Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're going to take a look at
Chris: Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 2504, fresh off the mirrors, what's new,
Chris: what works, maybe what doesn't, and our thoughts after trying each of them out
Chris: and a few of the different spins.
Chris: Then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts,
Chris: killer picks, and a lot more.
Chris: There is quite a bit of show today. So before we get into it,
Chris: we have to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent. Hi.
Chris: Hello. And hello, everybody up there in the quiet listening,
Chris: too. The very quiet listening.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale, tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are.
Chris: And if you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged, you'll get tailscale for free
Chris: on 100 devices and three users, no credit card required.
Chris: And then you'll build yourself out a flat mesh network protected by...
Chris: It really is. And it's fast. It's crazy fast.
Chris: You'll be amazed on how many devices, architectures, applications that integrate
Chris: tailscale. It's really quite amazing.
Chris: And then on top of all of that, you can take your really complicated networks
Chris: like myself. At the moment, I'm behind Carrier Grade Nat on two different cellular
Chris: networks simultaneously, and Tailscale just seamlessly works through that.
Chris: And everything talks to each other like they're just on their own land.
Chris: You should try it out because it's going to change the way you do networking,
Chris: and it makes all the legacy VPN systems look like something from the 90s.
Chris: Tailscale is truly an innovation.
Chris: Go to tailscale.com slash unplugged. Get it for free on 100 devices and three users.
Wes: Our secret accountability.
Chris: Try it out. You might really like it and take the path that me and many listeners
Chris: have where you deploy it for yourself, changes the way you do networking,
Chris: and then you bring it to work.
Chris: And there are thousands of companies just like us that are using Tailscale for their infrastructure.
Chris: Duolingo, Hugging Face, Instacart, and more, all using Tailscale.
Chris: Try it for yourself or for a business. Just get started at tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Wes: Wow.
Chris: So I want to start with something sort of bittersweet, and that is that the
Chris: self-hosted podcast will be wrapping up at the end of May.
Chris: Alex and I have thought a lot about it for a while. When's the right time?
Chris: How long does the show go? It's been going for about five years.
Chris: And we thought with episode 150, because we're fans of nice round numbers,
Chris: which comes in at the end of May.
Chris: probably if you're going to pick a place, the right place to do it.
Chris: And so I want to extend an invitation to the self-hosted community out there
Chris: and everybody that's built up around that show to come join us over here at Linux Unplugged.
Chris: We've always sort of viewed self-hosted as a sister podcast.
Chris: And so much in self-hosting is built on open source, runs on Linux, so much.
Chris: I mean, it really shares a lot of the same ideals that we do here on the show
Chris: too. And so we're going to incorporate some of Brent and Wes and myself and
Chris: Alex as well. He'll join us from time to time.
Chris: Our adventures in self-hosting in Linux Unplugged in future episodes.
Chris: Sort of like, well, you know, we do. We manage multiple topics.
Wes: It should be a lot of fun.
Chris: And that's one now, an extra one we get to now fold into the show.
Chris: And, you know, we've been teasing this one for a few weeks.
Chris: But the boys are ready to deploy their first Home Assistant instance.
Brent: I'm slightly afraid.
Chris: It's going to be great. I'll be there with you. Well, don't worry. It'll go great.
Chris: And I haven't really decided what I'll do about replacing self-hosted. We'll see how that goes.
Chris: Linux Fest is coming up. It's an opportunity to meet with people.
Chris: But there's also a lot we can bring to the show.
Chris: It's a little bit of extra work-life balance for both Alex and I.
Chris: And it means it's an opportunity to bring a little more energy into Linux Unplugged.
Chris: As the show grows, and this one has, it really gets big enough it could almost
Chris: have a full-time person that just does one show.
Chris: We're not quite there yet, but it is an opportunity to bring more of that into
Chris: the Unplugged program. have Alex join us and tell us what he's been doing and
Chris: what nots, all of that too.
Chris: So while it's bittersweet, it's also good.
Chris: It is the right move for both Alex and I. And it's an opportunity for us to
Chris: incorporate stuff that we've wanted to talk about in Linux Unplugged,
Chris: but also wanted to leave it open for self-hosted.
Chris: So that is news item number one.
Chris: Now, news item number two, we have decided we will be live Saturday and Sunday
Chris: at LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: Here we go, boys! All right. Our LinuxFest Northwest coverage.
Brent: Got our headsets and everything.
Chris: Got the headsets. Thank you, audience. And big shout out to Hybrid Sarcasm with an extra side donation.
Chris: So we're going to have LinuxFest Northwest coverage live Saturday, April 26, 10 a.m.
Chris: Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. and then of course same time on Sunday we'll have Linux
Chris: Unplugged itself live Sunday on April 27th at 10am,
Chris: 1pm Eastern we're going to also try to release the Saturday recording if we
Chris: can I don't know what exactly it'll be coming up fast I know we're going to try some new stuff,
Chris: Noah from the Ask Noah program is going to join us and help us with the production
Chris: as well so you'll probably hear from him on the stream,
Chris: we're going to try to do some men on the street,
Chris: probably Brent and myself or somebody will go out and have a mobile setup and
Chris: we'll be bringing guests to the live stream and talking to them about their
Chris: sessions as well as trying to give you an overall sense,
Chris: of the fest if you can't make it but as well if you are there we'll try to keep
Chris: you informed on what's going on so you can kind of tune in and get an idea of what's happening.
Chris: So big goal but I think we're going to have a lot of fun Saturday and Sunday
Chris: coming up this next weekend as we record April 26th and the 27th both at 10 a.m. Pacific and 1 p.m.
Wes: Eastern. Yeah right but there was actually multiple things going on for the
Wes: celebration because there was like a GitLab interview and then a GitHub video.
Chris: Here we go. Here we go.
Wes: It is true. He is humble and probably for the right reasons,
Wes: right? Because really, while he did give birth to it.
Chris: Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 25.
Wes: He's pretty smart and quick to hand it off and he wanted to go back to Chrome.
Chris: It's pretty fun. I think there's admittedly just a lot of excitement around
Chris: Fedora because it's the 42 release.
Chris: It's also Matthew Miller's final release, which was nice to see him write up
Chris: a little thing in the Fedora magazine.
Chris: and I think there's a lot to like in here. We'll get to some of this,
Chris: but just at a high level, I think the first thing we want to talk about is Fedora
Chris: Workstation gets the new installer, that new Anaconda Web UI installer.
Chris: I don't even know if you'd know it's a Web UI.
Chris: Yeah, and maybe try to access it remotely, but it starts up in a window like
Chris: every other installer, and it very much just looks kind of like an application.
Chris: Works well. I would say it is, you know, it's interesting installing Ubuntu
Chris: and Fedora back to back because they're both using refreshed installers and
Chris: they're both very much taking a different path.
Chris: I kind of have a preference for the moment at the new Fedora installer.
Chris: Yeah, I guess I don't really have like a great explanation other than it felt
Chris: like it was faster to get to the end goal with the Fedora installer.
Chris: Brent, did you get that? Did you have that experience? Did you prefer one over the other?
Brent: I kind of say I didn't, I wasn't going to choose favorites, but now that you're
Brent: making me choose, I'm going to agree with you.
Brent: It was super kind of streamlined, which was the opposite experience that I typically have with Fedora.
Brent: that's um spoken hub approach took
Brent: us several installs for me to get used to you get used to it of course like
Brent: anything but uh this time around i just felt like yeah
Brent: it was as far as a guided install goes
Brent: i was quite guided and i i really enjoyed it i
Brent: love the progress bar especially i thought it was just
Brent: enough information and broken up just enough to
Brent: be sort of a useful feedback without getting
Brent: in the way but also my favorite thing was definitely the location chooser i
Brent: might be the only person who cares about the time zone location chooser it is
Brent: so much improved here compared to what we've seen for the last 10 years so huge
Brent: kudos to the people that worked on the installer i'm a fan that.
Chris: Is a nice perspective now that i've never really had
Chris: too many complaints with the time zone selector other than i have to select
Chris: la they also come with a new
Chris: feature which i'll talk about in a minute which is quote
Chris: reinstall fedora option if you already have fedora installed you
Chris: see this after you already have a fedora 42 install if you reboot off of the
Chris: installer iso another option in the installer shows up reinstall fedora and
Chris: uh you know the idea is kind of like a chrome book refresh sort of do a reset
Chris: on your system you broke it and not delete some of your user data which i tried
Chris: and i'll report back on in a moment,
Chris: right right but it's cool it's good,
Chris: does seem like a good idea, especially if you keep iterating on it.
Mumble: The reason why that is even there is because of ButterFS.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Mumble: The feature relies on the fact that when we install with ButterFS,
Mumble: your user data is separated out into a separate subvolume.
Mumble: So all Anaconda has to do is just blow away the operating system subvolume,
Mumble: reinstall it, and mount your home subvolume again.
Wes: I mean, a decade apart, okay, but then in the two decades since then.
Mumble: It's very easy and very safe.
Wes: The world of open source is so great. Absolutely exploded, partially powered
Wes: by Git and, of course, by Linux in a different way.
Wes: So we just have a—there are a lot more other—you can use other people's tools.
Chris: We also got a Cosmic spin with this release, better SGX support.
Chris: We see the new Linux DRM panic screen in this release. Yeah.
Chris: KD Plasma 6.3.
Wes: Lands, XFCE 4.2.0, and LXQ 2.1.
Chris: In here as well.
Wes: So these were versions of Emacs. So if you imagine back in the day.
Chris: Emacs was fairly simple. All of the features really come from GNOME 48.
Wes: It's quite a robust environment, right? Almost an operating system.
Chris: A new JavaScript engine for GNOME. Better mock discrete graphics support for monitors.
Wes: So yeah, he has a random version of Micro Emacs with some private modifications.
Chris: The new digital well-being stuff is in GNOME 48.
Wes: Yeah, it...
Chris: Maybe the biggest one, though.
Wes: It's basic.
Chris: HDR support.
Wes: I did.
Chris: High dynamic range support.
Wes: My mistake...
Chris: It's a little early.
Wes: I popped it open. It is packaged in X.
Chris: I don't even know if it recognizes my monitor as HDR, but it let me do HDR.
Wes: As I do often with Vim, I just wanted to open a buffer without necessarily saving
Wes: it. I wasn't intending to keep it. I just wanted to try the other.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it's big.
Wes: Give it a file name to save.
Chris: And it's great.
Wes: It's fantastic.
Chris: It's something that the Mac could do that was tricky on Gano.
Chris: They also have the preserved battery health setting that lets you,
Chris: on systems that support it, set the max charge to 80%.
Wes: Maybe because I hadn't totally cleared my buffer. Yeah, but the easiest way
Wes: that I could figure out to quit was to save it to a file, and then I could save and quit.
Wes: So I just wanted to do a temp file. All the stuff you get with GNOME 48,
Wes: if you go with the workstation release.
Wes: You also see the plasma version right alongside the workstation download.
Wes: Non-modal editor. What a mind.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, Brent, which spin did you give a go of Fedora 42?
Brent: Well, because you guys keep getting on me about not, you know,
Brent: giving them enough of a try.
Wes: I figured, hey, everybody's talking about how this is a great version.
Brent: I would get this little going. Gosh darn it.
Brent: You know, tells you about the data structure in the library that the thing you're
Brent: looking at came from in all these modern environments.
Brent: So, I'm really having some existential questions like that.
Chris: Uh-oh. I mean, they are nice. Uh-oh.
Brent: Am I going that far? I, yeah.
Chris: It sounds like you liked it.
Brent: I did like it. I don't know what this means for the future of Brent's desktop,
Brent: but I think they're doing amazing things and starting to win me over.
Brent: So maybe I'll try it again, like long-term. We'll see.
Chris: Okay. I'm noting that one down.
Brent: Please do.
Chris: No, I thought you were going to try the plasma spin. I just assumed.
Brent: Well, I thought I should try something new, given plasma's in my everyday,
Brent: And they talk such a great game about the Plasma desktop in Fedora.
Brent: Like, saying features for everyone, for creators, scientists,
Brent: developers, gamers, and it's customizable. I think they did an amazing job at
Brent: describing exactly what the Plasma desktop is and offers compared to Workstation.
Brent: And I just thought, geez, they got this so figured out. I'm going to go try
Brent: the other one because it seems like maybe Plasma's taken over.
Brent: I don't know. That's a little bit of bacon. But...
Brent: Yeah, so I thought I'd just try something a little new.
Chris: Now, you also were going to try the Cosmic Spin, I believe.
Brent: Yes, I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up. Yeah, you think we might be past that?
Chris: Oh, well, that's what I'm the most excited to hear about.
Brent: I know, I gave it a shot in a VM and ran into some major issues and never even got to that desktop.
Wes: Unfortunately.
Brent: I don't know if you boys tried it and got some more luck.
Wes: But I ran into a Poison A, which is kind of fun. and I think I need to do a
Wes: little bit more work to find out if it's just my particular VM setup or what
Wes: and try it on some hardware.
Brent: Maybe I'd have some better luck.
Wes: And there are things, right? Like Fossil is a very interesting one.
Brent: Did either of you do that show?
Wes: You know, as it's based on like a theory of patches, there's several of these
Wes: that are sort of, they are in many ways better than Git, maybe not all,
Wes: and not even necessarily just in a porcelain sense.
Brent: I should have had a Neil there holding my hand the whole time.
Wes: That's what I did wrong.
Brent: Thank you, Neil.
Wes: That's great.
Mumble: Yeah, I discovered this while I was developing it. So like, well,
Mumble: I wasn't solely developing, but like when I was putting it together,
Mumble: along with Ryan Brew and the other folks in Fedora Cosmic, I discovered fairly
Mumble: quickly that you basically can't run it without hardware accelerated graphics being enabled.
Chris: Yeah.
Mumble: And since no virtual machine platform turns it on by default, it will just crash.
Mumble: So you need to turn it on and then try again and it will work.
Brent: Stay tuned for next episode.
Chris: So for me i'm gonna give the cosmic spin a try but i'm waiting i'm just gonna
Chris: wait for a few weeks after the release uh did you have any other right we're
Chris: past that it exists now so i have to it has to be.
Wes: An evolution no.
Brent: I really didn't which uh is unusual.
Wes: I do think it's funny,
Wes: because if you go check it out there's uh now been 175 different contributors
Wes: to the project and over 20,000 commits.
Wes: So even on its own, it's a pretty decent project.
Chris: I agree. I saw Tyler in our live chat too saying that, you know,
Chris: it's the one I'm going to give a go. I'm going to come back to it.
Chris: I'll jump ahead and tell you why I didn't give Cosmic a spin.
Chris: And this is, it's fine. It's fine. But I am, my laptop these days is an M1 MacBook Pro.
Chris: and I run Asahi Fedora on there. So for me, both of these releases have really
Chris: come very far in their ARM support, especially in 42 and in 2504.
Chris: It's delightfully improved.
Chris: And so this was a really special time to actually be testing these distributions,
Chris: on ARM hardware. And I went with Workstation because I was running it in virtualization
Chris: and I just wanted to make sure I knew that worked.
Chris: And I was so impressed with how well it worked in virtualization.
Wes: I got myself a debbing container running.
Chris: I know you noticed this too, Wes.
Wes: And then grabbed myself the code for the apt 3.0 release.
Wes: Managed to get it compiled. And then I did the thing where I installed all the
Wes: generated deb files and overrope a package manager in place with the new version.
Chris: And it kept working. It really feels like a first-class Linux experience on the M100.
Wes: No, it's nice, right? Like, I didn't actually...
Chris: So I was kind of limited in what I could test.
Wes: But what I did test with 442 was some of the solver stuff, but that's really good to see.
Chris: Getting these distributions to release a generic ISO image for ARM platforms is massive.
Wes: They integrated smarter sort of graph-solving problems in algorithms earlier.
Chris: So that's great.
Wes: I did try the auto-remove after
Wes: installing a whole bunch of build dependencies for ARM and ARM images.
Chris: That we then expand onto our disk and boot.
Wes: Not only is apps just generally faster.
Chris: You can get ARM laptops, you can get MacBooks, you can get water stations.
Wes: Very snappy.
Chris: Even the Pi 400 can boot iso-based. And if you have a generic ARM image like
Chris: Seuss has had for a while, all these systems, as they add more support,
Chris: they just work like any other standard x86 PC.
Wes: Oh, immediately.
Chris: And it's a terrific experience to be able to just put it in a thumb drive and
Chris: boot an ARM box like it's a standard PC.
Wes: And you know how apt it is?
Chris: And now we're here with both Adora 42 and Ubuntu.
Wes: It's just not very structured. It's more like reading the text log,
Wes: which is fine if you're a sysadmin, you're used to it.
Wes: The new stuff is structured, right? It's got text layout and formatting and color highlights.
Wes: So when you're removing packages, all of the packages you're removing are in red.
Chris: And they're on their own line. And it kind of works as you might expect.
Chris: So I set up my test system.
Wes: And it's tabbed out so it's indented.
Chris: And I changed my user wallpaper. I tweaked some of my desktop settings.
Chris: Based on the structure of the text in a way you just did not in the past version.
Chris: I installed three or four flat packs and I installed three or four RPMs from the repo.
Chris: And then, you know, went about using the system for a bit.
Chris: And decided, let's see what sticks, what stays.
Chris: Rebooted off of the ISO, went into the installer again. Sure enough,
Chris: the new reinstall Fedora option showed up. So I click that. It's pretty straightforward.
Wes: It doesn't ask a lot of questions. Yeah, I think we did see stuff added to make
Wes: it so it would stop you from doing that more often.
Chris: But even then, it didn't necessarily explain it a ton.
Wes: So that has been improved with 3.
Chris: So it remains.
Wes: It continues to stop you. I tried removing that.
Chris: It almost still in dark mode, my custom background, the icons I changed.
Wes: You can't do that.
Chris: Those were all still there.
Wes: But it was very clear about why. and big bold red letters that are like,
Wes: you just tried to do something real dumb, user.
Chris: Don't do that.
Wes: Also kind of interesting, I was testing out I now have an option to add a comment
Wes: when you're installing a package. And I don't know.
Chris: Maybe they'll pull it up. For an end user with isolated applications,
Chris: that would truly be the experience is refresh the operating system.
Wes: You come back and all of the applications you can install with a flat pack are
Wes: still there. You can do so with a comment and then later.
Chris: Maybe that's a better way to go figure out why do I have this package?
Mumble: Right. So the way that it works is it, by default, Fedora installs with ButterFS.
Wes: It's not quite other declarative systems, but it's definitely a useful tool to have in your toolkit.
Mumble: So with that in mind, when Anaconda detects that you have a Fedora install on
Mumble: ButterFS and you're going through the install process, it can offer to reinstall.
Mumble: And the way that it does it is it just simply erases only the sub-volumes that
Mumble: contain system data while retaining the sub-volumes that contain user data.
Mumble: So all you do is, say, reinstall Fedora, put in your things,
Mumble: and then it will just erase the root subvolume, which is what we call it,
Mumble: and then recreate it and then mount the home subvolume and attach the user and
Mumble: all that other fun stuff.
Mumble: So then you wind up having a very simple path to bring it all back.
Mumble: And this is why, for example, applications don't come with it because applications
Mumble: are installed on the system and not on the user area.
Mumble: So there you go.
Chris: Yeah. Thank you. So that I thought was a pretty neat feature overall.
Chris: I could see expanding it down the road and absolutely thumbs up on the arm support.
Chris: Wes, what was your experience with Fedora 42 like?
Chris: Oh, very good. Okay.
Chris: Yes, yes. And, uh, you
Chris: probably don't care about, but it's nice to see.
Chris: I mean, I'm glad they, you know, got that, even though they're kind of phasing
Chris: it out. That's great to see.
Chris: Smooth, yeah. Agreed.
Chris: A classic. Always a classic. It's nice that we have a hybrid. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chris: Hmm, okay. All right.
Chris: that's pretty neat yeah,
Chris: Red Hat is so serious about Bootsy it's great,
Chris: yeah yeah yeah it
Chris: would you know in a future where we had like a spare
Chris: B link or something it almost be worth putting a Windows install on there to
Chris: try out stuff in WSL almost plus we could try to a what,
Chris: Now, you had a note in here about the live environment doing something kind of fun.
Brent: Yeah, I put a note saying just about a little warning that I found on the release
Brent: page here. I'll read it for you because it's kind of fun.
Chris: Yeah, it seems like a good one.
Brent: Yeah, Matt Miller wrote this one. You know, it's a good one.
Brent: No, it's not the Vogons, but it is ugly.
Brent: We discovered a problem with the live boot media at the last minute,
Brent: and since the release was already out of the airlock, we can't do much about
Brent: it. It doesn't damage anything, but it is annoying.
Brent: Just booting the live media adds an unexpected entry to the UEFI bootloader,
Brent: even when Fedora Linux 42 is not installed to the local system.
Chris: Okay. That is a good little PSA. Fun fact.
Wes: You were.
Chris: Thank you. Now, we have a question. Neil wants you all to report in on your
Chris: experience with the LX-Cute version, the Cosmic version, and the Plasma version.
Chris: But specifically, probably out of all of those, we'd like people to try out
Chris: the LXQ version report. And yeah, Neil?
Mumble: Yeah, for sure. Because this version is special. Fedora LXQ is the first,
Mumble: as far as I know, again, I haven't looked super extensively,
Mumble: but I checked all the majors.
Mumble: Fedora LXQ is the first LXQ deliverable distribution, whatever,
Mumble: that ships LXQ with Wayland by default.
Chris: That is really neat.
Mumble: And we're using the mirror mirror
Mumble: way compositor to do it you you know from the mirror project right so so this
Mumble: is a very exciting and interesting release and i would love to see people check
Mumble: it out try it out and give you know feedback to the mirror way project as well
Mumble: as you know just talk about what it how it feels and looks for them.
Chris: Yeah i'd love to people are willing out there just a little uh you know contribution
Chris: to the show give it a spin and report back in send us to boost how it went.
Chris: Also, I'd love personally to hear how people's experience with the Cosmic spin goes.
Chris: I'd like to cast a wide net on that. So please do let us know.
Chris: 1password.com slash unplugged. That's the number one, password.com and then lowercase unplugged.
Chris: Now imagine your company's security a bit like the quad of a college campus.
Chris: They have the nice brick pass that the designers thought about, put in.
Chris: Those go between the buildings. They look really great. You could think of those
Chris: as your company-owned devices, your IT-approved apps, you know,
Chris: managed employee identities, everything's known.
Chris: Then you have what's called the preferred path, I've been told recently.
Chris: That's the shortcuts you'll see worn into the grass, the actual straightest
Chris: line from point A to point B that people end up taking just to get the job done.
Chris: You can think of that as unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps, and non-employee identities.
Chris: Like contractors, I've been on both sides of that. And the reality is most security
Chris: tools only work on the happy brick path, the designed path.
Chris: But we all know a lot of security problems take place on the shortcuts.
Chris: That's where 1Password Extended Access Management comes in.
Chris: It's the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices,
Chris: these apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential
Chris: is strong and protected. Every device is known and healthy.
Chris: And every app is visible. That's huge.
Chris: 1Password Extended Access Management is solving the problems that traditional
Chris: IAMs and MDMs just weren't built to touch.
Wes: It does seem like if you're trying to do the same thing, but you don't have the same setup.
Chris: And it's available for companies with Okta.
Wes: Microsoft, Entra, and Data for the workspace.
Chris: You know 1Password changed the game with general password hygiene.
Chris: Now they're bringing that all the way around. Now it's extended access to management by OnePass.
Chris: I couldn't imagine life without OnePassword, and I couldn't imagine trying to
Chris: manage all these devices.
Wes: Apps, and identities.
Chris: In a world where so many services and online web apps and identities are just
Chris: sort of crammed down people's throat to get the job done.
Chris: You need something that secures every app, every device, and every identity.
Chris: Even the unmanaged ones.
Chris: That's where OnePassword comes in. Check it out, support the show,
Chris: see what they have to say at 1password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: That's all lowercase. So you go to 1password.com slash unplugged.
Brent: Well, this week, we also saw the plucky puffin come to life.
Brent: Ubuntu 2504 came shipped for us with all of the GNOME 48 stuff,
Brent: like the HDR support, new well-being controls, and group notifications,
Brent: including Linux kernel 614.
Brent: Yeah. And Mesa 25.0.
Chris: Ooh, yeah. That's going to be, you know, all of this stuff really stacked together
Chris: for both these releases. Oh, it's great for gamers. It's great for gamers.
Chris: It's nice to see this stuff get in here. It's so great. And also both of them
Chris: have focused on better dual boot support.
Chris: There's the replace Ubuntu option and more in the OS installer.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, that's neat too. So let's take a moment though and talk about the
Chris: ARM64 unified ISO for this release because this is truly what's got me excited.
Chris: And I think Canonical worked with Qualcomm?
Chris: I think, to do some of the QA testing on this. I think I read that.
Chris: And they've really, and I don't know. I know they also focused on Snapdragon.
Chris: Sorry, I think that's Qualcomm, right? They focused on the Snapdragon X Elite,
Chris: which some of these Windows PCs are shipping. So if you get one of these ARM
Chris: PCs, they're targeting that. Probably just work. Yeah, they're targeting that.
Chris: So those are ones that are often marketed as like co-pilot AI plus PCs or something.
Chris: So they're really aiming for a smoother experience. And as a result,
Chris: the rest of us ARM users are benefiting too so hey.
Wes: This is true.
Chris: Yeah yeah yeah definitely they also made a little switch it's not a big deal
Chris: but the default document viewer switches from evans to papers uh which doesn't
Chris: have everything but still a perfectly fine app.
Wes: Are we going to celebrate on the show? No, we're just going to get it away.
Chris: 2504 is also using something new for location services.
Chris: And this isn't really something you hear distributions talk a lot about,
Chris: but they're now using BeaconDB to handle things like your automatic nightlight
Chris: or time zone detection and weather-related features. If you enable location
Chris: services, it's now using BeaconDB. Yeah, what was it before?
Chris: I believe it was. Yeah, exactly. And now they switched to BeaconDB,
Chris: which BeaconDB.net, a public domain wireless geolocation database.
Chris: I'm not necessarily known for being the most accurate, I think,
Chris: is what I've read, but still pretty good for it.
Chris: I mean, you're really looking for like general time zone, sunrise, sunset, right?
Chris: It's probably good enough for that. Um, yeah. And there are,
Chris: there are, um, plenty of ways to contribute to it and plenty of ways they,
Chris: they, uh, accept, uh, contributions either in a code or in location data.
Chris: So they have a map too, that has all the hotspots that they have.
Chris: And there's, there's this one that's just, uh, obviously a flight it's over
Chris: the Antarctic or whatever.
Chris: It's just, they got location, people reporting location while they're live on
Chris: flights using beacon DB. I mean, it's really all over the place.
Chris: So I suppose it's going to work just fine for this. I just thought it's kind
Chris: of noteworthy that they even kind of mentioned it. I don't know.
Chris: I was kind of negative about the installer in the Fedora section,
Chris: but now that we're in the Ubuntu section, I did want to mention.
Wes: Do we have to talk about which user? I don't know if anything's changed for
Wes: the power users on the Mac platform.
Wes: Not that it hasn't gone worse. I don't know that Linux has significantly involved in all those things.
Wes: But for folks that do not necessarily have concrete expectations.
Chris: That is not the case with the S.G.
Wes: I'm used to this exact version of the app doing it this exact way.
Chris: I wouldn't know. It is smooth in the way that a native app is smooth.
Chris: No, I know. I know. You create something that's a cross-platform.
Chris: thing and I just in my brain I just associate it's going to work like electron
Chris: because that's what we've had to suffer with for so long.
Brent: That's just from your jaded experience over the years Chris.
Chris: Things are getting.
Brent: Better welcome to the modern world.
Chris: I can kind of see why they like it,
Chris: I know, Brent, you kicked the tires on your install with encryption and some
Chris: of the disk partitioning stuff. How'd that go?
Brent: Yeah, you know me. That's a good tell for various distros and whether that goes well or not.
Brent: And I have to say, I think I'm officially going to crown this the very best
Brent: encryption install experience across the board.
Chris: Ah, dang. All right.
Brent: When you enable that little checkmark for encryption, you get all sorts of options.
Brent: You get, of course, like Lux encryption, but ZFS, which has a little experimental tag.
Brent: but it's there just like everybody else uh so zfs with and without encryption
Brent: but also the new hardware backed encryption as well that uses the tpi so lots
Brent: of options there and uh i'm a big fan of having many many encryption options.
Chris: I didn't actually get it i think my whole macbook's a tpm to tell you the truth,
Chris: that's what it feels like I'm.
Wes: Dying for an X86 laptop again I am dying boys I think if you're willing or enjoying,
Wes: have you checked the couch cushion there might be one slipped in there maybe.
Wes: I'll do a little couch diving,
Wes: it's great to see the ZFS options in there still maybe the one place this doesn't
Wes: necessarily still fit is for folks who are busy enough with enough concerns
Wes: that they need things that have those parts taken care of in a thoughtful and
Wes: flexible professional way.
Chris: Oh, right, right, right.
Wes: But you're right. Outside of that, on the modern Linux desktop,
Wes: we have a lot of the tools.
Chris: Maybe they're not always assembled exactly like what you need.
Wes: But the primitives are there.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: I noticed that too on my slow connections.
Chris: Yeah, I bet you did.
Chris: I agree. Yeah, I agree.
Chris: Well, you know, part of that is because Fedora does a little trick where they
Chris: finish some of the setup after the reboot, where you create the user account
Chris: and all that kind of stuff, where Ubuntu does that up front.
Chris: And so I think it creates for a longer experience.
Chris: And to me, it felt like I was having to do more. But when I thought about it,
Chris: it's like, well, no, I still have to do that stuff. I just do it after installation.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wes: Oh yeah,
Wes: you keep trying i saw you with the cottonwood,
Wes: We're going back to FreeBSD.
Chris: True, yeah. Its own individual identity and website, right.
Wes: Hey, it's not technically a year.
Chris: It does make the Fedora system seem like a tighter ecosystem.
Chris: I'm going to tell you something.
Wes: Not bad, not bad.
Chris: Yes, yes, I was mentioning that.
Wes: Yeah, we're going from ZFS 2 to 4 Yeah.
Chris: A new addition in AppArmor is a new profile for BubbleRap called BRAP Users
Chris: Restrict, and the profile allows the creation of user namespaces and initial sandbox.
Wes: And then it switches to a stricter enforcement mode, limiting what processes
Wes: can do inside that sandbox. We are not so lucky.
Chris: Not necessarily a flashy thing, but could be a nice security improvement.
Chris: But like Wes said, when these things get turned up, just be aware. There's logs.
Wes: Check your logs. I did get some compiling going for ZFS already to try to help us out here.
Chris: Yeah. You bring it all together with either the latest Plasma or the latest GNOME.
Chris: Of course, the other distros as well. But App 3.0, Linux 6.14,
Chris: the new Mesa. and I've been seeing
Chris: multiple reports of NVIDIA-Wayland combinations successfully working.
Chris: Proprietary NVIDIA driver, accelerated graphics on Wayland, and it's working.
Chris: I mean, can we just take a moment here?
Chris: That's really good to see. I mean, I have to just circle back for a second.
Chris: The milestone level here, I'm not saying mission accomplished yet.
Chris: But we have lived through eras where Linux did not support entire categories
Chris: of hardware, and they were fundamental blockers for users to switch.
Chris: I mean, the classic example was Wi-Fi for forever.
Chris: And then we really solved Wi-Fi in a big way, thanks to contributions from Intel and others.
Wes: Geek boosts in with 45,000 sacks.
Chris: I think since then, the biggest kind of fundamental blocker to Wayland and user
Chris: adoption and things breaking during updates has been the NVIDIA driver.
Wes: And people buy these increasingly more expensive GPUs without issues for the next time you do a game.
Chris: They don't work on Linux. They're going to go somewhere where it does work,
Chris: and that's Windows. And to nail this now.
Wes: To be able to start fresh.
Chris: And just install a distro with all of the modern desktop stuff in Wayland, and have it work.
Wes: There's some minor window issues in the menus.
Chris: It is turning the corner on one of the most arduous, crappy chapters in desktop Linux history.
Chris: And I know it only works with certain hardware, newer hardware and all of that.
Chris: But as we go forward from this point, it's only going to get better.
Chris: And we'll look back. It was early 2025 when this stuff actually started shipping to end users.
Chris: And we've been talking about the developments now for two years that got us here.
Chris: And here we are, and it's actually shipping to end users. And that's why the
Chris: kernel stuff really matters.
Chris: It sometimes takes a while to actually reach end users, but it's huge and a major milestone,
Chris: yeah yep yeah
Chris: we're really in a good spot and then you imagine what happens if we I don't
Chris: know which I don't know which door release rel is going to be based off of but
Chris: it's going to be moving forward from here you know this is setting up for an
Chris: LTS it's going to be a great Ubuntu LTS,
Chris: they're both they're these longer term distros that will be built in the future
Chris: maybe we're allowed an exception machine.
Wes: But we have to time ourselves on how much we use it.
Chris: Oh, I thought I had to wait till 10. Did you try it? You gave it a go. Of course.
Chris: And?
Chris: LS works.
Wes: Derivation dingus boosts in with 22,000 sets.
Chris: Better?
Wes: Headphone boost. Yeah. As someone who's boosted in about thoroughly enjoying
Wes: highly technical content, I also have to say I enjoyed the gaming content.
Chris: I thought you'd say something.
Wes: Maybe it's the ADD.
Chris: But I personally think the wide variety is a feature.
Wes: Keeps the show feeling fresh.
Chris: ConfigCat.com slash unplugged. Yes, ConfigCat is sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Chris: This is the feature flag service that helps you release features faster and
Chris: with less risk. They have an unlimited seats program.
Wes: Awesome support, and a very reasonable price tag.
Chris: ConfigCat solves problems that make it easier to manage feature flags in your code.
Chris: And they have open source SDKs for over 19 different platforms.
Chris: JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, even Rust is in there.
Chris: You can turn features on and off remotely without having to redeploy your code. Use feature flags.
Wes: It's a very casual conference.
Chris: So just kind of show up. A-B testing, canary releases, or even instant rollbacks,
Chris: all from a beautiful dashboard.
Chris: You got to go see that. It's a great way to support the show. Check it out.
Chris: ConfigCat.com slash unplugged. It's built with data safety in mind.
Chris: Your user data never leaves your system. You can try ConfigCat's forever free
Chris: plan or get 25% off the paid plan when you use the code UNPLUGED25. All one word.
Chris: My recommendation, put it in uppercase too. And we'd love it if you go there. Check out the site.
Chris: Support the show by going to configcat.com slash unplugged. And when you're
Chris: ready to try it out, take 25% off the paid plan with that UNPLUGED25.
Chris: Put it all caps. Scream it at them. UNPLUGED25.
Chris: Learn more at configcat.com slash unplugged.
Wes: Uh, yeah, that could make an exception for you.
Brent: We got a ton of feedback on our gaming episode.
Wes: Thank you.
Brent: I got some personal feedback. We got some feedback to the show and PJ just kept
Brent: bugging me to make a JV gaming den room on Matrix.
Brent: And so now we have one. PJ made some additional pylons and we made that happen.
Brent: Thank you very much. And also, uh, get over there.
Wes: If you want to organize maybe some community gaming nights.
Brent: That's up to you guys. We're not involved.
Brent: If you want to get in there, we have a link in the show notes. The JB Gaming Den.
Chris: Yep, check it out on our self-hosted Matrix.
Chris: And our baller booster comes from the handsome, the delightful,
Chris: the wonderful Adversary 17 with 84,768 sats.
Wes: Yeah, we had to remind you to, you know, sign off to do the show.
Chris: Atversaries writes, I really liked the gaming episode. It was fun to hear y'all
Chris: just kind of hanging out.
Chris: And here's some sats for a headset boost. And he says, and I appreciate this.
Chris: We play this in the member stream.
Chris: The headset sample sounds good to my ears. and for what it's worth,
Chris: I'm kind of picky about audio, having been an audio technician for years. How do we not know that?
Wes: Yeah, I did sense it.
Chris: Yeah, thank you adversaries, I try to change it up.
Wes: So what, full disclosure, Gene Bean was helping me.
Chris: And that was even with a bit of a head cold.
Wes: It turned out that if you sent my node We'll be trying them out for Linux West and Northwest.
Chris: Well, not trying them out.
Wes: We're going all in. We'll look
Wes: cool. Between 600 and 1,000 bytes or characters. I forget the specific.
Wes: But basically, under that, fine. above that fine but in this right range there's
Wes: a bug in the key send plugin that meant that the stats would not make it to
Wes: me so to recreate that i just kept copying gene's message so that's really gene's
Wes: message that i sent like 11 times oh boy.
Brent: You know that was just open source recently i think if i got that right so i
Brent: think we should jump jump jump into that yeah.
Chris: All right all right i'm down i'm down.
Brent: Well the tebby dog also said gene also so we'll have that later.
Wes: On yeah i just sent so many that.
Brent: I've been learning and configuring a new proposal software
Brent: at work when i hit a snag during setup i wished
Brent: for easier access to expert support as waiting for availability didn't always
Brent: fit my timeline to solve this i set up an open web ui knowledge base with all
Brent: the available documentation from the developers and now i can just ask an lm
Brent: questions and it provides answers with citations from that documentation it's been working great.
Chris: I mean, that is a great solution. I am kind of chuckling, though,
Chris: that you had time to set up an LLM and open web UI and then somehow get at the
Chris: documentation, which I don't even know how you do that.
Chris: But you didn't have time to sit on support, which sounds like something I would do.
Wes: I was taking public transit last week, and folks across from me on the train
Wes: were talking about just, I don't know if it was exactly the R36,
Wes: but they were legit talking about little handhold emulator devices because they wanted to get one.
Chris: How did you feed it and train it on the docks? How are you doing that?
Brent: How do we get access? too.
Chris: Right. I want that. I'd love to be able to feed all our show notes. That would be so cool.
Wes: Well, with Starcher F64, probably.
Chris: Brons and Wings here with a row of ducks. Headphones and gaming.
Wes: DD Spec comes in with 3,000.
Chris: Cents. How about a row of ducks for that, I say. That's much appreciated.
Wes: Thank you, Brons. Also, would love if you could get Mr. Dominic on a Jupyter
Wes: pod, or Chris or Wes could go on New Coder.
Wes: I love the small business owner's perspective on that.
Chris: Alright, it's gonna happen.
Chris: yeah,
Chris: especially these days.
Wes: I don't know so okay i noticed that acoustica boosted from the all shows which
Wes: is cool via phone i think i maybe not do chapters not show up there because
Wes: the show should have chapters would help in this particular case my kids maybe
Wes: there's a technical reason they.
Chris: Naturally just started using discover and um software depending on one of them's
Chris: on plasm one of them's on you know, and they just install things via flat pack.
Chris: I sat down with them. Like you had all these things. Oh yeah.
Chris: Well, I wanted a new Minecraft and launcher. So I just searched.
Brent: About t-mux uh i specifically remember when i forced myself to learn this and
Brent: chris it's your fault a couple years ago you did a refresh of a system over
Brent: ssh yeah well and uh your your main moral of the story was more gaming content
Brent: he said the word also like odyssey i've.
Wes: Lost i don't know 70-plus hours?
Brent: Well, our dear Odyssey Wester came in with 10,000.
Wes: Due to what seems like a sync bug between two PCs. Oh, my.
Brent: While I love to hear more gaming stuff in general, I think just discussing your
Brent: experience instead of listening to clips would be the best way to go forward for me.
Brent: Just hearing you guys playing and not having visual context was the confusing part.
Brent: Otherwise, you're better off
Brent: just creating a gaming video instead as extra content for those curious.
Brent: Either way, I will see you at LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: It's a tricky thing, right? That's why one of the reasons we went with StarDrop.
Wes: Wonderful to hear from you.
Chris: It's such a well-known. But, you know, then it was also suggested that maybe
Chris: future gaming stuff we do in the launch or something, which we could totally do.
Chris: So keep tuning in. You never know where we're going to go next.
Chris: Rotted Mood comes in with 10,000 sets. No message, just the value.
Chris: Thank you, Mood. Nice to hear from you.
Wes: Yeah well every show can't be like that because if we do it again we're gonna lose to brent,
Wes: uh-huh outdoor geek boosts in five thousand cents,
Wes: oh but actually i think in this case brent should be boosting them because
Wes: uh outdoor geek writes hey brent on my nyx os laptop the kde indexer would sometimes
Wes: wake the laptop from sleep about a minute after the laptop was seeming to go
Wes: to sleep this config turns off the indexer and then there's a link to a nyx config for you.
Chris: Okay, you got to tell us more about that, Tomato. Please boost back and tell us more about that.
Chris: So we'll give you all a heads up. I think we're also looking for tool suggestions.
Chris: We're still kind of in the discovery phase, and then we'll lock in and give
Chris: you a date so you can do it along with us. This is one of my favorite boosts
Chris: of the week. This is a very well thought out boost.
Chris: And it's something I've thought a lot about myself is all of the data around
Chris: your source code that GitHub owns and is centralized around GitHub.
Chris: And for a while, we were really trying to push and push and push on decentralized
Chris: services, but we just didn't really, it just didn't really seem to be landing.
Chris: But it's an issue that's always on my mind.
Wes: That sounds slick.
Chris: And there are ways to solve this today. There are technologies that could solve it.
Chris: But I agree with you, it's going to take some kind of meltdown to create a mass exodus.
Chris: i maintain that post microsoft exodus acquisition there we go they've they've
Chris: rebuilt stronger and better and there's just no unseating that i think maybe
Chris: for the next couple of decades,
Chris: Fuzzy Mistborn moves in with 2,500 sats. And you know, they haven't really burned
Chris: anybody in a really bad way since the acquisition.
Wes: You must construct additional bylons. Love the episode, makes me want to go and start StarCraft.
Wes: And you know, StarCraft 2, that was an excellent trilogy as well.
Wes: I think that bit's for Brent.
Brent: 19,111 sats saying, here's a little support for LinuxFest Northwest cost.
Brent: Hope you guys have a great time.
Chris: Thank you. Thank you for the boost, turd. Sam H is here with 9001 sats.
Chris: He says, I enjoyed the gaming content. A few things I would like to know about
Chris: retro handheld game systems, like the one you mentioned.
Chris: At least they're based on Linux from what I have read. The cheaper ones,
Chris: though, sometimes run a more lockdown version of Linux.
Chris: I'll just mention that. He says, sometimes, though, you can do things like SSH or SyncThing,
Chris: and they use RetroArch for emulation, which supports rewind shaders and retro
Chris: achievements yeah there's also on on the um,
Chris: 37x there's like a otg port a usb data ports two usbc ports one for charging and one for data and,
Chris: i didn't i haven't bothered with it because it comes with so many roms i haven't
Chris: really needed to add any if anything there's too many i'd almost rather have
Chris: an sd card with fewer roms on it
Chris: but i suppose you could probably mount it as a disc too he says
Chris: also you can look into third party os options like kn nully rockinix or mu os
Chris: it depends on the device there's a wide range of form factors and prices though
Chris: the future is unclear in the u.s due to tariff charges for recommendations and
Chris: reviews i did although you know really with linux fess.
Wes: Coming up that's.
Chris: That's the real that's the real day i think i'm gonna don't tell my dad but
Chris: i think i'm gonna get him caffeinated linux moves in with so cool right and
Chris: he's got he's still got his old no way black screen.
Wes: Long time listener.
Chris: But it's funny how small the screen is.
Chris: And the other thing that struck me, because I was over at his place this weekend
Chris: and I was, you know, playing Tetris.
Chris: One cartridge at a time.
Brent: Oh yeah, right.
Chris: And I've got one that's thinner with a bigger screen that has 18,000 ROMs on it.
Wes: And like one cartridge at a time. Because that was about roughly when I first
Wes: got started with a bunch of things. 610 works though.
Chris: I didn't know, I didn't get to play it. I was so sad on Tetris.
Wes: I got my USB Wi-Fi adapter is finally working. Yeah.
Wes: So here's two thousand and six bits in honor of two great releases from 2006.
Wes: Also love hearing the deep dive and gaming episodes and would love to hear.
Chris: Hey, thank you for the review report.
Brent: Well, GC boosted in 7,777 sats.
Brent: Best show ever. Been binge listening on old episodes and you know,
Brent: it's too much when that Bang Bus song is stuck in your head.
Chris: Oh no, not the Bang Bus one.
Brent: When wes gets technical it's a thing of beauty.
Chris: Yeah we do love it we do love it.
Brent: I will be in your neck of the woods in a few weeks presenting at a grafana con with my nixos laptop oh.
Chris: Okay grafana con wes.
Brent: And also this happens to be a zip code boost if you take the boost and you go
Brent: times 12 and plus 118, you get that old zip code.
Chris: Oh, good, because we were just saying before the show, like,
Chris: we haven't had a zip code boost in a long time and we miss it,
Chris: and Wes has been bringing the map every week.
Chris: Whoa. Whoa.
Chris: Got a little dusty. Alright.
Chris: Yeah, now slide that over. Slide that one over. Mm-hmm.
Chris: Right.
Chris: Okay.
Chris: Paper map, of course. Yeah, plug it into your paper map, Wes.
Chris: Damn theater of the mind, Wes.
Brent: I like the LEDs you added for where the zip codes come from.
Chris: Yeah, well, you know, it was hard to read in the dark.
Chris: I feel like...
Chris: People do not appreciate that. People do not appreciate that.
Chris: What do we got? What do we got? What do we got? It says green.
Chris: Oh! Hello, California. Thank you for boosting in.
Chris: And GC, thank you for being a zip code boost. We love those.
Chris: You know, it's fun to make Wes search the map during the show.
Chris: Both Brent and I just like to sit back and watch.
Brent: It's folding it back up that I appreciate the most, actually.
Chris: Yeah nobody doesn't like
Chris: us nobody doesn't like you yes let
Chris: us know how it goes and thank you everybody who stream sats as you listened
Chris: as well we had 31 of you stream sats and you did a pretty good lift i have to
Chris: say thank you very much 79,430 sats were streamed as you listen to the show
Chris: that's pretty rad and then when you combine that with our boosters episode 611
Chris: are before linux fest Northwest episode,
Chris: stack 294,854 sets.
Chris: If you'd like to boost in, you can use Fountain FM. They host everything and
Chris: make it really easy to grab sats or connect it to something like Strike.
Chris: Strike is a great company. They only work with Bitcoin. They're available in over 110 countries.
Chris: There are also a lot of self-hosted options and a bunch of great apps at podcastapps.com.
Chris: You also get our transcript.
Chris: You get notification when we're live. Include live listing in your podcast app.
Chris: So like when we're streaming next week, that'll be in your podcasting 2.0 app.
Chris: You get enhanced chapters and near instant notification when the published version
Chris: is out too. So not only can you boost, but you get all those extra features
Chris: with a better podcast app at podcastapps.com.
Wes: That sounds right.
Chris: And Fountain makes it the easiest, but there are lots of options.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supports the show, our members, our boosters.
Chris: It means a heck of a lot to us.
Wes: Self-hostable, GPL-ed Zelda. Wow.
Chris: Now let's talk about Ignition. Well, that's what they called it.
Chris: I guess it's kind of a cute name, you know, starting your system up.
Chris: Ignition is a minimal app for editing
Chris: the auto-start entries on a free desktop-compliant Linux distribution.
Chris: Read your distribution of choice. Now, most desktop environments,
Chris: well, actually, that's not true.
Chris: Some desktop environments have tools built in to manage your quote-unquote startup items.
Chris: But not everyone does, and not all of them catch everything.
Chris: Ignition focuses on just managing your startup entries.
Chris: You can create entries. You can create scripts that can run.
Chris: You obviously can delete stuff.
Chris: It's just a straightforward app. You load on any Linux box, Plasma,
Chris: Organome, or any free desktop.
Wes: And you can take things out of your startup. You know, at first it just seemed
Wes: like, okay, kind of a handy way to, maybe you were going to go ask Gyppity something
Wes: or Cloud or whatever else or your local Ollama or OpenWeb UI.
Chris: It's GPL3.
Wes: Oftentimes, that's just kind of a lot of context switching from the terminal,
Wes: right? Like, you know, okay, copy and paste bits of the file I'm working with.
Chris: Love this.
Wes: It's called Record Fs. As often happens, like, oh, I want an FFM pick in the end.
Wes: And it's just a very simple, well, in design, a desktop application that allows
Wes: you to record audio from a specific application. The height wasn't divisible by two.
Chris: And that makes it just before unhappy. I could go top.
Wes: Pop to another tab and ask something there. Or I could just sort of echo my
Wes: prompt into this tool and have it spit me out the command.
Chris: And then you can save the recording.
Wes: So I just kind of started that way.
Chris: By default to your music directory. So you could capture a live stream like
Chris: ours, a YouTube video you're watching, anything.
Wes: Absolutely. Or capture a blog file.
Chris: This always happens to me when I'm capturing audio. If you have an app that gives you something.
Wes: You won't capture.
Chris: Because it's only using the audio from that one application.
Wes: So then I can just set up a little loop where I echo what I want the script to do.
Wes: And then I use T to record the results. So I would have it continue the pipe,
Wes: but also write to a file so I could actually see what was generated because
Wes: in a test system, I decided I would just start piping these directly to Bash or Python.
Wes: So I would say like, write me a Bash script to do X and just pipe it to Bash.
Chris: I'll have links to their GitHub repos and their Flatpak pages. No, I did not.
Wes: I was trying this in a semi-safe situation.
Chris: I'm always grabbing little audio bits and stuff like that. So I'm always looking
Chris: for applications that can record desktop application.
Wes: And that was kind of fun too because it felt like do experiment in like what
Wes: kind of scripts or even applications,
Wes: especially ones I started, you know i was doing python and i would
Wes: set up there's a lot more virtual environment i'd give it sort of a
Wes: standard set of libraries you know okay you can make it okay
Wes: you've got a thing to like but i think west is right is pipewire brings
Wes: us to the whole and so it became a really easy way to experiment with just how
Wes: far you could sort of as they say so if you got that you know or also remember
Wes: we're looking for your take on a command line fedora spins application uh and
Wes: as you guys saw i was able to get it to make i mean they were kind of half broken
Wes: or like most kind of jokes We'll contribute to next week's episode.
Chris: Which is going to be our big one live from LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: It's coming. It's coming very soon.
Chris: So make it a Linux weekend. Join us on Saturday for the Linux Fest Northwest
Chris: live stream and then Sunday for our live episode from Linux Fest Northwest,
Chris: both at jblive.tv or direct audio at jblive.fm.
Chris: And we're going to also try to have it up on our YouTube pages and whatnot.
Wes: Okay, at first it was cool just to see what kind of range it up with.
Chris: Links to what we talked about in this episode. We're all trying these AIs.
Chris: Like, oh, you can make it safe on your stuff.
Wes: And look, it made some code that mostly works.
Chris: You also find links for our Mumble Room, our Matrix Chat, where you can become
Chris: a member and support us directly.
Wes: Limits of what it can quickly make a program are are
Wes: the limits thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged
Wes: program generate a c program see you right back here next tuesday only the standard
Wes: as in sunday linux c gcc plus
Wes: ffmpeg and make a procedurally generated landscape fly over into an mp4 i don't
Wes: know how to do that offhand uh but i know how ffmpeg works enough to know that
Wes: the c can just sort of spit bitmaps out and ffmpeg can turn it into an mp4 and
Wes: do that side of it and okay it was kind of half broken and it had a weird line and discolored but,
Wes: it worked i was able to get it to generate real real janky wave files that actually
Wes: played uh including some and then i made some uh kind of fun uh a custom defrag
Wes: command that didn't actually defrag anything but you know if you ever wanted
Wes: a way to make your terminal look busy Yeah, I always do.
Wes: So i spent a little while just trying to see like okay how far can you one shot
Wes: stuff what wacky utilities can i get this thing to make i had it make like
Wes: a multi-user dungeon text adventure
Wes: game for a little bit that was fun um but
Wes: to make it super useful out of the box the stock script just uses chat gpt but
Wes: i've been using open router more and more lately which is sort of a facilitator
Wes: to all different providers and apis um so you can plug it in So it was really
Wes: easy to just hack that in so I could use Open Router instead of having to use straight ChatGPT.
Wes: Well, for the most part, their API is compatible. So... Yeah, exactly.
Wes: Exactly uh and so the our pig already
Wes: had enough support to choose different models right because there's already different models
Wes: on the chat gpt side um and then so you can i just
Wes: hacked in a different i added a new parameter to it so that you could add your
Wes: own url for the api provider uh and that was enough uh so which let me play
Wes: around with different ones which was kind of great and then i wrote a tiny little
Wes: helper script for myself mostly because you can set a model that you want to
Wes: use and then you can set a system prompt so i found it was useful to have a
Wes: system prompt that just reinforced,
Wes: I don't want comments, I don't want a preamble, I don't want you to say,
Wes: okay, here's your answer.
Wes: I don't want markdown code blocks and backticks, I just want the raw, plain text output.
Wes: So eventually, after trying a little bit, I stumbled onto something that mostly worked for that.
Wes: Using different models, you could tell different ones followed them,
Wes: you know, more or less or whatever.
Wes: So once I was kind of playing with the one-shot thing, eventually I had some
Wes: scripts that were actually kind of useful.
Wes: and I realized that I could then go back through and add comments either throughout
Wes: the file or even just at the top.
Wes: And that acted sort of as a preamble for the rest
Wes: of the script and then I could just cat that file and
Wes: ask it to output a whole like a fixed thing whether I
Wes: included the errors at the top or I just described the changes I
Wes: would want to have and then I used it's a
Wes: great little tool called sponge from more utils which
Wes: just helps you know you're trying to overwrite a file you want to
Wes: get the contents of a file pipe it somewhere and then write it back to the same
Wes: sponge lets you do that really easily so i set up a little loop where i would
Wes: just you know i would add what i wanted at the top of the file i would rerun
Wes: my loop to send it off to the ai have it generate a complete output and then
Wes: replace the contents of the file and then i could just run it again and see if it did what i want.
Wes: And you could also ask it to do a code review or like you
Wes: know summarize the file or eventually i
Wes: started playing around with making a audio visualizer but
Wes: to do that i was going to need i wanted to connect a pipe wire
Wes: so basically it would make a waveform visualization from whatever
Wes: the mic was connected to i don't i didn't
Wes: know how to do that offhand and i knew i would need like the right kind
Wes: of environments and libraries so i was able to ask it
Wes: to generate me a script or a c c actually ended
Wes: up being a c plus plus program of all things but then once i
Wes: had that i just added at the top i said make a flake for this
Wes: and then catted it in and then out popped a
Wes: flake and i had to do that a couple times to kind of tweak it but eventually i was able to
Wes: get it so that it you know it had everything it needed
Wes: and it worked and you then you can just kind of keep going so
Wes: i realized that maybe sometimes i would want to update it needed to
Wes: know both of those files to have a complete context like if i
Wes: wanted to add a new library that i was using in the c program and i needed to
Wes: be provided by the flake so i had it write me a bash script that would just
Wes: bundle files together in like a little plain text way and then yeah so So I
Wes: could then cat that entire file in and then it could just spit out like, oh.
Wes: Just update the flake consistent with what we've changed in the other file.
Wes: Absolutely. And, you know, you can, it seemed like you could really easily have
Wes: like a library of different prompts and modes, right? You have one prompt for
Wes: code generation, another one for doing code review, another one for bug fixing
Wes: for your particular thing.
Wes: Yeah, it was surprisingly useful. And all it needed was, you know,
Wes: the API setup, the URL and API key, and there was just a little compiled Rust
Wes: app. So it was like super fast.
Wes: And you could give it with different models and prompts. So why wouldn't I want
Wes: a little helper in my terminal?
Wes: I think this is a pick that's sticking around yeah i mean there might there's
Wes: probably better versions of this out here i know i mean it's there's
Wes: you know the whole vibe coding thing i guess i guess this is vibe
Wes: shelling i don't know um there's probably better tools in all kinds of these
Wes: areas already but what i liked about this is it was all a la carte right like
Wes: i didn't i was playing a bit with klein which is sort of like an open source
Wes: cursor thing it's a VS Code plugin that tries to use a bunch of different AI
Wes: agents to like do this for you.
Wes: So you can tell it to make a change and then it'll first use an agent to figure
Wes: out which files to pull in to send to the next agent, which will actually make the code changes.
Wes: And then it'll review those with all kinds of neat, complicated tooling that
Wes: is evolving. But that's all a lot to learn.
Wes: And the most important thing to me was like, I have the context.
Wes: Let me send the right thing to it. let me kind of control the interaction and
Wes: just have the lowest barrier to entry possible. And this really works.
Wes: No, not at all. It's just a Rust app, so if you're comfortable building a cargo
Wes: app, that's basically all you need.
Wes: Or you could probably ask an LLM to make a flake for you. Oh my god.
Wes: Yeah, we're ready to reboot. Remember how we were updating our server?
Wes: can i get another uh i think you're already trying to get there,
Wes: uh-huh all right we've been up for 42 days let's reset that,
Wes: yeah let me know when you got your ping going here i gotta go and i think Is
Wes: it a special point? Yeah.
Wes: Well, now it's going to stop.
Wes: Oh, based on the timing, it looks like we've... Yes, we have got SSH.
Wes: I'm in. The box is up. I think it's pretty busy getting everything started, which is a great sign.
Wes: We do. Levi is online. All discs look good. Okay.
Wes: Oh, yeah, and I see a bunch of Docker containers started 20 seconds ago, so we are in progress.
Wes: And as usual, I had started the upgrade without actually looking at the,
Wes: you know, website, although while it was happening i did go look and there were,
Wes: i did notice halfway through it was like manual intervention for pac-man 7 required
Wes: but not only if you had a local repository so we so we we lucked out there.
Wes: That's true. and new dates.
Wes: Yeah, that way we can set it up in a special way that'll help us out.
Wes: And why you'll write it with AI.