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 Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. We're coming up on the show today as we prepare physically,
Chris: mentally, and emotionally for episode 600, we're going to introduce you to what
Chris: might be our next challenge, if the boys can convince me in this episode,
Chris: and there might be a way you can join, too.
Chris: Then we're going to round it out with a killer pick, some great boosts, and a bunch more.
Chris: It's a banger of an episode. Let's make this one really good so that way we
Chris: can slack off for 600. And let's start by saying time appropriate greetings
Chris: to that virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello.
Chris: Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. Hello, Wes. Hello, guys.
Chris: Hello. Shout out out there to the quiet listening, too.
Chris: I see our baller booster hybrid sarcasm up there and others getting ready for
Chris: next week's episode. Just chilling in the quiet lounge. You're always welcome. Just grab Mumble.
Chris: Join our servers. We have details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Mumble.
Chris: Also, I want to say good morning to Tailscale.
Chris: Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Go there, support the show, and get it for free
Chris: for up to 100 devices and three users.
Chris: Tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other,
Chris: wherever they are, secured by a mesh network protected by WireGuard.
Chris: Yeah. This is the ultimate realization of what WireGuard is capable of.
Chris: It's just secure. It's remote access to whatever you might have,
Chris: your production systems, your databases, all on a mesh network, and it's really fast.
Chris: It's intuitive to set up, but it's also very flexible. It's programmable.
Chris: You have like a programmable private network for a business or for an individual.
Chris: I started with my personal plan, 100 devices. I still use that.
Chris: But now we've also expanded to have a JB business plan because there's so much
Chris: we can use it for the back end of JB as well.
Chris: And it makes all other VPNs seem really old.
Chris: Like when I hear people are using like, no disrespect, but when they're using
Chris: things like OpenVPN and other proprietary point-to-point VPNs, I feel bad for them.
Wes: It doesn't have to be that painful.
Chris: It doesn't have to be that way. Tailscale is so much better.
Chris: Try it for free on 100 devices and up to three users and support the show.
Chris: Right now, just go to tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: We're going to keep the housekeeping short this week because we've got a lot of news to dig into.
Chris: But I do want to mention that we have a lot of details for LUP 600 meetup parties and whatnot.
Chris: So be sure you stay tuned to After the News so that way we can cover all that
Chris: because there's details and logistics and things like that that we don't want you to miss.
Chris: but let's start with something that is a
Chris: tantalizing idea a dream a passion of
Chris: the linux community that seems to never die and
Chris: that is a full linux smartphone it's
Chris: called the librax and they're promising privacy security
Chris: and freedom and this is landing the
Chris: announcement at least right around the pine phone celebrate
Chris: the original pine phone celebrating its fifth birthday so
Chris: we got a handful of these devices out there boys you know this you know
Chris: like you got the pine phones you got the libram 5
Chris: right but i mean
Chris: it's like you could count them on one hand how many true linux smartphone devices
Chris: they are and the librix next is a new smartphone that uses librix os which is
Chris: based on debian 13 huh and it's got some i don't know are you looking Look at
Chris: the pictures there. I'm curious to know what you think of the design.
Chris: It's got an interesting design. I wonder if you notice what kind of jumps out at the top of the phone.
Wes: I did. Yeah. It doesn't look especially modern or sleek. No. But it doesn't look bad.
Chris: No.
Wes: Kind of like an older iPhone.
Chris: I imagine these are pre-production designs as well. Right.
Wes: But it's got all kinds of toggles on the top for Wi-Fi, for LTE probably, probably other things.
Chris: Yeah. Mic and camera definitely on there. I saw Bluetooth on there.
Chris: It's got a RK3588S SOC. So that's a pretty good check.
Wes: Octa-core.
Chris: Yep. 256 gigabytes of eMMC storage built in, then expandable with an SD card.
Chris: It has a 6.34-inch OLED screen running at a nice 2400 by 1880 resolution with
Chris: a fingerprint sensor on the back and Corning Gorilla Glass for the screen.
Chris: And it has a removable, I'm going to say it again, a removable 5,300 amp hour
Chris: battery, 32 megapixel rear camera, 13 megapixel front camera.
Chris: It also has a legitimate LTE modem, they're saying.
Chris: It's at least one that I think is considered pretty good.
Chris: The Snapdragon X32, which supports 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth,
Chris: and the hardware switches.
Chris: Brent, could this be, if it's true, if it's real, could this be a Brent phone?
Brent: Well, I've been looking for a phone like this for...
Brent: I was going to say five years, but I think it's been more like 10 years.
Brent: I feel like many of us have, but nothing that's come out has been up to snuff.
Brent: Now, this sounds very promising. It is, of course, a bunch of promises at this
Brent: point. So we haven't seen any development devices.
Brent: Nobody's gotten their hands on it. And it is a crowd funder.
Brent: And I know you have a really good experience with how these go, right, Chris?
Brent: So a lot of this makes me pause a little bit, although I got to say something
Brent: in me is tinkling because, yeah, I would love a phone like this if it was.
Brent: I'm usually typically fine with giving up a few popular features to lean a little
Brent: closer to my ideals, as you guys know.
Brent: So I would totally go this way. I would if this got into production.
Brent: Yeah, you've got me hooked.
Wes: I think the one question I have, okay, so you make a great point that you're
Wes: willing to forego a lot of conveniences and sort of quality of life stuff.
Wes: But my question is, isn't there still a set of Android or iOS apps that are
Wes: almost at the essential layer?
Wes: Maybe not. Maybe you can kind of not, but I'm just thinking like.
Chris: Maps.
Wes: Well, maps, or I don't know, there's, is there like a, you know,
Wes: an app you need to register if you're like coming into another country,
Wes: or instead of having to fill out a paper form, or?
Chris: Boy, you're right. I have to go apps blunking like when I'm traveling quite a bit.
Brent: Well, I did read on their website here that they're doing like an Android jail,
Brent: so you can run some of these apps if you needed to.
Wes: Okay, see, that would work.
Chris: So, Wes, for you, I got a question.
Chris: Imagine this thing, it kind of lives up to what they say here,
Chris: right? We have to be kind of skeptical here at this point, but let's just go with this for a second.
Chris: It's using Posh, I believe, that GNOME GTK stuff that Purism and others have
Chris: worked on, the adaptive GTK.
Chris: That stuff's in a pretty good place.
Wes: It doesn't, you know, look bad, I don't think.
Chris: Apps that you're going to be familiar with.
Chris: An underlying OS you can tweak to your heart's content. You could run,
Chris: you know, an Apache server on this thing if you wanted to.
Chris: Battery life, though, four hours. Is that a deal breaker for you when it's removable?
Wes: Huh.
Chris: By the way, that's not their estimate. I'm just thinking, when you've got this
Chris: RK3588SOC, and you've got a Snapdragon X32 modem, and you've got a Linux OS
Chris: and a 6.34-inch OLED screen,
Chris: all of those things are on the higher end of power use so i think we would have
Chris: to and you know especially if you're on 5g.
Wes: Right i.
Chris: Think you'd have to set your expectations to kind of mid for battery life.
Wes: Yeah i suppose uh i wonder if they were if they're gonna have good os level
Wes: options for like battery saver mode or other sort of power profiles because
Wes: you know if i could put it into like background mode for a lot of the day and
Wes: just like hey every couple minutes wake up for notifications and otherwise kind
Wes: of sleep yeah it doesn't need to be constantly.
Chris: Receiving yeah Yeah, you're right.
Wes: Especially if I can choose the granularity or switch the mode pretty easily.
Chris: Pull every 10 minutes.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Not constantly. Stop it. That's a great point. That'd be a freaking great OS.
Wes: It's just like so rare that I need to know.
Chris: Right now.
Wes: Yeah.
Brent: Very true.
Chris: Yeah. That's, yeah, I think the removable battery is such a nice return.
Wes: Especially if you could get a couple of them. Keep some charge in your bag.
Chris: Imagine a travel, like going back to your point about a travel day,
Chris: like, yes, maybe You couldn't get some of the apps, but you could bring three
Chris: of the batteries with you.
Chris: And this could be your entire entertainment device, your media information,
Chris: you know, like everything.
Chris: And you could even install Jellyfin on this.
Wes: You might feel better about, well, maybe not from iOS, but you might feel better
Wes: about some of the security risks of traveling too if you're using a Linux-powered phone.
Chris: Yeah, perhaps.
Brent: Chris, you've had, you know, multiple devices in your life for a little while.
Brent: You were doing the dual phone thing for a bit there.
Brent: Do you see this being an option in that respect? Like having certain apps on
Brent: the everyday, always on phone and having, I don't know, most of your private life on this guy.
Wes: I was just sort of thinking that, right? Like, especially if you could keep,
Wes: like, an older couple gen out Pixel that you just kind of have for,
Wes: like, if you need it for one thing. Or maybe you take that one when you travel or.
Brent: Yeah, like something that one can RDP to the other.
Wes: I wouldn't need to bring it with me if I'm going over to my friend's house for the night, right?
Chris: Yeah, it doesn't maybe have all your passwords, doesn't have all your notes,
Chris: doesn't have all your pictures, all your history. Right. You know what I was
Chris: thinking, actually, is.
Wes: Especially because I already own several old Pixel phones, you know?
Wes: Like, I wouldn't have to, like, get a new phone to be my second phone.
Chris: I feel like I still haven't landed on the sweet spot for, I'm going to a relative's
Chris: house, I'm going to a hotel, I'm going to an Airbnb, and I want to take USB-C
Chris: to HDMI, and I want to put something up on the TV.
Chris: And because I just, I had my 10-year anniversary with the wife a few weeks ago,
Chris: and we went to a little Airbnb nearby.
Chris: And I get in there, and of course, I didn't bring anything to take control of
Chris: the TV. It didn't even cross my mind.
Wes: Uh, yeah.
Chris: And a little portable phone that maybe I had a C to HDMI adapter that I could,
Chris: you know, run Cody on or a jellyfin front end would be really nice.
Chris: And I've tried to kind of replicate this with the Fire Stick to not really much success.
Chris: I don't know. I like that idea. Maybe the audience has a device out there that's
Chris: already perfect for this that they could boost it and tell me about.
Chris: But I could see the phone doing this, but this is probably going to be,
Chris: you know, somewhere near a thousand dollars.
Chris: There's got to be a cheaper way to accomplish what I'm looking to do.
Chris: But if it was one of many things that provided for me, I could see getting this,
Chris: even if it wasn't my daily driver phone. Potentially.
Chris: crowdfunding is the red flag here we have to kind of see how this goes they
Chris: haven't actually built anything as far as we know yet maybe prototypes we don't
Chris: have any information on battery life or price we don't even really know when
Chris: the crowds funders gonna fully kick off like they haven't even said that yet
Chris: you can't even go crowdfunding.
Wes: At this point you know i don't know if i've tried hdmi but the pixels and those
Wes: usbc little docs that have you know uh usb and hdmi My own have been fairly well compatible.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: So if you had the jellyfin client on your phone connected to your server,
Wes: maybe we'll do it that way. I don't know if you want to.
Chris: But you know, also in this space is the Mecca comet. Yeah.
Chris: And this one is really out there where like this makes the Libre next seem reasonable
Chris: and totally achievable because this is in a whole other level of what they're trying to do.
Chris: It's a modular Linux handheld and it's extensible by slapping on different modules.
Chris: We've seen these ideas over the past, but my goodness, if this isn't the most
Chris: slick, elegant version.
Chris: And the dang thing has two USB-A ports in the side of it, as well as a small Ethernet port.
Wes: I don't know why, but suddenly I love the idea of a phone with a USB-A port.
Chris: Heck yeah. And it has these ideas of modules that magnetically snap on and then
Chris: interface with the device over USB.
Chris: So they show up to the Linux OS as USB.
Chris: And they demonstrated this actually functioning at CES.
Wes: So it's kind of like what framework does, but just remove the connector.
Chris: Yes. And so an example of this is you could, where you might have a keyboard,
Chris: you could slap off the magnetic keyboard and slap on a controller pad for maybe
Chris: a Game Boy emulator or maybe a data cable to connect to an external disk.
Chris: They have right now a GPIO, I guess, accessory. You could call it a gamepad
Chris: accessory and a keyboard accessory.
Chris: But it's just general GPIO stuff. It's all USB, pretty basic,
Chris: open source, how they make it work. So it's nothing really particularly secretive about it.
Chris: Anybody could really probably wire up something. It is a Linux OS.
Chris: They call it Mechanix OS. It's based on Debian.
Chris: They say the perk to that is that there's, quote, 60,000 packages in the Debian
Chris: repo that work out of the box.
Chris: The Mechanix shell is built in Rust and supports GPU rendering on Wayland.
Wes: Whoa.
Chris: Yeah. Built with the tools you already know, and they list Chromium.
Chris: They list Docker, Go, Cute, Rust, obviously, Node, and others. It is also...
Chris: It's a, it's a Kickstarter. It's a crowdfund. It's a Kickstarter specifically.
Chris: And it's in the pre-launch mode. It has not technically launched either.
Chris: They seem to have prototypes because I watched coverage at CES of like a whole
Chris: booth of them actually functioning and snapping pads on and whatnot.
Chris: And they have now videos of that up on their website as well.
Chris: So this one's way out there, boys.
Wes: They seem busy. They've got a GitHub link and, you know, those repos are active.
Chris: This might be better for what I'm thinking of. My kind of device,
Chris: you know, a portable media server. because you could see snapping on a disc.
Wes: Yeah, this opens it up to a whole other conception than a traditional phone.
Brent: They do have some use cases here, Chris, that I think will bri you over too if you need.
Brent: One of them called the Car Whisperer. You can add a CAN or ODB port to the common
Brent: and start talking to your car or RB.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: The other one here they suggest is build your own tricorder.
Chris: Well, I was thinking a portable recorder. You know, if you could have a little
Chris: USB interface that you could snap on to this thing.
Chris: Because again, it's just USB with power pins and whatnot. It's pretty straightforward.
Chris: That could, you know, for events, with the recording, like Audacity running
Chris: on the little screen, right? You just use, or Reaper even?
Chris: You could even use Reaper because it's available on ARM. So this is way out there.
Chris: I invite you guys to go to the show notes at linuxownplugged.com slash 599 and
Chris: check out the link to this thing because-
Chris: It's the coolest implementation I've ever seen of this idea of this kind of like Lego kit phone.
Chris: It's not as modular as like the Motorola stuff we've seen in the past.
Chris: It's just really that front end spot where a keyboard would go.
Chris: There is a magnetic mount where things connect.
Chris: And so you just can swap different stuff on there. And then it's got USB-C on
Chris: the bottom of the phone. It's got, I mean, in the versions they show on their
Chris: website, it's got USB-A on the side and an Ethernet port.
Wes: It seems like you could sell some to just anyone who worked in like a data center
Wes: or support environment just with the, you know, USB-A and the Ethernet right
Wes: there on the side and having a nice keyboard, physical keyboard.
Chris: Or like what about Amazon, right? So you buy these as a standard device and
Chris: then you build a custom snap-on module that's particular to the work case or something like that.
Chris: I don't know, man. I could see it. Again, not sure I'm pricing.
Chris: It's a crowdfunder. But these are really interesting ideas.
Chris: Notable, too, that I think that both of them are running on Debian.
Chris: I would love to have you boost in and tell us if you're interested in devices
Chris: like these still, or have you soured on the idea of a Linux device.
Chris: And are you willing to go far enough to actually put your money on the line
Chris: and crowdfund one of these?
Chris: Boost in and tell us, because I'm really interested in the audience's temperature on this.
Chris: Before we move on, just a couple of quick stories to wrap up on.
Chris: I thought it was noteworthy that the Linux Foundation has launched the supporters
Chris: of Chromium-based browsers.
Chris: Quote, the supporters of Chromium-based browsers will provide the neutral space
Chris: where industry leaders, academia, developers, and broader open-source communities
Chris: can work together to support projects within the Chromium ecosystem.
Wes: We've seen some, I'd say, confusion or maybe some anger in some of the Linux
Wes: and open-source community over this. I think, Brent, you had a take I kind of liked.
Brent: Well, I have heard a lot of people think, well, what's the deal with Firefox?
Brent: Like, why are we supporting Chromium-based stuff when we've had Firefox all along?
Brent: And that's a good question to answer. I don't know who's going to answer it,
Brent: but it seems like we need one.
Chris: Well, the argument I've heard is, well, it has a foundation already. It's Mozilla.
Wes: Well, I think I'd also, Brent, I think you said this, that, you know,
Wes: the Linux Foundation in a way was sort of dealing with the solving for a future
Wes: where maybe we don't have a Firefox or, you know, we need a healthy Chromium
Wes: ecosystem because it's going to be here whether we like it or not.
Chris: Yeah, but wouldn't the way to solve for that be to support Firefox more?
Wes: Not if it's doomed. Then it's just a waste of money.
Chris: Oh, my God, that's dark.
Wes: I'm using Firefox right now to be clear.
Chris: Am I the only one that just is cooking a little conspiracy bacon on this one?
Chris: To me, this seems like a hedge that the Justice Department might go through
Chris: with their threats of separating Chromie Ma from Google.
Brent: And then they're positioning themselves to be ready for when that happens.
Brent: That makes sense. I'm going to go with that bacon with you.
Chris: Wow. That's rare for Brent. All right. Thank you. I like that.
Wes: It wasn't even Canadian bacon.
Chris: What do you think? You think it could be like them like laying the cards out
Chris: or I guess maybe another metaphor would be like preparing the deck, the seats.
Wes: Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know if that's the only reason or it's a direct
Wes: response, but I think that and sort of a wider concerns around that,
Wes: especially as we've seen, you know, more and more in Microsoft,
Wes: you know, there's just like a lot of companies now tied to this code base and a lot of, uh,
Wes: it's some extent the real economy that relies on it functioning.
Wes: I think that probably plays a factor. Yeah.
Chris: Short Dom in the live chat also points out Electron's a factor here.
Wes: True, yeah.
Chris: You know, even if Chrome never got separated out, like Electron's such a huge
Chris: thing now, you'd want to have at least some, maybe they're hoping to get input
Chris: or developer influence and build influence over time.
Chris: I'd love to know.
Wes: I do think, you know, I mean, the Linux Foundation, for all of its faults,
Wes: it does seem to do a decent job of being able to, like, help coordinate and
Wes: provide some funding and centralized, you know, dispatch or whatever for open
Wes: source projects sometimes.
Chris: I feel like I'm missing a wider play.
Brent: Well, Chris, I see a big old Join Now button on their website here.
Brent: Maybe we should do some inside reporting.
Chris: Maybe the Unplugged show should become a supporter of Chromium-based browsers.
Wes: What if we make our own browser? And you can just only go to the show pages.
Chris: That'd be great. That'd be so good. And then I just wanted to wrap up as far
Chris: as news goes with a shout out to Wine 10.0.
Chris: Now with native Wayland support and better high DPI support.
Chris: And I just think this is incredible because the Wine Project was started in 1993.
Wes: They just keep going and going and going.
Chris: And it is so respectable.
Chris: 2008 which we covered on this show i think every at least one of our shows wine
Chris: reached 1.0 and that felt like such a huge deal you know and now here we are
Chris: 10.0 is out and i think this is also going to make one of my predictions about
Chris: proton correct in linux unplugged but.
Wes: We'll see we'll see it's also like maybe remind ourselves the the promise of
Wes: what wine advertises that it can do seems kind of impossible in practice you
Wes: know what i mean like oh yeah you could write a paper about how you could do
Wes: that sure right but you're gonna keep up with the changes and make real world
Wes: complicated applications work like a game turns out yeah.
Chris: OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase.
Chris: It's the number one password.com slash unplugged. Okay, I have a question for you.
Chris: Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception,
Chris: work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps?
Chris: I don't think so. I don't think it's possible. So I think the next natural question
Chris: is, how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting in all those
Chris: unmanaged apps and devices?
Chris: Well, OnePassword has the answer to this question. It's extended access management.
Chris: 1Password extended access management. It helps you secure every sign-in for
Chris: every app on every device because
Chris: it solves problems that traditional IAMs and MDMs just can't touch.
Chris: And it's also bundling 1Password. You know 1Password. We've all had those situations
Chris: where we've seen the passwords under the keyboard, we're stuck to the monitor,
Chris: or somebody uses the same password everywhere.
Chris: You think, God, if they just had a great password manager that would solve all of this.
Chris: Well, 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users,
Chris: 150,000-plus businesses from
Chris: IBM to Slack, and now they're doing more than just securing passwords.
Chris: Now with extended access management, they're taking to the next level.
Chris: Plus, 1Password is ISO 27001 certified, and they have regular third-party audits,
Chris: and they have the largest bug bounty out there.
Chris: They just exceed the standards set by everybody else.
Chris: Secure every app and every identity, even the unmanaged ones.
Chris: Go to 1password.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase.
Chris: Again, support the show, check it out, and try it out. It's 1password.com slash unplugged.
Wes: All right, well, we are one week away as we record from LUP episode 600.
Wes: And that includes all of the awesome looking meetups that the community have set up.
Chris: Oh, yeah. I'm going to go to colonyevents.com right now. Let's go check them out.
Wes: Okay, and something that became clear, and thank you to everyone pointing this
Wes: out, recently we've been experimenting with an earlier live time by two hours.
Wes: but we started doing that just because it it kind
Wes: of was working a little better for a variety of boring reasons uh
Wes: but we'd already planned and set up schedules for the lup 600 event with you
Wes: know the expectations of the show would be at the time that it's been for years
Wes: for years and years yeah uh so just to be clear lup 600 we will be live at the
Wes: normal time which was which is 12 p.m pacific here in the pacific northwest 3 p.m.
Chris: Eastern so that way you can join the mumbler room and listen along and pop in
Chris: the on-air and give us a little shout.
Chris: I would recommend showing up early so that way we can sort out mumble issues
Chris: and audio issues, which we'll no doubt have.
Chris: And then for the Pacific Northwest meetup, we're not having the meetup at the
Chris: studio because we realized we couldn't really have a party and do the show at the same time.
Chris: As awesome as that would be, if that were a thing that we could do,
Chris: that would make for a horrible podcast.
Chris: So what we're going to do is record the show, and then immediately after,
Chris: we're going to head over to the point, which is really close to the studio.
Chris: So we're just going to walk over afterwards about 3 p.m.
Chris: at our local time. And we have all the details at colonyevents.com.
Chris: But that also means we can accommodate more people since we're not having it
Chris: at the studio. So more the merrier.
Chris: Everybody is welcome to join us next week in person right here in the Pacific
Chris: Northwest in Smoky Point.
Chris: Come to the point at 3 p.m. All the details are at colonyevents.com.
Chris: There's like a whole bunch of events on there now. It's really awesome to see.
Chris: And ours for the details is just the one that's listed as the Pacific Northwest meetup.
Chris: We'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. But all of them are listed
Chris: over at colonyevents.com.
Brent: There's a couple new meetups here I think I want to do a shout out to.
Brent: There's a FOSDM meetup that popped up because FOSDM is happening at the exact
Brent: same time. So I think that's pretty exciting.
Brent: and also uh maybe this is more of a psa there's one in melbourne that's happening
Brent: which is pretty awesome but it uh seems to be happening march 6th which i don't
Brent: know my time math is pretty good but i think that's a little too late to join
Brent: lup 600 so folks who are organizing the melbourne meetup maybe have a look uh
Brent: make sure you're on the right day.
Chris: Yeah although everybody is welcome to continue to use the colony events.com
Chris: service to schedule meetups forever just if you want to meet up with other JB
Chris: listeners in there and then you could always boost in or write us and have us
Chris: give us a shout out so people know to go sign up.
Chris: We are happy to do that. Every time we go to a meetup,
Chris: Literally 100%. I'm not saying 99%, not 99.5.
Chris: 100% of the time we do meetups. The people there say, oh, we should do more
Chris: of this. Even if the guys can't come, we should do more of this.
Chris: And then we leave and sometimes they do it, but most of the time they just sort
Chris: of drift apart because we don't leave them with any tooling.
Chris: But if they said it and we gave them like, you know, here, go right here, go set up a meetup.
Chris: I think it would actually continue to create some momentum. So I invite everybody
Chris: out there, continue to use ColonyEvents.com after this as well,
Chris: especially as we get close to LinuxFest and Scale and Planet Nix.
Chris: If you want to make some plans around there, that could be really nice.
Chris: People could just go there and see what's going on. What are people doing?
Chris: I say take and run with it. And we're sorry if there's been any confusion around
Chris: the timing in all of this, especially because for a bit we were thinking about
Chris: having our meet up here at the studio. But now we've decided to have it at the
Chris: pub nearby. Oh, and kids are welcome at our meetup.
Chris: It is family. It is a family friendly venue as well.
Chris: Okay, boys. You have been slowly trying to convince me that we should do a free
Chris: BSD challenge on this show.
Wes: That's right.
Chris: And you've recently provided some documentation to indicate that now may be the time.
Chris: So make your case. I will admit I'm on the fence. I think you two are a little bit more pro than I am.
Chris: I don't know. I think my hesitation is, um, I have been down this path.
Chris: I've run free BSD in production.
Chris: You know, I've, I've tried it. It has been a bit, but I've tried it.
Chris: So I feel like this is, this is like something I've done. And you guys are like,
Chris: let's go do this. I'm like, yeah, okay, but I've tried that and it's all right.
Chris: You know, it's all right. But that's one of the reasons I'm over here,
Chris: you know, it's because I tried that.
Brent: So you're saying prospector Chris has been there, done that.
Brent: And, uh, Prosperster Chris Knows.
Chris: Back in his day, he learned a few things.
Wes: Well, I think you're a curious fellow, first of all.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Wes: And, you know, FreeBest, here, you love seeing community-driven open source.
Chris: Coming in hot and hard.
Wes: That is what FreeBest is.
Chris: Immediately going for the soft spot. Immediately.
Wes: And a lot of other people have seen that recently because 2024 was like a standout year, I think.
Wes: in terms of, like, there's just been good investments and donations and improvements.
Chris: For FreeBSD?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Oh.
Wes: Following AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborations and the Sovereign Tech Fund
Wes: making a big investment,
Wes: the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research have announced a $750,000 USD
Wes: commitment to improve laptop support. That's one news item, for instance.
Chris: And specifically, it looks like AMD laptops.
Wes: Dell, AMD, and Framework.
Chris: Okay, okay, okay.
Wes: So I think...
Wes: Okay, maybe we don't have to try it immediately. That's maybe a separate case.
Wes: But just in general, I think there is more and more reason to think that a couple
Wes: of years ago, FreeBSD take is outdated.
Wes: And for that reason alone, we might want to make sure that we're current.
Chris: I do think that's your best argument. Yeah, I do agree.
Wes: They're also working on improving their audio stack and maybe creating a graphical
Wes: installer. Those are big changes.
Chris: They haven't done that yet.
Wes: Well, I mean, it's just serverless.
Chris: I guess it could be fun to not have a graphic. That could be fun.
Wes: Ghost BSD continues to be developed as well as like a, you know, desktop focus.
Chris: That's what I was going to ask you is how much, like, is this,
Chris: is this like, do we do free BSD because that's the big one or is,
Chris: is ghost BSD the direction we should go because it's desktop focus and that
Chris: could be a fun comparison?
Wes: Yeah. Or maybe you could do a mix, you know, I think, you know,
Wes: I think running maybe free BSD on a desktop or a server would be fine.
Wes: And then you could do ghost BSD as the desktop component if you wanted to.
Chris: That's an interesting idea.
Wes: I think it's worth trying to make sure you use it in ways that will test the
Wes: areas that are being developed and improvements.
Chris: Okay. You know what? I think that's a good parameter is it has to be tried as
Chris: a server and as a desktop.
Wes: Yeah. Try to get the full sense of how you would use it if you were maybe going
Wes: to try to actually replace some Linux.
Chris: That's fair. Okay. Huh.
Wes: Plus, they're making a bunch of investments in their build system and security
Wes: investments and doing audits, and they're working on zero-trust builds now.
Chris: Hmm. Look at them go, huh?
Wes: Also, reproducible builds, they've got efforts there. I think at one point,
Wes: at least in 2024, they were talking about maybe integrating Rust.
Wes: I don't know where that conversation went offhand.
Chris: It'd be interesting to see how ZFS is integrated now that they've had it for so long.
Wes: Right. Yeah, they've got very nice boot environment support that you can get
Wes: going, so we should definitely play with that.
Chris: And I have become a fan of the centralized config file. I mean,
Chris: it used to be part of how FreeBSD worked, because a lot of that was just went
Chris: into one configuration file, which I really liked about FreeBSD back then.
Chris: Brent, what are your thoughts?
Brent: Oh, I'm in.
Brent: Like I've been BSD curious. I don't know, maybe for even two years now.
Brent: I mean, people have been suggesting it to us for quite a long time. Yes, we do listen to you.
Brent: Don't worry. But also with all these new developments, it feels like,
Brent: why wouldn't we give it a shot?
Chris: Hmm. Okay. All right. So let's think about some parameters.
Chris: Got to use it as a server. see what it's like to host something like a home
Chris: lab thing or a production thing.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I gotta try it as a desktop on physical hardware?
Wes: Ideally I guess.
Chris: Maybe I'd kind of be I'd like to try both I suppose.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Okay. What do you think Brent? Is there anything any other things that?
Brent: Well one question I have is how long is the challenge?
Chris: Hmm. Hmm.
Wes: How long did we do the 32 bit?
Chris: I don't know.
Wes: Was that a week?
Chris: And I wonder should we delay it so the audience could participate like we shouldn't
Chris: probably we shouldn't launch it.
Wes: Yeah well and also we may want to ask if we have experienced FreeBSD folks.
Chris: Yeah I.
Wes: Bet they will have some like pointers to things we don't want to miss while trying to check it out.
Chris: Right okay so those are the things that we're going to need to know is like
Chris: yeah basically we're totally noobs to this again because it has been a long
Chris: time so what should we know and what should we try and are you willing to take
Chris: a challenge with us I guess boost in or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact
Chris: and let us know and I think
Chris: if we get some good feedback maybe we just launch it in episode 600 next
Chris: week and then 600 will be the week we launch it and maybe
Chris: by then we figured out how long to run it i kind of think the
Chris: nice thing about if we launched it'd be nice to just end it
Chris: in 601 it doesn't give us a lot of time though we could
Chris: do an update in 601 maybe maybe that's what we do maybe we
Chris: run it for a couple of weeks and we do a midpoint check
Chris: in 601 and a conclusion in 602 that could work yeah that gives us a couple of
Chris: weeks to try both you know make sure we have enough time yeah both the server
Chris: and the desktop stuff it is nice to see this development happening over there
Chris: you know it's a really great project and it will be interesting to look back
Chris: at it now with a nyx lens a bit more
Chris: than i have in the past yeah nyx is available.
Brent: On bsd right.
Chris: I don't know,
Chris: I don't think so. No, but what I'm saying is the previous times I tried FreeBSD,
Chris: I was coming at it from like an Ubuntu user's perspective, which is totally fine.
Chris: But I think there's more similarities in the way, you know, you configure Nix
Chris: and FreeBSD than there would be with FreeBSD and Ubuntu.
Chris: So there may be less of a culture shock this time. I don't know.
Chris: I could be totally wrong, but that's my that's my suspicion.
Chris: Why have you never tried it, Brent?
Brent: Well, I remember poking around at GhostBSD and even Hello Systems when we did the 32-bit challenge,
Brent: because those seemed to be some of the only ones that supported the very odd
Brent: CPU that I had in the machine that was sort of dropped off in my front door.
Brent: But I think mostly it's just because we've never done a challenge.
Brent: I don't really have a better excuse than that, to be honest.
Chris: Well, this will be great. So this will be your first time. I know you've must
Chris: have run it before, Wes, right? Oh, yeah.
Wes: I've had a couple of FreeBSD servers over the years.
Chris: We've probably tried it once or twice on the show years ago.
Wes: I think we must have, yeah.
Chris: Okay. You got me with the I haven't used it in years thing. It has been a really,
Chris: I mean, it's probably been pre-10.
Chris: I think FreeBSD 9 was the last time I tried it.
Wes: Yeah, I even, for a little tiny bit, I was renting a dedicated server.
Chris: Really?
Wes: From Hetzner and running FreeBSD on it.
Chris: Just because you wanted to?
Wes: Yeah, well, I was trying it. I dabbled with it before and I wanted to get like
Wes: more of a sense for, you know, really running it.
Chris: How did it work?
Wes: Worked well. It had like, I think, four disks in it. So, you know, I had ZFS going.
Wes: I did eventually replace it. I think ultimately at that time it was an Ubuntu
Wes: box running LexD with a bunch of containers.
Chris: All right. Well, Boosted and let us know if you're in on the FreeBSD Challenge
Chris: and if you have any guidance for us as well, which we can incorporate.
Chris: And then we'll officially kick it off next week. So you don't have to do anything
Chris: yet because we're going to incorporate everybody's feedback,
Chris: set all the final parameters next week, and then officially launch it.
Wes: Well, we got to do it because we already got hybrid. Hybrid's in.
Chris: All right.
Wes: So, you know, if you want to be cool like hybrid, join us.
Chris: Episode 600 is next week. Can you believe it? It feels like a milestone.
Chris: It feels like a rare one. Not many podcasts get this far. And if you've been
Chris: on the fence or been meaning to boost, this is your time.
Chris: We'd love to hear from some first-time boosters and long-time boosters to celebrate episode 600.
Chris: Maybe we'll even put it on the charts. Wouldn't that be pretty cool?
Chris: Strike and Fountain tend to be the combo, the easiest to get started,
Chris: the least amount of friction. That's why we link them in the show notes.
Chris: But there's also things like Breeze. That's B-R-E-E-Z. It makes it pretty simple
Chris: to get going. and you don't need to switch podcast apps.
Chris: Of course, episode 600 is also a celebration of our members.
Chris: Jupiter.party to support all the shows and linuxunplug.com slash membership
Chris: to support this specific show and get the perks.
Chris: We would love to hear from you next week. Let's have a blowout.
Chris: Episode 600 is going to be a special milestone and we'd love to hear from you.
Chris: And thank you to everyone for all your support. It's just incredible to be at
Chris: $5.99 right now. It feels surreal and I can't wait for 600.
Brent: Well, that said, we do have some pretty amazing boosts here,
Brent: and we do have a baller of a baller in Eric the Red.
Chris: Yes, Mr. Red writes with his 100,000 sats. Thank you for all the great shows.
Chris: During the middle of the night, I started to think about how amazing open source software is.
Chris: Someday, we'll learn to apply these same community-based efforts to things like
Chris: energy and investing and be more prosperous.
Chris: I hope so. I just updated two Nix OS machines that started on 2305 to 2411 with no issues.
Chris: That is nice. Also, Jess did the same.
Chris: I revived the dead Thaleo.
Wes: Oh, right.
Brent: Oh, nice.
Chris: And went from 2305 to 2411. I had to change.
Chris: I had to comment out like the, something in there I like about enabling sound.
Chris: Like you just don't have to do that anymore.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And that was it. And then it was off to the races. It was really awesome.
Chris: He says, Brent's comment on not distro hopping since adopting NixOS has been
Chris: true with me as well. NixOS has been a great desktop operating system.
Wes: Oh, glad it's working well for you.
Chris: Yeah, I know. That's why that take that we covered, where it was like even experienced
Chris: Linux users shouldn't use it
Chris: on the desktop, just felt like it really missed it. It really missed it.
Wes: Yeah, there are a lot of things that it got right.
Chris: And you know what? I also, for many years, was very happy with Arch and Fedora
Chris: and Ubuntu as my desktops.
Chris: So it really just depends on what gear works for you. And thank you very much
Chris: for being our baller user, Eric the Red.
Chris: We really appreciate you. And you got in before we clicked over to 600. Thank you very much.
Wes: Turd Ferguson boosts in with 88,222 cents.
Wes: I was going to write a blog post
Wes: about how Windows isn't ready for the desktop, but no one would read it.
Chris: Oh, Bert.
Wes: Coming in hot, Turd. Coming in hot.
Brent: Well, our dear producer Jeff boosted in two boosts for a total of 28,888 Satoshis.
Brent: He says, I find it hard to recommend any particular distro to people these days.
Brent: It really depends on their backgrounds. Wait, Chris, it's your birthday.
Brent: Happy birthday, Chris, he says in his second boost here.
Brent: He says, I wish I could join live today, but I'm busy earning that fiat S coin.
Brent: Have you heard of S coin? so I can buy more sats.
Chris: There you go. You got to mine it somehow, right? Either directly or in the fiat mines.
Chris: Thank you, producer Jeff. And I agree. Every distro is, it's like a personal
Chris: recommendation based on their work and what they're doing, what their expectations
Chris: are on a computer and how they're going to use it, right? It's a personal thing these days.
Chris: I know it's weird to say that because Windows and macOS are supposed to be one size fits all.
Wes: But I mean, right? People have preferred tool brands. So is it that surprising?
Chris: Oh, you're right. There's so many different like electric drills and whatnot.
Chris: That's a great perspective, Wes.
Chris: Hybrid sarcasm comes in with 27,500 sats.
Chris: Yeah, he is. Who's ready for LUP600?
Chris: The Central Florida Orlando Listening Party has secured a location.
Chris: Well done.
Chris: All the deets are at colonyevents.com. Even Mike from Coda Radio has RSVP.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: Isn't that great? Isn't that? It's so great.
Wes: I think hybrid has more pull than we do.
Brent: Yeah, sounds like it.
Chris: All you wanting the remote meetups to be able to join on Air Mumble via LUP600?
Chris: Quick shout out to the check-in or something like that.
Chris: Oh, he wants us to give one. Yeah, and Hybrid's trying it today too.
Chris: So ideally, you go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. You get the mumble
Chris: app installed. And then you get a microphone and you get headphones on.
Chris: And you get in the quiet listening. Or there's like a joint queue actually.
Chris: And we'll kind of go through and make sure your mic's working.
Chris: And then we'll bring it in.
Brent: So I think what you're saying, Chris, is for LUP600, we'd love to hear from
Brent: a variety of the listening parties happening. Just a little quick report on
Brent: what the scene looks like and who's that.
Chris: Yeah, and in that case, you know, maybe it's a USB microphone and a pair of
Chris: headphones if possible, and then, you know, people can come by and,
Chris: or maybe headphones aren't possible. I don't know.
Chris: But yeah, that would be perfect. We'll see how it goes. It's definitely an experiment.
Chris: Thank you, hybrid. It's always great to hear from you.
Wes: Why is Papa John boosted with 22,222 sets?
Wes: Plus, one for the Tuxies, I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't vote in 2024.
Wes: I was away from podcasts for a few months and I'm just getting caught up.
Wes: The Tuxies finally convinced me to set up Image, though.
Wes: What do you guys use for monitoring server stats like CPU and hard drive temps?
Wes: Unraid has temps in its GUI, but I'd love to pipe that data into somewhere that I'll actually see it.
Wes: Thanks for all the great work. I plan on messing around with CacheOS and maybe
Wes: even a little bit of NixOS sometime soon.
Chris: Oh, wise Papa John. We would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Chris: And don't ever worry about falling behind and boosting on an old topic.
Chris: A, it is good signal for us to know where the audience is at in the listening backlog.
Chris: So when people boost from an old episode, it's good for us to know where people
Chris: are at. Just from like a content release schedule so we know what our expectations are.
Chris: But two, a good topic is always what we're talking about. So don't ever feel
Chris: bad about coming in on something from a previous episode.
Chris: And I would love to hear your thoughts if you do try Cashi or NixOS.
Chris: The Tuxies I often hear have been how people like finally decide I'm going to go try that thing.
Chris: So we are working on something and I'm liking what's cooking.
Chris: We don't have a full recipe yet for next year's Tuxies, but if it does,
Chris: if we pull it off, it's going to be different, but hopefully better at a whole
Chris: new level. I think, right?
Wes: Yeah, I think so. thank.
Chris: You wise papa john.
Wes: Also thank you papa john uh sent a second boost just to let me know that my
Wes: split failed so just thank you for the info and uh sorry about that i will rejuggle
Wes: some liquidity after i got a channel class i know i won't i'm motivated to fix that all.
Chris: Right all right.
Brent: Well distro stew was motivated sent in five boosts for a total of 20 301 sats,
Brent: Per your year-end prediction about a major platform rolling out a declarative
Brent: system, I think it's coming.
Brent: I've been playing with some small but interesting projects around this.
Brent: For example, there's a Metapack, there is also Deckman, and a ConfManager.
Brent: All have different takes on the solution, but I like where they're going.
Brent: So just checking out Metapack here, it looks like it's a declarative package
Brent: manager, multi-back-end declarative package manager, hence the name.
Brent: This allows you to maintain consistent packages across multiple machines,
Brent: setting up a new system with preferred packages, with your preferred package managers.
Brent: It makes it much easier. So it sounds almost like a meta package manager,
Brent: which seems to make sense.
Chris: I don't know if this quite qualifies, but I'm inclined to want it to,
Chris: so I'm definitely going to look into it.
Brent: It is active. It's been, yeah, there's people doing stuff around there,
Brent: and it looks like it's been around for at least two years.
Wes: And a quick follow-up to our previous boost because we totally forgot to actually
Wes: answer what do we use to monitor things like.
Chris: Cpu and.
Wes: Hard drives and.
Chris: Temperatures we did um well yeah net.
Wes: Data for a long time uh although there's been some troubling developments there
Wes: recently oh there you guys on self-hosted talked about a great little option
Wes: that's relatively new with bezel right.
Chris: Yep i would say the last episode and the
Chris: episode before that really the episode before that we get into it and then we
Chris: have a brief follow-up at the top of the most recent episode of self-hosted
Chris: so the last two episodes kind of get into this topic uh net data is still probably
Chris: my favorite but uh you know bizall is a little bit lighter a little bit more limited um but also,
Chris: just totally free and open isn't trying to go for like a you know like a cloud monetization strategy.
Wes: Depending on like retention needs and scale you know you can do like a cloud
Wes: native thing with the prometheus agent and prometheus and grafana or something
Wes: like that or influx db is is totally fine too.
Chris: This is an area i would love to also take in input from the audience if there's
Chris: other cool tools out there some real cool tools that do this that i don't know
Chris: about that kind of do the net data thing.
Wes: There's a lot of options.
Chris: I know, but there's got to be some good ones.
Wes: I am sure the audience has some killer picks in this area.
Chris: Gene Bean comes in with a row of Nix. I don't get not touching your Nix config.
Chris: I'm always using new tools and doing new stuff, and therefore I mess with my config a lot.
Chris: Additionally, I keep most things in Nix because my system isn't reproducible otherwise.
Chris: As a result, I forget to document something otherwise. Yeah,
Chris: that's true. That's a good point.
Chris: That is the nice self-documenting. If I set up VMI flag, I won't forget about
Chris: it. You can check out github.com slash gene beans slash dots for my commit history, for example.
Chris: That's cool, Gene. Thank you. I will check that out.
Chris: Yeah, why have I not? I still have not checked my configs.
Wes: Well, I think I was thinking about this because I saw the boost come in.
Wes: And I think to some extent we were almost saying, you know, like Gene isn't
Wes: running into the problems that some other folks are seemingly.
Wes: So we were kind of addressing problems maybe that Gene isn't having to the same extent.
Wes: And I do touch my config, but it's mostly like a creative in terms of adding
Wes: a few packages or tweaking an option on, which felt maybe qualitatively different
Wes: than what, like, the article we were talking about in terms of,
Wes: like, struggling and fighting with their config.
Wes: You know, like, actually, like, I'm debugging or something, which is very different
Wes: than just, like, adding a package.
Chris: I agree. Like, when I was getting the Thalia going again and I just,
Chris: like, commented out the sound stuff, enable sound.
Wes: Versus, like, writing a new helper function to set up config for multi-machine or something.
Chris: But in the last episode, when we talked about when we last touched our configs,
Chris: I was literally using the last modified date, which is December for me.
Chris: And I just think I get to a point where a system is pretty set up.
Chris: And then anything that I add, I either do via Nix shell just to try it out or a flat pack.
Wes: Yeah. And you, uh, you are, you do use Nix shell. And I was going to say from
Wes: seeing some of your Nix configs, I would say you have already accumulated a
Wes: lot. Like you probably have 95% of the tools you're going to use at all. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, I really do. You know, that's the one thing about using it every day for so many years.
Wes: You're going with like the six gig everything installed version of Ubuntu.
Chris: It's minimal in my own way.
Brent: But that's also been the promise of a Nix config was that the things you solved
Brent: would just pay dividends in the future.
Brent: So, yeah, you put a bunch of upfront time, but then it gets less and less and less as time moves on.
Brent: And I've seen that at least to be true in my particular use case.
Chris: Yeah. I wonder though, perhaps, I mean, I'm looking at Gene's setup here.
Chris: You know, he, I mean, I think he's just learning. And as he learns,
Chris: he's kind of refactoring and building it better.
Chris: And so that's why he's touching it more frequently, where I've kind of just
Chris: been like, ah, it's working.
Wes: Yeah, that makes sense too. You can be kind of, there's different modes that you end up in.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And if you're actively developing.
Chris: Thank you, Gene.
Wes: I will say too, something that works okay for me is if I'm going to like make
Wes: a trade-off between like I was going to try to manage the Nix,
Wes: but right now I'm going to just not,
Wes: is sometimes I'll just leave comments in my, somewhere in my Nix so that they're
Wes: documented there of, hey, I'm managing this elsewhere. Right. Warning.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brent: I caught my brother with his Nix config, like he was making a few changes and
Brent: I was just looking over his shoulder and there's a bunch of to-do items in his
Brent: Nix configs, like figure this out later.
Brent: So I think that's a really nice approach too.
Wes: Shapira May. Huh? What do you guys think?
Chris: Yeah!
Wes: Shapira May boosts in with 4,321 sats.
Wes: Hello! Talking about NixOS, have you guys checked out Replit.com?
Wes: It's an online development platform that gives you a virtual machine with pre-installed
Wes: Nix packages, depending on what language you want, and it's basically an in-browser IDE.
Wes: Most of their codebase is MIT-licensed. I've been using it for some years now
Wes: And it's a really nice way to dip your toes into Nix You know,
Wes: I've tried it a little while ago I've used it a few times But I hadn't actually
Wes: thought about using it with Nix That's great Yeah.
Chris: Thank you for the tip I have to admit, slipped my purvey My purvey Okay.
Wes: Here's a fun question Okay Follow-up boost All right,
Wes: So about the old to-do list.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Do you ever have moments when you're in the shower?
Chris: Yes.
Wes: Some situation where you just like can't get to your phone or a notepad.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: And you remember something you have to do and an idea you really want to capture.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: Do you have a solution for that? Shower Linux, please.
Chris: You know, I've thought about this so many times. So I do sometimes bring my
Chris: phone into the shower now and I have kind of above the shower, I put a magnetic mount.
Chris: and then I just slap the phone up there and it doesn't really get wet and then
Chris: if I have to, I can document it and that's just because I've really lost some good ones.
Chris: I've lost some real good idea babies and I do not want to lose any more idea babies.
Chris: So I do that, but I have thought about the whiteboard thing.
Chris: I know that's another route people go. Brent, how do you capture your best shower thoughts?
Brent: Well, I would say the shower is definitely like my sacred think tank,
Brent: but I've gone full psychopath mode and I got a permanent waterproof marker and
Brent: I just write stuff on the walls.
Brent: And so if you saw my washroom, it just is scary.
Chris: Oh my God, are you serious?
Brent: Will you take a picture.
Chris: Please?
Brent: No, I'm not serious. Oh my God, that's good.
Chris: Brett. I love that visual.
Brent: But I have certainly thought of it because like really if I'm in this like deep
Brent: thinking mode, which happens for me all the time in the shower,
Brent: I want the simplest solution possible.
Brent: So even the fact of like picking up my phone and having to unlock it with wet
Brent: hands and then finding the app and then creating a new note that is somehow
Brent: categorized and then writing the thing is that's too much friction.
Brent: So I would love something simple. I've heard of people having just like a,
Brent: a stick on waterproof notepad that they can have in the shower,
Brent: just like to temporarily document it there.
Brent: And then once you've, I don't know, dry off, you can figure out where else to put it.
Brent: Uh, but I would love to hear some solutions to this because yeah,
Brent: they're all just vanishing thoughts unless I can somehow hold on to them, which never happens.
Chris: It is a real shame. My other one is driving.
Chris: Again, I don't have a great system for that. I can sometimes capture on the phone.
Wes: Yeah, sometimes.
Chris: Do you have a way to capture great shower thoughts?
Wes: No, I've been thinking about this. And the car, I think the car one gets me more often.
Chris: Yeah. I can imagine you're driving up to the studio. You've got like an hour.
Wes: Somehow the shower, I have a little, it's like I can, if I'm willing to stop
Wes: the thread, I can kind of keep the insight.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely have been like rushed the shower a little bit,
Chris: finished up, and then like dried off quickly, got down and just wrote it down
Chris: and then got back to finishing up to, you know, the whole shower routine.
Chris: Too much information, but I would love to know how people are capturing that.
Chris: I'm taking a lot of different sacrifices. Nothing's working.
Wes: Can you do like whiteboard paint on your shower wall?
Chris: I like that. Brett was thinking permanent marker, which I think I would have a good idea.
Brent: But I also don't want it to be permanent, so I don't know.
Chris: Somewhat Justin came in with 4,000 and 4sats. It says he just wanted to say,
Chris: thank you for your mention of Bazite.
Chris: I picked up an Asus RIG Raleigh. Oh, that's the machine my son has.
Chris: On sale, and thanks to the show, I already knew I needed some Linux,
Chris: and Bazite was a great option. What a perfect match for that laptop.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: Those things are really meant for gaming. Good call. The install was fairly
Chris: easy, according to the benchmarks.
Chris: It seems to perform better than the default OS, which was Windows.
Wes: That's great.
Brent: I'm not surprised.
Chris: These handhelds are so fun, excited for the coverage of SteamOS.
Chris: Oh, man, I'm so excited to see where SteamOS goes, too.
Chris: When it starts getting distributed, which they've kind of been hinting at,
Chris: we're going to be all over that.
Wes: Maybe we could use it to run a server.
Chris: Of course we're going to try.
Wes: Wham Geek boosts in with 6,444 sets.
Wes: Hey guys, when I hear tuxies, I always think of the Oscars.
Wes: So I'd like to suggest aligning the annual tuxies to occur on the same day as the Oscars.
Brent: Put our tuxes on and everything?
Chris: Like we don't already.
Wes: Right. This moves them maybe away from the holiday season, but it keeps it a
Wes: night of celebration and fanfare.
Wes: Pairing the two adds a layer of fun spotlighting open source achievements alongside,
Wes: you know, mainstream culture. Plus it taps into the shared excitement of awards season.
Chris: You know, the only flaw here is it actually almost be kind of fun in a way to
Chris: do it the old way one last time.
Chris: Because the Oscars are on March 2nd.
Wes: Oh.
Chris: Yeah. But if we could get, because all we'd have to do, I wonder,
Chris: could we rejigger the survey a little bit and just do it one last time for fun?
Chris: Now I almost want to do it.
Wes: Isn't that weird? What's the cost?
Chris: What is wrong with me? I want to kill it, and then now I want to do it again.
Wes: Well, because the stakes are different.
Chris: You're right. You're right. I'd almost be willing to do it if people are interested.
Chris: Just ironically, almost. Like the spring tuxies.
Wes: We'll boost in for $600 a week.
Chris: Yeah, we'll figure it out. Let us know if you're interested,
Chris: because otherwise maybe I'm just being a jackass. It really is a stupid idea.
Chris: But it is, right? It's the dumbest idea I've had in weeks, isn't it? Don't you think?
Wes: I think it is. I have to go check the notes.
Brent: You've had a lot of ideas this week.
Chris: Both of you. Boy, I've had a bad week apparently.
Chris: Amazing. Amazing. Outing me right now on this show.
Chris: Thank you, everybody, who boosted in. We really appreciate it.
Chris: Also, thank you, everybody, who streamed sats as you listen.
Chris: 38 of you streamed those sats. And collectively, y'all stacked 56,449 sats.
Chris: And then when you combine that with our boosters, we had 47 people participate
Chris: in the value for value process for episode 599.
Chris: And collectively, we stacked 363,195 sats for the show. Thank you, everybody, very much.
Chris: We have links to Strike and Fountain. Fountain is a new podcast app.
Chris: You can also listen to our live stream.
Chris: You can see our pending episodes in there. And there's more features coming
Chris: to the show soon that'll be available to podcasting 2.0 apps.
Chris: So there'll be even more reasons to listen to Linux Unplugged in a new podcast app.
Chris: Newpodcastapps.com for all of them. And thank you everybody,
Chris: including our members who supported episode 599.
Chris: All right. So for our pick segment this week, we have two picks.
Chris: We've been really just coming in with the picks hot and heavy recently.
Chris: There's just so many good apps.
Wes: It's mostly a pick-based show, and then we do some other segments on the side.
Chris: I think if anybody skips this, they're missing out, especially the last few
Chris: weeks. And I think one of you found Olive Tin this week.
Wes: No, no. It came from a booster last week.
Chris: Oh, oh, oh, oh. Right. And we wanted to make sure we kind of brought it forward again.
Chris: So Olive Tin is a safe and simple access to predefined shell commands from a
Chris: web interface and so picture a interface that would work with big buttons on
Chris: a mobile device or on your desktop and you have just things like ping the internet
Chris: or check d message logs delete old backups restart a docker container just buttons to do stuff.
Wes: You combine that with a mesh network and bam.
Chris: Yeah or um you know i could see on my tablets there could be like a little like
Chris: hey wife i need you to take care of stuff screen and it brings this up and there's
Chris: buttons where she hits a button and it restarts the server channel you know
Chris: i like that i could just be.
Brent: Paired with your stream deck for instance.
Chris: Could totes you could totes probably do that hmm i
Chris: would like physical buttons so that could be kind of nice all right
Chris: and then this next pick is open tv and
Chris: i have really been enjoying ersatz
Chris: tv which lets me have a television network
Chris: inside my home you create custom
Chris: live channels using your own local media and they
Chris: show up as iptv streams and you
Chris: can have different iptv players that can pull in like
Chris: the scheduling data ersatz also generates scheduling data so i can see when
Chris: seinfeld's playing and star trek the next generation and roseanne and i've got
Chris: the 1980s battle star galactica on there because it's just great and retro like
Chris: it's it is like having your own cable TV network inside your own home.
Chris: We've talked about it before and we haven't really mentioned a great way.
Chris: to enjoy this on your desktop.
Wes: I don't want to have to set up Jellyfin just to enjoy.
Chris: That is, yeah. Or like maybe you could tune VLC into one of the particular streams if you're a maniac.
Chris: OpenTV has been recently rewritten, and they're also making a plea for contributions
Chris: via GitHub, Patreon, PayPal, or Crypto.
Chris: But it is a desktop app that runs on the various desktop operating systems that
Chris: gives you a front end to any IPTV system.
Chris: It doesn't have to be URSATS TV, but that's what I'm using it for.
Wes: Yeah, this looks pretty sleek.
Chris: And it is a DVR as well. So it'll import the M3U file and the metadata for the playlist.
Chris: It'll record while you're watching. It can record multiple streams at once.
Chris: They have crazy optimize it for super low RAM usage with really fast UI.
Wes: Okay, well, now I want to try this for me to like record my favorite hits from your ersatz stream.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. And you know, there's also a surprising amount of public IPTV streams.
Wes: Yeah, that's true.
Chris: Especially like Europe news. Like there's a lot of European news stations that
Chris: just make an IPTV stream of their station.
Chris: There's not as many in the States, but there are a couple.
Chris: And there's a couple of public broadcast stations that do it as well.
Chris: So you don't even have to have any service in particular.
Chris: But if you have AirSats TV and you want something to watch it and DVR on your
Chris: desktop, you can use OpenTV to sit in front of that.
Chris: And it's just a really nice app that just plugs in to that whole ecosystem,
Chris: the M3U file, the XML playlist, as well as then also the back-end recording.
Chris: And then they've optimized it to be super fast and responsive.
Chris: So it's open-tv, and we'll have links in the show notes over at linuxunplugged.com slash 599.
Wes: While we're here, license check. What are our pick licenses today?
Chris: Oh, you're right. Thank you. I've been, you know what? I've been really trying to.
Wes: We've been hit or miss, but we're trying.
Chris: I've been trying to add them to the notes. I did not add them to the notes this week.
Brent: Well, I can report on Olivetan here. It looks like we've got a, Olivetan is AGPL 3.0.
Chris: Very, very nice. And Open TV is GPL 2.
Chris: So we got some very, very fussy picks for you this week. Very nice. Thank you, Wes.
Chris: I should have noted that in the notes. I need to have like a checklist of picks now.
Wes: Yeah, maybe we should add it to the template.
Chris: Yeah, that is a great idea.
Wes: I'll do that.
Brent: Well, it looks like your ersatz TV here is a license. I'm not sure about.
Brent: Zlib license? Have you heard of this one before?
Wes: Better check the FSF list.
Chris: I mean, I know Zlib. I like Zlib a lot.
Brent: It's extremely simple. It's four paragraphs, not even.
Chris: Really?
Brent: Yeah, worth looking at. I don't know if this applies, but.
Chris: I don't know if the SFF would approve.
Wes: Yeah, see, this is paying dividends already.
Chris: Remember, we want to hear your thoughts on if you would be willing to crowdfund
Chris: either the Mecha Comet or the Librex Nex.
Chris: Have you been sufficiently burned? Or is the dream of a Linux phone still alive
Chris: in your heart? I genuinely would like to know.
Chris: And then ultimately, we need your guidance on the FreeBSD challenge.
Chris: Are you willing to participate?
Chris: What requirements or rules should we follow that we haven't mentioned in the show already?
Chris: And any kind of notes or details that we should know as Linux guys that are
Chris: going to be using FreeBSD for the first time in a long time,
Chris: or in Brent's case, the very first time.
Chris: I feel like that's a big thing to bite off. So please let us know.
Chris: And episode 600 would be a great episode to bring all that in.
Chris: So we'll try to collate all of that and have it for you and review it before the next episode.
Chris: Technically, we're going back to the original time, noon Pacific, 3 p.m.
Chris: Eastern. So we'll be live at our regular time. And of course,
Chris: if you're in a podcasting 2.0 app, it'll be in your stream.
Chris: And well before the show starts, we always open up Mumble.
Chris: We'll help you troubleshoot your audio issues, you know, making sure everything's
Chris: working and you get to listen in on the stream too.
Wes: Plus, I don't know, you know, maybe you can't make every live stream.
Wes: I bet 600 is going to be especially fun.
Chris: Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.
Chris: Even if it's not 600, we still had a good time. We hope you did too.
Chris: And of course, links to what we talked about there at slash 599.
Chris: Thank you so much. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday as in Sunday.
Chris: Whoa! Some breaking news. That was a news eagle.
Wes: Yeah, this month Deepin25 came out, which is a distro.
Wes: We don't really follow that closely, but they are implementing some big steps
Wes: towards immutability powered by OS3.
Chris: No!
Wes: And in their own system, they're calling Solid.
Chris: Deepin's going immutable?
Wes: Yeah, and Atomic.
Chris: I gotta look this up. Where is this?
Wes: It's in the release notes for 25. But yeah, they're mounting the core directories
Wes: read only. This is powered by OS tree.
Wes: And then they're doing the like, you know, atomic style reboot into the new system approach.
Wes: I don't know if it's like for everything, but they're at least starting to adopt it.
Chris: The solid, the deep and immutable system focuses on the stability and security of the system.
Chris: It provides users with a stable, reliable, and easy to maintain experience through
Chris: the technology such as read-only protection, atomic updates,
Chris: and snapshot management.
Wes: Yeah. And it's also got the like, you know, if it fails to boot,
Wes: it'll automatically roll back to the previous version. It's happening folks It's happening.
Brent: I mean it's just a better way to compute Come on.