Brent: How much caffeine does this actually have?
Chris: Not enough. Let's do a simultaneous sip. You ready?
Brent: Here we go.
Chris: Three, two, cheers.
Brent: Oh, it's so sweet.
Chris: It's sugar-free!
Brent: That doesn't mean it's not sweet.
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. Well, we have spent the week trying to figure out how to exit
Chris: apps, install dependencies, and try to earn a few bonus points.
Chris: Because today is the conclusion of our TUI challenge.
Chris: We're going to score up how we did and own up to it live on the show.
Chris: And, of course, we'll read some of your challenge reports as well.
Chris: Then we're going to round it all out with some great boosts,
Chris: some picks, and more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate
Chris: greetings to our virtual log. Hello, Mumble Room.
Chris: Hello. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent. Hello. Got a nice tight crew on air.
Chris: And hello, everybody up there in the quiet listening stadium in the special seats.
Chris: Brent will be serving hot dogs later. Don't forget about that.
Brent: They're veggie dogs, but still good.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash
Chris: unplugged. Go there to get it for free on 100 devices and three users,
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Chris: And there's so many great features like Tailscale Send, which allows you to
Chris: move files between all your different Tailnet devices, sort of like AirDrop,
Chris: but for everything from like a Linux box to a Mac. It's magic. It can actually be done.
Chris: It's a really cool application and tons of little things that you can build
Chris: on top of Tailscale. So all of my container applications fire up a sidecar container,
Chris: which then connects to my tail net.
Chris: So each application gets its own IP, gets its own DNS name.
Chris: And so I just go to something like code.mydnsname.com and it loads VS Code wherever
Chris: I'm at as long as I'm on my tail net.
Wes: There's a whole ecosystem of great tools. There's like tail scale aware proxies. It's rad.
Chris: It's getting better every day too. So go get it for free on 100 devices and
Chris: up to three users at tailscale.com slash unplugged. It's great for companies.
Chris: It's great for individuals.
Chris: Thousands of companies use it. Thousands of people in our audience use it too.
Chris: So try it for yourself or a business. Just get started at tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: I don't have much in here. Just a reminder, there are a few calls for papers
Chris: open. We have those linked in last week's show notes.
Chris: And I just wanted to say a happy Father's Day.
Wes: Hey, happy Father's Day to you.
Chris: Oh, thank you. Yeah, happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, really.
Chris: Doing the show on a Sunday, so I did my Father's Day festivities last night.
Chris: It was nice. And we're going to have the leftovers for lunch today after the show.
Wes: Oh, hey-o.
Chris: Yeah, so you know it was a good meal. We had some steaks and we have some leftovers.
Chris: So for the last seven days, we've been living in the terminal,
Chris: trying to do everyday tasks.
Wes: And now have more gray hairs.
Chris: That is true. And many of you listening have joined us. Collectively,
Chris: we've all spent many days in the terminal this week.
Chris: And I hope that those of you who are listening after the fact are still going
Chris: to give this a try and then check in and let us know how you did.
Chris: We want to know even down the road how it went for you.
Chris: So let's start with a listener check-in. This is a great email.
Chris: And Brent, you met this listener. They're a long-time listener. And we got a full report.
Brent: Yeah, this is Darnier, who I've met several times in Berlin when I've been there.
Brent: You guys should go sometime.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Brent: There's some great listeners over there.
Chris: Yeah, we should.
Brent: So Darnier sends a variety of emails because they sent in their TUI results
Brent: via Git patches, sent in via email to our dear Linux Unplugged.
Wes: Amazing.
Brent: But here's the intro, at least. Hello, JB. Very long-time listener.
Brent: Your first email, though.
Brent: Not your oldest lister, I'm sure,
Brent: but I remember watching the Linux action show on YouTube back in 2010.
Brent: And have since followed JB through LAN, Coda Radio, self-hosted,
Brent: and of course Linux Unplugged.
Chris: Thank you, sir.
Wes: Amazing.
Brent: I've been a member for as long as I can remember, but never actually wrote into the show.
Brent: Well, you all finally did it. You made me write in by doing the TUI challenge.
Brent: This is something very close to me.
Brent: As a little bit of a background, I fell in love with 2Es when I did a 2E challenge about 13 years ago.
Brent: back then my friends and i uninstalled xorg entirely
Brent: living purely in the linux console and forced ourselves
Brent: to find ways to get things done amazing my current music setup with mpd still
Brent: uses parts of that original mpd.conf just you know on a different machine today
Brent: i live in the terminal most of the tui challenge therefore wasn't much of a
Brent: challenge just daily life for me,
Brent: Only web browsing and music playback are the categories that I usually use a GUI for.
Brent: However, for honesty's sake, I continue using a web browser at work.
Brent: I don't have a way around that or around using MS Teams as a GUI for video calls.
Brent: At home, though, I've shifted 100% to TUIs since last week, and only web browsing
Brent: has been the pain in the ass.
Brent: Modern web is much worse to load in a TUI compared to 13 years ago.
Chris: That is the truth.
Brent: I hope you enjoy reading the rest of these emails, which are long,
Brent: as much as I've enjoyed listening to you over the years.
Chris: They scored themselves as we encouraged. And, you know, what I did is I took
Chris: the TUI challenge rules and I said, hey, chatbot, make a scorecard out of this.
Brent: Yeah, you should have known.
Chris: I should have known better. I was moving quick. You know, I was trying to 10x my productivity.
Chris: You know, I wanted to be a 10x guy. um so
Chris: but that said i mean
Chris: darnir just crushed this right because he got all of
Chris: the primary points text editing email management
Chris: web browsing music playback file management task management system monitoring
Chris: and terminal multitasking and he got all the bonus points so he has like a score
Chris: of like the max 220 i think is the max it is yeah that's incredible so right
Chris: there i think he's gonna He walks away right there as one of the winners.
Wes: Well deserved.
Chris: This is the challenge he was built for. I love that he did this on his own 13 years ago.
Brent: Darnier also left us a little hidden Easter egg in the emails,
Brent: which we touched on in the members feed, which was a really sweet gesture. Thank you, Darnier.
Chris: Yes, and thank you for listening for so long and for finally checking in. Glad we got you.
Chris: Finally, we got you. Now, we, it hasn't been going as well for us.
Chris: At times, it's been a little rough.
Brent: You don't sound so confident.
Chris: Yeah. And about midweek, I could tell the frustrations were rising amongst me and the boys.
Chris: So I figured it's only fair. We got to capture the bad and the good on the show.
Chris: So let's sit down and capture this. So earlier this week, we did just that.
Chris: Yep. So it's midweek and we thought maybe we should do a check-in because at
Chris: least two out of three of us, I'm not sure about all three of us, are feeling pretty bad.
Chris: And I'll say myself, I'm feeling frustrated, like I am beelining for a failure
Chris: here. And it's not for any of the reasons I expected, which is why it makes me frustrated.
Chris: You know, so I'll get to that. But how are you doing over there, Mr. Brantley?
Brent: Well, I wrote down a couple notes before we sat down to record this,
Brent: and the very first word in the note is frustrated.
Chris: Oh, really?
Brent: But I also added desperate.
Chris: Desperate, uh-oh.
Brent: And then the realization that I, previous to this challenge, was so cozy.
Brent: And now I'm very much not cozy.
Chris: You didn't know how good you had it, did you?
Brent: I didn't really realize it. I guess I should have seen that coming,
Brent: but I figured, oh, yeah, I use the terminal every day to do a bunch of stuff, but it's rough.
Chris: What in particular has struck you as the roughest bit?
Brent: Well, I've taken something like...
Brent: at least two days to try to choose a text editor that just does markdown highlighting by default.
Brent: And I think today I might have found one. So there's that.
Brent: Took me a little while to try to escape out of some of them.
Brent: So Nano's not the only one that...
Wes: You use an editor, right? I thought you were an editor guy now.
Wes: I built you that custom version of it.
Chris: Right. Big NeoVim guy.
Brent: Well there's what i said previous to the challenge starting
Brent: and my hopes and dreams and uh now
Brent: that we're midweek i am drastically changing
Brent: my expectations of what i'm supposed to
Brent: be getting out of this challenge i thought you know had these big dreams of
Brent: yeah i'm gonna learn vim bindings and that's gonna last me the rest of my life
Brent: uh and then but i realized there's like we're we're trying of changed so many
Brent: of our productivity apps that all of them have different key bindings and things.
Brent: And so five days is not enough.
Chris: Hit pause because that's the observation, just kind of watching you fight with
Chris: some of it that has been a bit of a revelation for me because I think I took this bit for granted.
Chris: Before the GUI, back in the old days, before the GUI, every application essentially
Chris: implemented its same interface.
Chris: And there was some standardization over the years, but for the most part,
Chris: especially on unix every application had its own
Chris: ui that you had to discover and that's why it was really common
Chris: for people to just live in a certain application like emacs
Chris: or this definitely happened with particular business applications you would
Chris: learn all the hotkeys and everything and just be able to whip right through
Chris: it once you learned it but every single command line application has its own
Chris: interface and the discoverability is pretty low compared to a gui application
Chris: where you can just look around, discover, and click and browse.
Brent: I remember as a kid playing with the computer that my father and mother supplied us.
Brent: It was like an old Commodore of some kind. So that's the first computer I remember.
Brent: But I remember on that keyboard, they had these...
Brent: little helper i don't know what you call it.
Chris: Oh yeah a little like thing you could stick over the keyboard and then it would.
Brent: Tell you all the key bindings for that very.
Chris: Specific application lots of those is.
Wes: This a new swag item you know to go along with the tui challenge i.
Brent: Feel like i need this this week.
Chris: There you go um we yeah just a bunch of different ones you could print out and
Chris: put over your keyboard yeah.
Wes: You know mpv i would use that one.
Chris: So wes how is the tui challenge going for you oh.
Wes: I'm definitely also feeling some frustration here i
Wes: thought yeah i spend a lot of time in the terminal you know for like a computer
Wes: average computer user in 2025 and i still think i do i almost always have one
Wes: up but i also spend a lot of time in a web browser and it's as impressive as
Wes: stuff like browsh and carbonyl are i i miss full resolution.
Chris: Pixels yeah.
Wes: I was trying to do some route planning and oh man you know something about the
Wes: mapping applications they just they just don't work as good in the terminal
Wes: at least not the ones we have today.
Chris: Yeah and the chatbots chatbots have
Chris: been tricky as we've tried to look a few things up okay so
Chris: here's my frustration and because i have not
Chris: been frustrated with the tui interfaces i find
Chris: it to be nostalgic i remember each application having
Chris: its own bespoke way i set it up in different ways they implemented ways
Chris: to input those configurations and i've kind of been enjoying that i mean i knew
Chris: that coming in that would be something i'd have to do and i've liked that part
Chris: of it i could not have picked a harder worse time to switch to bluefin this
Chris: is you know a cloud native oh.
Wes: So this isn't a this isn't a two-week right fast this is something else.
Chris: Well just slightly because of i mean it's i'm i
Chris: picked probably not the ideal ideal tool for
Chris: this job right um if you want flat pack applications
Chris: you got the the world uh if
Chris: you want something packaged by brew so for
Chris: a lot of so the the ideal combo in bluefin is
Chris: flat pack for your gooey applications brew for
Chris: your command line applications and then if you if you can't find it with brew
Chris: you bounce out to maybe a distro box which they have done a tremendous job with
Chris: the you just command there's like a you just assemble and it assembles a distro
Chris: box for you in just seconds there's a couple of different arches there um some of the standards um.
Chris: And then if you want to create one from scratch and just give it an image name,
Chris: you can do that as well. And it makes it really easy, super integrated.
Chris: Right there is just a tab in my terminal.
Chris: So to set up a distro box, they've nailed that.
Chris: But it actually leads to a secondary effect problem. And that is I have some
Chris: stuff installed via Ubuntu because it was available via apt or PPA.
Chris: I have some stuff installed in my arch distro box because it's in the AUR.
Chris: But not everything because not even everything in the AUR builds. It's gotten really bad.
Chris: I would say three out of the five things I try to install from the AUR,
Chris: TUI apps, fail to build or a dependency fails to build.
Chris: So then, you know, so my first path is I'll try brew because I prefer to have it on my local system.
Chris: And then I go to one of my distro boxes. I often have to also fall down to pip.
Chris: And so pipx has become my friend this week. And a lot of times I'm installing,
Chris: and I'm not exaggerating, 100, 200 dependency packages to say I want to get a music client.
Chris: Oh, okay, that's 200 dependencies because it's a bunch of Python packages,
Chris: a bunch of FFmpeg, and when it's all done and it's all installed,
Chris: I run title DL, for example, and it says FFmpeg isn't in my path, so it doesn't work.
Chris: And it's these little things that it's like, obviously if I was trying to install
Chris: the best-in-class Linux desktop applications and I'm building web applications
Chris: or I'm managing systems, Bluefin would be a killer solution.
Chris: But when you're trying to install a bunch of random, half-supported,
Chris: some underdevelopment, some abandoned TUI applications that some of them are
Chris: Python, some of them are Rust, some of them are Go,
Chris: et cetera, or Bash even, it's a real mixed bag and it could not have been a harder way to do things.
Chris: And I'm sort of saved by the AUR, but so many of them fail to build. Thank you.
Chris: So it's been, honestly, I've spent a lot of time.
Chris: For example, I'm trying to get CMOS going, which is a music TUI client.
Chris: I got that working just great.
Chris: Now I want to populate my music folder with some music.
Chris: Okay, well, I've been using Tidal for a while now, so I'll go get Tidal DL.
Chris: And then I go into these rabbit holes of just trying to get a dependency application
Chris: working so that way I can get the main application working, assuming I can even
Chris: get the main application working.
Chris: So not only am I jumping around between different environments a lot and having
Chris: to implicitly remember, okay, this application, my email client,
Chris: I could only get running in the Ubuntu environment, right.
Chris: But my Todoist client, that is going to be an Arch because I installed it from the AUR.
Chris: But Title DL, I ended up installing via PIP.
Chris: And I have to actively think about that before I launch every terminal app.
Wes: Maybe you need a TUI app spreadsheet so you can keep track of which things are where.
Chris: Yeah, I need a matrix. Right, I need a matrix. If I installed it via software
Chris: and things, they'd be fine.
Chris: So that's been interesting. And then there's been certain things I've installed,
Chris: like the ERC email client.
Wes: Yes, I was going to ask about that.
Chris: Yeah, this is the one, I think, because it does give you a 2E for configuring your email options.
Chris: And much like the beloved Nano, it gives you the commands at the bottom of the
Chris: screen, where something like Neopine, you have to know the commands.
Chris: So that's been nice, except for on all of my Bluefin systems,
Chris: regardless of the terminal application and regardless of the environment, i.e.
Chris: local or within one of the DistroBox environments, the TUI UI never renders
Chris: in my terminal. Doesn't matter the application, never renders.
Chris: I installed it on one of my Nix desktops that I still have, and it renders just fine.
Chris: So it's just a lot of weird little edge cases that I'm hitting that make me
Chris: feel like we're not that far away from this being a bygone era and a way of using computers.
Chris: And I know that seems silly because some of these are brand new applications,
Chris: just like the ARC email clients under active development.
Chris: But it's getting harder and harder to do this. It really is.
Chris: Unless you're on something that has all this packaged for you.
Chris: And it reminds me of what a nightmare package management can be.
Chris: Because I'm trying to get one
Chris: application installing and a dependency of a dependency fails to build.
Chris: And so I can't get the application running. A lot of that.
Brent: Have you gotten anything running?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, things that I can run via Podman or Docker container, no problem.
Chris: So like my web browser. And I have gotten title DL working, title DL NG,
Chris: working to a degree, although it can't find FFmpeg.
Chris: So, yeah, and I've got the to-do as client working, so I've got my task management going.
Brent: Okay. So you're getting a couple points.
Chris: Yeah, but it's not what I expected to spend my time fighting.
Chris: You know what I mean? I just didn't expect that.
Brent: Well, it sounds like you're spending most of your time learning the OS instead of learning the TUI.
Chris: Yeah, and really learning the limits of what DistroBox can do,
Chris: too, because I haven't spent...
Wes: It's probably the most time in it, really, huh? Using it for real?
Chris: Especially using it in anger. Yeah, using it for real. Like,
Chris: I've always played around, oh, I'll just try this random thing as an experiment.
Chris: But now I'm, like, actively using it in multiple different ways and really,
Chris: like, okay, this is a different workflow.
Chris: So I picked a bad time to switch. I'm not actually pinning any of this on Bluefin
Chris: to make it clear because I think it's, you know, if you wanted to do all a bunch
Chris: of Tuis and stuff like that in Ubuntu or Debian box, maybe it's a better route to go.
Chris: you know this is really a modern desktop experience
Chris: is what bluefin is and i and i decided to go get the most modern desktop experience
Chris: you could currently find packaged for somebody right now and then
Chris: go throw a bunch of you know time machines on at it so i
Chris: understand i'm not i'm not pinning the blame on bluefin i want to make that
Chris: clear i'm putting the blame on me for picking
Chris: the wrong tool for this particular job like i should have just waited
Chris: until the two-week challenge was over but i was so excited i
Chris: have otherwise been enjoying it i want to make that clear as well but
Chris: oh my god right now mid challenges i can see
Chris: that i'm not stacking the wins and the points that i thought i
Chris: would be oh boy i can't
Chris: believe it i mean if i told chris from the late 90s and early aughts that he
Chris: was having these struggles he would call me an old man and laugh at me and he
Chris: would show me how he was browsing the gentoo wiki using links and finding things
Chris: no problem when he couldn't get x11 working and to shut up and figure it out
Chris: that's what he would Maybe.
Wes: You should have been using Gentoo. I don't know. If you're going to be building
Wes: stuff anyway, you might as well use a tool that's made for it.
Chris: You know what? You know what? I think it might have worked better.
Wes: My other thought is, can you run Bedrock Linux, that Linux that combines a bunch of distros into one?
Wes: You just put that in a distro box, and then you only need one distro box.
Chris: Oh, right, right. Smart.
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Brent: Well, we're back in real time. It's the end of the week, the end of the seven-day
Brent: Tui challenge. Boys, how are you feeling now?
Chris: I'm feeling a little better. I think, yeah, I don't want to give it too much
Chris: away. I don't think I'm going to be the champion this week, but I am feeling better.
Wes: Yeah. You know, I still miss a web browser, but I am feeling better than when we checked in.
Chris: Okay, out of the three of us, who do you think is going to score the highest?
Brent: I think it really depends how honest we are. Yeah.
Wes: Whoa.
Chris: I mean, you sprinted hard towards the end.
Wes: That's what I was going to say.
Chris: I'm kind of inclined to give it to Brett over there.
Wes: Uh-huh.
Brent: I think you're making a mistake here.
Wes: You were working right up to the start of the show.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, you were cramming your homework. So, I don't know.
Chris: I feel like you were trying to cram in on the bonies to get ahead.
Brent: I may have cheated lots this week.
Chris: Okay. So, you mean there may be some penalties?
Brent: I may have pushed hard because I needed the bonus points.
Chris: I got you. Yeah. So, you know, just to remind everybody, the TUI challenge had
Chris: a few categories along with points.
Chris: You needed to conquer text editing, email management, web browsing,
Chris: music playback, file management, task management, system monitoring,
Chris: and for bonus points, terminal multitasking.
Chris: And then some categories also had additional bonus points available.
Chris: So how did you do with text editor?
Brent: Well, as you're in that clip, I kind of wanted to find something that just worked out of the box.
Brent: And it turns out from that day forward, I did. I found an application called
Brent: Helix that I really liked.
Brent: I wanted throughout this challenge to learn some Vim keybindings.
Brent: Not all of them. That's ridiculous. That takes years. But I did learn a couple,
Brent: and Helix uses them by default.
Brent: But Chris, as you and I love using Nano, it gives you like a little cheater
Brent: bar at the bottom when you open the command palette to try to type in a command.
Brent: You can like tab complete those, but also just like makes them discoverable for you.
Chris: And they're kind of like regular language commands too.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: That helps.
Brent: And it gives you the shortcuts as well. So it's a good discoverability for the
Brent: shortcuts. So I found it a really nice balance between learning a new thing,
Brent: having that like handicap, I guess, of that little panel that helps me out.
Brent: And also being able to change the themes fairly quickly.
Brent: Because I did one thing I really discovered I wanted was markdown highlighting
Brent: that wasn't super complex to get out of the box.
Brent: So I think in that regard, I found a happy place and maybe an editor that'll
Brent: stick with me. I did try a couple others. Like I mentioned, I tried NeoVim.
Brent: The right decision was to give up on that.
Brent: I also tried something called Z, which is written in Rust. It's supposed to be a modern text editor.
Brent: I didn't realize it uses Emacs key bindings, and I got stuck in it for quite a while.
Brent: So I eventually got out of there and never touched it again.
Wes: Hey, that's supposed to be a Vim thing, okay?
Chris: I'm going to try out Helix after the show. I didn't really go outside my comfort
Chris: zone when it came to text editors. I just felt like that was a category I had solved.
Chris: But then watching you use Helix, and I tried it quickly. I'm like,
Chris: oh, I might, even though I didn't really use it for the majority of the challenge.
Wes: You're switching after.
Chris: I might, yeah. I think so.
Brent: I was quite happy to find it. And I don't think all, well, maybe not most of
Brent: these tools will stick with me, but I think Helix might be the one.
Chris: What about the email tool? Because you and I used, you and I went the same route.
Chris: We used the same email tool.
Wes: I think we all did.
Chris: Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, we all three did. Right. So ARC or AERC, A-E-R-C.
Wes: ARC.
Chris: We talked about it earlier. We all three went with it, and I had initially just
Chris: the weirdest problem where it would not render on my terminal. Rebooted the system,
Chris: resized the terminal and ran it again and it
Chris: worked so after the after we recorded i
Chris: was able to continue to i was able to use it without having to do anything fancy
Chris: so i don't know why it wouldn't work initially but it
Chris: did eventually but where i went wrong is
Chris: i i asked an llm how to set up because i had just gotten that working in the
Chris: web in the browser in the terminal like well let's try this first of all arduous
Chris: second of all didn't work couldn't render properly so i couldn't really read
Chris: the instructions very well oh no and it sent me down this route best i could tell of,
Chris: setting up like an app profile under google workspaces and then generating like
Chris: a project and then enabling oauth 2 and then generating oauth keys and client
Chris: ids and client secrets and all the stuff and brent was like you don't and i
Chris: was told because i'm like 15 minutes into this yeah.
Brent: I was outside tinkering on something and came back.
Chris: In like 20 minutes later between trying to read it off of the terminal web browser
Chris: and then going through the google works i was so frustrated i had to take a
Chris: little walk and brent was outside cooking i'm like brent i wish you were inside
Chris: right now so you could commiserate with me you're not gonna believe what i'm going through,
Chris: he's like you don't need to do that i'm like what now you don't need to do that,
Chris: but once it got running we have a little admission to make.
Brent: Uh-huh it's embarrassing.
Chris: It is embarrassing i don't know where.
Brent: You want to start with this one but you and i both ran into it identically.
Chris: Yeah and.
Brent: We don't think west did.
Chris: And i think you need to be aware of this listeners if you use Nano.
Brent: Okay, so Arc is quite lovely in that it presents you with shortcuts and it tries
Brent: to guide you through it. And I woke up pretty far.
Chris: It has like global commands and a lot of them are sort of Vim inspired.
Brent: Yeah, so I was feeling good. I thought email was going to be like the biggest challenge here.
Chris: And one of the sweet things about Arc is it uses your favorite default text
Chris: editor. So the compose environment is the text editor you're used to, whatever it might be.
Brent: Which is awesome. So Chris and I both started composing messages to Wes.
Brent: in nano of course because that was our default and couldn't figure out how to
Brent: actually couldn't send it get out of the text editor to move on to the next step you.
Chris: Have to exit the text editor and then arc takes back over and then you're on
Chris: a review screen and you can send the email it's.
Wes: Kind of like with git right like when you're presented with an editor to edit your.
Brent: Commit message.
Wes: And then you quit save and quit the file.
Brent: Exactly yeah which is a fine way to do it yeah the issue comes in that uh well
Brent: as you know chris uh wes you might not know this but to exit nano you know you
Brent: hit ctrl x yeah sure do just get out of that says.
Chris: It right there on the screen it's real handy.
Brent: Yeah it's awesome part of the problem though is that arc hijacks that keystroke
Brent: ctrl x to bring up the command palette yeah so chris and i both ran into the
Brent: situation where we composed our beautiful email and wanted to move on to the
Brent: next step by just closing the editor and you can't actually ever do that you.
Chris: Can't close nano because it's like you said it's it's overriding that control X to be the global.
Brent: Command. I tried so many things.
Chris: So you get stuck.
Chris: You get stuck. And you can never send the email, as far as we could tell,
Chris: if you're using Nano as your default text editor.
Chris: So this is where, for me, using Bluefin took a turn to the positive.
Chris: And where I crossed from feeling like Bluefin was holding me back to where the
Chris: Bluefin design was actually getting things done for me.
Chris: And it was when I realized I could open up my Arch distro box and I could change
Chris: my default text editor in my Arch distro box to Vim and I could just compose
Chris: emails in there and not have to actually stop using Nano on the host system.
Chris: But the other thing that's great about the way the distro box configuration
Chris: works is when I fired up Arc, it had all the configuration when I had set it
Chris: up on the host system because it's reading my home directory and all my dot files.
Chris: So I didn't have to reset up Arc. Everything I had done on my Bluefin host system
Chris: was immediately working inside the Arch distro box.
Chris: But now inside Arch, I'm using Vim.
Chris: And then what do you know? I'm doing my emails, baby. And I'm sending emails.
Chris: I'm receiving emails. I'm replying to emails.
Wes: It's a pretty nice client.
Chris: It's powerful.
Wes: I do like it.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: I think the setup on the Google side was annoying.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wes: But the actual experience after that is totally fine.
Chris: Nothing Arc can do about that, though.
Wes: Right.
Chris: So once we switched editors, how did it work for you?
Brent: Well, I did the right thing and switched to my new text editor.
Chris: Oh, so you're using Helix to write your emails?
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Cool.
Brent: My new default. I even committed.
Chris: Nice.
Brent: And worked perfectly fine after that. So got a nice little email off to Wes,
Brent: and he confirmed that, yes, Chris, you and I both got points for this category.
Chris: All right. We should probably keep moving. Webb, what did you end up actually using here?
Brent: This is probably where I'm going to have to start getting honest.
Chris: Uh-oh.
Brent: Okay, you both had some success with Carbano. We kind of teased that last episode.
Chris: We're great.
Brent: I could not get this thing going.
Wes: Really?
Brent: I could not get it running.
Chris: Now, I believe, since I was running it via Podman.
Wes: I was also just doing Podman.
Chris: You opted to try to not do the Podman route.
Brent: I tried to nex it.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: And failed quite miserably after quite a long time.
Chris: Which was very cathartic for me to see. After the struggles I went through, I have to say.
Brent: Yes. Yeah. I felt your pain. Yes, you did.
Chris: For one app, you felt my pain.
Brent: But I did pivot, and I used Browse, which was available by default in NixOS.
Brent: And so I got a quick win there, and I loaded our website, and the images took
Brent: about a minute to load. But I did get the website loaded.
Brent: That said, I did not use that browser all week.
Brent: I could not. So I feel like probably I should be deducted points,
Brent: but given some for at least getting a browser working. So I don't know what
Brent: you boys want to give me in this particular.
Chris: So web browsing was worth 20 points, but you have to deduct 20 points if you use Firefox or Chrome.
Brent: That sounds like a big zero for me.
Chris: Well, I could half that. I'd be willing to half that if we want to do funny math.
Wes: Okay.
Brent: Well, this is where you should get honest, because I don't think that you guys
Brent: exclusively used the terminal browser.
Chris: There's just certain apps to publish our shows and stuff I have to use.
Wes: I tried to do stuff in Carbano first.
Chris: And then I would fall back. Oh, I suffered. I mean, the portion of suffering,
Chris: getting things done on the Carbano was high.
Chris: So, I mean, I definitely feel like I paid my pittance.
Wes: So maybe like, is that a 10 point then?
Chris: I feel like it's a 10 point for the web browser. Because, you know,
Chris: we didn't hire a judge for this episode.
Chris: So, all right. You and I both use CMOS for music.
Chris: I'll talk more about that later in my segment, I think.
Chris: But you use something that I didn't even bother with for your file management.
Chris: I'm really curious about your choice of file manager.
Brent: Yeah, I mentioned two of them, Ranger and also Joshudo, which is just a Ranger-like
Brent: file manager written in Rust.
Brent: And I kind of used both 50-50. They're very similar to each other.
Brent: I wanted to see what the differences were.
Brent: They worked amazingly well. Very simple to use. They have shortcuts and all
Brent: that stuff, too, that you can learn.
Brent: I tried to stick to using this for file browsing because I did make that comment
Brent: in the clip saying, hey, maybe you should lean on a TUI and not just console tools.
Brent: So I tried to use it as much as possible. I used it all week and kind of liked it.
Brent: Even did some shell commands from within Ranger or Joshuda. And I think this went really well for me.
Chris: Ranger here, and I think you're going to get some bonus points here for this.
Chris: Ranger has some neat support for multi-file functions.
Chris: And if you look at the file management section...
Chris: If you perform batch operations, you get plus five bonus points.
Brent: I sure do.
Chris: Yeah, you do. And I saw you perform the batch operation.
Wes: Did you?
Chris: I did.
Wes: I witnessed it. What? That batch bastard.
Brent: And you do the batch operations similar to the Git editing.
Brent: So you change them in a text editor. So I had my text editor of choice Helix
Brent: going in this. So everything kind of near the end of the week started gelling
Brent: a little bit more than the frustrations I was feeling midweek.
Brent: So I'll take the extra five points.
Chris: Yeah, I think you earned it. So keep track of that. I think the Ranger looks really interesting.
Chris: And it reminds me to say that since the last time where I actually used these
Chris: tools in the real world, more so than ever, Vim has sort of become almost a
Chris: universal interface for these TUI applications.
Chris: Not 100%, but 80% of these apps use Vim keybindings.
Chris: And so it really gives you a multiplier if you just learn Vim keybindings,
Chris: even the basics, because so many apps outside of Vim are using them now.
Brent: You know, that was my intuition coming into the challenge, and I think it turned
Brent: out to be quite true. There were Vim keybindings in places I never even expected them.
Chris: Oh, yeah. All right, so how did you do on the task management?
Brent: I never got there. Yeah, I did exactly nothing.
Chris: Uh-oh, uh-oh. I'm surprised by that.
Brent: I went as far as opening a bunch of tabs of interesting-looking task managers
Brent: that I could run, but of the terminal applications I thought I would learn the
Brent: most, I decided this was last on the list.
Chris: That's a big fat negative 20 there on the points there, big guy.
Brent: That sets me back quite far. I should have did at least something.
Brent: Jeez, now I regret that. Can I just go away for five minutes?
Chris: But you get the Btop points, so you get points for system monitoring.
Chris: I'm going to give that to you, which is 10 points.
Brent: Thank you. Thank you.
Chris: And then did you do any multitasking on the command line?
Brent: I realized, you know, we put this as the last day's challenge and I did this
Brent: as the last sort of challenge that I set some time to.
Brent: I feel almost like this should have been first.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I see. That was one of the things I realized about midway into.
Chris: And then I started using the hell out of like Zelgi tabs and stuff. Yeah.
Brent: Yeah, because I opened Zellage, which everybody was raving about.
Brent: So I was like, I've got to try this thing. But this was like...
Brent: the hour before the show this morning and realized very quick.
Brent: I played around and I was like, Oh, this is sweet.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: And realized very quickly that I had missed out on using this all week.
Chris: Yeah. And I just have like, I just have my email up in one of the tabs. Just, Oh yeah.
Brent: Why not? So I did get it running. I did kind of fall in love with it very quickly,
Brent: but I did not use it in anger.
Brent: So I don't know. You guys are going to have to judge what that's worth.
Chris: No, you tried it. You got some multitasking going. So you get 30 points.
Chris: Oof, I'll take it. You get 30 points from that.
Chris: And then I see in the bonus category, you tried an LLM app. You tried some password
Chris: apps. Can you give me a quick rundown on how that went?
Brent: Yeah, I found quite a bit of success. Yesterday I was griping about it,
Brent: but I found some success with a little app called Teneri, which is basically
Brent: LLM in your terminal 2E, written in Rust, of course.
Brent: And this is pretty cool. You can, by default, it's connected to, like, your chat GPT API.
Brent: Turns out I don't have one of those. So that instantly put me in hard mode.
Brent: But it also supports, like, Llama CPP as a backend or Ollama as well.
Brent: So I connected it to my Ollama instance and used that for a bit and actually kind of love it.
Brent: It has a bunch of history and it uses Vim keybindings.
Chris: Hey, go figure.
Brent: So it's modal and all that good, great stuff that I'm learning to love.
Brent: So Tenere, I think, awesome tool. I would totally recommend.
Chris: We'll have a link to that in the show notes. And password manager?
Brent: This is another one that I wanted to get working, so I use KeePass XC generally.
Brent: That's a GUI, of course. So I was looking for KeePass 2Es. There's,
Brent: of course, a terminal...
Brent: like just a console program you can use, which was real painful.
Brent: So I quickly exited that.
Brent: I didn't want it. But I did find a TUI for KeePass called KPXHS.
Brent: It's basically interactive KeePass, and it's just a front end for the KeePass CLI.
Brent: But this is where I fell down again. If something wasn't packaged in NexoS,
Brent: I tried and tried to kind of make a flake to just pull something down from GitHub.
Brent: But Wes, you got to teach me this. Cause like I'm doing something wrong.
Brent: It's not working. And I really want to be able to do this little thing.
Chris: You've identified an area to learn more about.
Brent: Yeah.
Wes: So homework after the show.
Brent: I feel a little proud of myself for trying cause it's a skill I've wanted to
Brent: acquire, but I did not quite acquire it, but I got into it a little bit.
Brent: So never got to the point of doing passwords in the terminal, but I tried.
Chris: So keep track of your score. We're going to total up all our scores at the end. Okay.
Chris: So don't reveal it now. Wes, how did your week in the terminal go?
Chris: Anything stand out for you in the categories when we get to text editing or
Chris: email management? Anything there that surprised you? I imagine you probably used Vim.
Wes: I did. Yeah, NeoVim to be precise.
Chris: And you went with ARC for email.
Wes: I didn't get super creative on that front. That is true.
Chris: Well, I like that we all tried ARC. That's new for all of us.
Chris: You got it working first, I have to say, because you figured out the app password route and I...
Chris: So dumb.
Wes: I've done that before. I also asked an LLM, so I just got better LLM advice, I guess.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Wes: Well, and then I realized I tried using the JB email, which didn't seem to work,
Wes: at least with my level of permissions or whatever.
Wes: So then I pivoted to mine, and then I was able to... It was kind of hard because
Wes: I ended up getting a link to the right place instead of finding it in the UI,
Wes: and then I was able to sort of initiate what I needed.
Chris: That was the thing for me is I actually had to search for it and then click
Chris: to it. You could not find it in the Google settings.
Wes: So once that hurdle was done, that worked pretty well.
Chris: What did you do for music playback?
Wes: Yeah, so I did do CMOS a little bit. I also did actually manage to try out Castero for podcasts.
Chris: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Wes: That one hadn't been updated in a little bit, but it does, you know,
Wes: I was able to listen to our stuff. I listened to some other ones.
Wes: I mean, you basically just have to add feeds yourself, but that's fine.
Wes: So, you know, paste in the feed URL and then...
Brent: I know that's not quite considered streaming, because our bonus points said
Brent: extra bonus points for streaming, But I feel like if you get podcasts going
Brent: in the terminal, it could be worth extra bonus points.
Chris: I think so.
Brent: Can we give it to them?
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: All right. Five points for you, Wes.
Wes: I did try, what was it called?
Wes: YTUE-music? YTUE-music?
Chris: Yeah, how did that work? I wanted to try it, but I did not get it.
Wes: I could not get it running.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Wes: I didn't try a ton, but in what time I did experiment with it, sadly.
Chris: Did you opt to use a TUI file manager at all?
Wes: Not, I mean, I didn't use it all of the time, but yes, I did try out Yazzie.
Chris: Which i actually have running here yeah yeah um.
Wes: Because i wanted to try the fancy image support.
Chris: Right in.
Wes: Kitty so check this out.
Chris: Okay whoa it's perfect yeah.
Wes: Isn't that nice.
Chris: So what i'm seeing is a three column uh file manager and in the third column
Chris: is a perfect rendering of a pdf,
Chris: It looks, so it's a manual for a microphone.
Brent: Oh, wow.
Chris: It's great. And that's a 1080p display, right?
Wes: Uh-huh.
Chris: And it renders, it all fits on there really nice. That's nice.
Chris: Okay, so I kind of have to admit, I stuck with Midnight Commander here because,
Chris: again, I was going for easy points.
Chris: I use this all the time. I love Midnight Commander.
Chris: It reminds me of Norton Commander from when I was a young lad and my dad's computer
Chris: ran Norton Commander before Windows.
Chris: and um i still have a very soft spot for it and so i just know how to whip through that thing.
Wes: That makes sense.
Chris: And it's got multi-pane support and so i i used midnight commander but yazzy's looking real good.
Wes: I did also use dua because i like it for specifically deleting files and because
Wes: you can um you know go in and mark a bunch of stuff to delete and then have it delete all of it.
Chris: Did you do anything for task management.
Wes: Uh yeah i didn't again this was i didn't do a ton i
Wes: kind of pivoted to this part of it a little late um but i was
Wes: trying out let's see here i tried
Wes: to open all these up a vault tasks it's
Wes: a tui markdown task manager all right
Wes: oh i like this markdown yeah so you kind of have a vault um
Wes: you put a bunch of markdown files in there and then it's got like a its own
Wes: little bespoke tui interface front end to that yeah so it has its own thing
Wes: where it's kind of parsing it it's all very new sounds like maybe refactor is
Wes: pending but it is written in rust and it is in nix packages so that's actually how i found it.
Chris: That's cool nice little find there yeah i got i think i have a couple of finds
Chris: maybe you guys haven't seen i'm not sure we'll see when.
Wes: Yeah it does have like some basic like filtering support you can browse through
Wes: your your files in it uh and then it does have some support for parsing out
Wes: stuff for like calendar and time management too which i didn't try the time
Wes: management stuff but it you can have it like figure out calendar stuff which is neat.
Chris: It sounds like you got all the base points i'm guessing.
Wes: Yeah i did also cheat a bit on the browser part so you should i should only
Wes: get the 10 there for sure yeah i think.
Chris: We're all just getting 10 for that one there were moments boys there were moments
Chris: i mean you gotta get you gotta do the job and multitasking.
Wes: Uh yeah i was also just sticking with zelige because i've been using it a lot
Wes: lately anyway it's solid it's kind of taking over it's.
Chris: Totally solid so i don't really you know mine were not that surprising i've
Chris: sort of covered them as you boys have gone along uh but i did a couple of different
Chris: so i'll swap mine out uh for task management,
Chris: Todoist CLI, I've recently gone back to using Todoist about three months ago.
Chris: It's just because, for this reason, everything talks to Todoist.
Wes: It's true, yeah.
Chris: It's really great.
Wes: I'm missing LogSeek because I've been spinning out of Todoist into Log.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Wes: If I hadn't done that, this would have been easier.
Chris: GoMux totally worked out great for me, a 2E matrix client written in Go.
Wes: Oh, yeah, I was using Iamb.
Chris: Oh, yeah?
Wes: Uh-huh, matrix client for Vim Addicts Red X written in Rust.
Chris: Yeah, there it is. This one is written in Go, and I think this is the one that's sticking.
Chris: I've had trouble getting it verified, though. I think I'll figure that out.
Chris: But I actually think this one might stick because I love just having the matrix chat in a terminal.
Chris: The resource usage is fantastically different. Oh, yours looks a lot like IRC.
Chris: Oh, mine looks like Element, but in the terminal. Yours looks like an IRC client.
Chris: I kind of like yours, too. Have you been enjoying it?
Wes: Yeah. It's pretty minimal. And it is, right? So if I want to go explore rooms,
Wes: I have to type colon and then rooms.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Wes: But you can use slash and then just type for search. You can do a lot of the
Wes: Vim key bindings are all there.
Chris: Of course.
Wes: You can use GG and Shift-G to navigate up and down the page.
Wes: So it's all very natural if you know Vim movements.
Chris: As a Starlink user, ping times are pretty important to me.
Chris: We've mentioned this app before, but there's a couple of these where I was like,
Chris: oh, yeah, I know this app. I'm going to use this while I'm doing the TUI challenge.
Chris: And one of those was GPing, which gives you an NCURSES graph of your ping latency
Chris: up and down, which has been really nice to see.
Chris: And then I started the TUI challenge at the studio, and then I realized I need to go home.
Chris: I've got to switch Wi-Fi. There's several ways to do that, but Impala is a TUI
Chris: for managing Wi-Fi on Linux.
Wes: Oh, smart. I was just supplicating like an animal.
Chris: And then like you, Wes, I use CMOS. Small, fast, fast.
Chris: Very light. And I just added a podcast. And it's really easy just to add also
Chris: a directory or an individual file. And there's kind of like a Vim command.
Chris: And you get into the command mode. And then you tell you want to add.
Chris: And it'll start auto-completing the path for you. And then it just figures it out.
Wes: It's very efficient. If you just want to listen. Yeah, exactly.
Wes: Like you have a folder of music.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Boom. No problem.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. So that was, those all worked. I don't know.
Chris: There was every, I got every category. I didn't get very many bonus points though, Brent.
Brent: Well, that's not quite true.
Chris: Oh, yeah?
Brent: Yeah, because you get a bonus point for syncing your tasks with Todoist.
Chris: Oh, okay. That's nice, I suppose.
Brent: Well, if you don't want to, we don't have to get it.
Chris: No, I'll take it. I'll take it. I think I was really struggling to get the apps running.
Chris: And so then by the time I got them running, I was like, I'm just going to get to work here.
Chris: You know, I'm just going to try to get the basics done.
Brent: I take it none of you boys did any batch operations in your TUI file manager?
Chris: Not unless do we count moving a directory of files as a batch operation?
Brent: Not at all.
Chris: No.
Wes: I did in DUA.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Brent: Okay.
Wes: I did a batch delete.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: I mean, I think we have to give it to him.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Also, I have a bunch more picks if we want to.
Chris: Yeah, give us a rattle off a couple while Brent totals it up,
Chris: and then we'll get our total going.
Wes: Okay, so for more system management, I tried out system CTL TUI.
Wes: oh cool yeah yeah just kind of a you know a nice
Wes: little way to check out what's running in systemd which you know
Wes: it's nice on the file management front it's not really management
Wes: but i found um tdf which is
Wes: a tui based pdf viewer uh that's
Wes: surprisingly decent actually cool let's see
Wes: i on the dev side i checked out uh
Wes: jqp which is a tui playground to
Wes: experiment with jq if you ever use jq you kind of write semi-cryptic little
Wes: strings to parse through json files um so it's nice to have like an environment
Wes: that can like you know refresh it for you and reevaluate your rule and play
Wes: around right and then also rain frog which is a database management tui,
Wes: because you know sometimes it's already psql but i wanted to see what else if it's on the.
Chris: Tui it means you can ssh in and use it you know what i mean yep that's pretty good all right.
Wes: Let's see for the LLM I did Parallama which you can it's kind of got a nice
Wes: graphical TUI for choosing models and then you know kind of standard thing for chatting with them,
Wes: And then to try to make my life a little bit easier for some of the stuff that
Wes: I could answer this way, I started using WikiTui, which is a Wikipedia-specific
Wes: Tui, you know, which has pretty nice support.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: It uses the text interface, right? So it's like you didn't have to backwards
Wes: try to support the web. You could just get right access to the information.
Chris: It's so nice. All right. So we will have links to all of those plus all of ours
Chris: that we used in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 619.
Chris: But you know what that means?
Chris: it is now time for us to add up our scores and see how we all did.
Chris: Brent, do you have the math over there?
Brent: I have some math but I think I'm going to advocate for extra points for you
Brent: guys if you want me to Okay So one thing we didn't answer, did you use your
Brent: terminal multitasking app to have more than one session open?
Brent: Yes Okay, let me add extra points here for you.
Wes: Would have gone insane if I couldn't do that.
Chris: Yeah, mandatory Okay,
Chris: He's mathing.
Brent: Yeah, math hard. Actually, our rules don't actually say how many points you
Brent: get for that. So how many points would you like for that?
Chris: Five?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: That seemed fair? Five.
Wes: A little sprinkle of points.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: All right. We'll give you extra points for that.
Chris: That's exciting.
Wes: You're using some sort of TUI-based calculator, right?
Brent: Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, indeed. Okay. And I also feel like you could get some extra, extra points here.
Brent: So, Chris, you used GoMux to browse Matrix.
Brent: I think that's pretty fancy. so I'm open to giving extra points for...
Chris: Is it? Is that?
Brent: I didn't do it.
Chris: Is it fancy?
Wes: Well, how about five for each of us then?
Chris: Okay, five for Wes and I, yeah. Now you've got to give us the math before the music runs out.
Brent: Oh, how much time do I have? But Wes, you also did LLMs. Do you want some extra five points for that?
Wes: Yeah, but you should get it then too.
Brent: Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm headed with this.
Chris: Wait, I use an LLM. I just did it in the browser. Does that count?
Brent: Not at all. Okay.
Wes: Then a judge comes out.
Brent: Do you want to guess? Who you think is at the top, based on our explorations here?
Chris: I think you.
Brent: Wes, any guesses?
Wes: I'm going to go with you as well.
Brent: Oh my god, you guys. Okay, here are the scores. So I have 9 zero points, 90 points.
Chris: Uh-oh.
Brent: I got a big minus 20 for the task management, but I also didn't get 20 points.
Brent: So that's actually like 40 missed points.
Brent: And Wes, you got...
Wes: 145 nice job wes nice.
Chris: Job nice job and.
Brent: Chris you got 75 points.
Chris: So wes you are the winner.
Wes: I did not expect that congratulations wes i have to share my prize with next
Wes: packages because i gotta say compared to your experience it felt like cheating
Wes: because not only could i browse for ideas to try but then like for most of them
Wes: i mean not all of them worked but most of them you know they just pretty much ran i.
Chris: Hey man i picked the hill to climb and at the end i think It was helpful,
Chris: but it took me the entire week practically to get there.
Chris: So a couple of these, I think the matrix client and the email client are sticking
Chris: because I have them set up already.
Chris: So I'm just going to keep using them. So in the end, I'm walking away with a
Chris: couple of applications I'm still using.
Brent: I'm curious in this challenge, do you have any lessons learned you want to share?
Brent: Anything that really was like an aha moment in trying all of this?
Chris: If you haven't used Midnight Commander yet, give it a try.
Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged. Head on over there to check them out and support
Chris: the show and unleash your hardware.
Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged. I'd like to introduce you to Unraid.
Chris: You might not be familiar with them. They're a powerful, easy-to-use NAS operating
Chris: system built on top of modern Linux for those who want control,
Chris: flexibility, and efficiency in managing your own data, your privacy,
Chris: and your own applications.
Chris: And Unraid allows you to mix and match the drive of any size.
Chris: So if you've got multiple different sized disks, you can put them in the machine
Chris: and it'll work with you. It also supports all the modern ZFS and other file systems.
Chris: XFS and others are in there as well. And they've integrated tail scales.
Chris: So you can bring remote access to your applications with a checkbox.
Chris: No port boarding, no static IPs, no complex firewall rules. None of that stuff
Chris: you've got to worry about.
Chris: It'll just integrate right into your tail net. And there are...
Chris: I mean, thousands, thousands of different applications that are just one click away to install.
Chris: A lot of the stuff we talk about all the time and more is in there,
Chris: including special versions. If you have AMD hardware or Intel hardware or NVIDIA
Chris: hardware, so you can get things that are GPU accelerated.
Chris: They also make it really straightforward to get Linux VMs going with virtual GPU support.
Chris: So you could have multiple GPUs in there. You could have one GPU in there.
Chris: you can work with their vm system to pass that through to
Chris: your linux machine oh something else that i think is really nice because
Chris: this recently shipped in unraid 7.1 if you've
Chris: got uh like an ubuntu system now or a free nas
Chris: or maybe a proxmox system using zfs and it was good but you want to move to
Chris: something a little more robust a little bit more feature rich that'd be like
Chris: unraid well unraid 7.1 now lets you import those zfs pools yeah you can just
Chris: bring them right in so that's slick.
Chris: If you've got data on there, you've got virtual machines already,
Chris: just bring them right in to Unraid 7.1.
Chris: They also have a 30-day free trial that lets you test out Unraid,
Chris: no credit card required.
Chris: This is nice, too, because it means they have a sustainable development model
Chris: over there, and they keep building, and they have been iterating for so many
Chris: years on making this thing just a champ.
Chris: So go check it out and support the show. It's unraid.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Go see what you can build, play with the stuff we talk about,
Chris: and build something reliable and useful for yourself, for your friends, or for your family.
Chris: Get started at unraid.net slash unplugged.
Brent: Well, we got a bunch of feedback from the Terminal 2E Challenge.
Brent: Thank you, everyone. We got one here that we're pulling out from Don Harper, who sent in an email.
Brent: Hashtag 2E Challenge. Hey, guys, I thought you might want to follow my attempt on the 2E Challenge.
Brent: They wrote a series of blog posts over at duckland.org.
Brent: And he says, great to see you folks in Boston. So I've pulled a couple little
Brent: excerpts from those blog posts. You want to hear?
Chris: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Don.
Brent: All right. Day one here. Text editing. Since I normally read my email and RSS
Brent: feeds in a TUI app, and I use Vim as my editor and IDE, I figured it would be
Brent: fairly easy for me to take part in this one.
Chris: That's what I was thinking coming into it. I thought, hey, I've used some of
Chris: these apps for years. This is going to be no problem.
Brent: Yeah, turns out not so much. Zidane says, there are bonus points for using a
Brent: script to help things out, and I guess the script I use to start editing a file should work.
Brent: And he included that script, which is kind of nice. Day two here,
Brent: email, since I already live in NeoMutt, I should probably describe my setup.
Brent: So they use Gmail, and for filtering, use a tool called Gmail CTL.
Brent: Don says, which allows me to control Gmail's filters from my computer,
Brent: works by connecting to Gmail and pulling down the filter definition file and
Brent: then firing up my default editor.
Brent: Once I'm happy with the changes, it'll upload it back to Gmail.
Chris: That is a real Linux nerd solution.
Brent: He also uses SystemDTimer to schedule the sync runs for the email and runs not
Brent: much to index the mail so you can search through it all.
Brent: And day 7, TMUX, with the first pane split into 4 to show the tools off,
Brent: but I have also I also have panes for my email RSS,
Brent: Mastodon client and SSH shells on a couple other machines, which brings my grand total to 200 points.
Chris: Not bad! Not bad at all!
Brent: There's a bunch more details in there. There's basically a blog post for every
Brent: day's challenge, which is a fun read. So duckland.org for that.
Wes: Yeah. Thank you for sharing.
Chris: I love that we heard from some folks now that have been like mostly living in
Chris: the TUI, you know, already using their TUI apps. It's hilarious.
Brent: Speaking of mostly living in the TUI, Darnier sent in really fascinating details
Brent: about how they use the TUI and some tools that they were involved in way, way early.
Brent: so neomut being one of them actually so i think we'll read that in the post show.
Chris: Well that means it is time to read some boost and we got some tui challenge
Chris: follow-ups in the boost too and we're going to start with someone else who is
Chris: our baller booster this week with a generous 100 000 sats,
Chris: Thank you very much, someone else. Our longtime listener, Sporadic Booster.
Chris: That's, well, we appreciate it very much. Checking in with a nice valuable boost.
Chris: Making up for lost time. It's good to hear from you.
Wes: Adversaries 17 comes in with 42,000 sets.
Chris: Hey, it's adversaries. There he is.
Wes: So, does Emacs count as a TUI? Technically, doesn't it have a daemon and then a GUI client app?
Wes: If it does, then I don't know what problem there is, because Emacs is the whole darn operating system.
Wes: A long time ago, he goes on, in a Pacific Northwest far away from me,
Wes: three hosts, well, really only three years ago, had a mission to get a ham radio license.
Brent: Oh, no.
Chris: Uh-oh.
Wes: I waited and waited and waited and waited, saying when they do,
Wes: I will. It'll be a whole JB community thing.
Chris: Oh, no.
Wes: Well, I got tired of waiting, so I went and took the test. Get your ham radio
Wes: license, guys. It's not that hard.
Wes: ke9 dmq out.
Chris: Thank you adversaries very nice now you know adversaries maybe we should do
Chris: that for another challenge one day we got to recover from these challenges this one ham chow this,
Chris: yeah make a whole ham sandwich theme out of it too thank you for the boost.
Brent: Well shy fox boosted in 30,999 cents.
Brent: I love this challenge. I learned a lot and will keep using some of those TUI tools.
Brent: They also link to basically their TUI challenge results here.
Brent: Let's see if we can figure this out. The total didn't do so good on email management,
Brent: it looks like, but the total, 100 points.
Chris: 100 points, not bad at all.
Wes: Excellent.
Chris: Beat me.
Brent: Right?
Chris: I think that beat me. That's so bad.
Brent: They also included a bunch of backgrounds and some screenshots.
Brent: We'll be sure to link to that.
Chris: I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think ShyFox, I also, you know, parts of it were
Chris: torturous for me, but it was sort of a nice reminder of how good we have it
Chris: now and to get out of the comfort zone and then to walk away with a couple of
Chris: apps and kind of like a new understanding of how to use Bluefin.
Wes: It doesn't seem like maybe the email worked great for them, but they did find Himalaya.
Chris: Oh, yeah, okay.
Wes: A CLI to manage emails written in Rust. It's got a nice little minimal UI to
Wes: it. So there's a lot of good options.
Chris: Thank you for the boost, Jack Fox.
Brent: Oh, they also use tell jelly fin to we.
Chris: I wanted to try that. I was on, that was on my list of things to try.
Chris: I just really, we just didn't watch much TV this week. We were busy.
Brent: Do we challenge week two is coming up?
Chris: Oh my gosh. Turd Ferguson comes in with 22,000 sets.
Chris: Loved the last episode. It had me laughing. Some of us still use mutt.
Chris: And let me tell you, that old dog still hunts.
Chris: You know what? We're finding out a lot of our audience is still using these.
Wes: That's surprising.
Brent: Chris, you said you were going to use mutt when this all started.
Chris: I thought I was. And I did not remember how to use it.
Chris: It's true. It's true. That was it. I just don't know what happened.
Wes: Big ol' boosts in with 21,000 cents.
Wes: I love the TUI challenge idea. I use system CTL TUI, Enmon, and Alacrity with
Wes: Zellage, and I'm looking forward to trying many more of the TUI applications mentioned in the show.
Chris: Ah, very good.
Wes: See, another TUI natural.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Well, Gene Bean sends in 4,444. That's two. What do we call them?
Chris: You mean rows of ducks or like a McDuck?
Brent: Two rows of ducks.
Chris: It could also be an Aflac duck.
Brent: Says i'd love some open shift coverage.
Chris: Okay you.
Brent: Were asking for some feedback.
Chris: I was thank you.
Brent: I'd also welcome coverage of its upstream okd.
Chris: Oh yeah that was something that crossed my mind too was chasing down the upstream
Chris: projects and taking a look at those uh he also sent me a dm and i'm going to
Chris: share it with you guys after the show uh i don't want to share too much because
Chris: it was a private dm but uh shout out to gene son who also listens to the podcast that's cool,
Chris: Outdoor Geek is here with 5,000 sats.
Chris: A tip for the privacy tech person. The 2024 Subaru Crosstek base model doesn't have a cell modem.
Chris: It has two smaller touchscreens instead of one giant one, which means they're
Chris: including more buttons and knobs.
Chris: The base model still includes adaptive cruise, lane keeping,
Chris: emergency braking, Android Auto, etc.
Chris: I wonder if the low end of other model brands are preferable to some.
Chris: that is to me chris.
Brent: You don't love subarus.
Chris: I mean i just don't love what they've become.
Brent: What have they.
Chris: Become they're like minivans now on car platforms that's their huge vehicles um yeah.
Wes: Complicated often too.
Chris: But i do like this this is i like that direction they start going more in that
Chris: direction i'm all about that.
Brent: They're finally listening.
Chris: Walk it back manufacturers just walk it back a little bit my.
Brent: Other suggestion would be i don't know a van of the.
Chris: 1990s era.
Wes: Early or late.
Chris: Early go.
Wes: Early Antoine 1109 boosts in with 4,444 sats,
Wes: definite yes on the red hat open shift deep dive we use vmware currently and
Wes: i've looked at proxmox and hyper v and would really love to get your take on
Wes: open shift from a linux admin perspective.
Chris: I think it's time to get on that i think it is thank you
Chris: antwan appreciate that feedback and i've heard that from a lot of people at
Chris: red hat summit uh they are not happy with the direction things are going through
Chris: vmware and they are shopping and i think it's a good time for us to take a look
Chris: in because they've been modifying upgrading improving the product to try to
Chris: address that customer base. Let's see if they've done it.
Brent: Well, SystemDBSDD sent in 3,433 sats.
Brent: What do you all think of Apple's new containerization framework?
Brent: Answer to WSL, maybe? Threat to Linux?
Chris: We did some coverage of this in the members bootleg version earlier today in
Chris: the show, and it's interesting.
Chris: Just a quick overview. In macOS 26, a new container command is going to be available,
Chris: And when you execute it, it will pull down Linux images and then it will run
Chris: them in what they're calling a lightweight VM.
Chris: So it's like a tiny little VM that runs a tiny version of Linux kernel with a custom in its system.
Wes: Just enough to boot up and then start the container.
Chris: Each container does run its own kernel.
Wes: I think the thing for me is like, you know, there's a lot of developers with
Wes: Mac laptops and there are a lot of options, Podman desktop, Docker desktop,
Wes: Colima and Lima, I think have been pretty great tools, but all of these,
Wes: there's kind of like more setup and for some baby, maybe you want to customize,
Wes: you want to have ability to like run more stuff inside this VM where all your
Wes: containers are running or take advantage of other workflows.
Wes: But having something that's just simple and well-supported, kind of more stock
Wes: out of the box, I think is probably going to be a usability win,
Wes: both just that and then whatever other tools can sort of be used as orchestration on top of this.
Chris: Oh, that could be interesting.
Wes: You could totally see some more open source stuff making this easier.
Chris: Yeah, I bet you will. GUI apps and whatnot.
Chris: I'll just add this system, DBSD. I think it's a capitulation from Apple.
Chris: And when the WWDC video that explains this feature starts, they introduce it
Chris: by saying containers are the standard way to ship software on servers,
Chris: not on Linux, but on servers.
Chris: Now, that's a pretty big statement when you consider that it wasn't that long
Chris: ago that macOS server was a product and Apple even sold server hardware.
Chris: Now we live in a time when Apple talks about shipping software on servers,
Chris: they're talking about Linux containers.
Chris: And so it's an acknowledgment that their user base needs to have a good production
Chris: system or at least semi-quasi production that they can build on and then ship.
Chris: So it's an interesting capitulation from Apple in that regard.
Chris: And it also now means, as a result, both Microsoft and Apple are shipping commercial
Chris: operating systems that take advantage of the Linux kernel and either distribute
Chris: it after the fact in some form or another.
Chris: and that's a remarkable moment to be in as well.
Chris: Thank you for the boost. Brett came in with 2,222 sats. That is a row of ducks.
Chris: Stay out of my van. All right. Thanks, Brett.
Brent: I know what the user agent here is for Brent instead of something like fountain. Interesting.
Chris: Very sus. Brett's hacking the system.
Brent: Brett Johnson, that is.
Wes: Kalech Bussin with another Robodux. Greetings from Poland.
Chris: Hello.
Wes: I started my journey with Self Hosted a year ago and have been hooked on the
Wes: network ever since. Welcome aboard. Thanks for listening.
Wes: I just want to say thank you for the great content. I discovered a ton of self-hosted
Wes: apps from your podcast and now use them almost every day.
Wes: All running in Docker on a VM on an i3 8100T Fujitsu mini PC running Proxmox
Wes: at home with USB 2TB hard drive for the Jellyfin library.
Chris: Ooh, a mini PC. I love the mini PC for the HomeLab system. And I bet the i3
Chris: doesn't use too much power either.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Nice. Okay.
Wes: I will second the recommendation I heard here for Obsidian syncing.
Wes: The Obsidian LiveSync plugin with a quick CouchDB container running over tail
Wes: scale works really well across iOS and Linux.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: As for Nix, because of you, I'm tempted to try it one day.
Chris: Yeah, you could always install it on your existing Linux of choice and play around with Nix.
Wes: Yeah, a little Proxmox VM. Why not?
Chris: So it's interesting the timing of this boost because just this last weekend,
Chris: I was thinking, do I really want to pay another year of Obsidian Sync? Because it's not cheap.
Chris: And so the LiveSync plugin and a CouchDB container on my tail net does seem
Chris: like a pretty good solution.
Chris: Thank you for that idea. I appreciate it, Kellogg.
Brent: Well, hybrid sarcasm boosted in 10,000 sats.
Brent: I spent some time with GoMux this week. I think I'll keep it around.
Brent: Otherwise, you're all better men than I. I need my Goey.
Chris: Oh, I don't know. I read we were suffering too. We were suffering.
Chris: There were moments of bliss and retro beautiful nostalgia.
Chris: You know, that nostalgia kit did come, and that is almost worth it on its own.
Chris: But I agree. The Matrix client wasn't too bad. Thanks for the boost, Hybrid.
Chris: Kongaroo Paradox is here with 8,400 sets.
Chris: Hey, I'm boosting with my progress for the TUI Challenge. No time for more.
Chris: So he's trying to do a little bit at the last minute. And he,
Chris: see, does he have a total here, Brent? Oh, a total of 95 with two penalties applied.
Brent: That's pretty good.
Chris: That is pretty good.
Brent: I mean, I'm saying it's pretty good because that's about what Chris and I got.
Chris: He got a negative 20 on the email, but he got some bony points on the text,
Chris: on web, on file. He's liking Yazzie, too.
Chris: Very well done. To-do man was his task manager of choice.
Chris: I had a great time with the TUI challenge. It was easy for me on the NeoVim
Chris: and Tmuc side because, well, I daily drive it.
Chris: But for the rest, it was great discovering all these new apps.
Chris: The big surprise for me was how manageable it was to live without a full-fledged browser.
Chris: Being used to Vim motions, W3M was great. It was a great experience to reduce
Chris: the learning curve for text content.
Chris: Broush, a little rough around the edges, but it got me the rest of the way.
Chris: I was able to log into GitHub, and most of my tests were okay.
Chris: I ran out of time to get email and music going, but I look forward to getting
Chris: it done soon. You guys got me excited about going full Tui.
Brent: Full Tui.
Chris: Can't wait to hear how you guys did. Full Tui is great.
Brent: It's not title material.
Chris: Thanks, Kangaroo. Thank you for that boost. It's good to hear from you.
Chris: And if you're listening after the fact, we still want to hear your reports.
Chris: This is a topic we'd be happy to revisit for many episodes to come.
Chris: So feel free to hashtag TuiChallenge email, or if you'd like to support the
Chris: show with a boost, it's a great topic to boost in.
Chris: Thank you everybody who boosted. We did a 1,000-sat cutoff for this week's episode, and we appreciate it.
Chris: Normally what we do is we read all the boosts, but the ones that make it on
Chris: the air are 2,000-sats and above.
Chris: And if you'd like to boost in, fountain.fm makes it really easy because all
Chris: of it's hosted for you, but there's also totally self-hosted routes and all of that available.
Chris: Lots of apps, too, where you get all the podcasting, 2.0 features.
Chris: Podcasting 2.0 is not just about boosting.
Chris: You get chapters. You get also in there live stream support,
Chris: which I think is I just don't think people wrap their head around how cool this is.
Chris: You subscribe to the podcast and you get our podcast like regular,
Chris: but if you're on a 2.0 app you also see when we're live and there's a lot of
Chris: content on the live stream.
Chris: So there's a bunch of other great features, but that's some of it.
Chris: But thank you everybody who participated in this week's episode. We
Chris: had 22 of you stream sats as you listened i always appreciate that and you all
Chris: collectively stacked 50 50 000 299 sats for the show which is not bad at all
Chris: thank you sat streamers when you combine that with our boosters we had a really
Chris: good showing we had 306 863 sats total for this week.
Chris: Thank you everybody who supported this episode, episode 619 with a boost.
Chris: And of course, a shout out to our members who make it possible for us to keep
Chris: on going with a nice known amount and really are the foundation for the show.
Chris: And then you can support each individual production with a boost.
Chris: You found this one, this pick this week, right?
Wes: Yeah. Enter SOMO.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Wes: A human friendly alternative to Netstat for socket and port monitoring on Linux.
Wes: pleasing to the eye thanks to a nice table view filterable interactive killing
Wes: of processes also instead of having to do netstat netstat dash t-u-l-p-n you can just do somo dash l.
Chris: I have to say you got me with this one because it's always really handy to be
Chris: like what app is listening on what port what ports do I even have open who's
Chris: using it is anything listening is there a connection established this gives
Chris: it all to you in a TUI table.
Wes: There you go.
Chris: Fits in with the show and you didn't say it, but you probably guessed it.
Chris: It is written in Rust and it is MIT licensed.
Chris: So you can do with it as you will.
Chris: Let us know how your TUI challenge went. Of course, if you have any future challenge
Chris: suggestions as well, we'd love to hear that or any other feedback.
Chris: You can boost it in or go to linuxunplugged.com contact.
Chris: We also want to remind you that we have chapters and transcripts for every episode.
Chris: Those are available. Some of it's available only in the podcasting Twitter app,
Chris: Some of it, but some of it's also available in the regular One Auto apps as
Chris: well. So just make sure you're checking your app for that.
Chris: And then you can skip around or re-listen or look something up in the transcript.
Chris: It's actually pretty handy, too, for trying to get, like, the name of something.
Chris: So just want to remind you that we have that.
Wes: Did Chris really say that? You can check.
Chris: Uh-oh. Yeah, I suppose that's the downside right there. And,
Chris: of course, we'd love it if you joined us live. It gives it a special vibe, as the kids say.
Chris: Yeah, that's right. We do the show at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
Chris: Eastern over at jblive.tv or jblive.fm in whatever IceCast stream client you want.
Chris: Or pop in that mumble room and listen to a low latency opus stream.
Chris: Details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. Don't forget all the great
Chris: apps we talked about linked at linuxunplugged.com slash 619.
Chris: And then there's a bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: Go check out the launch. Brent's been joining us recently. We've been telling some fun stories.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Unplugged Program,
Chris: and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday!