This is Matthew Miller and this is another Fedora Council video meeting. So we try and do these about once a month. In general, we don't want the Fedora Council to be driven by meetings because meetings are terrible. But on the other hand, communication is essential. And it's turned out that having meetings actually makes things move forward. And so we also want to have occasionally high bandwidth meetings where we talk to different parts of the project about what's going on and produce a video that people can share and get the Fedora Council updated on the status of things. We had some communication crossed wires this week and this wasn't actually on the calendar. Matias and Alan, I'm glad you could actually show up at last minute here and we'll try and make this as productive and useful as possible. Alan and Matias are from the Fedora Workstation Working Group and both on the desktop team at Red Hat as well. And the topic we suggested for this meeting is CADOM 40. So we're going to hear a little bit about that. Now that's been out in Fedora 34 for a while, kind of a highlight of Fedora Workstation, and about future plans for that. And then maybe some things about the Fedora Workstation and Fedora Silver Blue efforts in general. So first of all, welcome. Hi, thanks for having us. We want us to introduce ourselves, so should we just dive right in? Yeah, introductions sound great. All right, then I'll make a start. As you said, I'm Matias and I manage a part of the Red Hat desktop team. The people who work for me mainly work on the GNOME part of the desktop, like I have Florian working on Glowshell, Benjamin working on GTK and a bunch of other people. And we maintain both the Fedora packages to some extent and the Red Hat Workstation packages, of course, and do a bunch of work upstream. And Alan is the designer of my team and he kindly agreed to support me here. He was not very well prepared, so we have to rely on some questions from the audience to see what you guys are interested in. Awesome. In general, I have some questions, but I also encourage other members of the Fedora Council, other people on the call to jump in with questions. I think we have this pretty informal. If you have a question, turn your camera on and ask it. And Alan. Hi, as already mentioned, I'm a designer in the desktop team. And I do a fair amount of my work upstream in the GNOME project. I've been doing that for a fair while. I'm a part of the design team there. I'm also in the Fedora Workstation Working Group, where I can naturally end up in that kind of design UX liaison kind of role just because of the kind of work that I do. So, trying to make sure that Workstation is aware of what's going on upstream and everything was coordinated effectively. Cool. I guess I'll start with a hopefully easy question. GNOME 40 was the topic here and I think obviously a lot of people have been exposed to it now. It's not hot news anymore, but I think we can kind of talk a little bit about where this came from. Why is it 40 all of a sudden after it being three for a long time and kind of what the design motivations are and also what's what the next steps are in that design. Yeah, so maybe I can, I can take the first part of the second part of your question about the mysterious version number change. So that is something that started being discussed. I think about a year ago where people figured that we have been doing GNOME 3 for a very long time and our mind version numbers started creeping up towards the middle ages. We were well into the 30s with GNOME 3, 36, 38 and then people eventually figured this is getting too big. And so we decided to do the usual drop the first digit approach to shortening your version number. So GNOME 40 really is GNOME 3.40 and we just stopped saying the three in front of it. Now, of course, this has some implications for downstream handling of version numbers and packages and whatnot. Some complications around this, but I think everybody has adapted to this more or less well by now. We used to do the even not thing where we had like the version numbers always split out by two. We had like 330, 332, 334 following each other with the odd numbers being reserved for development. And as part of this change, we're also dropping that somewhat odd approach to versioning and we just bump our version numbers by one for each single release. So the next GNOME release this fall will be GNOME 41. So it's still going to be on a six month schedule as well? Yes, we did figure our release schedule a little bit and we cut down the number of like intermediate snapshot release. Like we used to work that people have to do just rolling towels and writing release notes. But yes, we stick to the six months cadence, which is very well established and is also I think something that our downstream consumers rely on a lot. So Fedora, for example, kind of needs to have a new release. We'll synchronize with the next Fedora release and a lot of other distributions are in a similar position. Basically add six to the Fedora release number to get the corresponding GNOME release number. We'll have to do something to catch up somehow. So part of the complications that came up when we were discussing this versioning change was that we did not want to do a GNOME 4 because a lot of people have traumatic memories to the whole GNOME 3 change, which was automatic. And we took a long time to leading down that memory of people and we did not want to erase their fears that oh, we're doing that whole GNOME 3 thing again. So we kind of did not want to do a GNOME 4. We wanted to have some change to the versioning that was not perceived as showing over everything. And now then in the end, we ended up having a release that we call GNOME 40, which also includes GTK 4 and a whole GNOME shell using experience. So I guess we kind of messed up the try to avoid batching too many big changes together with the version number change. But what can you do? It was not really meant to be dramatic, but ended up being dramatic anyways. I hope it was amazing. I've seen generally positive feedback from people overall. Does that match with your experiences? Are there things about it that one of the truisms is no design really survives first contact with actual users? Are there things that you're looking at now that this is in the Fedora release, in other Linux distro releases, things that you're looking at adjusting for GNOME 41 and beyond? Certainly there will be tweaks, but maybe I'm about to hand the mic to Alan for a little bit to talk about some of the background to the changes and the back story. It was always a bit nerve wracking making that release and making more substantial changes to the core elements of the desktop. It was a bit nerve wracking, but I think we have been pretty pleased with the response. We did do a fair amount of user research as a part of this, and it's one of the most user experience changes that we introduced for GNOME 40 was one of the most heavily researched lists of design work that we've done, and so that gave us some indication of how people would respond. We weren't pushing this out with no data on what we thought the response would be, and we had a professional piece of research done by a research firm, and they pretty much said to us, we think that this will go down well with your users.  I don't know quite how it's going to go in real life, but it seemed to go pretty well. So really pleased about that. You know, nerve wracking. This is a roof right here, and there are roofers on the other side of it pounding on things. If you hear strange noises, that's what's going on here. I'll try and keep my mic muted while I'm not talking. Also, that distracted me. But yeah, it is really nice to see the research, and then that actually reflected in responses as well. I'm sure that's very validating. But yeah, I guess the second part was, are there other changes that are planned that are coming up? What can we expect to see in GNOME 41 that's different from a UI perspective? In the shell side, I don't think a huge amount. There's some smaller kind of polish behavioral changes that we're kind of tracking, just general kind of refinement under kind of bug fixing kind of stuff. Not particularly looking at any more substantive UI changes on that side.   So I think we'll see less change on the shell side for 41 as people catch up with other work and just take a little bit of a breather. You know, we don't take, we don't make larger UX changes lightly, and it's not something that we want to do a lot. So I wouldn't say that people should expect anything like the level of change that we saw in 40, but, you know, anytime soon at all. There are plenty of things that we'd like to improve, you know, around the system status and notifications and more login improvements and all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, we continue to look at the new design that we introduced for the overview in 40 and think about how that can be improved. But I wouldn't, you know, we don't want to see the same piece of UI being in constant flux. And so, you know, I don't think that's not the kind of thing that users should be expecting, I wouldn't say. Yeah, that's nice. I think people have some chance to get used to it. One thing you might see is that the focus on shift back, as Ellen said, I mean, the UX changes will probably be very subdued in 41, but people have continued working on performance things to make sure that the compositor runs smoothly and does not get behind things and can keep up its frame rate. And the major changes we landed in 40 had some risk to, like, regress in some areas there. And I'm sure there will be improvements to make the performance and the discontinued work on atomic mode setting and on, like, breaking out an input thread that handles input events independently of what else is going on at the same time. Neil, why don't you jump on the camera and ask that question? Fine, fine. So you brought up, you know, improvements in mudder and stuff like that. So something that I've seen as a relatively regular common complaint is that on the Wayland session in GNOME, giving performance kind of sucks, like the frame rate is choppy or too low, and game compatibility with it has not been good. Is there, like, some effort going on to focus in on improving that part of the experience? Because, you know, at least from my perspective, the bigger enthusiast types that tend to be attracted to Linux for all the flexibility and customizability tends to be the gamers because they can get better performance if you can, like, have all the knobs to do all the right things. So I never play any games myself. So this is all secondhand knowledge for me, but I will say that I recently got Carlos Kanachi, actually, a 1000 hertz mouse. So he can actually work on this kind of high resolution gaming mouse to make sure that we don't add any unwanted latencies in compositor and in the tool kit. So I hope that makes a little bit of a difference. Hopefully that will include making the scroll wheel go at a reasonable speed on my high resolution scroll wheel, my Logitech mouse. There's also an effort to add better support for high resolution scrolling, but that needs to fix this up and down a statuette. First it needs to be fixed and input to provide the right events that need to be made all the way. There's patches for that, but I don't think they have all landed yet. But that's also on Carlos's radar. The amount of infrastructure work that your team does that benefits the entire Linux desktop ecosystem. So I shout out to your team there for that. The high resolution scrolling support was actually mostly done by Peter Hadera on the graphics team. That's cool. Peter's on the graphics team? Yeah, but he's moving on to some other team. That explains why I'm reviewing the wire plumber package from him and I'm like, wait, what? Well, he's moving on to work on the pipe wire going forward. So there's some changes in rearrangement happening there. Oh, okay. Kashti, do you want to come on video to ask that question or should I repeat it? Sure thing, Matthew. Right. So being a laptop user primarily myself, I've been using workstations in some time now. But the tick title bus is kind of something has been something which has kind of stuck out to me. So would there be any offering in coming times and the coming releases that would kind of make things a bit more fitting for a laptop user? So just want a sleek interfaces because, you know, the screen size is small. So would there be something like that? Do you have anything to say? I'm sure about that. I mean, I'm not really sure about the screen size. You know, I mean, we do primarily, you know, laptops are obviously one of our primary form factors and 40 reintroduce a lot of enhanced support for gestures and make multi-test gestures much part of the experience. On screen display, I mean, certainly there's a lot of work going on around adaptive layouts and making it easier to view multiple windows side by side. We're always interested in kind of snapping and tiling like functionality and kind of gradually improving support for those kind of things. I'm entirely sure if there's anything else that's specifically interested in. Yeah, I guess one thing to mention is the new gestures for going to the overview and changing workspaces that landed in the room 40, which has supposedly a lot more focus on like laptops where you have a touchpad that you can actually use those gestures with. And as a general comment, I was going to say that it's actually an interesting situation for my team that like on the rail side where workstation is mainly used on big desktop machines with multiple monitors and whatnot. But most of the development down in Fedora and in my team, like most people have laptops and develop on those machines, those kinds of machines. So, I think those not really targeting workstations exclusively like I mean laptops are certainly, at least for development purposes, the most immediate thing that we use day in, day out and I'm using my laptop every day. I've never used it on a workstation for any amount of time. So something that I've observed at my workplace is that we've been moving away from, unless there's a really good reason for it, we've generally been moving away from giving people desktop class workstations. And we've just been giving people beefier notebook PCs, and still giving them the multi monitor setup and all that stuff. So like something that kind of stood out to me because we were talking about multi monitor and gestures and stuff is that, you know, using GNOME 40 in this particular setup on my work laptop. The thing that I kind of miss the most coming in from using a Mac is each display in my multi monitor setup gets its own set of workspaces. And so you can kind of partition out your stuff and be able to cycle through them independently and it's also like it saves the state of it. So if you unplug and replug them, the applications actually go back to where they're supposed to be, which is useful for when you're taking preparing a presentation, going from one place to another, plugging it in, giving it and that sort of thing. Is there any of that sort of stuff coming down the pipeline for GNOME? I know the window placement when you plug and unplug has been historically a pain point for a lot of users. I don't honestly know what the current state of that is. I know that historically some of the limitations of X didn't help with that. I don't know whether once we're living more and more in a Wayland by default world that handling those kind of situations will get easier. Hopefully they will. Well, we're in a Wayland by default world, aren't we? That sounds like a killer Wayland feature of my windows go back to where they were. When I start Firefox and I've got multiple windows, each of them goes to the workspace that I had for that window. Yes, please, because I do that. I have my work stuff in one window and my friends chat stuff in another window. And whenever I reboot, I spend like five minutes rearranging my desktop. I don't use computers so that I have to spend five minutes arranging things. That's terrible. That would be a great feature. Send the five minutes once. No, and honestly, that makes me apply security updates less often. Because if it were just a matter of I'd reboot and then things would come back basically like they are, I would apply security updates when I walk away from my computer sometimes. But generally, I don't. That's probably terrible of me to admit. But yeah, you know, I think that's probably. I never reboot, so it's perfectly fine. I also know how to, you know, apply updates on the fly with DNF, but I really like the offline update mechanism for its funliness. Yeah, I guess we'll take a future request here to take this more seriously. I mean, I know in the past, we have had efforts to look at those kind of issues. We did have a whole multi monitor push at some point in the business. So another thing that I hear a lot is the I don't know what the actual proper term of it is, you know, the status bar icons of running applications that have decided to hide themselves. And in particular, I am thinking of zoom, which is unavoidable. You know, when you close zoom, it actually keeps running in the background. And if you have like top icons plus or one of those things installed, it you can actually see that it's there. But if you don't, you have to, you know, like go to top and kill it or something like that, which is kind of annoying. And obviously that's annoying proprietary software problems on the one hand. But also, you know, steam works this way to like it's a thing people are kind of used to. And that hasn't I know there's not been an official gnome three approach to that. What is what is the plan black apparently also. Yeah, one password along a long list of things that kind of depend on this behavior. Is there anything being worked on around that. I'm not sure I fully understand the question. I mean, like they depend on being able to run in the background. I mean, they can do that when that works. They depend on showing status icon so that you can actually print them. Showing the status icon or showing some, yeah, some way to get at those applications that assume a status icon is available. I mean, using top icon seems like a fine approach to me. Is that something we should look at installing by default and put our workstation. Yeah, I don't know.  And it's kind of a it's a it's a really difficult problem. Actually, like the there's a lot of technical constraints there in terms of what you kind of can do. And, you know, there are implementation issues which, you know, some of the maintainers aren't very thrilled about. So it's it's a tricky, tricky problem. I mean, what I would say is, I mean, on the UX side, you know, I've been working recently on gathering more user data. We've got a user survey coming up. And we've got someone in our team as well. It's kind of working on. I'll pick us with that. And I think that will probably give us a better idea of, you know, which extensions people are using which apps people are using. I think that will all having a better sense of how big those challenges are for the current users will now. What was to reassess these kind of questions, you know, like do we install something by default do we need to deal with this, you know, we can, we can get a better handle on those kind of issues. I wish there was an easy answer that I'm not sure there is at the moment but I think more data always helps. Yeah, definitely agree with that. I don't know if I'm necessarily representative of a sample of like what Linux users wind up having, but my work laptop. I have to have an extension installed in the genome environment for seeing the seeing the app indicators because basically there's no way to access some of the applications without it. And on my work mandated setup of software that I have. There are seven of them that that exists basically persistently. One of them is the VPN software, which is extremely important to actually have. There was a time when we were kind of tracking all of these apps and just keeping a tally of how each of them uses the status icon because it's actually highly varied. There is not, it's not like every app does it in the same way. There's a lot of different behaviors there. Well, for sure. I agree with you it's just, I don't know whether it'll be worth reviving that and you could put your experiences in that because it is, it is good to know which apps people are using and how they rely on it. Some of the apps you can do use a status icon you can kind of get along. Okay, without it, but there are a few where it gets pretty hard. I assume all I really need is kill all zoom from the command line just every now and then, but, but I know you, I, I sometimes use zoom and I've always been able to what's without the status icon. Oh, you think it's difficult to totally quit it without that icon. It's a simple kill. Same thing right exactly. It doesn't quit the whole application. It just quits it to the menu. There may be preference that tells it to. I think we can all agree that it is terrible software. Right, for sure. Like in the case of my VPN software, the only way to interact with it is through the status notifier. There are a few of those. Do other people have questions or topics here? Yeah, I'll jump in with one. I was just curious when, you know, doing the user research process was there anything that just kind of stood out to you as wow we really did not expect to get that result from it or you know something where you thought you'd get you'd hear one answer and you heard the opposite. A little while ago. So it's hard to remember all the details. I mean, we just got so much from those exercises. It's pretty incredible. I think someone would describe huge long list of issues to look at the one even directly related to the topic we were looking at. One of the ones that I do remember is jumping out. We had previously just a release before I think it's just been 338 we'd introduced a new onboarding assistance.   And we used we tested this we use this as part of the testing because you know we wanted to make it realistic we wanted users to be experienced it like they were experiencing loam 40 for the first time so we gave them the onboarding which we just introduced and everyone thought it was fantastic like we got really positive praise in the reviews lots of users telling us that the known tour is fantastic we really love this thing and we put it in front of users in the test and it was a complete fail like they they would they would read through each step in the onboarding and then they'd say. So what do I do. It was like, it was literally just in one ear and out the other. It was like they hadn't even been exposed to the thing. So, we, we, we, we little gamification points to make sure people remember it they get their gold stickers when they do the different parts of the. Yeah, so maybe. Yeah, like, I was thinking is it not interactive enough if there are no feedback when somebody tries to do something. Like, did you get that kind of thing.  I think you're right partly it's the lack of interactivity. The other I think is the nature of what's trying to be explained the fact that you're particularly with that the one we had in 338 it was trying to present ideas with which new users have no frame of reference. Like click here to open this whole new view that you've never seen before. But I know you've never seen before. Unless it's hyper realistic and actually talks you through the real life action of doing that thing and seeing it for the first time you've got the frame of reference. There's explaining something that people don't really have the knowledge to understand. So we did tweak the content a bit for 40 it's a bit more focused on features and what you can do rather than UI and how you use it. And I think the tool still has a useful role in welcoming people, kind of showing them something when they first arrive and something pretty and just nice and it makes you feel good about the experience, even if it's maybe not really kind of educating, particularly for the new users. I think for a returning user who's maybe just done a reinstall, it's still kind of a nice thing. And particularly if something's changed. I think long term we will be interested in doing something more interactive and we do have, do you have designs for that. And I'll be more of a, actually clicking through the real shell UI with little kind of bubbles. Pretty, pretty easy to imagine. Like some sort of cute cartoon, like office supply character floating over this. That's that's the picture in my mind here. Yeah, I mean, you can't do better than that. That's something we'd love to do. And I think there is some code out there that would allow us to do that. It didn't make it in for 40 with everything else that was very well done. I don't really have a thing that surprised me with user research or maybe it came up there. I don't remember, but what surprised me from the reactions to 34 and comforting being released is one of the things that people complained about the most was to change from horizontal to vertical workspaces. Back when we did go on three, many years ago, we changed from horizontal to vertical and that got people upset and we had to do classic mode to bring it back to horizontal workspaces and even add like a horizontal workspace switcher because people couldn't work with vertical workspaces. And now that we actually make the switch back, people are still unhappy. So that's not really surprising like any big change of that sort would have people unhappy. It seems like in some ways it's kind of a coin flip of which way you prefer and you're going to make half of the people unhappy with either approach. Yeah, I know I have basically two different setups here. My desktop is just one big monitor and then here at this thing I've got a monitor here and then my laptop screen below. And with this one, I end up just not using the workspaces because it becomes too confusing with the two monitors and the workspaces to the side and I just always use the main workspace. That on my single monitor system, I use the workspaces all the time. And previously I had actually used workspaces more with this setup, but I also have this setup basically stays set up for video most of all the time anyway, so I don't have as much many different things going on. So that's part of it too. Anyways, that's just my impression of it. Another thing I wanted to ask about that I get a lot. This isn't actually GNOME 40 or even footer workstation, but with Silver Blue and what our plans as a team are for Silver Blue and where that's going. I know Matias, you've done a lot for Silver Blue. I'd love to hear your thoughts about what the plans are there. Yeah, but despite me having done a lot and there's not actually a big team behind it that has big plans, I mean it's just a thing that exists at this point and we're trying to make it better in little bits here and there. But by and large, we don't have the resources to push it forward as much as we would maybe like to. It's kind of like cut to the point that it is at now and it's good. I use it like my laptop runs Silver Blue, but that's maybe it for now until we find a good opportunity to take it to the next level. I think one of the problems is that our upgrades and applying updates has been so smooth that the major selling point of the atomic updates to Silver Blue isn't all that compelling. We haven't really had problems with that. Some of the other like container focused things are nice, but you can also do those on traditional flora workstation. So I still think it's a really interesting concept, but you can also see why it's not like we have a building on fire we need to flee to that to solve. I think it depends on the user and the case. I mean, I think a system like Silver Blue comes into its own particularly if someone is going to keep the same OS installed for a long time and upgrade through a lot of different major versions. One of the things that you find with a package based system is upgrading between two versions or three versions is kind of fine, but once you keep upgrading and upgrading and upgrading the known state of that system, you kind of get this kind of entropy situation. You don't quite know where you are anymore. No one's really ever tested this thing that you're running anymore because I think they're definitely awesome. My advantage is for some users who maybe are reinstalling soft. The main I think I see as an advantage for Silver Blue and and one of the driving reasons for us doing, you know, I in in the KD community in the Fedora KD community is. There is a class of users that want. A desktop that actually doesn't do a lot. And and there are use cases where there are people interested in using that light. For example, one thing that has come up in the KD community, we've actually got someone who's interested who. Really provoked the interest in creating Kenai was. They wanted to make the Dora the desktop to put on to computers for children. And in order to do that, you need a level of reliability and self healing that you just don't normally get. With a traditional environment when when you're giving it to. Actually children, and you need a way to make sure that the system is going to stay working and can be reset trivially. This became this is a lot more valuable. And so like. The way I see it is that that's a, the Silver Blue and Kenai variants are interesting from that perspective, because it opens up a. A market vertical that has typically been close traditional operating systems period. Because it is a lot easier to. Mass manage in that particular. Style where you need to be able to have total control of the software that is on the desktop and be able to. Ensure that it's in a reliable known state consistently because you know that the user using it. Can't do anything about it. Yeah, I think there's also a lot of developers who are very interested in that same kind of minimalistic kind of story. Yeah, that's actually that's a point I forgot to mention when Matthew asked that question about silver like the toolbox is the 1 part I guess of the Silver Blue story there. We continue to like work on improving it and I mean, just some ideas if you maybe could have nicer integration of the toolbox into into a terminal application and some more. You write it makes it easier to find your way around your toolboxes and that sort of thing. Yeah, I am really a big proponent of a toolbox terminal integration things ever since I saw Owens purple egg demo thing I think it's great great idea that this would be a really compelling feature. I think we do keep chipping away where we cannot silver blue right I mean one of the one of the challenges is that there's a long tail of problems you have to solve like, there's always little, little problems that have been solved in the package base world which you then have to come up with a replacement for that you don't quite expect, you know, it's pretty amazing just how many small kind of limited kind of challenges there are that you just need to kind of work your way through and I think as we're printing and who wants to work on printing, that's great. Yes, no, these are things that we do every once in a while we'll come back to one of those things and we'll try, you know, if we're reworking it will reworking in a way that is compatible with silver blues. We are kind of working our way through the list, but it just, it's actually a long list. So it's just a slow process. That makes sense. We've filled some good time here. One of the other things I wanted to make sure you ask is, you know, this is Fedora Council talking to you here and we provide, you know, this kind of overall governance for the organization. We have some resources in terms of money, time, project, things. What can we do for you as the workstation working group and, you know, GNOME team working in Fedora to make things better for you? I mean, it's maybe worth saying like, first of all, like, you know, Fedora has a really strong presence upstream in the GNOME projects if people don't know that already. Like, I think Fedora is pretty much the de facto distro that upstream developers use. And, you know, a lot of the time if I'm testing a new app or a new system component, you know, it's very typical for the build instructions to be for Fedora, for coppers to be available for Fedora. So that is where a lot of the upstream testing goes. So, you know, I think the first thing to say is that's really great and let's not break that. Let's keep that going because I think it's really mutually beneficial.  And I think we've done a great job there in terms of developing. Yeah, I'm on the GNOME advisory board partly to help keep that relationship going in a nice smooth way. And it's a good time to plug Gwadak as well, the GNOME conference coming up in a couple of weeks. We will have some good Fedora presence there as well, including Ask Me Anything session. Yeah, I think it's just two weeks away now. It's July 21st or 25th. Yeah, unfortunately, still virtual. I was looking forward to the in-person one. Yeah, me too. Next year. In Riga, I think that we're supposed to be. I think we may go back to Mexico still. Okay. I'm ready for it. You too. Other things I can think of that can't think of, don't you do? I mean, the user research study that I referenced that was done upstream through financial support by a partner. And I said like more data is always good if there is something in the user experience realm that council is particularly interested in. And I think there's definitely an opportunity there to invest or share the cost of running user research and having that be contracted out by the GNOME foundation. That worked successfully last time. And, you know, if there are particular questions that you think are relevant to the Fedora community that you would like to be investigated in more detail and have the upstream design team work on then. That's definitely a door that is open. And, you know, likewise with any kind of data that you want to send our way, like, we always need more data. It's amazing how little we know about our users. I mentioned I'm doing this user survey, so we'll be looking for helping getting the word out about that when it comes up. Yeah, we had, we did a sort of a general Fedora contributor survey and that got about a thousand responses, which is pretty good. I think we might even get more for a user focused survey so we can, we can help provide good information there. Yeah. Another example of something that benefits both upstream and Fedora is the corporations and other and preinstalling. Bit of a laptop's keeping that going and making it grow and successful enterprise benefits all of us. We have another laptop. We're working with that's going to be pretty exciting. That's cool. See how it goes. I can't say who it is or what's going on. I can't tell you, Neil. Sorry. But yeah, and more stuff with Lenovo. A lot of, right now, there's just COVID supply chain issues. We launched the X1 Carbon Gen 9 with Fedora Workstation on it and then immediately said it would be available with four month delays. So it's kind of out of out of their control as everything in the world is right now. But, you know, hopefully that will get better as well. There's one more question that kind of touched on this some, but, you know, what do you see as, you know, the future of both, you know, GNOME specifically but also the Linux desktop more broadly in say five to 10 years. Just a small question to end on. Yeah, nice. It's a good one. I'm pretty sure I started using Linux on my desktop in five years. I have a prediction for the wider world. I don't know, people like to make really predictions or predict the demise of this entire ecosystem, but I'm not that negative. I think people will keep using it because it's fun and it's easy to take a risk and we can maybe go a little, we will not take over the world. I think, but we don't have to. Yeah, I mean, I think on my side, you know, I think things are really positive upstream right now. We've got a new generation of contributors who've come into the project and are doing amazing things and there's things happening in the project right now that, you know, I want to drift off three or four years ago. New apps being written. A lot of activity around the application developer platform. No real sense of energy. You know that's reflected on the design side in terms of. You know, we've got a much more comprehensive design system than we ever used to and I think we're in a much stronger place than we have been for a long, long time. So in that respect, you know, I'm pretty optimistic and I think we're going to see a lot of good to keep coming out of that. Particularly around apps, app development is going to get a lot easier to it's going to continue to get easier to make apps and it's the apps that we do produce their qualities going to get better and better all the time. So I think that's really exciting and positive. I think, you know, on the upstream on the foundation side there's a lot of interest in taking the platform into new markets and, you know, going out into the world a bit more like rather than, you know, catering to the usual kind of communities that we are closer close to our hearts but, you know, reaching out to new audiences and really promoting the product a bit more forcefully so I think both of those things, I think combined could be could be powerful. Like with to you said I don't think we are going to necessarily take over the world but I don't see any reason why things are going to be getting better and better. You should aim for taking over the world. Because that's how you that's how you do the best that you can do. Yeah, perhaps. It's good to have high lofty goals. Thank you very much for joining us for this. And next month we are it is nest with Fedora our own conference so we will be off for the month for video calls and we'll see what we're doing the month after that. I hope to see a lot of GNOME folks at nest as well. And we'll see you at Gaudac in the meantime and we'll get this video up online for everybody else to see soon too. Thanks all. Thanks a lot.


I'm going to be discussing with you this morning the anarchist-minarchist debate. This is a debate between two groups of libertarians, so we've already confined the debate to a fairly small number of people. And both the people in both of these groups accept individual rights, including property rights. Both anarchists and minarchists want a free market. So the question between them is, should all services be provided by the free market, or is a state necessary to provide protection, justice, and defense? I should say term anarchist is one that's familiar in political science, but minarchist was a word that was coined by Sam Konkin, who was a libertarian, he was an agorist, to say, someone who believed that production should take place in small businesses. He was very good at coming up with terms that caught on, and minarchist was one of his coinages. Another one that he coined was in reference to the large number of organizations controlled by Charles Koch and his brother. He coined the phrase, the Coke to Puss, which some of you may have heard. I knew him back in the 1970s and 80s. He lived in the Los Angeles area. He was not a minarchist. Now, the prima facie, there seems a difficulty in the minarchist position, which is if the free market is the best means of supplying goods and services, why should there be an exception for protection, including defense and justice? If a free market is so good, why is this type of service an exception? In fact, it was just that line of thought that led Murray Rothbard to anarchism in the very late 1940s that he had been convinced of the general desirability of the free market in debate with his friends at Columbia University who were much more socialist inclined. They said to him as if it were a reductive argument. Well, if the free market is so good, why don't we have a free market in defense as if that were an obviously absurd idea? Murray Rothbard thought it's actually a good argument. We should have a free market in these areas and consistency requires this, and that led him to his study of 19th century individualist anarchists such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. So prima facie, there is this difficulty for the minarchist position. Now, one argument in favor of the state that's very often given, we're fortunate we can set aside in this standard economics literature, which I'm sure you encountered this argument in classes that you've taken or lectures given here, an argument for government provision of protection, defense and justice is that these are public goods. You'll remember a public good is one that has to be non-excludable. It's supplied to everybody. The argument would be for defense that if there's a defense over the whole country, individual people can't opt out of the defense services provided to everybody. It's jointly supplied and non-excludable. So the argument is the free market can't supply such public goods or can't supply them efficiently. Now, there's a great deal to be said about what's wrong with the public goods argument, but fortunately we don't have to get into that in this lecture. And question, can you see why not? Well, remember the debate is between anarchists and minarchists. And minarchists are people who think that the free market can supply everything except defense, protection, justice. But there are many more public goods than that, so they don't favor the non-market provision of the other public goods. So they can't appeal to the public goods argument as a reason for the provision of these services. They could say there's something different about defense and the related goods from other public goods that require supply of that good by government rather than market, but they can't in general appeal to the public goods argument, so fortunately we don't have to consider that one in its various complexities. I should say a couple other points is when we're talking about anarchism versus minarchism, the question would come up over what territory we're talking about. This I won't go into detail, but in general one has in mind something like a similar territory to that of a modern nation state. One could also possibly when talked about individual rights, one could allow for anarchists and minarchists who favor legal rights, but their moral theory doesn't have rights in it at a fundamental level. That's to say one could imagine or there actually are people such as David Friedman, who has a somewhat utilitarian theory justifying anarchism, although his view on moral theory is a bit hard to pin down. There's a apparent problem for minarchists who are natural rights libertarian. The state claims to have the sole legitimate authority authorizing the use of force. Now within states there are very often other people or agencies who use force, for example individuals who are acting in self-defense or private security firms or sometimes states have allowed labor unions to use violence to prevent people from breaking strikes. Very often in states there are other groups other than the state that are using violence, but the state claims to be the final authority in determining what rules they operate under. If say you had a legal dispute with someone now and you went to a private arbitration agency to settle the dispute, then let's say the party, one of the parties refused to obey the decision of the private arbiter, then what measures you could take to enforce the judgment would be dependent on the state. The state claims the final authority to set the rules for the use of violence. So why is this a problem for minarchists? Well supposing we have a minimal state, that's to say a state that's confined to production of protection and defense justice, and someone sets up a competing agency. The agency says well we're supplying defense protection justice, but we can do it in better terms than the existing agency. Would the existing state be able to suppress the competing agency? The difficulty is whose libertarian rights is this competing agency interfering with? According to the, it would seem like if the state says to the competing agency well we're going to shut you down, you just don't have the right to exist. We're the final authority in setting the rules here. It seems to be violating the non-aggression principle because how has the competing agency aggressed against the state if you say well the state has the right to be the sole supplier of protection, justice and defense in the territory. How did it acquire this right? It doesn't appear to be one of the standard libertarian rights. So that is a big difficulty for the minarchist position. That's a problem that they have to get around. Another problem is that the state takes resources from people by taxation. Again this would be true of a minimal state. It says you have to pay for the protective services, but what if you don't want to pay? What if you refuse? It appears that the state is guilty of theft. So we have here two apparent problems for the state. One is it appears to be violating rights if it suppresses competing agencies and it's committing theft if it takes resources from people by taxation. Now in posing these problems I don't argue that that settles the debate. At once we have to consider the minarchist responses to those arguments, but I'm just for now just suggesting that this is a challenge that the minarchists have to face. It's worth noting that some supporters of minarchism don't favor taxation. For example, Ein Rand has a system in which there's no taxation, but people pay user fees, say for going to court or for bringing in the police. So you don't have to pay these user fees. You can say, look, nobody, it's my property. I don't want to pay for this, but it would be, at least in most cases, very much against your interest, not to pay because then you wouldn't be able to get any protection or go to court and sue anybody. I remember in Rand's system there's a monopoly agency supplying these things, so it's either pay the user fees or you don't get justice or protection. You can't go to your own police force and pay for it. Similarly, in the minimal state of Robert Nozick, I'll be discussing him in more detail later, doesn't involve taxation either, but in his system, people who don't want to be clients of what he calls the dominant protective agency are offered to cut raid policies for protection and if they don't want to pay for those, those are free to do so. But again, if they don't, they'll be severely limited in what they can do to protect themselves and secure justice. So how does the how do the minarchists respond to the problems I've raised? Remember, the problems are that the state, even a minimal state appears to violate right since if it claims a monopoly on the who exercises force on permissible use of force, it seems to be violating the non-aggression principle and then for at least some minarchists taking resources by through taxation. So again, it appears to be violating right. So how do minarchists respond? Well, there are two sorts of responses. One is to say that I'll be discussing in the most detail is to say that the minimal state doesn't, in fact, violate rights. It appears to, but in fact, this is a false appearance, the minarchists claim by various ways, which most elaborate is the one who is followed by Robert Nozick, that one could show that the minimal state doesn't violate rights. The other way is to say, yes, the minimal state does violate rights, but unless we're willing to allow these rights violations society couldn't exist at all. So in this view, we're in a less than ideal situation. It would be nice if we could have a system that fully respected libertarian rights, but we can't have that because the conditions would be so chaotic that society wouldn't function. So we have to make an exception in our usual adherence to rights. Now, I want to go into and hear for those of you who are unfortunate enough to listen to my lecture on Robert Nozick. This will involve some repetition. I want to go into Nozick's views on how the state, the minimal state arises in a way that doesn't violate people's rights. He imagines a situation in which we start off from a libertarian anarchist situation, which people have individual right, libertarian rights, individual property rights, and we have a people joining protection agencies to defend these rights. Now, he thinks it's likely that what he calls a dominant agency will arise. There'll be a single agency that will be the one that's setting the rules. In part, he gets to this conclusion through a rather tricky procedure in that supposing the protection agencies form some sort of agreement among themselves on what to do if there's a conflict. Say they come up with some sort of appeals procedure and they'll say this is what we'll do in case their disputes will go to an appeals court. He counts that as making those agencies a single agency that seems doubtful, whether that's a good way of looking at that, but not much turns on this semantic point. But he's defined an agreement among agencies as being a single agency. What happens, let's say, you're a client of a dominant agency and you get into a dispute with someone who isn't a client. Let's say the other person is a client of some other agency or somebody who is independent. He's not a client of any agency. He just enforces his rights by himself. So what would happen then supposing the other person wants to try you in the courts of his protection agency? Then the question would arise, what procedure would be used to try you? What do we mean by procedure? Just what are the rules that would be used to determine your guilt? We could imagine different sets of rules. Some rules would make it very likely that anyone who's guilty would be found guilty, but they would risk finding innocent people guilty as well. We could imagine other rules that would be extremely unlikely to find innocent people guilty, but they would free a lot of guilty people as well. So each agency would come up with some balance of these considerations. They would come up with some procedures that would give what they considered a way of balancing innocent people being wrongly found guilty against guilty people being wrongly found innocent. Now, what if the agency that's proposing to try you has what you consider a risky decision procedure? That's to say one that say if you're innocent will have some chance of finding you guilty. Then Nozick thinks, he says, well, this might arouse fear.  So the prospect might make you afraid and this fear will be present even if they don't in fact apply the procedure to you. That's to say, suppose you know that there are all these agencies or independent people around who might apply risky decision procedures to you. You'll feel fearful even if in fact you don't get into trouble with them and they don't apply the procedures to you. So according to Nozick, there was kind of general state of fear of people suffering from risky decision procedures. So then Nozick says, well, the dominant agency can prohibit these other group agencies or independents from applying such procedures. You can say we don't want to, our clients don't want to be subject to such fear so we can stop you from doing so. Now I won't go into the reasons Nozick thinks that they can do that. They are very complicated and I created enough trouble in my Tuesday lecture in trying to explain that. So I'm not going to get into the same trap again.  Why should the dominant agency have the right to prohibit risky decision procedures? Why should it have more rights than other people or other agencies? And Nozick's response is no, it doesn't have such rights. It's other people have the right to prohibit risky decision procedures also. But if there's a conflict, they'll lose because the dominant agency is the strongest agency so it will win conflicts and then its procedures will be the one, its decisions will be the one that are established. So to repeat a point I mentioned earlier, if the let's suppose that the dominant agency prohibits other people from applying risky decision procedures, the people who are prohibited from applying such procedures haven't really done anything wrong. It's just they have a different view of what are the proper procedures from the dominant agency. So in Nozick's view, it owes them compensation for prohibiting them from using these procedures. It can't just say, well, we're prohibiting you, that's it. And the compensation consists of offering them cut rate policies, protecting them and offering them justice and defense. So they're free to reject these, but again, they'll be generally ill advised to do so since they won't be protected. Now, again, I won't go into the details here. I tend to think that argument doesn't work. It's tremendous fun going through all the complicated variations that Nozick gives on the art. And to think that it's ultimately an unsuccessful one, but that is the most elaborate argument that the minimal state doesn't violate rights. I should say, I knew Nozick quite well for 20 years. He was amazingly ingenious in coming up with counter examples to arguments. It would be very difficult, almost impossible to give him an argument he hadn't already thought of, but it sometimes can be done. Now, so that, as I say, was the most elaborate attempt to argue that we a minimal state doesn't violate rights, even though it prohibits competitors. And in my view, it doesn't really succeed. Now, I want to go to arguments that have been advanced in favor of a state. And these are ones very often advanced by people who say, all right, maybe a minimal state does violate rights, but we need it anyway. We just couldn't function without it. But people who think we can have a minimal state consistent with rights can advance these arguments also. Probably the most popular argument for the state would be something like this. Well, in order to have a free market, we have to have a system of property rights, law and property rights. Supposing, for example, in a free market, I want to exchange my apples for your oranges. Well, we have to have some system that says, what are my rights over the apples? What are your rights over the oranges? And what are the requirements for an exchange? We have to have rules in place. So the argument is, well, we can't have a free market for a legal system and for property rights because we can't have a free market until we have such a system in place. So that can't be supplied by the free market. It's a presupposition of the market. Murray Rothbard has a very interesting response to this argument. He said, first, the basic problem with this argument is that it's confusing the need for a system of property rights and a system of legal rules with a state. But what would be required for a free market is an agreement among people in a society on what the appropriate property rules and legal system should be. So if, say, we want to exchange apples for oranges, and we agree who has the rights to the apples and oranges and how the rights should be specified, why do we need a state? All that we need is the system of rules. Now, we could say, well, will people in fact agree on a code, a common code, does this, are we presupposing that there's a single common libertarian code that settles everything? Well, Rothbard didn't think that there was such a code that settled everything, but he thought that there was a large measure. We could establish what the objective procedures and rights should be, and he thought that people could come to accept such a system. And if they did, then no state would be necessary. In Rothbard's view, a libertarian society would depend on a large measure of agreement among people on what the appropriate legal rule should be. And there are many historical examples we could point to where people have come to agree on a common legal code, for example. The law merchant, which governs what happens in, say, in international trade and disputes between merchants of different countries. These were very often settled by private courts not bringing in the state. There are many cases. Ed Stringham, who gave a lecture earlier this week, has a book discussing many claims of private law settlements of dispute. Bruce Benson is another author who's written on this. So in the response to the Minerchist argument, we need a state for a legal system, is that in fact we don't all that we need is some sort of agreement on a system of rights and laws. And in fact, in many areas, we've actually had such an agreement. Now, another argument that's very often given is this. If there were private defense agencies, wouldn't they fight with each other?  Of course, that wouldn't get you very much if you did that. I don't know why anybody would do that, but I suppose that happened. And then I got my agency to arrest you and try you in its courts, and then the other person just appealed to his agency to come to his defense. Wouldn't this lead to a fight among the agencies? So Rothbard says, no, that would be very unlikely. It wouldn't be in the interests of the agencies to fight with each other. They would come to an agreement on an appeals procedure. And you remember I mentioned this before. Nozick said, well, if they did that, they'd be part of a single agency, but this seems like an arbitrary stipulation. Why should we say just because there's an appeals procedure that they're part of a single agency? Now, one odd thing, I didn't mention this in my Nozick lecture, but I found it a bit odd. There's one footnote where Nozick mentions Rothbard's suggestion of an appeals procedure by which competing defense agencies would settle disputes. And he said, well, this could happen, but Rothbard doesn't give any argument that this would have to happen. It just seems like something he's just come up with to settle the problem. But he doesn't show this would have to happen. And what I found odd about this is that Nozick himself earlier in the book said that that was what would happen if they were competing agencies. So he was giving the same solution as the one he said that was arbitrary when Rothbard was giving it. Just as a side point, when you read Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it's really quite surprising how much of the book is a response to Rothbard. It really is taking Rothbard's ideas and just modifying them in very slight direction. Let's say the whole property theory of acquisition then passing on to different generations, principle of justice and acquisition and transfer is completely Rothbardian. So it's really a very Rothbardian book that's not acknowledging what it really is. So if you read the book, you'd be surprised at the number of citations of Rothbard in the book or maybe after I've said that you won't be surprised by it. Now, another argument that's sometimes given for a state is this. Supposing there's a dispute, say a dispute among agencies such as the one that we have saying we have an appeals court. There has to be some final court of appeal. Say there's a dispute, we can have an appeals procedure, then we can different appeals court if people still aren't satisfied. But there has to be some final court of appeal. So there has to be one agency that's kind of the final one in society that's settling all disputes. We can have disputes at a certain limited level, but there has to be one agency that's really settling everything. Now, this argument, many times in political philosophy, we have arguments that just rest on competing premises that certain people find plausible and others don't. And it's rare that we can come up with a straightforward logical fallacy. But here, in this argument, we can, we have an actual logical fallacy because we're moving from the premise for every dispute. There's a final decision maker to the premise. There's a final decision maker for every dispute to bring out the difference. If it isn't immediately obvious, let's consider a parallel case. Very often, if we're trying to look at whether an argument is right, it helps to just substitute premises where we, the same form, where we're able to see the structure argument better. So suppose we have the premise every person has a father, which is like the premise for every dispute. There has to be some decision maker to settle it. So we couldn't conclude from every person has a father to someone, meaning some particular person is everyone's father. The first premise is, is true, but the second is rather more doubtful. The conclusion is rather more doubtful, namely that there's one person who's everybody's father. So similarly, it doesn't follow from for every dispute. There are some decision maker to there's some decision maker and the same one for every dispute. That's what's called in the trade a quantifier shift fallacy that that probably won't be on the written exam though. Now, another problem with the argument is that it's starting off by saying every for every dispute, we have to have some way of settling it. But why is that true? Maybe there are some disputes we should just put up with it's not worth the cost of settling it. It isn't at any rate immediately obvious why every dispute does have to have a decision maker. Another problem that sometimes advanced against anarchism is what's called the problem of the rogue agency. The suggestion here is that if we had an anarchist system, there would be possibility that rogue agencies, agencies that didn't respect libertarian rights could arise and start aggressing against other people somewhat like the mafia. And that if we had an anarchist system, it would lead to control by these rogue agencies. But as Rothbard pointed out, other agencies would be able to combat the rogue agency if presumably most people in the society wouldn't want the rogue agency. So the other agencies could combine against it and suppress it for violating rights. And in any case, the issue would come up. Why is that worse than the state? Why is this possibility more dangerous than having the state? Because if we had say a minimal state, wouldn't there be possibility that that could be taken over by rogue elements that would suppress people's rights? And then in that situation there wouldn't be by hypothesis any other agencies to combat it. Another monarchist argument, which is I think a very interesting one, it's interesting because it tries to apply the free market against anarchism. Anarchist view is the, we would say the extreme free market position, but this argument says, well, there's a tension between the certain aspect of the free market and anarchism. The argument is that if anarchism is such a great idea, why doesn't it already exist? In the free market, general argument is that the market will supply what consumers demand because it's in the interest of business people to supply them. If the market isn't supplying something, that's a good indication it isn't profitable to do so. If it were some business person would have thought of the idea and come up with it, the claim is, well, we don't have anarchist societies, at least ones that cover large territories. There are various historical claims that there have been such societies such as Iceland or sometimes other claims Ireland at various times. There are all sorts of historical claims, but we don't have such anarchist societies now. The argument is, doesn't anarchism fail the market test if consumers wanted anarchism, we would have it already. The problem here is with the market argument is one where we have a certain structure of rights in place and it says if under those conditions it will be in the interest of business people to supply consumers with what they want. But once we introduce violence into the picture, that changes matters. It isn't an argument that once we introduce the argument isn't that once we have violence, then the market will still produce what people want. Once we have violations of rights taking place, all bets are off, we can't say that because a service isn't provided under such conditions, then this shows that people really don't want it. That argument applies in situations where we have a free market without violence, so it isn't really relevant here. It doesn't apply if the market would be forcibly suppressed. Now, I would say also this, to the extent this argument has any weight, it would have more weight if there were cases of anarchist societies that had been established that just broke down and didn't work. Then we would have some reason to think that that wasn't such a good idea, but we don't have such a society so we can't say that the anarchism has been tried and has been shown to fail. Now, yet another problem is, this is not a problem with the argument itself, but it's a problem for a monarchist who used the argument is that it hasn't been, we don't have cases of monarchist societies either. So if the monarchist says, oh, well, the anarchist is really in very bad strikes because anarchism fails the market test, then it doesn't appear that monarchism does any better. So then why shouldn't we use the argument to show we need substantially more of a state than the monarchist allows. So I think we've reached the end of, if not the anarchist-minarchist debate, at least the end of this lecture on the anarchist-minarchist debate. Thank you.


Next week the German city of Bonn will be hosting the 23rd COP negotiations, an annual gathering of global state leaders with the aim of mitigating against most catastrophic consequences of climate change. Much of the media will be focusing on what's happening inside these buildings here, obsessing over the absence of a certain president who's thrown his toys out of the pram and focusing on the minute details of what are ultimately non-binding and therefore largely ineffective commitments. However outside these buildings happening alongside the negotiations will be a mass gathering of climate justice activists from all around the world. We're here to show you this alternative side to the climate fight and to ask fundamentally different questions like are these negotiations fit for purpose, what are the real stakes here and how can we fight against climate change in a way that has justice, liberation and transformation at its heart. Keep your eyes peeled for videos, articles and podcasts over the coming days. From frontline activists to climate scholars, we'll be bringing you the hottest takes on resisting climate injustice from the ground up. Stay tuned.