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: Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're going to cover eight
Chris: details about the Steam Machine that we think most people have probably missed,
Chris: and there's a few things that point at Valve's future Linux plans.
Chris: Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts and picks and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get to all of that, I want to take a moment and say good morning
Chris: to our virtual lug. Hello, mumble room.
Wes: Well, hello, gang.
Chris: Let me ask you something, dear listener. What other podcast do you know that's live?
Chris: Not many of them are live, and we're live every single Sunday.
Chris: But what other podcast do you know that has a virtual lug on Mumble that you
Chris: can join and get a low-latency Opus stream directly or hang out with us during
Chris: the pre-show and post-show or even talk? You know, get your word in on the show when you flag us.
Wes: You know, Mumble used an Opus before it was cool.
Chris: I don't know of any other podcast that actively does that. I mean,
Chris: I'm sure there's some, right? I mean, come on. Come on. This is a rare thing
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Chris: And join us on a Sunday. You can get it over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash
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Chris: Texas Linux Fest, coming up soon.
Brent: Already.
Chris: Yep, one week warning right here for the call for paper for Texas Linux Fest.
Chris: It closes actually very soon, July 1st. So just a couple of days.
Wes: Yeah, end of the month.
Brent: They decided to close on Canada Day for anyone who cares.
Chris: Out of respect, no doubt.
Brent: Mm-hmm.
Wes: And I think out of the spirit of competition, Seagull, the local Linux Seattle
Wes: conference going on this fall, its submissions also closed but one day earlier, June 30th.
Wes: because they're American.
Chris: I'm hoping to make it to both these. So we haven't really figured out how to
Chris: make it all the way to Texas yet, but I'm hoping we can make it.
Chris: It's always a really good event.
Brent: Usually it involves a race, I think.
Chris: Oh, that could be fun.
Wes: Both great conferences, and we'll be all the better if other folks still want
Wes: to submit their own talks.
Chris: Got to get that van working. But if you get that van working, it could be a good race.
Brent: There's always tomorrow.
Chris: I suppose there could be, maybe it'd be a great race if the van isn't working.
Chris: You know what I'm saying? We'd win for sure.
Wes: Yeah but then we don't have brent there.
Chris: Yeah and and really i don't i don't know uh i don't know what would be faster,
Chris: an old van or an ev i'm not really sure let's find it,
Chris: all right so uh texas linux fest that is july 1st and seagull which is uh june 30th coming up soon.
Chris: All right, gentlemen, everybody knows about the Steam Machine.
Chris: A lot of the details, they've been out for a while now.
Chris: I don't think there's much we could add that people don't already know.
Chris: But I think we would just cover the highlights for those that just want to refresh.
Chris: We now have the prices for the Steam Machine. The pre-orders are going out on June 1st.
Chris: I'm sorry, June 31st, I think, is some of the first will ship. I'm not sure.
Chris: But the low price for the Steam Machine for 512 gigs of storage is $1,049 US.
Chris: If you want to get that same Steam machine with a controller, $1,128.
Chris: Now, I'll be real with you. 512 gigabytes is probably not enough for even a
Chris: medium-sized Steam library.
Chris: So if you want to get the 2-terabyte model, which is the next storage option
Chris: up, $1,349. If you want to get the 2-terabyte edition with a controller, $1,428.
Chris: Okay, so everybody knows about the prices, but I just think it's worth putting
Chris: them out there. The Steam controller by itself is $99.
Chris: So if you bundle it with a Steam machine, it effectively makes the controller
Chris: $79. So you get $20 off the controller.
Chris: You also get a couple of different face places. I think you get an extra magnetic
Chris: face place with the two terabyte version. Either way, you get an Ethernet port.
Chris: You get 2x2 Wi-Fi, 6E, and Bluetooth.
Chris: And we'll get into some other details here. So that's the base thing that I think everybody knows.
Chris: And it is a little expensive. Do we want to just...
Chris: At this price, I think we're all priced out at this point. It prices all three of us out at this point.
Brent: Yeah, I guess it's not made for us, eh?
Chris: Well, you know, when I was at Valve with you guys in the spring,
Chris: I had the sense that the machine was sort of ready to go, but they were just
Chris: waiting on supply chain and memory prices, and they were hoping to ride it out a little while.
Chris: And then I think they had the internal discussion, like, these prices aren't getting any better.
Chris: And so we just got to do this thing. my gut was when we were there that they
Chris: wanted around you know a base price of 800.
Brent: The ps5 pro is like 790 right now so yeah.
Wes: Yes in some interviews i guess at least one valve engineers quoted as suggesting
Wes: that as things got crazy post november 2025,
Wes: yeah they had to reconsider shipping days they had to reconsider all the pricing
Wes: stuff um it influenced like what it actually finally shipped with right where
Wes: like they couldn't get a gig ram stick so they had to put 16 gigs in.
Chris: There there's no option and they couldn't.
Wes: Do dual channel yes crazy.
Chris: So the one thing also that influences this is and you and you just mentioned
Chris: it is the playstation is in this space and it's a little bit cheaper and in
Chris: some scenarios has better graphics,
Chris: and what's challenging about that is valve has a very strong no subsidizing policy
Chris: valve believes that if they subsidize the price of the steam deck or the steam
Chris: machine that it effectively prices out anyone else from ever building something in that ecosystem.
Chris: And we are seeing multiple builders create steam machine competitors now and
Chris: steam deck competitors.
Chris: So it would seem that Valve's calculus is right.
Chris: If they were to, say, subsidize even by $200, no other manufacturer could do
Chris: that. And the logic would be, well, Valve makes it up on the sales.
Brent: Mm-hmm.
Chris: But Valve doesn't necessarily make a ton of money on the sales.
Chris: And the reality is that Sony is subsidizing the price of the PlayStation.
Chris: Sony is taking a hit on the initial cost because they sell the games at like $80 a pop.
Chris: And they're all licensed through Sony. So every game that plays on the PlayStation,
Chris: Sony gets a licensing cut. So they do make it up on the back end.
Wes: It's just like a totally different ecosystem in that sense.
Chris: Right. It's a totally different market pricing incentive system.
Chris: Yet they're competing kind of in the same hardware customer space.
Chris: And so you look at the PS5 and you go, well, look, PS5 is cheaper.
Chris: But that's because Sony can subsidize the price. And I think what's also not
Chris: really fully considered with the Steam machine is you have access to,
Chris: in theory for a lot of us, not everybody, but a lot of us, pretty extensive Steam library.
Chris: I mean, how many times has a Steam sale come up over the years and I've been
Chris: like, well, I might buy it just in case because it's $2.99.
Chris: I mean, there might be 60% of my Steam library I've never played. I don't know.
Chris: and then there's a lot more that i would like to play and so you get access
Chris: to all of that on the steam machine and all future purchases as well so i think
Chris: you know that's hard to factor in because it means maybe over the long term
Chris: when you're actually buying games you're probably going to make that money up,
Chris: in the in the ps5 versus the steam machine but nobody purchases thinking that.
Wes: Yeah and like if are you coming into this because there's certain a few triple
Wes: a titles that you really want to play at the best experience per the money you
Wes: spend on hardware okay that's going to be a very different decision than like
Wes: i'm trying to buy some sort of thing i can play games on in my living room for
Wes: the next five years that will have access to the games i want to play.
Brent: There's another interesting aspect here where this same machine can be used
Brent: as a pc gaming platform or a console which is kind of impressive like the ps5
Brent: is kind of meant as only a console you wouldn't connect it to your,
Brent: you know monitor and at your desk or the keyboard right so the.
Chris: Fact that it You could, in theory, just use it as a desktop.
Brent: Yeah, is, I don't know, compelling, I think.
Chris: I think it also adds a bit to the value.
Wes: Certainly, I would think for our audience.
Chris: I mean, just play this line of thinking out a little bit.
Chris: This is the most Mac thing we have in our space.
Wes: For sure.
Chris: Because how many years has Valve been working upstream to get things in the
Chris: kernel, to get Proton working, to get Fex working, etc.
Chris: The controllers, all of this, video graphics drivers, it's just all this work
Chris: they've been doing for a decade.
Wes: Up and down the stack.
Brent: To the benefit of all of us, really.
Chris: And then they custom build with an AMD chip that's, it's kind of like what you
Chris: can get off the shelf, but it's also kind of unique to them with their own firmware.
Chris: So they're kind of involved at the chip level.
Chris: They're custom building everything in the whole stack. Then they're building
Chris: the OS on top of that. And the user experience then is on top of that.
Chris: So it's like, it's beyond, I mean, System76 does a very integrated package.
Chris: And I think it's, they're hitting the right space for that demographic.
Chris: But this is almost full Apple level. to both the pros and the cons of that.
Wes: I assume you noticed to that in some of the reviews the quote the quietest non-handheld gaming pc
Wes: i've ever used barely humming out a dull whir even under heavy sustained load
Wes: zero coil whine or case rattle you could tell like it's just it's a different
Wes: kind of product where they really
Wes: that whole experience has been shipped together well.
Chris: And who says that by steam os4 or 5 the desktop mode doesn't get more and more
Chris: refinement and you could buy the steam machine and just run it in desktop mode
Chris: you have an immutable arch distribution maintained by valve,
Chris: That's a pretty big deal. And it's on a hardware that they support and designed.
Chris: I mean, if you're looking for that Mac-like experience, it's probably as close as it gets.
Brent: It's plug and play, really, right?
Chris: Well, in theory. I mean, I don't think the desktop mode is fantastic,
Chris: but I think they could get it there.
Chris: All right. So let's cover sort of the eight details that aren't getting very much attention.
Chris: Starting with one that, you know, I don't think is, I think some people probably
Chris: heard about this, but it's probably worth us mentioning.
Chris: So the first thing on our list, the 4K thing.
Chris: is that what we're calling it.
Brent: The 4k thing.
Chris: The marketing kind of says it's a 4k gaming machine that supports 60 fps.
Wes: Yeah i guess they've pulled some of that.
Chris: Now so they've.
Wes: Changed the language on the store page yeah.
Chris: So this is important to understand that it's really certified as a 1080p machine
Chris: that can upscale to 4k that in fact if you look at valve's developer facing
Chris: documentation they tell the developers to target 30 frames per second 1080p.
Wes: Yeah okay so it used to say 4k gaming at 60 fps now it says up to 4k gaming with fsr 4.1.
Chris: Okay all right that's fair,
Chris: Um, so also the, they gave a GDC hardware talk and, uh, in there,
Chris: the valve representative said that you could expect the steam machine performance
Chris: to be roughly six X the steam deck.
Wes: And that number seems to be holding up better.
Chris: Yeah. And that's a decent improvement. I, as a steam deck owner was wondering,
Chris: would I see a bump? Six X is probably going to be noticeable.
Wes: So, and of course it will vary depending on the game and exactly,
Wes: you know, there are some distinctions and all that, but yeah.
Wes: Right. That feels like you would actually, it would feel like an upgrade.
Chris: Okay. Okay, number two, what verified means with the machine.
Chris: So Valve's Steamworks docs say any game that is verified on deck is guaranteed
Chris: to now be verified on Steam Machine.
Chris: So the same controller, the same launcher, text input, proton,
Chris: all of that kind of stuff.
Chris: The Steam Machine, however, skips the deck-specific display legibility checks because...
Wes: It's a bigger screen. They're kind of not worried about it as much.
Chris: They don't control what it comes with. It is interesting, though,
Chris: because Valve put a lot of work into display verification.
Chris: But I like that. That's good. Now, it seems like Valve is also trying to add
Chris: additional compatibility, hardware compatibility stuff in here,
Chris: which I think is going to be bigger in the future. We'll get more into this.
Chris: But if something is currently certified for the Steam Deck, you can essentially
Chris: be assured that it will work on the Steam machine. So that's,
Chris: I think, a decent little thing to understand, a little quirk there.
Brent: I think that might actually, that's an impressive deal. Like,
Brent: it seems like a small thing, but that's impressive.
Brent: They were targeting one piece of hardware, and then they came out with a totally
Brent: different piece of hardware, and they're guaranteeing that every single thing
Brent: will work? That's kind of amazing.
Chris: Well, now imagine the VR headset, the frame, which is an ARM platform,
Chris: but is also going to be a Steam Machine.
Brent: We will see when that happens.
Chris: Yeah, it may mean that being Steam Machine certified goes beyond just x86 in the future.
Chris: But before we get there, let's talk about number three.
Chris: SteamOS 3.8 seems to be perhaps the real launch that we're all going to care about.
Chris: Valve is now telling people that they can build their own Steam machine and
Chris: that they're working on broader desktop compatibility and that they will be able to deploy SteamOS.
Chris: Current reporting says SteamOS 3.8.10 improves compatibility with Intel and
Chris: AMD platforms, improves video memory management on discrete GPU systems.
Chris: And Valve is currently working with NVIDIA, although it's not currently scheduled
Chris: to land any time soon. but NVIDIA support is going to be in there too,
Chris: which why would they do that since none of the Valve hardware has an NVIDIA driver?
Wes: I wonder.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. They fixed a compatibility issue with SteamOS chain loader that
Chris: could cause a boot failure on some desktop systems with recent UEFI firmware.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: Again, doesn't affect their hardware. Fixed Bluetooth not working on some Intel handhelds.
Wes: What's that about?
Chris: Added firmware for upcoming Intel handhelds.
Brent: Not their machines.
Chris: Desktop mode now uses Wayland by default.
Brent: Yes, it should.
Chris: And they've added initial support for running SteamOS as a virtual machine guest.
Wes: I guess there's also like a new Rust demon under the hood that's sort of mediating
Wes: things between Steam and SteamOS, which is interesting.
Chris: So we don't have like just a standalone ISO, but we do have an image that's meant for the deck.
Chris: And the downsides to this SteamOS image right now is it just overwrites anything
Chris: that's on your first NVMe disk.
Chris: It just targets the main NVMe disk and blows it away.
Chris: But it's SteamOS. And you can load it on more and more devices now.
Chris: So the next step is really like some kind of installer or some kind of ISO.
Chris: I don't know exactly what Valve's going to do here.
Chris: I'd like to speculate about that for a moment, though. Because so if you're
Chris: Valve and it's, say, 2027 and they ship SteamOS 4 or whatever,
Chris: because you could technically make it with 3.8.
Chris: So maybe SteamOS 4 comes with an installer.
Chris: How would Valve do this? Would they maybe use like the Climera installer,
Chris: like some of the Arch derivatives? Yeah, I wonder.
Wes: Could see that. There are a few options now.
Chris: Would they create like some sort of Steam big picture environment that walks
Chris: you through an installer?
Chris: Or do they just skip the installer altogether somehow?
Chris: And they just assume you're going to blast it on a disk and they just...
Wes: Could be. I mean, they do seem to be making a few different moves here aimed
Wes: at simplicity. And it did sound like from some interviews that the installer
Wes: wasn't really something they were super focused on right now.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I just feel like with the cost of these Steam machines and the cost
Chris: of hardware in general, people are going to...
Chris: If you want to build out this ecosystem, I do think if you made it sort of as
Chris: easy as Bazite to install, You might get folks using this and deploying it on
Chris: their own home hardware that they can't afford, and then you're still building
Chris: out the SteamOS ecosystem while you're waiting for the hardware component prices to come down.
Chris: But that only works if you make it more accessible. Otherwise,
Chris: people will just load Bazite, and maybe they don't care.
Wes: I mean, maybe it doesn't matter if it is sort of meant for an appliance where
Wes: you aren't trying to dual boot or do anything fancy and things just get wiped
Wes: with something simple works.
Chris: I think what I... the Linux user in me that still wants to see mass desktop
Chris: adoption, which I've mostly, don't really care about anymore,
Chris: but there's still that part of me that still wants to see it.
Wes: Of course, of course, yeah.
Chris: I think like your, your Linus Tech Tip viewers would switch in mass to a Valve
Chris: Linux district. Yes. If they could install it.
Brent: Yes. Because there's trust there built already, right?
Chris: Yes. They love the brand. They want to use Linux for gaming.
Chris: Now here's the Linux gaming platform. Because right now they're getting really
Chris: drawn to PopOS and Bazite and CacheOS, and they're kind of split across those right now.
Chris: And if Valve came along with SteamOS that you could install on your existing
Chris: box as easy as Bazite or CacheOS or PopOS...
Chris: I just think it would be huge for Linux adoption. And I think you'd see a large
Chris: use case for the desktop, not just for big picture mode. I think you'd see a large use.
Chris: People would come up with Waze and they would permanently run it in desktop mode.
Chris: I really think it'd be big. Now, maybe Valve doesn't want that.
Chris: But I just feel like if they just take that extra step, that extra step,
Chris: it would be such an under.
Wes: I wonder if maybe they would like to see that too or are neutral on it but worry about sort of.
Chris: The support overhead?
Wes: Support overhead and or the image like you don't if there are quirks on other
Wes: systems and that gives Steam OS, you know, you get mixed reviews of Steam OS.
Brent: That kind of thing.
Wes: I'm not saying that I would agree or whatever, but you could imagine those sorts
Wes: of arguments or discussions.
Wes: And maybe it's a, that's sort of just a, you know, they're open to more installer
Wes: or other things, but sort of not the focus right now as they're just getting
Wes: the things shipped and sort of established.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, I could, you know, because as you widen that aperture of hardware,
Chris: you're going to have more and more random things that don't work with Proton.
Chris: I mean, just go look at ProtonDB.
Chris: Right. Yeah, that is a good point.
Brent: But at the same time, they have this verified system, right?
Brent: So they could just target, kind of like Macs, target a few systems that they really get right.
Brent: and then if you're going to run something else, it's kind of on you.
Chris: And they don't make a lot of margins on this hardware. The rumor is that they're
Chris: almost selling at cost. There's maybe 80, 90 bucks, maybe on the highest end
Chris: configuration, maybe $200 of margin in there.
Wes: You could maybe see too, I think to Brent's point, they're already offering,
Wes: more stuff for some of the other handheld things.
Wes: So you could also imagine some community reports or maybe there's a role for
Wes: the community to play, whether that's repackaging some sort of installer or
Wes: just smoothing things out and giving like targets.
Chris: Totally.
Wes: Like some people are saying the framework desktop works perfectly.
Wes: I mean, he's forum V3 ran just fine. Testing thinkpads out.
Chris: Yeah. I saw people are running Steam OS, the image for the Steam Deck on the
Chris: framework desktop online right now. And it seems to be fine.
Chris: You're right. The community probably could step in and build something around
Chris: that image and make it more approachable.
Wes: That doesn't, it's not going to the level that you're saying.
Chris: Yeah, it's not the same thing.
Wes: But maybe it would help.
Chris: Help a few more people at least. It's just, well, it's just,
Chris: it feels especially like the time is, is ripe when this steam machine wasn't
Chris: able to hit the price targets they want and the prices are just such crap out
Chris: there. It just feels like the moment is there.
Wes: How else can you get a piece of this experience, still get something better?
Chris: There you go. All right, number four.
Chris: AMD wasn't just for performance. I don't think any of us are too surprised by this.
Chris: But by digging through the details, we see the Steam Machine uses a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 core, or,
Chris: AMD Zen 4, 6 core, 12-thread GPU and semi-custom RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute
Chris: units, 8 gigabytes of GDR6, and 110 watts of GPU target power.
Chris: So they estimate when everything's really cranking, like the CPU and the GUPU,
Chris: you're probably looking at around 200 watts of full usage under full load.
Chris: So that's what you could probably plan on.
Chris: But what I think is the real story about them using AMD and both now the deck
Chris: and the machine is this would have been NVIDIA.
Chris: This absolutely would have been NVIDIA. But AMD is the company that made the
Chris: investment in Linux drivers years ago with no idea how it was going to pay off.
Chris: No indication that a Valve Steam machine and Steam Deck would come along.
Chris: And now they are the hardware partner for the last two releases from Valve.
Chris: And it's because they invested seriously in the Linux ecosystem,
Chris: and it's just paying off massively for them now.
Wes: Well, and I think we'll see another indication of this later,
Wes: but that you can tell Valve's feeling really comfortable building on Linux, right?
Wes: So, like, the fact that this is just first party, that it's something that they
Wes: know that they could influence, that can get changed if something does need
Wes: to get fixed. There's a clear process for how that happens.
Wes: Maybe it makes you feel a little better about something that has hardware cycle times.
Chris: So the Verge says that this has caused, essentially, Intel and NVIDIA to come
Chris: knocking on Valve's door.
Brent: Really?
Chris: Yeah. They say, so the MSI Intel-powered claw gaming handheld have been mostly Windows machines.
Chris: But according to the Verge, they are now working with Valve to make a Linux
Chris: SteamOS version that runs on there.
Chris: Using SteamOS optimized for Intel versions, while it's not quite,
Chris: quote, perfect yet, it appears everything works pretty well for the most part.
Chris: another user tried it on his intel arc b580 desktop gupu and got steam os working
Chris: on there well of course it works on the intel arcs,
Chris: but it's interesting that intel has kind of come to valve so we want to run
Chris: steam os instead of windows and they're starting with the steam os 3.8 release,
Chris: valve says they're also working with nvidia and they've been doing a lot of
Chris: hard work getting the graphic stack up and running on the intel and nvidia stacks
Chris: to make sure everything is quote optimized.
Chris: That's an interesting strategy there because, again, their hardware,
Chris: not using these chips, it just sort of feels like a similar strategy they could do with SteamOS.
Chris: And here we are seeing AMD just the default winner as the results of their investments here.
Chris: And I think that's pretty great. Like the Steam hardware is AMD first largely
Chris: just because AMD took a bet. They didn't have any idea which way it was going to go.
Chris: And it's just now we have a nice, clean experience.
Chris: And I think, you know, when you add this part, when you add these basic things
Chris: up, right, you've got a verification process for how things work and operate.
Chris: You've got SteamOS that's widening its scope of hardware that's supported both
Chris: including the Steam machine but also third-party hardware.
Chris: And you've got this AMD support at the plumbing level for the graphics.
Chris: That's a pretty good stack right there.
Chris: but there's still four more details that we haven't gotten to yet.
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Brent: Well, I think we should talk about the penguin in the room here.
Brent: This RAM story is, I think, worth digging into. We've heard a lot of people
Brent: say, well, it's very disappointing, the RAM situation that they were forced into.
Brent: So is that really the whole story, though?
Chris: It seems like, too, in the past you would have been like, well,
Chris: sure, it only comes with 16 gigs of RAM, but I'll just go buy my own stick of RAM.
Wes: Right.
Chris: Throw it in there for cheap.
Wes: That doesn't seem quite as possible these days.
Chris: And you have to feel for Valve, because when they announced the Steam machine,
Chris: the RAM prices haven't gone crazy.
Wes: And in their defense, it is possible to do some upgrades. They talk about what
Wes: SSDs you can put in there, and they're going to partner with iFixit like they
Wes: did with the deck and all that kind of good stuff.
Wes: It's just the rest of the world.
Chris: So ideally on a gaming system, you generally want dual-channel memory,
Chris: especially for CPU-bound tasks. And there's a lot in a game that can be CPU-bound.
Chris: You want dual-channel memory when possible.
Chris: But that's not what happened, is it? They couldn't do dual-channel.
Wes: No uh because if you're gonna target 16 gigs total
Wes: which is a reasonable number these days um and you want to get a gig sticks
Wes: you have to be able to buy two eight gig sticks and when they were trying to
Wes: source sufficient quantities uh that just wasn't available can you believe i
Wes: guess at least uh maybe it's pierre uh pierre lou cafe
Wes: or another valve staff member mentioning like
Wes: i guess there's a little more profit in the 16 gigs at the moment in the market
Wes: so they were producing more of those and so that is what they were able to get but,
Wes: again unless you're trying to go to dual with 16 and get 32 you can't get dual
Wes: or the reasonable amount,
Wes: and get both benefits.
Chris: But here's the detail i did verify you can if you get rich or if memory prices
Chris: come down in a year and you feel like giving your steam machine a boost you
Chris: could go out and buy another 16 gig stick on your own,
Chris: and you can install it in this and tests will show that you'll probably see
Chris: about a 9 to 13 performance improvement with the Steam Machine when you go to
Chris: dual channel memory with certain games. That said,
Chris: you do kind of have to disassemble the thing.
Chris: Like you have to take the heat sink off. You got to take the whole thing kind
Chris: of apart to get to where the memory's at. So it's not like a beginner job is
Chris: not impossible, but it's a job.
Chris: But I thought Tom's hardware put this kind of unfortunately accurate.
Chris: They said, quote, this is especially hard on the Steam machine,
Chris: which uses already kind of aging hardware, a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA
Chris: 3 graphics with only eight gigabytes of GDDR6 VRAM.
Wes: Right.
Chris: Note, AMD launched the Zen 5 in 2024, and the RDNA 4 GPUs, they dropped in early 2025.
Chris: So it's kind of a little bit of a double whammy because you're kind of working
Chris: with already a little bit older hardware, which is typical in these things,
Chris: especially when there's been a delay due to supply chain.
Chris: And then you're also, you're kind of taking a penalty with the single channel memory.
Brent: I found a quote I really thought was fascinating for the memory part.
Brent: Like to us, Valve is like a huge player in the Linux space, but in the memory
Brent: space, they're like a teeny tiny little guy, right?
Chris: Sure.
Brent: And there's a Valve employee, Yazan Aldehayat, who's an engineer.
Brent: And he gave a quote. He said, well, they just, the memory people just kind of
Brent: give us a price every month.
Brent: And you either can say yes or no to a certain quantity. And if you say no,
Brent: then they never talk to you again.
Brent: so they are in a really tricky spot with the memory the fact they even secured
Brent: some it's like actually kind of impressive um so i mean i think we're all collectively
Brent: a little disappointed including everyone at valve.
Chris: Would it be crazy for a DIY version that comes with no memory?
Brent: Whoa.
Chris: And like you buy it today and then in a few months you find yourself some memory.
Chris: I mean I know it's crazy because everybody likes to have things right away.
Wes: You plan to have something fall off a truck? What's going on over there?
Chris: Well, you could eventually – you know what I mean? Like just have patience.
Chris: Like buy it today at a lower price that doesn't have memory and then you source
Chris: the memory when you can get it off of eBay or wherever you can scrounge it.
Chris: I mean, you could, you could probably find secondhand memory on your own easier
Chris: than valve can do at scale.
Chris: I'm just thinking like, why not do a framework DIY edition and no memory?
Chris: Because so like the 1049 base price is, it just takes it out of the market for
Chris: so many people. So the estimated $300 price increase, almost not all of it,
Chris: but almost all of it is coming from the memory.
Brent: That's insane.
Chris: So sad. So it is a bit of a double whammy. But you could see maybe upgrading
Chris: this thing to 32 down the road and get a little boost out of it.
Chris: The fact that you can upgrade that RAM is one of the things that makes the thing unique.
Wes: Probably not doing that with your PlayStation.
Chris: Probably not doing that with the PlayStation or the Xbox or your Android-based
Chris: gaming console. All right? Okay, number six.
Chris: That was number five. Number six. The cooling design is interesting.
Chris: So it's like a six by six inch cube.
Chris: And the entire thing is built around a ginormous heat sink that is dominated
Chris: by a single 120 millimeter fan.
Chris: Like you said, Wes, everybody reports is quite quiet.
Wes: Quite quiet. Yeah. And I think that's where this thing, like,
Wes: if you're coming at this with like, I need the latest and greatest.
Wes: I'm trying to buy them like a really nice gaming PC that's going to be like
Wes: my be all end all for the next while.
Wes: Maybe this isn't it or at least not at the price point that you were hoping for.
Wes: But if you do want something that can play, you know, pretty much whatever game
Wes: at some quality level that you can throw at it,
Wes: has all your Steam library, looks nice, fits in your living room in an unobjectionable
Wes: way, is quiet, like you get all of that, that would be harder.
Wes: If you want that, that's harder to build yourself.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. When we saw one, I don't know if you boys put your ear up to it,
Chris: but we did see one and it was on.
Brent: Yeah. You couldn't.
Wes: You couldn't.
Chris: No.
Brent: It was very, very impressive. And that's what we're hearing around from people
Brent: who got review units is it's in like unhearable, indistinguishable from an empty room.
Brent: And that is super impressive considering.
Brent: Well, basically the entire thing is a heat sink with a couple of computer parts in it, right?
Chris: Underneath the heat sink, yeah.
Brent: It's hilarious, but actually kind of a smart design. And I saw that the front
Brent: face plate that they have on it that you can change because it just has magnets, which is nice.
Brent: Like, it actually makes a huge difference in the volume of the fan.
Brent: It reduces some of the cooling, but, you know, they're balancing all of these different priorities.
Brent: And if this is on your, you know, beside your TV in your living room.
Chris: You can just pop it right off or something if you want it to run hot. if you want to run cool.
Brent: You got options and i saw some aftermarket like uh people are already making
Brent: 3d printed aftermarket things you could slap on there that increase the airflow
Brent: and look nice as well so that'd be great it's it's nice they
Brent: they had to balance all these priorities i think they got it right in one way
Brent: and the pricing is something they didn't really have control over.
Wes: So speaking of that balance it's actually like a pressure balance system so
Wes: if you do take the faceplate off it cools the cpu and gpu more but it actually
Wes: hurts the ssd temperature which i I thought you might enjoy it.
Chris: Yeah, so it's using the pressure created by that faceplate to send some of the
Chris: air down to the NVMe. It's so funny.
Wes: There's clearly some attention to detail in all of this.
Chris: It is one of those things that I would love to play around with when I finally,
Chris: finally get my hands on one in probably two or three years.
Brent: They also described how they really, really custom built the fan that's in this unit.
Brent: because they kind of needed the airflow that they needed and they needed it to be super quiet.
Brent: So they designed the fan from the ground up too with their partner.
Brent: So they did a lot of impressive engineering work on this one too.
Chris: They do so much more physical testing. Again, reflecting on our trip in the spring.
Chris: They, which I think we talked about in a bootleg, they do so much more physical
Chris: testing. They have arrays and rooms and rooms and rooms.
Brent: Yeah, stacks and stacks.
Chris: Of physical testing going on, like things pressing buttons and stress testing
Chris: screens. And I was very surprised by that.
Chris: So they're doing a lot of that kind of stuff. And what are the,
Chris: one of the things they're testing? The controller, and that is item number seven.
Chris: So this is one of the small technical details that when I hear it,
Chris: I'm like, oh, I love this stuff.
Chris: So we all know the Steam machine has a Steam controller and it has an integrated
Chris: 2.4 gigahertz wireless system.
Chris: But what I think is really smart is Valve put multiple radios in this thing.
Chris: So you can use the puck and you can use its 2.4 wireless. You can use Wi-Fi.
Chris: And if you use Wi-Fi and you're using the 2.4 signal there, it's on its own dedicated radio.
Chris: So the controller doesn't have any kind of leg or any kind of interruption with your data radio.
Chris: So the data radio can be handled in your game, in your chat,
Chris: in your downloads, and then the dedicated isolated radio for the controller
Chris: is nice and clean, doesn't have any collisions or anything like that.
Chris: It's not competing for anything.
Chris: I just love those little design details, because if you were going to build
Chris: your perfect gaming system on Linux, that's absolutely something you would want
Chris: to build in, but only if you just had all the options. I just love that.
Brent: You can tell that is a system built by gamers, right? They're putting the right priorities first.
Chris: I agree.
Wes: Did you check out the thumbsticks on these things, though?
Chris: I, you know, just when we were there and we played with the one that we got
Chris: to, and it felt really good.
Wes: Yeah. So they're using what's called tunneling magneto resistance.
Brent: Of course.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Brent: Right, right.
Wes: And so it uses quantum mechanics to, you know, be able to tell how the joysticks work.
Chris: Are you pulling my leg? What do you mean it uses quantum?
Wes: Yeah, so there's a three, there's a nanoscale sandwich where they have what
Wes: they call the free layer, which is the sensing magnet, which rides with the thumbstick.
Wes: And then under that is a magnesium oxide barrier that prevents electrons and
Wes: current from going through it.
Wes: And then underneath that is what they have is a magnetic film that's locked
Wes: in one direction as a reference magnet.
Wes: And then in theory, without quantum mechanics, you wouldn't get any current.
Wes: But because the electrons can tunnel through that tiny barrier,
Wes: you do get a current. And with that, you get a resistance that you can measure,
Wes: but it's a smooth analog continuous change as you move thumb states.
Chris: So you get analog level measurement is what you're saying.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: Using quantum mechanics because of quantum mechanics, those electrons,
Chris: they pass through that barrier and it's measuring that. Yep.
Chris: So the steam controller is like a real world proof of like Einstein's theory
Chris: and quantum mechanics in your hand.
Wes: Yeah, totally. And so like they were using Hall effect.
Wes: there's other things they're doing but this is like 10 to 15 times more sensitive
Wes: and more and it doesn't need amplification
Wes: because the signal is just way stronger out of the box so you get
Wes: that means there's less noise which means you get finer details so you get better
Wes: tracking and the thing that used to make a lot of thumbsticks wear out is before
Wes: you had like a physical touch of capacitance that was changes you drag like
Wes: metal around or whatever this it because it's this it's just,
Wes: there's there's nothing yes so
Wes: it should last longer not degrade as much well tbd on that but so you get.
Brent: Like a quantum controller for 100 bucks.
Chris: That's so impressive that makes the price seem pretty reasonable i mean you
Chris: imagine the r&d in that over time,
Chris: Yeah, so the controller stack is neater than it seems, both on the radio side
Chris: and on that technical side.
Chris: And then there's one other thing that's hard to do when you're building your own machine.
Chris: And the other thing that is hard to do that Valve nailed is our last item, number eight.
Chris: HDMI CEC, I think, is the sleeper feature here.
Chris: So Valve engineers specifically have called out the CEC integration as one of
Chris: the things that makes the machine unique versus buying another PC.
Chris: So for those of you that don't remember, HDMI, CEC, it kind of solves the turn
Chris: the TV on, wake the box up, pick the controller, resume the game problem.
Chris: You pick up a controller with the Steam machine. You pick up the controller, you wake it up.
Chris: Controller wakes up the machine. They're immediately talking.
Chris: They're paired. The machine wakes up the TV, sets the input on the TV.
Wes: That's key too.
Brent: That's so nice.
Chris: And you're good to go.
Wes: So anytime you ever hit a button on like a Roku or whatever and it automatically
Wes: gets to the right spot, that's how they do it.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Consumer Electronics Control is what CEC stands for.
Chris: It's a data signal over HDMI, and both ends have to support the protocol and
Chris: actually use it correctly, which has historically never happened on Linux.
Chris: So it's – and like for family – gaming improved family, like your kids or whatever,
Chris: they want to sit down on the couch and they want to play a game,
Chris: and they just want to pick up the controller when you're not home and hit a
Chris: button and start playing.
Chris: This nails that, and it's just so massive. They also have DisplayPort 1.4 that
Chris: handles higher-end display modes if you need that.
Chris: Big win for family approval factor, I think, is HDMI CEC. It's like some of
Chris: my favorite features of the Steam machine is the way they're doing the wireless
Chris: controller communication.
Chris: The way they're doing HDMI CEC, I just think, is absolutely super great.
Chris: And the controller is super nice. And those are some of my favorite features of this thing.
Wes: Did you notice one thing I thought with the controller is on Windows and Mac,
Wes: you have to use Steam to take full advantage of it. Yeah.
Wes: because it needs the steam input layer and all that kind of stuff.
Chris: They're basically doing like a user space driver yeah.
Wes: And part of that's because like i mean you can still use it it shows up as like
Wes: a mouse and keyboard basically if you don't do it that way yeah um but essentially you,
Wes: know on those platforms i guess they didn't really want to have to deal with
Wes: maintaining a kernel driver and taking the risk and the you know that goes along
Wes: with that but we still get a kernel driver on linux oh.
Chris: Do we now.
Wes: So you can use it i don't know if you get everything like he's probably still
Wes: ultimately like and they've done more work to make sure that steam can load
Wes: and run whatever other program you want so that it does get injected even to
Wes: a non-steam game and there's even some open source projects out there that are trying to be,
Wes: sort of use like usb over ip libraries to sort of bridge so that you could get
Wes: so it looked more like a traditional controller in a system at the system level.
Chris: So it kind of fools into thinking oh so i've seen this before i.
Wes: Know what this is but uh just kind of interesting detail like clearly they're
Wes: more comfortable building on linux than they are for these other platforms.
Chris: I think uh you're gonna to see crazy scalping or I think we're already seeing
Chris: it, but you're going to see crazy scalping on eBay or whatnot because of the
Chris: order system for this kind of thing.
Chris: So you're going to see this, I think.
Wes: They were making some kind of changes with some of the ordering,
Wes: I thought I heard. I haven't gotten the details because I'm not yet buying one.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: I read a little about this. The ordering system's a bit fascinating.
Brent: It's a lottery of sorts in a few waves.
Brent: And that was meant to basically avoid scalpers coming in and buying all the
Brent: units up and then charging twice as much for these units that are somewhat limited stock.
Brent: So that is fascinating. So if you get in, you don't have to be like,
Brent: it's not like a concert where you have to be the first person,
Brent: you know, to hit their servers to be able to get one.
Chris: First come, first serve. That's how you got the deck.
Brent: Right, right. And so this is a little different where you have a certain period
Brent: of time to like put your name into the draw and then they just pull it randomly.
Brent: And that makes it a little bit more fair.
Brent: And the order is defined with that random pick. So less pressure,
Brent: but more fair. And you don't get these scalpers buying all the machines up.
Brent: But what is happening is that already you're seeing reservation slots being
Brent: sold on eBay for about double the valve price.
Brent: So there's that.
Wes: So we've just changed what we're scalping.
Chris: Amazing.
Brent: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris: People will always figure out a way. They'll always figure out a way, boys.
Chris: Um, you know, I think all three of us are old enough to remember 2015.
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Chris: This isn't their first attempt.
Wes: No.
Chris: That's the wild thing. It's actually been long enough that it almost feels like
Chris: this is the first attempt.
Wes: They've clearly learned a lot that's got them here.
Chris: Let's, I mean, just reflect on that for a moment. It doesn't feel like,
Chris: Brent, they built, like, they tried to throw a house party before they built a house last time.
Chris: And this time they realized they have to build, like, the whole house.
Brent: Yeah, in 2015, I remember the amount of excitement everyone had of Valve making,
Brent: you know, putting out these machines and also Linux.
Brent: And that was unbelievable in 2015.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: And they shipped it, which is even more unbelievable. But there are some major
Brent: differences between what happened in 2015 and what's happening now.
Brent: Like, it's basically, you know, an 11-year difference.
Brent: They did sell it until about 2018, but you didn't really hear about it very
Brent: often after the initial launch.
Brent: And there's a lot of differences that happened. They invested a ton,
Brent: especially if you look at Proton.
Brent: They invested just a ton in getting Linux games working for this release of
Brent: Steam Machine. So what is it like 80% or 90% of the library is now Linux compatible
Brent: because of the work there?
Brent: where back in 2015 it was like they were trying to encourage game developers
Brent: to do the the transitional work they wanted.
Chris: Them to port to linux.
Brent: There was yeah i remember that being a big discussion and that's a hard decision
Brent: to make as a developer of a game because you've put all your specialty into,
Brent: you know the windows system and all of a sudden you have to learn a ton.
Chris: You bring up a good point,
Chris: The Linux community was so excited about the original Steam machines in 2015
Chris: because the ask was developers were going to port to Linux natively.
Chris: And so when Proton came along, there was a lot of discomfort about that.
Wes: Knife in the back.
Chris: We had the conversations on Linux Unplugged. I remember debating with Neil on
Chris: the show about how this was going to really impact the future of game development on Linux,
Chris: and that people would not have any incentives to develop native games for Linux anymore.
Chris: And, like, that, while partially true, we wouldn't have the massive,
Chris: massive adoption we have seen of Linux for gaming, which, compared to where
Chris: I started, I never thought we'd be this far.
Wes: We wouldn't have Windows synchronization primitives in the Linux kernel.
Chris: And we wouldn't have Steam decks and Steam machines, right? So like their first
Chris: go didn't account for any of this kind of stuff. It's really,
Chris: I mean, it's really something, Brett.
Brent: There's a quote here I pulled from Pierre-Louis Griffe. He's a Valve engineer
Brent: well known for working on all of these projects.
Wes: And doing a bunch of media coverage. Great job on that.
Brent: That is also true, yeah. As we learned, there are folks of many hats at Valve.
Brent: And he said that the developers were kind of stuck back then.
Brent: And the question was, do I want to do a bunch of work to port my game?
Brent: But there's not really an audience for it yet. The catalog wasn't really there.
Brent: So it was like a chicken and egg problem, right? It's like, well,
Brent: we have this big Valve machine coming out that people are excited about,
Brent: but the games aren't quite there yet. So like, what's the investment?
Brent: And Yazan, the engineer we mentioned earlier, also said the software just basically
Brent: wasn't ready now that they look back at it.
Brent: On the Linux side, he says, we learned from the first Steam machines that we
Brent: need to make our developers' lives a lot easier. So now we have Proton.
Chris: I think, you know, the Steam machines...
Chris: And all of that were really provoked by the Windows Store.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: And,
Chris: I think Valve was hoping that other developers would recognize the threat of
Chris: a uni platform and would just use that as motivation to do all the hard lift.
Chris: But I think that assessment was right. The graphics stack wasn't there.
Chris: We weren't even really on Pipewire back then.
Wes: So much worse. Wayland was just a dream in her eye.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Well, and there's one other difference that really stands out to me as well.
Chris: Yeah. Okay.
Brent: In 2015, Valve wasn't controlling the hardware. They were teaming up with some
Brent: third parties to make these machines. And they had quality issues and some pricing
Brent: differences and some support issues.
Brent: And Greg Coomer, he's a Valve engineer in 2021, said that the Steam machine failure,
Brent: taught, and they called it a failure, taught them that they needed to control
Brent: the full hardware and software stack to have something be a success, basically.
Brent: So that led to the Steam Deck, of course, being built in-house,
Brent: and we all, I think, feel that that was a total success.
Brent: And that led to this Steam Machine having that same path that the Steam Deck
Brent: did. And it seems like a winning formula for them, or at least maybe we'll see.
Chris: Now, still to come...
Chris: We are going to see, I think, some real progress, maybe dependent on Steam Machine
Chris: success, with anti-cheat, right?
Chris: That's still the elephant in the room, whereas Brent says the penguin in the
Chris: room when it comes to these machines. But there are some job postings that do
Chris: seem like a positive sign in this area.
Chris: Now, there is some anti-cheat built in for developers, but it's not like the
Chris: Windows stuff that they want.
Chris: There's a really interesting Valve Developer Hardware Talk PDF that I will link
Chris: in the show notes that goes into some of this.
Chris: So I think we have two big frontiers that's going to be next for the steam machine ecosystem.
Chris: Solving anti-cheat is going to be a big one because that's the big blocker now.
Chris: It's no longer technical compatibility and things like that for the most part.
Chris: Largely, it's anti-cheat.
Chris: That's hill number one. Hill number two, which I am very excited about, is the steam frame.
Chris: That's next. That's an ARM-based VR headset using FEX and Proton.
Brent: Can you remind us what the frame is.
Chris: Well it's going to be a computer you put on your face it's a steam machine for
Chris: your face it's like a face hugger right and I am super excited about that because,
Chris: you know just like I presume the steam machine could be used as a regular PC
Chris: it's got to be hackable right I'm presuming and that to me is so much potential,
Chris: But the idea that it's going to be ARM, but still running some of these games,
Chris: it's going to be really interesting. That is exciting.
Brent: Interesting.
Wes: What I love is it's just like it is the hacker spirit meets Valve money,
Wes: right? Like proper funding and they hire brilliant people and collaborate with
Wes: brilliant people to get it done.
Wes: And clearly there's confidence enough to be like, oh, yeah, we could we only
Wes: not made it work across, you know, from Windows to Linux. We'll do it across architectures, too.
Chris: You're going to end up with users with a machine on their face that are running
Chris: Intel Windows games on ARM, on Linux, and not even know it.
Brent: What a success.
Chris: It's really something. And so it's really that Steam deck compatibility,
Chris: that Steam machine compatibility could end up meaning a lot more in the future.
Chris: And we're already at the point where you can reproduce that environment on other
Chris: Linux distributions. So it just means more general Linux availability for games.
Chris: so distributions like bazite will benefit and you know those of us that run
Chris: our own distros with steam on there are going to benefit like that's just huge,
Chris: and the whole library is going to is going to massively expand and the face
Chris: computer i cannot wait for it,
Chris: the only thing that really concerns me is obviously the price yeah,
Chris: i hope it's not apple vision pro levels i hope i hope i just please please don't
Chris: be more than two thousand dollars or something because i desperately want to
Chris: try a face computer as somebody who lives in a small space and would love to
Chris: have a virtual office just.
Wes: I wanted to like what level does it need like we saw things not go well so well
Wes: on the apple side in terms of what they decided to continue to develop what
Wes: do you need out of this batch,
Wes: for it to keep happening so that we get through a few hardware cycles in a way
Wes: that they don't need to reconsider this line of business.
Chris: Well what if it's just pricing like what if they just have priced out of the
Chris: market that's why i feel like the steam os strategy is still worth considering expanding on that,
Chris: And then maybe a DIY edition that comes with no RAM so they can at least have
Chris: a machine that's $7.99 or $8.99 on the store.
Chris: You know, that's at least a price point that is, you know, when people say the
Chris: minimum price, they're going to at least quote that.
Wes: Steam machine kit.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. That I think would, you know,
Chris: you do that and maybe you ease up on the Steam machine or the Steam OS.
Chris: You make a DIY. I don't know. I really want it to be a success.
Chris: Because I really think Valve's cooking here and it's a good product.
Chris: I think it needs a little bit more refinement on the software side based on
Chris: what I'm seeing reported online and early feedback, but I think they'll do it
Chris: with a few updates. They did it with the deck.
Chris: The deck got a lot smoother as time went on. It's continuing.
Chris: The deck still gets better with time.
Chris: You know, all of this has actually made me appreciate my deck more.
Wes: Well, and I think that means too, like they've really proven out shipping updates,
Wes: maintaining their own system. Like that seems to be working.
Chris: It's pretty cool. So if you're crazy enough out there to get one,
Chris: You've got to write in or boost in and tell us about it. You've got to let us
Chris: know because you know we want to hear about it.
Chris: LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact or boost.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting.
Chris: I want to take a moment and thank our members who make these episodes possible.
Chris: As a thank you, you get the bootleg or the ad-free version if you don't want to listen to these ads.
Chris: And the bootleg's always got a lot more, geez, the bootleg's clocking in over
Chris: two hours and five minutes right now.
Chris: And then also as a thank you, you get a free web boost per episode.
Chris: You can set a boost in for free when you go to boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com as a member.
Chris: Also, I want to remind everybody, if you want to do a one-off support,
Chris: we do have a couple of new stickers.
Chris: We'll link those in the show notes. The rest in peace, Apple talk and my computer
Chris: only opens ordinary regular files. Those stickers are available at the Jupiter
Chris: garage and we'll have a link in the show notes.
Chris: And of course, we appreciate everybody who steps up and supports the podcast.
Chris: It's been a lean year for us, but we're here. We're still going.
Chris: And it's because of you who appreciates that.
Brent: Well, this week we have a very special live boost baller. A dude is trying stuff.
Brent: 27,368 sats came in just when the show started.
Brent: Says just a live Brent boost as he figured out an agentic way to never have
Brent: to pin his tabs. Thank you for the coverage, gents.
Chris: You know, maybe. Maybe that's, maybe that's the solution.
Wes: Implementation is TBD, but.
Chris: Yeah. I could see him having an agent and still having too many damn tabs.
Brent: Oh, yeah. I mean, it just makes it easier to open tabs now, right?
Chris: Thanks, dude. We appreciate you. Thanks for being our baller this week.
Chris: Brian from Boise is here with 5000 Sats.
Chris: And he writes, a Father's Day to all and all the dads who keep their jellyfin online.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: They don't appreciate it, Brian. Back in our day, TV was a lot rougher,
Chris: right? Thank you. Happy Father's Day to you, too.
Wes: The facial hair boosts in with 4,100 sets.
Wes: I have returned with more freshly mined sets. And I wanted to ask,
Wes: what is everyone's 3D printing setup and any 3D printing hot takes?
Chris: Well, there's been a bit of, you know, drama in the 3D printing community recently.
Chris: I'm still, I feel like if I bought a 3D printer, I would probably find a million use cases for it.
Chris: But before I own one, I haven't really thought of many other than one-off little
Chris: repair parts here and there.
Wes: Yeah, that alone seems pretty darn handy.
Chris: If my kids were still pretty young, I think that'd be great. A lot of kid toys.
Chris: for me and i don't know if this is the case or not is there consumer grade 3d
Chris: printable parts for like you could use in a car or in an rv in,
Chris: like you know hot stressed areas is that a thing because that would be very
Chris: useful i would use it a lot for that but i feel like this and ham radio are my two biggest shames.
Wes: Yeah i mostly uh 3d printing is super fun uh i'm mostly in the abused friends who have a 3D.
Chris: Printer stage. I also, you know, of course, I'm going to be this guy for a second, but one wonders,
Chris: in a world of agents where you could task an agent to like, you know,
Chris: go get a spec or you could give it a, you know, you wonder if there isn't like,
Chris: an agent that ends up producing a physical thing is kind of a fun idea.
Chris: So boy, if I had the budge, I would try to get probably a nice open source setup
Chris: going and try to really learn how to use it. But there's always,
Chris: you know, something else.
Wes: You know think what you could do with a really quick pipeline right you wake
Wes: up in the middle of night with a weird dream idea and you wake up with a fresh print in the morning.
Chris: You do wonder how many things you come across in your day that you're like,
Chris: oh, I could really use like a little storage holder for this or an organizer
Chris: for that or a way to mount this or a little fix.
Wes: There's a lot of potential. Especially if you like your own custom stuff.
Chris: That's right.
Brent: Speaking of potential, Gene Bean came in with four boosts for a total of 7,118 sets.
Brent: That's this first one's elite message. Not sure I've said so yet,
Brent: but Clanker Therapy was an awesome stream.
Brent: When using Codex with Hermes, which model are you having it utilize?
Brent: And is it the same model for all the Codex-based tasks?
Chris: You know, I kind of use different models for different agents,
Chris: but I'd say on average I'm using Minimax M3, I think it is.
Chris: And then when I'm using Codex, GPT-55 Medium is generally what I use.
Chris: may switch to 5.6 when that's available. Once the White House decides I get access to it.
Chris: And I might try out a GPT-5.6, but yeah. So Minimax is really good,
Chris: very capable and very cheap.
Chris: But GPT-5 obviously is a little more advanced. So I kind of do the initial build
Chris: out with the GPT-5.5 and the codex or open code. And then I just use Minimax
Chris: to just sort of run it on the daily.
Brent: Okay, next question, Chris. Did you use Autrix 3 or something else for that
Brent: fancy clock you showed us?
Chris: Yeah, I think that's what I, yeah, yeah, that sounds right.
Brent: Okay, short answer. And another one here regarding sharing your AI-generated
Brent: music that we make for the show.
Brent: Why not throw it up on Wavelake? It would be far from the only generated music
Brent: up there. Of course, Fountain, you know, would also be an option.
Chris: I just feel like so many people are pumping out AI-generated music and putting
Chris: it out there and asking people to pay for it. I just won't do it.
Chris: Okay, I won't do it. Not going to do it.
Brent: Last message here. Did I just buy the Apple Talk sticker? Yes, I did.
Wes: Yay!
Chris: Nice.
Wes: Excellent. Thank you.
Chris: Well done.
Brent: JupiterGarage.com for that.
Chris: Dodge is back with 4,747 sets.
Chris: On the Audible topic, I kept forgetting to set up my cron jobs years ago,
Chris: so I was lazy and set up Libation on my mounted audiobook shelf drive.
Chris: Oh, smart. It auto-downloads DDRMs and follows my naming folder conventions,
Chris: and they show up on my audiobook shelf within minutes.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: Especially handy for friends and family that want to contribute to my audiobook
Chris: shelf. I just add their account to Libation, and done.
Chris: Yeah, Libation's got a weird UI, but it's pretty great.
Chris: I never thought about just setting the download directory to audiobook shelf.
Chris: I mean, I like running things as root and all that, but that's real YOLO mode, and I love it.
Chris: Thank you, sir. Appreciate that, Daja.
Wes: Oh, we got another Daja coming in.
Chris: All right.
Wes: 12,345 sets.
Wes: Talking about slowly accumulating too many VMs.
Wes: I know they don't have the best rep, but I've had a lot of success with wholesale
Wes: internet. or their sister company, Nosex.
Wes: Dual Xeons with 64 gigs of RAM, 4.5 Ts of storage for $35 a month is hard to beat.
Wes: If there is a hardware failure, they fix it fast and free.
Chris: Okay. I'd love that to be six or eight terabytes, but I know that's just asking for too much these days.
Chris: Like, a guy needs some storage. I've already got way more than 45 terabytes for this stuff.
Chris: But that is a good deal overall these days. i mean you know that's kind of what fake nas is,
Chris: although with 22 terabytes or 24 terabytes but uh you know it's an old xeon
Chris: with 64 gigs of ram just running out there in the garage like a champ still,
Chris: we really should do a uh live update on one of our future episodes it needs
Chris: it now it's been a long time.
Brent: Hydrogirum comes in with 4 000 sats,
Brent: A little more on my Hermes setup. I'm using it to help me outline some stuff
Brent: for a creative writing side project I have.
Brent: But the latest episode's mention of Audible CLI with Agents has me thinking
Brent: how I could safely give it access to my audio bookshelf library and integrate that.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Just mentioned a couple ideas if you don't mind going a little crazy.
Brent: I loved that Hermes stuff. set up my own little clanker on Quen 3.5 9b and it's
Brent: been much more useful than any other way I've interacted with an LLM yet.
Brent: Managed to use 2ml in tokens in one session though and it starts having issues at about that point.
Brent: Al still can't open the pod bay doors for me even so.
Chris: You know it's really great to hear the progress coming with Quen.
Chris: People are just I mean, you were early with, Wes was early with Quinn.
Chris: He was saying, Quinn's pretty good a while ago, and now we're just seeing it over and over again.
Wes: It's everywhere.
Chris: Yeah. Interesting. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you, Hydrogram,
Chris: for the update. Perseates you.
Chris: AB's here with a Spaceballs boost. That's one, two, three, four, five stats.
Chris: Did someone say web boosts? Keep up the good work, guys. Yeah, you got it, AB.
Brent: Heck yeah.
Chris: Nice to hear from you.
Wes: Thanks for trying it out.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Wes: Ed Brayton boosts in with 12,345.
Chris: Cents. Or a barotin' as I say.
Chris: We made it to plaid this episode. That's awesome. Thank you, Ed.
Wes: Oh, okay. MeshTastic has faded away, but MeshCore has taken its place in the Pacific Northwest.
Chris: Is that true?
Wes: And there is a home assistant connection.
Chris: All right.
Wes: So what are you waiting for? Challenge. Add MeshCore to monitor chicken telemetry without the internet.
Chris: I like this idea a lot.
Wes: Oh, Ed, smart.
Chris: Here's the thing. Is it true that, because my MeshTastic thing is popping off
Chris: all the time. Like, I'm having people all around me, but I...
Wes: Maybe you're not core.
Chris: Yeah, I don't want to... You might be tested, but you're not core.
Chris: Yeah, I want to be core if it's a thing. And I very much like the idea of using
Chris: this for garden and chicken coop monitoring. And I have a node mounted to the
Chris: top of the barn. So, you know, it seems like the right time to do it, right?
Wes: There's also, why not both?
Chris: Could you do both? Is that a thing? Can you do both?
Wes: I don't know. Why not?
Chris: Well, Ed, you've given me something to look into. Appreciate that. Thank you very much.
Brent: Kiwi Bitcoin Guide boosted in four, five, six, seven sats.
Brent: I've finally set up a Linux desktop and I'm slowly in the process of making it my daily driver.
Brent: I'm running Mint and have installed LibreWolf browser, but can you recommend
Brent: any other high-value services or apps for daily use, like notes,
Brent: email, backup, file storage as starters? Thank you.
Chris: Wow, Kiwi. Congratulations. That's huge. That's really great.
Chris: It's hard for us to recommend apps because we don't know what you use entirely.
Chris: Like, I don't know if you have, maybe you want to sync to something on your phone.
Chris: So we need some details there. If you have existing stuff you need to work with,
Chris: because that's key, right? But I mean.
Wes: One option, it's far from exhaustive. But if you go to jupiterbroadcasting.com
Wes: slash community slash pics, there's a list of all the stuff we've tagged,
Wes: at least since we started doing it in a way that we could capture on the website.
Wes: So there's a whole bunch of apps that we have at least tried out or maybe liked on the show.
Chris: That is not a bad idea. Let us know how it goes, Kiwi, with any specifics.
Chris: I think we could help you there. I think we could help you.
Wes: And welcome. That's exciting.
Chris: That is really cool.
Wes: Thanks for sharing your journey.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: MG101010 comes in with 6,666 sats.
Chris: Password managers. I use Vault Warden for years. I choose it over Bitwarden
Chris: subscription just so I can self-host it. Behind Nebula.
Chris: I love it. I sponsor Vault Warden via GitHub and I subscribe to Bitward just
Chris: to support both projects.
Chris: New pricing is $1.65 a month. Not that bad. Loving the web boost.
Chris: Here's a boost fest. Sorry for sending so many small ones. I just love testing this out.
Chris: I love the web boost. Yeah, buddy.
Chris: it's still not easy to get sats breeze oh uh it's still not easy well hopefully
Chris: that'll get easier over time with breeze sats but i can set up with breeze it
Chris: spins up i use strike via my bank deposit but unfortunately it's not available until july 14th yeah,
Chris: some providers what they do is they kill they don't give you access to the sats
Chris: until the ach transaction clears right right that ach transaction,
Chris: takes here in the states can take days up in canada they can do it immediately
Chris: but down here in the some sort.
Wes: Of technical wizards up there.
Chris: Like email or something yeah but that's great well done that is awesome MG nice
Chris: to hear from you welcome aboard.
Wes: Hey speaking of folks it's nice to hear from Elray741.
Chris: He's a good guy.
Wes: 3,333 sets. Amazing content as always.
Wes: I also wanted to ask your opinion on what kind of setup you would recommend
Wes: for live streaming an online conference. I'll be helping out with CarolinaCon this year.
Wes: And I'd planned on doing Jitsi.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Wes: And I'd planned on doing a self-hosted route instead of a SaaS solution because
Wes: the conference doesn't have much money and my personal budget is tight.
Wes: So I'd imagine paying for the VPS just for, you know, maybe a couple of days
Wes: around the conference. Shouldn't be too expensive and just a one-time cost.
Wes: Solution doesn't need to be perfect, but I just don't want it to be terrible.
Chris: So the, are you trying to host and stream multiple talks, right?
Chris: Because the complexity of that gets pretty high.
Chris: Because the obvious easy, cheap setup is Linux box, OBS, and you just go to YouTube.
Brent: Yep.
Chris: That's the, like that, that's the low effort. Just going to work and everybody's going to find it.
Chris: Now, you could do individual Jitsi rooms and all of that, but the way you're
Chris: probably going to have to do that quickly would be...
Chris: a laptop in the room with the presenter called into a Jitsi session,
Chris: you're going to need a USB microphone that picks them up decently well.
Wes: Yeah, a lot of hardware pieces to kind of connect through.
Chris: So it depends on the scope of your stream.
Wes: You might also want to check out VDO Ninja.
Chris: Yeah, VDO.Ninja. VDO.Ninja.
Wes: Which I believe is also self-hostable.
Brent: One advantage to YouTube is it's also just kind of recorded for you.
Brent: you don't have to do the recording locally or anything like that.
Brent: So it's one less thing to take care of if you're on site and it's your first
Brent: time juggling all this stuff.
Chris: The kind of close to that experience that is fully self-hosted would be peer tube.
Wes: Oh yeah.
Chris: Which will let you do a live stream and record it for you and all that.
Chris: But you know, then you're talking about a VPS that needs to be able to encode video.
Chris: It's a different, it's just something.
Chris: I don't like it. The more I think about it, I think you need to consider the
Chris: scope of the event and what you want to capture.
Wes: Is it just about being live? Is it deliverables of all of the talks recorded
Wes: and available for viewing later? That could be different, yeah.
Chris: It's really on the hardware and software side, you know, simple mixer,
Chris: PC with OBS. That's what's pretty straightforward.
Brent: The crazy option, I think, would be Big Blue Button, right? Isn't that a giant
Brent: platform you can run for this? I think it's probably oversized, but.
Chris: And there's StreamYard. There's a couple other things where it's essentially
Chris: like a zoom that goes to a live stream.
Chris: Yeah. Stream yard could be another one. River will also do that. So there's a couple.
Brent: Rosado has a link here in the chat. It looks like there's a project called Jitsi
Brent: deployment that might help with this. It's an auto scalable Jitsi.
Chris: It does seem like he's pretty set on going with Jitsi. So that might be something worth looking at.
Chris: I, you know, I think what happens a lot of times is people really focus on the
Chris: infra of the stream and not the mechanics and actual day-to-day direction of the stream.
Chris: And what's going to be on stream, how you're going to do the stream,
Chris: how you're going to get, like, that stuff is way more important than how you
Chris: actually get the stream out because you have a thousand options to get the stream out there.
Wes: And that first stuff might inform, sort of, what you need on the second.
Chris: Get good audio.
Wes: Yeah, thanks for helping out a conference. That should be priority number one.
Chris: I think, I wish more people were doing that for conferences.
Wes: Yeah. Good on you.
Chris: Wish we could do more of that.
Brent: Have a good time.
Chris: Greg, the lawyer comes in with $25 in fiat fund coupons.
Chris: You asked in 672 about what sort of lawyering I do.
Chris: I work in tech, mostly ISPs, for nearly two decades, then went to law school.
Chris: I practice IP law, patents, copyright, trademark, and licensing.
Chris: And I maintain roots in my prior career by cultivating a robust home lab.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Living the next life. Yeah, Greg.
Wes: Wonderful.
Chris: Very good.
Brent: Are we still looking for someone to help us with Google stealing all our voices? Is that a thing?
Chris: Greg, you want to go after that?
Wes: A guy from Vienna, Bussin.
Chris: $5 in fiat.
Wes: Indeed. I need help to pick a birthday present.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: Ooh.
Wes: I want to buy a Steam Deck. Would you buy the old version or would you go for
Wes: the OLED? The price difference is quite something.
Wes: And I don't know if it's worth it. Please help.
Chris: Well, I think it's worth it if you're planning to use the main screen for your primary gaming.
Wes: Right. Are you doing it dark? mostly traveling with.
Chris: It i i thought i was gonna be mostly handheld and i probably 70 percent play
Chris: it hooked up to the tv i got a little dock,
Chris: hook everything in there then i just slide it in boom i'm on the tv and at that
Chris: point i don't really care what the screen is so just kind of i think depends,
Chris: hate to give that guy a guy from vienna but like yes on oled if you're staring
Chris: at the screen as your primary interface no if you're gonna be hooking up to the tv,
Chris: Seems pretty straightforward. Yeah. Okay.
Brent: Our dear friend adversary 17 is here with the first free members boost.
Brent: Oh, he says, uh, so I'm serious here. Um, if you guys want some network attached
Brent: storage for whatever, my server has about 30 terabytes just sitting here for
Brent: you. You know how to find me.
Chris: I just think I thought of a use for zero FS.
Wes: Well, you're just too kind.
Chris: Adversaries.
Brent: Adversaries also says, so it seems that I can send multiple member boosts.
Brent: He's going and breaking our system.
Brent: Is it an honor system?
Chris: No, it's kind of a, I think maybe it's just a, maybe misunderstanding of DUI.
Chris: As far as we can tell, you can't actually. Although we, if somebody were to,
Chris: we would not be too offended.
Chris: Especially if it was you adversaries. Thank you very much.
Chris: Vipers here with a free member boost. Thanks for covering useful and positive
Chris: AI use cases. So much of the general Linux related coverage of AI is burnt out
Chris: negativity or avoidance.
Brent: Yeah, so true.
Chris: No kidding. Talk about, yeah. Wow, we should be seizing the means of production.
Brent: You get it.
Chris: Like if you don't participate actively you're just going to get left out and
Chris: then you don't get a right to complain about what we end up with it's like people
Chris: who never vote and then complain about political decisions
Chris: well if you don't participate in the process,
Chris: like this is why like we got we got steamrolled on some of the license station
Chris: stuff initially and it took a pushback before that was respected,
Chris: uh and you see like the conservancy stepping up and taking an active role in
Chris: some areas it's finally defining some of the edges of this actively from our
Chris: perspective as a free software community it's great to see but yeah you really nailed it there,
Chris: it's burnt out negativity or avoidance really does seem like it nails it.
Wes: Which i mean we can have some empathy for.
Chris: Yes oh for sure there are.
Wes: There can be issues too.
Chris: Yeah well it's i i totally empathize empathize with that like i that is why
Chris: it's such a good description, because that's what it feels like. All right.
Wes: Triton member boosts in. I personally use Duper Move with ButterFS and can recommend.
Wes: I usually target specific directories
Wes: per run, i.e. Steam games on desktop or media or ROMs on server.
Chris: ROMs is clever. I definitely have dupes in ROMs. That's a good one, Triton.
Brent: So thank you. This is a question I've been pondering for the last week or two,
Brent: on my little home server, so thank you. Good little one plus there.
Chris: A guy from Vienna boosted in with a free member boost,
Chris: Long time listener since episode 375, first time booster.
Chris: Thanks for the option to web boost. I love it. I always appreciate your coverage
Chris: on the Red Hat Summit. But this year, I've been feeling it. I think it wasn't the event, though.
Chris: I think it was the event, though. It was, I missed the real insights. Was it blue washing?
Chris: You know, I don't think they really talk about IBM much at these events.
Chris: Like, it comes up from, like, the granite model perspective.
Chris: But they really don't emphasize IBM. And Red Hat tries to really kind of present
Chris: themselves as their own unique brand.
Wes: Yeah, when they do, it's kind of as more of a partnership that you might see
Wes: with a different company.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. It's funny. So, like, you may see a few IBM logos,
Chris: but it's probably a 1 to 1,000 ratio of Red Hat logos, at least.
Chris: They don't really bring it up. They want to appear to be like the Switzerland
Chris: of operating systems, I believe is what it is.
Chris: But thank you, and thank you for listening so long. I love it.
Chris: That's great. I see somebody just wanted to test to see if the free member boost was real.
Wes: That was me testing to see if I could send multiple.
Chris: Oh, I see. Okay. Are you a member?
Wes: I'll have your adversaries. Nice boost alerting us.
Chris: Yeah. You had to test it. Got to test it. Dodge is back with a free boost.
Chris: You should make sure you have proper, I think he's referring to something I
Chris: missed. But he was talking about making sure that you have proper backups,
Chris: which I always completely agree with on that.
Wes: Configure it with auto local failover. In his case, everything's R-synced as part of a 3-2-1.
Chris: There you go, Brent.
Wes: That's impressive.
Chris: You want to take a chupacabra?
Wes: Yeah, a chupacabra member boosts in. Hello, fellow nerds.
Wes: Blank canvas syndrome update. My syndrome is really about setting up Hermes
Wes: on NixOS with wrappers. Plenty of ideas on where to integrate Hermes afterwards.
Wes: Cloud code helped a lot, but I'd love best practices from pros to keep this genie in the bottle.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Plus one on higher character limit.
Chris: You know, something if you're really concerned about that is you could run it just in a container.
Wes: Container, VM, whatever boundary.
Chris: The production one that we use for Jupyter Broadcasting, we have it in a VM.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And we just, that VM is completely isolated and dedicated just to that agent.
Wes: I started mine in a micro vm on a nix os both so it just had a whole own little
Wes: setup there and it could have free range inside but i could filter it and then
Wes: i had the host as well available if i wanted to do firewalling or other things there.
Chris: It's nice because you can take backups before it does anything if it like you know nukes itself or.
Wes: Something true.
Chris: Jcube has a free mamba boost,
Chris: I just wanted to add a big plus one for the Zeus home automation gear paired
Chris: with home assistant. Yeah.
Chris: And the ZWA to the home assistance releases. I have 20 plus of the Zen Z1 switches
Chris: and a couple of the Xen04 plugs. They just work.
Chris: ZWA2 has cleared up several of the Z-Wave issues I was having prior to the swap. Yeah.
Chris: I have not had a single issue. And I didn't expect I would. But I have not had
Chris: a single issue with the new coupe stuff. The sensors have been online 24-7.
Chris: I only really have two Z-Wave devices so I guess it's not that surprising but
Chris: it has been really, really rock solid I just love that setup so again,
Chris: just key points here Zeus, Z-O-O-Z, no relation I just,
Chris: love the company because they make great Home Assistant compatible hardware,
Chris: combined with the ZWA-2 which is made by the Home Assistant folks which is a
Chris: great Z-Wave antenna it's big, but it's good and it's open.
Brent: Well, Eric, the musician, oh, no, wait, Eric, the magician is here with a members boost.
Chris: That's a different one.
Brent: Chris, how do you deal with split DNS on Nebula?
Brent: The DNS server configuration doesn't seem to overwrite my clients as smoothly
Brent: for me compared to, say, tail scale.
Brent: I don't want the VPN on when I'm home, and I'm currently using two different
Brent: DNS servers for home and on the mesh.
Chris: So I'm doing two things a little bit differently. I'm using DNS servers on each network.
Chris: So I'm not using the built-in client DNS stuff. And I leave the VPNs on all
Chris: the time. So I don't turn them off.
Chris: I kind of think, I think if you're doing a mesh network, the point is to sort
Chris: of leave it on 24-7. And if you don't want a mesh network, then you could just
Chris: do a wire guard, you know, and maybe avoid some of this.
Wes: If you do have full control, you might be able to have it so that the same name just...
Wes: like you still keep it resolving to the mesh system and then you could just
Wes: route to it or something like that?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wes: You have a few options. You have complete control, but that doesn't always work
Wes: for every client. It kind of depends on.
Chris: There's really no, at least when you're using Nebula, there's really no performance
Chris: downside to just always talking to the Nebula machine names and IPs.
Chris: It's really good about figuring out local or all that. So it's,
Chris: I just always, always am using the Nebula names.
Chris: And then it's just which IP it gets resolved to based on the DNS server it uses.
Chris: Eric, I would argue that maybe you should reconsider turning the mesh on and
Chris: off. That seems surprising to me. I don't know how many people that do that.
Chris: That seems like you're making a hard mode, my friend. But maybe there's a reason.
Chris: I'd always love to know what it is.
Wes: Yeah, tell us more. Thanks for sharing your setup.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Wes: Nutters members boost in. This is awesome.
Chris: Nutters member. He's nutters.
Wes: Responses to download folder file count.
Chris: Oh, here we go.
Wes: Looks like 182. Bit less than I was expecting.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Okay, but how about storage space required?
Chris: Uh-huh.
Wes: Mine, apparently, sitting at 246 gigs.
Chris: Oh, no.
Wes: Guess I found where a good chunk of my two terabyte drive was going.
Brent: That's impressive.
Chris: I wonder. All right. Okay, so my downloads folder on this machine.
Brent: Is that what we're doing?
Chris: I'm just going to tell you the size, because I want more people to tell us how
Chris: many files are in there, because this local machine is not my primary daily driver.
Chris: The local machine here in the studio has 32 gigabytes of downloads.
Wes: Oh, I'm at 11 over here.
Chris: That's really impressive considering how long you've had that laptop you must
Chris: prune it from time to time I do yeah what Brantley what's your total downloads
Chris: folder size at the moment.
Brent: Yeah I just checked it's 61 megs.
Chris: Oh that's really lean.
Brent: Yeah it's because I have basically I have Firefox ask me every single time where
Brent: I want something because I.
Chris: Hate the idea of having.
Brent: A giant folder filled with just.
Chris: Random I know I gave up on that 20 years ago just ask your.
Wes: Hermes agent to clean it up sorry.
Chris: See, sometimes I use browsers that don't even offer where to save stuff,
Chris: too. Like, I'm, you know, man, I like, I just got to lean into the defaults.
Wes: You know, one thing you can do is just mount your downloads folder as a tempFS
Wes: and really just commit to it.
Chris: Smart. Never reboot. So, Nutters, you got us beat at 246 gigs.
Chris: Can anybody beat Nutters for the downloads folder at 246 gigs?
Chris: Can anybody beat Nutters? Let us know. Boosted. All right. I'll wrap this up
Chris: here with, is this the last one I think? Bearded Zero comes in with a members boost.
Chris: I love it. They're testing it because they don't even believe it.
Chris: It's so good. Testing the member boost. Test, test, test, test.
Chris: Is this thing on? Oh, hi. I enjoyed your clanker therapy. Chris,
Chris: please make a new show already.
Wes: Wow. That was a direct call out right there.
Brent: I think he liked it.
Chris: Woo. I enjoyed it very much. I want a new show. It could be bi-weekly or monthly.
Chris: Members get the full episode publicly feed. It's the highlights.
Chris: Keep up the amazing work. Well, thanks for that vote, Bearded Zero.
Brent: Yeah, that's great.
Chris: That's some strong confidence there. Thank you, everybody, who boosted it.
Chris: And thank you to everybody who streamed those sats. We had 14 of you stream
Chris: sats and collectively use sats streamers.
Chris: Stacked a very handsome 24,156 sats. Thank you very much for that.
Chris: Just streaming those sats as you listen. When you bring it all together with
Chris: our fiat boosts and our regular boosts and our member boosts,
Chris: this episode, episode 673 of your Unplugged program, stacked a grand total of 180,959,
Chris: Satoshis. Not too bad at all. Thank you, everybody.
Chris: We had a good amount of boosts there. Love hearing from you guys.
Chris: It's our favorite segment. It's live, it's unscripted, and it often leads to
Chris: new episodes and new ideas on the show.
Wes: We get to hear directly from our audience.
Chris: You can boost at boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com with your fiat or your sats.
Chris: And then you get your message on the show if you're a member or if the boost
Chris: is above the $2 or $2,000 sat limit.
Chris: Boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com. Thank you, everybody who supports the show.
Chris: We got not one, not two, but three great picks for you this week.
Chris: I don't know, Brentley, are you still a Tidal subscriber?
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Still on Tidal Music?
Brent: Yeah, I love it.
Chris: I do like the Tidal Music service, and I often use it in the web browser, and that's fine.
Chris: But you don't get access to the absolute highest quality audio in the web browser. It's a shame.
Wes: So you're paying for the high-quality music service, and you're not getting it.
Chris: Yeah, it still sounds great, but it's not, you know, the best,
Chris: like the lossless flack, which is really what I want. I just want to know.
Chris: So there is a great native title desktop client for Linux called Sone, S-O-N-E.
Chris: And it does support the bit perfect lossless audio, 24 bit, 192 kilohertz.
Chris: And it'll even operate in exclusive also mode, which is necessary for some of this high res stuff.
Chris: So you can get the max streaming, absolutely beautiful bit perfect output.
Chris: It also has what they call smart DAC matching. So if you're nerdy enough to
Chris: have a supported high-end DAC to really take advantage of this actual high-quality audio.
Chris: It has smart DAC matching. It has signal path transparency. So you can see exactly
Chris: where the audio is going end-to-end through the GStreamer pipeline and all of that.
Chris: You can do a few things like automatic volume control, but the one feature that
Chris: you also don't get in the web,
Chris: is gapless playback, which they have added. So they have seamless,
Chris: silence-free transitions between tracks.
Brent: Yes, please.
Chris: Yeah, and a few other nice features. It's GPL 3.0. It's available on GNU slash Flathub or,
Chris: you know, on GitHub.
Chris: I'm just, I was distracted because I saw we also have high tide in here.
Chris: I, another title client.
Wes: A sneaky bonus pick.
Brent: I'm throwing in a bonus pick. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking to solve a similar problem.
Brent: I was using, uh, what was the other one that we mentioned? I was using something
Brent: and, um, I wanted a little smoother experience on the desktop. So I looked at Sony.
Brent: And I ultimately went with something called Hightide. So it says here,
Brent: Lib Edweta title client for Linux, GPL3 as well.
Brent: It has 34 contributors, which is not too bad. And it's just a native Linux title streaming client.
Chris: Nice GTK4 style, which I think would probably work fine really on any desktop.
Chris: You were using it on Plasma, obviously.
Brent: Yeah, it's available on Flathub as well. And it's been pretty good.
Brent: There's a couple ways of using it I don't love.
Brent: Like, sometimes you click in a certain place and you hit spacebar just to stop
Brent: it from playing, and it just doesn't do that. So, that would be my worst feedback.
Brent: That's my worst feedback.
Chris: Yeah, okay.
Brent: But other than that.
Chris: It's great. Meanwhile, mine gives you, like, exclusive DAC control, audio graphs.
Brent: Hey, it depends what you're looking for.
Chris: You're like, yeah, but, you know, mine's Eduardo, so. Yeah, okay.
Wes: Okay, good news for both of you.
Chris: All right.
Wes: They're both packaged in Knicks.
Chris: Hey! Very good. Okay, so this next one's really for the nerds that just like
Chris: to know how things are working under the hood.
Chris: This one's called COPWR.
Chris: It's C-O-P-P-W-R. COPWR. And what it does is it gives you just unbelievable
Chris: insights into what's going on in Pipewire under the hood.
Chris: Node graphs, object inspection, creation, rerouting.
Wes: Everything.
Chris: The details that it gives you, I didn't even know Pipewire had this information in some cases.
Chris: Like, it's down to, like, driver-level latencies and just the entire pipeline.
Chris: And the design is really nice, too.
Chris: And it just gives you insight into individual, like, latencies of applications and hardware devices.
Chris: You can really see what your system is doing when it comes to your audio system,
Chris: even if you never really –,
Chris: need it it's just so cool to see it.
Wes: Really is yeah there's a process viewer so you can see all the processes interacting
Wes: with the sound system obviously there's like a graph of all the ports and links
Wes: between them plus there's a profiler in there so if you're.
Chris: All writing.
Wes: An audio program that could be useful.
Chris: Yeah yeah yeah anyways i mean i know i'm we should probably move on from this
Chris: one because i know it's pretty niche but it's just you know a gooey app to show
Chris: you all this cool stuff going on under the hood you never really knew about.
Brent: Something tells me you two are We're trying to solve something, and this came in handy.
Chris: It does. All right. Last but not least, kind of a different category.
Chris: This one is a new tool out there being made in our community by AndersWeb, and,
Chris: this is a simple control plane CLI that enrolls and unrolls Linux hosts into
Chris: a Define.NET managed Nebula network. DN-tool.
Chris: It calls the Define.NET REST API to create and delete host records It obtains
Chris: single-use enrollment codes and then,
Chris: orchestrates the proprietary DN client daemon, which then downloads and verifies at runtime.
Chris: You see, easy for me to read. It is strictly a control plane and never re-implements
Chris: the Nebula server or replaces DN client.
Chris: And it has a flake. It is currently unlicensed at this moment,
Chris: so I couldn't tell you the license.
Wes: Oh, no, it's the unlicensed license.
Chris: Is it really?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, you're right. It is. Yeah.
Brent: Okay.
Chris: I just zoomed right past that. Yeah.
Chris: But so you got a few commands, install, enroll, unenroll, run, write config.
Chris: So the idea here is if you're using define.net, manage Nebula network,
Chris: they have an API where you can create and delete host records,
Chris: obtain single use enrollment codes, orchestrate things like the DN client,
Chris: all of that. And this is a little CLI front end to do that.
Wes: Yeah, and I think in particular, so this, I found this because the person popped
Wes: into our agent operators guild in Telegram.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And so they're running a home lab, got Hermes in there, obviously using Nix OS.
Wes: And the define.net has a client that does all this already, but it's a little
Wes: tricky to use, doesn't have compatibility out of the box with Nix OS.
Wes: So I think this is partly an implementation that would let them bridge those
Wes: things. And thankfully, we're willing to share.
Chris: What's neat about Nebula is you can have agents stand up a mesh network without any permission to,
Chris: from a tech company, but it is, you have to stand up the whole thing.
Chris: So with this, you can use the defined networking stuff that makes it a little
Chris: bit simpler to get going, but still have the agent stand the entire thing up.
Wes: And it's the same nebula.
Chris: Yeah. It's the same nebula underneath. We're using the same lighthouses that
Chris: you could self host yourself.
Chris: And the agents have, they can have full governance over it if you want,
Chris: or have not, like, it's so cool when you wrap your head around what it means
Chris: when you can control and build the mesh network directly yourself,
Chris: and with the way they have the setup you could also just take advantage of the
Chris: hosted defined stuff i mean yes they're a sponsor but they don't pay for this
Chris: section this is all free this,
Chris: is all just free right i'm giving the milk away right now because i think it's great.
Wes: To use your own caution this is a freshly ai generated tool.
Chris: To serve.
Wes: This particular need so evaluate if you want but just that you can do this right
Wes: or you could write your own because there's just an api if you're using that
Wes: side of it super flexible.
Chris: A couple of commands and you've got a mesh network that works over carrier grade
Chris: NAT and reconnects when it goes down because of internet connection issues or
Chris: whatever. I mean, it's powerful.
Wes: You can also host your own relays, which we don't talk about much.
Wes: But if you do, you're kind of picky about how your network flows go,
Wes: that's probably for you.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. All right. We want to know, are you in the market for a Steam machine?
Chris: Are you going to pay the premium? Why or why not? I want to know if you're going
Chris: to build it too. So boost in, boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com,
Chris: and let us know if you're going to do it.
Chris: I'm worried nobody's going to do it.
Wes: And then tell us which model.
Chris: Yeah, we want to know that too. Yeah.
Wes: And what game you're playing first.
Chris: Okay, Wes. Is there anything, you know, extra we ought to know about the show?
Chris: Extra details, metadata?
Wes: Yeah. It turns out we're publishing a sneaky video version of the show.
Wes: And it's hidden inside the RSS feed.
Chris: If you can find the MP4 file, you could watch a video version of the show. How about that?
Chris: Yeah. Also, like, what if you want to know what was said? Or search across multiple
Chris: episodes? Or maybe you want to go right to a particular segment, even.
Wes: Okay, well, we have cloud chapters.
Chris: All right.
Wes: Yeah, they live in the cloud.
Chris: That's a JSON file, which turns out structured data real easy.
Chris: Great. Okay, so we've got structured data that tells you what's in the show and where.
Wes: And if you want, like, all of the words, not just the sounds,
Wes: but the words, we've got two options for you.
Chris: Oh, what we do? Yeah.
Wes: You've got your SRT, traditional option. Oh. Or if you're fancy and modern, you've got your WebVTT.
Chris: Oh, I do like the WebVTT. Not really. But I like it.
Wes: That one has extra features, like diarization.
Chris: That is nice. I do like that. So that is packaged up with every single episode.
Chris: We try to make sure our members have accessed all of that for our member special as well.
Chris: And then don't forget, we are live. And that's kind of a unique thing.
Chris: I think more podcasts should do it. It's special. You can be here during the
Chris: actual making of it. Why not be part of episode 674?
Chris: So join us next week. Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv.
Chris: Of course, you can get it in your time zone at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Chris: Now, if you want more show, we got the LUP plug going right now.
Chris: Good little quiet listening up there. Listening to the show in a low latency
Chris: opus stream from Mumble.
Chris: Our Matrix Room is popping along all week and during the show as well.
Chris: And, of course, links to everything we talked about at linuxunplugged.com slash 673.
Chris: Don't forget, if you want more show, members get twice the content,
Chris: if not more, with the bootleg.
Chris: And we appreciate those members. And we appreciate you for listening.
Chris: We hope you enjoyed the show. Hope you learned a little something.
Chris: And we hope you'll join us right back here next week.
Chris: We'll see you next Tuesday. As in Sunday.