Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brentley.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Good to see you. And hello, everyone here at LinuxFest Northwest 2026.
Producer Jeff: Woo!
Chris: Hello there. In the beautiful Bellingham, Washington, in the very corner of
Chris: the majestic Pacific Northwest at the Bellingham Technical College.
Chris: And it is LinuxFest Northwest 2026.
Chris: And this is a very special year. We'll get more into that in just a little bit.
Chris: We also are going to set the ground rules for the BSD Challenge,
Chris: which actually kicks off next week.
Wes: Uh-oh.
Chris: The show don't slow down. The show don't slow down.
Wes: You brought your flash drives, right?
Chris: We should get going, right? And then, of course, as always, we'll round it out
Chris: with some boos, some great picks, and a lot more.
Chris: We don't have a mumble room with us, but we do have producer Jeff. Hey, PJ.
Producer Jeff: Hello.
Chris: And we have Tech Dev with us. Hello, Tech Dev.
TechDev: Hey there, guys.
Chris: Nice to have you both. And we are going to do day one right now,
Chris: and then we'll be doing day two a little bit later in the show.
Chris: Before we get to all of that, I want to say good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go to defined.net slash unplugged and check out Managed Nebula.
Chris: It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that we love.
Chris: And when I'm building a network, I really do try to think long term now.
Chris: I want something fast. I want it secure and I want it resilient.
Chris: And most importantly, I want it under my control.
Chris: That's why I like Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. It's a decentralized
Chris: VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform, which was originally engineered for Slack.
Brent: What?
Chris: Yeah, real scale. And get started. You can use it yourself. 100 hosts,
Chris: totally free, no credit card required. Just go to define.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Go deeper. Check it out. You can self-host the entire infrastructure yourself.
Chris: You can build it totally private the way you actually need it.
Chris: It's simple enough for your home lab. It's strong enough for a global team.
Chris: And it's built for people who want to own the entire stack. Try it free,
Chris: define.net slash unplugged. Go support them and check it out at Define.net slash Unplugged.
Chris: We really do appreciate Define Networking for supporting the Unplugged program. Thank you very much.
Chris: All right, this is our LinuxFest Northwest episode, but we invite all kinds
Chris: to join us here, and there are the BSD types as well.
Chris: And so we want to get everybody queued up on what the deal is,
Chris: what the rules are for the BSD challenge, because it starts.
Wes: It wouldn't be a challenge without some convoluted rules that we probably argue
Wes: about now and later when we do the adjudicating, but we've got to start now to be, you know, try.
Chris: We want you to be able to follow along. Yes, sir.
Brent: Excuse me, is one of the rules don't launch a BSD challenge at a Linux event?
Chris: So we're going to give you the rules. The challenge will actually start next episode, 665.
Chris: And then it will conclude in episode 600 and 666.
Chris: So you have a little bit of time. You get to follow along. So it's not a Linux versus BSD challenge.
Chris: It's really can Linux users become functional on BSD challenge.
Chris: Fresh BSD install is the idea. Four levels you can climb. You get to pick your
Chris: own BSD, free BSD, open BSD, net BSD, ghost BSD, brand BSD, whatever it be.
Wes: Hey, where's Dragonfly?
Chris: Sure, Dragonfly BSD. Just didn't.
Brent: Is there a BTSD version?
Chris: It didn't rhyme, and I came up with a little rhyme, and I liked it,
Chris: so I went with it. So we have, like I say, four levels, like Wes over there say. Four levels.
Chris: Level one, you can get up to seven points. If you can get it booted,
Chris: a fresh BSD installed somewhere, connect to the internet.
Brent: That's going to be easy, though, right?
Chris: Install a package, read a man page, you get points. We'll put all of this up
Chris: at linuxunplugged.com slash BSD. So you can go there and get all the rules.
Chris: So there's level two, which is you become a daily driver. Can you just do normal
Chris: desktop stuff for human beings on this thing?
Chris: Can you get a graphical desktop running a web browser?
Chris: You know, don't run as root, which is awesome.
Chris: And can you get audio working? Even just test sounds.
Wes: Oh, yeah. Is that a thing?
Brent: Oh, why are you making that face?
Chris: It's a thing.
Wes: I don't know if Brent knows how much is different. I mean, there's a lot that's the same or similar.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Or spelt differently, I hear.
Wes: But there's whole sort of areas where the concept is the same,
Wes: but the implementation has a totally different history.
Chris: Have you ever seen pictures of a Russian knockoff of a Russian computer in the 80s or a Russian car?
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, it's kind of like that.
Wes: I mean, they might suggest that's what Linux is.
Chris: Nope. Level three, if you can get to be a level three user, so you earn somewhere
Chris: between 15 and 20 points. Again, all this will be on the website.
Chris: You are now technically in the power user power band.
Brent: Well, that was easy.
Chris: Well, maybe. Can you stop and start certain services? Can you edit the config
Chris: so it does something right at start, at boot the way you want it?
Chris: Could you write a little shell script that runs on BSD? Can you edit a config?
Chris: You know, those guys, can you do it?
Wes: Have you effectively kicked your systemd habit?
Chris: Yeah, again, all the things that you can do to earn points will be on the website.
Brent: There's no systemd?
Chris: And then level four, bonus round. If you can get over 21 points,
Chris: you are truly, truly a BSD master.
Chris: And this includes things like getting certain services inside a jail.
Chris: So not just going with a pre-built jail.
Brent: I don't even know what you're saying anymore.
Chris: Yeah, I know. And some of the BSDs don't have jails, so you're going to have to figure that one out.
Brent: They're more prisons?
Chris: Also, there's other things like, you know, we could maybe, if it doesn't have
Chris: jails, we could say if you could still get a service running that you can access
Chris: from the network, then that would be allowable too, I think.
Wes: Yeah, you know, maybe you're building it out in your home lab or providing mesh
Wes: network services. There's a lot of stuff you can do.
Chris: All right, so TechDev has a qualifying question. Go ahead.
TechDev: Yeah, do we get extra points for users who can get this going in California?
Chris: Yeah, I feel like that's true, yeah.
Producer Jeff: That's a good answer.
Chris: There should be maybe a handicap for California. I could, yeah.
Wes: Or list the number of sort of compliance or regulatory hurdles you overcame
Wes: to get this working, and we'll give you points.
Chris: Boost in to plead your case, and the board will consider it.
Chris: So, you know, if you want, we'll give it special consideration.
Producer Jeff: Lawbreaking points?
Chris: All right. Rebel points. Also, I think points will be issued...
Brent: Randomly.
Chris: ...for the craziest place you've installed BSD. I mean, it has to get us going.
Chris: So you know So the craziest place you've got BST Let us know And here's how we want you to submit,
Chris: You can send a boost or you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and tell
Chris: us in there which BSD you used, your score that you got, if you have a weird
Chris: install place, how you installed it, that kind of thing.
Chris: And if anything surprised you about it, let us know that too.
TechDev: When you say location, are we talking about what device or what physical location
TechDev: that you were able to install it on?
Chris: Sure, both.
Brent: You can plead your case. I have a question.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: It's me now.
Chris: Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Brad. Go ahead.
Brent: Can we get extra points with how many days we ran BSD?
Chris: I feel like if you can run it for the whole week, that's definitely some points,
Chris: right? Or every day you drive it, maybe? What do you think of that?
Brent: Yeah, that's fair.
Chris: Every day you drive it, what would be fair? A point for every day?
Brent: Yeah, okay. We got a max of seven days.
Chris: Because I'm not going to daily drive it.
Brent: Oh, you say that now. You might love it.
Chris: No.
Wes: What if, I mean, when you start seeing Brent stacking points,
Wes: maybe you'll change your mind. That is true.
Brent: I hate it. I started early.
Chris: I hate it when he's... What?
Brent: No.
Wes: The reason that there wasn't a van is because he was getting BSD installed.
Wes: You can't do brake swaps when you're doing BSD swaps.
TechDev: Well, that's the whole reason. The gas line broke because it was running on BSD.
Brent: Ah, yeah. You've got to pick the right field.
Chris: All right. So let us know how it goes. Give us your score. If you can get over
Chris: 21 points, you're truly a beastie whisperer.
Chris: I'm going to be honest with you. I think I'm going for the survival level,
Chris: which is somewhere in the 8 to 14 points. So here's how it stacks out.
Chris: If you get 0 to 7 points, then you have visited BSD as far as the show is concerned.
Chris: You've done it. You've visited BSD.
Chris: If you get 8 to 14 points, you have survived BSD. I think that's probably where I'm headed.
Chris: If you can get 15 to 20 points, you can hang with BSD.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: And if you get beyond 21 points, 21 or beyond, you become a Beastie Whisperer
Chris: as far as the show is concerned.
Wes: I got a personal stretch goal for you.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: You know, just think about the hero's journey here if you were able to convert fake NAS.
Chris: Oh, my God.
Wes: Back to BSD and then import the pool back to BSD ZFS.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: There's no way I couldn't do that without you guys, though. Well,
Chris: both from an emotional support level.
Wes: Call in friend support.
Chris: Oh, come on.
Brent: You could do a 50-50, call a friend, you know.
Chris: You're going to make me put everything into open code? No.
Brent: Oh, is that a rule?
Chris: I mean, I don't think it runs on BSD, but you can figure it out.
Chris: So there is a conceivable possibility where somebody could get up to like 30 points.
Chris: And if anybody wants to link us an audio file or something like that of their
Chris: journey, if it's short and tight, we might play it on the show as well. That could be.
Brent: A lot of fun. Did you say call the launch?
Chris: You could call the launch, but it's probably better to send it to this show.
Brent: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Okay, sorry.
Chris: We should need a number.
Wes: Send it to Brent's voicemail.
Chris: We need a number for this show.
Wes: Yeah, we do.
Chris: Kind of thing, so people can call and give us live reports right in the heat
Chris: of the moment. This damn thing. That'd be so amazing.
Brent: Please send those.
Chris: Maybe the next challenge we could get that set up. That could be good.
Producer Jeff: Email that to alanjude at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Alright, so it might be day one of LinuxFest Northwest for us,
Chris: but the reality is LinuxFest Northwest is a week-long, if not two-week-long process.
Chris: PJ, you got here Wednesday evening.
Producer Jeff: Yeah.
Chris: And then made it over to the farm pretty quick and got right to work.
Brent: Oh.
Chris: Something always happens we were down a couple of cars and we got an extra crew
Chris: here we need to get another car working we didn't get that car working and.
Wes: You know that Jeff gets kind of handsy if.
Chris: He's not helping you with something he gets handsy? he does he's got to jack
Chris: something up or he gets handsy.
Wes: He has for consent.
Brent: But you had how many cars to work on?
Chris: Well we had three cars to work on we got two out of three two out of three working
Chris: No, yours was already up and running, thankfully.
Brent: Oh, surprising.
Producer Jeff: Somehow.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. But you got here, which is great. You got in yesterday evening.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: Time's going fast.
Brent: It takes a long time when you're on the other side of the continent, it turns out.
Chris: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Brent: But I got here, and I feel good.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, it does feel good. And, you know, I've been thinking about,
Chris: like, what do we do for LinuxFest this year?
Chris: Because I've been going for 26 years now, and how do you make that different?
Chris: We've been covering it in the show for almost a decade.
Chris: How do you actually make that different? And I was thinking about this,
Chris: and I realized that it's kind of the theme of LinuxFest, which is back to root.
Chris: Because it hits different this year for a few reasons, and I want to get into that.
Chris: Some of them are close to home. Some of them, I think, are really about where Linux is at now.
Chris: But first, it's lunchtime for us. So we have to go grill up some hot dogs.
Chris: And then when we come back after the break, it'll be day two of LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: But before we get there, I want to say thank you to our members for making this possible.
Chris: Sincerely, members, we're like
Chris: running on fumes these days, and it's the fumes that you are providing.
Chris: So we really do appreciate it. And of course, Define Networking is also like
Chris: coming in clutch, as the kids would say.
Chris: They're really clutching it up. Between the two, it's like we're making it,
Chris: and we're able to do things like LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: If you'd like to become a member, linuxunplugged.com slash membership.
Chris: If you want to support the whole network, that'd be jupyter.party,
Chris: and we really do appreciate it.
Chris: sincerely you can also boost the show and support each episode individually the
Chris: splits go to all of the host editor drew the podcast developer and a little
Chris: bit goes to the index as well and the nice thing about that it's immediate it's
Chris: all done there's no banks anything like that it's just all over a peer-to-peer
Chris: open source network using an entire open source linux to linux stack on our
Chris: end thank you everybody who supports the show through a membership or through
Chris: a boost we really do appreciate you,
Chris: And here we are at LinuxFest Northwest Day 2. Hello, everybody in HC108. Nice to have you here.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: Actually, round of applause. How many of you got a hot dog yesterday? Anybody get a hot dog?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: All right. Some hot dogs. Some hot dogs. Pizza and Indian food was also available.
Chris: The hot dogs were free. It went really well.
Chris: Emma and my wife, Adia, were absolute machines at the barbecue.
Brent: I took a photo of the lineup. It lasted, like, for two hours,
Brent: and it was huge. Lots of lineups. Very efficient and courteous.
Chris: Yeah, it was grill crazy.
Wes: So shout out to System76 for that.
Chris: So we wanted to talk about a couple of things just to kind of warm us up while
Chris: we're all getting going here.
Chris: And the first one is actually a local LLM story and the Linux kernel.
Chris: And how Greg KH, the number two in command of the Linux kernel,
Chris: has been running his own bot that he calls, I love this name, GKH Clanker T1000.
Brent: That's appropriate.
Chris: That's the name of his bot.
Wes: The label is up front, and you've got to appreciate that.
Chris: And he's running it locally on his LAN on an AMD Ryzen system that's in a framework desktop.
Chris: And he's put a picture of it up on Mastodon.
Wes: Like the rest of us, he's got a monitor propped up on some various sort of tech
Wes: books he probably hasn't read for a decade.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wes: So you know he's a real hacker.
Chris: Yeah, that's very true.
Brent: He doesn't care.
Chris: So I thought I'd kick this off. And if anybody has any input or thoughts,
Chris: raise your hand. But we've been watching, I feel like, the Linux community and
Chris: the open source community really grapple with a lot of the moral and licensing issues around LLMs.
Chris: At the same time, what we're also witnessing is...
Chris: Folks like kernel developers and project leads and people that are shipping
Chris: software are rapidly also using these tools.
Chris: And the adoption seems to be kind of like there's this bifurcation of some folks
Chris: that are working on the lower level projects, like maybe desktop software and
Chris: things like that, and they're taking very strong anti-AI stances.
Chris: And then you have people on the kernels and on the larger projects and services
Chris: that we all use, and they're integrating, they're already integrating and using AI.
Chris: And it seems like we have, and I'm sure you probably maybe have some thoughts
Chris: on this. It seems like we have this split here, this kind of bifurcation inside our own community.
Wes: You know, I think at least some of that, I mean, there's a lot of aspects to
Wes: unpack, but I think some of it is, thankfully, we've seen that Greg and some
Wes: of the kernel team these days are, I guess, a little more well-resourced than
Wes: your average open source FOSS developer, right?
Wes: And so I think some of this is, whether you want to engage or not,
Wes: there is the rise of other folks using it, whether that's for good or just a
Wes: lot of bug reports you don't know what to do with or whatever.
Wes: So I think what we are seeing is that for the people in the privileged position
Wes: on some of the kernel team who are interested and willing in doing a lot of
Wes: their own work, they are in a good position to be able to adopt and play with
Wes: and use some of this tooling maybe in the ways they want, like running locally,
Wes: like having sponsored hardware and that kind of stuff.
Wes: So I think maybe it could be a leading edge exploring when you do have time,
Wes: when you do have support, how can you adopt some of these tools to help your workflow?
Chris: Okay, so here's my question to you guys. If anybody wants to answer it,
Chris: raise your hand. Otherwise, I'm going to make Brent answer it.
Brent: Oh, please help me.
Chris: Is this the first step to our community kind of coming to a consensus on AI?
Chris: Will we kind of come to a general consensus of, yes, it's good when you use
Chris: it in these conditions for these things? Is this how we get there?
Chris: Anyone have thoughts on that? Do you have thoughts on that?
Brent: I think I have some thoughts. I'll warm up till someone wants to approach the mic.
Brent: Yeah, I think it's reasonable that a lot of us are hesitating.
Brent: but to have someone like the Colonel team start to do this and in ways that
Brent: are local, I think feels really nice.
Brent: And it shows that some of the teams that we look up to,
Brent: I mean, literally it's on every laptop in this room, are doing,
Brent: at least using the tools in a responsible way that we can also sign up for.
Chris: Maybe that's it. He's kind of demonstrating a responsible way to use the tool.
Brent: And like using, you know, some computer manufacturers that do follow some of
Brent: the ideals that we care about and that, hey, it's possible today.
Brent: And even if you don't have as big of hardware as that, give it a couple of years.
Brent: And the work that Linux has done to make AI available to run on these machines
Brent: is going to allow us all to have AI in a way that kind of fits for us,
Brent: despite all the challenges that we currently have with how it's made and being used.
Chris: PJ is here. What do you think? Does Greg doing these kinds of things,
Chris: does it set a good example?
Chris: And my second question would be, is he maybe limiting himself only using the free local stuff?
Audience: Oh, that's a good second question. The first one for me is, I think it's just an example of trust.
Audience: And that's something I took away from Mad Dog's talk about, Mad Dog's talk about
Audience: sovereignty is you have to trust something at some point, you have to trust someone at some point.
Audience: And even if I don't trust all AI
Audience: all the time, if somebody like Greg KH is using a tool, I trust Greg KH.
Audience: Knowing what tool he's using would be helpful. And the fact that he is going
Audience: local, well, that's been my personal stance as well.
Audience: I have used the online stuff. I think it's very powerful, but I specifically
Audience: want to focus on running the software locally.
Audience: And I'm kind of glad that I'm seeing these guys.
Chris: These turn on developers do the same thing. So what about any of this would
Chris: apply to you too, if you're only using local stuff today, I mean,
Chris: this is going to change in a couple of years, but today, maybe it's not finding
Chris: as many vulnerabilities as you know, an opus or a mythos or whatever it is that
Chris: you'd pay thousands of dollars for.
Audience: Yeah, I mean, I think that's just gonna get better and better.
Audience: What we've noticed every month, the local stuff is better and better.
Audience: You know, they're, they're finding better ways to compress everything and fit
Audience: more into memory. And it's just insane. I've got a very old graphics card, and it's running great.
Audience: I'm just trying to do more and more with it. And I think we're just going to
Audience: keep seeing that get better and better.
Audience: Eventually, eventually, we're going to be on the same stage as,
Audience: the mainframes running these things.
Wes: It only makes me think, right, in open source, we're kind of used to this.
Wes: So, home labs and self-hosting, right?
Wes: Like, can we compete with the storage for Google Photos back in?
Wes: No, but kind of we can now because we have image, right?
Wes: So, it might take longer because there's a bigger hardware difference than we were facing before.
Chris: That's my thinking, is the commercial guys don't stand still,
Chris: right? So, the Googles and the Apples.
Wes: But they also, as part of that, tend to incentivize.
Chris: Yeah, that's true.
Audience: And I feel like we're getting kind of a Moore's Law set up here with AIs too,
Audience: right? Like, with the AI software and the AI models, we are accelerating so
Audience: fast the way we did with CPUs back in the day.
Brent: So true.
Audience: Yeah, I don't think it's going to be long before we're running extremely capable
Audience: models. And maybe the models will just get smaller and we'll just choose different
Audience: models for different tasks. Can't wait.
Chris: I like it. I like it. Thank you, PJ. That's an interesting point.
Chris: And I hope you're right. And I think they are getting faster.
Chris: Tell us your name and tell us what you think.
Audience: Yeah, my name is Sam. So I, up until very recently, taught at-risk youth IT
Audience: skills and things like that to help them get into the IT field locally where I live.
Audience: and um we had a very big conversation as
Audience: a non-profit about how to approach ai i bet and how to
Audience: like actually teach it effectively and um
Audience: i don't know if this is 2pg 13 for the podcast but um the
Audience: the analogy that one of our staff members used was kind of like the sex ed talk
Audience: of like you're not going to stop people from using it you might as well teach
Audience: them how to use it responsibly yeah yeah right so um i was very big on local
Audience: models about um using them as a tool to like help yourself get an advantage,
Audience: but not like putting your personal information out there for it to be put up later.
Audience: Like I'm thinking of the GitHub co-pilot thing that happened and it's only a
Audience: matter, I mean, you know, Gemini had a leak like that.
Audience: Like there's, there's plenty of examples of that happening.
Audience: Sorry, I'm not too close, but yeah. So I think I liked your take on that too, Chris.
Audience: So the like how, like Greg cage kind of like demonstrating, how can you use this responsibly?
Audience: And I also think too, yeah, it might be,
Audience: because they have the resources to actually use these tools and the scale and
Audience: also, you know, thinking about the Linux kernel being like millions of lines of code.
Chris: It's got to be a job.
Audience: It's a lot different than smaller projects. Not to, you know,
Audience: it's just scale. It's huge.
Chris: Yeah, and that sometimes necessitates tools like this.
Audience: Yeah, for sure.
Wes: Well, I think we've seen kind of Greg has his unconventional attitude perhaps, right?
Wes: Like we've seen some of his great blog posts about like how the kernel treats
Wes: security, which is very much not the way that a lot of other projects sort of have a security model.
Wes: so it makes sense to me that if you have that sort of outcome focused
Wes: view that they're not just like whole hogging AI slop into the kernel at least
Wes: I don't think anyone here thinks that right and so they're showing this version
Wes: of like well we can keep our standards the code is the code and if the process
Wes: is there and the people are signing off and they're responsible for it and Linus
Wes: isn't mad at this commit and yelling at you then okay it's probably going to work.
Audience: Yeah the fact that something's being audited by Linus Torvalds is enough for
Audience: me to be like you know that's probably going to be okay.
Chris: Yeah there's layers there.
Audience: He's not a guy to be shy of when things are bad.
Chris: I wonder if we'll be discussing this next LinuxFest, right? Because it seems
Chris: like this is a seasonal thing that we're working through, and this phase we're
Chris: at right now is we're sort of digesting this stage of it.
Chris: And with the development of local and folks like Greg, maybe by a year from
Chris: now, we'll have sort of settled on kind of a common community agreement on this.
Chris: Thank you. That's good. Did you want to join us? Yeah, come on up.
Chris: Tell us your name and what you think.
Audience: Hi, everyone. My name is Aaron Wolf.
Chris: Hello, Aaron.
Audience: I just wanted to share a sort of meta perspective that I think is something
Audience: I tend to try to keep in mind in all of this space, and that's the topic of induced demand.
Audience: So people know this from things like traffic engineering. You have the issue
Audience: of if you just widen the road because there's congestion, then people say,
Audience: oh, well, now I can drive more, and then there's just more congestion again.
Audience: And, of course, it's something in the general pattern of,
Audience: when you make things available, people will use it. So the question is,
Audience: what are you making available?
Audience: And I think of this as the significance of the local movement,
Audience: because obviously if your goal is to, you have a limited hardware and you're
Audience: going to make use of it, then you're going to work through how to make that work well.
Audience: And the pattern we see with the big corporate AIs is mostly,
Audience: we just throw more hardware at it.
Audience: But the issue is basically software eats Moore's law, right?
Audience: So the point is, if you get more
Audience: powerful hardware, then people are less careful to use it effectively.
Wes: This guy's used an electron app before.
Audience: I don't have to care about compressing this or making it efficient or something
Audience: because I just got so much hardware. And the end result is you can be worse
Audience: off than you were to start with.
Audience: And so there's also this pattern of people just using it just to use it,
Audience: which is what we're seeing with corporate AIs.
Audience: So, you know, my other example would be we have LED lighting or something.
Audience: and then instead of being like oh hey we have a world in
Audience: which we use less electricity to do the same thing
Audience: which is just we need a certain amount of lighting no then you have like buildings in
Audience: china that are covered in leds just lights on everything
Audience: because now you can do that yeah and so there's guilty
Audience: there's it's extremely important that we have alternatives
Audience: to that pattern because that pattern is a catastrophic in
Audience: the long run where we actually figure out how to work
Audience: with reasonable systems so that that's an
Audience: alternative and the more people using that the more but but i think framing
Audience: it that way is extremely important because the point isn't just oh i can do
Audience: this for privacy or whatever else the point is we actually need a sustainable
Audience: system that doesn't have this runaway forever until you have 25 lanes of highway
Audience: yeah you know version of ai which is,
Audience: at least people are realizing that the energy resource and water and all it's
Audience: like crazy. And this is going to ruin everything.
Brent: Have you used any locally yet?
Audience: I haven't, I've sort of known people who did it or I've heard things about it
Audience: and I'm, yeah, I haven't actually jumped into it already, but I'm,
Audience: it's the place I'm most open to playing around a little more.
Brent: I'm curious if you think that it's a solution to the problem that you mentioned.
Audience: Well, I think that if people aren't even trying it, then, you know,
Audience: I mean, that's where we need things. It's sort of like, if you're going to build,
Audience: go with my metaphor, if you want to build walkable, bikeable,
Audience: efficient, you know, places, you have to have people advocating for that.
Audience: You have to design it so that that's a possibility.
Audience: And there's a, I'll go with that metaphor again, but I think it really just applies for AI.
Audience: The, the transit metaphor is if the buses get stuck in traffic,
Audience: then the congestion goes to infinity because in general, the congestion will
Audience: stop at the point that it's better to do the alternative.
Audience: So if you have light rail that doesn't get stuck in traffic,
Audience: then as soon as the congestion is worse than the light rail,
Audience: people just switch to using light rail, which means the congestion will always
Audience: get just bad enough that it's the same time as it takes to take the train.
Audience: But if the buses get stuck in traffic, then it goes to infinity because nobody
Audience: switches to the buses ever.
Audience: And so we have to have a situation with AI where...
Audience: You have to have a thing where you go, oh, the costs or the something or the
Audience: hassle or the awfulness of this runaway craziness, there's a reason for not
Audience: just me being because I have ideals, but for other people to go,
Audience: yeah, but it's just more convenient to run it locally.
Wes: I think even beyond locally, though, right? I think open weights come in here
Wes: because part of what you're describing is, I think, partly an effect of the
Wes: fact that we're racing at the frontier because it's a new untapped technology
Wes: that we don't know what the bounds are at this point, I think is fair.
Wes: So you have folks that are using more and more resources to try to find the
Wes: edge of what you can even do with this technology.
Wes: But on the other side, you do have some more commodification of some of these
Wes: providers who are willing to compete on, okay, well, we're all serving Minimax 2.5.
Wes: How do I make my business more profitable and how do I survive?
Wes: A lot of that might need to be, how do I do inference for the cheapest possible way?
Wes: So even if it's not at home, some of the open source ethos, I think,
Wes: can infect this drive to more sustainability.
Audience: Yeah, so I guess I'm just summarizing that it's the...
Audience: the ideals and the people who care about the principles and the systems and
Audience: the privacy or open source stuff,
Audience: that can be a driver, but it has to reach that point where there's some reason
Audience: why other people actually find it annoying or it's shittified enough that they're like,
Audience: oh, well, I'll go to this other thing because that's better and has to exist
Audience: for that pattern to happen.
Audience: So it's extremely important we do that because I don't see any other off ramp
Audience: to this pattern we're on.
Brent: Well, that has happened with Linux. I mean, we're seeing it.
Audience: Exactly. Yeah.
Brent: Windows 11, but the people who are helping make Linux easier than everything
Brent: else and more powerful than everything else are also the people that we're talking
Brent: about who are using some of the local AI to push the frontier of what is acceptable.
Audience: I think that framing, that's an example of thinking about the incentives of
Audience: the system so that when we're thinking about it, we're not just looking at the
Audience: day-to-day whatever about the tools. We're sort of thinking about what are the
Audience: structures that are getting people to go one way or another.
Audience: So I'm just offering that metaphor.
Brent: Great.
Chris: Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So the other thing that kind of,
Chris: oh yeah, no tech dev, you got, yeah, jump in. Come on up. Come on down.
Chris: Hey guys. So how are you?
Brent: He's taller.
Chris: And what are you thinking about? What are you thinking about?
Audience: So talking about AI, you had posed the question about, is this the point that
Audience: we accept it? And I'd like to reframe the question to...
Audience: To focus on a different aspect of what the AI is.
Audience: I think that in population movements, so let's say you're coming to another
Audience: country, you would end up going to the place that is familiar to you, right?
Audience: Not necessarily the best that a local might think, because the best is relative.
Audience: And in the Linux community, we're seeing an issue of attrition,
Audience: where people with ideals that come from the 90s, which is a different context,
Audience: are then going to be working against a context
Audience: that we exist in now in the 90s if we're looking
Audience: for software that is primarily meant to own
Audience: a system to control something to look for capability that is your own or greater
Audience: than something else is a very different context than i want to use the latest
Audience: and greatest tools much like you were just saying linux works for the most part
Audience: uh the last time that i've had a wi-fi card not work,
Audience: has been a very long time ago.
Audience: And this is coming from Zorn OS on a 2011 MacBook kind of thing.
Audience: So we don't have to Ethernet in to get our Wi-Fi drivers anymore.
Audience: Things work, which means that
Audience: we're functional. We've met largely the goal of the context of the 90s.
Audience: Now we have this technology. And if we don't bring in the technology,
Audience: if we don't support it, then the people now, the people who are coming in with
Audience: a different context won't come.
Chris: Yeah, I agree with that.
Audience: Is this the time that we start using ai i'm not sure
Audience: is it the time that we should to keep
Audience: the community alive and avoid a complete separation of
Audience: brain drain between the context of people coming in now right
Audience: versus the context of the the
Audience: old guard so to speak i i think it needs to be
Audience: from that perspective where the use of ai on the linux desktop is necessary
Audience: and the the question i believe it was listener sam who brought up the the question
Audience: isn't uh how do we stop or enable people to use it but how do we teach people
Audience: to use it responsibly yeah yeah absolutely i'm curious about perspectives on this.
Wes: Well i think it reminds me a lot of what happened just in the first wave right
Wes: where uh computing first was defined by like
Wes: mainframes and big things you couldn't really access unless you're sliced up
Wes: and yeah right right and then you got sort of like micro computing and
Wes: pcs and desktop but there was this whole world of
Wes: proprietary operating systems and proprietary products and
Wes: still interesting and new and you know the new frontier and
Wes: then we sort of figured out like oh we can make this digital commons of software
Wes: that like okay you can still have a proprietary photo editor but not everyone
Wes: needs that right the professionals need that so i think that spirit is there
Wes: and right and we do need it's just a question of bridging to today's world which
Wes: has gotten more complicated but.
Chris: The essence it feels like that's right yeah.
Brent: I would say uh teaching people how to use the technology has been a challenge
Brent: since technology has come around, right?
Brent: Any kind of technology, the hammer, you got to learn how to use that thing.
Brent: Otherwise, you got busted thumbs.
Audience: How many users use reset password as their password?
Brent: Yeah, exactly. Right. Or chip down their computers by holding the power button.
Brent: Anyways, I think AI is an interesting one because a lot of us are thinking about,
Brent: How do we use it in ways that match our ideals or how do we use it in ways that
Brent: feel safe for our information, especially that we don't really know how it's
Brent: scooping things up sometimes, right?
Brent: If you have one conversation and you might have suggested, I don't know,
Brent: which town you're in or it has your IP or something like that.
Brent: Well, is a conversation you're having in 10 months going to be linked to something like that?
Brent: Well, we have the compute to do that now, right? So you have to use your imagination
Brent: sometimes to a point that's a bit depressing to realize what's possible with
Brent: the information you're putting out there.
Brent: So when we try to suggest how to use this technology safely,
Brent: I'm not sure we even know what the bounds are for doing that safely.
Brent: And of course, everyone's risk is a little bit different. And it depends,
Brent: you know, who you're trusting with your conversations, your information and your coding. Yeah.
Brent: But it's not a straightforward question to answer.
Audience: It seems like the risk tolerance is somewhat similar or somewhat comparable
Audience: to migrating from virtual machines to Docker containers.
Audience: How we understand the problem is evolving.
Audience: And eventually we'll get into a world where it's LLMs first the way that it's Docker first now.
Wes: The thing I liked about the question and approach you had there too is not only
Wes: is it a change that matches some of our older styles,
Wes: but I think it's important to not let the proprietary versions of this define
Wes: what the technology is or how we think about it.
Wes: Like, okay, we do need to recognize that maybe the most ways people use it is
Wes: a chat GPT in a browser tab right now or whatever it is, or co-pilot in their 365 account.
Wes: But they don't get to set the ground rules for what's possible with the tech or the space.
Wes: and I think the FOSS and open source world has historically been really great
Wes: at figuring out all of the other things that aren't profitable or aren't interested
Wes: to the VC class or whatever it is and so it's like we should definitely push
Wes: back on the things that are wrong and that we don't like about how they're doing
Wes: it but I don't think that means we need to write off the entire technology.
Brent: Well said.
Chris: So here's the next part of this. This week, Bitwarden, the CLI version of Bitwarden
Chris: was popped, and people's vaults were exposed.
Chris: And it got me thinking, as we start accelerating bug discovery,
Chris: the open source software has always had this meme of more eyes, you know, on the code.
Chris: Well, guess what? We're getting more eyes all of a sudden.
Brent: More AI's.
Chris: Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how we handle that.
Chris: Anybody in here a Bitwarden user right now?
Brent: Oof, that's a lot of hands.
Chris: That's a lot of you. Anybody a Bitwarden CLI user? Nobody. Interesting. Are you guys?
Wes: No. I mean, I have before. I just don't use it regularly.
Chris: Yeah, I don't either. Interesting. Okay, well, here's the details.
Chris: So it looks like the more recent version was compromised as part of the ongoing
Chris: checkmarks-related supply chain campaign. Oh, yeah, that one. Yeah.
Chris: I guess they got into some GitHub actions, part of the CICD pipeline.
Wes: Yeah, the attacker injected a backdated commit into the checkmarks ASTVS code
Wes: extension repo. So part of the start of this.
Wes: But of course, right, yeah, it's all of this stuff that you've chained with
Wes: between extensions and then all the stuff that you've thought that was helpful in CI.
Wes: Come on, it's one more action. What's going to, what problem could it be?
Chris: Okay, okay. So I'd say about 70% of you were using Bitwarden-ish.
Chris: Okay, so same folks. Are any of you considering migrating away from Bitwarden?
Chris: Anybody in here? All staying. Okay, ish.
Chris: Okay, ish. Pretty much almost universally people are staying with Bitwarden.
Brent: Does that mean that the compromising of software has just become normalized?
Chris: Well, I mean, maybe they'd feel different if they used Bitward and CLI.
Brent: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough.
Chris: I probably would have. I probably would have been a little more upset.
Chris: I was like, ooh, dodge that one. That's fine. Well, next time it won't get me.
Chris: No, that'll be no problem.
Brent: But the emotion I have around that is like, it's just a matter of time for all software I'm using.
Brent: It's sad.
Wes: Well, and there are some interesting discussions now, like, you know,
Wes: considering different techniques.
Wes: I think I was just reading an article this weekend around, you know,
Wes: like maybe we need more delays at various levels, right?
Wes: Like we do tend to catch these things, but if you go install the latest thing
Wes: all of the time, especially from, you know, NPM or random repository tags.
Chris: Wait, is this guy saying we shouldn't roll? I'm not saying that.
Wes: I'm saying some people are saying that.
Chris: Are you saying we should go to RHEL?
Wes: We should go to RHEL.
Chris: Because jeez.
Wes: No, but I think it's that thing, right? There's the version where you're like,
Wes: well, you're so out-to-date. This is clearly irresponsible.
Wes: But then now is there a new version of like, well, you haven't given the AIs
Wes: enough time to audit that because this just came out. And who knows?
Wes: Because our software still works.
Chris: All right. If AI means I can't roll anymore, then I am anti-AI.
Chris: That's it. That sealed it for me right there. It's over. I got to be able to roll my distro.
Chris: Okay. So we've got a group. We've got some new timers here.
Chris: And we have got some long timers in the Linux space.
Chris: We did a little survey before we started recording. are anybody here that's
Chris: been running Linux for less than a year want to raise their hands anybody less
Chris: less than a year six months ish range oh.
Brent: There's someone really shy over excellent.
Chris: Okay all right what's.
Brent: With the blushing.
Chris: Can I ask you why you wanted to try Linux,
Chris: So, okay. That's a very common way, actually. So that's very common.
Chris: How's it going so far? The wife installed it for you. How's it going so far?
Chris: Going good. Good.
Wes: We'd love to hear that.
Chris: All right. Good. Good. Okay. So most of you then are long-timers.
Chris: That's probably why you're listening to our show. That makes sense.
Chris: We're sorry. So like I was saying before we started recording,
Chris: 26 years of LinuxFest Northwest.
Brent: Whoa.
Chris: Crazy. And 26 years ago, even 20 years ago, a lot of us were coming to try to
Chris: figure out, How to get XYZ to work on Linux or how to get Linux to work on XYZ.
Chris: Either way, just try to get something working.
Chris: How do I get this to work? Was really, you could almost have a conversation.
Wes: What do I install? Where do I go? I still have Windows on my laptop. Please help me.
Chris: Right. Every conversation really. How do I get this to work or how do I make Linux work?
Chris: That's not really what we talk about anymore at LinuxFest. It's not really what
Chris: we talk about with Linux or open source anymore.
Chris: So I kind of wanted to take the temperature and see what people think it's about now.
Chris: Here we are at LinuxFest Northwest.
Wes: 2026.
Chris: 2026. So would anybody like to be brave enough and break the ice and come up
Chris: and tell us kind of what they think when they think what Linux is about for
Chris: them? It could be a personal thing.
Chris: Would you like to do it with your name? Derivation Dingus taking the first step.
Chris: Good job, sir. Good job. Thank you. Come on down.
Brent: Brave.
Chris: So what is it about for you? What do you think?
Audience: So for me, I guess it's mostly about, I run a lot of services at home,
Audience: mostly for the wife and I.
Audience: And it's about making it do exactly what we want in a privacy-forward way without
Audience: cloud servers and without a tech corporation dictating what's allowed versus
Audience: what I can make it do sort of a situation.
Audience: and then there's also the maintainability of it now you have all this infrastructure
Audience: and so you have to maintain that over time and solve those problems and for
Audience: me that means NixOS but there are other options,
Audience: and even the wife's PCs run a NixOS now which turned out to be a really great
Audience: choice I didn't even believe that was going to be the case but it is actually What.
Wes: Are you struggling with? Are there things that are sort of persistent or you're
Wes: unsure about or, you know.
Audience: I guess lately the biggest struggle is just getting completely off the cloud.
Chris: Oh, sure.
Audience: And things like that. That's been my...
Audience: journey lately.
Brent: Can you describe why that's important for your household?
Audience: It's really important for me the most. I don't think the wife would mind too much either way.
Audience: She just wants it to just work. But as you said, we're in a place now where
Audience: it does mostly just work.
Chris: You know where I slowly think the significant other buy-off comes if they're
Chris: not totally on the same page there is just, it is the incentivization over time.
Chris: As you start to upgrade the stuff and it gets frustrating and it sort of opens
Chris: up a window of opportunity to be like hey you know if we hosted this ourself
Chris: it only changes when we say it changes and that is that can be a window of opportunity right there and.
Wes: No one can hike the bill on you.
Chris: Well maybe your utility right there's that the power bill i.
Audience: Will say i did actually get off i was running unstable or rolling uh on even
Audience: the servers and stuff like that and uh i.
Chris: Didn't work so well i had to roll it back I.
Audience: Wrote so much stuff now that something breaks on every.
Chris: Update. Yes, yes, yes.
Audience: Yeah, so I waited for this last upgrade to basically to roll it back.
Chris: At that point, that was it, huh?
Audience: Yeah, so now everything is unstable except for my workstations, basically.
Chris: Derivation, would you like some hot dogs? Because Emma is here with a surplus hot dog.
Wes: Official System 76 hot dogs.
Chris: Anybody who comes up to the microphone gets free hot dogs.
Brent: I would have a hot dog.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I'm talking a whole Costco thing of hot dogs. You're going to
Chris: be eating for a week, sir. Eating for a week.
Wes: That way you have more time to work on your servers.
Chris: Thank you, Emma. She's supplying the hot dogs.
Brent: Wait, Emma, come on over here.
Chris: I think she's getting more hot dogs. Do you have to go?
Chris: Okay, come say hi.
Wes: We have a microphone with your name on it.
Chris: Yeah, I got something I want to ask you real quick. Also, I like your jacket.
Brent: It's pink. I would have never expected you to.
Chris: Hi, Emma.
Audience: Oh, hi.
Chris: Hey, nice to see you.
Audience: Thanks.
Chris: So I just wanted to tell everybody what a badass you were yesterday.
Audience: Oh, thanks.
Chris: So it started really back before you even got on the airplane.
Chris: Because you went to Costco ahead of time with a piece of paper and all that,
Chris: I imagine. Went around and did full inventory.
Audience: Oh, a spec run?
Wes: Wow.
Audience: Yes. And I even mathed it out. I said, I need 22 packs of hot dogs to make 400 hot dogs.
Brent: Oh, my goodness.
Audience: So we ended up cooking 300. So there's like 100 left over.
Brent: That's pretty good.
Chris: Yeah.
Audience: So yeah. And I think everybody ate. We had leftovers.
Chris: So when you land here the next day, you get there in the morning, like 7 a.m.
Chris: You're up and at them. And as soon as Costco's open, you're in there.
Chris: You're going right to every spot. You already know where to go.
Chris: You know what you're getting.
Audience: Yep.
Chris: And you knew who to get the grill from.
Audience: Yes.
Chris: So it was a pretty smooth operation.
Wes: She's more connected here, and she lives states away than we have.
Chris: I know. Seriously.
Audience: It's because I have boots on the ground here. I have a Hadiyah as my partner in crime.
Audience: And then, yeah, it was really funny, though, because there were so many buns in the car.
Chris: My car was loaded with hot dog buns.
Audience: Yeah, there were so many buns in the car that when she hit the brakes,
Audience: they all flew forward and we're like getting attacked by hot dog buns.
Audience: So we're like dodging them in the car.
Audience: I mean, well, I guess if we get in an accident, we're safe.
Chris: Yeah.
Audience: Like pillows.
Chris: Totally safe.
Audience: Yeah.
Chris: And then also shout out to Olympia Mike because he brought like a tent and some
Chris: fire starter and some stuff we could poke at.
Audience: Yeah.
Wes: Mike was essential.
Chris: Yeah. And his Chromebooks used to hold down the tent. The tent was blown away.
Chris: So we deployed a bunch of Chromebooks. surprisingly heavy that's what all they're
Chris: good for now yeah when you put like a dozen of those things in a crate it's
Chris: like 60 pounds it's ridiculous it.
Audience: Was the only way to keep the canopy on the ground.
Chris: So once again you fed hundreds of people yes well done and.
Audience: I thought it was pretty quick.
Chris: Yeah,
Chris: Not two hours-ish, but yeah, that's pretty quick, yeah. So, round of applause.
Chris: Did a fantastic job. Thank you, Emma.
Audience: Stop by our booth.
Chris: Yeah, go check out.
Audience: System 76.
Wes: They got that shiny new Thalia.
Brent: Do you want to ask her the Linux question? I mean, she's been in the- Okay.
Chris: All right. All right, Emma. You ready for this? This is what we were just asking folks.
Audience: Okay.
Chris: So, like 26 years ago, when LinuxFest Northwest started, everybody was always
Chris: talking, how do I make XYZ work on Linux, or how do I make Linux work on this?
Chris: It's like what everybody talked about.
Chris: Now, it pretty much always works, for the most part. Things just work.
Chris: So what do you think people really talk about now at these events? What's the thing?
Chris: How do I make it work isn't really a topic anymore because it works.
Audience: How do I make it work?
Chris: What do you think?
Wes: Because, like, you know, you've heard all the support calls over the years,
Wes: etc. Like, it used to be in an era where Wi-Fi or just what laptop do I buy?
Wes: Or how do I even make a USB to get this installing?
Audience: Yeah. I don't know. We don't. It isn't, like, it's all custom,
Audience: I guess. Everyone wants to make something different.
Chris: Yeah, their own thing.
Audience: It's how can I make it more different than everybody else is what it feels like.
Chris: I guess. Yeah, that sounds about right. How do I do my own specific thing that
Chris: I'm trying to do and make it look like my own thing?
Brent: Emma was telling me at the after party last night that System76 had zero tickets
Brent: for support recently because everything just works.
Audience: It was very weird. I was like, something is broken.
Wes: Yeah, it's our support system.
Brent: I tested it out. I opened a ticket.
Audience: It went through.
Chris: That's true.
Audience: And I was like, oh, weird.
Brent: But that's a sign of the adoption of Linux and how it works on the hardware.
Brent: Because years ago, System76, one of your challenges was like,
Brent: how do we make the hardware as smooth as possible? But these days,
Brent: that's as easy as it's ever been.
Audience: Yeah, and we have a stellar QA and engineering team. So I trust their work,
Audience: because it's showing that.
Brent: Yay, Linux.
Chris: Yay. Thank you, Emma.
Wes: Thank you, Emma.
Chris: Thank you for everything. All right. So before we wrap up, I want to just take
Chris: a moment and talk about somebody who's not here this year.
Chris: Oh, this is going to be tough. A big part of LinuxFest for a long time has been
Chris: James Mason, 4 or 5-4 in our community.
Chris: And James is a really nice guy, really genuine guy, very hard worker,
Chris: and really carried the torch for LinuxFest for many years, especially you know
Chris: after COVID and we weren't sure if it was coming back I mean I think James was
Chris: quintessential in making that happen you might recall Bear also,
Chris: he helped us get a dot matrix printer in our studio and hooked us up with the paper and all of that.
Chris: Regular booster giving us thoughtful things and pushback Jupiter party member
Chris: since like 2023 really really really good guy also don't tell anybody this but
Chris: slip me SUSE and OpenSUSE Intel on the DL from time to time so I kind of had
Chris: an inside line on what was going on. That was great,
Chris: and he had been battling cancer for years, and James did pass away recently,
Chris: so he can't be here, obviously, and he leaves behind his wife and a couple of
Chris: kids, and he's just such a good guy, and they're doing a fundraiser for his
Chris: family. We'll put a link in the show notes.
Wes: And there's a spot to donate over in the expo hall as well.
Chris: Yeah, and I just want to do a round of applause for James and for all his contributions,
Chris: even though it couldn't be here.
Brent: Over the years.
Chris: Really appreciate him.
Wes: Absolutely the best spirit of Linux Fest right there.
Chris: That's just it. And a great guy. Local guy, too. So it was really great.
Chris: And, yeah, he'll be missed.
Brent: Yeah. Already is.
Chris: Yeah, he already is. He already is. But this has been a great Linux Fest for
Chris: us. Yesterday was a ton of fun.
Chris: And I think he would have loved to. I think he would have enjoyed it.
Chris: And it was another classic one where we had the beautiful weather this year.
Chris: You know, we always say it's like, yeah, it's sometimes a little crappy.
Chris: Got to warn you. It could be a little crappy. We got a good one this year.
Wes: There's something about a lawn full of Linux nerds having a good time.
Chris: Yeah, seeing everybody out there eating, having a picnic, eating cookies and hot dogs.
Wes: And getting that vitamin D we don't always get in the Pacific Northwest.
Chris: Very much so. Thank you, everybody, for coming. We're going to wrap it up there
Chris: so we don't make it too long on the recording. But we'll hang out for a little bit after this.
Chris: But thank you very much. And we hope to see you back here next year, too. Thank you, guys.
Wes: Hey, a big shout-out to the LinuxFest staff and our proctor. Making all this work.
Chris: Thank you, LinuxFest staff. Thank you.
Brent: While we're here back in the studio, we might sound a little different.
Brent: Do you sound different? You sound clean.
Chris: Yeah, it's nice. Oh, hello, boys. Back on the regular microphone.
Brent: It was amazing to see everybody at LinuxFest. And, well, of course,
Brent: it is always a special fest. This was no exception.
Brent: So a huge thank you to everybody who flew from all over, drove from all over,
Brent: swam if you swam, but the entire community for coming out and hanging out together with us.
Brent: And to the bigger community for
Brent: helping us get those headsets that we use reliably at every single event.
Brent: Those things are amazing. So thank you for that.
Brent: We are super grateful.
Chris: Oh, my gosh. Has things really improved for us in terms of our mobile kit?
Chris: Thank you again, everyone.
Brent: It's so simple.
Chris: Who contributed to that. Still paying dividends on that one.
Chris: All right, Brentley, kick us off with our baller booster this week.
Brent: Well, we are extra grateful this week because we have a baller booster. Spooky satcom.
Brent: Spooky Satcom came in with a mega space balls boost. One, two, three, four, five, six.
Chris: That's amazing. Thank you very much, Spooky.
Chris: $123,456. That's great.
Brent: It's insane. Ventoy has been my go-to in a pinch.
Brent: With all my .files backed up to a self-hosted Forge.io instance,
Brent: and my important files running on a self-hosted NextCloud instance,
Brent: my worries are pretty much low these days.
Chris: I like this setup. This is a solid setup. I like this a lot.
Brent: Shout out to Carl from System76 for his work on the amendments to Colorado's age attestation bill.
Brent: That's SB 26-051.
Brent: Thank you for that dedication.
Chris: Indeed. Thank you very much for that baller boost, Spooky Satcom.
Chris: Nice setup you got there. Really appreciate that.
Chris: Our next boost comes from Turd Ferguson with 22,222 sats.
Chris: Sending some value your way for LinuxFest Northwest efforts and expenses. Grill a hot dog for me.
Brent: Thank you, Turd.
Chris: We did. We appreciate you very much.
Brent: Where did it go?
Chris: Brent, don't go there.
Wes: TR Selby boosts in with 7,490 Satoshis.
Wes: There and back again. I'm betting on Brent going west-southwest for the Linux Fest northwest.
Brent: Well, pretty much.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Just in case you need AAA to boost your battery, you can put this boost towards
Wes: it. Otherwise, enjoy a cider.
Chris: Aww thank you thank you that's nice yes alright we'll find Brent a nice gluten
Chris: free cider there's plenty to enjoy Gene Bean comes in with 244 nope 200 2,444
Chris: sets sorry I'm stealing it Brent,
Chris: I'm not defending the training methods of AI, but comparing to user grabbing
Chris: stuff from Stack Exchange or GitHub isn't really fair either.
Chris: Two wrongs don't make a right. A user violating the license is just as wrong
Chris: as model training and not giving required attribution.
Chris: Yeah, and I think really I was probably being too glib when I said,
Chris: you know, somebody goes to Stack Exchange and they copy-paste.
Chris: What I was really trying to say is like people just are learning iterative from
Chris: each other, and that's how they naturally do it on the internet.
Chris: And attribution still matters.
Wes: Well and just there's like i don't know i think part of it too at least from
Wes: my side was we were trying to lay out the scope of different just the the landscape
Wes: of things and issues to um,
Wes: to fight about which can you know can start with what do you even assign to
Wes: like how should copyright work right like you what layer of the discussion you
Wes: start on kind of matters for this debate so part of i was just hoping we could
Wes: lay out all the different ways so that we could be clear about which things
Wes: we are talking about, but yeah, totally agree.
Brent: Very, very complex topic with many emotions and many should-bes. It's a difficult one.
Brent: Ford Humor boosted in a row of sticks, 11,111 satoshis.
Brent: I'm not sure what all podcast players support flipping between audio and video
Brent: on the fly, but I'm enjoying catching portions of the stream on video in Fountain
Brent: when I can tell you're doing a demo.
Brent: This week, I switched to video to watch the pics, and it was super handy.
Brent: Here's a big thank you to Drew for including a high-quality video cut as part
Brent: of the production. Great work, guys.
Chris: There you go.
Wes: Aw.
Chris: Thank you very much.
Brent: That's true.
Chris: Now, I have to say we don't have the regular video version for this episode
Chris: because when we're live, it's much harder to do the video setup.
Chris: Maybe one year we'll have a stretch goal.
Brent: When we have a video crew.
Chris: It'd be nice to actually be able to make clips of Linux Fest and these events
Chris: we go to and release them individually too.
Chris: But that is a stretch goal for the future. And we do love Drew.
Chris: Thank you very much, Forward Humor. Appreciate you.
Chris: Appreciate everybody who boosted it, including those of you who boosted below the 2,000 set cutoff.
Brent: I think I want to pull one up here.
Chris: Let's do it.
Brent: There's a 1,000 set here from AmazingQ.
Brent: Long-time listener, circa 2018 first-time booster, though.
Brent: You asked about Pixie booted servers. For three years now, I'm running my NAS
Brent: diskless, which sounds strange to NASers that generally need disks.
Brent: This is what I mean. There is no disk or partition used for an OS.
Brent: It is based on Alpine Linux via Netboot.
Brent: The state is stored in a tar file, which is generated by the command LBU.
Brent: This tar file is stored on a web server.
Brent: During boot, it does fetching Pixie-related boot configurations,
Brent: fetching kernel via TFTP, and booting that kernel.
Brent: And this one's cut off, Wes. Do we have maybe extra?
Chris: That's a slick setup. So he's basically the NAS OS is loading over the network.
Brent: Isn't that cool? So then, like machine agnostic almost.
Chris: We have talked about that for our studio machines once in a while.
Chris: That's true. Don't even run with local OSes, just have them always netboot.
Chris: That's an interesting idea. I'd love to know how it works and practice it if
Chris: anybody else out there is doing it.
Chris: Also, shout out to everybody who streams stats. 21 of you stream stats.
Chris: How about that? Right there on the money. 21.
Wes: That is cool.
Chris: I know, right?
Wes: Bunch of streaming nerds out there.
Chris: And, of course, thank you to everybody. If you did not hear your boost read
Chris: this episode, we cut off a little early when we were prepping for Linux Fest.
Chris: So you may not have gotten in because we collected before Sunday morning.
Chris: But don't worry. We'll catch it next episode. So thank you, everybody,
Chris: who did boost those collectively.
Chris: We stacked 196,240 Satoshis.
Chris: We really do appreciate it. And if you would like to participate,
Chris: you can get Fountain FM. It makes it very easy to boost.
Chris: And there's also a lot of great apps you can connect to what's called AlbiHub,
Chris: which is a self-hosted way to do it.
Chris: All of this is based on free and open source software.
Chris: Thank you, everyone, who supports us either with a membership or with a boost.
Chris: Well, we do have a few picks to get to before we get out of here.
Chris: And, Wes, you came across Updo. I feel like we've talked about Updo before.
Brent: Is that what your hair does sometimes?
Chris: It does do an Updo every now and then, especially in the mornings.
Chris: But then I was looking through it, and I don't recall actually talking about this.
Chris: It's an uptime monitoring CLI tool, but it's not just for your local host uptime.
Wes: No, and that's maybe where it sets itself apart, is we have looked at a lot
Wes: of sort of cool networking TUIs, and this one's more directed outward.
Wes: So think something like Uptime Kuma, but less something you've set up as like
Wes: a server daemon and more something you might run, you know, more temporary.
Chris: As a TUI.
Wes: Yeah. But it does have a Toml configuration format, all kinds of easy ways,
Wes: Nix, NixOS, Windows, Docker, Linux, macOS.
Wes: So lots of ways to run it. It's a Go app, MIT licensed, and it's a TUI.
Wes: And so you can kind of do real-time monitoring, multi-target, multi-region.
Wes: It's got AWS support, lambdas. It's got metric exports for Prometheus,
Wes: so you can get Grafana dashboards going, alerts.
Wes: It's got custom web hooks, flexible HTTP support, so custom headers,
Wes: your posts, puts, deletes, etc.
Wes: It can also monitor SSL expiration, verification, that kind of thing.
Wes: So, yeah, if you need a quick ad hoc way to go do a little bit more with your
Wes: network monitoring at the sort of application HTTP layer, check out Updo.
Chris: Thank you, Wes. You know, when you put something out there, sometimes the internet provides.
Chris: And this week, the internet provided me with Bake, I think is actually how you say it.
Chris: You turn any web page into a desktop app with one command, P-A-K-E,
Chris: but it's a Hawaiian word.
Chris: It's lightweight. It is 90% rust.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: And they have some pre-made ones ready to go. They say it will be nearly 20
Chris: times smaller than what an Electron version would produce. 20 times smaller.
Wes: That's what got you right there, huh?
Chris: Yeah, it's using Rustari, which is a much faster traditional JS framework with
Chris: lower memory usage. You use one command to get it going.
Chris: No super complex configuration required. Support shortcuts, immersive windows,
Chris: drag and drop, style customizations, built-in ad removal. I don't know if I
Chris: mentioned, but it's an MIT license.
Wes: This is for Brent, right? Because he won't pin his tabs, but maybe he could
Wes: make apps out of what we would consider pin tabs.
Brent: Now you're talking.
Chris: I like that. I wish he would just pin his damn tabs, but that would also work.
Brent: I won't pin my tabs.
Chris: You have so many windows now. Instead of tabs, he would just have so many windows.
Wes: And that'll force him to get a proper window manager that can handle it.
Brent: I am an entropy enthusiast.
Chris: So we will have links to those in the show notes over at linuxunplugged.com
Chris: slash 660fer, which is where you can get all of that.
Chris: Again, thank you, everybody who came to out to LinuxFest Northwest, made it a special 2026.
Wes: Shout out to the organizers and all the folks putting it on.
Chris: Wes, before we get out of here, is there any extra nerdy details people should
Chris: know about the show that only people that have listened this long would really
Chris: actually even care about?
Wes: Yeah, well, since XML is really painful to read, we sort of hide these things in our RSS feed.
Wes: But there are magic text files you can get. Yeah, that's right.
Wes: Chapters, JSON chapters, yeah.
Chris: JSON?
Wes: JSON.
Chris: Oh, that's useful.
Wes: Oh, super useful.
Chris: What about like, I don't know, maybe transcripts?
Wes: Yeah, if you want to track exactly what Brent says in every episode,
Wes: check out the VTT file. It's got labels there.
Chris: It says Brent.
Brent: What? It's diaririrized?
Chris: That's right. Diarirized, yeah.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: Just for you.
Chris: You should probably see a doctor about that. And if you look really,
Chris: really closely, you'll find an MP4 file in there, too.
Chris: Although this week, it's not actually our faces.
Brent: But it's still good.
Chris: And every now and then, you might also see what's called a live item entry,
Chris: because we are live on Sundays, which we call a Tuesday at 10 a.m.
Chris: Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: So why not make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday?
Chris: Join us at jblive.tv or jblive.fm. And, of course, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash
Chris: calendar is where you get it in your local time zone.
Chris: We have bots, the early versions of bots. Before we call them bots,
Chris: before we call them algorithms, we got them over there and they convert it to
Chris: your local time. It's amazing.
Chris: We got a lug that's on Mumble. You'll love it. It's great. Slow latency opus.
Chris: Details over there at jupiterbroadcasting.com and on our website,
Chris: linuxunplugged.com. We also
Chris: have a matrix chat room going all week long and during our live shows.
Chris: You can also join that. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode
Chris: of Your Unplugged Program. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.