On this episode of Data Driven, hosts Frank La Vigne and Candace Gillhoolley are joined by hardware and open source expert Michael Makowski to discuss the shifting landscape of developer workstations and AI hardware. As Windows usage declines among developers and AI engineers, Linux is experiencing a surge in desktop adoption. Michael takes us inside the latest efforts to make Linux not just accessible, but enterprise-grade—sharing how his team is driving advancements in stability, reliability, and user experience for validated Linux hardware.

We talk about the dramatic improvements in Linux desktop support, the importance of privacy and avoiding surveillance-driven proprietary systems, and the game-changing features coming to market—like automated system rollback and curated app installs. Plus, we explore the current state of gaming on Linux, the technical edge unified memory brings to AI development, and why companies are increasingly opting for supported, Linux-based workstations. Whether you’re Linux-curious, rethinking your hardware choices, or just passionate about the future of developer tools and data engineering, this conversation will equip you for what’s next.

Links

• Mike's Company Website -https://kfocus.org/
• Mike's LinkedIn Profile -https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-mikowski-7601393/
• Watch this show on YouTube -https://youtu.be/E03EObEa2lQ

Time Stamps

00:00 Website security concerns and solutions

05:03 Supporting KDE for long-term stability

09:45 Desktop environment compatibility issues

10:46 Conflicts in desktop environments

15:07 AMD vs Intel & Nvidia Performance

18:58 Showing the production site

23:49 Steam's Linux runtime environment

25:43 Running Windows games on Linux

29:47 Concerns about software privacy issues

33:31 Migrating from Windows challenges

37:48 Setting up machine learning hardware

41:31 Resolving system issues efficiently

42:59 Setting up a VPN correctly

47:40 Running VMs on alternative OS

52:49 Upcoming OS Upgrade Details

56:19 Rigorous testing and development process

57:25 Tuning BTRFS for performance

Today it's 5%. It's two and a half times greater.

And I think that we're reaching a tipping point. So

to meet that tipping point, we also need to match the

expectations of people who are coming from commercial software and

quite frankly, up the game and up the support

mechanisms and provide the capabilities the proprietary users

are really looking for. And that is stability and reliability

and validation. Hey, Frank here. I just want to give a little bit of

context for today's episode. It's basically not really a

data or AI talk per se, but it is something

that I think that the community in general needs to start thinking

about. The Windows that we know and love

isn't really a thing anymore. And increasingly I'm seeing

a lot of workloads and developers and AI

engineers shift away from Windows into

the Mac or Linux ecosystems.

Now, what this means for you practically is. I get it, Linux can

be a little intimidating at first, particularly on the desktop, but

we have the opportunity to speak with someone who is

really alleviating that. So listen with an open mind and keep

in mind that the future may not have a start menu on it.

Hello and welcome back to Data Driven, the podcast. We explore the emerging field of

data, AI and data engineering. Now,

Andy couldn't make it today, so with me, I have the most

quantum curious person I know. But today we'll be talking about AI and data

and hardware. So who do we have talking to us today? Candace?

Today we're going to be speaking with Michael Makowski, and

he is a really fascinating guest because he sits at the

intersection of user experience, open

source development, Linux and the evolution of web

applications. He is an author of single web

applications and a longtime advocate for SPA

architecture. And I'm really, really excited to dig in

deep about what he's doing now. Very cool. Well, welcome to the

show, Mike. Hey, thanks. I appreciate it. No problem.

Spa. So you like to spend time at the spa? Well,

I did back in the day, although recently

with the introduction of AI exploitation

tools. They're very popular in Hollywood, from what I understand,

although maybe they're applied a different way there. But as far

as websites are concerned, the more active your website

is today, the more likely it is to get

exploited, especially if you're using something like WordPress. I

spent some time in the security space,

actually about four years in Silicon Valley, and

the number one attack vector for a

lot of companies was WordPress.

So our website actually is all static these

days. So after writing an spa book, and there are great

things you can do with an spa, basically Having a web application as

opposed to a website. But for

what we're doing today, which is selling validated

Linux systems with a fully fleshed out

web infrastructure, we don't have a need

for having a web application. So

you don't have a need for it and you value

privacy and security then. I'm a big fan of

doing static web pages, which is what we're doing now.

Interesting. So you, you make and ship

Linux laptops. Is that high performance Linux laptops? Is that a

correct statement? Yes, we actually do arrange.

We're launching this week. Hopefully we'll get everything

pulled together. Major initiative which we've

actually had under the way. We're now going into our second month on that

and then we're launching, at least depending on

how you want to count it, six new or refresh

models. So with the latest

2.26.04

Kubuntu operating system, which we

provided stipends for the developers and then directly help

develop and also we provide hardware and then

we're a patron for kde, so we get to pay a lot of

different ways to help make sure that we've got a really

reliable system. And then the

other way that we are moving the needle forward

for validated Linux systems is by

announcing a bulletproof KDE

initiative. That's our working title. We don't know exactly if that's

going to be what sticks for the actual press releases, but

that's a $100,000 plus commitment

to KDE for the next three years to ensure that we

have a stable long term support release on

KDE the desktop. And this is going to

benefit lots of companies and organizations that

use kde. A great example. You'll see that if

you look around NASA that the desktop they offer now running is KDE.

And of course we have Fortune 500 companies

that use our systems and AI companies

and all those folks are going to benefit. But basically anybody

that uses KDE and wants to use the LTS

release will get a big boost. And then of course

we do have a little, what is it, enlightened self

interest involved with this because you know, we're funding that. So hopefully it's going to

drive interest to the systems we produce

and so that we can build a virtuous cycle so that

we can continue to build an ecosystem that

meets or exceeds the best proprietary systems

available, but without all the spyware and without

all the surveillance and all the phoning home and

the age verification APIs that are basically

a thinly veiled attempt to have a

national ID system in place. You know, a lot of people

are really recoiling against all the Big Brother activities

that are occurring currently. And we

have recoiled against that for a long time. But

it's getting so overbearing these days that we're seeing

an extreme amount of interest. Linux usage just a few years

ago was 2% on the desktop, today it's 5%,

it's two and a half times greater. And I think that we're reaching

a tipping point. So to meet

that tipping point, we also need to match the expectations of people

who are coming from commercial software and quite frankly up the

game and up the support mechanisms and provide the

capabilities the proprietary users are really looking for.

And that is stability and reliability and validation.

And so Candice has been involved with me on this for a

seven year journey and she knows that we've been beating that drum

for a long time. But I think that sometimes you just keep on doing

what you're doing and then, you know, the whole world shifts

and you're there to take advantage of it. So I get a

feeling that we're around that zone right now. No, 100%.

And I think that, you know, the privacy story as you look at, you know,

and most of our listeners are Windows users, I would say

with some Linux experience. So KDE is the desktop environment,

is that. Yes, that runs on top of any distro

Linux or just Ubuntu or just certain ones.

It runs on virtually any build

of Linux. Okay. But the.

It's one of those things that's in a certain extent like

Windows in that it doesn't like to

share the OS with other desktops.

Right. Actually, that's kind of the wrong term. It's more like the other way around.

Certain desktops don't play well with other desktops. So like certain

kernels don't play along with certain desktop

experiences. No, kernel is very lower

level. Yeah, well, not lower level. It's. But it

is very

generic in the respect that it's a component

that everybody works with. What you run into trouble with

is, you'll remember back in the day when they had

ZR dos, you know, I'm going way back here, so

that's a lot goes way back. Yeah, yeah. We're losing about three quarters of your

audience right now. But bear with me, back in the day,

Gary Kildall from Digital Research created

ZR dos, which was dos but with stability

and performance. And it was better than

Ms. DOS by almost any

measurable factor. And it gained a lot of

popularity. The problem was that Microsoft

didn't like it. So what Billy and his friends did

was they decided to make it incompatible

for their Windows program. Windows 95

ran perfect on it until they decided to make it not run perfect.

And so it's. Now, not everybody

is so nefarious as that. But if

you don't build your desktop system to work with

the underlying layers, you're going to have problems or if

you create like services that conflict. And

that's what indeed can happen with

certain other desktop systems in Linux.

So the most notorious one, and I'm not saying that this is

an example of any sort of

malfeasance, it's just that the GNOME

desktop environment has a lot of services

that are required by GNOME that

don't play well with other desktop systems.

And I'm certain it goes with other ways as

well. But. So that's the reason why you see distributions that, that only

ship one or two desktop environments. Instead of

giving you 20 to choose from if you want to like go out and play

with a bunch of them, it's because they conflict. And

again not because people have malfeasance in their heart, but

because of the fact that nobody actually tests to make

sure that the interplay actually is going to

work out the way you want it to. I think we've probably done

a lot more than the average bear in that respect where we've actually identified

the conflicting services, but nobody's paying us,

quite frankly, to make those

conflicts go away. Or nobody's paying Gnome or

KDE to make sure those conflicts go away. There's really not

much of an incentive to change that because people who

use a certain desktop tend to stick with it. It's kind of like they

choose a type of cigarette and they stick with it too. Maybe not, maybe not.

The best example, they picked a favorite type of soda. How about

that? Yeah, there we go. Exactly. Pepsi or Coke? There we go. Pepsi or

Coke or Dr. Pepper. Yeah, so

what? I think you're absolutely right. I think there's a.

Something is rotten in the state of Windows land. We have a lot of folks

here who are Microsoft centric, who do listen. And

if they've been following me, they know that I've kind of gone. I've gone

rogue, right? Because Windows 11

has really pushed me over the edge in terms of the decisions that were made,

the usability and when you start peeling back the

curtain behind the privacy story on Windows 11, certainly the home version

Pro is not as bad. Enterprise is a little bit less bad. It's

painting a picture. I really don't like. Right. My, my beef was, you

know, if you look at my office, I got a lot of equipment and

you know, because of an arbitrary decision made in Redmond,

most of this will not run Windows 11. And

that really made me mad. I was going to use other words, but

I think Windows 11. And again, I used to be a Microsoft

MVP. I used to be a Microsoft employee twice

and I doubt that I'll be reinvited for the MVP program

anytime soon. But I just take issues with

some of the decisions that were made with Windows. Now I haven't seen what

they announced at build this week but or last week,

but I'm just very much annoyed and

I think that Windows choices,

be they what they are, I think has really driven Linux

adoption. You mentioned Linux on the desktop has

doubled. I don't think it's a coincidence that Windows 11 has drove

away a lot of hardcore Windows users like me. Right. Like, I mean I,

for me to, you know, obviously I, you know, my day job is at Red

Hat now. You can see the fedora there. Right. But you know, for the longest

time I was the only person on my team that had a Windows laptop.

Right. But with the rise of AI development tools

being fairly agnostic in terms of what

platform they're on, almost to the point now where they're, they recommend

Mac or Linux and if you have a Windows device they

actually say you probably should run this inside WSL or Windows subsystem for

Linux. I think that you're right. I think we are on the cusp

of an inflection point of Windows.

Certainly in the AI field, if you're an AI developer, it's almost

exclusively Macintosh, I would say.

Well, we have a lot of companies

that develop for AI that use our systems.

Right. There's a saying in Silicon Valley

which is nobody deploys to Mac.

So when you really think about it, the

tools have to first and foremost be

Linux compatible and Linux proven and

Linux battle tested. Right. Mac is popular because

got a trophy status and they also are

popular now because of the unified memory mechanism. They

have relatively weak GPUs compared to the

top end Nvidia GPUs obviously. But because

they have unified memory that can overcome that

disadvantage and for certain models can actually run faster.

Now with the advent of AMD processors as

well as now the latest Panther Lake intel

processors, Those now have BPIGPUs in them as

well. Again, they don't touch the Nvidia in

terms of the level of performance

available. But again for certain models, say

running llama from my understanding, and I'm not an expert here, so if

I sound foolish, it's because I am.

But the. For certain

models, Llama, for example, will work better because you can

have a memory window of 128

gigabytes, for example, instead of being limited to 16 or 24

gigabytes on an Nvidia system. On the other hand, you know when you got a

5090 and you want to start swapping stuff out, if your model is

the right structure, that 59 is going to decimate anything

else. But I think the reason why you're seeing people developing

on Mac for models that will eventually be

deployed, typically on Linux Nvidia

systems, is because of the fact that they,

they can have a

proprietary quality,

user experience and reliability and

then also have reasonable performance when working with their

model. Sometimes better performance working with their model,

although again, I don't think that tends to be deployed. But I'm

not an expert in the deployment arena. I just know what our customers

buy and what they tell me. Well, no, I mean,

so as someone who is in AI space, I will say that

unified memory, I think is what makes the Apple Silicon really appealing.

And I also have a DGX Spark, which that's also. It's kind of claim to

fame is that it's unified memory, right? Oh yeah. And you're right, like depending on

the actual chip you can get more done,

but very often the VRAM that's

available to you or the RAM that's available to the video card

is also a blocker too. Right. So the fact that you can have a unified

memory space I think is a huge deal. And you're even seeing Microsoft follow

suit with this with their new I think RTX Spark. I think that's what it's

called. Yeah, I think that's kind of the future.

But yeah. So tell me about some of the AI specific hardware.

You have me curious. Well, I can show you what we have that

people. Yeah. And then we'll let Candace ask, ask questions because I'm hogging away. We

have lots of companies that buy hardware

that. And I'll show you the heavyweight stuff.

Let's see. Yeah, we're actually, like I said,

going to be launching new versions of these systems. But

I'll, I'll see if I can share a.

Let's go to our website, be able to share your screen and I'll,

I'll talk through it for those that are listening.

Yeah, you just go, ooh, wow, you can do

that. Take my money. Yeah, that's my recommendation.

Yeah, take my money. Yeah, you can keep doing that.

Let's see. Share and let's try

a home tab. There we go. And there we go.

If those who are listening and they want to see this, we are on YouTube.

Just check the show notes. I always link the YouTube version. Sorry, cut you

off. That's it. No, no, you didn't cut me off. Interesting thing about doing

these web pages, by the way, is that I

think it's a pretty fascinating thing here. But if you look at these

graphics here, right? And then I'm going to change this to a

dark theme right now. So the OS is changing to the dark theme

and. Oh, that's on a local host. Let's do it. Let's go to the actual.

I was showing the development model. That's the reason why that broke.

So here's the actual production site. But what's pretty

fascinating about this that you never think about is that these are

mostly black, you know, very dark machines, right. But

if you now switch over to a light view, you

may not notice it. But these, the chassis here just bumped up

about two levels of lightness in the gray area.

And it's a kind of funny thing because the, you

put something in a white room and it makes the whole thing lighter.

Those things you don't just run into unless you're, I

guess, selling black computers on the Internet. So let's take a

look at a couple of the products that we have and the ones that are

popular for AI. So this is the, this is

the beast. And it is a 5090

with 24 gigabytes of video RAM. Oh, wow.

Yeah. And then it's got up to 192 gigabytes of

RAM. So I guess 2000, $2500 of RAM

at wholesale these days that you put into that. It's got an 18 inch

screen, 2560 by 1600, which is a beautiful

screen. It's DCIP3, 100% and

it's just a beast. It's got a subwoofer in it for, you know. Oh, wow.

Crying out loud. There we go. I almost slipped up there.

So. And the, the subwoofer does sound good. So

you can get your jam on when you're loading up

your, oh, I don't know what 30 billion

parameter model. See, I might be sounding ignorant here now too,

but yeah, while you're loading up your model and this one's real popular

with ML. What's the,

what's the 5090 vram?

24 gigabytes. Oh yeah, you can do, you can do some serious damage with

that. Yeah. So.

And it's got the 24 core. The new version coming

out is the. And this was actually recommended

by Wired magazine as the best Linux

laptop for performance. And the next generation is

the 2090 HX which gets it about a 6 to

15% bump in single and multi core

performance. The GPU remains the same,

but that gives incredible performance as well. So pardon

my ignorance, but one of the, one of the screenshots that kind of cycled

through was a game. Yes, obviously,

obviously anyone buying this would buy it for serious business purposes. But what

is the state of gaming on Linux these days? I've

heard things kind of mixed and is Kubuntu also what is

based on the Stream Deck or Steam Deck is

not what the Steam deck is based on. Steam Deck is

a custom version of Arch

Linux that uses a non

mutable version. It's designed to be

an appliance, not a general purpose computer.

And there are some alluring aspects of that.

Obviously if it's designed to be an appliance, that means that the end user

is unable to easily break it. The

downside to that is that the end user is

unable to easily add system level services

to the system. So. So if you want to run a database for example,

and have a multi user system, well, you're probably kind of out of luck. But

then again you're running a Steam Deck. You're not. It's something that you hold in

your hands. Well, it's like an Xbox, right? Like a PlayStation.

Yeah. They by the way run KDE Linux and

I'm sorry, KDE Linux, they're running the KDE desktop on that as well.

Gotcha. Okay. That's where I saw it because in case people are wondering what's Frank

talking about? And again I'm not a Linux guru. I, one of my

co workers said I speak Linux with a Windows accent. The. When you

go to kde.org, one of the devices on there is. You're, you're on that

page and. But next to your logo,

a couple of items down is, is the Steam deck. So I

noticed that like. And I noticed that Linux gaming has really taken

off. Right. It used to be like good luck with that.

I think it used to be. Now it's. Now I would say again this is

just based on conjecture and I may sound like an idiot now, but I would

say if you want to play a triple A game, it's probably a

5050 shot that it will run on Linux. I

think it's better than that even really. At least if it's a. If

it's a triple. If it's a triple a game

like if you want to run something like Grand

Theft Auto, one of my favorite Grand Theft Auto 5.

So almost certainly you can run that.

Okay. The biggest challenge right now with

gaming on Linux is not a technical issue

because because

of Steam's investment

in that aspect, they've created a

runtime environment that is not a

translator, but is an

API layer that Windows programs can run

and say, I want to make this video call. And it

works the same on the Linux system as it does on

Windows. So it's not running through a

like Rosetta Stone translation layer. It's

running in a virtual environment that then makes

calls out to local

resources and they just work. So

if you can imagine you in Windows, and

this is a very simple example of this, and if any

of your readers want to pick apart my explanation, have at it. But

I think in a grand sense this is correct.

When you're on Windows and you want

to list the files in a directory, you type in dir. Correct.

And when you're on Linux and you want to type or list files in a

directory, you use ls. And the layer

which is called WINE that is used by

Steam, it basically aliases

LS for dir. And so. So that's what WINE is.

Okay. In fact, WINE is something along like

Wine is not an emulator. It's one of those recursive

acronyms, I believe, that plague us to this day.

Find is not elm. Yeah, yeah, stuff like that.

The whole point is that it's a layer that instead of

creating a whole new emulation environment and having to recompile

stuff, it just takes the executable and allows it to run.

And then when it asks for a DirectX call, there

is a. Actually a repointer that occurs

that allows that to work. I think DirectX

has fallen out of favor in for a lot of

games they just go right to Vulcan. And Vulcan is native to

Linux, so there doesn't even have to be a translation. There are

a number of AAA games that actually run faster on Linux than they do on

Windows. Especially now that you have all those background services running

on Windows 11 to take snapshots and send them to Lord knows

where or to drive, you know, you have to have that background service so that

you can get advertisements in your system settings

configuration or get advertisements in your Start menu

and you know those are important. So you can't turn Those off. No,

yeah, yeah, people. And that's actually driving

Linux to be more power efficient. We're able to get longer

battery lives on Linux, then you are able to get on

Windows, even though Windows has such

fantastic cross device driver support.

You can't bring the CPU necessarily

down to the sleep level that you want it to if it's

constantly calling all these background services. So

through some tweaks we're able to be competitive or even better than

Windows as far as battery usage and battery life on

a number of our systems. So you've already

listed a couple of the truly competitive advantages

for someone who's considering gaming the gaming

platform they want to use. That's exciting. It's

actually very exciting. What else do you think would surprise people the most

about the current state of game compatibility, performance and

overall user experience when considering

Linux as their primary gaming platform? Well, I do want

to answer one thing that is a negative

for Linux and it's not because of Linux, it's because of the game companies

and the Sweeneys of the world. And that is

what's a Sweeney? Sweeney runs

the company, I believe, that creates Fortnite.

Oh, okay, okay. So you've got on one hand

the Steam team that

wants to get out from under the yoke of Microsoft and they

went and did something amazingly

proactive with releasing their Steam deck running Linux,

not Windows, you have

that side of it and then the other side you have game companies that want

to make sure that their intellectual property

locked down and the weather locking that down is by using

kernel level anti cheat mechanisms.

And from my understanding what that means is that

they're actually running in kernel space

code that is meant to prevent people from

cheating on massively multiplayer

games. So mm pgs,

you can tell I'm a real gamer, but that is a downside that

MMPGs are not always as well

supported or not supported officially by the game studios.

And the on the flip side,

the fact that you're running code at the kernel level on

your Windows system is going to be an

incredible vector for somebody probably real

soon to own a lot

of Windows systems. Right? Because

people who just want a game are going to download whatever, they're not

going to go and review the source code

for the kernel code that's running in Windows. And

Lord knows you probably couldn't do that if you wanted to because it's certainly

protected under 3 NDAs and a couple of

licenses that have been created for that

purpose. And so you're just

basically adding mystery code on top of a system

that is built for surveillance. And so now

what's going to happen when you get into that and then what's going to happen

when commercial OSes are going to be

required to effectively tap into a national

ID database for the save the Children

effort for age verification? That's their vector.

Now you're going to have somebody running so they can play their

favorite mmpg. They're going to have running kernel level

code that somebody with Claude code is going

to be able to dissect and find a backdoor for.

Once they get into the kernel level they own the system. Now

you have all these wonderful tools and APIs available at

the the kernel level and the user space level that allow

you to go in and basically docs anybody

And I don't want to be part of that. So I guess the

short or the long answer because I've made this long

is that you can't game everything because

of these kernel level anti cheat as well as other anti

cheat mechanisms that you can't get anything but Windows.

But you have to ask yourself do you really want to be

putting those things on your system because of the security

implementation. Sorry,

implications, Implications. There we go. My

mind was trying to throw in an extra syllable there but the security

implications that you're exposing

yourself to so sounds dangerous.

Yeah, you're right.

I think the whole national ID thing is a

whole other can of fish can of worms to open.

But you're right just from an operational security point of view, if these

things are running in kernel mode. For those who don't know kernel mode an error

in kernel node is what caused the crowdstrike issue. That was

two summers ago and there are very good reasons

to run things in kernel mode. But I have a hard time thinking that the

risk of

cheat prevention. I don't know if it raises to that level in my

opinion. Right. And I think.

Do gamers. Are gamers aware of this or. And I know I don't want to

make this all about gamers because even though it's cool but these are high performance

systems. Right. But so sorry about that but do gamers

know the risks involved? I

don't think all of them do. Certainly some do.

Right. I would say that people that have

been ardent Windows users

for a long time like Linus Text tips. Right, right. Right

out of Canada they just did their Linux challenge which seems to

be like a yearly thing for them now or once every few years anyway.

I've done a few of them now and maybe

three. I don't follow that closely but

this last Time around, you know, he had his typical, I'm

moving to a different platform problems. And

in previous challenges, if

he ran to a wall, he was. And he's actually on the record saying this.

He said, when I ran to the wall, I just threw my hands up and

said, well, I'm just going back to Windows. He said, but now with all the

trouble that I'm having with Windows right now with security and

root level anti cheat and stuff like that, he knows what's going

on there. And he's like, now I am

motivated to put in the effort to migrate

to something else because this is.

This is just getting to be too much of a pain point. So.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah, here's, by the way, the page that you mentioned

on kde. So they do ship these around to be fair to people.

So sometimes we're at the very top, sometimes we're near the bottom

here. So I guess we. I mean, next time around

we'll be at the top again. So we'll see.

Maybe they're just trying to get more money from you. Who knows?

We're a big contributor. I think we're one of the. I

wouldn't say we're the largest contributor to kde, but I think we're

now moving towards the upper echelon because. Okay, we're a patreon. I'm just

joking. I'm just joking. I don't want to. I don't want to start any fights.

I don't want to start any trouble. Oh, no, no, no. The initiative that I

was talking about, though, is the bulletproof KDE initiative that.

Yeah, working title. That's where we're basically

freezing KDE at a specific version and then

we are pro providing them. And I won't get into all the

details, but we're setting up a continuous

integration environment and where we're able to

do automated tests within the data center. It's in

Finland. And then we work with an international team

for identifying. We manage the list

of key paper cuts and. And then

we pay them to help shepherd getting

those things fixed. And we work with a Kubuntu team, which we also provide

stipends for, to make sure that those get backported to

the release. So if you buy one of our systems, not only do we continually

test things like kernels and drivers before you

ever see it, to make sure that it always works. So we're kind of

like your remote IT department. Right? You know how, like, with your IT

department, you don't get an image until they verified it? Well, we

verify that we. Oh, that's pretty cool.

Yeah. So we actually, if you want to take a look at

what we verify, I'll share this tab instead. If you get a.

This is probably a good way to put it, but here let's just go to

support and you can look at the

system support and it walks

through everything that we do from hardware selection to

making sure. Like making sure that the dual ethernet

on the ZR Gen 2 which is coming up,

or the big beast we just looked at, making sure those work,

making sure three monitors work on sleep and

resume etc, we make sure that's there. We make sure the

kernel updates always work and that we have about 150

major KPCs that we go through. We make sure

that the Nvidia machine learning language, sorry,

machine learning libraries are available

and all these, which for non Linux people that's a

massive pain point. I will say making sure you get that

working like. No, that part of the reason why I

chose to get the Nvidia, the gtx, the DGX Spark.

Yep. Was that it was made by Nvidia and Nvidia

would be on the hook to supply those drivers.

So hold that thought because I want to. I want to come back to Nvidia

and Linux in a few minutes, but go ahead. Sorry. Well, it's all right. We

just. We spent the last. On the ZR Gen 1

and the M2 Gen 7. We

spent about 150 hours of development time on

creating and packaging everything for those

Nvidia drivers and the machine learning libraries.

It was a. That. That is not normally the amount that we

spend, but because we do support the machine

learning libraries and this was with Ubuntu

24.04. There were a lot of challenges

this time around. I think it's partially due to the newness

of the hardware and also due to the fact that there's more of an

emphasis on commercial hardware than they

used to have versus consumer hardware.

But in any event, setting all those things up, adding the

right repositories from Nvidia and then pinning to the right

machine learning and inference libraries is

a lot of work. And if you buy from us, you

outsource that. So we test that

before every kernel upgrade and we test that for every major

upgrade. For the Nvidias we actually have an

Nvidia meta package that we create that's validated for your

hardware. We also have a kernel which is spun

off of the mainline Ubuntu kernel, but

we will advance patch stuff that

we then upstream to the mainline kernel or to the Ubuntu

kernel that allows say proper hardware

integration or sound routing and stuff like that. So when you get

the system, you open it up, you turn it on

and everything works. And then it continues to work for the

entire support window. And the standard support window is three years.

So we keep bench models and we validate every

single model that's been released and last sold in the last three

years. So when you buy a system, you typically get three and a

half to four years of support

in basically IT team support for your system.

And then by the time you go off of that support, generally

everything is upstreamed anyway. So. But

it's. That's the reason why companies buy from us for

this purpose. So the other thing we do here,

and I'll change the sharing here because you'll. Is there's a lot of

integration that we do that is

people ask us are we a hardware company or a software company?

We're really a software company that does hardware because we have

to. Interesting.

Yeah. The best way to describe that, I would say is that when you buy

a Mac you get a full ecosystem

and you have a few key pieces of hardware

that they continuously integrate for. And so I

don't think anyone's going to argue that Macs are more reliable than Windows

systems because of the. And it's because of the limited hardware

and the fact that Apple does continue

for a number of years to do basically what we're doing, which

is they have a limited amount of hardware and they have

a limited amount of software. It's a vast support

surface, but it's manageable. And we're

doing the same thing for Linux is that that Apple is doing for their

proprietary os. But we have the advantage of being Linux native.

That is very valuable if you're deploying to Linux

as opposed to deploying to macOS. Yeah, that's

our philosophy. The other thing that you'll see and we're in

kind of transition here, so. And I'm actually gonna. This is the 26

out of 4 development. I'm in an alpha system. So if something

breaks here, don't go around and point say, hey look, they're

shipping broken stuff. This stuff isn't shipping for another. We're planning on

two to three weeks. Two weeks would be the very minimum. Probably three

weeks we'll be shipping once all the bugs are worked out. But

here's an example though of if you go to like support here,

we have all of these. Pretty much anything that you want to do

that's a workflow, but. And

so if you look at like Linux help, you can go to Chat

GDP and have it lie to you for six or seven iterations

on a question, or you can go to a forum

or a bug report and try to figure out how to get something done.

And we've all had the experience where it's kind of similar to Chat

gdp where it'll lie to you numerous times and hallucinate

until you kind of have to know where you're going to get the correct

answer. Or you could just go here and get a correct answer right off

the bat. Because it's tested for your system, so

it's tested for the OS for your system. So if you want to connect to

a phone, you can see that this is tested for a

previous operating system that's still supported. It's also verified

on the current one because we actually have people to go and test the

entire procedure on the OS

with the drivers that are in place. So

interesting. You can, you know, let's say I want to set up a

vpn. So you just go here, press VPN and

oh, look, I can connect to a VPN. And there you are,

VPNs everywhere. There's Taylor Swift. I was wondering when she was going

to show up. And this will actually walk you through setting

up a VPN completely for your system. And this

is a amalgamation of

over here running a Wireguard server

or installing OpenVPN and configuring everything

in an optimal fashion for your system

if you want to know how to do things right. And it's a

common workflow, we probably already have it here and

it's been tested for you. One of the things

that we do that our customers really like

is we make sure that they don't have Franken systems.

So you see that with a lot of people that are using Chat GDP

or using forms and stuff like that, they end up finding

suboptimal solutions after

maybe breaking their system a couple of times. Then they copy and

paste something to a configuration file somewhere and it works kind

of well enough and they limp along with it and they're afraid to touch it

because I might break it again. And then they have to reinstall the OS

for one reason or another or move to a different machine and they have no

idea what they did. If you contrast that to what we

do is that we end up finding those solutions

and we'll create them into this documentation. But

the way that we run the company is we actually push those

changes up into software so that you just

update your packages and. And those configurations are

done for you in a repeatable fashion, again, like an IT

department. So we even have

a pitch deck that actually shows how we do that. And

so our goal is always to move everything up the stack. Because

if you look at compliance, people doing the

right thing, if you put the stuff into the packages

that people update, their compliance is 100%.

If you put it in documentation, if you're lucky,

you might get 50% compliance or 30% compliance.

Right? And we're always pushing to get

100% compliance so that people don't have to worry about that.

One thing that's also interesting here is like, if you look at. Let's take

a look at image editing, for example, and we have a whole

subsystem that's in place here for,

we call Curated Apps. And this allows you to

like, say, start an application directly from the

documentation. And if the application isn't installed,

it'll actually add the cryptographic keys and

then add the repository and then download the program

and then install the program if necessary.

So you don't have to step out and do five or six different steps and

say, what was I doing? You just click on something and if

it's installed, it'll launch it like you see here.

And if it's not installed, it'll go all the way back as necessary.

It'll even encourage you to

even step you through, for example, installing,

say, Docker, which

requires service setups and adding

yourself to groups so that you can run as a regular user and stuff like

that. It'll actually walk you right through that.

So if I go to support, let's say, let's go to Curated

Apps right here. Now, I haven't checked this out on here.

We're still in alpha, but I believe this is actually already in

place. So let's take a look for Docker. So click

on Docker and there it's not installed. So do I want to

install it? Yes. Now I'm asked for my password

and away we go. And now it's actually downloading the system. It's

added the repository for the official Docker release.

It's added the cryptographic keys for the actual Docker release.

It's installing it right now. And then it's going to guide me through changing

the groups again. We're just really

focused on making sure that people are

prepped for success. Here you go. It

says Dockers installed, but the user dev must be added to the Docker group to

run as normal user. Do you want to add to the group. Now

say yes, now I have to do that as

root. Now it's been added,

Docker's installed. But you got to log out and log back in if you want

to use it as a user.

It's fantastic. That's amazing because this does. I know a lot of people that

are very, very lost right now in terms

of Windows isn't what it used to be. And

there's a lot of people that are looking for a new place to land with

high performance hardware. And I can only assume that you

could probably run this as the base operating system and kick off as many

VMs, particularly if you have enough RAM, kick off as many VMs as

you need for Windows. Right. If you really absolutely needed a Windows like

a pure Windows machine. Oh, absolutely. In fact, if you.

That sounds like a common workflow. Let's see if we have something that fits that

category. Oh, here's how you stall

virtual 11. Right. And by the way, all of these right

here have, are available

in blow up format, if you will.

So we can just walk right through these and it'll just go through all the

steps for you. This has been validated for Windows 11

on the latest OS. You can see over here that it's already applied

to this os. I mean this is brilliant because

there's so many times when there's no instruction manual, there's no

instructions anywhere. You kind of have to just,

you know, Svengali it yourself. But to have these guided solutions

is just. Is really, I think

reduce anxiety. Especially with Linux.

Right? Linux, you're kind of, you know, good luck

is kind of like the. You're kind of

left to your own devices and your own skills, which for some people is perfectly

fine. But not for everyone. Oh yeah, and even

the people that. There's a bit of a dunning Kruger effect out there.

Yes, smidgen of that. Especially people that get behind

chat gtp. Right. And you know, I used it just the other day and

I was trying to solve a problem where I knew already what the answer was.

It was actually the answer was

looking to pull down the latest Jetbrains toolbox

and install it. So one of the curated apps here that

is not finished for this version of the release is

installing the Jetbrains toolbox. So I knew that I had to go out and

pull a web API and make a request to

get the current version and then build a

URL to create a download poll.

Being a developer for three or four years at

least. Yeah, multiply that by a

bit. But I knew that that's where we needed to be. Right.

And so I went and used GTP and asked,

how do I do this? And I had to ask literally six times.

And it kept giving me the wrong URL to go and make the request on

it. And I was like, you know, I could have just looked up for the

Jetbrains API and I would have gotten there in

a search and then a quick query. But the

problem with those answers were they were all

extremely confident. Oh, yeah, you just need to

do this and this and this here, cut and paste this. It won't hurt.

We're seeing an uptick in people breaking their systems because they're using chat

gdp. Why doesn't that surprise me? Yeah,

we're actually been talking about creating a local

LLM that will basically consume all of these

documents that you see and use these as the primary source

instead of going out to the web and scraping that. And

that way people will have an interface that will be available

directly from their toolbar and

that they're. They will be just as confident. But

unlike the confidence of chat gdp, most

of the time, in my experience, it'll be right.

Bonus. Another thing here is you

can see that we have service guides for all of our systems that.

And we have the same structure for every one of them, including what the bio

settings should be for any one of the systems,

so. Oh, very cool. Yeah, you click on the show you how to swap out

your ram and we don't void the

warranty if somebody opens up their case, so.

Interesting. Yeah, I.

Where can folks find out more and get their hands on one of these sweet

systems? Well, I just go to our website, which is

the. There's our. That's the.

That's the new interface you're seeing there. I shouldn't say

new. That's an overview. So we have different

things here. Oh, very cool. Yeah, so

it's a beautiful interface. It's just.

Kfocus.org is our website. Okay. We used to have

kfocus. Com, but we had somebody steal it

from us and to give it back. Yeah, I

won't go into all the details on that one, but watch your backs, people.

Yeah, just go here. And I think it's pretty straightforward.

And yeah, we'll be. I

wouldn't recommend buying it right now because in the next couple of days.

So if you're watching this in the next couple of days, then yeah, buy right

now. But we'll be updating all these

models to 26.04 and we don't expect to

release any or ship any other models with the

earlier version of the os. So we're basically on a little bit of a

pause as we finalize that and finalize the validation

for all the new hardware. It's a big hard push right now that we're

going through, but it's going to be pretty awesome.

It's our again, Candace was there at the

beginning from 2019 and

this will be our fourth major or

fifth major OS upgrade. And fourth actually.

Fourth and

yeah, it's better than ever. Well, there's one thing that I do want to show

you that I think that you would very much appreciate

and let me put it here. One of the things you run into

with immutable systems. Immutable systems are great

until you don't want them to be immutable anymore and then you're stuck.

We put about 1200 engineering hours

into a thing called

rollback. Oh, very

cool. So you can, it's. That could be very

useful. What system rollback

does is it takes a snapshot of your root system and

boot system and then it is immutable.

People that are creating immutable file systems or immutable

systems are basically doing the same sort of thing.

But here you're doing it at your

leisure or you can have it done automatically. You

can see up here we have automatic snapshots on here and I'd give you

a demo on it, but it's not on this system because it's a development system.

But there's people that you'll see post recently there was

on Twitter where one of the guys said the best system you can get is

Kubuntu Focus because they're amazing rollback system.

And this is what he was referring to. This allows you to take

snapshots, roll them back and every time you upgrade your system

it takes a snapshot before the upgrade. So it

causes problems. You can roll back. So not only are we pre

checking all the major updates, like all the kernel updates etc and all

the Nvidia driver updates, but even if a minor

update causes a problem, let's say an app update, you can just go

over here and roll back to the previous one version. That's

fantastic. We also wrote an event driven

monitor. It's a throttled and

debounced event driven system.

So it doesn't have a major

impact in performance. It's a very tiny impact of performance.

But if you end up pushing this copy on

write file system to the point where you don't have enough space,

it will actually pop up and warn you immediately and

it will also turn off the automatic snapshots until you

fix it. And it also guides you on how does turn off the

snapshots until it's fixed. Interesting. Yeah, that was a

part of the reason why it was 1200 hours is because we have the

whole solution. Also, unlike a lot of

software, this was accelerated tested. I come from

automotive design background so like when if we screwed up,

people died and you lose your job. We use a lot of

spec driven development techniques that have been around

for probably 50 years or longer in automotive that have been

proven out. And so we use design for

design failure mode effect analysis with RPMs

and KPCs and then we also use accelerated

testing. So we actually had laptops set up for this where

they ran through multiple three year cycles

of taking snapshots, installing packages, rolling

back, taking more snapshots and that was all automated. So we just had

systems that were like 125 watt light bulbs burning up

constantly doing all of that. But we wanted to make sure that it

was reliable for users. And so. And then we

also did the same thing like with. Or we do a

related thing which is make sure the BTRFS file system that

this is based on has appropriate performance and we tune that

as well. Basically it's like again it's like you're going into a big

company, you've got an IT department that looks after you

and make sure that everything just works and keeps working.

That's cool. Yeah. All you got to do is update. Awesome.

We'll make sure that we put the shit linked here and you got me,

got me. You got my attention. Good. So very

cool. And I think it's a good alternative for people that.

I think it's a great alternative for people who want to get into Linux but

maybe don't are afraid of it. And all these things you put in in place,

I think remove a lot of that fear and I think that's great.