Pablonius Monk

If you follow us on Twitter, you’ve probably seen software development company The Mad Botter dangling a System76 machine before your very eyes. Thanks to the company’s recent conversion to Linux, that’s not the only System76 machine you’ll find there! This week, we sat down with Michael Dominick, The Mad Botter’s Founder and CEO, to discuss his team’s switch to System76.

What kind of work goes on at The Mad Botter?

Michael: We’re a software development company. We mostly code on Python, along with some Ruby and Rust, coding IDEs, and using a whole lot of LibreOffice. One of our products is a radar display that runs on Linux and Windows. We actually use a Thelio as a flight simulator to test our software.

Our new product is an automation tool called Rabbot. It involves us having to very quickly spin up a bunch of Ubuntu servers for customers who need them. Having the .deb instances on our computers has made that process a hundred times easier, because we can deploy test units to our machines with the same docker container that works exactly the same as it does on our cloud instances.

Why is it called Rabbot? And what’s with The Mad Botter?

I went a little crazy with the Lewis Carroll references. I have a degree in literature, so I’m very familiar with Carroll’s work. When I moved from New Jersey down to Florida, the name of the company conflicted with a very large football team in Florida, and they did not like that. I had to rejigger everything. We already had a product called Alice at the time, so we decided to build around that.

How long have you been in business?

The Mad Botter has been around for 3 years, and the company before it in New Jersey was around for an additional 3 years. I’ve been running development businesses for around 11 years.

How did you hear about System76?

When I was hosting Coder Radio with Chris Fisher, he would always tease me for being an Apple guy. You know—hipster coffee, the whole thing. He told me, “If you really want a controlled experience to try Linux, take a look at these guys in Denver.” So I did. It wasn’t a huge investment to try on a laptop, and I ended up loving it, so I got the Ratel tower. That was the beginning of a long road to Linux purity.

What System76 machines do you have around the office?

I was the first one to adopt a System76 computer at the company. Now, to make life easy, we only buy System76 computers. Currently we have an older Galago Pro, a Thelio, and 3 Lemur Pros. There’s a couple of Darter Pros running around, too. All of our machines are running Pop!_OS 20.04.

Moving forward, we’re standardizing down to the Lemur Pro and the Oryx Pro. People who have to run VMs are getting the Oryx Pro because you can spec it up a little more. Everybody else is using the Lemur Pro, which is a great all-around computer. The Thelio is a special case because we have to run our flight simulation software on it.

What prompted you to bring your company fully onto Linux?

Honestly, it was macOS Catalina. We were having too many problems with people updating OS X and breaking Homebrew packages, to the point where we had to reinstall our custom toolchain every time we updated. The last guy on Mac updated to Catalina recently, and he had to struggle with Excel libraries because Apple moves things between OS versions. It just wasn’t worth it. I’ve been talking about it for about a year with my CTO.

All of our back-end service runs Ubuntu. Most of the client-side work we’re doing is for IOT devices, and that’s all Linux. We ended up basically having an expensive machine so that we could emulate Linux on anything. It didn’t make a lot of sense to keep using Mac, so we switched.

How was the transition from macOS to Linux?

Actually super easy! Once we wrote a few setup scripts and packages we needed for different jobs in our pipeline, we were up and running. We already had a bunch of scripting and automations for the servers we had, and they’re all on Ubuntu, so it’s not a big jump in terms of the command line.

How did you find the overall experience on Pop!_OS 20.04?

I found it pretty intuitive. Learning the keyboard shortcuts took about a week. I really don’t have any issues. I like the tiling, I use that every day. It definitely makes it easier to multitask on a laptop screen.

Have you tried other distros?

We had a brief stint with Fedora, but because all of our back end was on Debian or Ubuntu, it made sense to stick with that Debian world. We also tried Linux Mint briefly. But honestly the ease of being able to buy a system pre-installed with Pop!_OS that you guys support—where I can just go to your GitHub and see if there’s an issue—is an attractive option.

Have you had any experiences with our support team?

I have a bad habit of spilling tea and other beverages in my laptops… A few times you guys were able to walk me through my issue. I think the most recent one was with Thelio. There was an issue with the graphics card where only one of the DisplayPorts actually worked, so they walked me through trying different things and we were eventually able to figure out why that was happening.

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Committed to STEM education and open source software, The Mad Botter INC team is holding a Fourth of July contest for high school and college students! Create and share an open-source project that addresses ballot access or assists with voting, and you can win a System76 Thelio. Hey wait, that’s us! Check out the contest page for details on how to enter.

Michael Dominick is also host of The Mike Dominick Show, where he looks at the latest news from the worlds of technology and open source. Listen to his interview with System76 Principal Engineer Jeremy Soller—stay tuned for the teaser!