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. Coming up on the show today, we'll cover the copy-fail vulnerability,
Chris: tearing through Linux distributions out there, plus Ubuntu 2604,
Chris: the Resolute Raccoon, is here, and John Seeger will dig into the details with us.
Chris: And then we'll round out the show with some great boosts and picks and a heck
Chris: of a lot more. So before we get into that, this is like three big shows in one.
Chris: We've got to bring in our virtual lug. time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hello, Chris. Hello, Brent.
Chris: Hello.
Brent: Hello, hello.
Chris: And shout out to everybody up there in the quiet listening and everybody on
Chris: the live stream. Pershing H.
Wes: We see you. You hear us.
Chris: Something like that. A version of that somewhere in there.
Wes: You boost? I don't know.
Chris: I don't know. Also, good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go check out Manage Nebula from Defined Networking.
Chris: It gives you a decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we just love.
Chris: And what I really like is the flexibility. You can build the network you want
Chris: and the way you actually want it, from maybe your home lab to a full enterprise setup.
Chris: And you have the option to run your own lighthouse nodes so you own the stack
Chris: end-to-end. But you don't have to start the hard way.
Chris: Define gives you a full managed experience, so that way you can get up and running
Chris: fast with speed, security, and resilience baked in from day one.
Chris: No big tech login required. Try it for free, 100 hosts, no credit card,
Chris: at defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: That is defined.net slash unplugged. You go over there, you support the Unplugged
Chris: program, defined.net slash unplugged. And a big thank you to the defined folks
Chris: over there and the fine, fine folks at Defined for sponsoring this here program.
Chris: Let's get right into it. Gentlemen, we have ourselves quite the vulnerability this week.
Chris: Copy fail, which is an unprivileged local attack that allows,
Chris: say, even just a generic Brent user with no admin rights to pop your box.
Wes: Yeah, that's not great.
Chris: No. And it turns out it's been baked into most Linux distros since 2017-ish. Is that right?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So that's a while and just about everything that's shipping right now.
Chris: And some distros are still working very hard to get it patched.
Chris: ours writes it's the quote most severe linux threat to the to surface in years
Chris: and it is catch it has caught the world flat-footed and my tongue what do you
Chris: think there wes pano what i want to get your take on this first because you've
Chris: actually been playing around with the exploit.
Wes: Yeah um it is worth noting right you do need some sort
Wes: of access right so you need you if you don't have a user account on
Wes: the box you need some other chain some other vulnerability maybe it's a
Wes: you know some kind of injection in a web app whatever
Wes: it is um but once you have that user access then
Wes: yeah pretty much any system because it's a kernel logic issue the
Wes: particular like the first poc that was released was
Wes: like a python 3 thing and sort of made some assumptions about like particular
Wes: set uid binaries like su uh but those are all particular implementation details
Wes: so it's important to realize that like the core thing is this is this kernel
Wes: flaw uh which we could get into because it's it's kind of fascinating because it,
Wes: As often is the case. Well, one, I guess we should note, it was an AI-assisted
Wes: finding, but began with insight from human researchers at Theore,
Wes: Taiyang Li, who's studying how the Linux crypto subsystem interacts with page
Wes: cache-backed data, and we'll get into that.
Wes: So there's a few layers. The first is the VFS layer. There's this call called
Wes: Splice that kind of lets you combine pipes and file descriptors.
Wes: So you can open a file for reading and then combine that with a pipe and then
Wes: pipe it into other things that you're using when you're calling kernel APIs.
Wes: And in particular, there's this AFALG API and it lets user space programs take
Wes: advantage of all the cryptographic stuff or a lot of the cryptographic stuff
Wes: that exists in the kernel, which is good, both because like you don't have to
Wes: reimplement it, but also the kernel has access to hardware stuff.
Wes: Like there's various reasons the kernel might be able to do it faster or more
Wes: securely or better than the random user space program that needs to handle encrypted data.
Wes: The problem is that in 2017, there was an in-place optimization made.
Wes: So basically to avoid allocating duplicate memory during decryption processes,
Wes: you have some encrypted data, you're calling the kernel to say,
Wes: hey, please decrypt this for me.
Wes: The kernel tries this in-place operation.
Wes: Basically, you need to pass the data into the kernel for what you want to decrypt.
Wes: And there's various parts.
Wes: There's like some of the cryptographic primitives, which is the actual encrypted
Wes: data, and there's the authentication tag.
Wes: and it builds this buffer that it's going to pass into the kernel and it copies
Wes: some of the first parts in there but it doesn't actually copy the tag instead
Wes: it basically passes a reference to the tag's memory at the end there instead
Wes: of like allocating new memory and putting the tag in there.
Wes: And unfortunately, later on in the cryptographic algorithms,
Wes: this spot, the RxSGL, the destination, is inherently treated as writable.
Wes: So in this stage, like kind of when you have the splice side of it,
Wes: it's all fine. It's like read-only. You're just kind of like splicing on this read-only reference.
Wes: And we'll get more into that. But it's really the problem where we did this
Wes: optimization in the mechanism that lets user space programs call into the kernel.
Wes: And then you need another piece, which is there's a particular encryption mechanism
Wes: for IPsec, auth and ESN for extended sequence numbers.
Wes: And basically it's these 64-bit
Wes: numbers that they need to do stuff and rearrange some of the bits for.
Wes: And it kind of cheats. It uses the caller's destination buffer,
Wes: which is the thing we were just talking about, as a temporary scratch space.
Brent: That's okay, though.
Wes: And specifically, it uses scatter, walk, map, and copy to write four bytes past
Wes: the end of the legitimate plain text data precisely at an offset.
Wes: So you kind of put this all together, and this is what the actual,
Wes: like, exploit does is...
Wes: The attacker, so you basically, you need some sort of file that you have read
Wes: access to. That's important. So you open that file for reading.
Chris: Which should just, I mean, that should be pretty easy. As long as you can get on the box.
Wes: Yeah, yeah. So there's some file that the user can read. We'll get into that.
Chris: But could that even be like a web server process? I mean, this is,
Chris: that's pretty generic. Okay.
Wes: Yeah, it doesn't need special permissions or anything.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Wes: So it basically opens that file, which loads it into the page cache,
Wes: right? which was the memory cache that sort of like you put things in so that
Wes: you don't have to go fetch them from disk all the time in the kernel.
Wes: And this ends up being system-wide, by the way.
Wes: And so it has that available, and then it makes this splice call to sort of
Wes: set up this pipe that gives it basically a memory reference to that data.
Wes: So the attacker aligns the splice offset so that what it is thinking is this
Wes: tag reference, right? It's trying to pass a tag into the crypto API.
Wes: That actually points exactly over where it's trying to write in whatever the
Wes: target is. So it opens, say, the SU binary, right, with this.
Wes: It opens it just for reading.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And then it kind of aligns things then so it passes a memory reference to wherever
Wes: it's trying to overwrite.
Wes: and then it calls into the crypto API, and then it just blindly changed that
Wes: page cache reference because the actual reference it gets is the page cache.
Wes: It's the page cache for the binary.
Wes: That's a key part of it, right? So it's like when it opens it for reading,
Wes: the kernel happily goes and reads it and then gives it a reference to the memory
Wes: that corresponds to the actual page cache entry.
Wes: So then when the crypto stuff happens, it just changes that tag thing,
Wes: which ends up being the page cache reference, onto the actual final buffer that it's going to be using.
Wes: And then the particular IPsec encryption algorithm does its byte shuffling stuff
Wes: and writes those four bytes, which are now attacker controlled,
Wes: past the normal sort of plain text stuff it's supposed to be using.
Wes: And then that, because it was aligned from our first thing with the splice,
Wes: then writes not to the file on disk, but it writes four bytes to whatever you
Wes: like in the page cache version of the file.
Wes: They have a very clever little payload. it's
Wes: like 158 bytes and people have been golfing this further but
Wes: it's basically a super clever tiny little minimal elf thing
Wes: that like all it really does is look so
Wes: instead of having to figure out like target a particular binary
Wes: to patch in a particular way they just override it from the
Wes: start with a super minimal little tiny custom binary it's clever
Wes: to be like as position independent as can be and like work is in
Wes: many places but it basically just it calls set uid zero to like really sort
Wes: of sink in and like make sure it has full root permissions it's already running
Wes: here in like a context of a set uid binary but like it makes sure that's synced
Wes: to all the kernels places and then it just has like a nice clever way to call
Wes: slash bin slash sh but it could do anything here that you wanted this was just
Wes: a quick way to spawn a root shell.
Wes: Now, what's interesting is, like, if you just do it on, say,
Wes: like, an affected Ubuntu instance, it'll just work.
Wes: But the script that was first sort of put out there, hard-coded user bin SU.
Wes: So, like, on a NixOS app, when I was trying to play with it,
Wes: at first that didn't work just for the reason that that's not the right path
Wes: for where SU lives on a Nix system.
Wes: But then also, it turns out that on NixOS, a lot of SUID binaries,
Wes: or the wrappers for them, are configured as execute only.
Wes: So you don't actually have read permissions. So that's another way it could
Wes: fail. And you could think that you're not actually impacted,
Wes: but those are all just implementation details because you could also,
Wes: like, there are a bunch of stuff that you kind of have to be able to read,
Wes: like shared libraries, libc, pamunix.
Wes: You could also target something like etsypassword, say, right?
Wes: There's like a lot of stuff that you could overwrite that you have to have read
Wes: access to to be able to do.
Wes: And then what's so tricky about this, right, is then it's poisoned the page cache.
Wes: but the kernel in all of this stuff that's happening it never there's like an
Wes: error but it never sort of undoes anything and it never then marks that as dirty
Wes: so it doesn't know that it needs to be re-read like anything's wrong and so,
Wes: If you go try to hash it, the hash will go check the, like the hash thing command
Wes: will actually go get the bytes on disk and it'll be fine.
Wes: But if you make an exec call, like the exeve call in the system call,
Wes: the kernel is just going to use the page cache.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: That's the whole thing. That's the point.
Chris: Oh, man.
Wes: And you're not checking that. Right. And so you have to be much more clever
Wes: around how to detect it because you can't just like do the hash.
Wes: Now, it does mean it's not persistent because if you reboot,
Wes: then the page cache is gone. So that's a small blessing here.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: But it's, yeah, it's widespread, kind of nasty. It does need some chaining in a lot of cases, but...
Chris: Containerization doesn't solve it because it's still using these same primitives.
Chris: It does seem like systems that
Chris: have strict SE Linux and perhaps AppArmor profiles might be better off.
Chris: Or like you said, if you have it where execute is only and read isn't an option.
Chris: So key takeaways are this is a bad one. And it's been on machines for a while.
Chris: And we're going to have a lot of patching to do.
Chris: and the bug was found by an AI-assisted coding analysis tool in roughly an hour.
Chris: So expect the cadence of deep kernel disclosures to pick up.
Wes: Yeah, I guess folks at the xint.io and they've got some various setups and harnesses
Wes: to kind of go poke around.
Wes: So they had some hypotheses, partly from human researchers, exploring various
Wes: places that might have bugs and then I guess they threw some AI at it.
Wes: It turned up a bunch of stuff and this is what it rated as the highest severity issue.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So 2604, not currently affected?
Wes: No, I believe not.
Chris: That's good. And, of course, the Debian security channel has a patch.
Chris: Alma Linux has it patched.
Chris: So the patch is getting out there. NixOS has something, even though,
Chris: like you said, your box wasn't. But all the big distros are going to get it
Chris: affected. There is a way people can tell, right?
Chris: If they just look at their kernel version, if they have, well,
Chris: basically anything since 2017.
Wes: And you can also, like, there are very safe, like, little test exploits you can run.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: You can also check, like, you do need some of these modules.
Wes: Like, some kernels have them built in.
Wes: Some are as, like, loadable modules.
Wes: So you could sort of remove them and prevent them from being loaded.
Wes: So there's various mitigations per distro, sort of, depending on how your kernel is set up.
Chris: I think we're going to have to, as a community, look at this as an opportunity,
Chris: not as a burden, even though it is absolutely going to be a massive workload.
Chris: But as a community, we have always championed the idea that more eyes means shallower bugs.
Chris: And now we are getting dramatically more eyes. We are getting exponentially more eyes.
Brent: More AIs means less shallow bugs.
Chris: More AIs means, yeah, exactly. And the upshot is our software will get more secure.
Wes: Yeah, so when they fixed this, they didn't actually fix the IPsec part where
Wes: it was kind of cheating and using that little scratch part. They fixed the in-place
Wes: optimization from 2017 so that it never passes this reference anymore.
Wes: So there's no longer some sort of coupling between the input and output and
Wes: reusing some of those stuff.
Wes: And the part that's so funny is in the commit message, they note there's actually
Wes: no benefit in operating in-place in this way since the source and destination
Wes: come from different mappings.
Wes: So we didn't even really need to be doing this.
Brent: I have a question for you, Wes. It's more of maybe your opinion.
Brent: Given this has come out now and is somewhat obscure for the kernel,
Brent: any thoughts on, given the kernel's complexity, like how many of these little
Brent: things are just hiding in there?
Wes: That's a good question.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: It's hard to estimate.
Chris: And think about every library...
Chris: every service, every service on the internet that listens remotely.
Chris: But we probably have been needing to do this for a long time.
Chris: We probably should have had a lot more humans focused on this,
Chris: but we just weren't doing it.
Brent: It's a hard problem.
Wes: It is also right, like that where, you know, and maybe using the assistance
Wes: where you can, whatever, to try and up your posture and do things more by default.
Wes: Because like, if you do things like, you know, okay, fewer permissions on set
Wes: UID binaries, or you try to take as much advantage of all the hardening that
Wes: systemd services offers by default. so that it sees less of the system and has
Wes: less access to things, even read-only.
Wes: There are tools we have, and we need to grow better ones.
Wes: But I think it just means defense in depth will become even more important.
Chris: I do think when we see these, a lot of times, folks that have taken the time
Chris: to actually have a solid SE Linux setup and actually use it have been validated
Chris: over and over again that it's worth the effort because they end up protected
Chris: from these kinds of things.
Chris: I want to thank our members for supporting this here podcast.
Chris: It really has made quite the difference recently as we're very lean on the advertising
Chris: and we're trying to turn that around.
Chris: But in the meantime, the members and the boosters are really keeping us going.
Chris: If you sign up to you get quite the bootleg this week, we had a chance to go
Chris: to Valve and we tell that story in the bootleg.
Chris: So go to linuxunplugged.com slash membership and sign up.
Chris: You can get the bootleg edition or the ad-free edition, whichever fits your
Chris: schedule better because the bootleg is kind of long.
Chris: And, of course, you can support all the shows, including the launch,
Chris: This Week in Bitcoin, and more at jupyter.party, and you get special access
Chris: to all of them, including the bootleg for this here show.
Chris: You can also boost an episode with Fountain FM, and that gives a signal on what
Chris: you thought about that particular topic, how we did, the value, et cetera.
Chris: And it also goes to each one of us directly and to Editor Drew,
Chris: as well as the developer, and the podcast index.
Chris: So it's a nice way to kind of put it all around.
Wes: Support all the great things.
Chris: Mm-hmm. And it's nice, too, because it's all transparent. It's open source, free software stack.
Chris: And like I like to say, the contract is in the RSS feed, so you as an audience
Chris: get to see exactly where everything goes.
Chris: But we appreciate the memberships as our foundation and the boosts as our signal.
Chris: Well, this week, we had a chance to chat with John Seeger. He is the VP of Engineering
Chris: over at Canonical for Ubuntu.
Chris: And, of course, the big news is 2604 is out. And this is one of the LTS releases, the 11th LTS release.
Chris: Yeah, and this, as they often are, was a focus on stability.
Chris: But a few bits of innovation worked in there.
Chris: We have a couple of highlights in here, like TPM-backed full disk encryption.
Chris: Wayland's now the default.
Wes: Obviously, they're now like, they're shipped in the interim,
Wes: but now they're actually shipping some of that Rust stuff in the user land and
Wes: the core utils, which is exciting.
Chris: And something I want to chat with John about, too, is they've done that thing
Chris: they do in Ubuntu where they one-click something, kind of, and for now it's CUDA.
Wes: And Rock M. I don't hate on AMD.
Chris: No, I love Rock M. But it's just that there's so much demand out there,
Chris: and you combine it with new hardware.
Chris: It's just, that's a really nice thing, especially for an LTS release.
Chris: And then John also made posts recently about an AI strategy that they're taking
Chris: on at Canonical, which made a lot of news.
Chris: So I think that's something we could chat with him about as well.
Chris: So John is joining us on the Unplugged program.
Chris: We didn't scare him away last time. Returning to the show, John Seeger from
Chris: Canonical. John, welcome back to the Unplugged program.
Jon: Hello there, thanks for having me.
Chris: Hello and congratulations on the LTS release, which, rumor has it,
Chris: is also the first LTS under your watch.
Jon: That's right, yeah. So the questing release was my first kind of interim that
Jon: I had, I guess, a full cycle, and then this is the first LTS, yeah.
Chris: Okay, is it a little different this time? I mean, does it feel different?
Chris: being on the inside hit different john.
Jon: It uh i mean from the
Jon: perspective of like the release and planning and uh the whole
Jon: we do this sprint in london where the release team come along and we get everything
Jon: together it all felt kind of similar but just with a little bit more pressure
Jon: to you know it kind of has to fly a little bit quicker and be a bit less or
Jon: even more bug free i suppose than an interim but we also decelerate slightly
Jon: the pace of change and we we make the call slightly differently as we get close to the release date,
Jon: whether or not something's going to make it based on our view on whether it's
Jon: going to cause any instability or issues.
Jon: Whereas, you know, the early interims, we would maybe be a little bit more.
Chris: Risky so i i do hear that a lot but is there still something in the lts release
Chris: that is like the thing that you're excited about releasing do you like i'm sure
Chris: that happens with the interim releases where you're like this is the thing we're
Chris: really looking at but does that happen with an lts release or is it all old
Chris: by then you just it's all known.
Jon: And there's nothing new that we've never done in this release aside from the shipping rock m and cuda.
Chris: Oh part of canonical sure but.
Jon: Of course it is also the first time that everybody or 90% of our users will
Jon: get the Rust core utils and the Rust sudo.
Jon: And so as much as I'm confident in those changes, we've done testing,
Jon: we've had lots of feedback, there are going to be a whole bunch more people
Jon: getting that over the next few weeks.
Chris: Right. Now it's really getting out to a whole new group of users, the real base.
Wes: Yeah, I can kind of tell in some of your writing that there's obviously the
Wes: regular sort of professional pride in releasing a nice product and running a
Wes: good team and all that but it feels like you all get the you know just how much
Wes: of the internet and the cloud sort of is underpinned especially by these lts releases it's.
Jon: One of honestly one of the most exciting things about working on ubuntu in my
Jon: view i quite like that sort of sense of impending doom if you get it wrong uh keeps you sharp.
Wes: Yeah it means your work matters clearly okay.
Chris: Let's keep talking about the rest stuff for a minute because I saw a recent,
Chris: I think it was a post on the community discourse that,
Chris: I may be getting some of the details wrong, so John, so please fill in the details,
Chris: that you hired a third-party audit firm to go through some of the Rust core utils.
Chris: They found some stuff, and now you guys are working through bug fixing that.
Chris: Can you work me through, because obviously I'm a little vague on the details,
Chris: can you work me through that?
Jon: So when we first committed to doing this, our security team,
Jon: which is pretty large at this point, as you would imagine, were keen to take a look and double check.
Jon: They found a few issues themselves, and as a kind of abundance of caution,
Jon: we decided to fund a third-party security audit with a company called Zellic.
Jon: They found a bunch of stuff, fixed a bunch of stuff, worked with Sylvest,
Jon: who runs the Utils project.
Jon: We were pretty happy, but we thought we would go again, do another round of
Jon: security audit, and also get some assistance from Zellic on patching in some
Jon: cases. I found a bunch more stuff.
Jon: They were pretty great to work with. Sylvest, I have to say,
Jon: did a phenomenal job. I think we,
Jon: piled a lot on his plate. We gave some funding to the project and we tried to
Jon: be as careful as possible, but we found a lot of issues.
Jon: There was a lot of bug reports from our users, et cetera, and he handled it superbly.
Jon: And so where we've landed is we patched the vast majority of the vulnerabilities
Jon: that we found or the issues that we found.
Jon: There are three utilities which are still affected, which is CP, Move, and RM.
Jon: And so we chose not to make those the default in the LTS, just sort of out of
Jon: an abundance of caution. So this is a time of check, time of use error.
Jon: They're all linked to kind of the same problem and will get patched over the
Jon: coming weeks and we will then switch those utilities out for the next interim.
Wes: I wonder if it's, you mentioned that specific vulnerability.
Wes: I wonder if these rounds have been informative around sort of the things that
Wes: like the Rust improvements can address and the things that, you know,
Wes: still just need to be addressed via, you know, more traditional software techniques.
Jon: Right, that's it. Writing Rust code does not mean bug-free.
Jon: means a much lower likelihood of memory safety violations were used correctly,
Jon: and this is kind of proof of that.
Jon: Although not all of the issues we found were exclusive to the Rust versions.
Jon: We found issues in the GNU versions, and if you actually look at the latest
Jon: GNU Core Utils release, Sylvester's one of the most prolific contributors to that release.
Jon: So it's nice. There's nowhere near as much animosity as perhaps people might
Jon: suggest. It's quite collaborative. um the game here is not to discredit the
Jon: new core utils as if we find things that can benefit them that work goes upstream too.
Wes: So that's that's great i mean especially because right having having
Wes: two implementations is just all the better for the whole ecosystem it
Wes: did strike me too you touched on you know working upstream and just especially
Wes: with the the rust version just it's one thing to get funding and doing all the
Wes: support that y'all are offering which is wonderful but it's kind of another
Wes: to then i don't know implicitly be willing to accept some of your priorities
Wes: if in like an upstream way of you know being able to prioritize those things
Wes: and keep the working relationship.
Jon: And this was, and I'll be honest, it got tough a couple of times.
Jon: You know, there was a point midway through this cycle where I think we didn't
Jon: quite get that balance right or our communication wasn't perfect and we had
Jon: a bit of a shaky moment with Sylvester and we got on a call and we,
Jon: you know, made it better. We found a little bit more funding to help.
Jon: But it is hard. And this is why when we started this project,
Jon: before we ever announced it, we started with conversations for these projects
Jon: to say, we'd love to do this, but it could get kind of intense.
Jon: You know, what do you think? Like, is the project in a position to support this?
Jon: You know, how could we help? What funding, what support could we try and extend
Jon: where we have the resources to kind of make it as successful as possible and
Jon: also not bury the project?
Jon: It's no good for us to switch it in the LTS if the project then flames out and disappears. Sure.
Chris: Yeah. Okay. I know we've touched on this before, but somebody listening maybe
Chris: that hasn't heard our previous conversation, they've got to be asking themselves,
Chris: why go through the trouble? You've already got these great utils.
Chris: They've been around for 30 years. Why not just use those? John,
Chris: why are you going through all this trouble for this buggy software?
Jon: It is. There are a lot of answers to that question. So one is it's a bit of a statement of intent.
Jon: So I 90 some 90 percent of vulnerabilities in the software world are due to
Jon: memory safety violations. and so I think if we move to a language where that
Jon: becomes very difficult or impossible, that's great.
Jon: And you could argue that starting with the core utils maybe isn't the best target,
Jon: but starting with the core utils is kind of the statement in a sense.
Jon: There's also loads of them.
Jon: And I think it is a way of us getting more people engaged with open source development.
Jon: There's lots of new graduates who are learning Rust at university and think Rust is very exciting.
Jon: And we need to keep thinking about ways to keep people involved in open source
Jon: and having them learn or work in languages they're interested in with modern
Jon: tooling, with a vibrant community is one way.
Jon: There's the cynical angle, which
Jon: was kind of highlighted to me after we committed to it, if I'm honest.
Jon: The cynical angle is we get paid for fixing security vulnerabilities in code.
Jon: Like we, long-term support and security maintenance is how Canonical makes its money.
Jon: And one assumes that over the next 15 years, we will have to address fewer with
Jon: this change, though we bluntly have made quite a large upfront investment in
Jon: this. So I think it'll be a few years.
Chris: But it is seen as a large, it's seen as an upfront investment in perhaps a long-term
Chris: payoff for support a decade down the road.
Jon: I think it will be personally. I, you know, that wasn't particularly front of
Jon: my mind in the decision-making calculus. What was front in my mind in the decision-making
Jon: was, I want to ship the most resilient operating system I can.
Jon: And the fewer things, or I'll say the more things that are written in a memory-safe
Jon: language that are high-performance, that are well-tested, the better.
Jon: So Core Utils is one of those projects where there was quite high conformance
Jon: with the original test suite.
Jon: Pseudo-RS was another of those where it was quite a high-quality,
Jon: quite a mature project already.
Jon: the next one will be NTP DRS, which I'm actually really excited about because
Jon: I think that'll be the first time we get a single binary that can handle NTP,
Jon: NTS, and PTP all in one utility that is both the client and the server.
Jon: Whereas previously, it has been a bit of a dance.
Jon: So that's part of the work that we're funding on the way to rusty time syncing in Ubuntu.
Chris: Rusty time syncing.
Wes: Well, and that seems exactly kind of what you said, right? You're interested
Wes: in a resilient, robust, well-functioning operating system.
Wes: And, you know, most of us don't usually have to think about it,
Wes: but especially in distributed systems, keeping the time is of critical importance.
Jon: Right. And another target is going to be compression libraries.
Jon: And the bit that genuinely gets me fired up here is, okay, compression could
Jon: be a little faster, maybe.
Jon: What's even more exciting is the energy usage? You think the scale of Ubuntu
Jon: and how many machines are running Ubuntu.
Jon: Imagine if we took 1% energy usage of every single one of those machines on the planet.
Jon: Now, we're not going to get there by changing CP and RM and move.
Jon: And we maybe even won't get there with compression or a single compression algorithm.
Jon: But cumulatively, over the space of five years, we could genuinely make a meaningful
Jon: difference to the idle consumption of a machine anywhere on the planet,
Jon: which I think is an interesting goal.
Brent: Yeah, it's these are the kind of
Brent: goals that you don't necessarily start an operating system having in mind.
Brent: But something like Ubuntu being around so long, you can start to have the luxury
Brent: of having these greater goals in mind. So I like hearing that.
Brent: I do have a question about Rust. You mentioned an obvious reason to adopt Rust,
Brent: the memory safety aspect of it.
Brent: I'm curious how that has affected the team in adopting Rust and also why Rust
Brent: if you ignore the memory safety?
Brent: There are other potential languages out there.
Brent: How's it going, maybe, is the general way of putting all that?
Jon: It's going. I would say mixed. With any other push for a new tooling,
Jon: there are people who are really excited by it and people who are less excited by it.
Jon: Our foundation's team have really leaned in here. We're doing some work on boot
Jon: at the moment, which will be in Rust.
Jon: I am trying to get us away from,
Jon: in as many places as possible from things that are becoming more antiquated.
Jon: And so I have asked the team to stop writing new C code.
Jon: We still have to keep maintaining old C code. That's going to happen for a long
Jon: time. We need to maintain our, you know, app is still written in C++, for example.
Jon: Although we'll start to introduce Rust, I suspect, in the next year or so.
Jon: But when we're writing new code and when we're looking at bits of tooling that
Jon: we use for building the distro, I would really prefer it if we stopped using
Jon: C. we ideally didn't use bash and python bash is great for small scripts but,
Jon: I don't know, like as they get bigger and bigger and bigger,
Jon: they get harder to maintain and test.
Jon: Python, language is nice, bit of a packaging distribution nightmare.
Jon: And so I'm steering my teams at the moment towards generally go for where things
Jon: are very networky or very concurrent.
Jon: So programming language designed for doing network, networking and concurrency.
Jon: And I don't think that's kind of low level systems programming towards Rust.
Jon: I think Rust is the best option we have right now as
Jon: a replacement or a successor to the c and c++ ecosystem so we we don't tend
Jon: to adopt loads and loads and loads of programming languages at canonical we're
Jon: not that big it wouldn't be very helpful if we had one team doing haskell and
Jon: another team doing erlang and one doing rust and one doing zig and one doing
Jon: java so we try to be quite deliberate and generally those languages at canonical
Jon: are python go and rust well.
Wes: It makes sense that you can kind of like rust is one of those languages now
Wes: that can target a lot of things between like a modern tool chain that,
Wes: you know, I'm sure a bunch of, and Canuck has a lot of experience trying to
Wes: find the limited pool of developers who are up to date on the sort of esoteric
Wes: desktop Linux, you know, how you put together a distro.
Wes: So if you have that wider, but you also get, right, like abstractions that don't
Wes: have as much runtime cost, and you can have security benefits.
Wes: So you kind of get this all in a package, and there's just not that many other
Wes: languages right now that compete with that.
Jon: Yeah, and I think the Rust Foundation, the core team take it very seriously.
Jon: So we recently joined the Rust Foundation as gold members.
Jon: And that was partially to support the ecosystem and the folks who develop the
Jon: language, but also with a bit of an agenda of our own, which is to try and work
Jon: with them on things like the crates.io security story,
Jon: on things like hopefully enhancing the standard library.
Jon: I have some opinions about where Rust could go with that and potentially some
Jon: of the mechanics around things like async.io or async, sorry.
Jon: So we joined the foundation to give funding, but also to try and contribute
Jon: expertise from Canonical where we have them in the right discussions, that kind of thing.
Jon: And they've been, we only joined formally in 2018.
Jon: When was it? Whenever KubeCon was February, I think, February or March.
Jon: But they've been great to work with so far. And I'm looking forward to seeing where that goes.
Chris: Well, there's a lot in there. I want to bring us back to Ubuntu a bit,
Chris: because just before we got on the horn yesterday or so,
Chris: you posted a post on the discourse that was titled The Future of AI in Ubuntu.
Chris: And it's a rundown of Canonical's approach.
Chris: your thoughts around integration of these toolings, how to get the balance right, and all of that.
Chris: And this, of course, it's a huge topic. AI is such a huge, encompassing term
Chris: for a bunch of different technologies that users are going to want to use on top of Ubuntu.
Chris: So, John, can you kind of walk us through what the announcement is here and what the plan is?
Jon: Yeah, so, I mean, I'll preface this by saying, like, I knew this was going to be spicy.
Chris: Yeah, I imagine, right?
Jon: This is, like...
Chris: If you thought the rough stuff was spicy.
Jon: Right, like I figured I'd annoyed all of the people I probably could with that,
Jon: so it's time to shift on something even more exclusive. So I think the point here is.
Jon: Anytime there's a change like this, and I see people reacting,
Jon: I always think, I try to understand where they're coming from.
Jon: And the thing that I would try to remind people of is whatever your feeling
Jon: is valid, like if you really don't want AI in your operating system,
Jon: that's a perfectly acceptable position.
Jon: But what I try to articulate in a way that isn't too brash is Ubuntu is not for me.
Jon: It's not for you. Ubuntu is for millions of people.
Jon: And for everyone who is desperately trying to avoid AI, who is an Ubuntu user,
Jon: there are probably as many people who can't get it quick enough.
Jon: And so the challenge that we have is always like, how do we walk that line?
Jon: Balancing either two sides of a feature like AI, but more broadly,
Jon: making an operating system that is appealing to educators and students,
Jon: to two-man startups, to Fortune 500 companies.
Jon: It's a difficult line to walk. And so we haven't pounced on this too quickly.
Jon: And really, this is the first post to open the conversation about how AI will
Jon: play a part in Ubuntu's future.
Jon: It will play a part in Ubuntu's future, partly because I truly believe there
Jon: is some value in the technology when it's applied correctly.
Jon: And partly because it's kind of difficult not to in 2026. Like customers,
Jon: partners are asking us what our plan is.
Jon: So we've thought about this quite a lot. We've taken what I think is a really
Jon: measured approach at Canonical.
Jon: You see lots of, frankly, quite scary things on the internet about companies
Jon: setting token quotas for people and measuring the percentage of code they write with AI.
Jon: And I don't really believe in that.
Jon: That doesn't seem like the right approach. We're taking a more careful approach.
Jon: We are heavily, as of this year, heavily encouraging, incentivizing our folks
Jon: to go at the team level to go pick a vendor and a tool, ideally an open source harness if possible.
Jon: But if a team really wants to use Claude, we'll let them use Claude,
Jon: understand it, get to know it.
Jon: And then that way we can get a sense of which are the tools that work for Canonical, et cetera.
Jon: And we'll ramp up our expectations. It'll be start with experiment with something,
Jon: then it'll be demonstrate that you've built a bit of a habit around it,
Jon: perhaps demonstrate that you've been able to accelerate a roadmap feature with
Jon: it, and then demonstrate that there There is rigor around it in terms of running
Jon: evals and really understanding how it can be embedded into automation workflows,
Jon: potentially things like Claws, I know you guys have been having fun with.
Jon: These are all possibilities, but not things to be taken lightly.
Jon: There was news this week of, I forget the name of the company,
Jon: an AI bot that supposedly went rogue and took out production infrastructure.
Jon: The AI bot didn't go rogue. The AI bot was given far too broad of permissions,
Jon: right? That's what happened there.
Wes: And probably vague instructions.
Jon: All right, so our challenge is how do we...
Jon: Like if we're going to, how should we integrate AI into Ubuntu?
Jon: And I see this in two camps.
Jon: I laid this out in the post as kind of implicit features and explicit features.
Jon: And the way I would think about this is implicit features are enhancements to
Jon: things the OS already did.
Jon: So this could be screen reading, could be speech to text or text to speech,
Jon: could be follow focus on a camera,
Jon: things that people have kind of become accustomed to being enhanced by ML.
Jon: And I wouldn't necessarily call those AI features, even as we add models to
Jon: those features, I wouldn't necessarily be decorating them as AI features.
Chris: Right.
Jon: But think about, you know, from the perspective of a user who is hard of hearing
Jon: or visually impaired in some way, this could be a huge game changer.
Chris: Right.
Jon: Screen readers are pretty tough to use. And imagine you could point a camera
Jon: at the screen instead and ask it, I don't know what's going on.
Chris: And it's an area in particular that Linux could use some help with,
Chris: right? It's an area that...
Jon: For sure.
Chris: Yeah.
Jon: For sure. So then the explicit side is a little bit harder to quantify because
Jon: I don't want to tell you what we're planning yet because we're still planning it.
Jon: The explicit is much more like this is an AI feature.
Jon: And I would describe this as features that introduce a new mental model or a
Jon: new way of working with your machine that you didn't have before.
Jon: Like you guys have already explored this. You're sending telegram messages and
Jon: matrix messages to a bot that is doing things on your behalf.
Jon: That is, like, you have not been able to Telegram message your computer before in such a rich way.
Jon: That's a new, like, mental model for interacting with the machine.
Chris: Standing up infrastructure via Telegram, basically, you know?
Jon: Right.
Chris: It's a new area.
Jon: But also, like, Linux is so wildly powerful, but also kind of vexing for people
Jon: who aren't experienced. Yeah.
Jon: And imagine if, you know, you could bring up a box and say, my Wi-Fi is not working.
Jon: Why isn't my Wi-Fi working? Can you help me fix it? Or, um...
Jon: I don't know. I'd like to run a Postgres container. Can you help me with that?
Chris: Right, right.
Jon: And interestingly, lots of the things we've been working on over time,
Jon: I don't think we could have necessarily predicted this much of a fit,
Jon: but things like snaps turn out to be kind of a boon here.
Jon: Like individual tools or models confined with individual profiles of confinement
Jon: that say, this thing is allowed to read these directories, access the camera,
Jon: you know, do this on the system.
Jon: And we can have a bunch of them on the machine with very, very tightly scoped
Jon: permissions using a mechanism that we trust that is in the kernel that is AppArmor.
Jon: And one of the questions that got asked a lot on that thread,
Jon: and I posted a follow-up, was about would we do an AI kill switch in Ubuntu?
Jon: Which I think controversially, I answered no to. And I answered no to because
Jon: I don't think we can hand on heart honestly do that.
Jon: There are so many ways which you can consume software on a machine.
Jon: What happens if I say, we're going to ship a kill switch, you turn the kill
Jon: switch on, and then Mozilla ship a package update in their official dev that you just smell at them.
Chris: Yeah, or a driver even. I mean, it could happen at any level.
Jon: Or a driver.
Chris: Yeah, it could be.
Wes: Unless you're proxying every request that any system makes. Like,
Wes: how could you even have that?
Chris: It could, yeah, it could just sneak in. Yeah, that's where we're at now. And for better or worse.
Chris: Yeah. So how do you address that? Because it does seem like a user,
Chris: there is some sort of user demand there for that.
Wes: Either for performance or for privacy or a variety of things.
Chris: We have seen Mozilla try to offer for some kind of kill switch in Firefox.
Jon: Yeah, and I think in something like the browser, it makes a bit more sense.
Jon: It has a kind of product where you can, it's a bit more isolated.
Jon: So no browsers are huge now. It's a bit more isolated than the whole OS.
Jon: So my approach is, firstly, for all of the distaste people have for snaps,
Jon: this is an area where it's actually going to be really beneficial.
Jon: So we can't ship LLM models in the installer because our ISO will be.
Wes: It's already a little happy.
Jon: It carries a little bit of timber these days, so I don't want to make that decision.
Jon: So my plan is that we will, as part of the first run onboarding wizard,
Jon: you will get the opportunity.
Jon: We'll say, hey, we have this thing to be defined. Do you want in or out? It uses AI.
Jon: And if you are in, then it will go off and get the correctly sized model to
Jon: run locally on your machine.
Jon: And so the irony here is lots of the same people, I think, who have displayed
Jon: some distaste for snaps are now displaying distaste for AI. but it is the snaps
Jon: that are going to allow them to remove the AI from their machine very cleanly.
Chris: Oh, that is ironic.
Wes: It does seem like the, you've mentioned a few things that snaps help here.
Wes: It does seem like the sort of architecture awareness that snaps have is probably
Wes: pretty helpful here considering all of the AI models and custom silicon and all that.
Chris: Yeah, really.
Jon: We did some work a few months ago called Inference. We did a product called Inference Snaps.
Jon: I talked about this at a meetup, and if you search for Inference Snaps,
Jon: you'll find the details.
Jon: But this is essentially, we are packaging models like Gemma 3,
Jon: DeepSeq, Quen, Nematron from NVIDIA.
Jon: And then you say you can snap install Gemma 3, you can snap install Nematron,
Jon: you can snap install DeepSeq.
Jon: But the work we're doing that's actually interesting is we then work with all
Jon: the silicon vendors like AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, MediaTek.
Jon: And we work with them where they want to on particular models to get like silicon,
Jon: how to describe it, silicon optimized versions of those models precisely for
Jon: your hardware. so there's like a,
Jon: manifest your machine goes hey this is what i've got talks to our store and
Jon: our store goes haha we know all about that gpu so does amd here's a model that
Jon: works just great on that gpu.
Wes: Just the tensors for you wow that's amazing.
Jon: Right so it saves you having to do this go to hugging face hit search and then
Jon: sit there scratching your head for a few minutes trying to work out that's going
Jon: to fit on your machine right just go i've heard of gemma 4 i want gemma 4 let
Jon: me install it and so the foundation for ai in ubuntu will be these snaps so
Jon: local first local inference,
Jon: with models that we distribute, having worked with the silicon vendors to get
Jon: the most efficient form of it to you that we can with some confinement around it as well, right?
Chris: So does part of this process work when, you know, you're looking at the roadmap
Chris: for Ubuntu and hardware partners come to you or come to Canonical and they say,
Chris: in the next two, three years, we're going to be building these inference chips
Chris: into our laptops and desktops.
Chris: We'd really like your desktop to take advantage of this. And then,
Chris: so you're looking at the plan, you go, okay, this is some ways we can do that.
Chris: Is that part of the calculation here?
Jon: Yeah, absolutely. It's actually quite interesting to me that I hadn't really
Jon: appreciated this until I stepped into this role, even though I'd been at Canonical for some time.
Jon: The silicon partnership side of our business is increasingly one of our strongest assets.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Jon: If you think about the work we just did to ship CUDA, so like apt install CUDA,
Jon: ROCKM, apt install ROCKM, that's huge.
Chris: It is.
Jon: From the perspective of like a developer getting up and running,
Jon: getting the right version that works with their kernel. you don't end up with
Jon: loads of DKMS modules building every time.
Chris: 100%, it's a huge deal for them.
Wes: Even just renting a GPU, it probably spins up an Ubuntu VPS, so the better that gets.
Chris: Yeah, really.
Jon: Right, and so the same is true of other kind of harbor and eggments.
Jon: So one of the things we're shipping is the Docker OFED stack,
Jon: which is the accelerated networking stack, like data center networking stack
Jon: that NVIDIA, or that's the SDK that NVIDIA distributes.
Jon: So I think it is really important. Things like AI in Ubuntu, Thank you.
Jon: and being able to, with some confidence, tell you that that will be plausible
Jon: in a local first way is only really possible if we work with the people who
Jon: are building the chips really closely.
Jon: And it's quite a symbiotic thing, right? They want to build the best silicon possible.
Jon: They don't want to concern themselves with Linux distribution packaging and,
Jon: because they have their focus and we have ours.
Jon: And that partnership worked out really nicely for us with NVIDIA, with the DGX Spark.
Jon: We sort of went on this journey with NVIDIA where they used to take ubuntu you
Jon: know with agreement with us repackage it into a thing called dgx os,
Jon: and then put some extra stuff on top of it and ship it with their dgx machines
Jon: the dgx spark was the first time nvidia went you know what we're just going
Jon: to ship ubuntu and so the dgx spark which is like a four thousand dollar ai
Jon: workstation went out the door where the only supported os was,
Jon: ubuntu and it was just like not special nvidia ubuntu not like weird frank and
Jon: ubuntu it was like just go download Ubuntu, put it on a USB stick, off you go.
Jon: And I think it's a nice experience in the end.
Chris: It's really great. It's the perfect positioning at the right time.
Chris: This could have gone a different direction where all of this was done on Windows
Chris: or Macs or something like that.
Chris: And it's, you know, have what people say about AI and how they feel about it.
Chris: I am very grateful that it is...
Chris: Linux is very much part of this, and people that are deploying all this infrastructure
Chris: are deploying it on Linux.
Wes: And there's been a lot of great open source work here, just with LamaCPP,
Wes: all kinds of stuff in this space.
Wes: But there are some things that the open source community side is less well-situated
Wes: for, which is things like working with partnerships with companies making hardware.
Chris: Yeah, that's very true.
Jon: And it's interesting. So one of the things I would argue that has been complicated
Jon: for Linux's desktop adoption is the fragmentation. And I think fragmentation
Jon: in the desktop space is simultaneously Linux's biggest strength and also weakness.
Jon: It's its strength in the sense that there have been like thousands of really
Jon: bright people who have scratched an itch that they've had over time and done amazing things.
Jon: The drawback is they're not always necessarily motivated to make it work seamlessly
Jon: with other people's stuff, which is why if you look at the modern Linux desktop,
Jon: it's like so many different things kind of stitched together.
Jon: And every time something breaks on my Linux machine, I'm simultaneously kind
Jon: of annoyed and also kind of stunned it works at all.
Chris: Yeah, I agree.
Jon: But I think in the world of agents and think about what I was saying about perhaps
Jon: an experience where you could ask your machine to do something or troubleshoot itself.
Jon: Like all of a sudden that fragmentation problem isn't such a problem if you've
Jon: got a thing that already knows all the things, right?
Jon: Or knows how to go and get information about all of the particular parts of
Jon: the system that you have. Like, in reality, I don't know anybody,
Jon: even the best Linux admins I've ever met do not know everything about every
Jon: package on their machine.
Wes: But now we have something that can pull the actual source and read it and teach
Wes: itself a lay of the land in, you know, a few minutes.
Chris: I think we're going to end up with a lot more Linux usage. Yes.
Chris: Don't you think we're just going to see even more free software,
Chris: more Ubuntu, more Linux deployed because of this?
Jon: I do. And I totally recognize people's skepticism. I have a lot of empathy for the people who...
Jon: are replying to my posts a little hot under the collar. And I guess it is our
Jon: responsibility to demonstrate to our users that we will keep privacy in mind.
Jon: We will try to pick models that are licensed in such a way that it feels aligned
Jon: with the values of open source.
Jon: Because I think even when you talk about things like open weight and open source,
Jon: they just carry a different meaning in this space.
Jon: It's not the same thing that open source people have been used to.
Jon: And so we have to work out how to navigate that in a way that is useful to the
Jon: people who are all in and want to play and provides a nice on-ramp,
Jon: but not offensive to the people who just want out at the end of the day.
Jon: And my goal is absolutely not to start shipping a Clippy or a co-pilot button
Jon: on everyone's dock and forcing you to use it.
Jon: Do you know what I mean? That's not the model. No doubt.
Jon: I can almost hear people typing about the Amazon affiliate link that happened
Jon: to you from like 15 years ago.
Chris: It's not going to be like that.
Wes: Now we're introducing Debbie.
Chris: Yeah, right?
Jon: Right. So we are going to, we are going to build a layer features in, I hope,
Jon: as an experiment, but I'm quite committed to it. It's not an experiment that I think will fail.
Jon: It's just that we have a few ideas. We'll try them out.
Chris: You know, I'm excited because, John, it has a lot of potential,
Chris: especially when you're saying the solve my Wi-Fi, why won't my printer connect,
Chris: my second monitor isn't turning on, because you have an opportunity to focus
Chris: something that knows the system well.
Chris: It knows the version of Ubuntu it's on. It knows it's on.
Chris: There's these things that will just the agent or whatever it'll be that's running
Chris: on the system will be aware of that a user would have to spend a lot of time
Chris: if they just opened up OpenCode or something the first time trying to get the same results out of.
Chris: So I think that has a ton of potential there. That's exciting.
Brent: I'm curious if you gents think that that will make us Linux users less aware
Brent: of our systems and how they're built.
Brent: Because part of the joy, I think, early on in probably each of our Linux journey
Brent: is breaking all the things and learning how it's all put together and then being
Brent: able to customize it in such a way that makes it our own or makes you understand some users',
Brent: challenges and solve them if you have that kind of position at somewhere like Canonical.
Brent: And so is using some of these tools going to take us away from understanding what's under the hood?
Jon: I don't think so if you have an interest in understanding what's under the hood.
Jon: But I think if you are someone who wants your computer to work and you don't
Jon: care how, it's a huge level up.
Jon: So I have, you know, a year ago, I know I was very much in the skeptic category.
Jon: I have completely immersed myself in clawed code and played around with claws and all this stuff.
Jon: I've gone really deep on it and tried to learn as much as I can and use it as
Jon: kind of natively as possible.
Jon: And I have found it the most unbelievable accelerator for learning some things
Jon: I've always wanted to learn, for trying out perhaps new architecture patterns
Jon: that maybe I'd never have had the time to do. So of course one can,
Jon: poke the machine blindly accept what it has and ship it
Jon: and actually for little personal projects why not do you know
Jon: what i mean like you want to do something for you do the thing but
Jon: an example like i built this coffee tracking app i'm a insufferable filter
Jon: coffee nerd i built this thing and i think you guys picked up on the book thing
Jon: which was actually a fork of the coffee thing there was a bunch of stuff in
Jon: there that i had never done before and it took me a while to build it but like
Jon: it was really interesting to be able to go through that process you know i was bringing the,
Jon: this is how I want this application to be structured. I want to use domain-driven design.
Jon: There are some rules I don't want you to break. And it was able to assist with the bits I didn't know.
Jon: And I was, it felt more like a long-lived pair programmer than someone who was
Jon: just doing the work for me.
Jon: It wasn't a vending machine for an app, do you know what I mean?
Jon: I was heavily involved in it.
Chris: It's a fascinating journey I think people take. Similar one myself, very skeptical.
Chris: It's just autocomplete. What's the point to finding an extremely useful and
Chris: an accelerator myself, and realizing it's a very powerful Linux tool as well.
Wes: It does make me think we have an opportunity for the show, just in that to Brent's
Wes: point, you learn a lot when you have to constantly fix things.
Wes: The trade-off is you don't always get to choose, right? Sometimes you have to
Wes: fix it when you'd much rather be using your computer for something, right?
Wes: So then the danger is maybe you never stop to ask. If you don't have to fix
Wes: it, you never ask, but I think that's maybe an opportunity for us to make sure
Wes: people who want to be curious know that there are questions they can't ask.
Chris: And I think, John, I don't know what for you, but it reminds me too of some
Chris: of the arguments we're still having to this day about cloud computing versus
Chris: spinning up your own Linux system or serverless computing is,
Chris: you know, it's essentially abstracting away part of,
Chris: if you do a one-app deployment on DigitalOcean or if you deploy something on
Chris: AWS or use serverless technology, you're not really learning Linux either.
Wes: And you don't even know NTPD needs to be a thing.
Jon: And I see lots of the, lots of the arguments, and this is, I don't know,
Jon: like, this is maybe a hot take, but like lots of the arguments sound exactly
Jon: like the arguments people made when we first got compilers.
Chris: Yes. And package managers. I don't trust that to write code.
Chris: And package managers as well.
Chris: I'm not going to let that install stuff in my Linux box. Are you crazy? You're right.
Jon: Yeah. And so what I say is like, to people who perhaps have been skeptical, I've been there.
Jon: I feel like I really get it. But the space moves so fast that if your opinion
Jon: is even six months old, it's worth just playing around and seeing what happens.
Brent: I think that's so true.
Jon: I've also seen people who have bounced off it where they've said,
Jon: okay, well, I've heard about this Vibe coding thing, and they've gone away and
Jon: tweaked their Vim configuration and tried to get an LSP.
Jon: And like, okay, cool, you can kind of make it work with Vim.
Jon: But just spend a day with Antigravity or VS Code and Claude.
Jon: Spend a day in an environment that was designed to be used in this way and just
Jon: see, like, just poke around a bit, see how it feels.
Jon: Like, you know, my feeling is that this really isn't going anywhere.
Jon: And I think there are two ways we could try and stop this or try and shape this.
Jon: One is stamp our feet and say, we're not doing it. We don't like it.
Jon: It's open source. It's big tech, blah, blah, blah. And be petulant over it. We're not going to win.
Jon: The other way is to educate ourselves as much as we possibly can,
Jon: be part of the conversation and influence it.
Jon: so that it isn't a burden on open source, it is a positive force.
Jon: So right now, lots of projects are absolutely suffering because people are irresponsibly
Jon: hurling commits at them that they haven't reviewed.
Jon: I think it is the responsibility of us all to basically try to work with those
Jon: people and say, hey, this isn't quite what we're looking for.
Jon: Can we work with you to kind of like, we like the idea. Can we work with you
Jon: to get this in a state that we can review it?
Jon: And over time, we will have a generation of people who really understand how
Jon: to yield these tools in a way that gets great results.
Wes: Yeah, we don't have a lot of culture yet, you know?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: We don't know how to use these. We're constantly discovering what we can even
Wes: do, let alone how we should do it with each other.
Chris: However, I think that's the right mindset to start building a culture around this tooling in Ubuntu.
Chris: I think you have the right recipe there to build something responsible in Ubuntu.
Chris: So I'm looking forward to see where you take it.
Jon: It's an exciting time. I personally have gone from being, like I said,
Jon: very skeptical to feeling like I'm more excited about coming to work and working
Jon: on tech than I've been in a really long time.
Chris: Yeah.
Jon: There is something unlocked in my mind and I am building side projects at an alarming rate.
Chris: I love it.
Jon: It's just, it's been, I sort of also, I have sympathy for the,
Jon: it's taking my craft and I can see that people are...
Jon: I can see how people would have the other reaction. My experience has been the
Jon: opposite. I'm like, all of a sudden, there's all this stuff I can build that
Jon: I've been thinking about for years.
Chris: Yeah, we've been saying it's the most fun we've had with computers in years.
Wes: It feels like finding Linux again, in a way.
Chris: It really does. And to your point, too, you're right. There is a bit of a craft
Chris: in art that I see Wes wince when I produce some slop things.
Chris: But at the same time, it's a comparison that's a little cliche,
Chris: but I was just thinking when you were talking, it's very much like digital photography.
Chris: Everybody now has a camera in their pocket, And because of that,
Chris: I have incredible pictures of my children that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
Chris: So I'm glad the digital photography and cameras came along, even though it sort
Chris: of wrecked the art of photography a little bit for everybody trying to get that
Chris: perfect golden hour sunset shot.
Chris: It was a tradeoff, but now I have these keepsakes that I'll treasure forever
Chris: that are extremely valuable to me.
Chris: And I think it's kind of a similar tradeoff with, yes, some of the craft and
Chris: the art of programming will be lost.
Chris: That's not going away. They're still photographers.
Chris: but I also will have these keepsakes and these personal things that are extremely
Chris: valuable to me and it makes me very excited and I'm glad that Ubuntu isn't shying
Chris: away from it and that they seem that you seem to have a very responsible and
Chris: practical pragmatic take for it so I think it's great.
Chris: John I mean this is, it's been a great week, it's been a great chat.
Chris: Is there anything else you want to touch on before we scoot?
Jon: No other than we're going to need help so if this sounds interesting then hit
Jon: us up we are hiring like crazy which is a little unusual at the moment in tech,
Jon: but we have a lot of openings and a very famous hiring process.
Jon: If you'd like to come play, then I would recommend it.
Jon: But otherwise, I think the next exciting thing is let's make the interims crazy
Jon: again. I promised it when I took over Ubuntu.
Jon: So the next release is going to be the stonking stingray.
Wes: Good name.
Chris: I like that.
Jon: Very excited about. And so, yeah, we'll start to see the first of these new
Jon: features landing and we'll see where it goes.
Chris: We'll keep an eye. John, thank you so much. I hope we can chat again soon.
Jon: Likewise. Thanks very much.
Brent: Well, dear listeners and distinguished hosts, you may have noticed this week
Brent: is Linux Unplugged 6.6.5.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Brent: And we've been teasing that, well, this week, this coming week,
Brent: is the BSD Challenge week.
Chris: We officially are kicking off the BSD Challenge. This is my stupid stinger.
Chris: is that what it.
Wes: Sounds like when you put BSD.
Chris: Yeah that's my that's BSD in a song in a stinger so.
Brent: You've mentioned BSD a great number of times this week compared to I don't know.
Chris: Every other.
Brent: Week this year so I'm wondering have you gotten any closer to deciding what you're going to do this.
Chris: Week yeah yes I have because
Chris: I wanted to hit the ground running like we
Chris: do with these challenges there's no rule that says you can't poke around a little
Chris: bit before the starting line oh of course not you know like if you're going
Chris: to race a car you take it on the track a few times so uh i wanted to have the
Chris: best experience possible to to to flip my impression of bsd as a desktop operating system.
Brent: Oh what's your impression currently.
Chris: That it's it's it's for masochists it's for people that like to hurt themselves,
Chris: and and just want to struggle the entire time they're
Chris: using computers or trying to get software running or anything like that
Chris: okay great um and so i thought ghost bsd would
Chris: be a great way to kind of get a modern take on free
Chris: bsd designed for the desktop to kind of smooth over
Chris: some of those rough edges and give me a good shot of
Chris: changing my impression and that may
Chris: be the case but i wanted to test the car out around the
Chris: track a few times so i downloaded the latest
Chris: release and try to get it going on my machine in
Chris: qmu kvm and it just wouldn't it
Chris: wouldn't start up it started to boot and would fail start to boot and fail and i
Chris: looked into it and it turns out that gosh darn
Chris: it wouldn't you know it for the most recent release of ghost bsd there
Chris: is a currently open bug where the live session fails to start x under qmu and
Chris: so just your luck so i'm like oh okay okay before i saw this bug i'm like i'll
Chris: go get the community iso which uses xfce instead of mate sure same problem same exact problem come on,
Chris: And then I found this open bug report that exactly is my issue,
Chris: which doesn't mean I couldn't use it on a desktop, and I still might. It's still a candidate.
Wes: You couldn't easily try it.
Chris: Yeah, I couldn't easily try it. So I decided to pivot to FreeBSD 15.1 because
Chris: the beta just came out this week, and I like me some fresh stuff.
Chris: And this version of FreeBSD is supposed to offer, in the TUI installer, Plasma Desktop.
Brent: Oh.
Chris: And I'm like, oh, imagine if I could get myself a modern Plasma desktop on BSD.
Wes: That's pretty good.
Chris: I'd have Kate, console. I'd have all the stuff I like. I think I could make that work, right?
Brent: This feels unfair already.
Chris: So I download this morning before the show thinking I'm going to get this in
Chris: and I'm going to get a sense of it. So I have an answer for the segment.
Chris: And I boot it up in the old VM and it starts and the installer,
Chris: you know, classic free BSD text based installer, TUI, whatever.
Chris: Doesn't have the Plasma option. It's not in there. They talked about it being
Chris: in there. It's not in there.
Chris: It's not in there. So what I got was a headless FreeBSD install.
Wes: Well, that's not that. That's always what you were going to get,
Wes: really, right? Didn't we know that? Didn't we know that?
Brent: Good try, though.
Wes: But you could add it later, probably.
Chris: Well, I tried that. I tried that. And I do get SDDM working. And I can log in.
Brent: Okay.
Chris: And then I get a blank session. Because there's some kind of bug that's preventing
Chris: X11 from working under QMU on FreeBSD.
Brent: Come on.
Wes: See, I've got that working on. I don't have 15.1.
Chris: Which one do you have 15.
Wes: Yeah maybe.
Chris: We should trade notes maybe i should try the 15.
Wes: Although i did then end up just for convenience so i started using a vnc session
Wes: so you could also try that so.
Chris: You've been kicking tires.
Wes: Yeah i got an i3 going um oh yeah on free bsd that.
Chris: Seems like a good.
Wes: Choice i took the cheating route though because i noticed that props to free
Wes: bsd they provide a bunch of pre-built images and stuff ready to go like cloud
Wes: in it minimal ones and like more full ones including with zfs set up in a pool
Wes: already just as a thing yeah.
Chris: I did do zfs on route why not.
Wes: So actually i need to do it play with the installer because this just meant
Wes: i haven't actually tried the installer yet because i was able to just sort of
Wes: dd that right into memory and then boot that in qemu and start mucking around
Wes: you know get my rc conf you and.
Chris: Ram disc all the way.
Wes: Yeah nice just as because it was an exploratory setup right i do so like i was
Wes: trying to i did have some issues i do think there probably are some some things
Wes: we could figure out or work around perhaps maybe i mean look into around the
Wes: qmu stuff specifically especially for the graphics side i.
Chris: Also at this point i could just
Chris: give up i mean i'm ultimately for the week i'm gonna run it on hardware.
Wes: Yeah so i could.
Chris: I just i wanted to just try out a few options to see which one i wanted to commit
Chris: to hardware i guess silly me but yeah all right i might i mean i don't know,
Chris: So which one are you going with officially? 15? FreeBSD 15?
Wes: Yeah, well, I wanted to try 15 one. I was just having some issues.
Wes: Maybe I needed to do some setup, because I think they've made some changes to
Wes: how some of the package and user land stuff is getting shipped.
Wes: But I was using it slightly before the beta was officially out, so I don't know.
Chris: Brantley, have you picked a BSD that you're going to roll?
Brent: I think my choices may be less responsible than both of yours.
Brent: I was under a car for most of the week, and then I had this brilliant thought
Brent: while I was under there, as you do, that I might give Nick's BSD a try.
Wes: Whoa.
Chris: I can't believe we didn't think of that.
Brent: Actually. I know. I know. I was waiting to see if either of you.
Chris: So you're going to have a real advantage, possibly, here.
Brent: Or disadvantage. We're going to find out.
Wes: Yeah, he might have some compiling to do.
Chris: Oh, I hope he does.
Brent: I think I also probably need a backup, because I'm not sure.
Brent: So I would love to hear from the audience.
Brent: You vote, and I will honor this, vote for which BSD Brent needs to try.
Chris: We better get in quick.
Brent: If next BSD doesn't work.
Chris: Gotta get in quick.
Brent: Yeah. So send in a boost. We will read them ahead of time because I probably
Brent: in a day or two will desperately need an option B.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Or send us an email, linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Brent: Or even if you're on Matrix, we've got the Linux Unplugged feedback room.
Brent: So I'll keep an eye on all three of those.
Brent: And I will honor whatever crazy BSD choice you guys send out there.
Chris: Okay. I'm thinking, I'm thinking for me, I might go retro hardware too,
Chris: which may increase the suffering.
Chris: Now I have different degrees of retro.
Brent: Uh, we got the whole museum over there. What are you choosing?
Chris: PJ? I don't know if you remember, but did, is that Dell that,
Chris: that prototype Dell laptop? Is that in working shape at the moment or did we
Chris: have to harvest from that to make the Odroid work?
Mumble: Uh, it should work fine. It just needs a drive actually.
Chris: Okay. Okay. So I may try and power.
Chris: Right, right. And it takes a lot of power. I may try running BSD. Oh, there we go.
Wes: That's fine.
Chris: I mean, this laptop is- Whoa.
Wes: This is a chunker.
Chris: It's a Dell prototype that was gifted to us when I toured Dell way back,
Chris: I don't know, four, five, six, seven years ago.
Wes: It needs 180 watts?
Chris: It takes 180 watts of power.
Brent: That's going to be the biggest issue.
Chris: Because the reason is it has two Xeons in it.
Brent: What?
Chris: It has two Xeons. It can have up to something like three or four drives,
Chris: an insane amount of RAM, although it doesn't have an insane amount of RAM in it.
Wes: Oh, it's got that old docking connector of theirs.
Chris: The old classic docking connector.
Wes: Obviously came with Windows Pro.
Chris: It's beautiful on the inside. When you open it up, it is absolutely beautiful.
Chris: It's huge, too. Open up that. Open up. Just go ahead and.
Chris: How would you describe the size of that, Wes? It's larger than any laptop probably on the market.
Wes: I feel like I'm sinking into it.
Brent: Monstrous.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, it was a big one, so I don't think I were planning to ship a lot
Chris: of them, so they just went crazy.
Wes: Small trackpad.
Chris: Yeah, tiny trackpad. Well, actually, it's a big trackpad. It does have a trackpoint.
Wes: Though.
Chris: It is actually a big trackpad. It's just a huge laptop. That's what's going on.
Wes: The perspectives are all shipped.
Chris: Because, look, it's got a full 10 key and a full QWERTY keyboard.
Brent: I have a question. When's the last time this thing booted?
Chris: The last couple days ago.
Brent: Really?
Chris: Jeff got it powered up.
Brent: Whoa.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: What did he power it with.
Chris: Um some usbc battery thing some high power battery.
Brent: And he didn't he didn't leave that for you well.
Chris: It's his toy it.
Brent: Was pulling.
Mumble: Nearly 100 watts from that by the way.
Brent: Oh this thing weighs a lot yeah.
Chris: It's very heavy too.
Brent: Holy yeah you've got hdmi though,
Brent: Huh.
Chris: It's a USB-C.
Brent: This thing is...
Chris: It does have USB-C. However, it's sort of an early implementation of USB-C due
Chris: to the era, and it does not pull enough power.
Chris: So you have to use the barrel connector to actually properly power it.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: And I don't know if I'm going to find that.
Brent: Okay. Good luck.
Chris: So that's my leading candidate for hardware, just because it'd be a lot of fun
Chris: to get that old thing running again. It's been on the shelf for a long time, and it's a one-of-one.
Chris: However, I don't know. I may have to go a different direction.
Chris: So that all kicks off after the show. We have to officially start knocking off
Chris: the points. We do have the details.
Chris: We'd love you to participate and let us know how it goes. LinuxUnplugged.com slash BSD.
Chris: And it will give you the details on the Linux Unplugged 666 BSD challenge.
Wes: Join us, won't you?
Chris: Oh, episode 666.
Brent: Please send in your experiences because we want to know how it went for you
Brent: as well. by that episode. You've got one week.
Chris: Good luck. The scoring system is on the website.
Chris: Ooh, Kongaroo Paradox kicks us off with a baller boost. 177,000 sats.
Chris: Mr. Paradox writes, it's been a while since I boosted, so here's some value
Chris: back for all the value you provide each week.
Chris: I think you're also getting the right balance of your AI coverage. Keep it up.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Woo-hoo! Thank you very much.
Brent: Did you mention how much the boost was for?
Chris: Yeah, $177,000.
Brent: Okay, great. I missed that. That's unbelievable.
Chris: It is.
Brent: I just was in a state of, yeah.
Chris: But you know what else is unbelievable?
Wes: Oh, Derivation Ding is coming in with $102,767.
Chris: What?
Chris: Oh my goodness!
Chris: Wow! All right. Also, we just got to see Derivation Dingus.
Brent: Yeah, such a treat.
Wes: So one of these is a live boost. Great seeing you guys. Linux Fest was a blast.
Wes: I'm writing this while sitting directly in front of you.
Brent: Oh, amazing.
Chris: At our live show.
Wes: Uh-huh.
Chris: Right, right, right.
Wes: And then also props to Dingus for sending us a really nice breakdown to some
Wes: of the copy-fail stuff, including some neat disassembly visualization there.
Chris: A little pre-value, because he saw the lit pending item, saw we were going to
Chris: be talking about a copy-fail, and hooked us up with some 411.
Wes: Great.
Chris: Thank you, Derivation, for that. That's a double-layer value this episode. Very nice.
Wes: And it was indeed great seeing you at LinuxFail.
Chris: Yes, indeed.
Brent: You know what else is unbelievable?
Chris: What's that?
Brent: A Dude Trying Stuff is also a booster with 100,000 sats.
Chris: What?!
Chris: Oh my goodness, what is going on?
Brent: Boosting in to celebrate getting a new job.
Chris: Hey, congratulations, buddy.
Brent: It is rough out there, gents. Been applying for over six months.
Chris: Way to stick with it.
Brent: Thank you for doing the most to keep us updated on the happenings in the community
Brent: and helping me keep my passion and remember how awesome software really can be. Cheers.
Chris: Cheers to you and congratulations. Thanks for sending some value our way,
Chris: dude. Nice to hear from you too.
Brent: Keep trying stuff.
Chris: Yeah. Keep trying stuff. The dude abides comes in with 65,432 satoshis.
Chris: Quite nice as well. Hey, yo, I just realized the last time only a portion of
Chris: my boost got to all you, so here's a little bit more.
Chris: Live boost! Thank you. Very nice.
Wes: Amunday boosts in Big Ducks, 22,222 cents.
Wes: Live show, LinuxFest Northwest boost.
Chris: Very nice. Thank you. Boosting right there from the audience. How about that?
Brent: That was fun last week. Well, tomato or tomato or tomato boosts in 4,444 sats.
Chris: You say tomato.
Brent: Love the LinuxFest Northwest coverage. I've got Dragonfly BSD and OpenBSD both downloaded.
Brent: I've never run either of them before, so let's see how this goes.
Brent: 666, devil horns, et cetera, et cetera.
Chris: Ah, yes. Dragonfly BSD. I'm surprised that didn't come up.
Wes: I don't know if you saw, Brant, but I started a little poll for you in the Matrix chat.
Brent: Oh, thank you. That's very kind of you.
Chris: Yes, good. Let's get to voting. And you know the mission. You know what the mission is here.
Wes: NetBSD, all the way.
Chris: So good. Hey, our buddicy, our buddicy, our buddicy, Odyssey.
Chris: Odyssey Westriff from Spooking comes in with 5,151 sats.
Chris: Great to see you all live. Odyssey, it is always great to see you live.
Chris: I was saying to the guys and to Angela, it's like, it's not a Linux fest unless Albert shows up.
Brent: Oh, and I got a little 3D printed gift from Albert as well. These little tiny,
Brent: really impressively printed penguins.
Chris: Super smooth 3D printed penguins.
Brent: Yeah, super nice. Thank you.
Chris: And he gave me 3D gift to the kids, which I did.
Brent: I saw them a little all over.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Brent: Also, Odyssey Westra is in the live chat right now saying, I'm just trying to
Brent: get Ghost BSD to boot on this damn Chromebook.
Brent: Can't get it to boot though. Can't mount the U2F mount.
Chris: Well, it is famous for its wide variety of Chromebook support.
Chris: Thanks for the value, Albert. We appreciate it.
Wes: Moon and I boots in with 2,000 sets. I've been using Ventoy for a while,
Wes: and I'm curious what baggage and edge cases y'all are referring to in this episode.
Chris: I don't know. These two guys don't like Ventoy.
Brent: Zero.
Chris: I love it.
Brent: I have never had success with Ventoy. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Brent: I've tried several times, but I always run into an issue where it can't boot
Brent: the specific ISO I want to be booting.
Brent: And I don't know if it's a hardware issue. I don't know. I don't know.
Wes: We should try maybe one that we make.
Chris: Yeah maybe I mean the.
Wes: Long time No I.
Brent: Have He has one on a like really fancy USB drive.
Wes: With SSD in there Oh even that doesn't work Still.
Chris: Using that by the way from the very first time we covered it I'm still.
Wes: Using that same thing That's true NVMe.
Chris: In there and it rocks It's got
Chris: C on one end A on the other end It works on every machine ever Not at all.
Wes: Wow Yeah.
Chris: So let us know what you think about Ventoy.
Wes: I will add so there's the some people struggle with it seems like maybe some
Wes: firmwares or UFI setups similar just don't like it so mileage may vary but then
Wes: separately there's some concern around binary blobs that are present in the
Wes: code base and so it's been brought up it hasn't ever really been fully addressed,
Wes: there's been more tension about it over time so some folks have sort of provenance
Wes: and trust issues with the delivery of how you get Ventoy you.
Chris: Can pivot to that now that.
Brent: Makes me feel slightly better.
Chris: But thank you for that question clearly Moon and Night it needs addressing and
Chris: I'd like to hear what people think about Ventoy.
Wes: I guess last year the dev did have some response saying that the blobs come
Wes: from other open source and propose to build them from GitHub CI.
Wes: I don't know if any of that's actually really happened yet.
Chris: Maybe instead of blobs.
Wes: Make your own judgment. I don't know. It kind of depends on what your trust.
Chris: What if we called them magic boxes instead of blobs? And then it's not so bad.
Chris: You know, it's got some magic boxes. It ships with a few magic boxes.
Chris: I mean, I'd like to know how it works, but it's magic. Okay,
Chris: I'll accept that. And then we don't call them blobs.
Chris: Blobs is something you fight in a video game. Distro Stu comes in with 3,333.
Chris: And says, you're doing a great job. Well, thank you, Distro.
Chris: You're doing a great job. Should we, you want to play a little, I got that for you.
Chris: I do like the Leonard Nimoy clips from time to time.
Wes: Indeed it does.
Chris: That's a good one. And then, as distrust to be requested, there you go.
Brent: I just need to let that steep for a bit.
Wes: Well, Monty comes in with a row of ducks. Thanks for the push to get my rescue
Wes: drive system updated and in place.
Brent: Nice.
Wes: I added a rescue Nix config with boot to RAM now to my flake and have a USB
Wes: drive plugged into my Proxmox host.
Wes: From my laptop, I can update the config, build it, and flash it over the network to the USB drive.
Chris: Nice. with.
Wes: Just file so i don't forget and i can then boot a vm on proxmox that has the
Wes: usb drive passed through to test it.
Chris: Now that's using your kidneys that's.
Wes: Fancy i can pull the rescue drive out whenever i need it and then we get a link to monty's config.
Chris: Oh monty's a baller you know we love the configs thank you oh yeah oh i'm just
Chris: saying i like up front he's got the structure listed in the readme a real quick
Chris: blurb for 30 plus hosts my goodness,
Chris: and then even MIT licensing on there well done it's a clean lean machine.
Brent: Whomever whiz boosts in 10,011 sats,
Brent: Eric here. I had the best time at LinuxFest Northwest.
Brent: The brilliant and creative members of this community are intellectually inspiring,
Brent: funny, astute, inclusive, and generous.
Brent: I even managed to hook up on Matrix before I left this year so I can stay connected
Brent: and keep that conversation going.
Brent: Thank you so much for showing me the way to find my people. Fun will now commence.
Chris: Yeah, it really is great, isn't it, Eric? It's more than you can even imagine
Chris: from afar, and I'm really glad that you had a chance to share that with us.
Chris: Thank you for the value, too.
Chris: Mr. Mayhem is here with 6,660 sats.
Chris: Week one is done, and he posted a full write-up so far. He's started,
Chris: and he is going for maximum points.
Chris: The madman is repurposing what he calls a bad luck NixOS machine into a fresh free BSD setup.
Chris: He's avoiding past ghost BSD concerns. He's going for full graphical desktop.
Chris: He's got a browser. He's got his user count and mounts. Audio are already working. He's got that done.
Chris: System administration tasks include package updates, OS updates,
Chris: SSH, service, and scripts.
Chris: And apparently he has a BSD jail with NGINX running inside of it.
Chris: We're going to need to see. Oh, we're going to need to see the submission. I don't know.
Wes: Yeah, I just think it's sounding like Mayhem is winning.
Chris: Yeah, so far. Stretch goals include a PF firewall rule, beehive virtualization,
Chris: ZFS snapshots, and Dragonfly BSD.
Wes: And tailscale. Oh, yeah.
Brent: So Mayhem, if you want to.
Wes: I mean, that's a good playbook right there if you just want to join the challenge.
Chris: Do you want to just set mine up too?
Brent: If you want to be my challenge buddy.
Wes: Yeah, send us a disc image. Boost it in.
Chris: That would be great. Thank you, everybody, who boosted in.
Chris: Also, thank you, everybody who streamed sats. 18 of you streamed sats as you
Chris: listened, and collectively, you stacked 25,350 sats.
Chris: When you combine that with our baller boosters and everybody who boosted,
Chris: and we had some great ballers this week, it turned out to be a tremendous episode.
Chris: And this is the interesting thing about Value for Value. About three days ago,
Chris: it looked like it was going to be a rather low episode.
Chris: And then just a couple of members in the community stepped up.
Wes: Huge value storm.
Chris: It's one of our better episodes. And it's funny how that can happen sometimes.
Chris: And we just ride the wave, and we're so grateful. So thank you, everybody.
Chris: We stacked a grand total of 526,592 sats.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: That is very, very great. We really do appreciate that.
Chris: And if you would like to boost in, Fountain FM makes it really easy these days
Chris: with Fiat or Sats, including multiple ways to do that and connecting to your own AlbiHub.
Chris: Now, if you go AlbiHub, you can integrate with lots of different applications,
Chris: including the podcast index, and you can just boost from the web.
Chris: It's a great way to support the show, or you can become a member and put your support on Autopilot.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supported episode 665, and we look forward to hearing
Chris: from you and you boosted in on the BSD challenge.
Chris: Let us know how it goes with a boost or the contact page.
Wes: BSD boost.
Chris: We should have, yeah, 6,666 that's. Is that the BSD boost or something like that?
Wes: Any number of sixes will do.
Chris: All right, so we got a different kind of pick for you this week.
Chris: This is kind of, we're going to ask you to try it and report back.
Chris: Since we're busy with the BSD challenge.
Wes: Ask not what your show can pick for you, something like that?
Chris: I like that. Yeah. But what you can pick for your podcast.
Wes: There we go.
Chris: We'd like you to get nasty. N-A-S-T-Y. It is a NAS operating system built on NixOS and BcacheFS.
Chris: It turns your hardware into a storage appliance that serves NFS,
Chris: Samba, iSCSI, NVMe over Ethernet.
Chris: Managed all from a nice web UI.
Chris: Updated automatically. Has rollback support. New version just came out that
Chris: integrates a complete backup system using Rustic Core.
Chris: So you can go to anything basically rustic supports, which is a lot of the things
Chris: the new log viewer in the UI as services page with unified services configuration
Chris: for NFS, Samba, iSCSI, MVME, over networking, UPS stuff, SSH,
Chris: Docker, backup server, etc.
Chris: And ARM support. It's GPL3. So if you are not participating in the BSD challenge.
Chris: and have some time.
Wes: An alternate B-based challenge.
Chris: Try out nasty. And report in, because what we're trying to essentially get to
Chris: is if it's worth us giving it a full go.
Wes: Finally a NAS built on BcashFS.
Brent: Yeah. Wes, is this your project? It feels like something you would want.
Wes: I am interested. I will also just sneak in here.
Wes: BcashFS a day ago had V138.2 come out. A bunch of performance stuff.
Wes: Cycle detector and six locks improvements.
Wes: Btree write buffer multi-threading. btree node merge attempt thrashing fixed
Wes: so now uh kent writes if you've got a workload where we're slower than butterfs or zfs let me know.
Chris: Oh it's open all right we'll ride
Chris: that wave with nasty and let us know how it goes and if we should try it out
Chris: now we do have a pick that i think is very handy it's one of those legacy pick
Chris: here you know a standard pick but it's one of those you need it when you need
Chris: it it's called diffuse and it allows you to remove backgrounds from images locally on your desktop.
Chris: It's a GTK4-based application written in Python using Libidwadia,
Chris: and it just uses web GPU acceleration on x86-64 systems.
Chris: So it's using web GPU to do an accelerated GPU removal of the background on
Chris: just a little simple purpose-built application. You don't need to go to a website.
Chris: You don't need to go to a service. You can just use Diffuse.
Wes: Processing is performed using the ISNet general model through Onyx Runtime.
Chris: And it is also GPL3.
Wes: Neat. Have you tried it? How does it work?
Chris: It's pretty good. It does have some challenges on hair, but for some of the
Chris: stuff, I had a funny picture of Brent to make a sticker. I wanted to use it to make a sticker.
Wes: Oh, good.
Brent: Hey, no.
Wes: Yeah, we need Brent stickers.
Chris: And then there's also, I have this picture of Jeff when he's holding a long
Chris: pole, and that made for a great sticker.
Chris: I have them for when I need them, you know? If you get a moment, you make a sticker.
Wes: That's right. that's responsible sticker.
Chris: It's also available on flathub and no
Chris: no diffuse we'll put a link to that in the show notes
Chris: link to nass link to everything we talked about today will be
Chris: in the show notes you can find those over at linuxunplugged.com slash six six
Chris: five and of course you know what next week's it is the result of the bsd challenge
Chris: and we'd love to hear how it went for you too and wes some pro tips for people
Chris: before we get out of here you got any yeah um.
Wes: I'm hooked on structured metadata, maybe you are too.
Wes: So we have an XML file. And in that XML file, we have a JSON file.
Wes: Actually, maybe several.
Brent: What?
Wes: Yeah, and that has chapters.
Chris: Oh, nice.
Wes: Yeah, which is metadata about the show.
Chris: Uh-huh.
Wes: And we have even more metadata if you want like.
Chris: We do?
Wes: Yeah, well, if you want like an SRT file.
Chris: Mm.
Wes: Yeah, or a VTT file.
Chris: Oh.
Wes: And then that's like, who said what? When?
Chris: In there.
Wes: Right?
Chris: Ready.
Wes: Right, embedded. I mean, it's like a.
Chris: Good to go.
Wes: You go to the XML, and then that points you to the SRT, and then you got the data.
Chris: You got it.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I got it. All right.
Wes: But there's these things called podcast apps.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: A lot of them do that for you.
Chris: Oh, what a great idea.
Wes: Yeah. It's quite the ecosystem. They call it podcasting 2.0.
Chris: They also support live streams.
Chris: Yeah, that's right. We are live on a Sunday. You can make it a Tuesday by joining
Chris: us over at jblive.tv or jblive.fm or like Wes said, in your podcasting 2.0 app of choice.
Chris: A lot of them just support the live streaming. In there we go.
Chris: We have it pending so you know like a day before the show when it's going to
Chris: be. Boom, you hit the button, you're listening. It's incredible.
Chris: It's amazing. It's a podcast app.
Chris: We also got the website, linuxunplugged.com. That uses HTML and CSS.
Chris: It looks pretty good and it gives you links to stuff. Check it out.
Chris: You're going to love it. But thank you so much for joining us on this week's
Chris: episode of your Unplugged program.
Chris: Hope you enjoyed it. Let us know what you thought. This is a big episode,
Chris: and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday!