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 Brentley. Hello Wes. Well today on the show we are live at LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: We'll tell you about our experiences, we'll share some stories,
Chris: we'll talk to some guests, we'll do some trivia, and a lot more.
Chris: But before we go any further, I want to say hello to our live in-person lug.
Chris: Hello everybody at LinuxFest Northwest, thank you for being here.
Chris: We've got a good crowd, and we've got a lot to get into, so let me start by
Chris: saying good morning to our friends at TailScale.
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Chris: let me tell you, let me tell you, wherever they are, we have, in the room right now,
Chris: created our own isolated LAN, and I was able to
Chris: pick up the gear from the studio which talks to the
Chris: tail net ip's of everything we set it all down in
Chris: here and once we got the lan online everything started
Chris: talking even my steam deck which i used to like trigger the soundboard
Chris: everything just started talking it doesn't matter that we yesterday we're in
Chris: the rv and today we're in a classroom tail scale works everywhere and we're
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Chris: tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: I think I want to start the show right off the top by saying thank Thank you,
Chris: everybody, who helped us get these headsets.
Chris: We've been loving them. They worked out really great. Big upgrade. Big upgrade.
Chris: And it's so nice for us to have room. I can reach across and hit the boys now,
Chris: and I don't have to worry about the microphone stand in the way,
Chris: which was super annoying.
Wes: You know, I'm excited. We got to drive up here, right, because it's kind of our local fest.
Wes: But I'm excited for more on the road because more so than anything else,
Wes: those microphone stands is always what gets me flagged by the TSA.
Wes: So I think the headsets will be a little smoother.
Chris: That is true. I always wonder why these are in our bag. So yesterday we did
Chris: the live event which we will have linked in the show notes and it's also at
Chris: extras show if you just want to catch the highlights from day one of Linux Fest Northwest.
Chris: We did that from Lady Joops worked awesome running off solar.
Chris: We had people swing by and I think maybe we start there is.
Chris: yesterday it felt really busy raise your hands did
Chris: yesterday feel busy to you yay nay yeah pretty busy yeah i'm
Chris: pretty everyone's raising their hand it looks like i was surprised
Chris: and i think you know obviously in part the good weather helps people i
Chris: mean it's been beautiful and it's just right it's not too hot it's not
Chris: too cold but when we finished our live stream yesterday i i step out the door
Chris: of the rv and the grass is just full of people because we're next to like a
Chris: nice kind of grassy area and everybody's out there eating cookies and sandwiches
Chris: and emma from system 76 and my wife Adia went out and got over 100 sandwiches
Chris: from a local Bellingham sandwich shop,
Chris: brought them back, and then got a bunch of cookies and beverages and stuff like that.
Chris: And it was really low-key and easy, maybe not quite as fancy as a barbecue,
Chris: way less work for us, which was really nice.
Chris: And then I just got to enjoy a sandwich after the show, which was a nice twist.
Chris: And, you know, for us, the first day, we didn't really make it beyond just the socialization stuff.
Wes: Hardly, yeah. I mean, Brent, we just sent Brent in to try to even get into some
Wes: of the talks, and he could hardly get in.
Brent: I didn't really even make it in I got it to like
Brent: the central courtyard And got stopped by a bunch of our lovely listeners
Brent: So thank you for stopping me And we got some on-site interviews And then I had
Brent: to use Jeff to like Plow through people to get me into Carl's talk About System
Brent: 76's cosmic release And it was so packed That we only had like the two feet
Brent: past the door And I was like there's no way.
Chris: Next year we should be back in the bigger space So that will be We'll have the new building again.
Chris: And this is the 25th year. So it's also kind of a special year.
Chris: It's the 25th year of LinuxFest. And they tried to acknowledge some of the original
Chris: creators of LinuxFest last night at the end of the fest. And they had special
Chris: tie-dye uniforms on for all the original creators walking around. That was really cool.
Chris: And I don't know if any of you caught this, but when Hadiyah,
Chris: my wife, and Emma from System76 went out to get sandwiches yesterday,
Chris: They also randomly picked up a birthday cake.
Chris: It wasn't anybody's birthday, but they thought, you know, an event this big.
Brent: You never know.
Chris: It's probably going to be somebody's birthday.
Brent: Statistically. Yeah, we talk about math a lot.
Wes: We talk about math all the time. Yeah, the birthday paradox.
Chris: And that's a pre-show reference. So they bought this birthday cake,
Chris: and then they went around, and I think they found somebody. It was their 21st birthday, right? Yeah.
Chris: And they were just floored that somebody had a birthday cake for them.
Chris: Like, what? Really? Made their day.
Chris: They're here at Linux Fest, and somebody says, happy birthday.
Chris: Here's a birthday cake. What? So that was pretty neat.
Chris: And sort of, I think this year's felt kind of the most fun in a way.
Wes: It feels, I think, the closest to sort of the pre-COVID energy.
Wes: You know, like the fest you remember before all of the trials and tribulations
Wes: and building and timing changes and all the hard work and years of effort now
Wes: to get to where we are today.
Wes: It finally feels a little bit like it did when I first showed up in like, I don't know, 2010.
Chris: Yeah, I agree. What did you think about not having a booth this year?
Wes: That was a bit different. I think, well, we didn't get inside as much.
Wes: So that was the downside.
Wes: But the plus side is, I think it did give us, maybe it didn't show in how long
Wes: it took us to get going today, but it did give us a little more time and space
Wes: to work out some of the kinks in our setup.
Chris: Yeah, and not having, so one of the things when you're in a classroom,
Chris: we're here for our scheduled set of time.
Chris: So we have to get in after the last person set up, and then we have to get out
Chris: before the next person. Thankfully, the next person is you.
Wes: That's true.
Chris: I'll be gracious. We're going to make that guy wait a little bit.
Chris: But it's that is trickier.
Chris: Whereas when when you're in the RV you can just set up in the morning You're
Chris: set up all day long, and that's super nice But what the downside was is we didn't
Chris: quite make it in as much so we'll have to make up for some of that today but
Chris: yeah, I've really enjoyed it and I,
Chris: I'm ready for it to be over two at the same time. We stayed out late the last
Chris: couple of nights, so I'm a little worn down.
Wes: Yeah, an excellent post-fest social last night, I think.
Chris: Yes, we did. But two nights in a row, I stayed out a little later than I should have.
Chris: That means if in the next clip, if I don't seem like I'm on my game,
Chris: it's totally because I was out partying, we had a listener who's also a host
Chris: of his own podcast. He'll do his introduction in just a moment.
Chris: But he's been going around, and he's been doing Linux trivia and scoring people.
Chris: And the guy does it all in his head. He does the whole scoring and everything
Chris: in his head as he's going around. And he does the fact checking and the checking.
Chris: It's pretty fun. And so we had him stop by and quiz Wes and I,
Chris: because Brent, you already took the test once, crushed it.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: Beat everybody until other people played the game.
Wes: That's why you go first.
Chris: Yeah, that's right.
Wes: You get the first high score.
Chris: So let's see how Wes and I do on our live Linux trivia at LinuxFest Northwest.
Clips: Hey, I'm James. I'm here with my show, the Linux Prepper podcast.
Clips: I created a trivia challenge yesterday that almost a ton of people did as singles and as doubles.
Clips: So I thought, Chris and Wes, you'd do it today and potentially take the leaderboard.
Clips: Or really embarrass ourselves.
Clips: Brent did it yesterday. So the benchmark is to do better than Brent.
Clips: But I'm going up against some serious heavyweights, aren't we?
Clips: I hope you both can do better than just me.
Clips: Otherwise, we have a real problem on this podcast. Yeah. Okay.
Clips: If you're including the singles and the doubles, then you're further down the list. Oh.
Clips: You know, I was tied for second when I finished, but then that was early in
Clips: the day, and a bunch of people came and beat the pans off me. Yes.
Clips: And we only just switched to last year, right? No.
Clips: All right. We're ready. We're ready. All right. So this is the Do You Know Linux
Clips: challenge from yesterday. If you want to do the one from today,
Clips: you can come by the booth and do it, because anyone in the room can do it.
Clips: It's an open thing. So that's why I'm not going to say that one on the air. Homework.
Clips: All right. What are the rules? The rules, yes. So the rules are,
Clips: I'll give you questions. You can say pass at any time. We will move on.
Clips: Otherwise, just answer to the best of your ability. And some of the questions
Clips: are open questions, which means you can just rattle off answers.
Clips: And usually around 10 seconds, people kind of run out of steam.
Clips: And if that's the case, I'll give you another question. Okay.
Clips: And at the end of 60 seconds, that's the score you get. So every answer is a
Clips: point. Okay. All right. Yeah? Okay. Don't mess it up, boys. Okay, I'm ready.
Clips: Do you mind doing the little timing? Oh, I could do the timing.
Clips: This is about macOS, right? Yeah, macOS.
Clips: Get your HFS ready. Let me know when you want me to start. I'll count down.
Clips: Here we go. You ready, boys? Everybody's ready? Ready.
Clips: Three, two, one, start. Who created the Linux kernel?
Clips: Linus Torvalds. Ubuntu is based on? Debian. NixOS is considered a what distribution? Immutable.
Clips: The recursive acronym GNU means what? GNU is not Linux. Unix.
Clips: How many projects can you name that are maintained by Red Hat?
Clips: OpenShift. Podman. Project Stellaris. Podman.
Clips: What else? Fedora, of course. Sure. RHEL, of course. CentOS.
Clips: CentOS would be another one, of course.
Clips: Did we say OpenShift? I don't know if we said OpenShift. Yes, we did.
Clips: Pipewire, maybe? Pipewire is another one. FWAPD, for that matter,
Clips: as well, would be another one.
Clips: FWAPD and all of the services around that as well. A bunch of automotive stuff,
Clips: I'm not quite clear. Automotive Linux.
Clips: Do you want to move on? Automotive Linux? No, I don't think I'm done yet.
Clips: The RHEL update server is another project that they maintain,
Clips: the RHEL satellite server.
Clips: Okay, now I think I'm done. Five seconds. UUtils will replace what?
Clips: U-Utils? Zero. Core Utils? That's it. U-Utils replaces Core Utils? Yeah.
Clips: Is that the whole trivia? No. Oh, okay, okay. You want to do another minute?
Clips: Well, yeah, man. Wait, what was their score in this minute? Because that's the
Clips: official score. We'll have to go back and check.
Clips: Oh, okay. There's math to do. I thought there was more. Okay.
Clips: All right. I'm good to go. All right. Let's do another minute to finish the questions off.
Clips: All right. This is the one where people were just... No wonder Carl did great.
Clips: He's got an index of every Red Hat project in his head. Okay,
Clips: here we go. Three, two, one, go. How many text editors can you name?
Clips: Vi, Vim, Zed. Neo Vim. Nano. Ed. Ed, of course. Micro. Emacs.
Clips: Yep. G-Edit. K-S Code. K-Write. V-S Codeium. V-S Codeium. Did you already say
Clips: Zed? Mm-hmm. I said Zed. Yeah.
Clips: You got any others? I do, but I'm totally blanking now. Did we say Micro?
Clips: There's several. Yeah, we did. There's several REST ones. What's the?
Clips: Cocoon? Sure. You know, there's several REST-based ones. Cocoon, yep.
Clips: K-Write? I said K-Write. Notepad++, does that count? You run under one?
Clips: Oh, well, that's a whole other world, isn't it? Cat?
Clips: Does Bash count? Echo? Yeah, right.
Clips: Oh, come on, Wes. Should we move on? We're 15 seconds. Okay,
Clips: move on. Okay, AI used to be referred to by what other two-letter acronym?
Clips: ML? Yeah. Name the current Debian stable.
Clips: Say what? Name the current Debian stable. Ooh, stable. Is that Buster?
Clips: Bookworm? No. Bookworm. Yes. How many Debian derivatives can you name?
Clips: Is Zorin OS considered a Debian derivative? I don't know. Yeah.
Clips: L-M-D-E, Ubuntu, like Smint and Java. Obviously, yeah, yeah.
Clips: But I was trying to go out on the edge. Zorin OS I think might be, but I'm not sure.
Clips: Yeah. MX Linux? Yep, MX Linux.
Clips: Are we out of time? Yeah, but now we're just listing Debian stuff.
Clips: What's wrong with that? That's half the show anyway. Yeah, okay.
Clips: How'd we do? I lost track on the first one when you were doing it,
Clips: so you'll have to go back and listen to the clip to see how many you named off,
Clips: because you were mostly doing the Red Hat projects. Yeah, okay.
Clips: So we'll send James an unaltered... Yeah, totally unaltered.
Clips: Yeah, you'll have to go unaltered, because as you can imagine,
Clips: those guys were going absolutely ham in that section. Yeah, I bet.
Clips: If you would have asked them how many projects besides Ubuntu Canonical maintains,
Clips: I don't think they would have done so well.
Clips: Maybe next year we get a question.
Clips: Name Linux Podcast. Yeah, there you go. I think we do all right with that. Yeah.
Chris: I'm a little disappointed in our text editor performance.
Wes: I am too.
Chris: I thought we could have done better there. We didn't even mention the text editor
Chris: we're using right now to do the show, which seems pretty stupid.
Chris: It's right in front of our faces.
Wes: Yeah, what is that again?
Chris: Hdocs, of course. We got Hdocs. Hedge Docs. There's a lot more we probably could have named.
Wes: Maybe folks can boost in.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Contribute to our shame.
Chris: I feel like there is a really obvious one that was missing. I almost didn't
Chris: get Emacs in there, which would have been super embarrassing.
Brent: You both didn't mention VS Code.
Wes: I did, I did.
Chris: And Codium.
Brent: Oh, good.
Chris: And Codium, yeah. And I did, I went, I feel like it's a little bit on the edge, but I went ViVim.
Chris: I'm counting those as separate. They're separate.
Brent: You know what? I did the same thing.
Chris: That's technically accurate. That's technically accurate. So yeah.
Wes: You just have a whole class of editors that you can't quit.
Chris: That's true. I just get stuck. I just power off the machine.
Chris: So let us know what we missed.
Wes: I can't even say the micro Emacs we tried that Linus has been using.
Chris: Oh, we just tried that. You see, I don't test well.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I don't test well.
Chris: But I do know 1Password.com slash unplugged is well.
Chris: So go to 1Password.com slash unplugged. Try it out. I'm getting there.
Chris: Anybody in the audience, if you've got a browser right now, bring it up on your phone.
Chris: And we want to make sure it loads fast. Go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: It's all lowercase, the number 1Password.
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Chris: unmanaged user accounts, contractor accounts, services you use,
Chris: and brings it all under your control.
Chris: It assures that every user credential is strong and protected,
Chris: and every device is known and healthy. So Brent is not going to sneak onto your network.
Chris: One Password Extended Access Management solves problems that the IAMs and MDMs
Chris: just simply are not designed to touch, which is how Brent gets through everything.
Chris: It's security for the way we actually work today, and it's generally available
Chris: with companies that have Okta, Microsoft Entrance, and Beta for Google Workspace.
Chris: So imagine how life changed with a password manager. Now take it to the identity
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Chris: So go to 1Password.com slash unplugged. That's how you support the show.
Chris: You check them out, see what they got, be impressed with how fast the page loads, and try it out.
Chris: Secure every app, every device, and every identity, even the unmanaged ones,
Chris: at 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: And a big thank you to 1Password for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Chris: That is the number one, password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: Now, we had a chance to chat with a few folks. And whenever we're here live,
Chris: we like to try to get an opportunity to talk with people live.
Chris: And we have somebody join us right now. Tell me your name and remind me what
Chris: we were going to talk about.
Guest: Yeah. Well, my name's Eric.
Chris: Hey, Eric. Nice to see you.
Guest: Yeah, thanks. Good to see you guys. So this is my first Linux Fest to really
Guest: connecting with kind of anyone in this wider community.
Guest: before, I guess about a year ago, I kind of started listening to your show and
Guest: heard about this, but I couldn't make it, you know.
Guest: But before that, I just felt like I was living in a bubble by myself.
Guest: You know, I did not have anyone to talk to. I don't work in a tech job,
Guest: you know, and no one wants to talk about this.
Guest: So, you know, the whole year I've been waiting, like, okay, I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna be here.
Guest: And, you know, I saw a couple amazing talks, like stuff using a identity where
Guest: reverse proxy, you know, I want to try that.
Guest: And there was just a really cool talk about cyborg security,
Guest: which was like out of left field, but so I'm a physician,
Guest: and I kind of was like, well, this is kind of an off-topic sort of thing,
Guest: but we got deep in the weeds about, like, medical device security,
Guest: something that I'm really passionate about, but once again, never found anyone that cares.
Guest: And, you know, I wound up chasing this person down, and we're chatting for like
Guest: a half an hour and just some amazing, amazing conversations,
Guest: just connecting with people.
Guest: There's someone interested in all this stuff and I'm getting so many new ideas.
Guest: I just feel like all of a sudden, it's like mind blown, just kind of like euphoric
Guest: feeling from being able to talk like this.
Brent: You know, that's a...
Brent: Super similar experience to the experience I had when I first came to LinuxFest here.
Brent: The first one I came to was, oh gosh, 2018, I think.
Brent: And it was for the exact same reason. Like I loved these topics,
Brent: open source Linux, all this stuff.
Brent: Nobody else in my life cared. And you boys convinced me to come all the way
Brent: over here. I lived like on the other side of the continent. So thank you for doing that.
Brent: And it was the exact same feeling like, oh, you come here and all of a sudden
Brent: you can have very easy conversations with people who like the same stuff you do like what a concept,
Brent: and it's so rewarding so for anyone who has
Brent: never been to a conference like this is like we didn't make it to the talks
Brent: because of exactly what you just said is like all these great conversations
Brent: that you have just in the hallway track as they call it right and that is priceless
Brent: and it keeps us going we get like a boost of energy every time we do these so
Brent: uh and that's true for everybody here so like.
Guest: Literally every single person I would just bump into like walk next to or something
Guest: would you know it's like hello and then just immediately we're talking about
Guest: some super interesting thing just not every single person that's here it's like
Guest: there's there's something to talk about.
Brent: You know what the biggest challenge is like tomorrow when you go home remembering
Brent: it all or all the projects you wanted to try or the names of like suggestions
Brent: that you got. So if you figure out that one, you let us know.
Guest: All right, will do.
Chris: Thank you, Eric. It's good to chat with you. Thank you for joining us.
Chris: All right. We have a come on up. Come on down.
Chris: We need some come on down music. We do. All right, come on down.
Wes: Yeah, we do. What's going on, soundboard guy?
Chris: Oh, I might have something. I'll look for the future, okay?
Brent: Well, we have another guest here.
Guest: Hello.
Brent: Can you introduce yourself?
Guest: I'm Sean, also known as Senior Smile in all the online places.
Guest: And I have a call for participation.
Guest: So last year was the first NixCon USA.
Guest: And I met a surprisingly large amount of people from the Pacific Northwest,
Guest: even in the Seattle area.
Guest: Like, you know, like throwing distance almost.
Guest: So Planet Nix happened again this year. and I saw some of those same people and we got talking.
Guest: We need to keep this going throughout the year. How do we do that?
Guest: We need a user group, right?
Guest: So I met a few of those same people yesterday. Like, all right,
Guest: I need to start getting names.
Guest: But I need more than six people to have a user group.
Guest: I mean, I guess maybe not. We could start with just six people, why not? But...
Chris: You want to put a call-out, so anybody's interested in joining.
Guest: Yeah, this is a call-out for participation. So I've done many meetups in the past.
Guest: I helped start the Ansel meetup and became the sole meetup organizer for that back in 2015.
Guest: I've done several language meetups because linguistics was actually my major
Guest: in school, not computer science.
Guest: And so, yeah, there is an official call out on the NixOS forums, discourse.nixos.org.
Guest: I'll send you guys a link to put in the show notes.
Guest: Anybody who's interested, go there and just respond.
Guest: More details will come based on number of people we get.
Guest: If we get 40 people, that's going to dictate the venue that we need to locate.
Guest: If we only get 10, that's a little easier venue to find.
Guest: But I suspect there is a lot of us lurking in the Seattle area and I'm excited to have,
Guest: Monthly meetings about all things next OS because I'm just crazy about it.
Brent: Can I ask you? Do you have any ideas about You know the very first one do you
Brent: have any ideas of what you want to touch on in the world of next OS?
Guest: I already have a talk so,
Guest: At Planet next this year which happened in was that late April Co-located with
Guest: scale I I got talking to a couple people about all things security.
Guest: And there was one guy that's been working on SE Linux.
Guest: It was sort of abandoned in 2019. And he's just been going hardcore into it.
Guest: And sorry, I forget your name.
Guest: And I also learned that the hardened.nix built-in module that you can import
Guest: is essentially abandoned. It has all sorts of issues, and it's going to be deprecated
Guest: in the near future if my information is correct.
Guest: So I've been working on a module that's kind of firstly going for all of the NIST qualifications.
Guest: I'm going to actually also have a test to then test it separately from the NICS configuration itself.
Guest: But it's going to have so much more than that.
Brent: Don't forget to run your test, right?
Guest: Yeah, don't forget to run the test. And verify that the test results actually make sense.
Chris: Right, right. Okay, so Sean, so you're looking for folks in kind of the West
Chris: Coast Pacific Northwest corridor that want to join a Nix lug that would also
Chris: maybe want to organize around NixCon. Am I following you?
Guest: Yeah.
Chris: And then there's a discourse post people should find. We're going to link.
Chris: Okay, I just want to make sure we get that out there so it's clear.
Chris: If you're in this area, and that kind of sounds like something you'd be interested in doing.
Wes: Yeah, right. So you're not just looking for long-time Nix folks who can do presentations.
Wes: You're also looking for Nix Curious. Anyone?
Guest: Yeah, definitely Nix Curious. Or even if this is somehow the first time you're
Guest: hearing about all this, you're interested in open source and this is your first
Guest: time listening to this podcast, there's this thing called Nix. It's amazing.
Guest: It's part of the ecosystem.
Chris: We should check it out. That'd be a good idea.
Wes: I hear it's especially good for recovering Ansible users. Is that what you said, John?
Guest: Nice. I do have another talk. I'm not quite ready to release the actual project.
Guest: I use Ansible to control a fleet of 50 NixOS servers.
Guest: I found it better than Colmena and all the other solutions.
Guest: So it's almost ready, but that'll be a future talk.
Chris: A story for another time, perhaps.
Guest: My security stuff is much further along.
Chris: Very good. All right. Well, thank you for putting the call out there. We'll put a link to that.
Wes: Now, there's several good incentives already for me to go to this meetup.
Wes: So I'll see you there, Sean. Thank you for putting it together.
Chris: Yeah. Appreciate it.
Brent: Well, joining us again is a friendly face. Jose, you're here with us again this
Brent: year. It was a nice surprise.
Guest: Yes, we sat back. I'm taking over the Jar Jar personality now,
Guest: Tyson. So we sat back here in the Pacific Northwest.
Brent: Can you remind everyone where you're coming from?
Guest: Yes, we're coming all the way from Puerto Rico. So the nice Caribbean, hot, sun, the beach.
Brent: You were just looking for cold weather to go to, right? Is that it?
Guest: Well, the weather this year has been incredible. It's been very sunny, blue skies.
Guest: Wherever you go, you heal little birds, the flowers, everything.
Guest: So it's been incredible comparing to last year where we were ordering pizzas
Guest: with pouring rain on top of us and trying to cover the hot dogs.
Brent: Still a good time.
Guest: Yeah, yeah.
Brent: Why come to LinuxFest Northwest? I would imagine there are vents a little closer to you.
Guest: You think, right? um well in
Guest: puerto rico i to my to the best of my knowledge we
Guest: don't we don't have any events like this but at least
Guest: for me this is the this is
Guest: the one that i've always wanted to come my first time was last year because
Guest: uh letting some plug and the jupiter broadcasting that's how i started getting
Guest: into the the whole software development business and every time i was just listening
Guest: one day i'll make it there one day i'll make it there and then in 2021 i made
Guest: it to the Denver meetup and it was that.
Wes: Was incredible I mean I don't think any of us can ever forget that all the time.
Guest: Yeah yeah that was a really good one and then I said uh and last year I was,
Guest: talking over with the people I work with and my company I was like you know
Guest: what let's take a trip up there and we're all going there and we liked it we
Guest: loved it so much it was very fun even my wife who uh she knows a lot about tech
Guest: because obviously me and uh but even she left I was like, oh,
Guest: it was really nice seeing all these people just come together and volunteer
Guest: and just out of their will just putting this all together and made us really, really happy.
Guest: And this year we're back, I brought my best friend over, and we've really been enjoying it.
Guest: And so, yeah, it's been very, very nice to come back here.
Brent: Amazing. And this year you did something a little different. You gave a talk, right?
Guest: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I remember last year on this very same podcast,
Guest: I said, well, and this project will be ready in two months.
Guest: Well, I didn't say which two months.
Brent: So it sounds like the project you promised you were working on last year when
Brent: we interviewed you here at LinuxFest Northwest, you have continued to work on.
Brent: However, maybe it was a bit of a bigger adventure than you thought initially.
Guest: It was much more of a bigger adventure than I thought, if you want to put it like that.
Brent: Can you give us a sense of what it is and what you're working on and where it's at?
Guest: Yes. In defense of myself, when I got back home, work just swamped me.
Guest: so i was like nah i'm not gonna be ready for
Guest: july i'm gonna take a bit more and so
Guest: the project i'm working on is uh a media
Guest: center uh with the back end written go
Guest: with postgres and uh has a
Guest: web client and tv clients friend with react and
Guest: react native and um it's been a passion project
Guest: of mine i grew up with my dad he used to love movies so
Guest: we used to have a big rack of movies with like a binder with
Guest: all the movies categorized and everything and it was
Guest: so nice and i always wanted to do that and eventually i ended
Guest: up like most of us like trying to self-host with
Guest: jellyfin and and plex and i love jellyfin
Guest: it's a really nice project we have a very nice
Guest: server set up at home but first off i wanted
Guest: to build my own because of a passion project plus uh
Guest: i'm a blind person so accessibility was super important
Guest: for me and some of the features that are right now on the market like like accessibility
Guest: support for a lot of stuff to give you an example if you go into the jellyfin
Guest: library where your movies are you start like hovering over with the screen reader
Guest: what you hear is unlabeled unlabeled unlabeled and i don't know about you but
Guest: i don't have that movie in my library so um i.
Brent: Hear it's coming out in uh in the next year so yeah.
Wes: Why can't the studios make anything original.
Brent: Anymore.
Guest: Yeah so
Guest: that was my my target um and i
Guest: also wanted to take out i wanted to work on some features this
Guest: specifically i want this one's a bit more like uh like
Guest: niche but like for example i own a lot of blu-rays and some of them are in like
Guest: dts hd format and if you play on plex or jellyfin on certain televisions and
Guest: that kind of stuff they'll just uh put it down to like uh mix it down to like
Guest: a stereo pcm2 channels or something like that and it's very hard for me to say, no, no, no, no, no,
Guest: use AAC 5.1 or something like that, that it's a bit more.
Guest: And so I wanted to do that, and...
Guest: And so, yeah, I learned a very hard lesson that's very difficult to do.
Brent: Can I ask you why start your own project instead of contributing to,
Brent: say, Jellyfin, since you seem to like it for the most part?
Guest: Yes, that was a thing I did in my talk yesterday. The first one is because,
Guest: first off, it's a passion project of mine, so I really want to do it.
Guest: Like I said, there are certain features that I really want.
Guest: one of them is um you might
Guest: have heard i live in puerto rico and we might
Guest: be having some technical difficulties with our power grid
Guest: and so we lose power quite a bit and
Guest: so having something that's super power efficient for me that
Guest: only runs the necessary things that i want is super important for
Guest: when power goes out and we're on battery power um and
Guest: i want to make the jet the neighbors jealous and say
Guest: i got power and i got tv and you know god and so
Guest: i that's very important for me and um the
Guest: truth is also i don't like .net i'm sorry people
Guest: it's a preference yeah and and
Guest: like i said in my talk jellyfin is a great project um i started out like no
Guest: i'm not gonna look at anything i'm gonna just build my own then three bottles
Guest: of whiskey later and heartaches and everything i went like maybe just take a
Guest: peek at it just just a little peek and then i started looking at it i'm like
Guest: oh this is smart i like the way they're doing this like show less things and all that kind of stuff.
Guest: And so I took some inspiration from them because like I said,
Guest: they're a great project.
Guest: But this is like my passion project. This is also something I really want to do.
Guest: And my dream is one day to buy a house, have my own little movie room with my
Guest: own media center and everything like that.
Guest: And so passion project, certain technical differences.
Guest: And yeah, those are the main reasons.
Brent: Great. And are you looking for people to contribute at this point?
Guest: I would love it. um i would love to uh i have a github repo uh which uh,
Guest: It's not under the best circumstances right now, but it has the backend and
Guest: it has the TV client already there.
Guest: Sorry. And it has the TV client already there. And yes, I would love for people
Guest: to help me out with certain kind of stuff. One of the biggest challenges, I'm blind.
Guest: So doing the UI is very difficult, especially for TV clients because managing
Guest: focus and all that kind of stuff is really, really hard. And so,
Guest: yeah, I would love for people to contribute.
Guest: You can go to my website, blindpingbuttoncoder.com and we have a section there
Guest: that's just dedicated to this project itself.
Brent: Sounds great. Well, thank you, Jose, for giving us a little update.
Guest: Yeah.
Chris: Great to see you. Thank you.
Guest: Thank you.
Wes: You know, you can tell that this is a wonderful audience because as Jose was
Wes: talking about, you know, the disclaimers around Git Repos, which I say all the
Wes: time, you know, you could just see the heads nodding.
Chris: Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true.
Wes: All of our things are filled with to-do items, right?
Chris: So I'm going to play a chat we had earlier yesterday with Carl Rochelle from System76.
Chris: So that's coming up next. We also have some feedback we're going to get to. So we still have more.
Chris: And also, if anybody else has anything they want to jump on and chat with us
Chris: about, you'll have an opportunity to do it in just a moment. It's sort of last call.
Chris: And we're going to get to all that in just a moment.
Chris: but first i'm going to mention configcat.com slash
Chris: unplug this episode and it's our last episode that
Chris: is brought to you by configcat so go check them out while you still can they're
Chris: the feature flag service that helps you release features faster and with less
Chris: risk i'm trying to convince west to do this all the time and i keep saying west
Chris: you got to go to configcat.com slash unplug they got unlimited seats west they
Chris: got they got awesome support west and a reasonable surprise tag, Wes.
Wes: You don't like it when I just enable surprise features and you have no way to
Wes: turn them off without modifying the code?
Chris: No, I say, Wes, I need it easy to do gradual rollbacks. I want to be able to
Chris: do A-B testing. I want canary releases, Wes.
Chris: I want all of that stuff, and I want it from a friendly visual dashboard.
Wes: You know, if we had ConfigCat set up with our website, you probably wouldn't have broken it.
Chris: That's probably true. I probably would not have broken our website last week.
Chris: So the nice thing, too, is that the user's data never leaves your system.
Chris: You can go through their security set up. They have a really done good explanation on their website.
Chris: And you can try their forever free plan, but if you decide to do the paid plan,
Chris: use the promo code unplugged to Fiverr. That's unplugged25.
Chris: I do it in uppercase, so you're just shouting the whole thing.
Chris: You go to configcat.com slash unplugged and use coupon code unplugged25 to get
Chris: a little bit of a discount and support the show.
Chris: That's configcat.com slash unplugged.
Chris: Alright, so we had the opportunity to chat with Carl from System76, and he joins us now.
Clips: Here we go again, back live, LinuxFest Northwest 2025, in a sunny,
Clips: warm, beautiful Bellingham, Washington.
Clips: And Wes, we have something very special for the live members. Oh, yes we do.
Clips: And those of you that are catching on replay, join us right now.
Clips: It is the CEO of System76, Mr. Keyboard Warrior himself, Carl Rochelle.
Clips: Welcome back to the show. It's great to have you.
Clips: Thank you for having me, and I have to say, this is my first time in Lady Jupe. It is fantastic.
Clips: I'm looking out at Sunning Bellingham, as you had said. Yep.
Clips: I see my kids rolling around the grass, and my 8-year-old daughter is beating
Clips: up my 11-year-old son. Sure.
Clips: That sounds about what my kids are probably doing right now, too. As it should be.
Clips: It's wonderful up here. You know, the nice thing about Lady Joops is you can
Clips: take a parking lot and make it a camping spot. Right. Exactly.
Clips: We just got here late last night, and we're making, I love checking on this,
Clips: right now, we're making 686 watts of solar.
Clips: That's fantastic. Could be a little better. We're using a fair amount of that, too, I think.
Clips: So there's been a lot of interest in our chat room this morning about your Cosmic
Clips: talk. I saw Alpha 7 came out recently.
Clips: So I imagine every time you give this talk, you're probably adding new things,
Clips: probably covering new stuff, refining it a little bit. So what's kind of new
Clips: in your presentation for Cosmic?
Clips: This one was really satisfying because LinuxFest Northwest last year was my
Clips: first Cosmic talk. We've been working on it for two years.
Clips: And it was time to get out and start talking about what we had been building.
Clips: So we came here. This is the first place we did it.
Clips: Since there, I've toured the world, all over the U.S. I say world,
Clips: I went to the Netherlands.
Clips: Hey, there's an ocean in between. That counts. That was the Boon2 Summit.
Clips: But I think it was Scale and Southwest Linux Fest and, I don't know,
Clips: all over the country, talking about what we've been building with Cosmic.
Clips: And so this time I got to go all the way around, it's been a year,
Clips: and go back to the place where we started.
Clips: So how it changed throughout the year, I've talked about here's what Cosmic
Clips: is, here are the features, here's what makes it unique,
Clips: tiling and floating and stacks and how it's composable and modular and you can
Clips: build it to create experiences, all those kind of things.
Clips: I've talked about it for a year. And so this time we talked about,
Clips: okay, well, there's kind of a synopsis where, you know, what we've done last
Clips: year, the big things that we landed in the last alpha.
Clips: And I changed the focus to our app suite. Oh. Because the applications for Cosmic
Clips: have really matured into these awesome, awesome apps, like the file browser,
Clips: the Cosmic Store, add text editor.
Clips: Settings are all filled out. They're everything you expect for a desktop now.
Clips: So that's how the presentation changed.
Clips: Yeah, I've been following it, testing out the alphas here and there.
Clips: And it feels like, like you were saying, the applications around it,
Clips: I saw files got some nice improvements to the last few releases in this release
Clips: as well Accessibility continues to get iterated on high contrast mode and whatnot But we had one question.
Clips: Yeah, um, we noticed there was some work Optimizing was it window resizing application resizing?
Clips: Yeah, we wanted we wanted to know how did that come about? Did someone complain?
Clips: Did you notice on your own system things could just be snappy?
Clips: What's the story? In the release notes, it says, fixed high CPU usage when resizing application windows.
Clips: And Wes and I are just sitting here thinking, how do you even notice that?
Clips: Is there a micro benchmark in place? Was somebody just staring at system monitor
Clips: and they were resizing windows? How did this come about?
Clips: I think this is a fantastic question because it illustrates how far we've come
Clips: because the stuff people find is like crazy little corner weird things.
Clips: So I think this was a guy...
Clips: who was testing Cosmic, grabbing the corner of a window, and flipping it back
Clips: and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, while he was watching
Clips: System Monitor. Why? I have no idea.
Clips: That's how he uses the desktop, you know? This is how we find,
Clips: like, the ex-Evon or things like that, right? Some of us type LS.
Clips: It does a habit in the terminal. Some people drag the corner.
Clips: Yeah, and by doing that over and over again, you can see the CPU usage increase
Clips: because of how often we're redrawing.
Clips: And so we optimized that in Cosmic Conf to clear up that issue.
Clips: but that's the kind of stuff we're at now.
Clips: We've done, like, the big offenders for optimization have been pretty much resolved.
Clips: Now we've got some smaller ones. We still want to, you know,
Clips: make it faster and snappier and more efficient, but for the most part,
Clips: we're getting kind of weird stuff.
Clips: Yeah, or in polish, like now being able to drag the workspaces around kind of
Clips: dynamically or pin them, too, that's a really nice feature.
Clips: So if you clear out all the applications on a workspace and you don't want it
Clips: to disappear on you, you can pin it now and have that workspace remain persistent.
Clips: Yeah, I like it because I think static workspaces are an important feature to have.
Clips: But we wanted to try something new that was a bit more flexible,
Clips: where the settings are also accessible to the user in the view that they're looking at.
Clips: So as you open workspaces, if you hover over workspace, you can click the pin
Clips: button, and that workspace, regardless of whether it has a window on or not, will stay there.
Clips: If you unpin a workspace in between two and you remove the applications from it, it'll go away.
Clips: So it makes it really easy to have as many as you'd like and it also has the
Clips: flexibility of Dynamic workspace at the end, so you're not actually trapped
Clips: into four Let's say you pin.
Clips: Let's say you pin three and you have your fourth workspace It's not pinned if
Clips: you put windows on that one It'll add another one after it for you so it has
Clips: more flexibility than just I want to be stuck on for I think I,
Clips: I don't know if we can make everyone happy, but I think it's going to be an
Clips: easier feature for most people to use.
Clips: And hopefully we don't offend too many people that really want just for it. We'll see.
Clips: So I noticed, you know, when you're out and about these days,
Clips: because when I saw you at scale, you're really cosmic forward as a company. You're really there.
Clips: Even the booth branding was very cosmic forward.
Clips: How is the hardware business going? I imagine it's tricky times,
Clips: but is business still doing okay?
Clips: It's been, it has, tariffs are tricky for everyone.
Clips: Right, I have to figure, yeah. Yeah, our industry is obviously affected by the tariffs.
Clips: The 5,000 NVIDIA GPUs were coming out right before the tariffs hit.
Clips: And the prices when they were coming out were actually pretty good.
Clips: I thought for the first time, okay, they're not raking us over the coals with
Clips: the NVIDIA GPUs right now.
Clips: The price accelerated quite a bit over the last few years, but I thought,
Clips: okay, this looks pretty good.
Clips: and we had some of our vendors like PNY. We get our 5090s from PNY, 5080s from PNY.
Clips: And they said, okay, we're going to have them in April. They said,
Clips: all right, we're going to have them for you by the end of April.
Clips: We're good. We're solid. Here's pricing and everything.
Clips: And we said, okay, all right, we're going to offer these to our customers so
Clips: they can preorder, and then we'll get them by the end of April and ship them.
Clips: Well, Liberation Day happened, and they said, We're not going to deliver those
Clips: GPUs. And by the way, we can't give you that price.
Clips: And so... There goes all your planning, huh? So you don't know price or date
Clips: at that point? At that point, we didn't know price or date.
Clips: But we honored our... Now we do. We've got new pricing. It was more expensive than it was. I...
Clips: There's a story that was told to me that I don't really like where it's going,
Clips: but it's that computing is going to become more selective,
Clips: which is kind of the opposite of what I hope for as a person that thinks computer
Clips: science is really important.
Clips: Things are getting more expensive. These GPUs have cost like three grand for a CPU, for a GPU.
Clips: It was $2,400 before. Or it's not a trend that I'm very excited about for society.
Clips: It used to be you'd go finance your computer because it was,
Clips: your computer cost six, in today's dollars, maybe it was 10 grand or something.
Clips: And so you pay for it over a year. But not everybody had a computer.
Clips: Now everybody has a computer.
Clips: Are we turning to the times when not everyone could have the latest things?
Clips: I don't like it. You're choosing between the used car or part of a used car
Clips: and your NVIDIA GPU. I mean, it just really seems like it just sort of forces
Clips: people to use services, you know.
Clips: So if you can't afford a GPU, you're going to use a cloud service.
Clips: And all the downsides that come with that, I suppose, like data collection and whatnot.
Clips: Yeah, maybe it swings the other way. You know, we see both AMD and Intel integrating
Clips: neural processors like Apple did with their M series.
Clips: Maybe those become more accessible and can do some of those tasks.
Clips: Right. One would hope. Yeah, yeah. I fear about that, too, because I've essentially
Clips: been priced out of the GPU market, and I would love to play with this local AI stuff.
Clips: So, you know, we're talking like maybe we get one GPU for Jupyter Broadcast,
Clips: and we put it in a shared system, and we all use that one GPU instead of just
Clips: each workstation getting a GPU or something like that, which you would have
Clips: done a couple of years ago. Yeah.
Clips: Yeah, that is tricky. All that being said, especially our desktops,
Clips: another thing happened during this, we kind of saw the writing on the wall,
Clips: that it's somewhat bipartisan,
Clips: that competing with China is, you know, it's not just a Republican,
Clips: just a Democrat thing, it seems to be bipartisan, so we saw that writing on the wall, I'm sorry.
Clips: We had to accelerate this, though. Our laptops were being manufactured by Odium in China.
Clips: But, of course, tariffs of 145% make them impossible.
Clips: And so we shifted our manufacturing in the first quarter to Taiwan.
Clips: And in doing that, we were able to reduce the tariffs and kind of get ourselves
Clips: out of the way of that political battle that we aren't really,
Clips: that's their thing to fight. Our thing is open source.
Clips: You're trying to make open source hardware. That's what we care about. So that's okay.
Clips: So we were able to shift our manufacturing there. That doesn't sound like a
Clips: small thing to do. It was considerable.
Clips: And the cost and effort, and then we didn't have, and then that meant a longer
Clips: gap between when the new laptops came out. Right.
Clips: So now things are, I'm seeing it both with NVIDIA 5000 series.
Clips: it's starting to smooth out supply and it's starting
Clips: to smooth out um i'm starting to see
Clips: it with uh and with our laptops too that supply is starting to smooth out so
Clips: um that's good a few more weeks and uh yeah a couple more weeks a few more weeks
Clips: and we're going to be back to uh back to full strength that's good to hear um
Clips: so you mentioned you've been traveling a lot you've done a lot of these events um.
Clips: I don't remember you bringing the family to many of them. Is that something
Clips: you're doing more these days, sort of a work-life balance, an opportunity kind of thing?
Clips: What's your thoughts there as somebody who also travels a lot and does a lot of things?
Clips: I'm just curious what you think and how it's working.
Clips: Yeah, well, for this one, my kids are on spring break.
Clips: Spring break is very different. I live up in the mountains and I buy a ski resort.
Clips: And so it's winter for like six or seven months a year.
Clips: So our spring break is much later than most places.
Clips: The cool thing about that is it's really cheap to go Disney.
Clips: There's nobody there. So we're on the shoulders, you know.
Clips: But in this case, LinuxFest Northwest just happened to be on their spring break,
Clips: so I got to bring them with me. Spent a couple days in Seattle, come up here.
Clips: And I love bringing, if you have the opportunity to take your kids while you're
Clips: doing a presentation or do a talk or something like that, I like bringing them.
Clips: One talk I did in Boulder, my son came up and, well, he asked if he could demo.
Clips: Huh. Amazing. Well, first he asked me a lot of hard questions.
Clips: I'm like, come on, son. You're supposed to be my inside man here.
Clips: Yeah, what's going on here?
Clips: And then, yes, then I was showing him the theming and cosmic.
Clips: He's like, can I do a theme? And then he came up and did this canary yellow
Clips: blue theme. And it was great.
Clips: He went to Self with me, Southeast Linux Fest.
Clips: And we went to a baseball game out there. And he watched the presentation,
Clips: got to be part of the community and see it.
Clips: So every chance I have between the family, we do.
Clips: And I think it helps them. It makes it kind of real, too. Because a lot of the
Clips: technology stuff is sort of more theoretical and discussed, and it's online.
Clips: So you bring it into the real life, and it's like, oh, I get a little bit better
Clips: picture of what Dad does. Yeah.
Clips: Well, Carl, thank you for taking the time to come and chat with us.
Clips: It's always good to catch up with you. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Clips: Appreciate it. Yeah, have a good fest.
Brent: Well, it turns out, even though we're doing crazy things, traveling around,
Brent: moving, like, I don't know, the whole studio to a different location and streaming
Brent: from a different city, City.
Brent: Well, the boosts still keep coming in, and we have some ballers this week.
Chris: Ooh, and it looks like our baller booster, I think for the first time, is Mr. Turd Ferguson.
Chris: Who comes in with 37,222 sats?
Wes: It's almost ducks, but something else in there.
Chris: Too.
Wes: Yeah, maybe like the eagle duck.
Chris: A little extra turd spin on it. It was great meeting you guys in person.
Chris: Brent is much more handsome than he sounds on air.
Brent: And I sound very handsome.
Chris: I would kind of think you do. So I think that means, does that just mean we're uggos?
Wes: I think so, yeah. Did turd even say hi to us?
Chris: No.
Wes: We didn't get the name.
Brent: You guys had to go to the fest to see people.
Chris: I think you missed that part.
Wes: That's our bad.
Chris: And then Turd follows up, I meant to ask you guys, if NixOS and the Forks disappeared,
Chris: what distro would you switch to as a daily driver?
Brent: Oh, man.
Wes: So this is, I assume, like Forks means like geeks and stuff, right?
Chris: I think so.
Wes: Similar enough.
Chris: I think for the sake of this, we just write those all off.
Wes: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.
Chris: I feel like my honest answer would be Fedora, because I'm actually running Fedora on this laptop.
Brent: You're already doing it.
Chris: It seems like that would be a pretty good one.
Wes: Hey, we're both doing Plasma Nix OS over here. I don't know what you brought to it.
Chris: I know. Well, you know, somebody, I don't know who, Wes, convinced me I should
Chris: try Asahi Fedora on this thing. I just couldn't remember who that was.
Wes: Okay, so you're in the Fedora camp.
Chris: I think I'm going to go to the Fedora camp.
Wes: Especially because you're a GNOME guy now, apparently.
Chris: I mean, Arch has an appeal. I was very happy with Arch for many years.
Chris: But here I am, and this has been, I think, the same install since Fedora 40,
Chris: and I'm now on Fedora 42, and it's Asahi Fedora. at that so i've done three
Chris: release upgrades now on this.
Wes: Same you're committed yeah.
Chris: And it's been working really well so i think i'd have to go with that.
Wes: That makes sense yeah i'm i was debating you know
Wes: just in my head right now arch makes sense arch is what
Wes: i was kind of on before i mean a whole bunch of things right for the
Wes: show but it has that similar you got
Wes: lots of fresh updates right pretty much can install whatever you
Wes: want it doesn't have a lot of the nix magic but you
Wes: know pac-man is simple you've got the
Wes: aor and package builds and you can
Wes: pretty much make it work and it has it kind of shares again that
Wes: what nix has i think which is like a community of hackers
Wes: who figure those things out right they're like taking apart the deb file to
Wes: turn it into a aur package but yeah that's true part of me wonders probably
Wes: right like because i know arch and i want to learn new stuff i'd probably have
Wes: to be playing with something bootsy right it'd Probably be like a bluefin something.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: I think that might be it.
Chris: Bluefin would be interesting. They should make Bluefin a Sahi edition.
Chris: What about you? Is the arch pole strong?
Chris: Would you go back to your arch lover? Would you go back to Seuss?
Brent: Been there, done that.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Been there, done that. I think my curiosity with these questions gets me in
Brent: trouble. Because I always wanted like, oh, I got to try that new thing over there.
Wes: I don't have much experience with it. Do you remember how overdue he is for his Gentoo challenge?
Chris: Oh, my goodness.
Brent: I was hoping that wouldn't come up.
Chris: Oh, no.
Brent: Wait, this says I get to choose.
Brent: I think I would want to dip my toe into some image-based Linux distributions.
Brent: I don't have very much experience with those.
Brent: Some people I know have been telling me it's super great. I would imagine there
Brent: are some problems you can't predict until you get into it.
Brent: But I'm not too sure which version I would try, so I would be open to some suggestions.
Chris: Does anybody else, maybe show of hands, do you guys have a backup distro in
Chris: your mind? Like if you ever had to leave your distro, is this something you think about?
Wes: You know, they finally canceled Debian forever.
Chris: You do? A couple of you do? Only a couple of you, huh? Okay.
Chris: I think Turd's got me thinking about this now, and I'm wondering if I...
Chris: I don't know about my Fedora answer.
Chris: I'm curious with the listeners at home, what your backup distro is and what your primary distro is.
Wes: And you're just not saying Linux Mint because you're in Paris?
Chris: I don't get it. It works great. It works really good.
Chris: Thank you. Thank you, Turd. It was good seeing you. Well, I suppose. I didn't get to it.
Brent: Vicariously.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Brent's hogging all the Turd. The Doodabide boosts in with 22,222 sets.
Wes: Live boost? Oh, wow.
Chris: Heyo, thank you for the live boost.
Wes: That means our live stream must actually be working today, which I wasn't entirely sure about.
Chris: I think so.
Wes: Thank you, dude.
Chris: Yeah, I appreciate it, dude.
Brent: We also have a boost here from Rod Palmer Hoddle, which that's the first time
Brent: I recognize them here, so maybe a first-time booster.
Brent: That's for 5,000 sets.
Chris: Hey. Hashtag 40 hours of podcast a week. That's what happens. And that is.
Wes: Oh, I thought that was like a code for some sort of like oil specification.
Chris: You guys are not listening to enough podcasts.
Brent: Clearly.
Chris: Because if you were listening to enough podcasts, you would know what hashtag 40 HPW means.
Wes: That's full-time podcast listening.
Chris: I know. And I'm doing it while I'm doing shows. So catch up, boys. Catch up.
Chris: You're not doing it right if you're not doing 40 hours of podcast.
Chris: What are you doing? Watching YouTube? I hope not.
Wes: No. Tiny's not at all.
Chris: No, I hope not. We also got a boost from Uncle Joe MQ.
Chris: He came in with 5,000 sats, says thanks for all your shows. First time boost,
Chris: long time listener, and he's got a postal code here, Wes.
Wes: Did I bring the map? Did I leave it at home?
Brent: Notice it's called a postal code here, not one of those zip things.
Chris: You want to try the digital map, Wes? I mean, we've never done a digital map
Chris: before. We always have a physical map, but I think we should try it.
Chris: I'm a little nervous, Wes. See if you can find it on your digital map there,
Chris: okay? It still makes map noises.
Wes: It does, yeah. Well, I programmed those in.
Chris: Where are you keeping that?
Wes: It's in my back pocket. What do you think?
Chris: Okay. All right. All right, so the zip code is 97200.
Wes: Well, it's not a zip code, it would have seemed.
Brent: They suggested right here that it's not a zip code.
Wes: Yeah, postal code. Okay, and we've got a little clue, right?
Chris: What's the difference between a zip code and a postal code?
Wes: Well, one is U.S. only, and one is maybe a generic term for...
Chris: Sounds like tomato, tomato, pop, soda. I mean, it doesn't seem like it's that
Chris: big of a difference. I'll tell you what. And he gave you a little hint here.
Wes: See, the thing is...
Chris: Yeah. Are you effing looking it up right now on what it means?
Wes: Well, no, I just mean, you know, there's separate databases.
Wes: They haven't put this on the blockchain yet, Chris. So, you know,
Wes: like I have to go to separate systems.
Wes: Each one maintains their own proprietary protocol for postal code lookups that
Wes: the map has to do analog interface to.
Chris: I know, I know.
Wes: But this would appear to be postal code 97200 corresponds to Fort de France,
Wes: capital city of Martinique.
Chris: Really?
Brent: Wow.
Chris: You know what? He did say, he did hint it would be a French-speaking area.
Wes: Yeah, on a Caribbean island.
Brent: I think that's the first time we hear from a listener from Martinique.
Wes: I think Martinique meetup. That's got to be on the list.
Chris: That should be a thing. Thank you, Uncle Joe.
Wes: Let us know if we got it right. Zack Attack attacks us with 5,432 sats.
Wes: I actually took my laptop to the latest version of Gnome with Bluefin.
Chris: Hey-oh, speaking.
Wes: I do like Gnome, and I think it actually has some advantages over Plasma,
Wes: with the exception of, for some reason, the way they handle touchpads is just strange.
Chris: Oh, really?
Wes: I'd like to be able to toggle it on and off with a keyboard shortcut.
Wes: Yes. Maybe have the touchpad turn off when a mouse is plugged in.
Wes: I ended up writing a script that lets me toggle it on and off with a keyboard shortcut. In Plasma...
Chris: It's just an option.
Wes: That's just an option. Yeah, doesn't that really just sum up the whole thing?
Brent: It's true of so many things.
Chris: No, hold up. How is this not a GNOME extension, boys? How is this?
Chris: This has got to be a GNOME extension.
Wes: What? So you want to install some JavaScript that will break the next time I
Wes: upgrade my operating system?
Chris: Well, it might be superior to writing a Python script that the dude has to,
Chris: like, homebrew every time he wants to, you know.
Wes: So you like JavaScript more than Python now?
Chris: No. No, don't put me in that box.
Wes: Okay, okay, sorry.
Chris: Okay, so there is a couple of different...
Wes: Oh, yeah, okay. Hmm.
Chris: Trackpad, what would you search for? Because there's so many Gnome extensions.
Wes: Or maybe folks can boost in and tell us how they solved this.
Chris: Okay, what if he pivoted and he went to something that just does mouse pointers,
Chris: like mouse trails in Windows 3.1, and just was happy with it? That's what I would do.
Wes: Maybe some sort of UDEV rule detects the mouse being plugged in and then kills the touchpad?
Chris: As long as it turns on mouse trails. I'm happy.
Chris: All right, thank you, and good luck. Let us know how it goes,
Chris: ZackTack, with your custom solution. but you're right, it is nice to be able to just do it in plasma.
Brent: We've got a boost here from Bravo, 5,555 sats.
Brent: Hey, Jordan Bravo here. You mentioned that installed Flatpak apps would be erased
Brent: when doing a Fedora reinstall.
Chris: Right, the new feature in Fedora 32.
Wes: Right, the whole refresh your thing. You want to just, yeah, OK.
Brent: Well, that's probably because you were installing them system-wide.
Brent: Try installing Flatpak apps with the dash dash user flag, which installs them
Brent: in the home directory and shouldn't be affected by that reinstall process.
Wes: Right, because as Neil was telling us, right, it uses ButterFS subvolume,
Wes: so it and just sort of roll back to the fresh state.
Wes: So, yeah, you lose it if it's on that partition or that volume,
Wes: but you've got it in your home.
Chris: Jordan Bravo coming in with a big brain solution there.
Wes: I don't know if I've ever actually used the dash dash user flag.
Chris: I've never installed the Flatpak as dash dash user, ever.
Wes: But it seems like a great option.
Chris: Why not?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: It might as well. I mean, I don't have anybody else log into my system.
Brent: Maybe it should be the default.
Chris: Maybe it should be the default.
Wes: There's probably some limitations that we're not aware of.
Chris: Like if you install it by Discover or by GNOME software, how is it not the default? I don't know.
Wes: Probably some janky set UID somewhere.
Chris: Yeah, I think so. That's a good idea. Thank you, Jordan. Pod bun comes in with
Chris: a row of ducks. That's 2,222 sets.
Chris: Loved the episode. The clips of you guys gaming were great. I am for more gaming
Chris: content. I got Trimu. Probably not it.
Brent: Trimu.
Chris: Thank you. A couple of months ago, and I love it. No barriers to gaming.
Chris: Just straight into my ROMs. I ended up wiping them to move over my favorite ones.
Chris: That's kind of what I've been thinking about doing. I love that I can just pop
Chris: it in my bag and I don't have to worry about running down my phone to play retro games yeah.
Wes: Yeah try Mew maybe I don't know.
Chris: Yeah it looks like a Switch smart.
Wes: Pro 128 gig handheld game console with preloaded games $99.99 it says here.
Chris: Well that's cooler than what I got it.
Wes: Does yeah it's got joysticks.
Chris: And it's like the same price it kind of looks like a PSP yeah it does look more
Chris: like a PSP than a Switch and there's.
Brent: No like turtle shell or whatever that thing was.
Chris: Soccer ball that is yeah the stupid soccer ball they got Pikachu.
Wes: Stickers that come with it if you want.
Chris: Okay, so what's this thing called again?
Wes: T-R-I-M-U-I.
Chris: The Trimui Smart Pro. Damn, that actually looks really slick.
Chris: I'm a little bit jealous there.
Brent: You've been doing it wrong this whole time.
Wes: Yeah, PowerVR, all-winner A113+, Type-C.
Wes: It's got a mood LED, RGB, double joystick, mood light.
Chris: That's way better than a soccer ball.
Wes: The real question. Will I talk to Home Assistant, though? If not, I'm not buying it.
Chris: Well, there's a will, there's a way.
Brent: I have an observation. from the last two boosts. It seems our audience is much smarter than we are.
Chris: Yeah, they big-brained us again twice in a row. I agree.
Wes: Bug-Eyed Stormtrooper boosts in with 5,000 cents.
Wes: I enjoyed the gaming episode, but it does seem just a bit out of place on Linux Unplugged.
Wes: So maybe, should it have been a Jupyter Extra?
Chris: Never!
Wes: Anyway, keep on keeping on.
Chris: No, maybe. Actually, I think we'll put it in the launch if we ever do it again.
Chris: I think that's what the consensus has been.
Wes: Yeah, okay. Launches have a sort of, you know, there's like a pun somewhere
Wes: in there around launching the game.
Chris: Every four or five years, you know, we get the itch.
Wes: To do a little game?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Just to prove that our Linux computers can still do it.
Chris: Yeah, that's part of it. Can we actually make it happen?
Wes: It also feels like one of those things, right, where it's just so long,
Wes: it was a thing we couldn't hardly even talk about. Or if we did,
Wes: it was to talk about it in an embarrassed way.
Wes: Because it's like, oh, yeah, we all agreed not to talk about it because it doesn't
Wes: work very well. Or we have a secret Windows PC.
Chris: It's also like a low-key way to just like demo a couple of cool stacks on Linux
Chris: now. True. In a way. Yeah. But I agree.
Chris: Thank you, Bug-Eyed. Nice to hear from you.
Brent: We have a boost here from OtterBrain, 5,000 SAT, That's simply saying,
Brent: thanks for that coverage.
Chris: Hmm. Thank you, Otterbrain. Appreciate it. Odyssey Westra, who's also here at
Chris: LinuxFest Northwest, sent in a raw docs.
Chris: Live meep.
Brent: Are we calling them meeps now? I kind of like it.
Chris: I think meep is a good term. He's not here to claim it, though.
Brent: No, that's true.
Chris: It's okay. We did see him last night at dinner.
Wes: He was here earlier. I think probably dipped out for another talk.
Chris: Maybe another live meep.
Wes: Yeah, I think you're right about that.
Chris: You never know. Thank you, everybody, who boosts into the show and supports
Chris: episodes. directly by boosting. This is episode 612, which is a cool number, 612.
Wes: I'll just pull up, because we do it sometimes. We got 300 stats from Galactic
Wes: Flux, because I like that name, and it's just a good message. B-O-O-S-T.
Chris: Love it. Thank you, everybody. Also, who streams those sats,
Chris: 24 of you collectively. Kind of a low amount.
Chris: I think one of our nodes might have been down. Something's weird here,
Chris: boys. Only 17,473 sats on the stream.
Wes: Did people stop listening to this? Did we not publish last week?
Chris: That might have been it. Maybe we forgot to publish. Let's publish this one.
Wes: Okay.
Chris: Okay. All right. Combined, we have a total of 107,648 sats for this episode,
Chris: and we appreciate everybody who supports the show.
Chris: So you can do it too with something like Fountain FM or you can do it directly
Chris: with lots of apps over at podcastapps.com.
Chris: Something Wes is going to be talking about, some of this a little bit.
Chris: But there's self-hosted options, there's hosted options, there's all kinds of
Chris: ways to support the show directly and get your message read on the air.
Chris: We'll have links in the show notes to make it extra easy.
Chris: And thank you to our members as well. We really appreciate you.
Chris: okay now the pick this week
Chris: 80 of the reason we picked it is because
Chris: of the name but it is a really good pick okay but i'm just being totally transparent
Chris: with everybody this week our pick of the week is sausage sausage is a terminal
Chris: word forming game written in bash and it's under the Mozilla Public License version 2.
Chris: And I don't know if you guys noticed, but it just had a release seven hours ago.
Wes: Yeah, it's actively developed.
Brent: They noticed, like, we went to see the film.
Chris: Yeah, so Sausage is a terminal word-forming game written in Bash.
Chris: It actually has a nice little UI.
Chris: Can you turn your screen around, Brent? Sure. It looks really kind of fun.
Wes: You would not think it was written in Bash, actually.
Chris: No.
Wes: I know, I mean, friends of the
Wes: show have made some pretty incredible Bash games, and people do it, but...
Chris: It looks surprisingly good for
Chris: something in your terminal. It's really a clean-looking word puzzle game.
Wes: And I guess the idea is you kind of have to make words out of adjacent letters in this grid.
Chris: Oh, no.
Wes: But it has, like, VI key bindings. It computes statistics while you run.
Wes: You can also kind of reshuffle things. You can kind of get basic commands to go back or try again.
Wes: I guess it's based off of a game called Bookworm.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Look at this. Isn't that good 2003 energy?
Chris: Mm-hmm. On PC or Mac, CD-ROM available.
Wes: Yeah, that's right.
Chris: Oh, from PopCap Games.
Wes: Yeah, PopCap Games. So now we've got a Mozilla public licensed version that
Wes: you don't even have to install.
Wes: I mean, there is for some reason an install script.
Chris: Really?
Wes: What does it actually install? I don't know.
Chris: A shell script?
Wes: Because it's just a bash file.
Chris: Yeah, I'm curious to know what it actually installs. Okay, we're looking at
Chris: it right now. It looks like it moves it, makes it executable.
Wes: Okay, it just stashes a whole bunch of it. It's got like dictionary, it's got rules.
Chris: Yeah and then it's.
Brent: Got a preferred editor there.
Chris: And we have to trash this what is that preferred editor there west what does
Chris: it say there in that script i think it says nano yeah it says nano west that
Chris: says nano i hate that i gotta.
Wes: Fork it i gotta fork.
Chris: It this is a great pick i am 100 behind sausage now as a little tepidace as
Chris: a phrase i'm like i don't know it's a little great name but no now i'm loving
Chris: it check out sausage we'll have it linked in the show notes.
Brent: I have a tiny side pick.
Chris: For sausage you got an extra yeah well.
Brent: Every time i we run into the word sausage in a place that you don't expect it
Brent: to be i think of a youtube channel that wes has introduced to us a few times
Brent: wes can you give us a sense of what i'm talking about just check.
Wes: Out ordinary sausage he's uh i don't know let's say food alchemist who's turned,
Wes: Well, let's say he's managed to turn water into a sausage, as well as,
Wes: what, scorpions, several types of liquor, really almost anything except,
Wes: you know, regular pork, although that too.
Wes: So, yeah, check out Ordinary Sausage if you like culinary madness.
Chris: Oh, my God. You're welcome. That's a wild side pick, but I do kind of love it.
Chris: I'm just trying to figure out how he turns water into sausage.
Brent: Oh, you got to see it.
Wes: It's kind of great. You know how YouTube channels can develop their own lore?
Wes: And so there's sort of the, in the lore for that channel, there's the pre-water
Wes: sausage days and the post-water sausage days.
Wes: Because the theory is it sort of broke his brain. And then the channel really took a turn.
Chris: Sort of like when the Cottonwood got into the studio.
Wes: That's right, yeah.
Chris: Before Cottonwood.
Wes: It's never been the same.
Chris: It's never been the same after Cottonwood.
Wes: And the cat. Server runs so much better.
Chris: That is weirdly true.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. The cat smells the lock totally out, though.
Chris: All right. So links to everything we talked about in the show notes.
Chris: We want to hear your editors that we missed. And last but not least,
Chris: we are getting very close to home assistant season.
Chris: Both Wes and Brent are going to be deploying home assistants.
Chris: I may re-refurb on mine a little bit. Mine's about three years old right now.
Chris: So if we do something for theirs that I like a lot, I may end up redoing mine
Chris: or something. Mine's working fine.
Chris: So what I'm looking for is first-time home assistant setup tips.
Chris: So if you're listening out there, you've set up home assistant before,
Chris: and we can get some tips to the boys so that way it starts out right.
Chris: Also, we're looking for hardware recommendations for a mobile home assistant
Chris: in Brent's van because one of the very first projects before we fix the interior,
Chris: before we wash the bed, before we probably put new oil in it,
Chris: maybe just after we've gotten gas, we're installing a home assistant server in Brent's van.
Chris: And so I'd love some tips for something that could maybe run off of DC or mobile.
Chris: We're kind of thinking of Raspberry Pi, but maybe there's a better solution
Chris: out there. People could boost that and let us know too.
Wes: I'm curious as well, because having seen you over the past few years kind of
Wes: go down your route, and I remember you had a whole thing where one version of
Wes: integration, I don't remember if it was Zigbee or Z-Wave, things changed,
Wes: you'd architected it in one way.
Wes: So I'm curious if folks have, now that they've gone down the path,
Wes: what would they do differently to not get themselves painted into the corners
Wes: that they have in the setup they have now?
Chris: Yeah, let us know. Send it in, and we'll be talking about it very soon.
Chris: You can come in hot with your very own boost. Now, links to what we talked about
Chris: today They're at linuxunplugged.com slash 612.
Chris: Of course, you can also join us when we do the show live. Make it a Tuesday
Chris: on a Sunday, noon Pacific. Nope, 10 a.m. Pacific.
Chris: Jeez, still don't have it down. You know what you should do?
Chris: Don't listen to me. I don't know what I'm talking about. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com
Chris: slash calendar or get a podcasting 2.0 app.
Chris: It's just in there automatically. Why are you listening to me?
Chris: Why do you make me say it like this?
Chris: God, I mess it up every time.
Brent: Tuesdays, right?
Chris: Yeah, Tuesdays. Yeah, at 3 p.m. Yeah. All right.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Linux Unplugged
Chris: program. And we will see you right back here next Thursday.