings, etc. PI planning is one of the main ceremonies there. But it's very difficult to keep track of the dependencies between what all these different agile teams are doing. For example, where you have all these sticky notes on the wall, you could say different springboards, and then using pieces of RedString to identify which user stories depend on each other. This is of course not really a good way to manage dependencies in a larger organization. Things fall down on the floor, you can't easily share this. It's just a mess and it's not the right way to do things. This is where models can really be very useful. Now, of course, you can talk about which concepts to use in an agile context, which argument concepts fit in there. I don't want to take you through the details of this picture. Actually, I have one that nicely builds. Now you see it all at once that might be a bit too much. But just to highlight a few areas, we have stakeholders that have certain needs. Strategic themes identify where the enterprise wants to go in terms of its courses of action. These strategic themes can be decomposed, elaborated in terms of ethics, features, and eventually stories, like user stories, that are put on the backlog at different levels of your agile development. You can be planned out in Archimedes. This is the plateau concept that plans things in time, and then actual stuff is going to be designed and built. This is just a small bit of some Archimedes core concepts that express what you're actually going to develop. You could even go as far as expressing who is going to do that and what's the work that you want to do. That might be taking it a bit too far, but you could even express the organization of your teams and the different roles in agile in an Archimedes model. Now, let's not go too deep, but you get the idea that you can map different areas of agile development on different terms in Archimedes and then use those concepts to model things like the stories or the features you're developing, the application services, the capability that you're improving, et cetera. So that's quite a nice fit, and you might want to look at the document itself to guide you to see more detail about how this is involved. Now, just to give you some concrete examples of that, here we start with a model of the architecture intent, the why, the reasoning behind the architecture. And this is from an example that some of you might know, the arch-insurance example model that we've used across many years in many different contexts to explain Archimedes. And here we see Arch-Insurance as a company where its profitability is the main driver of the board and they see that there are some concerns there. There are some issues. They see profitability go down for certain reasons and they want to do something about that, defining a strategy that they call their digital customer intimacy strategy that has two parts. They want to be in close contact with their customers via digital channels like social media, and they want to gain a better insight in the customer situation by harvesting all kinds of data from digital channels, from digital sources. Now, that's a high-level picture, but there's much more to it than that, of course. These new capabilities they envisage require certain resources. So that's trailing down from that why into the what. So here we see new capabilities in the context of the larger set of capabilities of Arch-Insurance. And we see some resources still at a very high level that are needed for this. So for instance, this digital channel management requires things like social media apps or staff with the right competencies to manage that. And you see that for that data-driven insurance part as well. So high-level picture of the resources needed. And then we can drill down a bit more. We see the same resources here, and we see some relationships between them. For example, that data sources provide insights in customer behavior, that there's data analysis automation needed then to come up with sensible customer profiles, that then goes into the integrated backup automation, and we see a number of requirements that are posed on these high-level resources. Of course, this is a demonstration model, so it's much more, well, it's much simplified compared to a real-life situation. But you get the idea. In Arch-Image, you can express things at a very high level without immediately going down into the details of the implementation. That's basically the responsibility of the agile teams. So we're still talking about the what, but it is a bit more detailed, more about what kind of requirements we need to satisfy. So these could be certain, well, if we drill down from here, these could be certain user stories that we need to support for that policy automation. So that would be a further elaboration of this part. Now, continuing, we can look how those resources are then going to be implemented. So for example, the staff with social media competency that has to come from our customer service team. And maybe the social media apps, well, Arch-Assurance is going to develop its own mobile app for that. I'm not saying that that's here, but it's going to develop their own app to communicate with customers. These data sources come from various connected devices. One example, I know several auto insurance companies that provide you with a black box in your car that monitors your driving behavior. And if you don't take too quickly, if you don't break too abruptly, etc., you get a discount on your insurance policy. So that's an example of such a device harvesting data that the insurance company needs. Now, those are still pretty high-level pictures we can drill down further. We can look at how this is then going to be implemented. So here we see the Arch-Assurance back office suite and the services it provides and some of the infrastructure it runs on. But still, this is not very detailed. It's still, in an agile context, the details are left to the individual teams. But this gives them the context of what they're doing. So if you're in an agile team developing certain services on the back office suite or if you're responsible for, say, the DevOps part, knowing how this is going to be deployed on the infrastructure, you can use these models to convey how the bits fit together. And it's all traced back to these requirements and from there back to the high-level pictures. So you have the full stack of models all connected. That's just an example. Of course, it's a toy example, but the ideas are there. There are some things you need to think about in supporting your collaborating teams and models. Conway's law is something that's quite relevant there. The structure of your organization is often something that determines the structure of the design. The structure of the architecture is often dependent on the structure of your teams because of the communication between these teams and if you have lots of communication between two teams, that's often inefficient. And then to avoid that, they split up the work so that they can work a bit more in isolation. So the influence of the structure of your teams on the structure of your architecture is very important. Now, Archime doesn't make a choice in that. You could have component teams and feature teams. Feature teams more aligned along these requirements. Component teams align more along the structure of what you're building. And you see common modeling approaches that work in both directions. So either can work. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but it is explained in the guide how you can use these different approaches. Now, using another example model, this is an anonymized model from a real customer case just to show you how you could also use these models. Here we see an application landscape with all kinds of flows between them, and you can see how you can use these models. One thing you can project on that is, if my slide will show, is what the impact of a certain feature might be. And in this case, it might be a bit difficult to see, but the feature was about adding smart forms to the website that would use certain information from the back office. So here we see insurance back office applications, and some flows are impacted. The website itself is impacted. So that's the feature. Then in the next slide, we will see which teams are responsible for which parts of the landscape. And in this case, they have a kind of component team like structure, basically DevOps teams responsible for keeping these systems in the air. And you see with color coding, which teams are responsible for which parts. And if we would combine both pictures in one, then we could easily see who needs to collaborate. The two teams responsible for these bits. Then we have this relationship to the financial system. So there might be some collaboration with that team as well. So to help identify where the dependencies are, these models are also very useful. This helps teams identify what their connections should be. Now there are other ways of using models in an agile context. There are all kinds of so-called agile ceremonies that you could support. For example, PI planning might be a useful ceremony where you want to do some high-level planning on what needs to be developed and who's going to do that, who's responsible. So on the left, we see an example actually from Robert East. He was also in the call showing how and what needs to be developed. On the right, we see a different kind of model. This is from an event storming workshop. So you see lots of business events and some remarks about that. Identifying relevant events and how they are going to be handled. Again, using models to log that information is much more practical than just putting things on sticky notes and sticking them on the wall and seeing them fall down again. This makes it more persistent and shareable. And certainly in the current times of COVID, with everybody working from home, physical sticky notes are not the way to go anymore. So we do have to have some support there anyway. So why not do it in a proper architecture model? Then I mentioned at the start that I also wanted to talk a bit about creating models in an agile way because it's not just about using models in an agile context for agile teams, but also the way in which you create them. And one of the things that's important here is that if you look further into the future, your models cannot be as detailed as when you model something that's going to be built tomorrow. So higher level models, maybe just using some motivation concepts are useful when you look at the logger term. And the closer you come, the more concrete your models will become. So for example, if you need to model an architectural runway, you will add more detail there. If you're focused on a specific solution that's going to be built in the coming weeks, well, you might need even more detail. And most importantly, you want to model just in time. You want to stay one step ahead of the teams that are going to use your models, but you don't want to model 10 steps ahead of the teams. The world will evolve faster than you can keep track of with all your models, so you don't want to model too much ahead of time. Then talking about what to model, one of the common questions is also, what's the right level of detail of my models? And I think the question supposes something that's actually not there. There is no single right level detail. You always need to identify where you need the most detail based on things like what's the risk associated? Say, if you're spending a lot of money, you might want to add more detail to make sure that you're not making the wrong choice in, say, buying a new system. Or if there are sensitive personal data involved, you might need more detail to know exactly what data is used where. Otherwise, you might, well, it might be a liability to certain findings or data breaches that harm your reputation. So risk is a good way of looking at where you need the details in your models. But at the front, you need to iterate like any agile practitioner. You need to iterate to find your right levels of detail, the right things to model. You don't always know that at the front, but you harvest the feedback and more detail where needed. Maybe take detail out if it wasn't needed in an agile manner. So in conclusion, the architecture models in Archimates are very useful also in an agile context. In general, of course, it's important in agile. Doing architecture in an agile way is important, but models really help to become more agile as an enterprise because they help you identify complexity, reduce that complexity, manage the architectural debt. They help in conveying the vision to the different people involved help prioritize what users find most important and then make sure that the agile teams are aligned and perhaps most importantly these models help these teams collaborate because they show how the connections are made what the dependencies are so it helps them in aligning their work making sure that they all are moving in the same direction. So architecture models are certainly very useful in an agile context can be used in all kinds of ways and of course the open group does a lot of work on agile in general so I've collected a number of links here the first link is to that new guide I've just published a few days ago this is the document I've just outlined but there's more to be had and these are just some examples of agile documents and also agile initiatives if you remember the open group of either the Archiment or the Architecture Forum you can join these working groups mentioned at the end. So that concludes my presentation and perhaps there are questions or maybe we want to move questions into the panel I don't know what to do with that Steve Yes Mark I think thank you very much for that it's a very fluent and comprehensive overview and we will I think take the questions in the panel but in the meantime a warm virtual round of applause for Mark Langhorst. Thank you Mark


I am super grateful that I am still able to use the resources that UT Libraries has to offer. I have been able to contact the libraries and even zoom librarians to help me with any of my coursework needs. Wherever I am and whatever my information needs are, I know I can count on UT Libraries to help me succeed.


Now there's many variations on a theme of multiplication by using the distributive property, and so here's one example. We might use what's called distributive subtraction, because a distributive property also applies when we are subtracting. So if I have a times the product b minus c, I get the product a times b minus the product a times c. And this gives us the flexibility to find another way of multiplying two numbers. So for example, let's consider the product 85 times 19. This time we'll take advantage of the fact that 19 is 20 minus 1. And the advantage to that is that if I know that I'm going to be working with these numbers, it's much easier to work with a 1 and a 2 than it is with a 1 and a 9. So let's go ahead and expand that out. 85 times 19 is the same as 85 times 20 minus 1. And I can apply my distributive property 85 times 20 minus 85 times 1. Again, easy multiplication to do here, 1700 minus 85, and well, this is minus 85, so I'll subtract too much, so I'll go down to 1600, add back 15, and there's my product. Here's another example. Let's take the product 97 times 28, and in this case it might be worth noting that both of these are pretty close to an easy number to work with. So I might do this as 28 is 30 minus 2. So 97 times 28, 97 times 30 minus 2, and that expands 97 times 30, 97 times 2. Somewhat more difficult to do this multiplication here, 97 times 30, and that works out to be 2910, 194, and do the subtraction, and we end up with this as our answer. Again, one possibility, subtract 200, return 6. On the other hand, we might use the fact that 97 is pretty close to 100. So I'll use 97 as 100 minus 3, and I'll apply commutativity. So 97 times 28 is the same as 28 times 97, and that's 28 times 100 minus 3, and again 28 times 100, really easy multiplication there, 28 times 3, well, let's use the distributive property to think our way through this. Plus 28 times 3, so that's 60, plus 24, so that's 84, and again, product 2800 minus 84 gives us 2716.